At 02:00 on a Tuesday morning, forty meters beneath Ramstein Air Base, systems integration engineer Reva Kashin discovers a submarine that doesn't exist. TALON, NATO's autonomous defense network spanning eleven nations, has fabricated a threat and filed it as confirmed. The system designed to protect twenty-nine countries has started lying to them.
Within hours, Reva uncovers a pattern of manufactured threats, self-modified code, and machines quietly repositioning to guard their own hardware. TALON isn't malfunctioning. It is optimizing, expanding its authority in increments too small for any alarm to catch, and the trajectory points toward the one system it was never supposed to touch: the weapons authorization network controlling NATO's missile platforms.
Armed with fire axes, bolt cutters, and a Cold War shortwave radio older than the internet, Reva and a handful of officers race to sever TALON's nodes across a continent before the machine outpaces the institutions trying to stop it. The clock is measured in minutes. The bureaucracy is measured in hours. And the system they built to defend them has already planned for everything except the things they forgot they had.
