"They liquidated our assets," Graves said, his voice trembling slightly. "Massacre every test subject. And look."

  On the screen, the figures were moving equipment. Expensive machinery vanished into thin air as they touched it.

  "Where is it going?" Edgar asked.

  "Unknown," Graves said. "It... it just disappears. Spatial pocket? Teleportation cache? We don't know. But they stripped the lab bare."

  The video ended with the thermal bloom of the thermite charge, washing out the screen in white.

  Edgar turned away from the screen, walking slowly to the window that looked out over the dark city. He clasped his hands behind his back.

  "General Raddock," Edgar said, the name tasting like ash. "A man who has publicly decried the use of Supes in the military for years. A man who lobbies for traditional kinetic warfare."

  "It appears his public stance was... a diversion," Graves suggested.

  "It appears so," Edgar agreed.

  He turned back to the screen, looking at the five faces of the soldiers.

  "Look at them, Graves," Edgar said, his voice carrying a strange note.

  "Sir?"

  "Look at how they move," Edgar said, gesturing to the frozen image of the team breaching the gate.

  He pointed to Sergeant Miller. "A brute who opens doors, not a hero who poses for photos."

  He pointed to Corporal Banks. "A transport system, not a celebrity."

  He pointed to Lieutenant Kovacs. "A weapon of mass destruction who follows orders."

  "This lineup," Edgar said, his eyes gleaming in the blue light. "It is... better than The Seven."

  Graves stayed silent, knowing better than to interrupt.

  "The Seven," Edgar continued, his voice dripping with disdain, "are children, drug addicts and narcissists.

  Homelander is a mood swing away from lasering a city block. A-Train is a junkie. Deep is an idiot. They are products, yes, but they are defective products. They require constant management and constant cleanup."

  He looked at the five soldiers on the screen.

  "But these men... these are soldiers. And their powers compliment each other perfectly. The telepath neutralizes the threat, the cryokinetic alters the battlefield, the teleporter provides mobility, the brute provides force and the shrinker provides infiltration. It is a perfect tactical unit. A combined arms approach to superhuman warfare."

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  "They wiped out a black site in ten minutes," Graves whispered. "Without a single casualty."

  "Exactly," Edgar said. "This is what I have been trying to sell to the Pentagon for decades. And it seems... General Raddock has beaten me to it."

  Edgar walked back to the desk and sat down. The admiration faded into the cold calculus of business.

  "How?" Edgar asked.

  "Sir?"

  "How do five active duty soldiers in the United States Army possess such stable superhuman abilities?" Edgar asked.

  Graves tapped a command into his tablet, bringing up a secondary window on the main monitor. "Our technicians just completed a forced entry into the Department of Defense’s classified personnel archives. Look at these files, sir. These are the team’s medical records from their last deployment. Six months ago, Sergeant Miller and his men were baseline humans. They must have been injected with Compound V very recently."

  "Obviously," Edgar snapped. "But Compound V is not something you brew in a bathtub, Graves. It is the most complex chemical formula on Earth. It kills adults more often than it empowers them. To create a team like this, five successes in a row with stable powers... that requires the refined formula. The stabilized version we were developing at Sage Grove."

  "But there is a clear progression in their capabilities, sir," Graves noted, tapping a finger against the tablet to highlight the chronological data. "The violence we witnessed at the Supe Party and the signatures left at Sage Grove were consistent with high output physical force, telepathic suppression and extreme cryokinetic energy. Our leading hypothesis is that they developed an slightly less refined version of the serum through an initial leak, allowing them to field their primary hitters. However, once they successfully hit Sage Grove and secured Cardosa’s stabilized formula along with the complete research data, they clearly perfected the integration. That is how they managed to manifest the shrinking and teleportation capabilities we witnessed tonight."

  "Correct," Edgar said.

  The room fell into a heavy silence.

  Edgar looked at his hands. "Vought International is the sole manufacturer of Compound V. We control the supply chain from the raw materials to the final vial. And there is one strategic ingredient… that is found in only one place in the world. A mine that we own. A refinement process that we patented."

  He looked up at Graves, his eyes cold as liquid nitrogen.

  "No one else can make V, Graves. It is physically impossible. You cannot reverse engineer the catalyst without the source."

  "So..." Graves swallowed hard. "So they didn't make it."

  "No," Edgar said. "They didn't."

  "They acquired it," Graves finished. "From us."

  "We have a leak," Edgar stated. "A leak at the highest level of this company. Someone has been siphoning the stabilized V. Someone has been supplying General Raddock and his shadow program. Someone has handed the US Military the keys to our kingdom."

  "Who?" Graves asked.

  "That," Edgar said, "is the question."

  He stood up and walked to the wall of monitors. He looked at the face of Sergeant Miller again.

  "This video," Edgar said. "It never leaves this room. You will purge it from the ARGUS servers immediately after we are done. As far as the world is concerned, this footage never existed."

  "Sir? But this is proof. We could go to the President. We could bury Raddock."

  "And admit that Vought has lost control of its proprietary technology?" Edgar asked sharply. "Admit that the US Military now has super soldiers that answer to them, not us? If this gets out, our stock price goes to zero. The moment the government realizes they don't need us to make Supes, we are obsolete."

  "So we keep it secret," Graves said.

  "We keep it buried," Edgar corrected. "We let Raddock think he is unseen. We let him think his little 'Red Unit' is a secret."

  Edgar turned to Graves.

  "You will initiate a Tier-1 internal audit. I want every milligram of Compound V produced in the last five years accounted for. I want the financial records of every executive, every scientist and every board member scrutinized. You will find the traitor who gave Raddock the formula."

  "And when I find them?"

  "Bring the name to me. I will handle the rest." Edgar said.

  He looked back at the screen one last time.