The private transport plane tore through a wall of grey, jagged clouds over the Pennine Alps, its twin-engine turboprops screaming against the high-altitude turbulence. Inside the pressurized cabin, the ambient lighting was a muted, clinical white.
Ethan sat across from me at the narrow workstation, a sleek titanium diagnostic deck wired directly into the plane’s navigation array to mask our transponder footprint. His silver-rimmed glasses reflected a relentless cascade of sub-level kernel logs. The rolled-up sleeves of his shirt revealed the tense, coiled muscles of his forearms as he fought the system’s decay line by line.
"The hardware exploit is deep-layer," Ethan said, his voice a low, lethal baritone that barely carried over the engine roar. "It’s embedded in the physical logic gat
