“Cover me,” I say.
“With pleasure,” she replies, already pivoting to put her back to mine, grabbing a dropped plasma pistol off the floor and racking it with a wince. “You have about ninety seconds before someone remembers this room exists.”
“Plenty,” I mutter, jacking a cable straight into my forearm port and overriding the broadcast firewall with a brute-force key the Alliance burned into my brain when I was sixteen.
The system stutters.
Fights me.
Then caves.
Data floods my implant.
Shell corporations.
Transit laundering.
Blood contracts encoded in financial metadata.
Extortion ledgers tied to municipal officials.
Trafficking routes mapped through port authorities that technically don’t exist.
I dump everything.
Every file.
Every ledger.
Every dirty financial artery the Nine has been using to bleed Novaria dry for three generations.
Citywide broadcast.
Public net mirrors.
Independent journalist hubs.
Underground syndicate boards.
Union networks.
Community relays.
The upload counter ticks upward like a detonation timer.
“Holy shit,” Kimberly murmurs behind me. “You just put a global bounty on your own head.”
“Already had one,” I reply. “This just made it honest.”
The first data tranche clears.
I don’t stop.
I pivot to a sealed Oversight partition and break into it with a backdoor I’ve never used because it was always supposed to be my emergency nuclear option.
Alliance complicity files bloom across my vision.
Containment directives.
