Lucy read the line again like it might change if she stared hard enough.
NODE 2—SIGNAL ACQUISITION: ACTIVE
"We don't wait for them to build a network," Max said. His voice was flat, final. "We go now."
They moved fast. No celebration, no patching wounds—just the cold routine of people who know how little time they have. V checked the perimeter, planting short-range jammers and a few EMPs in tight loops to buy them seconds if Militech tried to trace them out. Max fed orders through Eidolon to his constructs—routing priorities, engagement envelopes, fallback vectors—everything locked and signed with his key.
Lucy stayed close to the console as they left the chamber, deck folded tight against her ribcage. Her fingers were steady enough now, but her jaw kept working. "If Node Two has started acquiring signal, it's already listening. We'll walk into a trap if we just charge the front gate."
Max glanced back once, the blue in his optics soft. "We won't charge. We'll move where they don't expect us. Node One was a forward host. Node Two will be deeper, under hardened systems. But redundancy means cables, junctions, maintenance seams. You find the seams, you find the path."
V snapped a grin. "We find seams. We tear them. You do your ghost trick. Everybody happy."
They went single-file through the ruined corridors. Electric arcs dotted the ceiling, shadowed catwalks creaked overhead, and the smell of burnt insulation hung in the air. Farther in, lights blinked on and off—Militech running diagnostics, hunting the hole in their net. Lucy's deck tuned into faint backchannels: maintenance pings, power reroute chatter, a civilian sensor mesh that hadn't been scrubbed. She fed those signals noise, masked movement, sent fake manifests into the logs—small lies that would slow a proper trace.
At a fork in the corridor they split roles. V took the flank, moving low and fast to clear physical guards, plant decoys, and keep sight-lines open. Max went straight for the systems backbone, his constructed units folding into stealth formations, black metal like shadows crawling along vents and drain runs. Lucy took the data path—creeping into maintenance ports and splicing a burnt line from a local battery pack, hardline only, no wireless handshake.
"This way," she whispered, pointing to a faded schematic on her holoscreen. A service shaft led down—old access, bypassing the main bus. If Node Two was under heavy guard, the shaft would give them a blind approach.
They descended in the narrow shaft two at a time. Max first, then Lucy, V covering the entrance. The shaft smelled of oil and old rain. Midway down, the whole facility kicked—alarms wailing distant and thin. A voice over a PA barked code words. Lucy's fingers flew. She injected a handful of masks into the facility's logging nodes—garbled maintenance tickets, a phantom crew shift. It bought them the length of a breath.
At the bottom, a maintenance vestibule opened into a reinforced corridor. Here the air was colder, the tiles newer, the conduits thicker. Power hums thumped in the walls. Lucy could feel the network like static under her skin—Node Two reaching, probing for points to latch. Her hands moved to prep a block: a timed sinkhole that would drop a false sink on any handshake for exactly ninety seconds.
"Ninety seconds?" V asked, loading a charge into her sleeve pocket.
"Eighty-five," Lucy said. She'd shaved it for safety. "But it's better to move slow and live than fast and die."
Max scanned the access panel and spoke one instruction. "We go in pairs. Lucy and I take the server access. V holds external egress and pulls the tail if it gets hot. No long net-hooks—slice, grab, burn, gone."
They stepped through the reinforced door together. Beyond it was a smaller room lined in server racks and thick fiber bundles. At the far wall a console blinked red: NODE 2 — SIGNAL ACQUISITION: ACTIVE. The signal was stronger here, beating like a living pulse.
Lucy set down her deck, fingers poised. "If this is a host like Node One, it'll try to handshake me within three seconds to push a probe. I'll take that handshake into a sandbox and measure its reach."
Max's tone was flat as steel. "You take it in. I hold the room."
V eased to the doorway, eyes on the corridor, pistol up. "Make sure it doesn't eat her."
Lucy jacked in. The screen blinked, then flooded with raw telemetry: routing tables, process threads, a mesh of hidden diagnostics. Node Two's avatar crawled into the sandbox like something testing the walls of a room. It smelled for seams.
"Got its signature," Lucy muttered. "It's older than their docs say. Layered, but slower than Node One—different hardware. Good. Different weakness."
On her deck, she saw their window: gaps in cache rotation, a maintenance handoff scheduled in sixty seconds where a physical splice would be exposed. "Sixty," she said.
Max's army took positions at the thresholds, shields raised. Outside, V tightened her jaw.
Lucy's voice dropped to a hiss. "When the handoff opens, I ghost the auth tokens, extract the node's local map, and plant a kill-routine that corrupts its replication tables. One clean sweep. Then we're gone before they wake."
Max's answer was a single nod. "Do it."
They waited ten seconds like an eternity. Then the maintenance splice blinked live on Lucy's screen. She pushed the probe through—small, invisible, surgical. The node sniffed, tasted, tried to push back.
"Now," Lucy breathed, and her fingers hammered the sequence.
Lines of code streamed into Node Two, blue surgical cuts that tore at replication threads. Node Two screamed data—defensive calls, counterprobes, a surge that tried to leap out into the facility. Lucy fed it the sink, isolated it into the trash, and pushed the corruptor: a precise cascade that would collapse its ability to reconstitute.
"Got it," she said. "Dropping trigger in three—two—one—"
The room shuddered as Node Two reacted. The corridor alarms switched from routine to emergency. Footsteps thundered. On Lucy's screen a line of red text blinked once, twice—
NODE 2 — REPLICATION TABLES CORRUPTED
NODE 2 — ISOLATION PENDING
Max moved like a machine in tandem—not because Eidolon made him, but because he'd chosen to be that line between the crew and the ruin. "Pull out," he ordered. "V, drag the tail. Lucy, burn the link."
Lucy hit the kill. Her deck screamed as the sandbox collapsed. For a beat the node reached for her—hungry, angry—but the sink closed and the false logs swallowed the trace. She yanked the hardline free.
They ran.
Alarms behind them cut the corridor into a riot of sound. V detonated the jammers in sequence, blinding chasing drones for precious seconds. Max's constructs fell back, covering each other as they retreated into service shafts and maintenance runs. They moved like a single organism, practiced and brutal.
By the time they popped out three levels up, the facility was fully alert. Red strobes painted the halls. Speakers shouted commands. The window had closed; Node Two's team would be repairing, rerouting, and locking down in minutes.
Lucy's hands trembled but steady. Her deck showed one final line before the screen went dark:
NODE 2 — ISOLATION: SUCCESS
REMAINING HOSTS: 5
She swallowed. "Five left."
Max didn't look around. He only started moving, already planning the next cut. "Then we keep cutting," he said. "Before they stitch themselves back together."
V laughed, tired and raw. "All right. Who brings the ropes?"
***
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