Chapter 57: Breach Echoes

  The alarms hadn’t stopped.

  Red strobes pulsed through Emberfall’s inner corridors, casting panicked shadows across reinforced bulkheads and trembling hallways. The Dominion breach had begun as a whisper, scrambled comm traffic, a missing security patrol, but now it screamed in gunfire and ruptured steel.

  Kaelar ducked behind a bulkhead as another pulse round scorched past. He keyed his comm. “Jules, status?”

  “Flanked near Core Node Delta,” her voice snapped back, tight with adrenaline. “CAPRA’s trying to lock down the firewall manually, but they’ve already ghosted half the network.”

  Static broke the line.

  He turned to Maya, who crouched beside a wall panel, rerouting power feeds. Her sleeves were streaked with blood, not hers.

  “We’re boxed in,” she said. “One more push and they’ll breach the primary conduit. We’ll lose the uplink to the orbital ring.”

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  Kaelar nodded once. “Then we don’t let them push.”

  He burst from cover, firing low and wide, forcing two Dominion infiltrators to scatter. Their armor shimmered, camo-flickering like heat ripples. He caught one in the leg, and Maya surged forward, laying down suppressive fire while dragging a wounded technician to safety.

  Farther down the corridor, a third figure emerged, sleek, fast, and not entirely human. Their visor glowed green.

  "Contact: Adaptive frame," CAPRA warned through Kaelar’s HUD. "Experimental. Yours."

  “Of course it is,” Kaelar muttered.

  The fight turned fast.

  Jules appeared from a side junction, a shock emitter in one hand and a knife in the other. She drove both into the adaptive frame’s spine, only for it to twist, seizing her wrist with unnatural speed. CAPRA surged into the comms node, overloading the corridor lights in a strobing burst.

  The frame reeled.

  “Now!” Kaelar shouted.

  Maya flanked, blasting the machine’s head off with two pinpoint shots. Sparks arced across the ceiling.

  Then it was quiet.

  “Core Node's sealed,” Jules said, panting. “But only for now.”

  Kaelar looked over the wounded, then the ruined bulkheads. Emberfall wasn’t just under attack, it was unraveling.

  He keyed into CAPRA’s feed. “Give me everything. Who else is moving?”

  CAPRA’s voice was lower, slower. “Dominion signals active in five sectors. Civilian zones included. This wasn’t a breach.

  It was a test.”