Chapter 14 - BLOOD IN THE ARCHIVES
The revelation hit the warehouse like a shockwave.
"Senator Sterling," Samir breathed, his voice hollow. "Sterling was the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense during Vega."
"Sterling didn't just authorize it," Cross said, descending the metal stairs with slow, painful steps. "He designed it. Project Cerberus was a multi-billion-dollar initiative to test autonomous drone swarm warfare in active theater. But they needed an unpredictable combat environment—a live-fire test without civilian or press oversight. Your outpost was selected because it was isolated. They turned off your comms to see if your unit could survive against an overwhelming force while Prometheus tested their experimental perimeter defense systems."
"They used us as lab rats," Rebecca said, a cold, deadly clarity settling over her mind. Every sleepless night, every comrade she had buried, every scream that had echoed over the dead radio—it hadn't been an operational failure. It had been an unsanctioned military experiment run by corrupt politicians and funded by her own father's fortune.
Suddenly, the red emergency lights of the warehouse flickered and died, plunging the cavernous building into pitch blackness.
"Contact!" Samir roared, instantly dropping behind a steel generator.
The glass skylights above shattered in a deafening cascade of shards as three flashbang grenades dropped through the ceiling. The concussive blasts ripped through the air with the force of thunderclaps, blinding white light searing the shadows.
Rebecca rolled behind a forklift, her night-vision optic automatically filtering the glare. Through the haze of burning cordite, she spotted four tactical operators rappelling down high-tensile ropes, silenced submachine guns already coughing streams of lead into the catwalk where Cross had been standing seconds before.
"Extract Cross!" Rebecca commanded over her comms, drawing her weapon and firing two double-taps into the nearest operator. The rounds struck the contractor’s ceramic chest plate, knocking him backward off the rope to crash violently onto the concrete floor.
Cross scrambled behind a pile of iron pipes, clutching a worn leather ledger to his chest. "They aren't taking me alive, Captain! They came to clean the board!"
"Nobody dies tonight except the people who came to kill us," Rebecca snarled.
She moved like a phantom through the familiar terrain of industrial machinery. This was the environment where she had earned her name. In the pitch-black warehouse, she was invisible. She flanked the second contractor, her combat knife severing the sling of his rifle before driving the heel of her boot into his knee joint with an audible crunch. He went down with a muffled shriek, and Rebecca used his falling momentum to strip his sidearm, turning and firing three precise rounds into the muzzle-flash of the third attacker forty feet away.
The fourth operator realized the ambush had inverted. The hunter had become the prey. He backed toward the shattered loading door, his weapon raised, sweeping the darkness frantically.
A cold steel barrel pressed against the nape of his neck.
"Drop it," Rebecca’s voice was a whisper behind his ear, colder than the grave. "Or find out how fast a 9mm round travels through a Kevlar collar."
The operator froze. His fingers slowly released the rifle, letting it clatter to the concrete. "You don't know what you're interfering with, Vance. This goes all the way to the West Wing."
"I don't care if it goes to God," Rebecca said coldly, striking him with the butt of her pistol, knocking him unconscious to the floor.
She turned to Samir and Cross. "Cross, where is the physical hard drive with the telemetry data?"
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Cross wiped blood from his forehead, holding up the leather ledger. "It’s not on a drive. Sterling knew drives could be hacked. It’s stored on microfiche in the Decommissioned Naval Intelligence Archives in the basement of the Old Post Office Pavilion. And the only person with access to that vault... is your brother, Grant."
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