Chapter 13 Fallout

Chapter 13 Fallout


The door opened without a knock.

Malcolm filled the frame for a single moment before he moved through it, and that moment was enough. Becca's hands stilled over the supply tray. Jin's eyes lifted from the workstation. Tessa, Rafe, and Soren, positioned at varying points across the room, each straightened by a degree that was small and involuntary and said everything about what command presence actually meant when it walked through a door with its jaw set.

Malcolm didn't look at any of them. He looked at Eric.

Becca took a quiet step back from the examination table. She didn't leave the room. Nobody left the room. It would have required moving past Malcolm to reach the door, and nobody was prepared to attempt that.

Eric turned to face him and kept his hands at his sides.

"Sir," he said.

Malcolm stopped two meters away. He clasped his hands behind his back, and his voice, when it came, was completely level. That was the first thing Eric registered. Not anger, not volume. Just precision, the tone of a man who had decided that every word was going to land exactly where he placed it.

"Unauthorized field deployment," Malcolm began. "No mission clearance. No operational brief submitted to command. No communication with the chain before, during, or after engagement." He paused for exactly one beat. "Key team leaders pulled from their assigned rotations without notification. Dr. Chen accompanied a field unit outside the scope of her medical clearance. Jin Park and her support personnel were redirected from active surveillance assignments without authorization from the recon division." Another beat. "Intel gathered through methods that remain, as of this moment, unclassified and therefore unverifiable by any standard protocol this organization operates under."

He stopped. The room stayed quiet.

"You took a team into an unsecured location with no situational intelligence, no command backup, and no extraction protocol." Malcolm's eyes hadn't moved from Eric's face once. "You did this after a direct conversation in my office in which I told you explicitly to stand down and allow the chain of command to function. Which means this was not an oversight. This was a decision."

Eric said nothing. He had counted six breaches listed so far and recognized there were more coming. He let them come.

"You want to tell me what was worth all of that?" Malcolm asked.

The silence that followed wasn't hesitation. Eric had known what he was going to say before Malcolm finished. He'd known it since he left the medical bay the first time and made the call to move forward anyway.

"The mission was necessary," Eric said. "The information we're working with is significant enough that filing it and waiting wasn't an option."

Malcolm's expression didn't change. "You made that determination yourself."

"Yes, sir."

"Based on evidence obtained through unauthorized database access, conducted by a member of your team who had no clearance for the systems she entered."

"Based on evidence that seventeen of our targets were confirmed human beings. Soldiers. People in this organization told their families they were dead." Eric kept his voice even, matching Malcolm's register deliberately. "Evidence that something is creating these mutations, and that we have been functioning as the cleanup operation for whoever is running that program. Sir."

The title came out clean. Not sarcastic. Not clipped. Just placed at the end where it belonged.

Malcolm looked at him. The rest of the room looked at the space between them.

Rafe stood with his arms loose at his sides, his burned forearms hidden beneath fresh dressings, his eyes fixed somewhere between Malcolm and Eric with the careful attention of a man running contingencies. Tessa had her back to the wall near the supply shelves, and if Becca hadn't known her, she might have read the posture as casual. She knew her. It wasn't casual. Jin sat at the workstation with her hands flat on the desk and her implant dark, every feed closed, nothing running. Soren stood near the door with his shoulders squared and his expression neutral in the way that meant he was listening to things the rest of them couldn't hear.

Becca stood beside the supply tray with a piece of gauze she'd stopped needing three minutes ago still held between two fingers. She didn't set it down.

Malcolm drew a slow breath through his nose. He looked at Eric for a long moment, and Eric looked back, and nobody in the room moved.

"You stand by the decision," Malcolm said. It wasn't a question.

"I stand by the decision," Eric said.

Another silence. This one had a different texture, tighter, like something being compressed rather than something simply absent.

Then Malcolm turned and walked out.

The door swung shut behind him with a click that was quiet enough to be almost polite and loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room.

Nobody spoke immediately. The silence Malcolm had left behind wasn't empty. It was dense with everything he hadn't said, the consequences he hadn't listed, the timeline he hadn't specified. It was a silence with edges, and each person in the room was quietly calculating what those edges might eventually cut.

Eric exhaled slowly through his nose. He turned back toward the examination table, picked up his jacket from where it lay folded at the end, and put it on carefully over the bandaged ribs.

"He'll be back," Rafe said quietly, from across the room.

"I know," Eric said.

"That wasn't a dismissal. That was him deciding how to proceed."

"I know that too."

Tessa moved away from the wall, her arms uncrossing slowly. "What do we do in the meantime?"

Eric glanced around the room. At Rafe's bandaged arms and Jin's closed feeds and Becca's careful stillness and Soren's steady posture at the door. At the team he had pulled into something that was no longer containable and had never really been safe.

"We do what I told him we'd do," Eric said. "We will show up tomorrow. We follow protocol. We give him nothing else to work with until we understand what we're actually dealing with."

He picked up his comm unit from the tray, pocketed it, and moved toward the door.

"Get some rest," he said. "While we still can.”