The white noise in my ear vanished. It wasn't replaced by silence, but by a void. A vacuum so absolute it felt like a physical pressure against my eardrum, a black hole where a signal used to be. The connection wasn’t lost. It was annihilated.
For a long, suspended moment, I didn't move. I sat in the leather throne of my office, the bank of monitors in front of me reflecting a man carved from stone. My hand was still clenched around the transmit button of my own comms unit, my thumb pressing into the hard plastic as if I could force a reply from the abyss.
*Boom.*
The sound had been a dull, distant thud, felt more through the floorboards than heard. It was the punctuation mark at the end of her last, insane transmission.
My men were already moving. I could hear their voices, sharp and
