Aurora Vermelha – The Red Dawn Conspiracy

[Bruno]

The rain had not stopped for three days. It beat against the cracked windows of the derelict warehouse in Barreiro, a forgotten relic of days past. Now the cavernous building served as a refuge for ghosts, rusted machinery, and the birth of a movement that sought to shake the nation. Inside, the light of a single bulb swayed with the draft, casting long shadows across the makeshift table in the center of the room. The men and women gathered there were not many, barely even a dozen souls, but their presence filled the silence with something heavy, dangerous. Their faces were mostly hidden: scarves, hoodies, caps pulled low. They were factory workers, students, the unemployed, fragments of society with little in common except their anger.

At the head sat the man they only knew as Silva. Nobody was certain if that was his real name. He spoke with the authority of someone who had studied revolution his whole life. A son of dockworkers, some whispered, a veteran of foreign wars, others claimed. What mattered was the conviction in his eyes, dark and unyielding. Laid carefully in front of him was a folded red flag, its edges frayed with time but its color still bright, almost defiant. The emblem of hammer, sickle, and star glowed in the dim light, a relic smuggled from some forgotten attic.

“Comrades,” Silva began, his voice steady and cold, “this democracy they worship is nothing but a cage. The workers live in misery, our youth are slaves to capital, and the ruling class celebrates in their palaces. We are here tonight because we refuse to kneel. Because we choose to act.” The group leaned in. A woman named Rosa, her hands still stained with grease from the devices she had been assembling, placed a small metal box on the table. Inside, coiled wires and a detonator gleamed faintly. “The materials are ready,” she said. “Enough to send a message across Lisbon, across the whole of Portugal. We strike once, and they will know our name. We shall shake the foundations of this false society.” Silva’s gaze fell upon the crate at his feet. Within it lay canisters and explosives, their silent menace filling the room with a tense electricity. He closed his eyes briefly, as though invoking ghosts of the past.

“Our fathers ended fascism in seventy-four. But the revolution was stolen, strangled by cowards and traitors. Now it is our duty to finish what they began. By dawn, the bourgeoisie will tremble. By dawn, Portugal will hear the voice of Aurora Vermelha.” The rain hammered the roof like a drumroll. One by one, the figures rose, fists clenched, muttering oaths of loyalty to the cause. Outside, the streets of Barreiro lay silent, unaware that in its abandoned corners, history was preparing to bleed once again.

 

[Bruno]

Marta’s eyes burned. The glow from the monitor etched tired crescents beneath them as she leaned closer, fingers moving almost unconsciously over the keys. Around her, the SIS operations floor hummed with the low, efficient noise of men and women who had learned to live on adrenaline and coffee and red dots on a map, a cascade of encrypted snippets, the soft buzz of a radio. It was the kind of place where secrets arrived as puzzles and the work was to make the pieces fit.

She had been following threads for weeks: throwaway social accounts that resurfaced with the same slogan, tiny transfers of cash that reappeared in different guises, a handful of travel stamps that seemed to orbit the same collection of names. Tonight the system had spat back something that felt like a hinge! A single decoded line that did not belong to the usual noise.

> “Tomorrow the bourgeoisie will tremble. Dawn belongs to us.”

Marta pulled up the surrounding metadata and felt the almost reflexive tug of her training. Time stamps. Waypoints. A manifest reference with a code string. The routing trail blinked across her screen: server hops through Eastern Europe, then, unexpectedly, a node that routed through Southeast Asia. An innocuous, almost apologetic name repeated in the backchannels Bangkok Logistics & Relief, and in the suppressed breath between analysts she sensed the first line of a carefully constructed illusion.

She clicked through public registries. Nothing. No tax IDs, no office address, no incorporation documents. She cross-referenced shipping manifests and port handling records. Blank. The name appeared everywhere in Aurora Vermelha’s encrypted chatter like an answer written before the question, but on the ledger of the world, the name did not exist.

Her pulse quickened. Marta opened the packet further: private messages where the group courted imaginary sympathy carefully worded queries about port access, veiled references to “relief convoys,” requests phrased to be intercepted and seen. It read less like coordination and more like auditioning: a script meant to persuade observers that there were hands beyond Portugal willing to help. The financial traces were small micropayments through obscure processors that funneled into shell accounts. A passport alias showed a stop in Bangkok on a convoluted route weeks before. None of it amounted to a neat typewritten confession. It amounted to a pattern: a group trying to build the impression of international support by any means necessary.

She pushed back her chair and carried the printouts briskly to Major Ricardo Esteves. He read them in silence, thumbs tapping his lip, eyes narrowing as the rain dragged down the glass outside.

“So they didn’t secure a partner,” he said at last. “They invented one.”

“Exactly,” Marta replied. “Bangkok Logistics & Relief is a fabrication on paper it’s charity; in their channels it’s a conduit. They’re broadcasting the existence of that conduit because a phantom lends legitimacy. They want the idea of Thai involvement to circulate. It’s recruitment theater. It’s propaganda.”

Ricardo’s jaw hardened. “That makes them more dangerous. The lie functions whether or not anyone answers. If people here believe a foreign line exists, they’ll act like it does. It inflates their credibility and their punch.”

She drew his attention to the micro-transfers. “Small sums, routed through Thai payment nodes. Not big enough to be state-sponsored, but sufficient to pay a fixer or buy forged documents. And look this alias traveled Bangkok–Istanbul–Lisbon two weeks ago. Not proof of complicity, but a breadcrumb. They are trying to stitch an international seam out of scraps.”

Ricardo inhaled slowly. “We can’t name a country. We can’t light a fuse under a diplomatic incident without proof. But we also can’t ignore the illusion. We treat Bangkok as a lead nothing more. We move tactically on the warehouse tonight and quietly follow the paper trail. No public mention of Southeast Asia. No speculation.”

Marta felt the familiar, heavy responsibility settle over her shoulders. Intelligence was not heroism; it was patience and restraint and the slow, surgical work of separating rumor from reality. Still, the image of the phantom NGO lingered like a smear on her screen: a hollow name conjured to magnify a small, violent intent. If the SIS could clip this fabrication at its root raid the warehouse, trace the tiny payments, find the men in Barreiro before they could claim the dawn the myth could be killed before it bred believers.

She closed the file. Outside, Lisbon breathed on, unaware. Inside, Marta keyed the encrypted channel to operations: warrants approved, strike teams dispatched, a diplomatic cable drafted for the Foreign Ministry careful, discreet, asking for verification through quiet channels. The plan was surgical: cut the local cell down, then follow the fabricated trail back through the shadow accounts and false documents until the lie had nowhere to hide.

 

[Bruno]

The vans cut through the mist like black fish, headlights low, engines muffled. Barreiro’s docks lay empty and obedient under a sky the colour of old metal. Major Ricardo Esteves sat rigid in the lead vehicle, comms humming at his ear. He had rehearsed this night for months in briefing rooms and simulations: the SIS packet on his chest, the order to act, the knowledge that a single mistake could cost lives.

They moved with the kind of quiet that practiced fearlessness breeds. Teams fanned out along the warehouse’s perimeter, boots whispering on wet concrete. When the front door went in, it was not subtle, flashbangs detonated in synchronized blasts. Shouts rang out: “Polícia! Ao chão! Mãos onde eu possa ver!” Men and women fell, hands bound, faces pressed against cold concrete. Within minutes the space was subdued, the chaos replaced by the low-step discipline of a successful raid.

Ricardo entered with two shield-bearers, scanning. The central table was a map-strewn altar filled with photocopies of port plans, scrawled notes, and a laptop still ablaze with encrypted chatter. Canisters lay tumbling in one corner, wires coiled like sleeping serpents, components for devices set out with the grim neatness of hostile craft. At first glance it looked as the SIS had feared... a cell readying for violent theatre.

Then Marta moved closer, frowning. Her hand brushed a sheet pinned under a weight of ink. It was a map of Lisbon annotated in feverish red: nine crosses, each numbered, each with a shorthand names of neighborhoods, railway junctions, and a single, chilling word next to each: detonate. Her breath stopped. She counted the Xs again as if the act of counting could unmake them. It didnt.

“Nine,” she said. “There are nine locations marked. Not one. Nine. Fuck.”

Ricardo felt something cold run down his spine. The room’s noise blurred at the edges as the meaning of that map settled in everyone’s minds. This raid had been meant to stop a single spectacular act, instead it uncovered a network primed to carve the city into nine wounds.

The operatives hustled the detainees toward the vans. Among them were the familiar faces of grievance..a gaunt youth with feverish eyes, a factory-hand who seemed knocked loose from his own life, a woman whose hands trembled as they were cuffed. None of them fit the profile of a master tactician. They had the hunger of the dispossessed, not the cool calculation of a ring leader.

Ricardo’s boot struck something beneath the table. He crouched to find the crate supposed to be the largest of the devices, gone. Empty pallets, an upturned shipping label. The largest explosive, the thing that had justified the urgency of the raid, had vanished.

Marta’s phone vibrated. A tech voice cut through their stunned silence. “Major, laptop packet trace. There’s a message—short-lived, sent two minutes before we breached. From a local node. It says: ‘Lead moved. Proceed as planned. Dawn remains.’ Then the packet rerouted through seven proxies and evaporated. No further hops.” The analyst’s voice sounded small over the comms.

Ricardo slammed a fist on the table. “Where’s Silva?!” he barked. The name that had been whispered in files for weeks, the man who spoke with the old fire of rhetoric and had been assumed to be the group’s mind. They had expected him to be here, to be the one to be sensible or to rage. He was nowhere.

“Not here,” Marta said. “No sign. We have five detainees, cell members, but not the ringleader. And the main kit is missing.”

An operative pulled a small paper from a jacket pocket. It was hastily folded, ink smeared by rain. “Found this on the table. It’s a scrap, directions, nothing concrete Sir. A single line repeated: ‘Trust the dawn. We carry the day.’” The operative’s tone carried a helpless anger.

Ricardo’s mind ran through possibilities and ruled out the mundane. Either Silva had slipped away in the confusion an inside job timed with their movement or the group had a contingency: a mobile cache, a courier, a shadow cell with capabilities they had not yet traced. Worse, someone outside Portugal might have answered their solicitations and provided a pathway to transport the main device out of the warehouse in a timeframe the raid could not have stopped.

Marta’s eyes stung. She looked at the open cell laptop’s screen again. One chat window remained open, frozen mid-line, the last line from a contact in a foreign vernacular she didn’t immediately recognize. Her fingers worked the keys until the techs brought forward the packet header: the hops that had led, briefly, to a Southeast Asian node. Not proof, but a thread. The phantom NGO name they had found in chatter days before had been invoked again here on paper—Bangkok Logistics & Relief—scrawled in a margin as if to bless the plan.

Ricardo felt the mood in the room shift from triumph to raw, taut anxiety. “We’ve disrupted part of their cell,” he said. “We’ve captured operators, we’ve seized equipment—but we’ve also let the lead escape, and the main device is gone. We cannot treat this as a containment. This is an escalation!!”

He radioed through the chain of command. Alerts were issued: checkpoints at ferry terminals, random searches at train depots, security lifts at government buildings and critical infrastructure. The Minister would need to be briefed immediately this was no longer a local disruption but a city-level emergency.

As the detainees were loaded, one of the young men with blood streaked on his forehead barked a laugh that had lost the shape of pride. “You think you stopped us?” he spat. “We’re already at work. Nine points. You’ll see. The dawn is not your mercy. It’s our promise.” One officer barked in return, anger within his eyes "Fuck you and your dawn".

But the words slithered into every officer’s ear and refused to leave. Marta felt their weight, and with it a personal responsibility that felt almost animal. She had lifted the first corner of the conspirators’ veil; behind it lay more shadow than she expected. Silva had vanished, the big crate was gone, and nine sites across Lisbon glinted like teeth under the city’s skin.

When the convoy returned to Lisbon, the SIS operations room did not breathe easy. Screens bloomed with feeds from CCTV, traffic cameras, and live police units. The Minister’s secure line flicked to life. “We stopped them?” he asked, voice steady but thin.

“For now,” Ricardo answered. “But not really. We pulled at a nest and found the hole it clung to. We have five in custody, a laptop with a breadcrumb to Southeast Asia, and a map with nine targets. We need to assume Silva remains at large, and that the missing device is en route or hidden. We move fast, we close the nets.”

Marta watched the map with the nine red Xs as if expecting them to rearrange. The city outside woke in pale light, unaware that it carried nine sleeping things within it. The raid had been a success on paper, a failure in the ways that mattered. The twist Silva’s disappearance and the missing bomb had turned a contained story into a corridor of possibilities, any one of them lethal.

Night had ended, but the dawn the conspirators promised still hung like a threat.