Blacktaliyahtag entered Brassveil with a maintenance badge that would pass a lazy glance and fail a careful audit. That was fine. She didn't need permanence; she needed thirty minutes of normal. The streets around the industrial lanes were wet, loud, and crowded with routine—forklifts humming behind chain-link, night crews smoking under awnings, delivery vans idling beside curb paint that still meant something in Orinvalde's corridor doctrine. She moved through it with a small Blackened cell that looked like contractors until it didn't: four Black Rangers in dark utility jackets, one Death courier-technician carrying a sterile hard case, and a Shadow liaison who never spoke and never touched a screen. The Shadow's hands stayed low, signaling turns with fingertip taps against thigh fabric; their posture did the rest, leaning weight toward safe seams and away from lit corners where cameras would try to become witnesses.
At 22:08, Blacktaliyahtag stopped in a service alley that dead-ended behind a shuttered machine shop. She set her kit down on a clean plastic mat and laid it out like a mechanic, not a raider. Tire-spike strips. Magnetic clamps sized for convoy door seams. A portable mast with a camera-framing hijack module that could steal thirty seconds of "official angle" if a press drone or street camera locked onto the wrong frequency. She checked each item by touch and sequence, then snapped the case shut with the kind of calm that made people misjudge her as patient rather than violent.
The Death courier-technician opened their hard case one hand-span and showed only what mattered: a quarantine-theater prompt module and a hush puck sealed in foil. Cross-shaped pupils caught the alley light when they looked up.
"Half-beat," the courier said, voice flat. "Same signature as Galaxenchi coast."
Blacktaliyahtag's mouth curved into a small smile. "That's all I need."
The Shadow liaison raised two fingers, rotated the wrist, then flattened the palm toward the street. Movement. Contact approaching.
Blacktaliyahtag didn't run to the main road to start a gunfight. She slid to the mouth of the alley and watched the corner like it owed her money. Across the street, an AES scout pair moved in escort cadence—Star Rangers by posture, box discipline visible in how they kept their feet aligned with lane paint even while scanning. One carried a slim folio on a shoulder strap. Route tokens. Work order paper. The quiet glue that held a convoy together when screens were not trusted.
Blacktaliyahtag lifted two fingers. Her Rangers mirrored her spacing. The Shadow liaison shifted weight, signaling the nearest camera's blind seam with a small tilt of the chin.
"Clean," Blacktaliyahtag murmured. "Take paper. No chase."
They moved on the third breath. Two Rangers crossed the street low and fast, cutting behind a parked van for cover. Gunfire did not start the contact; pressure did. Blacktaliyahtag sent a tight Blackened pulse down the lane—an intimidation wave that turned confidence into a half-step of hesitation. It wasn't magic for spectacle. It was timing for hands. The scout with the folio jerked their grip, looking for the source of the wrong feeling, and that moment was enough. A Ranger hooked the strap, yanked the folio free, and shoved the scout to the pavement with a clean shoulder check.
"Down," the Ranger said. "Hands visible."
The second scout went for their comm bead, and Blacktaliyahtag answered with the hush puck. The Death courier slapped it under the lip of a nearby street terminal; the air didn't go silent, it went late. The scout's call for backup arrived after their body had already been pinned behind the van, wrists controlled, weapon kicked out of line. Blacktaliyahtag walked into view and held the folio up, keeping it out of any camera's clean frame.
She didn't gloat. She extracted information.
She flipped the folio open, scanned the route token sheet, and marked the target line with a gloved thumb: convoy leg from Starlingford through Mirrorglen edge, hard brake point near Thorntruce where the road curved tight through forest belt, then a freight-lane push into Ravencrux before the shift change. The paper showed which vehicle carried the custody case by seal number and which escort lead would be calling the box geometry.
Blacktaliyahtag folded the sheet once and slid it into her vest. "We own the curve," she said.
Sirens rose two blocks away. Occupation patrols in Brassveil began to stir, drawn by comm chatter and the scent of disruption. Blacktaliyahtag didn't stick around to trade bullets for pride. She rotated her cell out of the alley in a tight wedge, using parked cars as moving cover, crossing only at angles the Shadow liaison marked with brief hand cues. One Ranger dropped a spike strip across a side lane not to kill a vehicle, to slow the first responder who tried to cut them off. They reached Starlingford's edge roads with their kit intact, and when the first AES pursuit vehicle nosed into sight, it found only wet pavement and a city returning to its own noise.
Blacktaliyahtag transitioned the fight outward on purpose. Streets made witnesses. Forest made geometry.
Mirrorglen's outskirts were dim and wide, the kind of corridor where convoy discipline felt safe because there were fewer corners to hide in. She made it unsafe by manipulating the one thing escorts relied on most: visibility of their own rules. Blackened smoke went out in controlled ribbons, tuned to cling to light sources and soften the edges of hard-light projections at distance. It didn't blind. It confused. It made "box" look like "almost box" from the wrong angle, and "almost" was where mistakes were born.
The Shadow liaison rode in the passenger seat now, still silent, still signaling. Two taps against knee fabric meant a turn. A flat palm at chest height meant hold speed. When AES pursuit tried to close, the Shadow leaned forward and made a small, deliberate latch motion with two fingers. Blacktaliyahtag took it as a command.
"Switch route," she said. "Service road. No center lane."
They cut into the Thorntruce forest belt under the cover of a distant bombardment flash. Trees swallowed sound. The road narrowed. Curvature forced vehicles into predictable arcs. This was where she wanted the convoy to feel disciplined and slow, because discipline under forced slowdown exposed its own seams.
She built a temporary encampment that wasn't a camp so much as a set of angles. Two hides in brush lines. One fallback lane marked by a strip of reflective tape only her optics could see. One kill pocket where the road's bend would force the lead vehicle to brake and bunch the second vehicle into a compression zone. She planted the quarantine-theater beacon in a roadside cabinet with gloved precision, then stepped back and watched it from ten meters away, treating it like a live animal.
The Death courier-tech checked the module's prompt shape on an offline screen, then nodded once. "Green will pulse clean."
Blacktaliyahtag's smile returned, brief and controlled. "Make them argue with their own hands."
The convoy arrived at 23:17, exactly on the paper. Solar Marines held the perimeter lanes—wide spacing, rifles low, heads scanning the treeline. Star Rangers maintained box behavior even on a forest road, keeping feet disciplined at stops and keeping hands visible near consoles. In the center vehicle, a custody case rode inside a cradle with tamper sleeves stacked beside it, the kind of portable proof Orinvalde wanted to show the public after every BRD hit-fade.
The lead vehicle's optics caught the roadside cabinet, and the prompt appeared on the dash with calm authority.
SAFE ACCESS REQUIRED
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green confirm pulsed.
A Star voice came through the convoy channel, tight and repeatable. "Hands off green. Maintain movement. Hold boxes."
Blacktaliyahtag let the rule land, then broke the movement.
Contact opened with controlled fire at wheels and engine compartments, not a spray, not a massacre pattern. The lead vehicle yawed as a tire shredded; the second vehicle braked hard, and spacing collapsed into the pocket she'd built. Her Rangers shifted into bounding pairs, one moving while one overwatched, rifles snapping to shoulders only when a target presented clean. Solar Marines attempted to fan out into the treeline to establish a perimeter wedge. Blacktaliyahtag hit the wedge with a Blackened pulse designed to punish bunching—fear pressure that made bodies cluster by instinct and lose the elegance of their spacing.
"Push right," she ordered. "Cradle vehicle. Door seam."
A Star Ranger tried to hold the lane near the custody vehicle, hard-light rectangles flickering under smoke-softened visibility. Blacktaliyahtag didn't trade slogans with them. She closed distance behind a moving shadow line the liaison fed her by gesture—two fingers pointing, then sliding sideways: blind seam, now. A magnetic clamp slapped onto the custody vehicle's door seam. The latch hesitated. That hesitation was enough. Her Ranger leveraged the seam open with a tool, not a hand, keeping the action procedural even while bullets snapped into tree bark.
Inside, the custody case was exactly what she expected: sealed, clean, filmed before transit, meant to be displayed later as proof of governability. She treated it like a weapon.
"Case," she said. "No fingerprints."
A Ranger lifted it into a Blackened sleeve. The Death courier stamped the sleeve's resin line with a sterile mark and photographed the seal in frame—BRD's own custody discipline, built not for ethics, but for survivability under later scrutiny. Blacktaliyahtag grabbed a stack of spare tamper sleeves and a small token printer from the crate beside the cradle. If Orinvalde wanted to win with proof, she would steal the tools that manufactured it.
The Star lead on the convoy channel adjusted instantly. "Custody breach! Box the retreat lanes!"
Hard-light geometry snapped onto the road behind her cell, trying to freeze her exit into visible rectangles. Blacktaliyahtag answered by refusing the most obvious path. She pivoted into the fallback lane she had marked earlier, moving her team through brush that would punish a disciplined chase with noise and delay. Her smoke clung to the convoy's headlights, making pursuit feel like running into a wall of uncertain edges.
A Solar Marine broke from the perimeter and came after them anyway, rifle shouldered, brave enough to be dangerous. Blacktaliyahtag stopped him without dramatics. A Blackened pulse knocked the barrel off line; a Ranger's controlled burst chewed dirt at the Marine's feet, forcing him to stop without taking his life. She didn't need bodies. She needed time.
They cleared the forest belt with the stolen case sealed and air-gapped, then transitioned into vehicles and drove hard toward Ravencrux. The city's freight lanes came up like a concrete tide—rail spurs, warehouses, canal cuts, and traffic barriers that forced movement into corridors. Ravencrux was where escorts regained options. Ravencrux was also where cameras multiplied, and cameras were part of her mission.
AES pursuit tightened. You could see the discipline in it: intersections boxed, lanes segmented, civilians pushed behind shelter lines. Star hard-light rectangles appeared on asphalt like a second city overlaying the first. Blacktaliyahtag drove straight into industrial zones because she didn't want civilians as cover. She wanted industry as cover—metal, noise, and hard corners where a team could move without pulling the public into the muzzle.
She forced the second set-piece at Emberquay, along canal-side walkways where street cams were mounted for logistics security and where drones sometimes hovered to capture "official response" footage. The Shadow liaison signed a small circle with two fingers—camera net—then a downward press—steal angle. Blacktaliyahtag deployed the portable mast and hijacked the framing frequency for a short burst, just long enough for the lens to catch what she wanted it to catch: a sealed custody case being moved under fire, hands gloved, seals visible, and a decoy package strapped to a different Ranger's back with a faint contamination stripe pre-smeared across its resin line.
She was building two stories at once—the real theft and the false proof that would be "found."
Gunfire erupted near a warehouse mouth as AES squads pushed into the freight lane, trying to isolate her cell. Blacktaliyahtag used the canal's geometry to deny clean pursuit—angles that forced AES to choose between chasing her into industrial corridors or holding the public walkway to keep civilians back. They chose governability. That gave her space.
Mid-fight, she recorded what mattered. She didn't record faces. She recorded behavior. Where the AES lead placed hands when a console blinked. Who spoke first in call-and-response. Which channel replied first. How they boxed the green confirm under gunfire. The Death courier captured audio timing and tagged it with timestamps and GPS drift markers. Blacktaliyahtag transmitted only metadata to Blackwing—short, precise packets: ritual order, box geometry shape, half-beat corrections under hush. No payload content. The stolen case stayed air-gapped in her custody.
Blackwing's reply came back with impatient satisfaction. "You got my angle?"
Blacktaliyahtag's voice stayed calm. "I got their hands."
Then she executed the proof replacement.
She planted the decoy custody package in a place designed to be found: a service alcove under a warehouse camera, near a marked shelter lane, where an AES recovery team would naturally sweep. The contamination stripe was visible enough to seed doubt. The counterfeit seal line would pass a casual glance and fail a forensic audit later, which was perfect, because the damage would be done in the first ten minutes of public argument.
She didn't linger to watch it be discovered. She moved.
Dunewatch's coastal lanes were the exfil route, and the corridor there ran narrow enough that bombardment rhythm offshore could cover a fast craft's silhouette. Shadow support bent camera lines at two intersections in Ravencrux, turning obvious exits into blind seams. Blackened ground fire shifted from "kill" to "deny," laying short bursts to punish chase without inviting a streetwide panic. Blacktaliyahtag kept her team's spacing tight, case centered, hands visible inside their own doctrine.
As they hit the final coastal service road, the world did the thing BRD loved most: it blinked.
The half-hour window opened on schedule, and the first operator-tier prompt didn't arrive as a scream. It arrived as calm safety language, pulsing across surfaces that wanted permission—billboards, public terminals, vehicle consoles in the distance.
SYNC VERIFICATION FOR SAFETY
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
Green pulsed.
Blacktaliyahtag didn't touch any screen. She watched the effect ripple outward, because this time it wasn't aimed at a substation or a rail hut. The civic backbone blink reached up the chain toward continuity authority—the people who would have to brief the public about tonight's convoy breach, the people who would have to explain why a custody package was found "contaminated," the people whose calm voice kept Orinvalde governable.
Her team's engine roared toward the coast. The stolen case sat sealed between her boots, air-gapped, stamped, filmed, ready to be weaponized. Behind her, Ravencrux's cameras would soon find the decoy and begin telling the wrong story. Ahead of her, the window's green pulse waited for a tired human hand to choose relief over proof at exactly the moment authority needed to be clean.
Blacktaliyahtag smiled, small and controlled, as the first citywide prompts began to synchronize and the chase shifted from streets and forests into the war room's throat.
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