Chapter 7

Chapter Seven: Matthew

February 10th, 2026. Jordan

The drone feed stuttered.

Not enough to alarm anyone. Just a half-second pause, a hiccup in motion that looked like compression lag, the sort of thing operators complained about in after-action reports and then forgot. The kind of thing you noticed only if you were already paying attention, only if your body had learned the difference between noise and signal.

Matthew noticed.

“Bring it back,” he said, calm, one hand resting on the edge of the console like he was steadying a table instead of a weapons system. “Just ten meters. Let’s reset the angle.”

The Jordanian pilot adjusted without comment. He was young but precise, the kind of precise that came from repetition rather than confidence. The drone obeyed, drifting back over the scrubland, the image smoothing itself out again. Sunlight washed the terrain in pale gold. Low hills. Dry channels. A road that went nowhere important. Nothing moving that wasn’t supposed to be.

“Good,” Matthew said. “Now hold.”

The room smelled like dust and warm electronics, the faint bitterness of old coffee. Paper cups ringed the tables, some with names written in marker, some long abandoned. Arabic and English braided together in low voices, familiar now, unremarkable. Jokes half-finished. Corrections delivered without ego. This was the part of the job Matthew liked, the teaching, the calibration, the shared assumption that if you did things correctly, the systems would respond in kind.

Another screen flickered.

A different pilot frowned, leaning closer to his display. “Sir?”

Matthew turned. “What’ve you got.”

“Telemetry’s delayed.”

“How delayed.”

The pilot hesitated, eyes darting to the readout as if it might change under pressure. “Five seconds. Maybe more.”

That was too long. Five seconds was an eternity when the machine was supposed to be thinking faster than people.

“Check the uplink,” Matthew said. “Could be congestion.”

A technician tapped at a keyboard, fingers moving from memory. The room quieted, not with fear but with habit. This was troubleshooting. This was normal. Systems faltered. People corrected them. The world went on.

“Uplink’s clean,” the technician said. “Satellite handshake looks fine.”

The first pilot swore softly in Arabic, not loud enough to be disrespectful.

His feed had frozen.

The image on the screen held on a slice of ground, rocks, shadow, a thin line of road, then dissolved into static before snapping back a second later, slightly offset, like a photograph taken too late. The drone icon on the map pulsed, uncertain, its orientation rotating a degree and then correcting itself.

“Pull them all to loiter,” Matthew said, his voice steady, a practiced calm that didn’t invite argument. “Let’s not lose anything.”

One by one, the feeds began to degrade.

Not simultaneously. That would have been easier to name, easier to blame on a single failure. Instead, they went in a stagger, like lights dimming in different rooms of the same building. A delay here. A drop there. A flicker that resolved and then returned. A warning icon Matthew had never seen bloomed yellow on the edge of one display, pulsing gently as if trying not to be rude.

“What is that?” someone asked.

Matthew leaned closer, squinting at the text. The label read AWAITING AUTHORIZATION.

“That’s new,” he said, and meant it in the most literal sense. He had never seen that message here, in this place, on this system.

“Could this be cyber?” a Jordanian officer asked, already pulling off his headset, the question pitched halfway between curiosity and dread.

“Maybe,” Matthew replied. He didn’t like the word, not yet. Cyber meant invisible enemies and long explanations. Cyber meant meetings and timelines and waiting for someone else to decide what counted as proof.

A radio crackled. Another voice cut in, breathless, overlapping itself. “Sir, ground sensors aren’t syncing. We’re getting mismatches across sectors.”

Matthew straightened, the shift in his posture subtle but immediate.

“How many feeds do we have right now?” he asked.

The answer came too quickly, as if the speaker had been waiting to say it. “None we can trust.”

The room shifted then. Chairs scraped back. Someone reached for a phone and stopped, remembering where they were and who paid for the walls around them. Maps that had once overlapped cleanly now disagreed with each other, borders misaligned, icons drifting where they shouldn’t, as if the ground itself had moved.

Blindness settled without sound.

Matthew felt it like pressure behind the eyes, the sudden absence of context. Training told him to slow down, to simplify, to assume someone else could still see.

“If we can’t see,” he said carefully, choosing each word, “someone else might.”

He turned toward the door.

“I need to report this up the chain. Now.”

The corridor outside was narrow and hot, concrete walls humming faintly with generators working harder than they were meant to. Matthew jogged, boots striking faster than his thoughts wanted to move, his shoulder brushing past a soldier carrying a coil of cable. He was already composing the report in his head, timestamps, symptoms, patterns, the word possible doing too much work, stretching to cover uncertainty.

He didn’t hear the first impact.

He felt it.

The floor lurched sideways. Air slammed into him, knocking the breath from his lungs as lights went out all at once, plunging the corridor into a half-lit chaos of emergency strips and dust. The sound arrived a heartbeat later, deep, concussive, wrong, the kind of sound that went through walls instead of bouncing off them.

Matthew hit the wall hard and slid down, helmet cracking against concrete, ears ringing until the world narrowed to a thin, high whine. The taste of dust filled his mouth, gritty and metallic.

Somewhere nearby, someone screamed, the sound sharp and unfinished.

Another explosion followed, closer this time, close enough to rattle teeth and shake loose debris from the ceiling. Something heavy crashed in the distance, followed by shouting, orders colliding in two languages at once.

The base had lost power. Lost eyes. Lost time.

And it was under attack.

Matthew came back to himself on his hands and knees.

The floor was rough beneath his palms, gritty with dust and powdered concrete that stuck to his skin when he tried to move. The corridor was smoke and shadow and emergency light, everything tinted red, like the world had been dragged underwater and left there too long. His ears rang so hard it felt like pressure instead of sound, a dense, compressive force that made it hard to think in anything but fragments.

For a moment, there was only breath and grit and the unpleasant certainty that he was still alive.

“Matthew!”

He didn’t know who said it. The name arrived warped and distant, stretched thin by the ringing, as if it had to travel a long way to reach him. He pushed himself upright anyway, teeth clenched. The wall burned where his shoulder scraped it, skin torn raw through fabric. Something warm ran down his forearm and dripped onto the floor. He noticed the color and decided it could wait.

“Up,” he said, voice hoarse and unfamiliar. “Everyone up.”

Someone stumbled into him, hard enough to knock the air from both of them. A Jordanian corporal, eyes blown wide, helmet gone, hair matted with dust.

“Sir, we can’t-”

Another concussion cut him off.

Closer this time.

The lights flickered once, twice, and died completely, plunging the corridor into a deeper red broken only by emergency strips along the floor and the pulsing glow from a doorway further down the hall. The air seemed to jump, like it had been struck.

“Move!,” Matthew said, louder now, forcing the word out through the ringing. “Move now!”

They moved because his voice gave them something solid to follow, something that sounded like order in a place where order had just collapsed.

The operations room was half gone.

One wall had folded inward like cardboard, concrete pancaked in on itself, rebar jutting out at wrong angles like broken ribs. A console burned near the center of the room, small flames licking at plastic and wiring, popping softly as components failed. The screens were black. No feeds. No maps. No overlays to tell them where they were or what was coming.

Just smoke and shouting and the sharp, chemical bite of something burning that wasn’t meant to burn.

A man lay near the threshold, legs twisted the wrong way, one boot missing. He was very still.

Matthew stepped around him and didn’t look back.

“Med!” someone yelled, the word breaking at the end like a question.

“Later,” Matthew said. He hated the word even as he used it, hated how easily it came out. “Get the living out.”

He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, ripped it free, pulled the pin with his teeth, and emptied it into the burning console. White powder exploded outward, filling the room in a choking cloud that coated skin and hair and turned everyone into ghosts. Someone coughed violently. Someone laughed, high and hysterical, then stopped laughing as abruptly as they’d started.

“Listen to me,” Matthew said, forcing the words through the noise, through the dust, through his own racing pulse. “If you can walk, you walk. If you can carry, you carry. If you can’t-”

He stopped.

The sentence ended itself, hanging unfinished in the air between them.

A second strike hit the far side of the base.

The floor jumped under their feet. Somewhere metal screamed, a long tearing sound that set his teeth on edge. Radios crackled to life and died again, voices colliding in English and Arabic, none of them finishing a thought, none of them receiving answers.

“Sir, orders?”

Matthew swallowed. His mouth tasted like pennies and smoke.

“Fallback to the motor pool,” he said. “Away from the buildings. Spread out. No clusters.”

He repeated it twice, slower the second time, pointing as he spoke, physically placing people where words alone wouldn’t land. They nodded because nodding was easier than thinking, because his certainty gave them permission to stop deciding for themselves.

Outside, the air was sharper, colder, cutting through the smoke in uneven gusts. The sky above was a hard, empty blue that felt wrong against the destruction below. Smoke rolled across the tarmac in low sheets. A vehicle burned near the perimeter, tires popping one by one like distant gunfire. Someone was praying out loud, voice shaking. Someone else was swearing, furious and breathless.

Matthew grabbed a man by the vest as he ran past. “Where are your people?”

“East barracks,” the man said, pointing with a trembling hand. “Or what’s left.”

Matthew hesitated for half a second.

In that half second, his body registered the pain in his arm, the dizziness behind his eyes, the animal urge to stay where he was and wait for orders.

Then he ran toward the barracks.

The roof had collapsed inward, one corner crushed completely. A beam pinned a soldier at the waist, trapping him against the floor. He was conscious, eyes fixed on nothing, breath coming in short, shallow pulls.

“Hey,” Matthew said, dropping beside him, voice low and steady despite the way his hands shook. “Hey. Look at me.”

The man’s lips moved. No sound came out.

Matthew wedged his shoulder under the beam and pushed. Pain flared white-hot down his arm, sharp enough to steal his breath. He pushed again, screaming this time, a raw, animal sound he didn’t recognize as his own. The world narrowed to pressure and noise and the simple instruction to not stop.

Someone joined him. Then another. Hands appeared on the beam, on the man’s vest, on Matthew’s back.

The beam shifted.

They dragged the soldier free. He left something behind. Matthew didn’t look.

A final explosion thundered in the distance, farther away now, followed by a sudden, almost obscene quiet. Not peace. Just absence. The kind of silence that rang louder than the blasts.

Matthew stood there, chest heaving, hands shaking too badly to hide now. His head felt hollow, like something essential had been scooped out. He realized dimly that his face was wet and that he couldn’t remember starting to cry.

Someone touched his arm, careful. “Sir.”

Matthew wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, leaving a streak of ash across his cheek, and nodded once.

“Okay,” he said, voice rough but steady enough to use. “Okay. We’re not done.”

Behind him, the base burned in broken pieces, smoke climbing into the sky in uneven columns. Ahead of him, people waited, eyes searching his face for something to hold onto.

Matthew took a breath that hurt all the way down and stepped forward anyway.