Having left Ezra behind, Kasandra, Jasmine, and Kaiden rushed through the station in search of Grito's uncle, Vi'ivando.
Door after door, they checked every room they came across for their target.
If they had had more time, it might have been possible to find the plans for this station's construction, but they had been on a tight schedule. Forcing them to have to resort to the inefficient method of simply searching everywhere.
Of course, they were not able to avoid some skirmishes with some of the guards running around trying to quell the chaos that their infiltration had caused.
Thankfully, they did not come across anyone anywhere near as skilled as the woman Ezra had stayed behind to fight. Every fight had been relatively easy and finished within no longer than a minute.
"Damn, nothing in this section either. This would be so much easier if we could just interrogate one of these guys." Kaiden growled, glaring down at an unconscious guard a few meters away.
Due to the implants in their heads, trying to question them was a fruitless endeavor. The only reason Kaiden had been able to get anything out of the man that they had captured previously was because he got Erantur inebriated to the point that his inhibitions had vanished.
Right now, they had neither the time nor equipment needed to do so with the guards they had taken down. Forcing them to simply search aimlessly.
"Still no luck getting into the station's network?" Kasandra asked, glancing towards Jasmine who was trying to access a maintenance console and pull up the station's map.
"Sorry, the security is sophisticated. I can't get in easily. Maybe if I had an hour I could do it, but this is not my area of expertise."
Jasmine merely shook her head and gave Kasandra an unfavorable answer.
She had undergone training for all manners of situations while part of the Alliance Police, so she knew a bit about hacking into criminal networks, but it was never something she particularly mastered. Plus, the hardware and software that criminals typically used was light years worse than what Iniquus had installed on this station.
"Okay, let's put our heads together. So far, we've mostly encountered storage areas, crew quarters, restrooms, and mess halls. Do we really think that Grtio's uncle is likely to be in this area?" Kasandra said, trying to get them focused on a new line of reasoning.
"Doubt it. No way that their prisoner would be kept in the same place as everyone else. He's probably in a more isolated area." Jasmine said, leaning on her own experience.
"That's what I was thinking as well. We also know that Iniquus wanted Grtio's uncle to build something for him. So, he's probably working in a specialized facility."
As the three of them continued to run and search, Kaiden had a sudden idea.
"A place that a genius engineer is working undoubtably needs a lot of power to operate. It would probably be close to the station's reactor, and we can follow the energy transmissions to where they are stronger. It might not work, but it beats doing this."
There were naturally some holes in Kaiden's plan, but Kasandra and Jasmine did see the merit in it.
So instead of searching ever room they came across, they opened up a panel and used their terminals to detect the flow of energy going through the station and followed it back to its source.
This strategy worked out a lot better than their earlier wandering and had them proceeding to clearly more advanced parts of the station.
Of course, they ran into more skilled soldiers the further they went, but truthfully, there were not too many troops left at Iniquus' disposal.
A lot of them had died when first assaulting the Dauntless or were still stuck on Phregon III. The majority of the rest of Iniquus' most skilled fighters had accompanied him when confronting Avery. And by this point, all of them were incapacitated.
"I think we might have found what we're looking for. Five guards are standing outside of a room at the end of that hall and don't seem to be reacting to the alarm at all. That means that whatever is in there must be more important than reacting the our infiltration." Kasandra said, using her tiny reconnaissance drone to spy on their enemies.
After a quick strategy meeting, Jasmine pulled out two concussion grenades on her belt.
At Kasandra's signal, she ducked around the corner and tossed the two devices towards the five guards.
They immediately noticed the foreign objects bounding towards them, but it was already too late.
A bright flash and cacophonous noise erupted as the grenades went off, and the five individuals were momentarily stunned.
Using this opening, Kasandra and Kaiden rushed in while firing off shots with their weapons.
The rest of the battle went about as expected.
By the time the two Woest siblings had engaged in close combat, they had already each taken out one of the guards with their guns.
With swift and powerful strikes, they brought down the reaming three that were still disoriented and not the best at hand-to-hand fighting in the first place. They relied more on their powerful gear and weapons to win rather than their skills.
"Now what's behind this clearly conspicuous door." Kaiden said, pulling out a laser cutter and creating a new entrance.
While it normally only took a few seconds to slice through the average door, this one took Kaiden nearly three minutes using the laser cutter at maximum output to break into.
It was far thicker and made out of a denser metal that was more resistant to tools such as the one Kaiden was using. If the model they had was not top of line, then they probably never would have been able to breach the thick plating.
Once they were finally in though, they found a large facility filled with dozens of different types of high-tech equipment. Had anyone said that this was a lab within one of the premier research institutes within the Alliance, Kasandra, Jasmine, and Kaiden would have believed them.