My father’s jaw dropped. “Casey? What are you doing?” I ignored him, checking the loadout on the screen. “Wind speed 12 knots. Distance 1.4 clicks. I can make the shot.”
“Make the shot?” my dad whispered, pale as a sheet. “You hate guns. You cry when you kill a spider.” I reached into my purse. I didn’t pull out lipstick. I pulled out a Glock 19 and racked the slide. “I hate cleaning guns, General,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Shooting them is my job.” He took a step back, trembling.
“But… why? Why hide it?” “Because the Agency needed someone close enough to watch you,” I said. I turned the tablet screen toward him so he could see the surveillance photo.
“And when I saw who you were meeting in the parking garage last Tuesday, I realized my next target wasn’t a terrorist….it was you.“
Silence falls like a bomb. My father stares at the image: him, in civilian clothes, slipping an envelope to a man with a blurred-out face. The timestamp, the location—undeniable. Rickman doesn’t flinch. He’s already raising his wrist comm to alert the airbase.
My father’s voice shakes. “You think I’m a traitor?”
“I don’t think,” I say, stepping forward. “I know.”
He lunges at me, wild, desperate. The MPs restrain him instantly, twisting his arms behind his back. Still, his eyes lock with mine. There’s something in them—rage, confusion, betrayal.
“I did it for you,” he growls. “You don’t know what you’re caught up in.”
Rickman nods toward me. “Move now. We don’t have time for monologues.”
I walk out ahead of them, boots echoing on the polished floor. My heart’s hammering, but my face is a mask. I am Valkyrie now. No more coffee runs. No more quiet daughter acts. The chopper is already waiting on the tarmac, blades slicing the air in a steady rhythm. I climb in without looking back.
Rickman joins me in the seat across. The tablet is already pulling satellite feed.
“Who’s the buyer?” I ask.
“Unknown. But your father was feeding them information on Project Halberd.”
My stomach knots. “I thought that was a myth.”
“So did I,” Rickman says grimly. “Until it went live this morning in a weapons test off the coast of Okinawa. It worked. It made the ocean vanish. Just—gone.”
I stare at him. “How big?”
“Four square miles. Vaporized. Not flooded. Not displaced. Erased.”
The mission parameters scroll across the screen. This isn’t a standard kill shot. This is infiltration, recovery, and if necessary—containment. But I already know what that means. If I can’t retrieve Project Halberd, I’m authorized to destroy the entire facility. Along with everyone in it.
Rickman leans closer. “They’re using your father’s access codes to run the prototype. We believe the buyer is a former DARPA engineer—off-grid since 2012. Name: Elias Cormac.”
I’ve heard of him. Genius-level IQ, no conscience. A man who believed in solving climate change by forcing a population reduction. He doesn’t want to sell Project Halberd. He wants to use it.
“How long till insertion?” I ask.
“Seventeen minutes.”
I nod. Then I start to change.
The armor suit is sealed in a titanium case in the back of the bird. Lightweight, pressure-adaptive, custom-fitted. I strip off the blazer and blouse, revealing the carbon-weave undersuit beneath. My pistol goes into the magnetic thigh holster. Rickman hands me the ocular HUD.
“You’re sure you’re up for this?” he asks. Not as a handler. As someone who’s known me since my first kill at nineteen.
“Don’t mistake quiet for weakness,” I say.
He smiles, tight and grim. “I never have.”
The drop zone is a cliffside ledge in the Sierra Nevadas, masked by a defunct radio tower. The facility is buried beneath it—five levels down. I descend via cable, boots slamming onto the gravel just as the wind whips harder. Thunder growls in the distance. I’m not afraid. I never fear the storm. I am the storm.
Infrared pings three guards patrolling the upper entrance. I tag them with the suppressor-equipped dart gun—three phhft, three thuds. No alarms. I breach the metal door using my cloned chip from Dad’s encrypted files. It hisses open.
And hell waits inside.
The hallway is dim, flickering with backup power. Blood smears the walls. A corpse is slumped against the security console—burn marks crawling across his skin. Not a gunshot. Radiation.
I press two fingers to my earpiece. “Rickman. There’s been a breach here already.”
“We know. We lost signal from our mole ten hours ago. We think Cormac tested Halberd on the staff.”
“Casualties?”
“All but one. Dr. Lynn Kessler. She’s the lead physicist. If she’s alive, she’s your primary.”
I move faster now. Down the corridor. Through the labs. Glass shatters underfoot. Broken beakers. Notes scattered everywhere. Some pages are still burning at the edges. Someone tried to erase their work before they were taken.
My HUD pings motion down the hall. I duck and roll into cover behind a fallen metal cabinet. A beam of energy slices past—so fast I barely dodge it. It liquefies the wall behind me. Shit. That’s Halberd tech. Portable.
“Cormac’s got a prototype rifle,” I mutter. “Looks like zero-point collapse tech.”
Rickman swears in my ear. “If he’s miniaturized the core—”
“I know.”
I crawl forward. Peek around. He’s alone. Wild eyes. Beard like tangled wire. Holding something that looks like a sci-fi prop—sleek, silver, glowing softly at the edges. And Dr. Kessler is there. Bound to a chair, blood on her lip, eyes half-lidded.
I toss a flashbang around the corner.
Boom.
He screams, blinded. I rush him, elbow to throat, knee to ribs. He stumbles, drops the weapon. I slam him into the wall, cuff his hands behind his back in one smooth move. The rifle slides across the floor and hums menacingly.
Kessler gasps. “The weapon—”
“I see it,” I say, grabbing a containment shell from my pack and sliding the rifle inside. The hum dies. The air feels lighter. The world… steadier.
Cormac coughs, blood in his mouth. “You can’t stop it. It’s already begun.”
I yank him forward. “What’s begun?”
“The chain,” he wheezes. “You think this is the only site? There are seven.”
Rickman’s voice cuts in, sharp. “Casey. Abort exfil. Interrogate Cormac now. We need those locations.”
“No,” I say, my voice low. “He won’t talk to you.”
I drag Cormac into the lab’s central console. Power it up with Kessler’s badge. She groans, trying to speak.
“He set a failsafe,” she murmurs. “If he dies, the cores go active.”
I slam Cormac into the console. “Then talk. Now.”
He grins, bloody. “Ask your father.”
Something cracks in me.
I call up the internal comms.
“Patch through to General Vance.”
He appears, on-screen, in a holding cell. Still in uniform. Still trying to look like he’s in control.
“Where are the other sites?” I demand.
He stares at me. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand you sold apocalypse tech to a madman.”
“I sold it to stop worse,” he spits. “The Agency was going to use Halberd on American soil. To test it on protestors. I leaked it to Cormac to force their hand. He was never supposed to weaponize it.”
Rickman is shouting in my earpiece. “That’s a lie! We had oversight! We—”
But I know better. I’ve seen the redacted files. The simulations labeled Operation Calm Storm. He’s telling the truth. In the worst way.
“I have a choice,” I say, looking between Cormac and the screen. “Shut down the network. Or let it all burn.”
Cormac chuckles. “You won’t do it. You don’t have it in you.”
I shoot him in the leg. He screams.
“Try me again.”
His hand twitches toward the console. “The codes. I’ll give them. Just… don’t kill me.”
I take the codes. Feed them into the system. Dr. Kessler confirms: the network is locked down. All six cores are accounted for and inert. The seventh—this one—is already deactivated.
Rickman exhales in my ear. “Mission complete. Get out.”
But I linger. Because the screen still shows my father.
“I should hate you,” I say.
He nods. “You should.”
“But I don’t. Because I know why you did it. I know what they were planning.”
“Then finish it,” he says quietly. “Tell the world. Expose them.”
I look at Rickman’s blinking comm. “We clear to speak freely?”
“Not even a little.”
I shoot the camera.
By the time I reach the chopper, Kessler is stabilizing in the med bay. Cormac is unconscious, shackled, drugged. Rickman looks at me like I’m a loaded weapon.
“You’re not going to leak this,” he says.
I stare at him. “You going to stop me?”
“No. I’m going to promote you.”
I blink. “What?”
“You saved the world. That buys loyalty. And options.”
I shake my head. “What it bought me was truth.”
“Same thing,” Rickman says, as the chopper lifts off into the storm.
But I don’t agree.
Truth isn’t the same as loyalty.
It’s a fire.
And I plan to let it burn.
