Outside, the Mumbai dawn began to bleed orange over the Arabian Sea, where a submarine named Arihant silently changed its course.

Every sector from 0 to 100,000 was filled with recursive gibberish—Russian nesting dolls of junk data. A less experienced tech would have declared it unrecoverable. But Rajiv had been at Arihant for eight years. He knew that the company’s founder, the late Dr. Arihant Jain, had designed a proprietary tool for exactly this: .

He picked up the industrial degausser—a device that could scramble a drive's magnetic field into pure chaos. A white noise machine for secrets.

His blood turned to ice. The client hadn't named the project after a mythical bird. She had named it after India's nuclear-armed submarine, the INS Arihant . The drive contained the naval fleet's defensive maneuvers for the next 72 hours.