Chapter 28 - The Energy Institute

Valen Brise stalked through the empty halls with near-boredom and zero adrenaline, used to the way missions were always completed without any problems. She had memorised the 50-page plan Ghost had dumped on her for the mission and had a backup plan for everything, including a case study for when she was cornered by pissed-off, Lightspeed-fueled university students seeking to protect their precious academic career from intruders.

The Energy Institute was a collaboration between Barkley University and many a corporation, meant to research potential and additional sources of energy. Despite poor press coverage, most corporations were smart enough to diversify their investments into developing technologies for the sake of adapting to market demand, and so there was a continuous stream of researchers studying things like methanogens as energy sources but also nuclear energy.

Their Interface page had been dry as hell for Valen, who had barely passed biotech class back in the original universe. She'd always preferred chemtech classes.

Valen had snuck into the autoclave rooms by sequestering herself in one of the full alcohol tanks to be smuggled in: something she could only do with her ability, Liquid Living. Temmy had teleported her to one of those manufacturing plants and she'd simply stowed away in one of the tanks scheduled to be delivered to the institute. Her food stores for the mission had consisted only of grain bars that didn't dissolve instantly in ethanol.

Valen would kill for a hot bowl of soup right now. Why Ghost hadn't just told Temmy to teleport her into the facility directly, she wouldn't know, but Valen wasn't in the habit of doubting Ghost's 100-percent plans.

Liquid Living did not protect her from the effects of alcohol. She was excessively drunk when she pulled herself out of the tank, and had fumbled with the packet of medical pills that she summoned from her subspace storage.

She expelled the alcohol in her lungs back into the tank itself (a messy job) and did her best to mop up the stuff seeping off her onto the floor. A change of clothes, a brief cleanup, and a firm pull of the tank's covers ensured she was ready for the next steps. The pills had finished working.

Hangovers were a thing of the past.

There was spyware, but only in the building's hallways because the directors weren't paranoid enough. She simply activated the holograph function on her custom Interface and allowed it to shroud her in an image of her surroundings.

It didn't do anything about sound, or people potentially bumping into her, but it would fool the spyware sufficiently.

She opened the door—Ghost had claimed it didn't matter if they saw a door opening and closing on its own as long as they didn't see anything else—and made her way up the stairs.

The elevators locked every evening at seven when the guards left, so they weren't usable. A door at every level prevented her easy entry, but she ignored most of them and headed to the ninth floor steadily.

It had been simple enough for Ozcar and Io to reel in graduate student José Statham and make copies of his biological data before wiping him and returning him to his bed without a fuss. Valen produced an artificial eye, and then a drop of blood. The machine scanned both and allowed her in; it wasn't uncommon for students to return in the middle of the night for some procedure, anyway.

You had to bleed these days to bypass most institutional locks. It wasn't much of a wonder that the man had just kept a small vial of his own blood on himself, of which they had just taken a portion.

Recreating a holograph of his eye had been a little messier, and had involved removing the eye temporarily from the socket. It was fortunate that Io had already learned how to take care of these kinds of minor surgeries; Wizah would never have agreed if they hadn't 'gotten consent'.

A medical pill restored him to full function without any discomfort, and a memory wipe and implant took care of everything anyway. José Statham would awake just fine, so Valen didn't really see what the problem was.

The lock clicked open, and she swung the glass door open. It locked behind her as soon as she closed the door, but she wouldn't be exiting that way, so it was alright.

Recalling the map Ghost had quizzed her on, Valen made her way right, and then turned right again, letting herself into a long hallway that separated two sides. On the left, a long room with rows of benches, where the researchers did most of their work. On the right, miscellaneous and specific machinery, separated by usage. She ignored everything and went all the way to the end of the hallway.

It was one of only two sections that had a closed door. The other was a fridge room that kept samples cold.

The last door didn't require eyeball access but did require some blood. She dropped a bit on the lock, which wiped it clean and sterilised it as soon as it authorised entry. She was still invisible to spyware, so there would be a huge number of red flags. José Statham would be facing an inquiry come morning, but that wasn't her problem.

Given that the Energy Institute studied...well, energy, they consumed an inordinate amount of lustre. This had forced the planners to include far more sources and caused the institute to be removed from the city's typical lustre grid. As a result, each floor of the institute had its own dedicated source of lustre alongside whatever other energy sources they might be studying, and everything was located in the level's source room.

Valen entered the ninth floor's source room and went immediately to the only item they needed. It was the only place in the entirety of the Southernlands which had it: a tank of radioactive nucleogenic bacteria that was capable of turning standard sugar sources into extraordinary amounts of usable nuclear energy.

A small tank like this was just enough to power one floor's worth of experiments.

She disconnected the tank from its typical sources, and its safety mechanisms clicked in immediately to notify her that she had less than an hour to reconnect things before the whole thing blew up. She stored it in her subspace.

Within minutes, she felt the tug of Ozcar's Fisherman ability on the back of her neck, and tugged back to signify that Ozcar could begin to reel.

Once she was home, she would pass Ghost the tank and watch her panic a little while she reconnected everything in their labs, and then she would undergo a juice cleanse.

Her liver deserved it.