The job was simple in description: infiltrate the orbital judiciary's archive, delete a warrant. Impossible in practice: the archive was air-gapped, guarded by Gen-9 AI sentinels, and buried inside a hollowed-out asteroid. But Kaelen didn't need to go there. He just needed to make the archive think he was there.

Kaelen didn't mind it. The static of the rain helped him think. And right now, he needed to think clearly.

Kaelen loaded a single exploit—a piece of code he'd written over six months, disguised as a routine patch for "floor waxing optimization." He named the file wax_on.wax_off.z3x .

The final step. He couldn't hack the archive directly, but he could hack the janitorial drone that serviced the archive. Drones had a backdoor for firmware updates. And the Z3X could pretend to be the update server.

The rain kept falling. And somewhere above, a janitorial drone stopped cleaning floors and started looking for a file named warrant_7492-K.pdf .