The rocket roared fiercely, the sound reverberated inside the cabin, and the change in acceleration made everything feel heavy and distorted—
The Prosthetics stabilized everyone’s blood flow, and the drops and aerial battles they’d engaged in Marvel World had made them resilient to overreacting in such high-altitude environnts.
When a person loses the ground beneath them, it can instill psychological fear.
[Lille: About to break through the atmosphere.]
The noise suddenly subsided.
The people leaned back in their seats, exhaled softly with their eyes closed, and through the observation window, they could see Night City growing smaller and smaller, Arica and Earth growing smaller and smaller...
Most people made unconscious movents, either tapping the armrests lightly, shaking their legs, or chewing nonexistent chewing gum. The rapid ascent, combined with the changing scenes and bodily sensations, made people uncomfortable.
Jack felt the sa, and it could be said this psychological discomfort was more severe for those more attached to ho. Even if the environnts in Marvel for airdrops and aircraft combat were worse, he had never felt so uneasy.
"It’s the first ti I’ve reached such a height alive..." Jack muttered softly, his eyes continually fixed on the increasingly diminutive Night City, until it beca hard to discern its details. "My mom used to say, trees can’t walk, but birds can fly. But no matter how far they fly, when the sky is falling, they still fly ho."
V’s emotions weren’t that intense at first. To be honest, she had sensed so discomfort in the atmosphere around them, but in her mind, it was all, "Riding a rocket is badass," "Wow, this is space," "How do I kill off those boastful wealthy people later?"
Until Jack spoke, she only then felt a slight trace of peculiarity: "That sounds a bit sad."
Jack chuckled: "It’s not sad at all. I didn’t understand before, but now I realize: even though there’s no ground to rely on under my feet, deep inside, I always know there’s ho waiting."
If there wasn’t a ho, what’s the difference between being alive and dead?—
The sky really is about to fall, and I have to hold it up."
Mission Ti: 00:58.
The first difficulty of this plan is breaking through the blockade by the troops stationed around Night City, and the second difficulty is breaking through the blockade of space debris near the orbit:
The Earth-Moon orbital system in this world is like a giant space junkyard. Due to the goal of "occupying space," during the boom years of the space industry, many companies and organizations launched debris parked overhead solely to interfere with others developing space.
Even though space seems vast, calculated probabilities might indicate a low chance of collision, but in reality, so of these orbital debris are traveling at high speeds in space, akin to traveling on a highway. Often, people find it too late to evade once they notice a car violating rules, much like in traffic violations.
Sure enough, when people were still focused on the Earth outside the window, a massive shadow almost skimd by the rocket at high speed!
"Holy crap!"
Everyone broke into a cold sweat: it wasn’t that no one saw that object, but rather that they lacked references and data. It was hard for both humans and computers to accurately estimate the distance and speed between the two!
Even Lille had to admit, that was dangerously close...
If Night City’s hope had been taken out by space debris just like that, it would have been the biggest joke.
Fortunately, everything else went smoothly.
The Crystal Palace was close at hand.
[Lille: Tactical deploynt check.]
[Munemasa: I never thought I would follow all the way to here...]
Munemasa sighed slightly, and a massive Crystal Palace raid plan, crafted based on Arasaka’s intelligence, was once again distributed to everyone’s system, with tasks marked for each person.
This plan took into account two significant benchmarks: the first was Munemasa’s over fifty-year-old work experience in Arasaka’s database, providing an extrely comprehensive technical analysis of the Crystal Palace.
However, fifty years have passed, and the Crystal Palace has changed significantly, so the second one was from Arasaka Yorinobu’s understanding of the Crystal Palace.
Although Yorinobu wasn’t that kind of Technical Expert, Munemasa could combine the two pieces of intelligence to roughly infer the state of the Crystal Palace and mark potential issues in the plan, devising many contingency plans for different scenarios.
Overall, it was divided into four groups: Lille in one group alone; Jack and Maida in one group; V and Little Octopus in one group; Hansen, Lark, and Yorinobu in one group; Night City gang leaders and Munemasa in one group; finally, David’s team and the Adkaduo duo, Pan’an and Sol, in one group.
Considering the size of the Crystal Palace, each group had their own Hacker, Technology Expert, and combat personnel, ready to disperse and deploy once they breached, hacking in at different locations to find closed loops that could directly connect to the main control and central database.
[Lille: We’re the main attackers; Jack, your task with Maida is to create the biggest commotion and eliminate every enemy unit you see, using a frontal assault to reach the target location. However, your goal isn’t to reach tactical location A, but to apply direct pressure on them.]
[Lille: V, your task is to ambush and intercept enemy reinforcents via the side passages and corridors of Jack’s route, focus on attacking support units like combat hackers or technical experts.]
[Lille: Your area of operation is the inner ring and spherical center, while my area of operation is the outer ring.]
A group’s tactical coverage was extrely vast:
The general structure of the Crystal Palace consists of a giant elevator at the center, with the main operational section of the space station composed largely of structures of varying sizes in ring form— on the whole three smaller inner rings, and two with extrely large radii outer rings, marked top to bottom as inner rings 1, 2, 3 and outer rings 1, 2.
And at the very top of the space station is the gigantic antenna array resembling dragonfly wings, connected to a sphere, seemingly the core part from its appearance.
Below the elevator is a structure architecturally similar to cylindrical buildings on Earth. At the top of this "base building" is a directional communication array aid at Earth, also a potential main control.
The primary mission of Group A is to directly capture this sphere and the ring structure below it, specifically the top layer sphere, inner ring 1, and outer ring 1, and ideally, Lille can also capture inner ring 2.
In the best-case scenario, the two outer rings are both entertainnt facilities, in the worst-case scenario, Lille must capture both.
Theoretically, this is the main assault side, and the top sphere is also the central control site, but both Lille and Munemasa believe they must capture the entire space station because no one can say for sure what its internal encryption and networking structure is like.
Group B comprises Hansen, Lark, and Arasaka Yorinobu, three forr corporate personnel.
What they have in common is not only their experience working as elite corporate personnel but also in high-level anti-corporate operations, across different levels.
The trio was equipped with three Titans, primarily the flight-specialized Polar Star modular equipnt, differing slightly in weaponry with an Assault Cannon, Electromagnetic Sniper Rifle, and Rogue’s Great Sword, respectively.
[Lille: Group B, you need to capture inner rings 2 and 3 using the elevator, we will take control of the elevator before you capture inner ring 2.]
A critical aspect here is that Group A must take the elevator faster than Group B captures the first inner ring, but no one questioned this point.
Group C, consisting of David’s team and the Adkaduo duo, had a large number of people familiar with teamwork and equipped with Pilots’ exclusive Exoskeletons and Power Armor.
[Lille: Group C, seize the top sphere area of the base building, and once the elevator is controlled, imdiately advance to inner ring 3.]
The final group, Group D, was the gang leaders’ group—
This group had no Titans, no standard Exoskeletons or Power Armor, only their respective gangs’ signature moves...
According to Yorinobu’s intelligence, the base building was certainly an entertainnt facility. The most famous here was the Crystal Palace Museum, displaying "replicas" of cultural relics from around the world, typically open to wealthy tourists.
[Lille: Group D... go back to what you’re good at with a free hand like performing a heist of human history’s greatest man-made artifacts.]
Sinister laughter was heard through the communication channel.
[Brick: Haha, you don’t need to teach us how to pull off a heist this good; you’re not as good at this as we are!]
[Sergeant: What are those sons of bitches doing with the greatest man-made artifacts in human history, if not setting us up for the biggest heist in human history!]
[V: It’s pretty evil I say.]
[Lille: Brace for orbital landing.]
It seems the Crystal Palace was also aware of sothing, as the antenna array overhead began to move...
There have been orbital wars at this height before—
This ans they are bound to have interception technology...
The spent carrier rocket began to detach, leaving behind a more flight-friendly part of the spaceship, and soon the kinetic bomb appeared diminutive in the vastness of space, appearing even more silent without the booming sound effect.
The dense interception Assault Cannon would have an apocalyptic effect on the ground, but in this Universe, it feels so small...
Even as the bullets seem to freeze their blood with an instant of acceleration!
Whoosh—
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