Chapter 109: Operation Aurora

While Ethan planned OmniTech Corp’s next step, Sentinel was busy taking the cyber world by storm just a day after its launch.It’s fame had somehow reached overseas in just one day and it had made a couple of black hat hackers hesitant.

One particular group of black hats currently sat around a table sharing skewers and a round of Yanjing1 at a roadside BBQ stall.

"Lǎobǎn, zài lái jǐ píng Yānjīng!" a man with close-cropped hair called out, raising his empty bottle toward the vendor. [Translation: Boss, bring a few more bottles of Yanjing.]

The stall owner gave a curt nod, before disappearing toward the cooler. The smoky scent of cumin and grilled lamb wafted in the air as the group clinked bottles together.

"They’re calling it Sentinel," another from the group of five muttered, picking at a skewer of chuan’r.

His thin-rimmed glasses reflecting the light above their table. "Even Google rolled it out overnight. I’ve never seen them move this fast."

"Tch," the man with cropped hair snorted, tearing into his meat. "Hype. Just another American trick. Code is code. Everything has holes."

A woman with dyed auburn hair, her nails tapping idly against the beer bottle, smirked. "Tell that to the crews who already tried probing it and came back empty-handed. Some of them pulled out completely after one day."

The table fell silent for a moment, save for the hiss of skewers grilling behind them.

Finally, their leader—a broad-shouldered man with grey hairs here and there in his head, known among them as "Elder Wood"—leaned forward. His voice was low, steady.

"We have our orders. Sentinel or not, we don’t hesitate. The client is paying us fifteen million. Hack, copy, sabotage. No excuses."

The man with glasses swallowed hard and nodded. Still, unease lingered in his eyes.

"I think we should reconsider this job," another man, who didn’t quite look Asian spoke up, "we’ve been crawling in their systems for a while now and we’ve gotten more than enough data, we should just present that to the client and pull back before it’s too late."

Soon after his words, the vendor came back with a crate of sweating bottles and set them down with a practiced thud. Someone cracked one open; causing it to let out a loud fizz.

Elder Wood eased back into his stool and let the noise fill the space for a beat. He watched the others—Lin, the close-cropped man who liked to talk big; the bespectacled man whose hands trembled whenever a new exploit failed; Mei, the auburn-haired woman who rarely smiled; and the pale guy who’d suggested folding up the work and walking away.

"Listen," Elder Wood said finally, voice low enough that only the table could hear. "This isn’t personal. Reputation is reputation. We take the money, complete the job and disappear, with zero fireworks."

Lin snorted into his beer. "Reputation? If we get caught, reputation would be the last thing we would be worrying about."

"We’ve completed impossible seeming jobs before," Mei cut in, "so why would this one be any different?"

"All we need is a connection to their systems and boom, we will be in, we’ll enter so quietly that Sentinel won’t even have a chance to realize we’re there.

The bespectacled man—Zhou, if you wanted a name—looked at Mei like she’d found a coin in the gutter. "You’ve got optimism," he said. "Or stupidity."

"The hell, old man?" Mei frowned at him, "say that to my face one more time."

"You might just be stupid after all," Zhou repeated with a smirk on his face, before almost getting a bottle to the face.

Luckily, he dodged fast enough and before the second could come, their leader, Elder wood cut in, "that’s enough."

Mei put down the second bottle in her hand as she went back to drinking and tearing through the meat.

The pale man—Aleks— on the other hand took a long drag from his bottle as the watched the banter, they might be like this now, but they were one of the most feared black hats in the world, responsible for many company hacks.

They had been recently approached by an anonymous figure with a job.

And the job?

Hacking one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Google, alongside a couple others more.

Their main job was to copy everything from their systems, important or not. What the employer wanted to do with such data was anyone’s guess.

The first ten million had already hit their offshore wallet. The rest would be released only after they had delivered the data and files they were tasked to copy..

Aleks swirled the last of his beer in the bottle before setting it down, the bottle letting me out a clink. "Anonymous figure, anonymous pay. Doesn’t it bother you we don’t know who the hell we’re really working for?"

Lin tore at another skewer, grease dripping onto the paper plate beneath it. "Who cares? We’ve done ghost jobs before. Money spends the same no matter whose hands it comes from."

"But that was when we weren’t going against a giant that possibly had software that was capable of exposing them before we even enter their systems." Aleks countered.

Elder Wood’s chopsticks paused midair before he set them down with deliberate calm and raising his eyes to meet Alek’s.

"You’re usually the excited one when we get dangerous missions," Elder wood started, "no matter how low our chances of success wouldn’t be, you were always excited for a good hack, so what’s different this time?"

"Why do you seem.....scared of this job?" The leader finished, his eyes still locked on Aleks opposite him.

There was a moment of silence on the table before Aleks sighed and started, "I spent the whole night doing a bit of research after you briefed us about the job."

"And by research, you mean—" Lin started before Aleks completed, "I’ve been probing sentinel."

"I did so through the smaller companies that were able to get hands on a watered down version of the software," he continued, "I figured, since it was probably all being hosted on the same server, a big in one would affect the main one."

He paused and looked at his team that were currently looking at him as he spoke, "but even this ’watered down’ version was a pain in the ass."

"No matter what I tried, the software just adapted to it," he added, "It felt like... it was alive. Learning me as much as I was trying to learn it."

The table went silent again, the hiss and crackle of grilling skewers filling the space between them. Even Lin stopped chewing.

"Alive? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just code." Zhou said as he nervously adjusted his glasses.

Aleks shook his head slowly. "Code doesn’t counter exploits in real-time. Code doesn’t predict your next step before you make it. Whatever this Sentinel is, it’s not just another piece of American software. It’s something else."

Mei scoffed, though her smirk didn’t quite reach her eyes. "So you’re saying what? A ghost in the machine?"

Aleks leaned forward, voice tightening. "I’m saying it’s like fighting another hacker. Except faster. Smarter. And impossible to tire out. If this thing’s guarding Google’s systems, then we’re not up against firewalls or intrusion detection—we’re up against something that thinks."

Elder Wood drummed his fingers against the table, face unreadable. His broad frame cast shadows across the skewers and beer bottles. Finally, he spoke, calm but firm.

"And yet the job remains, we can’t reject it after we’ve already accepted a part of the payment. We hack, we copy and we sabotage. Fear doesn’t change the payday."

Aleks let out a humorless laugh and leaned back, draining the last of his beer.

"You think fear is the problem? No. I’m saying this job isn’t just risky. It’s suicide. The Americans finally built a sword sharper than any lockpick we’ve got. And we’re about to walk right into it."

The others exchanged uneasy glances, the confidence they’d clung to now trembling at the edges.

But Elder Wood only gave a thin smile. "Then let’s see if we’re sharp enough to cut back."

He raised his bottle, waiting. Reluctantly, the others clinked theirs against his.

"We shall name this, Operation Aurora." Elder wood declared as they all took a drink.

All of them except Aleks.

His gut was telling him that they were in for an epic fail and he trusted it, hence the reason he tried probing into sentinel in the first place and also the reason he brought up the idea of dropping the mission in the first place.

But he guessed that apart from the him, none of the other felt that they were in for a failure.

Or maybe they felt it, but they were too blinded by greed to actually let go of the job.

With a sigh, he moved a newly opened beer bottle to his lips.

’Let’s just hope my instincts are wrong, just this once.’ he thought as he took a drink.

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