SENTINEL North American Command
Seattle, Washington
March 15th, 2:47 AM
Marcus Kane was dreaming of his daughter when the building started screaming.
Not alarms—those came three seconds later, overlapping and discordant. This was structural. Metal tearing, concrete fracturing, the death rattle of a fortress that had stood for twenty years and believed itself invincible.
He rolled out of the bunk as the first explosion gutted the east wing. The concussion wave hit his door hard enough to buckle it inward. His fingers found the sidearm on his nightstand through muscle memory and years of drills that never quite prepared you for the real thing.
The hallway was chaos painted in emergency red. Agents in various states of undress stumbled through smoke that tasted like burning plastic and something worse—something organic. Marcus's training screamed chemical attack but his detector stayed green. Not gas. Not radiation.
Just fire and murder.
"Secondary teams to the armory!" Someone was shouting, voice raw with smoke and panic. Marcus thought it might be Kerrigan from Logistics. Hard to tell. Everyone sounded the same when they were dying.
He made it six steps before the second explosion took the floor.
The fall lasted forever and no time at all.
Marcus hit concrete and rebar hard enough to crack ribs, tasted copper, felt his left shoulder dislocate with a wet pop that made his vision white out. When it came back, he was on his side in what used to be the server room, now open to the March sky through a hole that showed stars and smoke in equal measure.
Bodies lay in pieces around him. He recognized Kerrigan by her wedding ring, still on a hand no longer attached to anything else.
His earpiece crackled. "—all stations, SENTINEL North American Command is—" Static swallowed the rest, replaced by a sound that might have been screaming or just feedback. Hard to tell anymore.
Marcus tried to stand. His legs worked. That seemed unfair, given everything else.
"Command, this is Kane, North American. What's our status?"
Nothing.
"Command, do you copy?"
Still nothing. Then:
"SENTINEL Command is gone, Kane." The voice was mechanical, processed through a filter that stripped it of humanity. "Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, London, Berlin, Lagos, São Paulo. All gone. Ninety-three facilities. Eighteen thousand personnel. You're hearing this because you're still alive, which makes you either very lucky or very unfortunate."
Marcus found cover behind an overturned server rack, weapon up, tracking for targets in the smoke. "Who is this?"
"We are the Obsidian Covenant. Your organization has committed crimes against humanity for three decades. Tonight, we rendered judgment. The sentence is extinction."
"You murdered eighteen thousand people—"
"Your organization murdered three hundred thousand in Pakistan. Two hundred thousand in Venezuela. Half a million in the Jakarta Purge that you scrubbed from every database except ours." The voice was calm. Reasonable. That made it worse. "We are not terrorists, Commander Kane. We are the reckoning you earned."
The transmission cut.
Marcus stayed frozen for three seconds that felt like three hours, then forced himself to move. His shoulder was useless, ribs protesting every breath, but he was SENTINEL. Trained for this. Supposedly.
He found eight survivors in the sub-levels. Three were too injured to move. Two were in shock, catatonic. He left them emergency supplies and a sidearm each, though he knew they wouldn't use them. Not on the Covenant.
On themselves, maybe, when the pain got too bad.
The remaining three—Jenkins, Yao, and Corporal Something-or-Other whose name Marcus couldn't remember through the concussion—made it to the vehicle bay.
Every transport was slag. They hotwired a supply truck and drove through the burning skeleton of the compound while secondary explosions lit the sky.
Jenkins bled out before they reached the highway. Yao stopped talking after the first mile and never started again. The Corporal whose name Marcus still couldn't remember drove in silence, knuckles white on the wheel, until they hit the safehouse coordinates Command had drilled into every operative:
If everything fails, if the world ends, go to the Wraith.
SENTINEL Emergency Rendezvous Point
Classified Location
March 16th, 6:13 AM
The Wraith looked like exactly what it was: a cargo plane that had seen better decades, now parked in a hangar that barely qualified as standing. Rust and prayer held it together.
Desperation did the rest.
Marcus was the third to arrive.
The first was a woman in her early thirties, Asian-American, sitting on a crate with a rifle across her lap and eyes that had already seen too much. She didn't introduce herself. Didn't need to. The pink stripe of chemical burns across her left arm told Marcus everything: biochem division, probably Jakarta station given the scarring pattern.
The second was massive, Eastern European if Marcus guessed right, with a field dressing around his head that was already soaked through. He was conscious, barely, muttering something that might have been Russian or might have been prayer.
"Seattle," Marcus said, because someone had to speak. "North American Command. I had eight survivors. Three made it out. One's left."
The woman looked at him with eyes like empty rooms. "Dr. Mara Sato. São Paulo. Biochem research division. Four hundred and sixty-three personnel when the attack started." She paused. "I was in the parking garage. Forgot my access card, went back for it. That's why I'm alive. I forgot a piece of plastic, so I get to live."
Her laugh was broken glass.
"Atlas Reeves," the big man rumbled, accent thick. "Moscow heavy weapons training facility. Was in reinforced testing bunker during attack. Walls rated for tank shells. Held for six minutes. Everyone else..." He trailed off, touching the bloodied bandage. "Shrapnel. Lucky, they say. I do not feel lucky."
Marcus was about to respond when headlights cut through the hangar entrance. A sedan, civilian model, driving too fast. It skidded to a stop and two figures emerged:
A younger Asian man, slight build, moving with the jerky efficiency of someone running on adrenaline and nothing else. He had a laptop bag slung over his shoulder like a lifeline.
And a kid. Couldn't have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three. Brown skin, dark hair matted with dried blood, wearing a SENTINEL training division uniform that looked three sizes too clean for what he'd just survived.
"Silas Chen," the first man said, voice clipped. "Beijing. Signals intelligence. I was off-site monitoring encrypted traffic when—" He stopped. Started again. "The attack signature was coordinated. Precision timing down to milliseconds. They knew everything. Base layouts, personnel rotations, security protocols. Everything."
The kid said nothing. Just stood there, shaking.
"Name," Marcus said, not unkindly.
"Jesse. Jesse Park." His voice cracked. "Training division. Vancouver annex. I was... there was a night exercise. Urban infiltration scenario. I was three miles away when the base..." He swallowed. "My instructor. She told me to run. She was still inside when—"
"Don't," Mara said quietly. "Don't finish that sentence. Trust me."
Silence fell like a shroud.
They stood in that hangar—five strangers bound by catastrophe—and waited for someone to tell them what happened next.
6:47 AM
The rear cargo door of the Wraith opened with a hydraulic hiss.
The man who emerged looked like he'd been old for centuries. White hair, face carved by decades of decisions that left scars deeper than shrapnel. He wore a SENTINEL commander's uniform that somehow had no blood on it, which made Marcus trust him less, not more.
"My name is Director Nathaniel Cross," he said, voice carrying despite not being loud. "As of 0243 hours today, I am the highest-ranking surviving member of SENTINEL command structure. That makes this conversation official."
He looked at each of them in turn.
"The Obsidian Covenant has destroyed ninety-three SENTINEL installations. Estimated casualties are eighteen thousand, four hundred and twelve. Twelve facilities have confirmed zero survivors. You five represent the largest surviving group from any single region."
"Largest group," Silas repeated, and laughed without humor. "Five people. Out of eighteen thousand."
"Yes." Cross didn't flinch. "The Covenant has also released classified files documenting SENTINEL operations over the past thirty years. Jakarta. Caracas. Lahore. Operations that were... morally compromised. The public response has been... mixed. Forty percent view us as victims. Sixty percent believe we deserved this."
Atlas stood, swaying. "So we are war criminals who got what we deserve, da? That is what you tell us?"
"I'm telling you the truth," Cross said. "Because you deserve that, at minimum. SENTINEL was not innocent. Neither was the Covenant. Both things can be true."
"Why are we here?" Marcus heard himself ask.
Cross reached into his coat and pulled out five objects. They looked like watches, but wrong. The bands were too thick, the faces too dark, and they pulsed with a faint light that shifted through colors Marcus didn't have names for.
"Project Spectrum," Cross said. "SENTINEL's final contingency. Experimental bio-armor powered by chromatic wavelength manipulation. Amplifies the user's physical capabilities by a factor of twenty. Neural integration allows for tactical synchronization across team networks. In testing, it showed a ninety-four percent fatality rate."
"Wonderful," Mara said flatly. "Sign me up."
"The technology requires five operatives. Five specific wavelengths. Crimson. Azure. Amber. Magenta. Viridian." Cross set the devices on a crate between them. "Every SENTINEL operative was genetically screened during recruitment. Compatibility is one in forty thousand. You five are the only confirmed matches still alive."
Jesse spoke up, voice small. "What happens if we say no?"
"The Covenant wins," Cross said simply. "They've crippled SENTINEL. Exposed our crimes. Turned the world against us. Within a month, they'll start targeting government installations, infrastructure, civilian centers. They believe they're cleansing the world. They won't stop until there's nothing left to cleanse."
"Or until someone stops them," Marcus said.
"Yes."
The five survivors looked at each other. Strangers eight hours ago. Now possibly the last line between the Covenant and whatever came next.
Marcus thought about his daughter. Thought about the bodies in Seattle. Thought about the fact that maybe SENTINEL deserved this, but the world didn't deserve what came after.
He picked up the crimson device.
"How bad does it hurt?" he asked.
Cross met his eyes. "Testing subjects compared it to being burned alive from the inside. The process rewrites your cellular structure at the molecular level. Your body will never be the same. Your mind might not be, either."
"That's not an answer."
"Yes," Cross said. "It is."
Marcus looked at the device in his hand. Looked at the four other survivors. Looked at the ruins of everything they'd failed to protect.
Then he pressed the activation stud.