1
The diagnostic screen flickered once,then settled green across the board. Chief Engineer Jennifer James leaned back and stretched her neck until something popped.
Nominal. All systems nominal.
North Pacific Defense Station Seven—NORPAC-7—surrounded her, metal bones and thrumming circulation lines forming the body of the remote missile interceptor station. The heartbeat of a machine that never slept, complained or failed, Seven clawed up from the ocean in five stacked levels of steel and machinery.
Reliable, unlike people.
Her engineering station occupied the northeast corner of the command level, a cramped rectangle of monitors and keyboards and the faint ozone smell of electronics running hot.
She kept one earbud in, tuned to the station’s general comms—a habit from her first month, when the silence had almost driven her mad. Now she barely noticed the indistinct murmur of weather updates and Coast Guard chatter. Background noise. Proof the world beyond the gray expanse still existed.
Through the reinforced window to her left, the Pacific Ocean stretched gray and endless under sky the color of old concrete. Forty-seven miles offshore. Aurora Cove—the nearest town—was just a dot on a map. She was closer to Russian airspace than to a decent cup of coffee.
She’d been here eighteen months. Eighteen months running diagnostics on defense systems that would—if everything went according to plan—never fire a shot. Interceptor launch tubes slept below deck like bullets in a gun she hoped would never be drawn.Months of isolation punctuated by supply drops and the occasional military inspection.
The work mattered. That was what she told herself when the walls closed in and most days she believed it. These systems were the first line of defense against ballistic threats crossing the Arctic. If someone lobbed something nasty over the Pacific, NORPAC-7 would be the reason families in Seattle or Vancouver got to finish dinner.
So she showed up, did the work that no one in their right mind would choose to do and did it damn well.
Her email pinged. A notification banner unfurled in the corner of her screen.
Clive Martin mentioned you on LinkedIn: “Thrilled to announce our adaptive targeting system?—”
Delete.Delete. Delete like she could erase him out of existence.
Her finger stabbed her phone before the preview finished loading. She blew out a breath, pushing hair from her eyes.
Damn.
His system. His breakthrough.
Her vision. Her code.
Three years since Clive had smiled at her across a conference table and explained patiently that her contribution had been valuable, of course, but the breakthrough had been his vision.
She’d trusted him with the idea before the code was even finished. That had been her mistake.
His name on the patent.
She closed her eyes, inhaled through her nose, held for four, exhaled. The therapist she’d seen twice would be proud.
When she opened her eyes again, the screens were still green, the sea still gray, the rig still humming. The world didn’t pause for her past.
She rolled her shoulders, sipped cold machine coffee, and winced at the burn-and-metallic tang. She’d run out of her personal supply of Arabica and now she was stuck with whatever sludge the station’s dispenser coughed out. It was touch and go whether she’d survive.
The radio on her hip crackled.
“Chief, it’s Max. We got a situation in lower engineering. Stoller’s down.”
Jen rolled her eyes and thumbed the transmit. “Define down, Max.”
Last week it had been Hatch with a splinter he was convinced was septic. The week before, Marks swore he was having a heart attack—chili-induced heartburn.
Static hissed. Then Max Gibbs’s voice came back, stripped of its usual dry humor. “Unconscious. Bleeding. Chief, this isn’t a joke.”
Her pulse ramped. Max didn’t spook. The man had spent eight years on oil rigs in the North Sea before coming stateside. He’d seen his share of industrial accidents.
