Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

11. Risk Assessment

The immediate thrill of a life as space pirate sometimes didn't come from infiltrating an underground laboratory filled with forbidden technology, escaping pursuit by a hair's breath, or wild shoot-outs with a group of raiders in their base. Sometimes it was as simple as having to keep a vessel with three androids aboard in orbit around a space station filled with upper crust Neo -Tokyan elites and military personnel.

Hestia Station was exactly such a place. From afar, the uneven polyhedron forming the central core looked like a misshaped star surrounded by two rotating rings. It was one of humanity's oldest space stations, but also probably the best maintained one – even after decades, everything about it still looked slick, smooth and shiny.

A pretty shell to hide a rotten core, Null thought.

They had left the Blackstar and their crew farther behind, where it should have been out of reach of most routine scanners and security sweeps. They approached the station's docking bays in the shuttle they had stolen from the Butcher's lab, hacked to use a false identity signature associating it with a nearby trading vessel.

She had a vague feeling that they might not get a chance to leave the same way they were entering the station now, and if they had to sacrifice a shuttle, she preferred it wasn't the Blackstar's own, the Blackbody. Nonetheless, the Blackbody had some rather useful features that she dearly missed now, as they drifted closer to their goal. Among other things, the Blackbody was equipped with special shields that absorbed most incoming scanner signals – hence the name. In contrast to most other shields, which would avoid a successful scan through complete reflection of the signal, thereby revealing their location, the Blackbody could essentially turn invisible to most scanning frequencies.

The stolen shuttle had no such fancy features. They had deactivated most of their augments, so that in the event that an overly cautious station security officer might sweep them, they would hopefully not be able to pick up the few remaining electronics in their body over the noise of the shuttle's own systems.

As long as they kept their augments offline, chances of discovery were lower, but they also were more vulnerable. It was a strange feeling to be without their combat augments. Only the old ones, the ones she had gotten after Thanatos 3, and of course the hardware in her brain that used to be Lars' CPU, were still running. It gave her a vague sensation of déjà vu, as she was reminded of their very first shuttle trip together.

Don't worry, Lars spoke inside her mind. We'll be in and out before anybody notices.

She nodded almost imperceptibly, and kept her organic indecisiveness to herself so as to not annoy him. But rationally, it really probably hadn't been her best idea to meet Enigma in person. And on Hestia Station, of all places. It confirmed her suspicion that the man, who had previously only contacted her via encrypted text messages and videos in which he had never revealed his face, was probably connected to the elite of Neo-Tokyo one way or another.

Hestia Station was most definitely a hub for information – not just politicians and other wealthy people lived here, all kinds of traders passed through, and it was also a major base of operations for the military. So there was no doubt as to where he got his information from. There was just one question left burning in her mind now: Why had he decided to share any of it with them, of all people, in the first place?

And why had he wanted to meet in person now all of a sudden?

Probably because he knows it's incredibly risky for us, Lars commented on her thoughts.

You think he wants to test us somehow?

Our commitment to our cause... our willingness to take risks to get what we want... our trust in him, he suggested various possible reasons.