“It was a temporary override,” Turner said.

“Why did you sign it, Captain?” Hayes asked.

Turner swallowed hard.

The front of his khaki uniform was damp with sweat.

“The District Commander was arriving on Friday for my biannual review,” Turner said.

“Your promotion,” I said.

“If the system went down, the entire base would have been placed on operational lock,” Turner said. “The inspection would have been a disaster.”

“So you hid the error reports,” Hayes said.

“I rerouted the warning logs to a secondary directory so the automated flags wouldn’t trigger the main console,” Turner said.

“You let someone siphon our core telemetry data just to keep your record clean,” I said.

“I didn’t know it was an active extraction,” Turner said, his voice cracking. “I swear to you, Mitchell. I thought it was just a packet-loss glitch in the new decryption matrix.”

“You didn’t check,” I said.

“I didn’t have time to check,” he said.

“And now the entire system is compromised,” Hayes said.

He looked at me, his face hard.

“Where is the data going, Sarah?” Hayes asked.