“Everyone make sure you’re ready! We’ll be entering the storm in thirty seconds! Contact with the Shadow Broker’s ship two minutes, twenty seconds after that!”
Ignoring the statement from Rylia, Kara focused down on the controls and sensors of the Ghost. Thankfully, she’d been a fairly experienced pilot long before being summoned by Rylia, and she’d spent a great deal of time test piloting this ship specifically. Which, given how unusual a ship it was in many different ways, was important. Even aside from the wild mix of technologies in it, there was also the little detail that the Ghost was barely an assault shuttle, despite that having been the original goal.
It was, frankly, a little too big to be considered that way by the rest of the galaxy. This galaxy, at least. Part of the reason for that was that the version of the Slipspace Drive they’d managed to make out of local materials could only be shrunk so much, and that ‘so much’ wasn’t enough for a true small craft in the way this galaxy thought of them. The other part, however, was that they’d always intended the Ghost to be used for this operation and needed it to carry enough of their Commando Mechs to matter.
The Alliance Kodiak, for comparison sake, had a max capacity of fourteen, twelve troops and a pair of pilots. Unless you were Shepard, and possibly not even then depending on how accurate the narrative Rylia knew was, trying to take a Cruiser-sized ship with a dozen troops was insanity. Instead, the Ghost was large enough to handle twice that number of sentient soldiers…or four times the number if most of your troops were mechs that could fold for storage. That meant they were currently carrying 40 of the best commando mechs they’d been able to make in the ‘troop’ compartment, plus Bruce, Momo, and Lucy. While Kara and Rylia flew the ship.
All of that meant that the ship was actually around 25 meters long. Too big to really be considered a ‘shuttle’ by the standards of this galaxy, but a bit too small to be considered a corvette. Though only a little on the small side for the latter, as the smallest corvettes used by some species tended to be around 35 meters, while the smallest frigates tended to be around a hundred. The Salarian frigate that resupplied the Broker ship regularly was around a hundred and forty, while the Broker Cruiser itself was close to six hundred.
None of which was relevant, save for the little detail that the smaller places a Kodiak might have put down on the outside of the Cruiser weren’t viable for the Ghost, even if they hadn’t been afraid of what the lightning would do to the mechs. Instead, they would be hitting the secure airlock normally used for the resupply frigate, which had risks, as it was likely to be defended. Still, it was their best option unless they wanted to try getting multiple smaller shuttles onto the ship in rough weather. After all, the Broker wasn’t expecting guests, so his ship was currently riding deep in the storm.
Thankfully, the Ghost had been built specifically to handle that too.
“Engaging atmospheric flow shields.”
Rylia was the one that spoke this time, her hands moving calmly as she put action to her words. Those specific shields had been her and Kara’s answer to the early probes not being capable of surviving a search through the planetary storms. Proper full shields, or even the cruder kinetic barriers used by Citadel species, would have ruined any attempt at stealth. Yet attempting to navigate the high winds and lightning of the storms without shielding would have been a creative form of suicide.
Enter the Atmosphere Flow Shield.
The AFS was a much lower-power option, which relied on creating a tight-to-the-ship, shaped deflection field which encouraged turbulence in the atmosphere to flow around it. Even lightning discharges were guided by a careful field of static that created a path of least resistance which would drag any lightning strike into gliding past the ship. It wasn’t perfect, something displayed as they entered the leading edge of the storm and began to experience low-grade turbulence.
Yet, even as they penetrated deeper, heading for the probes that were keeping an eye on the Broker’s ship, the turbulence remained minimal. Better yet, the low power signature of the AFS system wasn’t enough to be picked up by even the best sensors. Not against the background noise of the storm itself, at least. Something they’d tested extensively with the probes that had been keeping an eye on the Broker’s cruiser for months.
Kara snorted, amused at Rylia’s ‘cheery’ message, even as she leaned heavily on the probes’ feeds to guide their vector. They were coming in intentionally hot, under no delusion that they would be able to maintain stealth once physically in contact with the Cruiser.
“30 seconds. 20. 10. Contact! Breaching protocol deployed!”
They weren’t stupid enough to go directly through the main airlock. Instead, they’d created a breaching frame using chemical cutters and explosives. Kara locked the Ghost to a spot just off from the airlocks, and Rylia deployed the breaching mechanism. It worked, thankfully, punching a hole into a corridor off the main route that would have connected to the airlock. The whole sequence taking less than forty-five seconds. Their own airlock latched onto the breach and the first mechs poured into the Broker ship, even as Lucy began an EWAR assault on the various security systems that weren’t physically air-gapped.
Less than three minutes later, the Ghost was empty save for them and a quartet of guard bots. Settling in for a tense wait, they listen to the tactical channel as the assault began in full…
… … …
Lucy was almost offended at how shit the Broker’s cyber security was. Oh, she was sure it was top tier by local standards. But compared to what she regularly had to cut through back in Night City it was pitiful. Something that was already costing the Broker, as it turned out Rylia had been right. The vast majority of the security aboard ship were mechs. Mechs that had wireless connections to the ship’s systems for coordination. With how easily she cut through the security, she managed to outright disable the first several waves of mechs, and turn many of those deeper in the ship against each other.
Pity that the Broker or his people weren’t complete idiots, and the mechs cut themselves out of the wireless system before she got all of them.
Not that it was going to do the Broker’s people much good, considering how much better the commando mechs that Kara and Rylia had built were. So far, she, Momo and Bruce had yet to lift a finger on the physical side of things, as their own mechanical muscle cut a swath through the defenses. A few were lost to weapons emplacements that were on hardlines, but those were few and far between, with most of them on networks that Lucy was hacking and disabling in real time.
Honestly this looked like it was going to be…
Instinct was all that saved her as she folded under the omni-blade of a Salarian who appeared out of thin air, his high-quality tactical cloak failing as he moved too fast for it to compensate. Momo was there an instant later, concussing the bastard with a staff, even as Bruce tangled with and quickly defeated a second assassin. Growling and kicking herself for underestimating the enemy, Lucy focused on looking for the telltales of a cloak. Even good ones had weaknesses to high-quality cyber-optics like her own, and she quickly spotted two more assassins moving into position.
One died as she whipped her mono-wire through his body, his barrier not reacting to that sort of attack. The second she pegged with her blaster, but didn’t tag him anywhere fatal. Thankfully, Momo wasn’t as squeamish about killing as Bruce was, and followed up knocking out the first assassin with a shot of her own that blew a hole through the head of the one Lucy had wounded.
More cautious now that that they’d encountered living opponents, they nevertheless pressed forward. The Ghost was jamming all outgoing communications, but that could only happen for so long before someone realized there might be an issue with their boss…
They’d lost half the commando mechs cutting their way through a small private army of opposing, lesser quality mechs. Along with them, and causing most of their losses, had been a handful more of living opponents, not all of them Salarian. Yet, they’d reached the central operations area of the ship all the same, with Momo producing a breaching charge using her Quirk.
Eight of the remaining commando mechs created a two-row deep phalanx of physical shields on command, ready to push into what was undoubtedly the best protected section of the ship. The charge went off, punching a hole in the heavily armored door, and the mechs advanced with no hesitation.
Their shields immediately started to get hammered by auto-turrets, and the first row went down in the process of slagging those turrets in return. The second continued advancing, only to be slammed into by a glowing blue figure. An Asari commando, who managed to destroy one of them and scatter the other three. Lucy and Bruce both reacted to the charge, monowire and a batarang slicing toward the Asari, only for her biotic barrier to fair much better than a mechanical kinetic barrier would have, blocking both.
The Asari charged again, but was met by Momo with a Quirk-Created riot shield, causing the Asari to stun herself striking it, even if Momo stumbled back in turn. Lucy fired point blank, as did two of the command droids, and one of their hits burned through the biotic barrier, causing the woman to cry out in agony. Then, Bruce was there, and with her barrier down she wasn’t able to handle him in close combat. She went down in a heap, even as Momo took advantage and charged into the control room, riot shield first.
That shield saved her from the small arms fire of three Salarians, and Momo’s own weapon, this one an actual blaster purchased via the marketplace rather than a lastech weapon, fired back with stun rings. They hit one of the Salarians, utterly ignoring his barrier and dropping him to the deck. The other two kept firing, but missed it when Bruce somehow ghosted into the room past Momo.
One of them didn’t miss it a moment later as he found himself in close combat with Batman, even as the third found himself pinned by Lucy’s careful shooting, with Lucy restrained trying not to hit anything important. Momo strafed, dropping the riot shield in favor of a flash grenade they were all equipped to ignore, with both remaining Salarians crying out in agony as the flash went off two seconds after she tossed it. Both went down seconds later, one to another stun shot, one to a fist.
Lucy was in the room a moment later, jacking into the main systems and assaulting the firewalls. They were good, better than she expected, but no better than decent Corpo Ice. Not even Black Ice, as this reality lacked that sort of thing for the most part. She burned through the Ice in less than thirty seconds, even as the other two secured their prisoners.
“I have access. Disabling system purge and redeploying mechs to sweep remaining mercs. Looks like they tried to send a standby message to the network. I’m checking it for malware or alerts and letting it through to the majority of contacts…”
Lucy’s work would continue for some time, soon aided by Bruce, Rylia, and Kara, as they both took control of the ship…and the Network.
Within less than twenty hours, the Broker Network would be running smoothly again, no one the wiser for the Shadow Broker having been replaced. As for the three Salarians…they would prove to all be the Shadow Broker, a combined team that had been running the Shadow Broker personality, but hadn’t been either STG or the original Broker. Who the original Shadow Broker had been, they would never find out. Given how long the network had existed, they suspected that this scene had played out many times in the past. Now, they just needed to work hard to make sure it didn’t happen to them.
Starting, probably, with the Yahg currently held in the prison section for experimentation. They would need to quietly drop him back on his homeworld before he got ideas about trying to duplicate their own takeover…
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
A/N 1: This chapter was a bit of a struggle to get right. Frankly, the actual Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC shows an unrealistically small number of enemies for a ship the size of the Broker's. Applying a bit of realism too it, then, I needed to strike a balance between too hard and too easy. All without getting dragged into the weeds of details, since this fic isn't really supposed to be combat focused. Hopefully, I struck a decent balance.