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Terra Commander Attaf was not having a good day. The vallis was having one of its 'pretending to be warm' days, which meant the ventilation thawed just enough to start failing again. The maintenance crew wouldn't arrive until noon, citing prior required commitments. Void-damned Solaris probably just didn't want to come up here until they had to.
Also, Enrichment Labs was leaking like a grineer-built outhouse. Again . Because somebody bragged to his workers about the security upgrades Attaf had paid for to get his overboss, the Prophet of Profit himself, off his back about the last time the Betrayers had a break-in spree. Since worker rumors spread faster than lasers, that meant Fortuna knew all about it, and so did their guests.
Who took the rumors as a challenge, because of course they did. So all the lights in the main labs were shorted out or broken. The cameras were in pieces or were now puddles of goo attempting to corrode the floor. The walls and floors were intact, but they had mud, snow, glass shards, and holes in them. There were drifting traces of Void energy everywhere fouling up the remaining security systems. The moas were in varying states of FUBAR or missing entirely. He received irritating emails from HR about the personnel shortage and sent back demands to fix it themselves. That was the entire point of their department, was it not?
Five expensive Jackal models were laying in the courtyard out front of the labs, having failed to even slow down the parkouring menaces. An Orokin-spec Gunslinger type had punched through all five control centers simultaneously before their frontal shield routine spun up, so while they were extremely salvageable wrecks, they were still a net waste of credits. The minimal remains of a sixth were in a small crater left by a lazily missed shot by the Profit-Taker Orb, who had blown it up instead of hitting the one-eyed one who hadn't sped off on a hoverboard and instead just ran away towards what appeared to be kubrodon excrement. The extra-secure doors he had paid good credits for were disabled and scrawled on with things that didn't even make sense and were probably made up on the spot by those tiny part thieves the Solaris called orphans. They shared a sense of humor with the Betrayers.
On top of all of this, Overboss Anyo was seething. Apparently the Jovian Madman, Alad V, had shown back up with a profitable new venture, and now was raking in the profits selling his new secure storage devices to all bidders with enough credits instead of being a disgrace. His seething came in the form of politely forceful reminders to not allow any of these devices in places owned by him, and demands for even better productivity. The penalty for finding these 'Conduits' during an inspection was so high that it made Solaran debt look like a drop in the bucket, but there was a (hopeless) alternative to being buried in penalty debt: Win a single round of his Index.
Attaf had already lost an entire battalion of crewmen to the idea, since if you were lucky, you and your hopeless companions in debt avoidance only had to fight a real, well-paid C-team or D-team level of Index Brokers. From the matches Attaf had watched and bet on virtually, they would give you a few early points to let it look fair, then slowly play better and better until they were at their usual level and their opponents trying and badly flailing to imitate them.
If you weren't, you got to lose to a Tenno squad, who would 99% of the time win with a merciless shutout, and 1% of the time miss a point or two on the ground but otherwise give the same crushing performance. Both losses resulted in your 'reward' being twice the debt instead of exactly enough credits to cancel it out. The tenno round had better chances for the spectators however, since you could bet on what set of four types (and optionally, which shape of each type) the squad would consist of, and there were a seemingly always growing amount of new shapes to pick from.
But despite his bad day, Terra Commander Attaf had a plan. He had requisitioned from his base's storage a pile of the cheapest toroids they had, along with one of the coildrive traps they had recovered from the site of a failed ambush. He had one of his Techs tear out the coildrive-stalling machinery and replace it with an experimental device cobbled together out of four different old-style comba helmets, a stolen amped up arc trap, and a tiny status light. In theory, this trap would dispel all the void bullshit immediately and stun the warframe long enough for him to get a picture of what kind they were dealing with. The toroids would survive even if the arc trap just exploded instead, and would make good bait. Once it was ready, he took it down to the lower level of the spaceport, since that was where he currently was, and set it up. It made its odd wobbling startup noise, followed by the tiny light changing from off to amber to green. Attaf took out the bag of toroids, poured them out on the trap, and as he was standing up, received a message that the maintenance crew arrived and were asking where to go.
A breeze blew past him as soon as he had stepped away to respond to the call, so he quickly turned back around to see if he had somehow already succeeded.
The toroids were missing, and the trap untouched. Terra Commander Attaf swore loud enough through his still-open communicator the maintenance crew rushed to find him and find out what happened.
---
Even if the Commander was their capture target, Alynn was curious what the bulky thing he was carrying downstairs was. And with Gauss now, it wasn't like time was an issue. So she tiptoed down the stairs after him, eventually finding themselves in the large underground room they had several times looted for toroids. She kept Gauss in the staircase, prepared to hypersprint over and knock out her target into the wall. He put some hodgepodge of corpus helmets and a coildrive trap on the ground in the middle of the room and activated it.
...And then he poured out a bag of toroids on it! Just out there for free! Sure, they were "only" Vega Toroids, the kind you rarely could find from swatting random mite raknoids, but free toroids!
Which...meant that device was probably a trap, Alynn realized. One for warframes, not coildrives. But maybe Gauss was faster than the sensor on it. She'd outrun her friends using their Volt and Wisp respectively earlier in a friendly plains race, and they had plans to race with an Itzal, a modded k-drive, and her mastered Gauss once they all were ready. At worst she'd just have to smack him upside the head with the handle end of the Tatsu instead of hit him with ramming speed, so it'd be worth a shot. With a burst of void energy, she was off.
One step. Into the room.
Two steps. Silent as a breeze.
Three steps. Shit, he's turning around. But he's certainly taking his sweet time to do so. Almost slow enough to be a whole new type of eximus. Sloth Eximus Terra Commander?
Four steps. Need to not step directly on the trap!
Five steps. Step right in front of it, grab the toroids with Helios' vacuum.
Six steps. Got em! Just need to not hit the wall on the way out…
Seven steps. Man is he still turning? I've already gotten up to him and away and he's not even finished turning around yet?
Eight steps. Stairs! Dodge!
A huge bang rings out from the staircase as they miss a step and faceslam the railing. Alynn gets up, rubbing where the frame's helmet hit the railing and grumbling about obstacles. They take the normal speed route out of the spaceport, and then hypersprint back to Fortuna with their lucky find instead of finishing the job, letting the sloth eximus terra commander have other things to worry about instead of capture, like how they'll pay for those toroids they lost.
---
Terra Commander Attaf was now having an even worse day. Back in one of the security rooms with his failed warframe trap in one hand, according to one of the cameras in a stairwell, they now had another new model of warframe to deal with. One that was running so fast it tripped and nearly shattered the whole part of the staircase it was on from the energy blast of them stopping . Going back frame by frame, they weren't even invisible. Just going fast enough the cameras only picked them up every few frames instead of every frame.
And they had been sneakily following him down there! When did they get here? Why did the alarm not sound?! How did they avoid his damn trap! He sent out an order for breeze-detectors on top of the railing and step replacements, fired a random nearby crewman for not noticing the event, and went back to his office to drink whatever he had on hand. It was only noon, but it was going to be a very long day.