The forest floor was a total mess. It was freezing, hard violence: roots like black iron snakes, flat rocks hidden under a thin layer of snow, and holes full of slush that ate your foot whole.
Julian was past tired, past hurting. The broken rib was a knife handle in his side. Every short, painful breath was a choice: fire in his chest or running out of air.
The only thing that mattered was moving forward—that pathetic lurch that kept the trees from closing in.
He clutched the Link terminal. It was no longer a device, but an organ, cold and vibrating, pressed into the warm, bleeding spot where his body was failing. The Link's single indicator light pulsed a frenzied, desperate red: **CORE DECAY RATE ACCELERATING.**
Eliza was just ahead, a dark, economical engine. She did not stumble. She did not gasp. She seemed to draw energy from the cold, a figure of pure, terrifying function. The Drive case, heavy with its doomed reserve power, swung in her hand, an unnecessary ballast that she carried without effort. She never looked back entirely, just a swift flick of the head, confirming he hadn't fallen permanently into the dark.
"Two kilometers, Julian. We are running out of air in the cylinder." Her voice was tight, a thread of wire stretched taut in the frigid air.
He tried to answer. No sound came. He pushed off a slippery boulder, his weight shifting wrong, the muscle memory gone. He landed hard. Not a trip, but a collapse, a boneless, sudden surrender to gravity. He hit the frozen dirt with a dull, wet thud, his shoulder twisting to protect the Link. He lay facedown in the sharp, icy dirt, lungs locked. He was done. The body had finally sent the veto.
***
Then came the hand. Not gentle. It was a metal vise on the back of his collar, jerking him sideways, lifting him like a discarded coat.
Eliza's face filled his narrow field of vision. No sympathy. No judgment. Only a terrible, demanding clarity.
"Get up." A command, not a request. Her eyes were black, deep, focusing solely on the mission, but something in the sharp angle of her jaw was wrong. Something broke the surface. A stutter in her control.
*The smell of ozone. The ringing silence after the pressure wave.*
She was seventeen. The server farm was silent, the air thick with the dust of pulverized concrete. Lieutenant Geller, his mentor, his friend, was pinned under the massive cooling unit, his face gray. His eyes were wide. *The heat signature on the central core was irreversible.*
"The purge key, Eliza. Activate the sequence. You have to lock down the local net, isolate the source. Now. **Now.**"
She had stared at the cooling unit, the crushed angle of his legs. She heard the secondary fail-safe klaxon—three seconds to catastrophic collapse. *I can pull him out. I can lift it.* She wasted that first second, that terrible, vital, unrecoverable moment calculating how a teenage girl could move a ten-ton refrigeration unit.
*Failure.*
The key remained in her hand. She watched the green light on the console flash red, then white, then nothing. A plume of superheated steam and plasma roared up from the floor, incinerating the space where Geller had been. The data, the seven months of extraction, the whole mission, gone to atomic vapor.
*She had chosen the ghost of a human life over the certainty of the mission.*
The memory was less than a second in the real world. It was a micro-seizure of the will. The granite hardness returned to her eyes, sharper than before.
"The Link stays alive because *you* keep moving," she hissed, her voice low enough that it could only be for him. "You don't get to fail the final extraction because your body feels inconvenient. Get up. Now."
She shoved him away, and the momentum, the shock of the refusal, propelled him forward. He found his feet. He was moving again, a crippled, staggering puppet animated by her terrifying, absolute conviction. The pain was just noise now.
***
The forest broke.
The sudden shift was jarring. They were spat out onto an incline of frozen scree and low scrub. The black lattice of the comms mast materialized, a skeletal giant against the bruised, pre-dawn sky. It was brutalist, impersonal, reaching impossibly high to pierce the cloud base.
At the base of the tower was the clearing, unnaturally flat, stamped out of the wilderness.
The service building: a square metal block, military green, anonymous.
And beside it, the **APC (Armored Personnel Carrier)**. Six heavy wheels, angled steel, silent, its massive frame absorbing the light. Its engine thrummed—a low, deep vibration that travelled through the cold earth and into Julian's worn boots. It was idling, waiting. Their ride, or their coffin.
Eliza pulled them deep into the final perimeter cover—a dense knot of frozen juniper and rock. She brought up the thermal scope.
"Two operators inside the shack. Static. Not moving. Running a receiver, passive monitoring. They're comfortable. They think we're still two valleys away, freezing."
Julian didn't need the scope. He could feel the proximity of the threat. The APC's exhaust was a faint, clean plume.
"They're using the APC for power," Julian said, his voice scraped raw but steady. "That's why the engine is on. It's a field generator. Its auxiliary coupling is everything."
"And it's hardened," Eliza countered, her focus locked on the Drive case. "The APC is shielded. Its systems won't even flicker with a burst EMP. We need to disable the men, connect the Link, and transmit *before* their backup teams arrive. The quick-response unit is ten minutes out. We have three minutes to breach and secure."
She opened the Drive case. The interior glowed with sickly, complex light. She bypassed the standard output dampeners. This was a surgical tool, and she was turning it into a bomb.
"The battery is rated for a high-density, thirty-second data transfer. I'm rerouting the entire charge through the antenna array. One pulse. Fifteen-meter radius. It'll fry any low-voltage unshielded electronics. Their comms, their monitors, their weapon sights—all dead." She looked at him, the gravity of the trade-off absolute. "It kills the Drive case, Julian. It's the last of the juice. **If we don't get power from the APC, we fail.**"
The APC itself remained the single, largest unpredictable element.
"We assume standard protocol," Julian whispered, eyes fixed on the angular vehicle. "Vehicle is passive while the operators are within the safety perimeter. But if they've remotely activated a defense system—a roof-mounted sentry, a tear gas dispenser, even an automated, non-electronic heavy weapon that doesn't rely on the comms link—the EMP is a death warrant. It signals our presence, but doesn't eliminate the core threat."
He carefully deposited the Link terminal beneath the juniper roots, placing his torn scarf over the pulsing light. The APC was their generator, but it was also a concrete barrier, a mobile pillbox.
"We don't gamble on their protocol," Julian decided, retrieving the utility knife. The blade was dull, the handle worn smooth and taped. "You trigger the pulse when I reach the door. I take the shack. But the men inside... we must eliminate their ability to organize or signal an alarm the moment the lights go out."
What Julian knew, what Geller's failure had burned into Eliza, was that a soldier's strength isn't just their weapon. It is their **cohesion**.
"The door will hold them. They have to come out through that single point," Julian said, calculating the tiny service entrance. "The APC is running. The men inside are keeping warm, comfortable. They have an armament locker. That's the most vital asset."
He pointed a finger at the APC. "The APC will have an **external armament lockbox**, standard issue for quick field deployment. It's always mechanical, sealed, right beside the main hatch. It contains un-sight-equipped weapons—shotguns, high-yield flares, perhaps a field-grade trauma kit. The EMP won't touch those. If they panic, they'll run for the nearest hard source of defense. If they can't use their electronic rifles, they will grab the oldest, dumbest firepower available."
"If we secure the APC, we secure the power," Eliza affirmed, already inputting the final, destructive command into the Drive case. "If they get the backup weapons, they cut the power line before we even finish the connection. They will destroy the generator to stop the transmission."
Julian nodded, the air colder now that the plan was set. "I take the APC's armament cache first. That eliminates their heavy, non-electronic counter-attack. You cover the door. Pulse in sixty seconds."
He lowered himself into a painful, flat crawl, moving away from the juniper towards the massive, silent shadow of the APC. The APC's chassis would provide the only cover until he reached the service shack wall. The Link, humming its lonely, urgent plea in the darkness, was a few feet behind him. The entire world had shrunk to a hundred-meter stretch of frozen dirt, a locked door, and a single, one-time pulse of electromagnetic energy.
They were committed. The price of hesitation was already known.
---
The most vital non-electronic resource Julian must prevent the operators from accessing is their **field trauma kit/aid supplies**. Why? In a surprise breach, a non-electronic weapon (like a simple shotgun from the armament lockbox) is dangerous, but the immediate human reaction is often to retreat and *treat the wounded*. Preventing access to the aid kit forces the surviving operator to dedicate all attention to the injured comrade, or risk letting them bleed out, eliminating their capacity for coordinated, sustained resistance and leaving Julian and Eliza time to connect the Link.