Incorporated with DeepSeek
The silent defense of a sanctuary worth a story worth telling from the overwatch.
***
### The Carambolage Sanction
The threat arrived at the Lite Noctem dressed in the cheap, sharp suits of ex-Knight Errant security. They were four, led by a man with a jaw that seemed to be in a permanent state of clenching, his cybernetic eyes scanning the place not with appreciation, but with appraisal. They called themselves "The Janitors." Their intent, hidden beneath bluster about "providing real security," was a cancer: to turn the Noctem's calm into a front for their novacoke and bliss operation.
They didn't know they were already in a cage, watched by two separate sets of eyes that had never met.
**The Founder's Watch: The Pattern in the Game**
In a nondescript safehouse in Lisbon, the Founder watched the top-down feed of his Carambolage table. His fingers, gnarled and steady, made a soft *clonck* as he sent his ball gliding across the green felt. On a secondary monitor, the Lite Noctem's security AI, a silent sibling to Aegea named "Janus," painted a different kind of game board.
Janus didn't track weapons; it tracked micro-expressions, pheromonal residuals, and conversational patterns. The Janitors had failed the moment they walked in.
* **Target Alpha (Jaw):** Janus highlighted him. Stress biomarkers spiked when he looked at the student "Cocooners"—contempt, not curiosity. His retinal movements mapped exit routes and blind spots, a tactical sweep, not a guest's exploration.
* **Target Beta (Weasel):** The talker. He lingered too long at the bar, trying to charm the staff, his speech pattern analysis revealing high deception probability. He was probing for weaknesses, for griftable employees.
* **Targets Gamma & Delta (The Muscles):** They stood with the relaxed tension of professional muscle, their subdermal armor creating slight anomalies in the background EM field Janus used for ambient sensing.
The Founder didn't flinch. He made another move on the Carambolage table. To his crew watching the same feed, he said only, "The board is contaminated. Initiate sterilization protocol. Non-lethal, architectural preferred." His plan was one of containment and psychological warfare. Janus would begin subtly altering the environment: locking interior doors they tried to access, turning up the climate control to an uncomfortable degree in their vicinity, flooding their preferred booth with a subliminal frequency that induced mild anxiety and paranoia. He would make the Noctem itself reject them.
**Smith's Recon: The Ghost in the Machine**
Smith saw it too, from his usual shadowed booth. He didn't need an AI to tell him what these men were. He smelled the cheap synth-leather and violence on them. While his teammate, "Valkyrie," used a stealth drone no bigger than a moth to plant audio pickups on their jackets, Smith accessed a different system.
He bypassed Aegea's polite firewalls and tapped into the raw sensor data from the Noctem's greenhouse—the moisture sensors, spectral light analyzers, and nutrient flow monitors. This data, when cross-referenced and parsed by his deck, created a ghostly ultrasound image of the space. He could *see* the Janitors as thermal blooms and sonar echoes, their movements tracked through the leaves.
"Amateurs," Valkyrie's voice was a subvocal murmur in his implant. "They're scanning for hardlines. They think this is a simple smash-and-grab."
"Not amateurs," Smith corrected quietly, watching the sonar-echo of Jaw's head swivel. "Just corporate thugs. Used to overt intimidation. They don't understand the ecosystem they're in."
Smith's plan was one of surgical removal. His team—Valkyrie, Wraith, and their rigger, "Rotor"—would wait for the Janitors to leave. They would be intercepted en route to their flop house. A quiet, off-site disappearance. No mess, no connection to the Noctem.
**The Convergence**
For three nights, the parallel operations ran. The Janitors grew increasingly frustrated. Doors wouldn't open for them. Their drinks always seemed to arrive lukewarm. The music in their booth would flicker, injecting random seconds of white noise. They were being gaslit by a building.
On the fourth night, Jaw snapped. He cornered a young decker in a restroom cluster, his hand on the kid's shoulder, his voice a low growl about "new management." It was the final move.
In Lisbon, the Founder saw the altercation flagged by Janus. He placed his final Carambolage piece with a definitive *click*. "The contamination is active. Shift to active neutralization. Contain the incident."
In his booth, Smith saw the same thing through his greenhouse sonar. The thermal bloom of Jaw's aggression was unmistakable. "They've declared themselves," he murmured. "We move tonight. On-site. Quietly."
The plans were set. The Founder's crew would use the Noctem's architecture. Smith's crew would use the shadows between them.
**The Sterilization**
The Janitors left late, buzzing with a volatile mix of anger and cheap soykaf. As they stepped into the chaotic, shadowy "outside" of the stacked containers where their rusty Americar was parked, the environment itself turned against them.
A series of industrial maglocks, normally silent, engaged with a sound like cracking bones. The main entrance sealed shut. The exterior lights died, plunging the scrapyard canyon into deep darkness, pierced only by the faint glow of the greenhouse and the distant sprawl lights.
"What the frag?" Jaw barked, reaching for his predator.
He never cleared his holster.
From the high ground, between two stacked 40-foot units, Wraith fired a single stick-n-shock round. It hit the car's roof, and the capacitor discharge bloomed outwards. The two Muscles convulsed and dropped, systems crashing.
Before Jaw and Weasel could react, the shadows *moved*. Valkyrie was there, a silhouette against the green glow. Her hand, reinforced with myomer, chopped down on Weasel's neck. A clean, silent takedown.
Jaw turned, his cybereyes struggling to adjust, and saw Smith.
There were no words. Smith moved in, a blur of efficient motion. A disarm, a joint lock that cracked like a twig, a final, precise strike to the vagus nerve. Jaw collapsed, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Above, the Founder watched through a security feed Janus had isolated. He saw the shadows move, neutralize, and disappear. He had never seen these defenders, but he recognized their work. It was clean. Professional. It respected the sanctuary.
Within ninety seconds, it was over. Rotor's van, silent as a ghost, pulled into the alley. The four bodies were loaded. The van disappeared. Wraith collected the spent stick-n-shock round. Valkyrie used a aerosol neutralizer to erase any residual pheromonal signature.
The maglocks disengaged. The lights flickered back on. The soft hum of the Noctem returned, uninterrupted.
Inside, a Cocooner looked up from her text. "Did the lights just flicker?"
Her friend shrugged. "Probably just the grid."
The next night, the Lite Noctem was as calm as ever. The playlists curated, the tea steamed, the conversations murmured. Sophia Harold sat in her nest, researching datahaven obituaries, unaware that the very silence she cherished had been professionally, and permanently, defended. The message was left not in words, but in absence. The Janitors were simply gone, a secret buried deep in the shadows, known only to a Founder in Lisbon and a ghost named Smith, two players in a game whose board was the entire Sprawl.
