Chapter 2

The voice on the tablet came through the small speaker with the quality of a man speaking from another room, another year. It was Daniel Voss's voice — the cadence, the deliberate pause before each sentence, the way he had of measuring every word like a man testing a bridge before he crossed it.

"Colonel Drake. You gave that order."

Reyes stood frozen behind the admiral's chair. His hands hung at his sides, his knuckles pale. He had carried this recording in his head for months, through the recovery mission, through the decommissioning paperwork, through the sleepless nights in the barracks when he replayed the traffic over and over. He had expected to be relieved when it finally played aloud. He felt instead like a man who had set a fire and now watched it consume the room.

Drake's face had gone the color of candle wax. "That's not possible."

"The man's been dead three years," the major two seats down said, his voice hushed. "That's his voice."

"It's fabricated." Drake said it again, louder this time, as if volume could make it true. "The captain is lying. They're both lying."

Kessler set the tablet down gently, face-up, the waveform still moving. She looked at Drake the way she had looked at hundreds of officers across four decades of service — the look of a woman who had watched men crack under pressure and knew exactly what she was seeing now.

"Three years ago," she said slowly, "a convoy left Forward Base Orion on the eastern pass. It was ambushed at 0214 hours. Most of the platoon made it out. Daniel Voss did not."

"I know what happened." Drake's voice had an edge of panic. "I was there."

"Were you?"

"You think I forgot? You think a single day goes by—" He stopped himself, breathing hard.

Kessler waited.