Upon arriving back at the bunker, I was dead tired. I managed to stay awake until around 8 PM, then meditated and went to bed.
I woke up feeling more centered than I had since the first night I had spent in this dimension. It took me until I was flipping bacon to realize what had changed. The constant ache of missing my family had finally dulled to something manageable. Meditation actually worked or time healed all wounds. Who knew?
Distracted by this relative light-heartedness, I forgot to check the time until after my workout. Noon. Not great.
I changed at speed and rushed into the workroom, cursing under my breath as I stuffed the blueprints and notes into the envelope. At least the train to Jersey shouldn't be too crowded.
The subway to Penn Station was uneventful. Just me, the envelope, and a handful of mid-morning passengers. NJ Transit was running late, a constant in any time period, but I made the 1:00 to Elizabeth with minutes to spare. Twenty-five minutes of industrial wasteland rolling past grimy windows later, I arrived at Elizabeth Station.
Exiting the station, I was deposited in a downtown that had clearly seen better days.
I caught the next bus toward Routes 1 & 9, paid my fare, and watched struggling storefronts give way to warehouses, then industrial parks.
I got off one stop early to scope out the area and make sure nobody was following. I was a relative unknown, but caution had kept my soul attached to my body for this long.
Fifteen minutes through identical glass-and-steel rectangles brought me to the Meridian building.
I checked my watch. It was about 1:50. Figuring that was close enough to 2 PM, and after one last look for any potential tails, I walked inside.
I nodded at the Life Model Decoy manning the front desk as I entered.
"Good afternoon. I'm here to discuss some business."
The LMD nodded.
"Please, go in. Someone is waiting for you downstairs."
Upon my arrival in the underground AIM base, I was greeted by Becca, who was awaiting the arrival of the elevator, with a nod. "You're punctual. Good. Patterson's tied up with something family related today, so it's just us." She jerked her thumb in the direction of the second elevator. "Darrell's already downstairs. Let's see what you've got."
After another brief elevator ride, I followed Becca through the soundproofed door into the server room. Darrell was clearing space on the large work table, pushing aside cables and documentation binders. The whiteboard had been wiped clean, a box of magnets sitting on the tray below it.
Darrell gestured for the folder, and I handed it to him.
He shook out the assorted papers, and started sorting through them. He grabbed the annotated map of the facility. "This needs to go on the board."
Becca muttered something about him being anal-retentive as she stood. Darrell shot her a look but didn't respond, and she was already reaching for the magnets with a faint smile. The complaint seemed almost obligatory.
Becca stood and began affixing the facility map to the whiteboard with the magnets. The sprawling industrial campus spread across the board in distinct sectors. Northwest manufacturing with factories and warehouses connected by monorail, southwest administration and main computer facility, southeast R&D labs culminating in a particle collider at the far edge, northeast aviation with hangars and airstrip. A docking facility anchored the western waterfront.
Again, I was struck by the uncanny similarity to the diagram I half-remembered from some Marvel handbook. It was frankly eerie seeing a detail-light schematic in a sourcebook transform into a full-fledged industrial complex.
Meanwhile, Darrell studied the building plans for what looked like the main computer facility more closely, then glanced at me. "How much did your guy charge you for these?"
I shrugged, deciding to play my hand close to my chest. "Traded a favor with him. Nothing too strenuous"
Darrell's eyebrows went up. "Seriously? Just a favor?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"Because an intelligence workup like this should have run you thousands," Darrell said. "That tells me that things are worse inside Stane than I thought, if your connection is handing them over so cheaply."
Becca smirked from her chair. "Or his staff is more pissed off than you thought."
Darrell shrugged. "Little bit of A, a little bit of B." He turned back to me. "Look, I've been out of the defense contracting game for a bit now, but I still keep in touch with some old friends-"
"I'm shocked you have friends," Becca interjected sweetly.
Darrell evidently decided not to let this one slide."I'm shocked you understand the concept of friends."
Becca grinned, shaking her head as she turned her chair towards her terminal.
Darrell continued. "Anyway, from what I've been hearing, morale at Stane International drilled right through rock bottom a while ago. Stane's sloppy."
I leaned forward "How so?"
"Defense contracting's always had gray areas," Darrell said. "But Stark was a tight operation. Proper containment, proper documentation, proper operational security." He shook his head. "Stane? He's cutting corners in ways that are going to blow up spectacularly."
"For example, Stane's running an experimental breeder reactor down in southern California," Darrell said. "DOE contract, officially part of the fast breeder program. But Stane's pushing it way beyond design specs."
"Sounds like Stane trying to squeeze more profit," Becca said.
"That's what everyone thinks," Darrell agreed. "But here's the thing. The reactor's losing money at this pace. Maintenance costs are through the roof, they're burning through equipment faster than they can replace it. You don't run a reactor into the ground for short-term profit. You do it when you're trying to prove you need a bigger facility."
He tapped the blueprints. "My guess? Stane's creating an excuse. Run this reactor hot enough to barely meet demand, then go to Congress, cap in hand saying 'See? We need three more of these or the program fails.'."
"In the meantime, safety goes to hell because he's treating a research reactor like a production line," I said.
"Exactly. Substandard waste handling, possible groundwater contamination, inspectors getting stonewalled because some of them don't have clearance for whatever the actual program is." Darrell shook his head. "When something really breaks, and it will, there's going to be a circus. Congressional hearings, criminal investigations, a media frenzy."
He tapped the blueprints. "Then there's whatever classified government contract they're working on. I don't know what it is. Way above my old paygrade, but the silence around it is loud, if that makes sense."
Becca glanced up from her terminal. "The silence is loud? How profound."
Darrell didn't let her break his stride."Usually you hear things through the grapevine. Former coworkers mention Stane's hiring, my acquaintances talk about unusual equipment orders, that kind of thing. But whatever this project is?"
He shook his head. "Nothing. Nobody's saying a word. That kind of lockdown doesn't happen unless it's serious. Whatever it is, people are scared to even speculate about it. That's unusual. Defense contractors love to hint at classified work. It makes them feel important. But this?" He tapped the blueprints. "Stone silence. That tells me it's either incredibly dangerous or incredibly illegal. Probably both."
"Point is," Darrell said, "Stane's not just doing questionable things. He's doing them in ways that create massive operational security failures. Company culture went from 'we're done with arms manufacturing and we're building the future' to 'we're defending America.' By that, they mean doing sketchy shit for a DoD paycheck and hoping nobody asks too many questions about how the sausage is made. When people feel that way..."
"They leak," I finished.
"Exactly," Darrell said. "The culture shift isn't just about the work, it's the people too. Stane's been parachuting some of his own management in. Former Stane Industries executives replacing Stark's old guard. They tend to be..." he searched for the word, "abrasive."
Becca interjected, leaning away from the terminal and back in her chair with a predatory grin. "I shook a few trees since our last discussion. The network connections are airgapped at Stane but the suppliers are a different story."
Darrell looked up from the blueprints. "Suppliers?"
"Yeah." Becca's grin was slightly predatory. "Stane's internal network is locked down tight. But they're not operating in a vacuum. They've got contractors, logistics companies, parts suppliers, all kinds of vendors that need to interface with them for orders, deliveries, scheduling."
"And those vendors aren't as security-concious," I said slowly, seeing where she was going.
"Exactly." Becca looked back at her terminal with obvious satisfaction. "Found a vulnerability at one of the companies that supplies Stane's biochemical research division. Their logistics database was wide open. Got their delivery schedules, which gates and docks they use, driver notes on procedures, contact info for the receiving staff."
Darrell looked up from the blueprints, one eyebrow raised. "What kind of vulnerability?"
"The old-fashioned kind." Becca's grin turned slightly smug. "I poked around a bit, figured out which facilities supply Stane. Then I went dumpster diving at a few of them to see if I could find anything interesting."
"You went dumpster diving?" Darrell's tone was caught between impressed and incredulous. "Personally?"
"Yep." Becca spun her chair to face him fully, popping the P with obvious satisfaction. "Found a printout of remote access instructions for their shipping coordinator. Phone number, username, password. Someone just threw it away with old office paperwork. Brought it back here and dialed in. Credentials were still valid."
Darrell leaned over her shoulder to look at the screen, close enough that he had to brace one hand on the back of her chair. "Which line did you use?"
"One of our clean ones. The PBX splice routing through that insurance company in Edison."
"Good," Darrell said, studying the data on her screen.
Becca shifted slightly so he could see better.
Darrell shook his head, but there was a hint of a smile. "Dumpster diving. Gotta love the classics."
She held his gaze for a beat. "Not all of us need fancy corporate security experience. Some of us just need a good pair of gloves, some clothes from the thrift store, and a lack of dignity."
"Read access to their entire logistics database?" Darrell added, leaning slightly closer to look at her screen. "Let me guess, the administrator got lazy."
"Our shipping coordinator's account has read/write access to the logistics database," Becca confirmed, shifting her chair so he could see better. "Probably because their sysadmin didn't want to bother configuring permissions ."
"Stark would have never picked a vendor that sloppy," Darrell muttered.
"Well, Stane's not Stark," Becca said, glancing up at him. He was still standing close enough that she had to tilt her head back. "We benefit from that."
Their eyes met for a moment before Becca rolled her chair back abruptly, breaking the proximity. "Anyhow, if we're looking at the bio building as an entry, we should probably get Jasmine's input, if you're not too scared of her today"
Must be the Davis they were talking about last time I visited.
Darrell rolled his eyes, but remained silent.
She stood, heading toward the intercom near the corridor entrance. "She's spent the second largest amount of time in actual bio facilities than any of us.." She keyed the intercom. A brief conversation followed, and a few minutes later, Jasmine Davis entered the server room.
Davis was an black woman in her mid-twenties, petite, with her hair pulled back in a practical ponytail. She wore a lab coat with safety glasses pushed up on her forehead. Her eyes swept across the room, landing on Becca and Darrell.
"So," she said with a slight smile, "Is the new bioreactor going to get hooked up properly sometime this month? Or are you both too busy flirting to actually finish the job?"
"We're not-" Becca started, her face flushing.
"That's not-" Darrell said at the same time, pushing his glasses up.
They both stopped, looked at each other for a fraction of a second, then quickly looked away.
So that's what their dynamic was. Man, I'd whiffed that one.
An awkward silence stretched for a beat.
Jasmine's smile softened slightly, and she mercifully moved things along. "Anyway. You mentioned biochemical supply chain?"
"Yes," Darrell said, perhaps a bit too quickly, turning to face her. "We're looking at a potential infiltration. Entry point might be through the biochemical supply chain. What should we expect in terms of facility operations?"
Jasmine walked over to the map on the whiteboard, tracing the biochemical building's location with one finger. "Biochemical research... okay. So that building's going to have its own protocols beyond general facility access. Hazmat concerns, contamination control procedures. From what I've seen at Columbia and other facilities, delivery personnel are pretty common."
"So high traffic?" I asked.
"Generally, yeah. More people coming and going means less scrutiny on any individual person, as long as they look like they belong."
She straightened up. "I should mention, I've only worked in academic settings, not defense contractors. The security culture is going to be different."
"That's fair," Darrell said. "But the basic operations should be similar."
Jasmine glanced at the assorted floor plans and maps one more time, then back at Becca. "Is there anything else you need from me? I've got cell cultures I need to check on."
"No, that's helpful," Becca said. "Thanks for the input."
Jasmine nodded and headed back toward the door, pulling her safety glasses down as she left. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
Darrell turned back to the blueprints.
"Got it. Here's the blueprint for the Main Computer facility. See the basement that's separate from the server room. That's where they'll keep the backups."
I moved closer to see what he was pointing at.
Darrell pointed. "Tape doesn't handle heat well. They'll have a dedicated climate-controlled room." He tapped the building plan.
"How do you know that?" Becca asked, rolling her chair over.
"Grumman had the same setup," Darrell said. "Tape storage is serious business. They'll have climate monitoring and gas based fire suppression.They'll have the tapes organized by rotation sets. Daily, weekly, monthly, project-specific archives. Standard grandfather-father-son rotation, probably."
Becca shrugged. "Unless they're weird, but it's unlikely."
Darrell glanced at Becca. "We should get Jackson in here. He handled physical security at the Brand Corporation for years. He'd have some good input."
Becca nodded and got up and walked to the intercom. "Jackson? You available? We could use your input on a security problem."
A pause, then a crackling response I couldn't quite make out.
Becca walked back to her chair. "Excellent."
A few minutes later, the door opened and Jackson entered the room. He was a white man, around six feet even with graying hair cropped short. He was utterly unremarkable except for the small scar on his left cheek. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, dressed like he'd just walked out of a hardware store in the suburbs. His eyes swept the room with economical precision before settling on the main map on the whiteboard.
"Stane International plant?" he queried. "Would've been nice to know about this earlier."
Darrell straightened. "Quince just brought the blueprints in today. No point wasting your time while we were still hashing things out. Now we've got something actionable."
Jackson's eyes flicked to the blueprints, then back to Darrell. A brief pause, then a curt nod. "Fair enough. What are we looking at?" He moved closer to the desk, and pulled the schematics closer.
Jackson intensely studied the security checkpoint locations and guard station placements. His finger traced the routes between buildings, pausing at choke points. He flipped to the handwritten notes from Vito's source, reading silently for a long moment.
"Stane's even more paranoid than Stark was, but he hasn't finished implementing everything he wants yet,'" he read aloud, then looked up. He looked back at the page again. "New construction project is mostly expanding underground infrastructure, but the purpose is unclear." He set the notes down. "These notes are very professional. I'd love to figure out who did the footwork for this."
"Does it matter?" I asked.
Jackson shrugged. "Call it professional curiosity. Whoever it was knows what they're looking for. Good detail on guard rotations, badge protocols, camera coverage." He tapped the margin notes.
Darrell pulled the computer room schematics closer, studying the layout.
I flipped through the notes, finding the storage specifications for the mainframe. "Twenty live drives in the primary array. Five gigabytes each." I did the math. "Hundred gigabytes total."
The tech level here was nuts. A hundred gigs in 1984, stored on 8-inch drives. In my original timeline, that kind of capacity wouldn't exist until the 90's. Darrell had mentioned twenty to fifty gigs as "typical". Stane had double that, and it was all on disk, not tape.
Only twenty drives though. I'd passively assumed there would be more - a few hundred smaller drives like back home. But twenty 8 inch drives at five gigs each? That was manageable. You could fit that on a cart. It'd be a heavy cart though. Might as well pitch this.
I cleared my throat. "What if I just take the live drives?"
Darrell looked up from the blueprints.
"Think about it," I continued. "Maintenance scenario - I roll in with a cart, say we're doing preventive replacement of the array before failure. Walk out with twenty drives for 'testing and refurbishment. There'd be some complaints about downtime, but I assume they have protocols for switching to a recent backup, and I'd be out before anybody noticed."
"That's..." Darrell paused, considering. "Actually, that could work. But you don't need the live drives."
"What do you mean?"
"Grab the backup drives instead," Darrell said. "These facilities keep backup HDD sets on-site in case the primary array fails. Standard practice is rotating daily backups - one complete set for each day of the week."
"Multiple complete sets?" I asked.
"Yeah. Monday backup, Tuesday backup, and so on. Probably five to seven complete sets total." Darrell tapped the blueprint. "Weekly tape backups happen once a week because dumping a hundred gigs to tape takes forever. But HDD backup is quicker and automated."
"So each backup set would be, what, a week old at most?" I asked.
"Depends which set you grab," Darrell said. "If you take Tuesday's set on a Wednesday, it's twenty-four hours old. Best part? You take one complete set - twenty drives - they keep running on the primary array. Nobody notices anything missing until that day-of-week comes around again and the backup tries to write to drives that aren't there."
"That's three to seven days, depending on timing," Becca interjected.
"They'll have empty spare drives on-site for replacements," Darrell said. "You swap one of the backup sets for blank spares."
Jackson nodded. "Taking the live array would not only shut down a load of their computing, it would also trip a silent alarm." He tapped the blueprints. "At Brand, we set things up that way, and I'm assuming it's no different at Stane. We caught an intruder that way once."
Darrell leaned back. "Backup drives buy us time. Could be a week before anyone notices that the backups are blank."
Jackson nodded. "You're looking at a pretty heavy cart though. Three-person job minimum. Two to load and push, one to run interference and handle doors."
"I can get good people," I said.
Jackson nodded slowly. "That could work. But you still need to get inside in the first place."
Becca turned back to her terminal. "Here's the thing. I've got read access to the logistics database now, but with a little more work, I can probably get write access too. Their security is a joke. If I can elevate privileges or find another account..."
She pulled up a database schema. "I could add Quince and his two hires to their employee database. Make them look like legitimate staff who've been there for months."
"Then use the delivery scheduling system to put them on a delivery going to Stane's complex," I said, seeing where she was going.
"Exactly." Becca's fingers flew across the keyboard. "I could add your team to their employee database and put you on an existing delivery order.."
Jackson nodded slowly. "So we add your people to the supplier's roster, schedule a legitimate-looking delivery, and walk them right through the front gate."
He glanced at me. "You'll still need proper uniforms, paperwork, and people who can act like they've done this before."
"I can handle that," I said, with more confidence than I felt.
"Then we have an approach," Darrell said, straightening up from the blueprints.
Jackson looked at me. "It's workable. Risky, but workable."
I nodded, already running through what I'd need. Personnel, timing, equipment. The personnel part was the problem. I needed people who could handle themselves under pressure, who wouldn't panic if things went sideways, and who I could trust not to talk. Where the hell did you find reliable muscle for something like this? I had the beginnings of an idea, but it would take time to develop.
"I'll need a few months to put things together," I said. "Can you have the database access ready by then?"
Becca raised an eyebrow. "Months? I should have write access to the employee database in a week or two, tops."
"Good. Get in, but don't make any changes yet." I gestured at the blueprints. "I need to assemble the right team. That's not something I can rush."
Jackson grunted approvingly. "Smart. Wrong people on a job like this, and it doesn't matter how good the plan is."
Becca shrugged. "Fine by me. I'll poke around their system, map out everything properly. By the time you're ready, I'll own their databases."
Jackson tapped the spread of papers on the table. "One more thing. The supplier disguise gets you through the gate, but once you're inside, you'll need a second identity to move between buildings." He looked down at the notepad he'd been writing in throughout the discussion, flipping back through a few pages. "I'd suggest maintenance personnel. They have access to most buildings."
Jackson held up his notepad, showing several pages of notes and rough sketches. "I've got enough from this intel to start working on what the maintenance cover should look like. Proper documentation, what kind of work orders make sense for moving equipment carts around."
Darrell leaned back in his chair. "If Stane's really ruined the internal culture like I think he has, people should be sloppier about checking work orders in general. Nobody wants to be the guy who delays 'critical maintenance' and catches hell from management."
Jackson nodded. "That'll work in our favor. But things still need to look legitimate at first glance." He glanced at me. "I should have something put together next time you drop by."
I nodded. "Appreciate it."