Chapter Seven—Motto

“Well that took fuckin’ forever,” Max sighed as he glanced about. He was talking about the cleanup they had just done. Hauling the dead guard into the security booth had trailed a smear of blood.

But there were plenty of cleaning supplies in the janitor’s closet. Lucky none of them were down here right now. “I guess nobody heard that gunshot.” John said.

“If a janitor or some douched out money bag comes down here, none of them will know the difference. Need to finish this up before shift change, though.”

“Yeah.”

So far about fifteen minutes had passed since Max and Staxx had entered the building. John lead the way into the elevator at the other side of the plaza.

“Where we going?” Kyle asked.

“Up,” John said. He knew he could hack the elevator, but did they want to get in that way? “If we arrive at Yate’s penthouse in elevator, we’re going to be noticed. So let’s do it this way.” John jumped and pushed the elevator lid off.

“Seriously?”

“Do you have a better idea, Max?”

He laughed.

“I thought you liked gunplay.”

“I like it,” John admitted. “I didn’t say I like suicide.”

“All right, I’ll boost you up.” He cupped his hands, allowing Staxx/John to get easy purchase so he could get onto the elevator roof. Max grunted as his back spammed a bit. “Damn you’re heavy.”

“Now hit the button for the penthouse floor,” John said, “and I’ll pull you up.”

“You got it,” Max said, doing just that, then John hauled him up.

“Damn you’re light.”

Kyle chuckled. “Shut up.”

The elevator started moving, the shaft falling below as the elevator rose to the fifty-third floor. Once it stopped, John took hold of the maintenance ladder and started climbing.

“Oh, I see,” Kyle said, following. “So it’s the vents. Great.”

“You already crawled around on a piss-stained bathroom floor,” John said. “What are you complaining about?”

“I’d just prefer a little more glamour to this all.”

“Glamour?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “You know. Style. You don’t want to see on the nightly news some douchebag pundit smirking about how we crawled around in vents and licked toilets, do you?”

“If that’s the most exciting thing they can come up with, then we’re not doing our jobs right,” John said, stopping. He reached into his compact satchel and pulled out a motorized tool and began removing the vent cover.

At least these are big enough to let me fit, he thought, having known this beforehand when viewing the building’s schematic Kyle had gotten from their contact at the strip club.

“For such a big guy,” Kyle began to quip, “I’m surprised you chose—“

“Don’t start.”

“Do you remember that time you got lodged in that vent on the Light of the Heavens cruise? You were so pissed.”

John sighed, then tucked his gear away, pulled off the metal grate. He bent and handed it to Kyle. “Make yourself useful and set that down quietly.”

John didn’t wait for Kyle. He crawled into the duct, cursing his time he spent stuck in that stupid vent during that space cruise operation. “Godsdamn story never dies…” he muttered, crawling along.

The air direction was dry on his eyes, so he pulled out his pair of tinted target acquisition goggles. There was a junction up here, but didn’t need to wait for Max. They had trackers installed into their wristlets that showed their exact locations on the 3D schematic.

According to the data, they had to crawl about thirty meters, climb up ten feet, and then climb another twenty or so meters until they reached the outside vent on the penthouse rooftop access.

“Should have just brought the aerial car,” Kyle complained over their wristlet coms.

“And then the cops would have our air traffic imprint to look for.”

“You know we could trick that out, Staxx.”

“It’s still risky.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Mr. Gunslinger over here is also our voice of reason,” Kyle drawled. “Don’t you see something wrong with that?”

“There’s plenty wrong with that. It means we’re fucking crazy.”

Kyle chuckled. “Hells yeah.”

“Hells yeah,” John echoed. “Now let’s take this to the max and walk out with staxx of cash.”

“We need to find a less cheesy motto.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Kyle said. “We sound like losers.”

“Then we can start calling ourselves the Losers.”

Kyle scoffed. “Hells no.”

“It’s more memorable this way,” John said as he reached the up-junction. There was a ladder there for maintenance access. He climbed it, grunting a bit. “We don’t wanna sound like a bunch of pretentious wannabes.”

“Just wannabes with bad taste.”

“Stop complaining and get up here.”

To John’s left, he could feel more pressure. In that direction was probably the ventilation control out building. He wasn’t sure if they would be able to get in there without breaking some heavy duty equipment, purifiers and rotary machines.

So instead, he chose the other ventilation corridor, which was showing up as a ventilation intake corridor that exited onto the roof.

That’s perfect. But we’ll need to take care of the guards on the roof.

“All good, big guy?”

John looked down toward his feet where he found Kyle, also wearing his target acquisition goggles. “It’s all good. We go this way. We’ll end up out on the roof.”

“Then let’s go.”