Charlie fired shots into the remaining security guard in the sub-level ensuring that they would be paralysed for several hours. Alpha covered the corridor from a vantage point part way up the wall while Charlie scanned the four remaining rooms to ensure that it was safe. The security screens, and personnel numbers matching their intelligence, told them they had covered everyone in the three floors they had gone down. But it was second nature to verify with a visual check ensuring they would not be disturbed.
Charlie signalled the floor was clear, and waited as Alpha detached from the wall and joined them. Moving as if one body the two Dricks quickly went into the second room on the left-hand side of the corridor. It was a break room for security personnel. Inside there were several circular metal tables fixed to the floor with seats attached to the underside of the tables. Along one wall were dispensing machines for food and drinks.
Alpha pulled the backpack from Charlie and started to unpack its contents. They passed Charlie a plasma cutting torch and Charlie immediately moved to a table that was in the area indicated on their overlay floor plan. They knelt and started to cut the fixings from the floor so the table could be moved.
Alpha had pulled two large tanks from the knapsack. They were controlled environment flasks. They used a monitor pad to attach to each tank and checked the contents. The internal environment was still inert at the moment and reported as being fully functional. A quick glance at Charlie confirmed the table would be free of its fixings in a few moments. Alpha started the activation sequence on both tanks, and then moved over to Charlie to help them lift and move the table.
They both checked the schematics. The circuit block they needed to interface with was directly below this section of the floor. Between them and the block was nearly three metres of reinforced plasticrete. Alpha placed the tanks on the floor and adjusted them so that they would release their contents directly above the circuit block and released the remote trigger that opened the cannisters. A metallic sludge poured out and instantly started to eat away at the surface of the floor. These were billions of nanorobots that had been specifically designed to pull the reinforced plasticrete apart to its molecular level. Using the exchange of forces for fuel and releasing the vast majority of the elementals that made up the surface as gases and dust particles. A second set of small machines was consuming this dust and gas. Using it to create duplicates of themselves to replace the work out nanobots who had only seconds of life before they wore down. The worn down bots were not wasted, they were re-assembled to be structurally similar to plasticrete and placed carefully to the side of the hole by their own descendents.
It was several worrying minutes before the Dricks saw real progress as the number of nanobots slowly decreased and a clear hole was formed. There was a precise circle of sixty centimetres diameter and three metres depth, at the bottom of which was an embedded block of circuitry. This was the main junction block for the fibre relays of the building. Every piece of electronic information flowed through this junction. It was in reality a very repetitive series of switches and pathways, but was significantly complex enough to be a low level intellect in its own right.
Alpha readied a small harness for Charlie and then slowly lowered the doppelganger into the hole. The nanobots had all left the hole and returned to the cannisters as was in their instructions. A new programme was being downloaded into their functional matrices for the next stage of their task.
Charlie reached the circuit block and quickly assembled a skeletal framework on top of it. Then they attached several specialised robots onto the arms of the framework they had built. They winched back up the hole and drew a small kinetic shield out. A thought activated the device below and the machine quickly sliced through the billions of fibres that ran into the circuit box and instantly repaired them at the same time placing an interrupter cable into each pathway.
Alpha had not been idle while Charlie was in the hole. They had assembled a device from the second backpack. It was another pulse weapon, but this acted more like a spike of energy than a wave. Alpha was setting up a complex series of panels, all pointed at the floor below. There was little chance of the spike going all the way through the floor without there being significant help. For this reason they had also started to assemble a small epoxy. It was three inert chemicals that they poured into a large pool onto the floor. One on top of the other. A large paddle was used to stir the chemicals. They then took a small glass bead from a secure box and placed it in the centre of the mix of chemicals.
Charlie waited a few seconds longer than was required to ensure that all the interrupts were functional. They had at least thirty seconds of leeway in the plan and this was a crucial moment. Satisfied that the frame was in place they activated the system and signalled the controller.
The device was a relay which simply allowed every pathway to receive a signal. But what that meant was that the vast series of intellects Rodero had prepared suddenly had full access to the entire of the network and more importantly the memory stacks for which this main board was the gateway.
The security system for the building was already severely compromised. Mapped and observed by a few thousand ice programs that had been unleashed on the system. They gave enough insight to the intellect programs assaulting the main data store that it was a matter of microseconds for them to compromise the security. It was a few moments more to unravel the encryption, this was less difficult since Rodero had designed some of the principal algorithms themselves. Then the system was breached and the intellects started to tear and transmit every item of data from the entire store.
Four minutes passed and then the system reported that they had taken almost all the data and transmitted it offsite using the maintenance relays and compromised satellite dish on the roof of the building. Drick Charlie winched themselves back down to the skeletal structure and quickly signalled it to repair and remove itself from the circuit box. At the same moment Drick Alpha restarted the nanobots who started to rebuild the plasticrete floor. Charlie had just four seconds of grace to remove the skeletal system before the nanobots started to rebuild the plasticrete over the circuit box. They quickly winched themselves out of the hole and nodded to Alpha.
Alpha triggered the small explosive and the ball exploded in the centre of the soup of three inert chemicals. They instantly reacted and turned into a powerful acid that started to melt the plasticrete floor. The nanobots completed repairing the floor and returned to their containers looking like nothing had happened. Charlie and Alpha quickly reattached the table to the floor with a molecular weld that showed no trace of the plasma cut. They had to ensure that no one knew they had accessed the junction box and the servers.
The room was filling with thick acrid smoke as Charlie and Alpha tossed the nanobots, tools and satchels into the deepening pool of gloop that had already eaten down through over a metre of the floor in a wide circle. Charlie and Alpha both signalled that this phase was complete and then placed themselves onto the edge of the hole. They waited until they could see the soup start to eat through the ceiling of the vast server stores below them. They could hear the screams and shouts of security personnel, and engineers, who were hidden inside that pulse shielded area.
Alpha looked at Charlie and nodded, They both sent a signal. “Task complete†and then as one they dropped into the hole and activated two switches. The first switch triggered the internal explosives both of them carried in stomach pouches which blew them to pieces and made a larger hole through the floor.
They exploded in large orange blooms spraying the remnants of plasticrete and acid into the server storage area. The second trigger had fired the electromagnetic spike that was aimed into this server room. It was a wave of energy that was powerful enough to kill organic life that was within ten metres of its main beam. It was more than powerful enough to completely annihilate the vast memory stores in this room wiping them clean.
