The extraction began at 0300 hours, the deadest part of the night when the world was shrouded in a thick, freezing fog that rolled off the Northern coast. The aftermath of the fortress was a blur of fire and ice, but there was no time for reflection. The true war was just beginning.
They didn't take a convoy or a security detail. They took a single, blacked-out stealth VTOL craft, its carbon-fiber hull invisible to the Federation's aging radar arrays. Caspian sat in the pilot's seat, his hands steady on the controls, while Linnea occupied the co-pilot's chair, her face bathed in the amber glow of the tactical displays. Their target was a decommissioned shipyard on the Northern coast, a graveyard of rusted iron and broken dreams. It was a place where the salt air rotted the steel of old tankers—and apparently, the morals of the men who hid within them.
"Thermal vision on," Linnea commanded over the comms, her fingers flying across the tactical tablet secured to her thigh. The screen showed the shipyard in shades of ghostly green and neon orange. "I've bypassed their exterior sensors using a back-door code I found in my father's old files. We have a four-minute window before the central hub realizes the perimeter camera feed is on a digital loop. After that, the hive will wake up."
"Drop in sixty seconds," Caspian replied, his voice calm and clinical. He brought the craft into a low hover, the engines whispering as they fought the coastal winds.
They fast-roped from the belly of the craft, two shadows descending into the mist. As soon as Linnea's boots hit the rusted metal of the dock, she was in motion. She was no longer the "pretty wife" or even just "The Ghost"—she was a woman seeking justice.
The shipyard was a maze of shipping containers and hollowed-out hulls, but Linnea navigated it as if she had the blueprints burned into her retinas. They moved through the warehouse like a two-headed predator. Caspian provided the overwhelming force, his rifle clearing the corridors with devastating accuracy, while Linnea provided the surgical precision. She hacked door locks mid-stride and used sonic emitters to disorient guards before they could even raise their weapons.
Every guard they encountered was neutralized before they could trigger an alarm—Caspian's strikes were heavy and final, while Linnea's were silent and swift. They were a symphony of violence, moving in perfect synchronization, their trust forged in the fires of the previous night.
They reached the central command hub—a glass-walled office perched atop a crane-control tower, overlooking the dry docks. Inside, servers hummed with the stolen data of the Federation. The blue light of the monitors reflected off the cold sweat on Linnea's brow.
Linnea slammed her palm against the console, her eyes scanning the data streams. She felt a surge of triumph, then a cold, hollow pit opened in her stomach.
"He's not here," Linnea whispered, her voice echoing in the empty room. "The logs show he left an hour ago. He knew we were coming."
"How?" Caspian asked, his rifle raised as he scanned the empty room. "This was an off-grid op. Only three people knew the coordinates."
Linnea's blood ran cold. She looked at the terminal's access logs. There was a remote ping—an unauthorized mirror-link that had been active for the last twenty minutes. It wasn't an external hack. It was an internal feed, originating from a device they carried with them.
She stared at the encryption signature, a pattern of code she had seen every day since she arrived at the Vane Estate. It wasn't an Eastern Bloc signal. It was a localized, high-level encryption—one used by the man who had been at their side through every trial.
The silence in the room became suffocating. The realization was a blade in the dark, cutting through the last of their illusions. Caspian stepped closer to the screen, his face hardening into a mask of stone as he read the metadata.
"The link," Caspian growled, his voice dropping to a terrifying, hollow tone. "It's coming from the estate's primary strategist."
Linnea looked at Caspian, the weight of the betrayal hitting her like a physical blow. Their closest ally, the man who had dismantle lies for a living, had built the biggest one of all.
"He's been watching us the whole time," Linnea said, her voice trembling with a mixture of rage and grief. "Every step, every move. He didn't just want to find Elias. He wanted to see how we would react."
Caspian turned toward the window, looking out over the dark, fog-shrouded shipyard. "Julian. He's not just a mole. He's the architect of the fallout."
The hunt had shifted. The enemy wasn't across the border anymore—he was the one who had cleared their path.