Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Hunter and the Hunted

Up ahead the spiral tower glowed hazy in the darkness.

The lights in the upper penthouse were off, and all was still.

He turned his head quietly towards NEMO and nodded towards the tower, "Disable the cameras."

The little AI bobbed with the glee of a challenge, and shot off towards the spiral tower, quickly shrinking into a speck before vanishing in the darkness. He remained where he was, slowly walking over to sit on a nearby bench, acting like a man just out for some midnight air.

He didn't have to wait long before his implants pinged, and he didn't bother to look down, rising to his feet and making his quick way over the moss and towards the base of the tower. Once there, he quickly tapped the heels of his boots together, bringing them to life with a sharp whirr.

Gravity boots.

They weren't expensive as the ones he had seen Admiral Vir using, and they weren't nearly powerful enough to reverse pull, but the advertisements said they could get him down to at least one tenth of his normal weight, which was basically around twenty pounds

He could lift twenty pounds in his sleep standing on his head.

NEMO appeared out of the darkness just then, snatching the small cable he offered to her before shooting up into he air and vanishing up the side of the tower. The thin wire spun upwards into the dark. The wire was no bigger round than the average piece of yarn, but it was made using Burg designed fibers taken from the silk making insects of their planet.

The tensile strength of the fibers were stronger than spider silk pound by pound, completely flexible, and relatively cheap to manufacture.

He felt a tug on the line, and threated the end of the line through the small spool with handles on both sides.

The light on the spool blinked green, and he pressed the trigger.

At only twenty pounds, neither the spool, nor the Burg silk had any difficulty pulling him upwards, working quickly so as not to be noticed by any lay person out walking at night.

This plan wasn't full-proof, there was no guarantee that no one would see him, but it was the best plan that he had.

He had originally been planning to lure the man away through a polite request for help out on the street one day. Maybe ask him to hep with some boxes, knowing that his naturally helpful nature would make him easy to lead away.

However, recently they had beefed up security, and now Adam didn't go anywhere without at least two Spartan or Drev guards watching his back.

It was all very inconvenient.

With a sharp purr, the spool wound down, and he found himself at the top of the tower, using one hand to grab the railing of the balcony and haul himself over the edge. He crouched there in the dark, on the roof, next to an outdoor patio table, and waited as NEMO worked on the door. She had already disabled the camera, but the lock was going to take a bit more work.

The Marshal had been feeding her information about the tower since they got here two years ago. Any blueprints he could steel, and any information about the technology that they used. His digging had eventually brought up the patented design for the locks they used on the tower, tucked away in a dusty corner of some sort of mechanical archive.

This turned out to be the most important part, as he listened to the door click softly open.

That was the most important part when it came to getting into the building, the second part was getting past their biological security,.