“There was an alert on seven-B Tuesday,” Carter said, his voice cracking. “I brought it to you, Captain.”

“Silence, Lieutenant,” Turner snapped.

“You told me it was a calibration error from the humidity sensors,” Carter said, stepping out from behind the rack.

Hayes didn’t turn his head, but his rifle barrel lowered slightly, angling toward the door.

“We have an active data breach, Captain,” Hayes said. “Your internal politics can wait.”

“It wasn’t politics,” Turner muttered, though his eyes remained fixed on the tablet screen in my hands.

“The file transfer is at seventy percent,” I said.

The progress bar grew, a thin green line eating away at the remaining black space.

“Can you kill the link?” Hayes asked.

“If I kill it from here, the server on the other end will wipe its own cache,” I said.

“They’ll know we found them,” I added.

“And we lose the IP path to the vessel offshore,” Hayes said.

“Exactly,” I said.

The scraping noise above us stopped completely.

A heavy silence settled over the room, broken only by the steady hum of the cooling fans.