Militech moved like a machine that had been kicked awake — fast, precise, and absolutely certain it could muscle every problem into submission. Convoys cut through the outer districts in tight columns, private contractors in blacked vans, drones sweeping overhead in tight constellations, all of it tuned to the practiced efficiency of corporate cleanup. They expected fear. They expected an empty street and quiet compliance.
They didn't expect people showing up.
Where the leaked manifests landed, anger found faces. Shopkeepers banged on metal shutters and turned their storefronts into impromptu message boards. Office workers streamed into the avenues with phones held high, live feeds looping the damning videos. Dockhands refused orders and walked off the loading bays. Small crews of ex-techs came out of the woodwork and started disabling Militech sensors with tactical precision. It wasn't a single organized army yet — it was a thousand little refusals, and refusal multiplied like contagion.
Mary's overlay lit with movement. "Protest clusters expanding at Dock 9, Contractor Row, and the North industrial ring. Militech convoys rerouting to avoid crowds — traffic gridlocks forming. Local independent broadcasters picking up at scale. Public sentiment skewing sharply against corporate narrative."
Max watched the feeds on a cracked holo, the reflected glow catching in his cybernetic eye. He said nothing for a moment, then: "Let them see the trucks stalled. Let them get footage of people taking the manifests off trucks and putting them on walls. Militech expects obedience; they won't be able to spin live footage of hands pulling their logos down."
Kade and the Ghost Dogs took the cue. Under Max's quiet orders — Mary feeding nodes and blind-spots — they moved like a ghosting crew taught to vanish into crowds. They slipped to choke points and peeled Militech convoys off their routes with nonlethal sabotage: punctured tires on the lead vans, hacked nav-links that sent escort drones to chase false GPS markers, simple hydraulics flooded with coolant to dead-stop a convoy's engines. No bodies, no headlines of massacre — just impotence where Militech expected control.
Militech answered with escalation: armored squads pushed into neighborhoods, automated turrets turned up at supply yards, and a handful of corporate PR bots tried to drown the feeds with denial. But every heavy step they took played out on other channels. Video of a contractor squad attempting to force a warehouse door ended up streaming to half the city when a dockworker trained his phone-camera on the scene and the clip propagated along union channels. The company could deploy metal; it couldn't undeploy a thousand eyewitnesses.
Max kept to the shadows, working the net like a surgeon. He rolled outages through the north grid — short, surgical blackouts that blinded corporate cams for exactly the moments Kade needed to slip past. He pushed false manifests into Militech routing tables so that patrols chased old signatures while unions and neighborhoods surged into the real targets. Each time Militech re-routed, Max and Mary nudged the city one degree further from silence.
By nightfall, the city looked different. Not safer, not by a long shot. But less resigned. People who'd shrugged at injustice for years were calling out names and traffic was clogged with protesters instead of empty fear. Small groups organized supply lines to blockades — water, food, med-kits — and ex-techs showed up at town-halls to explain, in plain language, what the leaked blueprints meant. The movement smelled of something older than outrage — accountability.
Still, Max didn't celebrate. From a rooftop under the drizzle, he watched Militech reroute a new set of teams and thought of the trials yet to come. "This is raw," he said quietly to Mary. "They'll regroup. They'll bring a cleaner hand and uglier tools next time."
Mary's reply was factual, but not cold. "They're recalibrating. Public support is a variable. It's favoring you right now."
He let himself nod once — small, private acknowledgment. "Then we keep widening the gap," he said. "We give them more noise than they can hide behind. Let unions and neighbors take the lead. We'll only step in where they can't."
Kade, listening in from a safe house with the rest of the Ghost Dogs, let out a breath he'd been holding since the first spark. He'd wanted a chance to matter; he was getting more than that. Outside, a crowd chanted the stencil's name — whoever had painted it — and the sound threaded up through the city like a current. People were looking up. People were talking.
Max stayed on the roof long after the others had pulled back, his coat flapping faintly in the acid drizzle. The city below pulsed — sirens, shouts, and a rhythm of boots on wet pavement. The noise of rebellion. He watched the lights shift as if the city itself were breathing, alive for the first time in years.
Mary's voice broke the quiet. "You realize this won't stop them. Militech won't concede. They'll rebrand, restructure, deploy something worse under a different name."
"I know," Max said, his tone almost resigned. "But now they have to hide again. That costs them time. Time's the one thing they can't mass-produce."
She hesitated. "And what about you? They'll trace the leaks, Max. Ghostlink or not — they'll know where to look."
He smirked faintly, eyes glinting blue in the dim light. "Then let them look. I've been a ghost once before. I can be one again."
Far below, the chants grew louder — "No more ghosts! No more blood!" A thousand voices carried through the smog, raw and imperfect, but human.
Kade's voice came over comms, a little shaky but filled with adrenaline. "Max, Dock 9 crowd's swelling. Someone projected the Ghostlink footage onto a Militech tower. Whole damn block's watching it on the side of the building."
Max blinked once, then actually laughed — short and genuine. "Good. Let them see what Militech made in the dark."
"Should we fall back?" Kade asked, half-expecting the order.
"Not yet," Max replied. "Let it breathe. This isn't just protest anymore — it's proof. You don't choke proof, you feed it."
Mary's systems hummed, recalibrating, mapping live feeds across sectors. "I'm detecting an uplink — Militech drone swarm prepping in the western district. Combat models. They're not here to negotiate."
"Send me visuals," Max said.
***
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