The air in the common room was stagnant, heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies and the ozone tang of the glowing monitors. The five recruits sat in the dark, listening to the silence of the compound above them. The War Room was closed to them. The "assets" had been shelved.
Pranav stared at the tactical map Gautham had cobbled together from leaked police bands. It was a mess of red and blue, a picture of their own extinction.
"We're waiting to die," Sanvi said. She was sharpening her knife again, the shhhkshhhk sound rhythmically irritating. "We're sitting here while Marco circles the drain. John won't send us. He thinks we're broken."
"We are broken," Gautham muttered from the floor, hugging his knees. "I panicked in the basement. You charged a kill zone. Pranav froze. We aren't soldiers. We're liability insurance that didn't pay out."
Pranav looked at the map. He looked at the glowing blue dot in the center of the West Side, the Alliance's communication relay. It wasn't a fortress; it was a repurposed radio station atop a condemned tenement block, coordinating the Russian and Spanish frequencies.
It was the voice of the enemy.
"He's right," Pranav said.
The sharpening stopped. Sanvi looked up.
"We are failures," Pranav continued, standing up. He walked to the center of the room. He didn't have the swagger of the fish market days. He looked tired, desperate, and dangerous. "We are the rust. We are the soot."
He pointed at the blue dot on the screen.
"And that is why we can get in."
Arpika frowned, shifting on the bench. "Pranav, stop. No more empires. No more 'DeltaSix' protocols."
"No protocols," Pranav agreed. "Just physics. Marco is looking at John. He's looking at Kevin. He's watching the heavy hitters. He's not watching the trash."
He looked at his crew, battered, terrified, and cornered.
"They expect John's move, or Kevin's, or Asrit's," Pranav said, his voice gaining a hard, serrated edge. "They won't expect us. Because to them, we're just the failures. Let's use that."
The approach was ugly.
They stole a sanitation truck. It was loud, smelled of rotting garbage, and blended perfectly into the grime of the West Side.
Pranav drove, his hands whiteknuckled on the wheel. "Target is the roof," he shouted over the roar of the engine. "The relay dish coordinates their encrypted comms. If we kill the dish, the Russians can't talk to the Spanish. The coalition goes deaf."
"Entry?" Sanvi asked, checking the magazine of a stolen pistol.
"Roof access is maglocked," Gautham said, looking at a tablet, his face pale green in the light. "I... I can try to bypass, but the encryption is Volkov grade. It takes time."
"We don't have time," Sanvi snapped. "We have mass."
They parked in the alleyway behind the tenement. The rain was torrential, washing over the garbage strewn pavement.
They moved up the fire escape. It was a rust eaten skeleton of metal that groaned under their weight. Sathwik took the rear, his massive frame shaking the bolts, his eyes scanning the windows below for movement.
They reached the roof access door on the top landing. It was a heavy steel slab, reinforced and blinking with a red electronic lock.
"Gautham, go," Pranav whispered.
Gautham fumbled with his deck, his hands shaking. "It's... it's a rolling code. I need three minutes to handshake the—"
"Contact!" Sathwik hissed.
Below them, on the street, a patrol car had slowed. A spotlight swept the fire escape.
"We don't have three minutes!" Arpika whispered, pressing herself against the brick.
Sanvi didn't wait for the order. She didn't wait for the hack. She stepped back, braced herself against the railing, and kicked the lock mechanism.
She didn't kick it once. She kicked it like she was trying to murder the door. Once. Twice. The metal groaned.
"It's maglocked, you idiot, you can't—" Gautham started.
Sanvi roared, channeling every ounce of her humiliation, every memory of the branding, into her leg. She kicked the hinges, not the lock. The rusted bolts, weakened by years of neglect, sheared off with a screech of tearing metal.
The door fell inward.
"We're in!" Sanvi yelled, stumbling over the fallen steel.
Chaos.
The roof was a maze of HVAC units and cabling, dominated by the massive satellite dish in the center. But it wasn't unguarded.
Four Russian contractors were playing cards under a tarp near the dish. They jumped up, scattering cards and grabbing rifles.
"Contact front!" Pranav screamed, diving behind a ventilation unit.
Bullets sparked off the metal. The air filled with the deafening crack of unsuppressed gunfire.
"Sathwik! The flank!" Pranav directed, his voice high and frantic.
Sathwik didn't need the order. He was already moving. He didn't have a weapon, but he had a riot shield they had looted from the truck. He charged the center, absorbing the hail of bullets, turning himself into a moving wall.
"Arpika, suppress them!"
Arpika, who hated guns, who hated noise, squeezed the trigger of her submachine gun. She didn't aim. She just held the weapon over the HVAC unit and let it spray. It was messy, inaccurate fire, but it forced the Russians to duck.
"Gautham, the dish! Kill it!" Pranav shouted.
Gautham sprinted toward the base of the relay tower. Bullets whizzed past him. He slid into the mud at the base of the control box.
"I can't shut it down!" Gautham screamed, typing furiously. "The software is locked! It's hardwired! I need a bypass key!"
"Forget the code!" Pranav yelled, popping up to fire two shots that went wide. "Use the dysfunction, Gautham! Don't solve it! Break it!"
Gautham stared at the box. Break it.
He looked at the cooling pipes running into the server stack. He looked at the rain.
He didn't type a code. He grabbed a loose piece of rebar from the roof debris and jammed it into the cooling fan. The fan shattered with a horrific grinding noise.
Then, he ripped the coolant hose free.
Pressurized liquid sprayed onto the superheated server rack.
HISSSSSS.
Steam erupted. Sparks showered the roof like fireworks. The blue light on the dish flickered and died.
"It's frying!" Gautham yelled, covering his head as a capacitor exploded.
"Clear out! Clear out!" Sanvi screamed.
The Russians were rallying, moving to flank.
"Sathwik!" Pranav yelled.
Sathwik was pinned down, his shield taking heavy fire. He looked back at the door. He looked at the crew.
He grabbed a propane tank from a heater unit and hurled it toward the Russians. It didn't explode, this wasn't a movie, but the heavy metal tank smashed into the knee of the lead gunman, dropping him.
"Go! Go!"
They scrambled back through the broken door, tumbling down the fire escape in a tangle of limbs and panic. They hit the alleyway just as the Russians reached the roof edge, firing blindly into the dark.
They piled into the garbage truck. Pranav slammed the gas.
The truck roared, smashing through a wooden fence and careening onto the main road.
Inside the cab, it was silent for a second, save for the heavy, gasping breath of five terrified people.
Gautham was shaking, covered in soot. Sanvi was bleeding from a graze on her arm. Arpika was pale, clutching the gun she hated. Sathwik was bruising already.
Pranav looked at the dashboard. He tuned the radio to the Russian frequency.
Static.
Just white, hissing static.
He laughed. It was a breathless, hysterical sound.
"They're deaf," Pranav whispered. "They can't talk to the Spanish."
Gautham looked at his hands, still trembling. "I broke it. I just... broke it."
"It wasn't clean," Sanvi said, wiping blood from her arm. "But it's done."
They drove through the rain, the garbage truck a lumbering beast in the night. They hadn't won the war. They hadn't redeemed themselves. But for the first time, they hadn't just survived. They had bitten back.
Marco's forces were blind. The tsunami had been paused.
And in the silence of the static, Pranav realized that Kevin was wrong. You didn't need to be a forest fire to burn the enemy. Sometimes, you just needed to be the rust that ate the machine from the inside out.