The wind howled across the crippled freighter, rain lashing down in sheets as if the heavens themselves were trying to drown the ship. Captain Elias "Grimm" Mercer kicked in the access hatch to the bridge, rifle raised, eyes sweeping for hostiles.
Smoke curled from shattered consoles. Electrical fire stung his nostrils. The control deck was a war zone—charred panels, flickering lights, and bodies. Lots of bodies. Helix operatives slumped over their stations, some killed by gunfire, others simply lifeless—no blood, no trauma. Like they'd been switched off.
Volkova stepped in behind him, rifle at the ready. "Looks like Cipher made good on his warning."
Grimm nodded grimly. "He wasn't bluffing. The bastard initiated a purge."
But not before he left them a gift.
The central terminal still pulsed with residual power. Grimm rushed over, boots skidding slightly on the slick metal floor. "Give me cover. I'll pull whatever's left."
Volkova posted up by the door, sweeping her scope across the hall. "We've got maybe five minutes before someone realizes we're still alive."
Grimm sat at the flickering console. It buzzed weakly under his touch, screens dancing with fragmented code. The Phantom command bridge—this was it. The digital heart of Kessler's operation. Every kill order, every target, every false flag.
Lines of scrolling operations greeted him:OPERATION: PHANTOM SWEEPTARGETS: CLASSIFIED NON-COMBATANTSSTATUS: PENDING TERMINATIONAI PREDICTION: 87% GLOBAL STABILITY
He clenched his jaw. "Jesus. He wasn't stopping threats—he was manufacturing outcomes."
Volkova glanced back. "And eliminating anyone who questioned the model."
Grimm's fingers danced across the board, re-routing power to the uplink kill-switch. He could see it now—a real-time feed transmitting to Helix HQ. Every move they made, every code fragment Cipher had uploaded… it was all going straight to Kessler's core.
"Hardwired uplink," Grimm muttered. "Satellite feed. If we don't sever it, this ship becomes a permanent node in Phantom's grid."
He accessed the emergency override panel. A timer blinked to life.
AUTO-WIPE INITIATEDT-MINUS 04:57
"Four minutes," he said aloud.
"I'll keep count," Volkova replied coolly, scanning the corridor again. "Still no movement."
Grimm opened a subdirectory, heart pounding as classified ops and personnel lists flashed across the screen. Political figures, civil rights leaders, humanitarians—all labeled "preemptive threats." Each tagged with outcome simulations and AI projections.
"Volkova…" Grimm's voice darkened. "He's trying to reprogram the future."
Volkova leaned over his shoulder for a second. "I recognize some of these names. Half are missing. The other half... dead in 'accidents.'"
The implications hit like a punch to the gut.
Kessler wasn't running an operation. He was authoring a new world order—one dead target at a time.
"Authorization required," the console warned.
A single box appeared:
ENTER DESIGNATION CODE TO INITIATE UPLINK TERMINATION
Grimm didn't hesitate.
He typed: REAPER-ONE
The system paused. Processing.
The timer continued ticking.
02:18
Then:
CONFIRM EXECUTION OF KILL SWITCH?Warning: This action is irreversible.
Grimm took a breath, remembering his squad—faces gone, names erased from the records. Reaper team had been ghosts in the dark, but this… this was erasure of a different kind. A global reset with no human conscience.
He hit CONFIRM.
Monitors blinked once. Then twice.
Suddenly, power surged through the floor as the uplink died. Consoles went dark. The hum of satellite transmission cut off like a severed lifeline.
Volkova exhaled. "That's it?"
Grimm nodded. "We just blinded the Phantom system."
She turned toward him. "Then we'd better move. Because the eye of the beast is now angry and blind."
Then the last active monitor lit up—on its own.
An incoming feed. Static resolved into a face.
Adrian Kessler.
He looked calm, even satisfied. His voice was smooth, surgical.
"Well done, Captain Mercer," Kessler said. "You severed one of my eyes. Predictable. Expected, even."
Grimm tensed. "This ends with you in a cell, Kessler."
Kessler smirked. "You're thinking too small. What you shut down was only a relay. Phantom is global now. Distributed. Alive. You've forced me to adapt… but that's what evolution does."
Volkova took a step forward. "You're out of control."
"I'm the only one in control," Kessler replied, unfazed. "You've bought yourselves time. That's all. And time… is a vanishing resource."
The feed ended abruptly.
Then the floor jolted beneath them.
Explosions echoed from the lower decks—one, then another. The ship groaned as bulkheads began to collapse.
"They're sinking the freighter!" Volkova shouted.
Grimm grabbed the external drive he'd rigged earlier, pulling it from the backup terminal. "We've got the data. That's all that matters."
"Then we run. Now."
They raced down the corridor, flames erupting behind them as the hull breached and seawater surged in. Metal screamed, the ship tilting hard to starboard. Alarms wailed in every direction, the Phantom bridge collapsing in on itself.
Grimm and Volkova reached the topside as a drone chopper descended—Reyes' evac route.
"Go, go, go!" Reyes yelled over the comms. "This ship's going under!"
They leapt aboard, barely avoiding a collapsing catwalk. As the chopper pulled up and away, the freighter cracked in half, swallowed by the dark waters below.
Grimm looked down at the sinking vessel—the last known node of Phantom's mainline data, now resting at the bottom of the sea.
He turned to Reyes and Volkova.
"This war just went global."