Ceres Chaos [Exosuit Progression]

The senior manager stood in the temporary command centre, overlooking all the cameras and sensors of the greenhouse.

“Everything is operational sir, but it may take some time to repair all drones that got faulty too. Our warehouses on the other side of the greenhouse will also take some time to establish a proper shipment line. Half of our repair parts were damaged in the fire.” A worker reported to him, to which he nodded.

Everything seems to be going according to plan. Nobody knew that he actually had a good idea of where Ardan was being held hostage.

He had already erased the communication logs in the multi-terminal of the temporary command centre and other computers here, ensuring that none of the workers here could ever find out his conversation or his log of giving the two imposters the identities needed.

All of the logs were stored on his personal multi-terminal instead, providing him with a backup in case he was caught and needed to pull Watson down with him.

It wasn’t in his job description to save people who had been kidnapped! Even if Ardan’s parents tried to find fault with him, he had cooperated readily with the enforcer squad and no one could say otherwise.

It would be against the employment terms to fire him, so his job was fairly safe too. If he did get unfairly fired, he could simply run over to Watson and just get revenge on the greenhouse.

He also knew that the four friends of Ardan were definitely going to try something, so he fixated himself in the temporary command centre.

Under no circumstances was he going to leave this spot and have his data exposed!

“Sir, two individuals are entering the main command centre. It seems to be Ardan’s friends.” A worker pulled up a camera feed, showing Lisa and Braton running into the main command centre.

“Fucking kids, why do they always have to screw things up,” The senior manager murmured to himself. “Doesn’t matter, let them do whatever they want! There’s nothing left of value in the command centre either.” He focused on his own tasks, which involved cleaning up any potential residual data that might indict him.

A few minutes later, however, the senior manager noticed that the worker was sweating hard. “What’s wrong? What are they doing in there?” He rushed over to the worker.

“I think they are trying to dismantle the drones in the loading bay!” The worker exclaimed, shocking the senior manager. The senior manager cursed – if he had been the only one who saw it, he would have just ignored it and let them do it.

But now that all the workers in the command centre had seen it, he had to act on it, otherwise, this was a real reason that he could get fired for. They already lost a good number of drones due to the fire.

“Send four guards over to stop them and send a group of workers to put the drones back together. We need them in operational condition as backup drones!”

“Sir, we don’t have enough people here, most of them are out in the fields or in our warehouses on the other side of the greenhouse. There’s only the seven of us in the command centre here that are nearby to respond.”

“Fuck, two of you, go right now!” The senior manager ordered before all of a sudden a loud audio was played to the live camera feed. It was a live recording of the meeting between Ardan and Watson, recorded directly by the butler drone.

The butler drone’s data could not be erased by the senior manager due to a lack of authorization. As the recording was played, the workers were stunned to see that the butler drone even managed to record the footage of the senior manager talking to Watson as they left the greenhouse together.

The only audible sentence caught was the senior manager remarking outside the greenhouse as Watson left: [Don’t be ridiculous, you and I are done!]

The senior manager immediately shut off the camera feed, staring at the workers: “Don’t go to the loading bay, the kids are just fooling around. Let me handle this directly, and do not let anyone else into the command centre!” Rushing out, he headed straight into the main command centre, aiming for the loading bay.

The workers didn’t dare to go against the senior manager, who in a sense was their direct boss. But a seed of suspicion has been placed in their hearts, growing slowly.

The moment the senior manager left, the workers all looked around at each other in doubt, before suddenly a fan and a filter panel fell from the top of the tent with a large bang, with Erik and Trissa landing down.

“Nobody moves! Haha, I always wanted to say that. Trissa, keep them down while I try to find something!” Erik shouted. Trissa smiled, standing still while she slowly stared at each one of them, expertly twirling her knife.

The workers shivered. They were not combat trained and had not even survived the first stage of the qualifiers during their graduation exam ten years ago, how could they even consider competing with the confident Trissa in front of them?

Erik quickly rushed to the multi-terminal of the temporary command centre, which had been locked by the senior manager. Luckily, the butler drone had a higher access code, which was granted to him, allowing him to easily override the permission restriction set.

“Fuck he almost deleted everything! I can’t find any of the communication logs nor the identity of the two workers!” Erik cursed before a worker spoke: “How about checking the backup camera feeds?

Erik started rushing as he followed the advice, however, he found out that the senior manager had been thorough and cleaned up the backup feeds too. How was he going to get any evidence now? Pushing his computational ability to the limit, he finally decided to connect his nerval jack to the temporary command centre.

It was dangerous to try and control a foreign data object with his nerval jack when he had only installed it a few months ago, but he had more than enough experience in the qualifiers and his daily VR training to do some basic operations.

***

The senior manager finally reached the loading bay, seeing Lisa and Braton sitting on the floor surrounded by the four guards who had rifles, though not aimed at them.

“Give me the butler drone. It’s here in the loading bay, isn’t it?”

“Fuck you, you’re the one cooperating with Watson to kidnap Ardan!” Lisa spat on the ground in front of the senior manager, who flinched.

The guards looked at each other in confusion, while the senior manager immediately snapped his fingers. He had to use his authority before it was too late.

“Don’t listen to her! Spread out and find the butler drone, it must be here!” The four guards immediately dispersed, while the senior manager took the opportunity to convince the ‘kids’.

“I don’t know why you’re accusing me of anything. I may have been the one to set up the meeting with Watson, but I am in no way involved with the kidnapping. You know I was the one coordinating the rescue, and I swear on my life I don’t know what happened to Ardan after he entered the building! You are accusing me without any evidence!”

Lisa and Braton didn’t reply, just merely smiling at him. It irked him to no end, but he couldn’t hit them and had to retain the moral high ground here.

There were video cameras without audio in the loading bay that could easily catch him assaulting teenagers – he should know because he was the one that erased the logs.

Soon the four guards came back, dragging an electrocuted butler drone that was turned off. “Sir we got him; he was hiding in one of the drone containers.”

“Great, now keep these kids in the mansion and make sure they don’t leave the mansion! We can’t have them running around jeopardizing the operation of the greenhouse!” The senior manager was about to leave before a video started to play as an emergency announcement from the temporary command centre on all multi-terminals.

The video showed Ardan walking into the loading bay, and talking to the senior manager via video call for five minutes. He was accompanied by two workers who eventually assaulted him, stuffing Ardan into an empty drone container before carrying it out of the loading bay.

The senior manager’s face was clearly visible on the video, even the four guards saw it with full clarity.

The senior manager was reeling in shock! Didn’t he delete the camera feeds already and covered all his bases? How was this video still being played? The four guards weren’t dumb, immediately surrounding the senior manager.

Two of the guards were the same ones that had been knocked out yesterday by the two workers, and they were now definitely against the senior manager after seeing the video.

“Didn’t you tell the enforcers that you had no communication with Ardan after he entered the building? Why was he on a video call with you when he was in the loading bay? You would have seen the attackers in the video call too, and you were the one who sent the worker to accompany him!” One of the guards questioned him.

“N-n-no, that’s not what happened! The video is fake! It can’t exist!” The senior manager stuttered, his brain racing to try to find a way out. How was it possible? He knew for a fact that the two imposters he collaborated with didn’t stuff Ardan into a container: they carried him on their backs.

He glared at Lisa, who laughed. He looked towards the two guards who were attacked by the imposters and saw them staring at him with great suspicion.

“Okay then, if it’s fake, let's go back to the command centre and find the real camera log!” Lisa sneered. “If you’re innocent, you wouldn’t hesitate to show us the real data, wouldn’t you?”

The two guards immediately approached the senior manager, devoted to their role of increasing security after their blunder yesterday. “Sir, please work with us. We will find out the truth of this!”

The senior manager’s eyes bulged. The game was up.

If he played along and went back to the command centre, they would find out that the real video would have been deleted, alongside a lot of other critical missing data.

This would place him under greater suspicion. Now, he was a cornered rat, he had no other choice.

He immediately ran away, surprising the four guards who were stunned as the senior manager ran out of the loading bay towards the greenhouse exit.

Lisa, on the other hand, was already prepared for it, sensing the desperation in advance, leaping out at the same time and delivering a fierce kick to the back to the senior manager, knocking him down in one hit! He hit the ground face first, suffering a concussion before being out cold.

The four guards were shocked that such a short girl could deliver such power in a single kick, while Braton was unsurprised, having sparred Lisa on a daily basis for the last two months.

He had been training to deal with fast kickers like her, considering his emphasis is on pure arm strength and upper body martial arts, rather than legs. He hated leg day.

“What are you guys waiting for? Bring him to the command centre! We got to find out what he’s hiding!” Lisa took command and snatched the senior manager’s multi-terminal before the four guards finally snapped out of their daze, moving forward to carry the senior manager to the command centre.

Arriving back at the temporary command centre, Lisa and Braton were surprised to see Erik slightly drained, sitting on the floor, while Trissa sitting next to him.

Two workers were busy getting nutri-paste and passing it to Trissa, who then fed it to Erik who could barely lift his hands or his body.

“What the hell happened in here? Did I miss an episode in the romance holo-drama?” Braton exclaimed.

“Oh shut up, I can’t move my body right now. That video took a lot out of me!” Erik sighed.

“What do you mean? Wasn’t it just retrieving the video from the logs? That’s just a simple copy-paste move function right?”

“That video wasn’t real,” Erik muttered. The four guards, Lisa, Braton and the workers were shocked. The video wasn’t real?

Then that means they have falsely accused the senior manager. But then again, why did the senior manager try to run away if the video was truly fake?

“I had to fake the movements of Ardan and the face of the senior manager. It took a lot of computational effort on my part to fully simulate how they would move too. You will notice if you look closely at the video that the two workers’ faces were blurry as well! Check his personal multi-terminal with this access code, he must have some data leads!”

They immediately took out the personal multi-terminal of the unconscious senior manager, using his fingerprint to open it while exposing all the dirty secrets within, related or not. Mistresses, illegal shipments of crops and even unsanctioned bribes from Watson under the table.

The senior manager even kept a ledger of all the bribes he received and exactly when from Watson, intending it to be a hidden dagger against Watson if he got caught by the enforcers for a more lenient sentence.

Too bad he made the wrong choice of trying to run instead.

“It doesn’t make sense at all, why would he choose to run instead? Wouldn’t the enforcers catch him if we issue an arrest case?” Erik asked.

“Didn’t you see how the enforcers work out here? It’s like everybody is in the same criminal ring together! I suspect even the enforcers are in on it.” Trissa sneered, scrolling through the rows of data of bribery logs.

A few of the senior manager’s personal fund injections were also coincidental with shipments of crops marked as lost or stolen.

“Ardan would literally puke if he saw this, knowing that this fucker has been working here for five years undetected! But more importantly, find out where has he been meeting Watson!” Lisa said.

“He’s been meeting him at a lot of locations, but the most frequent one would be this building.” A holographic layout of the commercial area and industrial area around the greenhouse showed up. A simple two-storey building was highlighted in red.

It looked like a regular shophouse built with cheap modular materials, characteristic of early colonization structures except it had lost any shade of white that it was originally fabricated in, instead covered in sand and dust as was typical in the outer zones.

“Okay good, now we can tell the enforcers!” One of the guards was about to call the enforcers before Trissa grabbed his hand firmly.

“You still believe the enforcers are on our side? If anything, they will try their best to stall the entire thing! No way we’re relying on them. We’re doing this ourselves!”