Chapter 71: Infiltration
Under the cover of night, a shuttle activated its stealth function and quietly landed on a hill a hundred meters or so away from Old Porter’s factory.
Sonny opened the sealed cabin and glided down the shuttle. He did not turn on any of the lights throughout his journey here as per Xia Fei’s instructions and landed amid this blanket of darkness by relying on the vehicle’s automated navigation system.
Xia Fei made his way over without making a sound from a spaceship wreckage and spoke in a hushed voice. “Sonny, I’m over here.”
Sonny shuddered and held his hand to his chest. “Boss, how are you not making any sound when you move? You’ve given me quite the fright.”
Xia Fei made his way to the shuttle and boarded it. “Let’s leave this place before we continue our conversation.”
The shuttle silently took off slowly from this spot. Sonny only turned off the stealth function after they got far from Old Porter’s factory. The shuttle’s engine let out a series of sputters before speeding off into the night sky.
“Where are we going?” asked Sonny, somewhat puzzled. He did not know why Xia Fei had asked to be picked up this late at night, and he also had no idea where they were heading to.
“Do you know where Old K resides?” asked Xia Fei instead.
Sonny’s wrists shook, and the shuttle abruptly lurched in the air for a bit. “Old K was once a pirate! He’s done stuff which involved murder and smuggling. Though he’s since retired from that life, he still has plenty of his underlings at his beck and call. He’s the most powerful person here in the entire warship graveyard; just what are you planning to do?”
Xia Fei shook his head. “I don’t care about what he’s done before, or what he’s dealing with right now. I only wish to know where he’s staying.”
The entire population across the warship graveyard knew about Old Porter’s situation, and Sonny was no exception. He could vaguely guess what Xia Fei was intending to do, but he did not dare to confirm it.
After about half an hour of flight, Sonny activated the stealth function once more and continued to flit across the sky for another twenty minutes before finally landing on the deck of an abandoned warship.
“This is as far as I can send you. Old K’s abode is a hundred fifty kilometers due south. His entire residence is lit by searchlights, so you can easily spot it,” said Sonny.
Xia Fei observed their surroundings and pointed to a valley in the west. “Head over there and wait for me. If I’m not back at daybreak, fly your shuttle back home.”
Sonny did not dare to ask questions and just nodded his head. “Okay, I’ll go wait for your return on that spot.”
Xia Fei smiled, patted him on the back, and jumped off the shuttle. He kept his body low as he headed south at a speed of 150m/s.
Soon, a well-lit mansion appeared ahead.
In this barren warship graveyard, such a massive structure was undoubtedly unique, with it being entirely made out of white stone blocks and encompassing a land area of twenty thousand square meters.
A sixteen-foot wall surrounded the property; there were towers, built at a measured distance from one another and manned by armed personnel, along this wall.
Dozens of big spotlights not only shone upon the snowy-white interior of this palatial abode, they also swept the perimeter of the wall on a set path.
Xia Fei calculated on his mind and figured out that he only had a 9.3-second gap for the next scanning process of these spotlights. Though the timeframe was very limited, it was more than enough for someone like Xia Fei who had the Speed Ability.
Xia Fei pulled on the full-face mask of the Windshade Mark IV, which left just his mouth and two eyes exposed.
Using the many old and disused warships around the area as cover, Xia Fei began to make his way over the mansion swiftly.
There was no cover around the area in front of the wall, so Xia Fei hid behind a small warship and began to count down the seconds inwardly.
A beam of light swang past just before him, and he darted past when a gap in the scanning lights happened. In the blink of an eye, he found himself right by the wall.
Pressing a button on his waist, hair-thin barbs suddenly extended out his gloves and boots. Like a gecko, Xia Fei deftly climbed the top of the wall and did a quick scan of the inner area.
He saw a large garden teeming with verdant greenery. Several security personnel were lazily patrolling along a path not too far from him, whistling as they made their rounds.
Xia Fei went over the wall and silently got himself in the garden. His one hand held the ground for support as he began to search for an entrance to the mansion.
The pristine mansion had three floors, and the square building had clear and defined corners, with a watchtower constructed on each of these four corners; Xia Fei could make out the presence of a guard on night shift inside.
There were glass doors in the north and south wings of this building. The underground garage entrance was in the east, while an empty clearing was to the west, which had an Amarr Execution-class frigate parked on it.
Pressing a very small button on his full-face mask, a thin, red eyepiece appeared on his left eye. This was the Windshade Mark IV combat suit’s scanning gadget which also provided the user with a night vision.
The gadget immediately began doing its job and soon projected a faint beam onto Xia Fei’s retinas which gave an analysis of the situation.
The front, back, and garage doors all had security devices installed, and Xia Fei could very clearly make out a colorful scanning beam moving at high speeds from these entrances. Anyone would be discovered the moment they passed through those.
Xia Fei gritted his teeth, lay in the underbrush and waited patiently.
Time passed. Xia Fei had been in the garden for over an hour when he suddenly spotted a black hover car driving in from the main gate, looking as if it were about to enter the garage.
Xia Fei placed both his hands to the ground as the muscles in his legs tensed up. He kept his crouching position, which was almost lying prone to the ground, like a cheetah ready to run off.
The hover car very slowly moved past the courtyard as it went along the programmed path.
When the vehicle neared the garden, Xia Fei promptly gathered strength in both his legs, then let his body fly out like a bullet, all along maintaining a low altitude!
*Whizz!*
Keeping his body streamlined, he cut through air like a thin blade as his nose maintained barely a one-centimeter distance from the ground.
Xia Fei quickly and soundlessly tucked himself to the undercarriage of the hover car, which was sliding across the ground like a flying saucer.
*Slap!*
He spread his fingers and palms wide and utilized the barbs on his gloves to lightly grab onto the chassis of the hover car, spreading his two legs symmetrically for stability. The sides of his combat boots also had similar barbs, allowing Xia Fei to plaster himself on this vehicle’s body!
Only microseconds passed as he performed all these actions, and the two people inside the hover car remained unaware of what had just transpired.
The hover car came to a halt right at the garage entrance, and the blond driver poked his head out to wave at the surveillance camera. The garage door slowly opened, while the security devices were temporarily disabled.
The car drove into the garage and parked beside the other luxury shuttles.
The vehicle would abruptly fall in place once the hover system was turned off, so if Xia Fei failed to separate himself in time, the shuttle’s several tons of weight would likely crush him into a meaty paste.
Xia Fei softly pulled both his hands away as his body did an implausible twist before crawling away from the vehicle without creating a noise, which also happened to be the driver’s blindspot.
With quiet footsteps, Xia Fei managed to hide behind the back of another vehicle.
The blond-haired driver turned off the engine and hopped out of the hover car to open the backseat door. “Mr. Qin, please follow me. Old K is waiting for you on the third floor at this moment.”
A man in his forties stepped out from the back seat. This person, with a portly figure, was wearing a pressed suit. His nose was red from alcohol and his pair of beady eyes were glimmering slyly.
The blond man led Mr. Qin up the stairs, and when the sound of their footsteps faded, Xia Fei studied his surroundings with great wariness, only standing up after he had confirmed that there were no intruder-detection devices installed in this place.
The defense outside of Old K’s abode was near flawless, yet there was hardly any camera of the ilk inside. Most likely the man disliked being watched while in his home, so the internal security of this mansion was rather lax.
Xia Fei went upstairs, sticking his body to the wall with his ears pricked for any movement.
The first floor was the lounge and dining room, and the lights here were dim. There was hardly anyone around, so Xia Fei was able to proceed onto the second floor smoothly.
Xia Fei was still leaning closely against the wall. He pulled out a small mirror from his spatial ring and used it to reflect and observe what was happening in the corridor.
He spotted the blond man idly chatting with an armed guard by the stairwell.
“Aside from Old K and Qin Sansui, who’s the other guy there? I could sense a vague yet frigid aura coming from him when I walked near that caused all my hair to stand up,” curiously asked the bodyguard.
The blond man lightly chuckled before he mimed a gun with his fingers and aimed it at the bodyguard’s head. “That’s on a need-to-know basis. Don’t ask too many questions, or you’ll have to take care of your head.”
“You’re right. The less I know, the better it is for me.”
The blond man wondered aloud, “Porter’s factory should soon be on its last leg, shouldn’t it?”
“Yup. Old K has been putting the screws in them over these few days; Porter’s workers were all taken care off yesterday, then we sent someone to plant a bomb today. The way I see it, Porter won’t be able to hold out much longer.
“Actually, we should’ve done this from the start. By sending our men to grab that old b*st*rd who doesn’t know any better, this matter would’ve been done and dusted by now; why even go through all the trouble? Say, is Old K having some doubts or something?”
The blond man laughed and pointed at the bodyguard’s head again. “Old Wu, why can’t you fix this gossiping habit of yours?”
Old Wu smiled foolishly as he slapped his head heavily. “Ah, d*mn! I’m really asking for it with this mouth of mine.”
Xia Fei quietly kept his mirror. The stairs to the third floor happened to be blocked off by the presence of the two men. How was he going to get up there?
His eyes shone when he discovered a dumbwaiter diagonally across him. There was always a dedicated chef in huge households and the dumbwaiter would be used to send the food up the stairs once they were done.
An idea came to him almost instantly the moment he saw it.
There was only a short distance of ten meters to the dumbwaiter opposite him, so it would only take Xia Fei .025 seconds to reach the dumbwaiter if he used his top speed. Furthermore, the dumbwaiter was positioned such that it was on the blindspot of the two guards.
Xia Fei took a deep breath and searched for the opportune moment, zipping past and diving into that open dumbwaiter.
It was a small and narrow dumbwaiter, barely enough to fit in a person. Using two hands to prop himself against its walls, Xia Fei quickly climbed up the shaft to the third floor.
Using his fingers to pry open a crack, he took a peek around.
The third floor was not partitioned into separate rooms, like what Xia Fei had seen on the first and second floors, but was an entire chamber itself, instead.
In this brightly lit room, he saw two men sitting on the sofa, having a discussion. Xia Fei was angled somewhere behind them, so all he could see was their backs.
The one in the middle of the sofa should be Old K, as this person only had a sparse tuft of white hair at the center of his head, while that middle-aged man on his right went by the name of Qin Sansui.
“Do you understand what I’ve just told you?” asked Old K.
Qin Sansui nodded his head repeatedly. “I thought you had called me over in the dead of night for something important. You could’ve just told me this matter over the phone… Rest assured; from tomorrow onward, there’ll no longer be any courier company that can deliver a parcel to Porter’s factory. The director for the Galaxy Spaceship Authority is my brother-in-law, so as long as I give him a call, I can guarantee that Old Porter can no longer register even one spaceship.”
Xia Fei furrowed his brows. It looked as if they were planning to isolate Old Porter completely, limiting him from both inside and out just to force him into submitting.
Old K handed Qin Sansui a thick envelope, and the man was beyond delighted, thanking the former profusely before leaving.
The moment Qin Sansui departed, a man in a black windbreaker stepped out from behind a secret door. This person seemed to be in his thirties and had a very prominent hooked nose as well as eyes that exhibited a quiet ferocity.
“This is your plan?” That hooked-nosed fella chuckled mirthlessly.
Old K sighed. “Mountain Hawk, you don’t understand what Porter is like. There’s no use doing things the hard way toward such people. You can only slowly drive his kind to desperation so that he will take the initiative to hand that item over, or else he can simply be more resilient in the face of adversity, potentially choosing to go for a mutual destruction instead, and that’s a least ideal result, for the cons outweigh the pros.”
The man called Mountain Hawk sat beside Old K and spoke in a placid tone. “Perhaps what you said makes sense, but my patience is running thin. I can only wait for three more days. If you’re still unable to get me that overclocking chip within these three days, I’ll just have to get myself involved in its acquisition.”
Old K held a liquor glass in hand and took a sip as he arched his lips. “At the end of the day, the warship graveyard is also my territory; there’s no need for you to interfere.”
Old K showed an old pirate’s true colors with that veiled threat, countering Mountain Hawk without a hint of regard for the man.
Mountain Hawk was momentarily stunned before he chuckled. “Don’t be angered Old K. Let’s carry on with your plan.”
“Yes.” Old K nodded his head lightly. “I’ll naturally help you get hold of what you want, but what about what I want?”
Mountain Hawk pulled out an exquisitely stitched leather pouch and placed it softly on the table, saying mysteriously, “I have it here.”
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