I stayed outside, eyes scanning, listening for changes in rhythm.
The base carried its own tempo. Floodlights swung in patient arcs. Boots crunched gravel in intervals. A distant generator droned behind the pylons, steady enough to make you forget it existed until it stopped. The patrol route near the fence repeated with the kind of lazy precision you got when nothing bad had happened yet.
Then something changed.
Not in the base. In the fence.
Metal whispered, not the clean snip of cutters this time, but the brittle scrape of wire moving against steel.
My head turned before my thoughts finished assembling. My eyes found the fence line and the hole.
A flashlight beam cut low across the grass outside the perimeter, not from the floodlights, but from something arriving in a hurry. Tires crunched gravel. A small vehicle rolled up fast and stopped hard near the fence, its engine still running. The shape looked like a light utility truck, stripped and practical, the sort of thing you used to move men quickly when you did not want to commit a full patrol. Four guards spilled out of it.
They moved with the confidence of men who believed they had found a problem that could be solved by shouting at it.
One of them crouched by the fence and shone his light directly at the cut. He ran a gloved hand along the wire as if checking for a signature he understood. He called something back to the others, voice sharp, and then the four spread, rifles coming up. Their eyes searched the dark forest beyond the perimeter.
They searched the wrong part of the dark.
I stood less than thirty meters away, behind a tree thick enough to hide most of my armour. The SPI plates took the light poorly; they swallowed it instead of reflecting it. That helped. My size did not. At some point, even good camouflage became a negotiation with physics.
The guard closest to the hole leaned forward and peered through it.
I could have let the team inside handle it. I could have stayed quiet and waited for Hoffman's timing. I could have trusted that the charges would go off soon, and the radar would die before this became a real complication.
Then the guard raised his radio.
The base would wake up if that radio crackled. The floodlights would speed up. Patrol routes would change. The small, quiet operation would turn into a chase across neutral land, and somebody would need to be cleaned up for deniability in a way that would stain the mission more than it already had.
So I stepped out.
Not fast. Not theatrical. I simply moved into the open like a decision that had been delayed too long.
The flashlight beam found me immediately.
The guard holding it froze. The beam climbed my armour plates and then jerked upward, hitting my chest, then my face. He stared up at me for a full second with a mouth slightly open, the pure expression of a man whose brain had prepared for a list of threats and found none of them matched the thing in front of him.
He tried to shout.
The sound came out as half a word, then broke as the others swung their rifles toward the light.
One of them yelled, "Contact," in a voice that tried to sound brave.
I closed the distance in two strides.
The closest guard took a step back and raised his weapon, hands shaking just enough to make the muzzle wag. He looked young in the way soldiers looked when they still believed their helmets made them anonymous.
I grabbed him by the front of his vest and lifted.
His boots left the ground so quickly his legs kicked once, instinctively, searching for traction that did not exist. His rifle knocked against my forearm plate. His flashlight dropped and hit the dirt, beam rolling across grass in a slow circle.
He made a strangled sound that might have been a threat.
I did not answer it. I turned and hurled him.
His body flew in a rough arc and slammed into the light vehicle with a metallic crunch. The truck rocked on its suspension and skidded half a meter. The guard hit the hood, then rolled off, landing hard on the gravel. He did not get up. He lay there twitching once, then going still, the way bodies did when consciousness decided it wanted nothing to do with the next few minutes.
The other three guards opened fire.
Their rifles snapped in short bursts. Bullets struck my SPI plates with sharp, flat pings that sounded like someone throwing handfuls of nails against a metal door. The impacts stung, not in pain, but in irritation, like a swarm of insects that believed itself important. I felt the force more than the penetration. The armour did not care. The armour did its job with cold indifference.
One guard adjusted his aim upward, trying for my face. I tilted my head slightly and stepped sideways. The rounds kicked up dirt behind me and shredded bark off the tree I had just left. He corrected again, firing too fast, wasting ammo on a target that did not behave like the targets his range instructor had promised him.
The second guard kept firing at my torso, as if volume could brute force the problem.
The third did something worse. He lowered his rifle and charged.
He carried a avergae Lancer.
Not a weapon the Indies should have had clean access to, not officially. It looked worn, scratched, the kind of rifle that had traded hands and owners. The bayonet chainsaw under the barrel sat heavy and familiar in silhouette. He roared as he ran, and the sound carried more fear than rage, as if he needed the roar to convince himself his legs still worked.
He thumbed the rev.
The chainsaw mechanism screamed into motion, loud and hungry, and for a moment, it sounded like the war itself, the signature noise that turned a gun into a statement. He aimed it at my midsection like he wanted to carve a solution into reality.
He hit my armour.
The chainsaw teeth bit the SPI plate and stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. The sound turned into a choking grind, then a strained whine as the motor fought against something it could not cut. The saw jammed so suddenly the guard's arms jerked, and his balance slipped. His roar turned into a sharp, surprised curse.
I looked down at the saw pressed against my chest.
It felt like a child had tried to cut steel with kitchen cutlery.
I grabbed the Lancer by the receiver with one hand.
The guard tried to yank it free. He pulled hard, feet sliding on gravel. He looked up at my face, eyes wide now, and the fear finally won the argument.
I crushed the weapon.
The metal folded with a sound like a car door being twisted wrong. The barrel bent. The housing buckled. The chainsaw mount snapped off in a shower of small fragments. The guard's hands still held the grip and trigger section for a fraction of a second before his brain registered that the gun had stopped being a gun.
He stared at what remained in his hands.
The other two guards paused mid-burst. They had watched the gun die. That pause was short. It was still enough.
I stepped forward.
The guard who had been firing at my torso recovered first and lifted his rifle again, trying to reacquire the rhythm. He did not get it. I grabbed the barrel and shoved it downward, forcing the muzzle to point at the dirt. He tried to fight the movement. His arms shook. His boots dug in. He might as well have tried to arm-wrestle a wall.
I drove my knee into his stomach, careful not to kill him, and he folded with a wet gasp. He dropped his rifle and clutched his midsection, eyes watering, mouth working without sound.
The last guard, the one who had tried for my face, changed tactics. He rushed in with the kind of desperation that looked like bravery from a distance. He slammed into my shoulder-first, trying to knock me off balance, trying to use mass and momentum like the fight had rules that evened the insignificance of himself.
The impact moved me perhaps a few centimetres.
He bounced off my armour and stumbled.
I reached out, grabbed him by the collar, and lifted him one-handed. His legs kicked. His rifle clattered onto the gravel.
He struggled, hands scrabbling at my wrist, and I felt the small, absurd strength of a human refusing to accept the problem. I could have dropped him. I could have thrown him. I could have done something simple.
Instead, I used him.
I swung him sideways and slammed him into the guard with the jammed Lancer.
Both bodies hit with a dull thud. The guard in my hand went limp from the impact. The other fell backwards, collapsing to the ground, breath knocked out, eyes unfocused. The guard clutching his stomach looked up at me with the kind of awe people reserved for artillery.
I released the body I held. He dropped onto the gravel like a sack, unconscious and maybe alive.
The last guard tried to crawl backwards, dragging himself with his elbows, legs not cooperating. He reached for his rifle with shaking fingers.
I stepped on the rifle and pinned it to the ground.
He froze, looking up at me, breathing fast.
"You do not want this," I said.
He did not answer. He could not.
I bent down and tapped his helmet once with two fingers, not hard enough to crack it, hard enough to switch his brain off for a while. His head snapped to one side. He slumped and stopped moving.
Silence returned in pieces.
The vehicle's engine still idled, a soft growl that made the scene feel unfinished. The floodlights continued their slow sweep. The base had not fully reacted yet. The radio had not crackled. The alarm had not gone off.
That meant I had done what I needed to do.
I walked to the utility truck and killed the engine, reaching inside and twisting the key until it stopped. The sudden quiet felt cleaner. I looked at the first guard I had thrown into the hood. He still breathed, shallow but steady. His eyes rolled behind his lids, and his mouth hung open.
Not dead.
Useful.
The mission required deniability. Deniability often meant bodies that did not talk. Hoffman's team inside the perimeter had already cut one throat because he stood near the pylons and would notice the charges. These four had found the hole. They would notice the hole again if they woke up too soon, and they would tell someone.
I crouched and dragged them.
Not far, just far enough to hide them from the patrol routes and the fence line. I pulled them into the treeline, deeper into shadow, behind low brush and fallen limbs. I used branches to break up their silhouettes. I positioned them in a cluster that looked like men who had stopped to drink and then collapsed from exhaustion, if someone wanted to be charitable.
Nobody in war wanted to be charitable.
I returned to the fence hole and listened.
Inside the perimeter, movement increased. A guard shouted. Footsteps accelerated. A flashlight beam swept across the grass and then jerked away. Someone had noticed the cut. Someone had noticed the dead guard by the pylons, or they had noticed the absence of his patrol route. The base had started waking up.
The team inside would be moving now.
I heard the faint snap of a branch to my right and turned to see Cho appear from the darkness, slipping through the hole with a controlled urgency. Baz followed. Sommers came next, clutching the detonator. Hoffman emerged last, face tight, eyes scanning.
They froze when they saw the scene.
Not the fence. Not the base. The bodies.
Hoffman's gaze moved from the unconscious guards to me and then to the crushed remains of the Lancer lying near the gravel. His expression did not shift into surprise so much as it shifted into recalculation.
Baz muttered something under his breath that did not qualify as a prayer.
Cho's eyes narrowed. He looked at the bodies, then at the utility truck, then at me. He did not ask questions. He filed details.
Sommers swallowed and tightened his grip on the detonator.
Hoffman spoke first. "What happened?"
"Four guards found the hole," I said. "They tried to raise the alarm."
"And now," Hoffman said.
The question hung in the air with all the weight of Baxter's unstated approval.
No witnesses.
I looked at the bodies. They lay still. They breathed. They would wake eventually. They would talk eventually. The easiest lie would protect the mission. The lie would also align with what Hoffman needed to report, because Hoffman did not want nuance. He wanted closure.
"I killed them," I said.
The words came out flat. They were not true in the technical sense. They were true in the operational sense. Nobody would wake up soon enough to challenge the mission, and if they did, the explosion would cover most questions.
Hoffman studied me for a fraction of a second longer, then nodded once.
Baz glanced at Hoffman as if hoping for a correction. He did not get one.
Cho's face remained unreadable.
Hoffman pointed at Sommers. "Trigger on my mark," he said. "We move now."
We ran.