An Act of War
The air in Rupa's dwelling was thick with the ghosts of the battle—the metallic scent of blood, the lingering smell of burnt tarpaulin, and a heavy, bone-deep weariness. The emergency council was assembled: Rupa, her face a mask of grim control; Jaya, a coiled spring of vindicated fury; Hakeem, his shoulders slumped with the weight of the wounded he'd treated all night; and Niran, his hands stained with grease from the salvage, his expression practical and grim.
Anja stood before them, the oilskin-wrapped logbook and the heavy data slate feeling like lead weights in her hands. The small, carved bird she'd found was a secret hardness in her pocket.
"It wasn't a raid for supplies," Anja began, her voice low but clear, cutting through the exhausted silence. "It was an execution. They planned it."
She opened the logbook, her finger tracing the precise, chilling script. "I found this in the officer's cabin on the skimmer. It details their entire strategy."
The Evidence Presented
Anja placed the logbook on the table, open to the first damning entry. The handwriting was small, precise, methodical—the penmanship of someone documenting an operation, not a crime.
"Six weeks ago," she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. "Listen to this."
She read aloud, her voice gaining strength with each word: "Phase 1 initiated. Deployed Agent R at designated coordinates. Current pull should carry bloom directly into target zone within 4-6 weeks. Proceeding with Phase 2: Observation."
The room was silent. She could hear Hakeem's breathing, shallow and quick. Rupa's hands had tightened on the edge of the table.
"Agent R," Anja continued. "Red. The red tide." She flipped to the next marked page. "This entry is from one week ago, just days before the attack."
She read the second entry: "Bloom has reached target. Observable impact: fishing ceased, purifier systems likely compromised, power rationing in effect. Target is softened. They are blind and starving, as predicted. Ready for Phase 3."
The Room's Reaction
A horrified silence descended as she finished. Anja watched understanding dawn on each face in turn.
Hakeem's face had gone pale. "The children," he whispered. "The fevers. The rashes. I thought it was a natural bloom. I've been treating symptoms while they..." He couldn't finish.
Niran's grease-stained hands slowly curled into fists. "The generator. We thought it was age, wear and tear. But the water intake was clogged with the bloom first. It was deliberate."
"They've been killing us for weeks," Rupa said, her voice hollow. "Slowly. Methodically. While we thought we were just unlucky. While we rationed and suffered and blamed ourselves."
Jaya stood utterly still, her warrior's discipline barely containing the fury Anja could see building behind her eyes. When she finally spoke, her voice was deadly quiet. "How many transmissions were in that data slate? How many times did they check in on their little experiment?"
"I don't know," Anja admitted. "The slate is encrypted. I couldn't access the full files. But from the logbook..." She flipped through more pages. "There are observation notes. Dated entries every few days. 'Fishing nets coming up empty.''Generator failures observable from distance.''Patrol patterns irregular, likely due to resource strain.'"
She looked up at them. "They were watching us die. Taking notes."
A Council Divided
Jaya was the first to break the silence that followed. She slammed a clenched fist on the table, the sound like a gunshot. "Vindicated," she spat, the word a curse. She rounded on the others, her eyes blazing. "I warned you! I told you they were organized, that they were scouting us, and you called for caution! Now you see. This is not about survival, it's about extermination. There is no negotiating with this. I demand a declaration of total war."
"War?" Hakeem countered, his voice raspy with fatigue. He gestured vaguely toward the clinic. "Jaya, I have twelve wounded, Kael among them. Tomas is dead. Our last antibiotics were spoiled by the generator failure. We are running on fumes and grief. An offensive is suicide. We would be sending our last able-bodied people to their graves."
"Then we fortify!" Niran interjected, his practical nature taking over. "We use the armor plating from that skimmer to harden the eastern flank. We build higher watchtowers. We turn this flotilla into a fortress they can't crack. Let them waste their fuel trying to break against our walls."
Rupa stood in the middle of the storm, her expression torn. Anja could see the war playing out in her eyes—the burning rage demanding vengeance, clashing with the cold, hard reason that knew Hakeem and Niran were right. To attack was madness; to simply wait felt like a death sentence.
The Strategic Dilemma
"Both of you are right," Rupa said finally, her voice cutting through the argument. "And both of you are wrong."
She placed her hands flat on the table, leaning forward. "Jaya, an offensive without intelligence is suicide. We don't know where they are, how many of them there are, what weapons they have beyond what we saw in the attack. We'd be sailing blind into a slaughter."
Jaya's jaw clenched, but she didn't interrupt.
"But Niran, Hakeem—fortification alone won't save us. They've proven they can hurt us without ever showing their face. What's to stop them from deploying another agent? Something worse? Poison in our water supply? Disease? We can't build walls against an enemy that fights with invisible weapons."
She straightened, her gaze sweeping across all of them. "We need intelligence. We need to know who they are, where they are, and what they're planning next. We need to shift from reacting to anticipating."
"The data slate," Anja said quietly, holding it up. "This was with the logbook. The officer kept both together. If the logbook has their past operations, this might have their future ones. Their base location. Supply routes. Command structure. Everything."
"Might," Malik said from where he'd been standing near the back. "That's a hell of a gamble to base a strategy on, Rupa."
The Technical Challenge
"What's the state of the device?" Rupa asked, looking at the cracked slate in Anja's hands.
"The screen is damaged," Anja admitted. "But the casing is intact. It's military-grade construction—designed to survive impacts, water exposure, electromagnetic pulses. The screen is just the interface. The data storage is internal, probably shielded."
"Can we power it on?" Niran asked.
"I tried," Jaya said. "Dead. Either the battery is drained or the pulse rifle damaged the power systems."
Malik stepped forward, holding out his hand for the device. Anja gave it to him, and he turned it over with professional interest, examining the ports and seams.
"Military data slates like this have backup power," he said. "Redundant systems. Even if the main battery is dead, there's usually a capacitor bank that maintains data integrity. With the right tools, we might be able to jump-start it."
"And then what?" Hakeem asked. "Can you bypass the encryption?"
Malik's expression darkened. "No. I tried to crack a military slate once, years ago. Salvaged it from a patrol boat. Spent a week on it before I gave up. These things are designed to resist tampering. Multiple encryption layers. Biometric locks. Fail-safes that wipe the data if you trigger them wrong."
The hope that had briefly flickered in the room began to dim.
"Without the original user, without the authentication protocols..." Malik shook his head. "It's a puzzle box that's designed never to be opened."
Anja's Uncertainty
"My father worked on encrypted systems."
The words came out of Anja's mouth before she'd fully decided to speak. Every eye in the room turned to her.
"What?" Rupa asked.
Anja swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. "My father. He was a structural engineer, yes. But for the city, before the floods. He dealt with municipal infrastructure—water management, power grid, emergency services. All of it was digitally controlled, all encrypted."
She could feel their skepticism, their desperation making them want to believe but their reason holding them back.
"People tried to hack those systems constantly," she continued. "Stealing water rations. Bypassing power meters. Accessing emergency supplies. My father's job wasn't just designing systems—it was securing them. And when they failed, he had to break back into them."
"That's civilian infrastructure," Malik pointed out, not unkindly. "This is military grade. Different league entirely."
"I know," Anja admitted. "I'm not saying I definitely can break it. I'm saying... the principles might be similar. Every system has to have backdoors. Maintenance protocols. Diagnostic modes. Ways for the designers to get back in when something goes wrong."
She looked at the slate in Malik's hands. "My father used to say that the most secure systems in the world are still made by people. And people make mistakes. They leave doors unlocked. They build in overrides they think no one will find."
The Flashback
A memory surfaced, vivid and sharp.
She was twelve, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her father's cramped office in the municipal building. The smell of electronics and coffee. The hum of servers in the next room.
"Papa, why do people try to break into the water system?"
Her father looked up from his screen, his face tired but patient. "Because water is life, little bird. When resources become scarce, people become desperate. And desperate people do desperate things."
He gestured for her to come closer, showing her his screen. Lines of code scrolled past, incomprehensible to her young eyes.
"This is the security protocol. See these patterns? This is the lock. And somewhere in every lock, no matter how clever, there's a flaw. A maintenance override. A diagnostic port. A password reset function."
"Why would they build in flaws?"
"They don't think of them as flaws. They're emergency access points. Because the people who build these systems know that someday, someone will forget the password, or the system will glitch, and they'll need a way back in. They build these doors for themselves."
He pointed to a specific section of code. "This is what I'm looking for. The backdoor they don't think about. The emergency access they built for themselves but forgot to secure properly."
"Can you teach me?"
He'd smiled, that warm smile that made everything seem possible. "Of course. But first, you need to understand how systems think..."
The memory faded. Anja found herself back in Rupa's dwelling, with all eyes still on her.
The Debate
"Even if you could access it," Jaya said slowly, "how long would it take?"
"I don't know," Anja admitted. "Days, maybe. Could be weeks. Could be never. It depends on how the encryption is structured, what kind of access I can find, whether the damage is just the screen or if it's deeper."
"We don't have weeks," Hakeem said quietly. "The attack proves they're ready for Phase 3. Whatever that is, it's coming soon."
"Which is exactly why we need that intelligence," Jaya countered. "Without it, we're blind. With it, we might have a chance."
Rupa looked at Anja for a long moment, weighing something. "Anja, be honest with me. What are the real odds you can crack this?"
Anja wanted to say something confident. Something reassuring. But these people deserved the truth.
"I don't know," she said. "My father taught me techniques, showed me approaches. But I've never actually broken military encryption. I've never even tried. The honest answer is... I might fail. I probably will fail. But—" She looked at the logbook on the table, at the cold, clinical entries documenting their suffering. "—I have to try. Because if there's even a chance that slate has information that could save us, we'd be fools not to take it."
"And if you trigger a fail-safe?" Malik asked. "If you accidentally wipe the data?"
"Then we're no worse off than we are now," Anja said. "We'll know what they did to us, but not what they're planning next. We'll have to guess and hope we guess right."
A New Weapon
The room fell silent as Rupa considered. Anja could see her weighing the risks, calculating the odds, trying to balance desperate hope against harsh reality.
Finally, Rupa spoke. "Jaya, what's your assessment? You've been in military operations. You know how these slates work."
"The girl's right about one thing," Jaya said. "If we don't try, we're guaranteed to stay blind. If we try and fail, we're blind anyway. But if we try and succeed..." She paused. "We might actually have a chance to hit back."
"Hakeem?"
The physician spread his hands. "I'm a doctor, not a tactician. But we need information. If there's even a chance Anja can get it, we should let her try."
"Niran?"
The old mender looked at Anja with his shrewd, assessing eyes. "She's clever. Sees patterns. Sees the bones of things. If anyone in this community can do it, it's her."
Rupa nodded slowly, her decision settling into place. She looked at Anja, and Anja saw both hope and burden in that gaze.
"Try," Rupa commanded. "But Anja—" her tone became serious, "—don't make promises you can't keep. If you can't crack it, you can't crack it. Don't torture yourself trying the impossible. We'll find another way."
"I understand," Anja said.
"Niran, give her a workspace. Somewhere quiet, with good light, away from distractions. Malik, provide her with any tools she needs—multimeters, power supplies, whatever she asks for."
She looked around the room. "The rest of you have your assignments. Jaya, continue security preparations. Assume they'll attack again. Hakeem, focus on the wounded—we need everyone who can fight ready to fight. Niran, salvage operations continue on the skimmer. Strip it for everything useful."
Rupa picked up the logbook, handling it like the weapon it was. "I'll make copies of the relevant entries. The council needs to know what we're facing. But we keep this quiet from the general population for now. Fear is already high. We don't need panic."
She looked at each of them in turn. "This community has survived floods, starvation, and now biological warfare. We're still here. Still standing. And we're going to find whoever did this to us, and we're going to make them pay."
It wasn't a rousing speech. It was a quiet promise, deadly and certain.
"Find us a weapon in that box, Anja," Rupa said, her eyes meeting Anja's. "Find us a way to fight back."
The Weight of Responsibility
As the meeting broke up and people filed out to their various urgent tasks, Anja remained standing, the data slate heavy in her hands. The weight of it seemed to have increased, as if the expectations of the entire community had been loaded into its circuits.
Jaya paused beside her on the way out. "Don't overthink it," she said quietly. "You've already proven you can think under pressure. Trust your instincts. Trust what your father taught you."
"What if I fail?"
"Then you fail. You won't be the first person in this community who tried something difficult and came up short. But at least you'll have tried." Jaya's hand came down briefly on Anja's shoulder. "And who knows? Maybe that clever brain of yours will surprise us all."
After she left, Anja was alone with Rupa.
"You didn't have to volunteer," Rupa said.
"Yes, I did," Anja replied. "They made us a target. They used the sea itself as a weapon against us. Children got sick. People went hungry. And they sat somewhere safe, taking notes, waiting for us to be weak enough to finish off."
She looked at the slate. "If there's information in here that could help us survive, I have to try to get it. Not because I think I can, but because I can't live with myself if I don't try."
Rupa nodded slowly. "You remind me of your father. That same... fierce determination wrapped in quiet competence." She paused. "Did I ever tell you I met him? Once, years ago, at a regional council meeting about flood management. He gave a presentation on structural integrity that was so technically dense I understood maybe half of it. But what I remember is his passion. His belief that engineering could save lives."
"He saved mine," Anja said quietly. "Everything he taught me. Every skill. It's kept me and Sami alive."
"Then maybe," Rupa said, "it'll help keep all of us alive too."