<h4>Chapter 504 The Ups and Downs of Working With Honeypots </h4>


    ?Timothy heard the hatch to the cargo hold hiss open and almost fumbled the atomic printer he was still holding in his hand. He paled and gingerly set it down, then turned around and saw his “wife”ing into the hold behind him.


    “Holy fuck, you startled me!” he eximed.


    Catherine was taken aback for a moment, thinking, ‘Aren’t reapers supposed to be hardcore badasses? Psh, a little door scared such a big man.’ Then, a mischievous grin crossed her face and she got a truly wicked idea.


    “Honey, I have a headache,” she said, slumping down to sit on the floor next to him. She leaned over and rested her head in hisp and practically purred at him. “Rub me?” she asked, blinking innocently and conveniently ignoring the fact that she was still wearing nothing but a sports bra andpression booty shorts.


    Timothy awkwardly fidgeted in ce and didn’t know where to put his hands. There were so very, very many options, and not many of them were good. He poked her forehead and growled, “Focus, ‘Siobhan’. You’re supposed to be a good girl, remember?”


    Siobhan stood up with a sigh, murmuring something about blockheads and no fun, then headed to the locker on the other side of the cargo bay and began inventorying her own goodie bags for the mission ahead of them.


    And just like Timothy, she let out a low whistle when she saw that the goodies in the goodie bags were very good indeed.


    She picked up what looked like a catsuit, if a catsuit were made for a doll, or perhaps an infant. Advances in materials science weren’t only for alloys in Lab City; they had also made staggering leaps in other materials as well. And this “catsuit” was one of them.


    The newly developed suit was made of a polymer that had incredible tensile strength and sticity, while maintaining all the benefits of the thicker, more ufortable nyxian outfit of a bodysuityered with a web vest and essorized with gloves andbat boots. The new catsuit model was all in one. Powered by a fusion generator the size of a hearing aid battery, it would stretch to fit anyone that cared to wear it. It waspletely bulletproof and could bepletely sealed or worn under clothing as a covertyer of armor. It also had optical camouge capability, wicked away moisture, and had a host of infiltration tools like sensor scramblers and EM signal jammers. It contained a distributed quantumputer weaved into it as nanofibers and integrated hologram projectors could mimic any number of other styles of clothing.


    But most importantly, any nyxian wearing one would be drop dead fucking hot in one. Every woman loved beauty, after all, and nyxians were no exception to that rule.


    Siobhan immediately stepped into hers and set the optical camouge to what she called “Office Lady Mode”. OLM was a dark gray side-slit skirt that red out just above her knees matched with a light blue silk blouse, white satin camisole, and a matching dark gray fitted zer over the top, cut to disy her blouse and camisole to her advantage. Peeking through the slit in the side of her skirt were ck silk thigh-high stockings with a redce top band and hints of a red garter belt keeping the stockings up and in ce. On her feet was a pair of shiny ck patent leather four inch stiletto heels.


    Timothy couldn’t help but cast a few extra nces her way. Hot was hot, after all, partner or not.


    Siobhan tossed him his own infiltrator suit and he donned his as well, setting it to low key athletic wear that still showed off his chiseled form. It also included the iconic coaches’ whistle, as well.


    “You look pretty good in that, honey,” Siobhan practically purred at him. They were still supposed to be in their honeymoon period, after all, and if they were to act too distant with each other, people might notice.


    At least it was a convenient excuse, anyway. Siobhan was one of the most aplished honeypots in all of the NIA, and Timothy suspected he would truly enjoy the downtime on his current mission, unlike most of the missions reaper teams were sent on. There was definitely a distinct difference between being cooped up in small rooms with nine other sweaty, unshowered men and being paired with a nyxian honeypot, an unforeseen perk he was only just nowing to realize.


    He cleared his throat and changed the subject in an attempt to remain professional before they madendfall. “I wonder how many other teams they sent out on this mission. Have you heard anything through your grapevine?”


    “Nothing specific. The response is just ‘a lot’ whenever I ask. Those cultist bastards are likely to be embedded in in sight where they can lose themselves in the crowd. I hate it, but it’s a damn smart move—whoever their strategists are are bloody good at their jobs,” she coquettishlyined.


    “Well, so are we,” he confidently imed, puffing out his chest.


    [Beginningnding sequence in three minutes,] AI 228 announced over the main channel and through the imnts of the nyxian and reaper.


    Siobhan cleaned up the kit she had just inspected, much like Timothy had done with his, then the pair strapped themselves in for groundfall and made small talk as the stealth shuttle fell screaming to earth like a shooting star, hidden against the backdrop of the sun in the sky.


    Not that anyone on the ground would have seen it anyway, given the general cloud cover over the part of Washington that was west of the Cascade Mountain Range. Because, while Eastern Washington was a cold desert and, like most deserts, was mostly sunny and arid, Western Washington was either a marine coastal environment or a temperate rainforest. People from around the Puget Sound, in particr, would experience more than three hundred days of cloud cover per year, on average, and more than two hundred days of measurable rainfall.


    They even had a term for the typical weather there: “liquid sunshine”, they called it.