[Illium, Nos Olmos] Withdrawal

In the room behind Aliquam, the quarian sat with his omnitool glowing brightly, fingers hopping deftly across the keypad.

Okay. They've obviously got some way of keeping the alarms down. If I were them and a krogan came charging through the door, I'd drop my security block and make a run for it.
Wise.

"I'm going to need to figure out how they blocked the alarm. They must have a different plan from mine - I doubt they've got a geth on board to help them monitor all the local nets. This might take a few."

A few more taps and the building schematic came up on one display, overlaid with the cabling and security systems layout. It had cost a lot more than expected, but Jil'Korah was glad he'd offered to pay extra for the details, even if it was coming out of his share.

There appears to be a denial of service attack in progress.
Seriously? That's sloppy as hell. They must have some kind of second stage; a DDOS would only keep the alarms from going off for a few minutes and it raises all sorts of maintenance alerts.
The attack is locking up local networks, I can not access them.

"Shirin, we have a problem. These guys are really sloppy, really stupid, or a lot cleverer than you'd expect. They've got the systems bogged down with a botnet, and until it stops we can't get in. Once it does stop, either the alarms go off or their second stage kicks in, and we can't tell what that is."

I have something.
Share it with the class.
The attack is originating inside the bank.
Oooooh, that's a good trick. Looks like a systems malfunction and since there's no increase in traffic to nearby nodes it doesn't raise the alarms. They'd need to...

"Okay, hang on! They've got something attached to one of the terminals in there, they have to. Must have put it on just before or just after they started their robbery. Remember the drone I used on the ship? Something like that. We can't triangulate from here; keep an eye out for it inside and once you find it don't touch it. Just keep in contact until we know what we're dealing with. Meantime, we'll work on isolating the nearest law enforcement station instead of the bank, should buy us some time if things don't go as planned."

Of course, to anyone listening and unable to hear the subvocal communication between Jil and Ensemble, it probably sounded like one long sentence rapidly strewn together and containing multiple thoughts at once. Something like a salarian.

An acceptable plan. If successful, local response will not scramble and more distant stations will assume the locals are taking care of it. The confusion should create a window of several minutes, perhaps longer.
We'll assume five minutes, if we get more it's a blessing. Ready?
Beginning.

Six centuries of life provided a great deal of wisdom to an individual krogan, but raw intellectual power was something else. Kirok had the uneasy sensation of looking down into a dark, empty hole as Jil continued to talk, his own mediocre intellect desperately trying to figure out the baffling stream of lingo. It wasn't easy, nor successful. Somewhere in his brain, a recipe for scorched klixen egg goulash was lost forever.

"This is dandy an' all," Kirok said as he looked down the sights of his shotgun as his brain rebelled against the endless stream of lingo, "but I think I'll stick with 'pointin' an' shootin,' if'n y'don't mind. Never failt me inna past. Just tell me who an' what I needta shoot, an' I'm good."

The stream of technology had pushed the plan out of Kirok's mind already. Shirin sighed and mounted a pair of charges on the door's main anchor points. It was pretty standard-issue; there were doors specifically designed to prevent this kind of tactic, but apparently the CFI didn't feel that investing in one was worth it. Oh well.

"Masks up." She dropped the visor, polarized, and stepped back. "Again, once we're in, look for drones, node plug-ins, anything connected to the network that doesn't look routine. Sync on my mark..." Three seconds went by as she pulled up her omnitool. "...Mark. Detonating."

No self-respecting Orozvhadi settled for second-rate tech. The charges were miniaturized plastic explosives, designed specifically for controlled door-breaches - they popped the connecting points with a minimum of flash or noise. This was not to say that it went down silently. The explosions, although small, were still noisy, and Kirok shoulder-blocking the door in a second later was thunderous.

Still, they probably had a minute or two before anybody came to check out the noise, and the safe deposit boxes were stored in a vault between the back door and the main stairwell - meaning anyone coming down the stairs could be intercepted before they saw the ruins of the door. A quick sweep of the floor revealed no one in sight, and Shirin put the plan into action. "Kirok, stay over here and keep the stairs covered. Ana, head in and run a Masterkey sequence on the door to the deposit box vault. I'll secure the elevator."

The power wasn't an option - securing the elevator would have to mean 'making it a tactical non-option' instead of just shutting it down like she'd preferred. Thankfully, Shirin was prepared with a whole set of monowire spools; she popped two open and began attaching it to the elevator door's frame, forming a barely-visible grid. Any unwary soul who stepped forward slowly would get some nasty cuts and find their progress barred, while any who charged forward would be diced into chunks.

"Nearly secure over here."

Nodding, the krogan hustled over to the staircase as he attached the foot-long bayonet to the end of his shotgun. For once, Whitefang had been left behind, at Shirin's insistence, so the krogan was on his own now.

He peered around the staircase cautiously, making sure that any 'company' they had would be quickly and easily seen.

"Nothin' yet, folks. But this ain't gonna last long. Hurry it up."

"There's some activity going on here..." the turian said, "I don't think it's related to you, they're still ignoring the basement access. hmmm..."

Ali shifted to a different window, and resighted, inside the bank a humanoid female or maybe asari was pointing to what was almost certainly a turian gesturing about.

"They might have hit a snag, or they are just arguing who's going to get the loot, maybe it's just a deadline approaching. Stupid privacy windows prevent me using a amplifier and hearing what they're saying."

He looked across the room and sighed, "looks that one of the hostages is getting itchy, might try to be a hero... hope she stays down. Last thing we want is half a dozen biotics going at it."

The backup plan didn't really extend far in terms of preparation - mostly just a few extra steps (covering points of entry from the main floor), and most of it was based around being ready to counter anything the competition tried, particularly since (at least for the moment) Shirin's team had the element of surprise. Hypothetical scenarios played out in her mind as she finished the monowire web, exploring the possibilities of between the bank robbers and the hostages.

...None of them were particularly great. One might think that a distraction from the hostages would work in the Band's favor, but it actually just produced more uncontrolled, random elements into the situation. A hostage might try to flee downstairs and be shot by Kirok, for example, or the entire team of robbers could seek cover in the stairwell, which would mean serious firepower to deal with. Additionally, any conflict upstairs would produce spectacle (audible, visual, or both), which would mean they were more likely to draw police attention prematurely.

"All right. Aliquam, you're authorized to take whatever action you deem necessary. I'd prefer to give everybody outside the bank as little reason to notice what's going on as possible, but you're in charge up top." Attaching the last anchor point on the monowire spool, Shirin began sweeping the hallways, checking every node for a drone or intrusive device. "Ana, once the door's open, you're looking for deposit box EM-2253 - they're sorted alphabetically then numerically. If you open the door and see guards, yell and I'll back you up."

To her annoyance, none of the network nodes were in use.

"Jil, I'm not seeing any drones down here. They must have attached it up on the main floor." The drell paused to consider the situation for a moment, then: "I can pop the cloak and go up to look for it myself - I don't particularly want them to have unfettered access to the system, especially not if they turn out to be smarter than they look. Advise?"

“You got it, hon.”

The problem with Masterkey bypass shunts weren’t that they were obvious or slow, it was that they were single-use. Taking advantage of an unpatched fault in security software, they simulated a power cycle, thus opening a secured door for a brief period of time during a series of self-diagnostic steps. Because the timing has to be exact when using them in a break-in, the question on door-hacking becomes less “which pieces of integrated circuitry to I attempt to short out” and more “how’s my reaction time?”

Ana’s response to such a question was “pretty damned fast.” Shimmering with a blaze of blue as she held her omnitool to the door, she narrowed her eyes, concentrating on the timer displayed on it. The moment the timer reached 00:00, she released, rocketing towards the door at the same time that it slid open…

…straight into a very surprised guard, who had just enough time to shout before being knocked unconscious by the blunt-force trauma.

“Oh, shit. Hon, we got company. Gonna see if I can’t keep this sucker open from this side!”

"Why th' hell is everythin' going t'shit right now!?" Kirok bellowed, still covering the staircase with his shotgun. "Ya'll got ten seconds t'make this work for I get tense! Thought this was s'posed t'be easy, Shirin!"

Kirok pulled a heatclip from his bandolier and slammed it into the shotgun as he glared up the staircase, just waiting for the security squad to come bolting down at any moment. Hell, the rate things were going right now, he'd welcome it. Too many people were screaming about things for things to be going well.

"What's the word, folks," he said, sneering in frustration. "What's goin' on?!"

"Shit they are getting real edgy, one just kicked a downed guard for no apparent reason... still keeping clear from the basement. I don't think this bozos will go to the basement unless they are trying to escape but..."

Ali didn't glance towards Jil but now was the right time. "if that alarm goes off the police might try to reach them through the basement. It's an ideal entry point."

Of course. He couldn't be bothered to plant the breaching charges and now he was shouting while they tried to remain at least moderately stealthy. The occasional temptation to shoot Kirok somewhere nonlethal but painful (like the eye, maybe) was strong.

All right. Guards in the vault. Edginess up top, with the likelihood that if things went south, they'd be caught between their erstwhile rivals and NOPD special response. This was one of those points you couldn't extensively plan for - you had to improvise quickly.

"Right. Kirok, into the vault with Ana - take out anybody in there. Ali, Jil, I'm headed up to find the compromised node."

If Aliquam watched the entrance to the stairwell very carefully, he would be able to just barely make out a shimmer of refracted light as Shirin slipped up to the main floor. She slid under a counter, waiting for the tac cloak to recharge, and started running a scan of the area.

Yes, these were the times that tried men's souls.

"Right. Ana, I'm comin' t'yer position. You shoot me, an' god help me, I'mma flatten you."

The krogan ran towards the asari's position, making sure his shotgun was loaded for the tenth time in the last half hour.

"MOVE T'TH' SIDE, SUMBITCH! HERE COMES TH' PAIN TRAIN!"

And indeed, he was about to crash straight through the door when it slid open, sending him careening past Ana before she could get so much as an “Oh hey there, kid!”

"DON'T CAWL ME KID!" Kirok managed to bellow out as he thundered through the door at top speed like a runaway locomotive. The krogan tore down the corridor at top speed, shotgun and bayonet at the ready. He turned the corner and... stopped abruptly. While fear wasn't in the krogan's vocabulary, surprise certainly was.

"Uh, Jil? Kirok here. How many drones y'think y'could hack at once?"

Jil'Korah had what he considered a pretty cool passive app installed on his omnitool - when he tapped a button, it produced a pleasant chiming sound inside his suit helmet. Under normal circumstances, this kept him relaxed; the chimes would sound vaguely like some sort of pleasant music or maybe even the wind blowing through an open window and setting the real thing jingling.

He usually turned it off before a heist - it was mostly to keep him calm while he did routine maintenance work. He'd forgotten to turn it off, these were not normal circumstances, and the chimes were not relaxing him.

Where normally Jil prided himself on producing some vaguely pleasing sounds with the tool, today the low-level racket inside his helmet was something akin to vorcha grindcore. His fingers flew across the omnitool, screens popping open and closing again in front of him almost as quick as the eye could see. One day he was going to need a cybernetic arm, because for this quarian carpal tunnel syndrome was going to be an absolute bitch.

Jil'Korah didn't mind, so long as that day wasn't today. His mouth moved almost as quickly as his fingers.

"Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay... Okay. We can handle this. We can. The local police station's isolated from the network and doesn't know it, so if the alarm goes off we've got about five minutes, probably more but at least five. They've got some pretty reactive VI's, fucking privatized law enforcement with the best of fucking everything, so they'll figure this shit out, but five minutes we can count on and once their network reconnects itself they'll get flooded by the backlogged calls so *maybe* another five minutes after that," the quarian paused only for air, "but count on five minutes. Kirok I do not like your tone at all because it implies that there are enough nodes that I might not be able to hack them and that would be a bad thing, and I don't like bad things so I need to see what you see. If that antique hardsuit of yours has a cam," another pause for breath, and at a moment of irony given Jil'Korah's own preference for older envirosuits, "...turn it on and sync it to this frequency so I can get an idea of what we're facing."

Keep an eye on the alarm and the police station, let me know if the alarm goes off or the police station realizes what's happening. Also if you have any ideas now would be a good time.
I will alert you immediately.

Subvocal comms were the best thing ever.

"Five hostiles immediately visible on the main floor - two by the hostages, two at the front desk, one watching the entrance to the server room. Linking the audio feed, Ali."

The cloak was ready again - Shirin had eight seconds to get out of sight again once she reactivated it. Vanishing from sight, she rolled out from under the counter and slithered across the main lobby, passing less than three meters from a pair of arguing robbers.

"Serem's taking too long," said the turian - scar over one eye, Invictus tattoo, milspec armor. "He was supposed to have the server cracked in ten minutes."

The asari - dark blue, floral red markings, Eclipse insignia - scowled at him. "It's been eleven. Be patient. We set this up perfectly, we've got time."

"Inside job." She passed a pile of Eclipse-uniformed corpses, carefully stacked in a secluded corner. "That asari was part of the security here - explains how they pulled this off so smoothly." Two seconds left on the cloak. The drell crouched behind an automated teller VI kiosk and waited for the recharge. "No sign of the node yet...wait. Oh." There it was...next to the server room door, with one of the thieves right next to it. Shit.

"Found it, Jil." Leaning her head out very slightly, Shirin zoomed her heads-up display's feed on the device attached to the node, and sent the quarian the image. "Anything you recognize?"

"Hey!" barked one of the humans across the room. "Stay down, all of you! Don't get twitchy, nobody needs to get an example made of them."

"Betting she's one of the brains of the operation... sighting her, if shit goes down, " well it was probably more 'when' then 'if' but he tried to stay positive, "she goes down. Using the Krysae here, so I might get the turian too... milspec armor won't do him a lick of good if without helmet."

The rest of the world slowly 'faded away' into the background while he kept the asari in his target... The clarity that this afforded him made him realize something, "Jil, you should try to isolate the nearby Eclipse garrison like you did with the police station, the bank hired Eclipse to run security they might have an alarm line to them too to get reinforcements."

His scalp itched, not a good sign, it tended itch when a clusterfuck threatened to happen, that's why he had the heavy weapons.

Meanwhile, Kirok looked hunkered down behind a wall as five small but well-armed drones floated listlessly. Scrambling for a cam on his suit - honestly, what a question to ask now - Kirok managed to find one in his collar that hadn't been turned on or maintained since he first bought this particular hardsuit a century ago. There was a moment of panic as the ancient technology started booting up with a loud whine, and he was sure the drones twitched in his direction as he ducked back behind the wall for cover. Somewhere in Jil's feed, a grainy black and white window popped up, showing a holo design at least fifty years out of style.

"Awright, I've got... a camera?" Kirok said doubtfully as he fingered his shotgun. "Look, take care of 'em an I gotta clear shot inta th' next room. Are they th' bank's? D'they b'long t'the other dudes? Or what, man?"

There was so much happening at once and WHY WOULD THE FUCKING CHIMES NOT STOP.

"Kirok, those are security drones, an old asari milspec model only slightly retooled for nonmilitary use. They probably belong to the bank or maybe to the Eclipse security detachment but no matter who they belong to, there's no good reason for them to all be in one place unless someone put them there on purpose. Standby." Jil was still speaking quickly, but given the tension of the moment he seemed to have switched out of "overexcited salarian" mode and back into something more befitting his capabilities. He was a quarian, and these were technological problems. No, not problems - puzzles. Puzzles to solve before time expired.

"Aliquam I appreciate your faith in me and may I say it's about damn time but isolating even one building from a network the size and complexity of these is taking a lot out of us." When had he started using 'us' to refer to himself and his suit? It was probably technically correct but warranted further investigation when there weren't seven things trying to go wrong at once.

"Shirin, that's the control node we're looking for - I don't recognize that model but it's not the same style as the terminals or the other control panels, definitely an outside influence. You might need to-" thankfully that wasn't a thought he was going to finish, because another one hit him like a brick to the faceplate, courtesy of Ensemble.

The security drones may be tied to the alarm systems.
Of course they would be, they're... Oh. Oh, they're not going to like that.
It is not an ideal solution, but may be viable.
It might get people hurt.
It is not an ideal solution.

"...Okay. Shirin, I don't think we can solve this. I mean, there's too much shit happening at once, and I don't think we can keep things from going bad. If you've got some kind of awesome plan, this is the time to let me know, because my best idea right now is to have Kirok open the door for those security drones to trigger the internal alarm. The only reason to lock them all in one place unguarded would be to keep them from doing that, and it's a lazy way to skip having to hack them. I can keep it from reaching anybody outside the building, but those bank robbers won't know that and it might get them out of there in a hurry, leaving the door open for us to grab shit and run. I just don't know what would happen to the hostages."

There was a pause, exactly three seconds long, as Shirin's mind processed all of this information at once. She placed no particular value on the hostages' lives, but needless destruction drew needless attention. On the other hand, they might be able to simply kill the would-be robbers - the Band had the element of surprise plus superior firepower and tactical positioning. Aliquam was poised to cover the asari and the turian, while the two humans watching the hostages could be taken out with relative ease.

That left the one by the server room, plus the one in the server room and whoever he happened to have with him. She could mine the entrance after taking out the hostage-watchers, perhaps - and Aliquam's sniper fire would cut them off from the stairs, forcing them to use the elevator, which was a deathtrap.

Presumably the hostages would be grateful enough to not become violent, but they would absolutely cause a racket and alert the local authorities. Even if Jil suppressed the signal, word of mouth meant that the NOPD would inevitably show up, unless...

Well. Three seconds were up.

"Ali, get ready to open fire."

The cloak popped, and as Shirin slid out of cover and broke into a full-on sprint towards the humans, the fabricators in her hardsuit festooned her shoulders, elbows, knees, and wrists with the silicon carbide blades commonly associated with militarized batarian martial arts styles. More than one of the robbers glanced up in alarm at the sudden burst of noise.

"Kirok, Ana? Do it."

Kirok looked around the corner to the drones, to Shirin's hovering face in his holoview, and back at the drones.

Welp. When in Roam. Rome? Roam.

There was a sound like a train being violently suplexed as Kirok tore down the hallway towards the doors, desperately keeping low enough so he was out of their field of view. As soon as he made it to the end, he rolled on his back and slid for the doors, firing his shotgun at the plastic and glass as he did. The doors burst open, letting the drones out on their pre-appointed rounds, surprisingly ignorant of Kirok.

The krogan stood up, dusting himself off. A salarian holding a floor waxer looked at him with intense dread.

"Hey. Which way t'th' place where all the stuff is?"

The salarian shakily pointed down a hallway.

"Thanks."

And Kirok was off.