Chương 460: 217.Black Cat Thieves 2

Imperial Military Perspective—Outpost AU-1206 The duty room at Outpost AU-1206 had been carrying the specific kind of quiet that settles over border postings where nothing truly significant has happened in a long time. Not peace. Just the low-efficiency comfort that everyone gets forced to learn after months of nothing real showing up.

The tactical clock on the wall ticked steadily; the cursor on the comms display jumped forward one tick at a time; the duty officers sat at their stations running through the work that looked important but was, at least nine-tenths of it, repeat-confirmation and repeat-authorization. Imperial border management was like that sometimes—vast in scale, rigid in procedure, with paperwork arriving before the enemy and responsibility landing faster than orders. Until that report came in.

When the duty comms NCO finished replaying the final segment of the recording, the entire duty room went quiet for a full three seconds. Then the first person to speak was the patrol duty chief.

"Pirates." The duty chief set his stylus down on the desk with a decisive click, tone already stamped with finality.

"Intercepting a civilian vessel, disabling engines, forcing a boarding, seizing property, leaving a calling card. If that's not piracy, what—a charitable organization?"

"I disagree." The intelligence analysis officer across the table frowned immediately.

"Pirates don't dress like that."

"Like what?"

"Like a phantom-thief prince from an opera house." She pushed the report page forward, expression carrying the specific displeasure of someone who has been personally insulted by reality.

"Furthermore, pirates don't typically require victims to recite their full team name. Nor do they generate a police report that includes an entry for a cat sound." Several junior officers in the room had to visibly work to keep their expressions neutral. Nobody laughed.

The duty chief's face had gone half-dark, and the intelligence officer was currently radiating the specific energy of someone who, if anyone laughed right now, would immediately assign them to hand-copy thirty copies of the Border Security Classification Handbook. From the far end of the briefing table, an operations planner in grey uniform slowly raised his head.

"It could still be a terrorist cell." Several people looked at him. The planner adjusted his glasses and continued in a tone of complete seriousness, as if presenting a thesis worthy of the doctrine manual.

"The objective isn't the property itself—it's to generate fear. That's clear. They didn't sink the vessel, didn't maximize casualties, and demonstrably controlled the scale of violence. That's consistent with using calibrated force for political effect. The name especially—Black Cat Thieves. It's too deliberate. Too symbolic. That's not standard border-bandit behavior." The duty chief let out a short, cold laugh.

"Do terrorist cells make cat sounds during operations?" The planner was quiet for a moment.

"... Perhaps it was a form of psychological warfare?" This time, even the records clerk had to lower her head slightly. Not to avoid reality—to avoid showing her face. The Imperial civil service had its virtues, and one of them was that even while processing a police report capable of humiliating an entire patrol network, a records officer was still expected to maintain a steady hand, tidy lettering, standard formatting, and no personal feelings bleeding into the report fields.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. From another corner of the duty room, a major handling local security liaison flipped through his materials and finally contributed.

"I think it's a local militia."

"Reason?" The duty chief was visibly impatient.

"Because the rhythm is too clean." The major pushed the incident timeline he'd assembled onto the main screen.

"They opened with a directed-paralysis beam to kill the engines, then forced the boarding, then a heavily armored point element broke the guard formation, followed by non-lethal suppression from the secondary team, then property seizure and identity declaration. That entire sequence is too organized, too efficient. Ordinary pirates don't train like that." He paused, then added:"It looks more like people with formal military training, deliberately performing as pirates."

That sentence made the air in the duty room shift slightly. More troubling than simple pirates. More troubling than simple lunatics. Because if this was a local armed group—or worse, some kind of irregular unit with military training—the classification would slide from a security incident toward military infiltration. The problem was that everything they'd actually done was far too absurd to look like any serious infiltration. Who sends an infiltration unit in phantom-thief costumes.

Who calls their armed operatives the Black Cat Thieves. Who sends elite operators to finish a mission by making a cat sound. So a fourth voice finally surfaced. From the far corner of the duty room, a young captain who had clearly been awake too long, holding a data pad, face blank, spoke without inflection.

"I think they're just a group of unhinged border eccentrics." Nobody in the duty room said anything. Several people turned to look at him at once. He probably knew the line wasn't particularly professional, but he had clearly been worn down past the point where official language felt worth the effort.

"Consider, everyone." He raised a hand, tone flat with something approaching despair.

"They didn't kill anyone. Didn't destroy the ship. No hostages, no political manifesto, no attack on a checkpoint, no weapons seizure, no life-support interference. They boarded, took the money, left a name, and made the victim file the report herself. This doesn't look like piracy escalating, and it doesn't look like terrorism. It looks like someone came here specifically to humiliate us." Nobody argued with that immediately. Because it was too accurate. Accurate enough to be undignified.

Accurate enough that the entire duty staff at Outpost AU-1206 had to briefly confront an extremely uncomfortable possibility—that the attackers' goal might not only have been the money, but to treat the Imperial patrol network like a large, slow-moving animal, throw a stone at it, and see which direction it lunged. The duty chief's face finally went fully dark.

"Enough." One word, and everyone shut up.

"Regardless of whether they're pirates, terrorists, a local armed group, or a pack of mentally unstable border eccentrics." He tapped the top of the report with his stylus.

"One thing is certain." He looked up and swept the room.

"They've already operated inside Imperial patrol territory. And they succeeded on their first try." That line was heavier than all the classification arguments before it, combined. Classifications could be argued forever. Responsibility had already landed. The records clerk asked carefully:"Then, how should we file the incident type... for now?" The duty chief was quiet for two seconds.

It was clear that even he didn't want to type the words Black Cat Thieves into a formal record, especially with the humiliating tail of details trailing behind it. But he couldn't leave it blank either—if similar cases recurred, without a unified identifier, the outpost's subsequent searches, case-linking, and tracking would fall apart. Finally, like swallowing a piece of iron, he said, low:"File it as... a high-mobility armed border-predation incident." The intelligence analysis officer frowned.

"That's too neutral."

"Then you write it." She immediately went quiet. The duty chief added one more line.

"Sub-tag: self-identified as 'Black Cat Thieves.'" A particular silence settled over the duty room again, as if everyone was privately thinking the same thing—that today, Imperial border security history had just acquired a very undignified entry. The young captain looked down at his data pad, and couldn't quite stop himself from asking, quietly.

"And... does the cat sound go in the supplemental notes?" The duty chief looked at him. No anger in the look—just the exhaustion of someone betrayed simultaneously by civilization and professional duty.

"Write it," he said, word by word.

"Leave out nothing." Nobody spoke after that. Because everyone in the room understood that from this moment on, whether they liked it or not, a name that sounded like a farce, looked like an insult, and had already successfully bitten through the patrol network's face, had officially entered AU-1206's operational system. And the more troubling thing was—nobody knew whether the Black Cat Thieves were coming back.

Nobody knew whether they'd only come for one ship, or whether they intended to ruin the entire border's night shift, one at a time.