Riley was halfway through her first coffee when her email pinged with the subject line:
External Analysis: Water Sample — Downstream Processing Plant
Her pulse skipped. She set her mug down, wiped her palm on her thigh, and clicked the attachment. The report opened in the clean, methodical format she knew by heart:
pH: within expected seasonal variation
Total dissolved solids: slightly elevated from baseline
Sulfates: within normal variance
Her eyes moved to the metals panel.
Copper, arsenic, molybdenum—all within historical ranges.
Then she saw it.
Uranium-238: 0.93 mg/L
Uranium-235: 0.007 mg/L
She frowned. That wasoff.
For the declared production level, downstream concentrations should be about 0.3 mg/L for U-238. The ratio between U-238 and U-235 looked wrong, too, slightly higher than what naturally occurred in the ore from this site.
It wasn’t enriched—nothing explosive. But it told her something critical. They were processing ahigher volume of ore than they’d declared. Possibly a higher grade. Her mind snapped back to the reagent logs. The spike made sense now, along with the vague “Special Mineral Compounds” export permits. Someone was pulling more yellowcake than they were reporting, and it was leaving the site quietly, disguised in regular shipping.
Her first instinctwas to escalate through internal compliance. Her second instinct, the stronger one that screamed at her, said,Don’t be stupid.
If the Admin account had scrubbed Bolivia and Indonesia’s data, someone at a high level was already invested in keeping this quiet. And she was just an ESG Officer.
She rubbed a hand across her mouth, staring at the numbers again.
This wasn’t just a compliance violation. This was the kind of quiet diversion that governments cared about. Her sat phone buzzed on the desk. For a second, she thought it might be her father, calling to ask about PR again, but the screen was blank. It hit her then—the quiet truth she hadn’t wanted to face.
She couldn’t pull this thread alone. Not without someone who could move quietly without leaving atrail in corporate systems. Someone she trusted to keep her alive if she were right. Her mind went immediately to Talon. Not because she wanted to involve him, but because the thought ofnotinvolving him suddenly felt reckless.
Her eyes drifted back to the lab results, the numbers burning into her thoughts.
If she were right, this wasn’t just an ESG problem.
It was a security problem. She glanced around to make sure no one was looking her way, inserted her thumb drive, and downloaded the official report before it disappeared.
CHAPTER 13
The sun wasn’t just beating down on the training field—it was sitting on their backs like a smothering weight, baking the dust into their boots and raising shimmering waves of heat from the hard-packed ground. Talon could taste iron and grit on the air and smell the tang of oil from the SRF’s rifles baking in the sun.
Beside him, Jug adjusted his headset, the thickset Guardian’s eyes scanning the layout below. The training village—mock walls, door frames, and alleyways of plywood—looked crude, but it was perfect for the day’s work: Close Quarter Clearing, or CQC, under pressure.
“SRF Team One is stacked at the breach point,”Wolf’s voice came over comms from his perch in the overwatch tower. “They’re holding good spacing.”
“That’s a first,” Hammer muttered, leaning against the rail next to Talon.
Talon’s lips ticked up faintly. “We’ll see if it lasts.”
Down below, the SRF squad leader, Captain Mbeki, gave the hand signal, and the first man hit the breach.
The comms crackled with the team’s internal chatter, which Dude funneled into Guardian’s channel just enough to follow their orders.
