Also at https://archiveofourown.org/works/47065192/chapters/119711608
It wasn’t hard to get out of the Orca. It’s model was considered vintage – Sombra could play it’s systems far more easily than a fiddle. It didn’t hold much worth examinging, one she’d gotten some food and water in her stomach – some. Not too much.
The base outside had more potential. She executed a simple macro – crack the loading door for a moment, so she could slip out, close it again, delete the macro.
Gibraltar, sea air blowing over the neglected landing pad just a few meters above the Mediterranean – was an anomaly among the bases formerly claimed by Overwatch. Spanish, British, A no-mans-land after the Omnic war after their robotic forces had started to blockade the connection between Atlantic and the Mediterranean… An outdated strategy until you considered naval trade. Some indecent years back had proved the importance of the Suez canal, this was as much a blockade against the Northern countries as anything else.
The Overwatch base overflowed the ashes, and was built into the hills themselves – disconnected systems, in fear of the god AIs of the previous war might not be contained as well as hoped.
It meant something to Sombra. There was no need to see everything going on in the base – just the data flowing though it. And her now two hacked hard drives gave her access to most of it – but she hated the prospect of two dead hard drives disconnecting her. She needed redundancy.
She needed to get past whatever surveillance systems they had and to the data. She had remote-control rubber duckies that were just waiting for an open USB. Internal header, external port, didn’t matter.
Walking up to the main base would have been no trouble – the night was bright enough to make out the path upwards, even without the light shining across the bay. The trees were thick as she went North – and southeast, zig-zagging upward. The important stuff was in the least accessible place, of course, and she had to take the back door.
The trees gave way to storm-washed barren rock and poured cement. Her translocator started doing more work – pitched forward, scanning the area. If it found cameras, it would snap back to her belt seconds later, if not, she would snap to it. The place didn’t seem well surveilled – she checked the data quickly – then realized how many of the cameras that had been were simply dead. Perhaps her previous hacks had been more thorough than she realized.
She fiddled through a few more options on the translocator before tossing it again. Might as well keep herself entertained.
It snapped back to her waist. She threw again, trying to land it on a high ledge.
She zapped up with it. Normally. Fine.
Another throw. Progress.
Another throw. She zapped across and found herself tied up in a mess of limbs – having lost her pseudorandom Russian Roulette with the translocator’s safety mechanism. It didn’t take her that long to figure out how she had been algorithmically posed, but it was something to break up the monotony of infiltration – and never bad practice to figure out how to unwind herself out of it.
She was close, now. The server room would be – yes. Down below. If they would open up the installation door, she could jump into it from here – as it was, she had to go through the normal side door. NFC scanner? Trivial. Hac- wait. It was propped open.
What the hell. Did these people know nothing about physical security? For a moment, Sombra regretted not being able to give them a scolding on proper security – but as she slipped inside, she heard footsteps. She tossed her translocator into the mess of wires at the bottom of the server stack – and zapped into it.
This was the very scenario her latest translocator updates had been made for – she found herself twisted behind racks of servers, unseen, where she could asses the situation around her.
“Ohhh… Just run. Just run.” The – female? – voice was followed by slow tapping on a keyboard. Trying to run something directly on the servers? Not connecting remotely? Dios mío, what a noob. Sombra tried to get a glance – Zhou. Meiling Zhou. The bitch who tried to seal her behind ice away back in the states. The very bitch who was the reason she was like she was now. Why was she even up – jetlag. It could only be jetlag.
No. Priorities. She managed to crack a few server cases open, plugging in her USB bugs, on the racks facing away from the noob. Connectivity tests were quick. Bam. Infiltrated.
But also. Zhou had provided a perfect alternate reason to be there. Sombra could just reach through the wires at the bottom of the rack and…
Mei didn’t even see the hand reaching out towards her ankles. She just felt something nip at her ankle – a she had enough time to jump back in fright before her legs collapsed under her. She pitched sideways, flopping to the ground.
A figure, dark, iridescent, emerged from the cabling beside where she was standing.
“Hello, Meiling. I’ve read so much about you.” The figure made a show of making a corkscrew of themselves as the emerged from under the computers before standing.
Mei wanted to say something back. She couldn’t she couldn’t move. This was just like what Cole had been carried back with. Her eyes would have gone wide, if they could.
The figure stopped for a moment, then turned to the screen she had just been working on. “Ohhh… I see. Tabs. You have to indent with tabs all the way though if you start with them. Silly niña.” The figure made a show of fixing her code, then hitting the enter key, and the screen started fill with progress text. “Protein analysis? That will take forever on this old hardware without an ASIC. I don’t think even I could help you speed it up.” She made to crack her knuckles, straightening arms, pressing palms forward – but they simply wouldn’t crack. She raised laced fingers and extended arms upward, then back, and stepped through them like a very slow game of jump-rope. “I just call it ‘twisting touch’. Oh, but I don’t think we’ve met officially. I,” The twister her hands toward herself in mock presentation, “was never named Sombra. But calling me that don’t cost you an arm and a leg.”
Sombra leaned close.
“But you know what? I think I may just borrow yours for a while. It’s always more fun to mess around than watching code scroll by on a screen.”
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