The glowing neon horizon of San Vespera blurred past the passenger window as five hundred horsepower shook Baltasar’s ribcage. His useless comm-link rattled against the carbon-fiber dashboard, dead as river silt.
"Stop glaring at the upholstery," Cosima said, shifting gears with a snap of her French-manicured wrist. She wore an oversized silk blazer over black tactical leggings, steering the hot-pink cabriolet through the commercial docks like she was fleeing an armed insurrection. "Leather absorbs bad vibes. If you ruin my bespoke seats with your brooding, I’m billing your non-existent estate."
"You brought a bubblegum-colored beacon to an illicit data heist," Baltasar muttered, checking the copper wire spool stuffed into his pocket. He patted the insulated sack buckled between them. A scaly green head poked out, slit pupil tracking the headlights. "Even Churro knows this is tactical suicide."
Churro hissed once, flicking a forked tongue at Cosima’s diamond-studded steering wheel, then retreated into his thermal cave.
"The pink is a distraction, idiot. Nobody suspects a socialite who accidentally drives into a logistics park looking for an all-night matcha dispensary." She swung the sports car into a dark alleyway flanking Sector Four’s industrial cooling towers. Above them loomed the DashGo centralized data bunker: three windowless stories of reinforced concrete, wrapped in razor wire and vibrating with the low, sullen hum of thousands of spinning drives.
Baltasar hopped the low concrete barrier before the engine fully settled. Without his citizen ID, the city's smart sensors failed to register him at all; he was an anonymous shadow, invisible to everything except the closed-circuit feeds. "External biometric scanners won't accept my thumbprint anymore. Leandro wiped the base registry. I can’t trip the fire door from the outside."
"Which is why," Cosima said, lifting the delivery satchel and setting it on the edge of a low-hanging intake vent, "we employ biological warfare."
Baltasar narrowed his gaze. "You want to put my reptile into industrial HVAC?"
"He’s eighty percent claws and pure grudge. Look at that vent grating—the screws are completely rusted out." She tapped the rusted mesh with a carbon-tipped pocket screwdriver she’d produced from an inner pocket. The grate gave way with a dry groan. She reached down, gently scratching Churro beneath his saggy yellow dewlap. "Go show the bad man what happens when someone insults artisanal pastries, sweet boy."
Churro puffed his throat scales out, fixed his sole yellow eye on Baltasar as if demanding double rations for the month, and slithered up into the zinc duct with astonishing speed.
"If he gets a scratch, I'm liquidating your jewelry box," Baltasar growled.
"If you don't breach that door in two minutes, my cousin liquidates both of our lives." Cosima leaned against the cold brick, her chin tilted up, though her fingers curled tight around the car keys. "Move, Cascabel."
They crept along the service perimeter to the auxiliary entrance. Inside the guard post, visible through a double-paned security booth, sat a hefty guard in an armored vest, slumping over a plastic tray of cold noodles. Above his head, the metal ceiling grate trembled.
A single muffled scrape sounded through the ducting.
Then, with a metallic screech, the ceiling panel gave out entirely. Twelve pounds of furious, leathery green demon crashed straight onto the guard’s bald crown. Churro did not hesitate. His tail whipped across the man's radio mike while his blunt claws clamped onto the poor guard's forehead like a spiked helmet.
The guard shrieked, an operatic pitch that penetrated the glass, flailing his arms as if assaulted by an extraterrestrial face-hugger. Chairs overturned. The guard’s elbow caught the emergency console, and the hydraulic latch on the heavy steel door hissed open.
Baltasar slipped through the door like grease through a funnel, Cosima right on his heels.
"Churro, heel!" Baltasar whistled sharply between his teeth.
The iguana detached from the dazed, wailing guard, scampered across a metal desk, and vaulted into Baltasar’s open delivery sack in one clean arc. Baltasar slapped the inner manual deadbolt, locking the weeping watchman out, and tossed the satchel over his shoulder. "Not bad, monster."
Inside, the central vault was an arctic crypt. Giant liquid-nitrogen chillers pumped vapor across raised metal flooring, dropping the temperature near zero to keep the towering server banks from melting down. Frost clung to the corners of the black glass cabinets. Thousands of server blades blinked in rhythmic unison, a digital hive humming at sixty hertz.
"It’s freezing," Cosima whispered, tucking her blazer tight around herself. Her breath puffed white against the blue LEDs. "Which one holds the keys to the kingdom?"
"Sector Zero-Alpha," Baltasar said, moving down the middle aisle with mechanical purpose. "The root system. When I built the routing architecture three years ago, I didn't trust my grandfather’s legal team. I left a physical copper bridge beneath the cooling tray. An analog tap that bypasses every firewall Leandro set up."
He dropped to his knees before a towering rack marked *CORE ROUTING - METRO*. Stripping off his work gloves, he wedged a flat-head blade into the cabinet’s baseboard, prying up the perforated steel floor tile. Below, thick bundles of fiber-optic cabling pulsed with light, submerged in mineral oil bath.
His bare hands went numb almost instantly. Gritting his teeth against the biting cold, Baltasar retrieved an old-school RJ-45 patch cable, stripped the plastic shielding with his incisors, and jammed the bare copper leads directly into a physical bypass socket hidden behind the main manifold. He linked the other end to a battered, air-gapped terminal he hauled from his pack.
The terminal's amber screen flickered to life, scrolling rows of diagnostic code.
[ANALOG HANDSHAKE DETECTED.]
[CASCABEL PROTOCOL ENGAGED: LOCAL OVERRIDE.]
"I'm in," he muttered, his fingers flying across the clacking mechanical keys. "Rerouting local identity tables. In thirty seconds, my admin status will re-propagate across the local subnet. Leandro won't see it until morning."
"Don't just fix your profile," Cosima urged, pacing the aisle with sharp, hurried steps. "Look for the Rivo Tech merger schedule. Find out how much time we have left to present Don Hector's medical trust to the board."
Baltasar keyed into the root ledger, running a rapid search on Leandro's shell company filings. "Hector's non-disclosure orders give me until the ninety-day mark. We should have four weeks left—"
He stopped.
The terminal screen spat out a fresh batch of calendar timestamps, pulled straight from Leandro's private encrypted partition on the DashGo backbone.
[AGENDA ITEM: SPECIAL SHAREHOLDER SUMMIT]
[STATUS: ADVANCED EMERGENCY SESSION]
[LOCATION: THE NAVARRO METROPOLITAN GALA]
[SCHEDULED TIME: TOMORROW, 20:00 HOURS]
[ACTION: UNOPPOSED HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF RIVO TECH CORP]
The screen reflected the sudden stillness in Baltasar's face. The humming of the server fans seemed to drop an octave, grinding in his ears like gravel.
"He didn't wait," Baltasar said, his voice flat, devoid of its usual mocking bite. "He discovered Hector’s medical leave was filed under false pretenses. Leandro pushed the vote forward. He's executing the takeover tomorrow night."
Cosima leaned over his shoulder, reading the illuminated text. The playful sarcasm vanished from her expression. "That's twenty-four hours away. The annual Navarro gala is scheduled for then. Half the city council and every tech board member on the coast will be in the ballroom."
"If he calls the vote without Hector present or an official proxy to counter him, the shell corporation automatically absorbs the Rivo voting shares," Baltasar said, unplugging the tap with a savage jerk that severed the exposed wires. "He takes the company. He takes my grandfather's patents. He freezes the trust funding Hector's treatments."
Churro poked his head from the bag, giving a quiet, irritated snort at the dropping temperature.
Cosima stood up straight, smoothing the lapels of her silk blazer. "Then we aren't just breaking into servers anymore, courier. You're going to need a tuxedo. We have a party to crash."