Blacktavren treated Starrup the way a locksmith treats a vault: he ignored the front door and studied the hinges, the timers, the human habits that keep "secure" feeling effortless. From offshore, the continent looked like an engineered garden—green-lit skyline, canopy corridors, water loops, and power routed through microgrids designed to fail gracefully. That grace was the entry point. Safe-mode always has a clock. A clock always has a tax. A taxed clock makes people click "Confirm" without thinking.
He came ashore at Starrhaven Bay under civilian cadence, riding a cargo tender that carried fertilizer drums and solar-cell pallets. His Blackened jacket carried no emblem, only practical stitching and pockets that opened silently. A courier case sat between his boots with a seal that looked legitimate from a distance and harmless up close. Inside were three tools that mattered more than weapons: a beacon drift injector, a microgrid handshake shim, and a stack of corridor tickets printed on the same stock Starrup used for perishable permissions. He didn't need to conquer a city; he needed to make its guidance behave like a liar for thirty minutes.
The first move was a lane rehearsal. He walked the dock's painted arrows the way a compliant worker would, stopping at the posted markers, letting cameras record him as "another body following rules." He scanned into a transit kiosk using a borrowed credential that had already been aged through normal systems—nothing freshly forged, nothing that would squeak under audit. The kiosk stalled one second, a tiny latency that would read as congestion. Blacktavren watched the operator behind the glass react to it: the operator's eyes flicked to the line forming, then to the green light that followed. Stress teaches a person to accept green as truth. He filed that reaction away and boarded the rail spur toward Starrsolis.
On the train, he did not stare out at scenery. He read infrastructure through the window: substation fences, drone perches, the way maintenance crews parked at angles that created quick exits. Starrup was disciplined, but it was also proud; proud systems rely on being seen. He pulled out a slim tablet, placed it flat on his knee, and mirrored the microgrid's public telemetry feed. The feed was honest. It reported load, generation, storage, and reserve margins. It also reported the one thing BRD needed to weaponize: when the system would choose safe-mode rather than risk a cascade. Blacktavren marked three nodes where reserve margins dipped at the same time each day, not from sabotage, from human routine. Lunch breaks. Shift changes. Irrigation cycles. Predictable strain.
Starrsolis was bright with greenery and glass, built to make civic life feel clean. Blacktavren moved through it like a contractor—tool case, clipped badge, neutral face. His first target was not a power plant; it was the verification office that issued temporary overrides for municipal crews. Perishable permissions were Starrup's strength. They were also a weakness when someone could make the permissions appear routine while smuggling in a second intent.
He entered the office at 10:17 local, when the lobby was busiest and attention was fragmented. The clerk asked for a job code. Blacktavren provided one that matched a real work order, down to the punctuation and the correct department abbreviations. He kept his voice short.
"Utility. Substation service. Time-bound."
The clerk's screen threw up a tooltip with a faster workflow, the kind that appears when a system is trying to help its users. Blacktavren had prepared for that. He slid his corridor ticket into the reader, waited for the green, and let the clerk choose speed over redundancy. A fresh badge printed. A fresh override token encoded. Blacktavren did not celebrate the win; he put the badge into a sleeve, sealed it, and tucked it beneath his jacket like evidence.
Outside the office, a figure leaned against a planter wall where shadows pooled unnaturally beneath sunlit leaves. Shadow Regime posture: quiet, still, present without invitation. Blacktavren turned his head just enough to acknowledge them. No handshake. No speech. A simple tilt of his chin toward the east line.
The Shadow operative answered with two finger taps against the planter rim—timing confirmed—then stepped away and disappeared into pedestrian flow without disturbing a single person's path. Blacktavren allowed himself a thin smile. Coordination that doesn't speak doesn't leak.
He took a short-hop aircraft out of Starrsolis toward Starrenmid State, landing near Starrcademia where research facilities sat beside forested corridors. Starrcademia had the kind of lab infrastructure a continent depended on: sensor calibration, clean-energy substrates, biometric access refinement. Blacktavren did not want the research. He wanted the lab's relationship with the city—because labs are trusted, and trust is a routing authority in disguise.
At the perimeter gate, he presented his new override token and stood exactly where the lane box on the ground told him to stand. He kept his hands visible. He waited through the scanner sweep. He did not rush the guard. He let the guard feel competent. The gate opened.
Inside, he moved with the precision of someone doing approved work. He visited a microgrid junction closet with a maintenance panel that looked untouched, and he opened it using a torque key tuned to the facility's standard. He inserted the handshake shim, a small device that didn't "hack" so much as it asked the grid to re-evaluate its own thresholds. He adjusted the margin that told the system, in a crisis, how long to wait before safe-mode. Then he set the safe-mode clock to demand extra confirmation at the worst possible moment: when load peaked and operators were already behind.
That did not trip alarms. It wrote a future argument into the system.
He left the closet and walked to a research wing where an internal beacon managed personnel routing. He introduced beacon drift—subtle, slow, and non-catastrophic. A drift of twenty meters doesn't make a person lost; it makes a person delayed. Delays compound into missed escort windows, mistimed deliveries, and "temporary workarounds" that become permanent vulnerabilities. Blacktavren watched a lab tech glance at a wall sign, then at their phone, and choose the phone. He didn't need them to trust the phone completely. He only needed them to distrust their own navigation.
The first half-hour window began without fireworks.
At 12:00, the microgrid's load rose into its daily crest. The system's reserve margin narrowed. The new threshold logic interpreted normal strain as a risk. Safe-mode engaged in the most polite way possible: brightness dips, non-critical circuits shed, and a prompt appears on a console asking for confirmation to preserve stability. That prompt was legitimate. The confirmation friction was not.
Across Starrcademia, doors that relied on clean power cycled to backup. Badge readers accepted credentials but hesitated before green. A technician ran a second scan and felt time slipping. A supervisor overrode a step to keep work moving. None of it looked like sabotage. It looked like a busy day.
That was Blacktavren's preferred signature. Quiet pressure that forces shortcuts.
He used the safe-mode lull to move into the lab's logistics cage where deliveries were staged for outbound distribution. Blackened ground assets slipped in through a service corridor that Shadow had made "longer," stretching sightlines so cameras saw empty hall where bodies were actually moving. They didn't smash crates. They swapped labels. They took only what supported future windows: spare scanners, sealed credential blanks, portable battery packs, and a small box of cryptographic fobs used for emergency authentication. Each item went into a case with foam slots and a manifest sheet. BRD looting, done properly, looked like procurement.
A Star patrol arrived sooner than expected, not in panic, in sequence. Two Elites stepped into the corridor in hard-light harnesses, their devices projecting lane bars that forced bodies into boxes. Their lead spoke one sentence.
"Stop. Re-verify."
Blacktavren did not answer with bravado. He answered with action and timing. He flicked a coin-sized emitter to the floor. It didn't explode; it pulsed a brief interference field that made the hard-light lane bars re-calculate. The bars didn't vanish, but they shifted for half a second, opening a diagonal gap where a human body could slip without crossing the red line. Blacktavren moved through that gap, low and controlled, and used the corridor wall as his cover plane.
A Star Elite corrected instantly, snapping a new lane bar to cut the diagonal. Blacktavren expected that. He had already placed a second drift injector in the ceiling conduit. With a thumb press, he made the corridor's own beacon declare a false occupancy event at the far end, drawing the Star Elite's supporting units into the wrong box. Professional response still takes time to re-aim. He bought that time and spent it on distance.
He reached an exterior service balcony and dropped to a lower catwalk where forest canopy met building edge. Shadow interference thickened the air behind him, muting footfalls and bending light in ways that made pursuit feel uncertain. Blacktavren looked back once, smiled, and raised his hand in a simple, flat signal: move to extraction. His Blackened crew didn't ask questions. They flowed to the planned rally point with clean spacing, carrying only what had been logged.
The exit route ran by rail through Starrenmid's outskirts, then by vehicle into Grassgroww State where Starredommah City's freight yards offered noise and cover. Blacktavren used the transit to review the day's true outcome. He had not "won" a fight. He had adjusted three parameters in Starrup's operating reality: safe-mode confirmation friction, beacon trust posture, and emergency credential availability. Those parameters would ripple outward into convoy lanes, shelter resupply, and leadership movement, especially as AES tightened corridors in response.
He arrived at Starredommah City after dusk and took a position in a maintenance mezzanine overlooking the yard. Below him, freight moved in obedient lanes. Patrols rotated. A Star supervisor barked corrections in short bursts that sounded like competence under pressure. Blacktavren respected it and prepared to injure it.
He opened his case and removed one of the cryptographic fobs. He did not use it to break a system. He used it to build a believable lie: a "priority routing class" request formatted as an internal continuity action, destined for the kind of operator surface that coordinates escorts and dispatch integrity. The request included enough accurate metadata to pass a quick scan. It also included a single trap field designed to trigger a civic backbone blink—one moment of authority confusion—during the next half-hour window.
Blacktavren keyed the request into a low-power transmitter, timed to piggyback on a scheduled telemetry burst. He watched the yard's clocks roll forward, each minute a measured step toward the next window. His dialogue stayed small, almost ceremonial.
"Clean," he murmured. "Quiet."
The transmitter's indicator shifted from idle to armed.
Somewhere in Starrup, a console would soon display a calm prompt: PRIORITY ROUTING: OPERATOR TIER. CONFIRM AUTHORITY. The font would be correct. The seal would be correct. The moment would feel urgent but manageable. A tired hand would hover above green.
Blacktavren's smile held as the half-hour window reached its start line, and the first blink reached toward the people who decide what counts as official rescue.
No comments:
Post a Comment