Mira’s mouth curves. “With pleasure.”
I watch the tactical overlay as the boarding pods detach—sleek, dark capsules that accelerate without flashy flares, riding silent vectors toward the relay sats. They look like falling teeth.
Renn leans closer, voice tight. “Boss, Morazin’s got patrol drones.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why we’re not fighting his patrol drones. We’re fighting his infrastructure.”
Soldiers fight what’s in front of them. Criminals fight what makes the front possible.
The pods hit the first relay sat with a soft, controlled impact. No explosion, no big show. Just a brief glitch on the relay’s signal as the sat’s skin gets cut open like fruit and my people slide inside.
Seconds later, Mira’s console lights up.
“Alpha sat is compromised,” she says. “Signal dropping.”
On the overlay, Morazin’s reinforcement channel line flickers—then collapses.
The second pod hits beta.
Another flicker.
Another line dies.
Morazin’s calls for backup start bouncing. I can see it in the routing logs—requests pinging out, then returning with dead acknowledgments like the universe itself is shrugging.
“Third repeater,” Mira says, eyes bright. “Flooding now.”
She injects false traffic into the mid-alt repeater: a storm of meaningless packets designed to look like legitimate corporate chatter. The repeater tries to parse it, tries to prioritize it, chokes on it. Morazin’s “priority” requests get lost in the noise, swallowed by an avalanche of nonsense.
Renn exhales. “He’s cut off.”
“Not fully,” I say, eyes on the map. “He’ll have local comms. Ground jammers. Drones. But help is gone.”
Jessa taps her earpiece. “Boarding pods report. Charges planted. Alpha and beta relay sats will cook themselves in two minutes.”
“Good,” I say. “Make sure they’re off before the fireworks.”
My gaze flicks back to the live feed.
Jordan is still on that platform.
Cameras still rolling.
Shooters still closing.
And then—there. On a lower band of the signal spectrum, I see it: a weird interference pattern, like a comm tower choking and rebooting in short spasms. It’s not random.
It’s familiar.
Mira sees it too. Her head snaps up. “Boss. That’s… that’s not our jammer.”
“No,” I murmur, and my mouth tightens.
Mira zooms in, overlaying the interference with our own signal analysis.
A pattern emerges: tiny spikes and dips in a rhythm that looks like a heartbeat someone is forcing into a machine.
Jordan.
