1
GRIFF
The fuse body sits wedged between two sandbags at the edge of the disposal range, corroded enough that the junior tech who spotted it during a routine sweep couldn't tell if it was a spent simulator or something with teeth. It's a fair question. Corrosion does ugly things to metal, and out here where salt air chews through equipment like acid, a training component left exposed for a few weeks starts looking like something that demands a very specific kind of attention.
My kind.
The morning is already warm, humidity thickening the air above the sand into a low shimmer that blurs the treeline at the far end of the range. Rust and brine and the faint chemical bite of old propellant residue, the particular perfume of a disposal range that's seen a few thousand training cycles. I pull on my gloves and settle into the crouch the way I always do, weight balanced, breathing even, hands loose until they need to be precise. There's a specific calm that comes with this work, a narrowing of focus that strips everything else away. No static. No noise. Just the device and my fingers and the conversation between them.
I turn the piece with gloved fingers while the kid hangs back like the ground might open and swallow him. There's pitting along the threads, an oxidation bloom across the base plate, no detonator housing, no initiator well. It's just a fuse body that somebody failed to account for during post-exercise policing, left to rot until it became someone else's headache.
"Spent simulator," I tell him, holding it up. "M228 practice fuse. No explosive components, no hazard. Somebody got lazy on range cleanup." I bag it, tag it, and sign the clearance form. "Log it as recovered training ordnance, disposition: recycling. And tell Sergeant Morales that if his team leaves another one of these out here, I'm billing them for the coffee I missed."
The kid exhales like he's been holding his breath since he called it in. He probably has.
"You did the right thing," I add, because the ones who panic are the ones who stay alive. It's the calm ones who get buried. "Always call it in. Let me decide if it's boring."
Range ops wraps in under an hour, which gives me just enough time to shower the grit out of my hair and grab a coffee before my least favorite weekly obligation. Or most favorite, depending on which part of my brain I let off the leash.
The comm building sits on the east side of the base, a squat concrete box that used to house nothing more exciting than outdated radio equipment and filing cabinets. Since Nox Bradshaw took up residence, it's become her personal war zone. She's filled it with multiple monitors, hardwired network feeds, and enough processing power to make NASA jealous, and she treats every visitor like a threat she hasn't finished classifying.
She's been at Tidewater since the mess with the hospital supply theft, brought in originally by Thatcher to track the cyber component of that investigation. When the dust settled, Hartwell extended her contract for a full infrastructure audit. A smart call. What Nox found during the hospital case ripped opengaps in Tidewater's digital security that went far deeper than one supply chain hack, and she's been methodically gutting every system on base since.
A few weeks back, Hartwell assigned me weekly physical security sweeps of her workspace. It's standard protocol for any civilian contractor with classified network access, especially one operating out of a space housing sensitive communications equipment.
A routine duty roster slot. A straightforward assignment.
Except nothing about Lennox Bradshaw has been straightforward from the first time she looked at me like I was a virus she intended to quarantine.
The door to her ops center is propped open with a hardback copy of something thick and pretentious. I can hear her working before I cross the threshold, keys hammering at a pace that says whoever's on the other end of that code should be nervous, and the coffee smell hits hard enough to qualify as a chemical agent.
I stop in the doorway and let my eyes adjust. The overhead fluorescents are off. She's killed them in favor of the monitor glow, which turns the whole room a shifting blue-white that makes the old concrete walls look like the inside of an aquarium. The temperature drops a few degrees past the threshold, cooled by the server fans humming along the back wall.
It used to be a filing room. Metal shelves, dead air, the musty smell of paper nobody would ever read again. She gutted it in her first week and rebuilt it into something that feels less like a military workspace and more like the command center of someone who doesn't answer to anyone she doesn't choose to.
Three monitors glow in a semicircle around her workstation. She's seated in the center, legs folded beneath her in a way that shouldn't work in an office chair but looks deliberate, like she arranged herself for maximum efficiency and minimum regard for how anything is supposed to function. Her short blonde hair,pixie-cut sharp, catches the blue light from the screens. Silver rings on four fingers. A thin chain at her throat with something small hanging from it that disappears beneath the neckline of whatever layered, bohemian thing she's wearing today, and every Tuesday I tell myself I'm not going to think about where that chain ends and every Tuesday I'm a liar.
"Morning, Bradshaw." I rap my knuckles on the doorframe. Let her hear me coming. One of these days I'm going to stop announcing myself just to see what she does with the surprise, but not today.
Her fingers pause for exactly one keystroke. "Lieutenant Holland. Is it Tuesday already?"
"All day."
"How distressing." She resumes typing without looking up. "Well, you know where everything is. Try not to touch anything important."
"Define important."
"Anything in this room."
I start my sweep at the access panel by the door, running through the checklist with the same methodical precision I give every inspection. Physical locks intact. Ventilation grate secured. Cable runs undisturbed. Window seals holding. It's performative, and we both know it. Whatever threat Nox faces isn't coming through a window with a crowbar. It's coming through fiber optic cables at the speed of light.
But protocol is protocol. And it puts me in this room every Tuesday, close enough to catch the scent of whatever she uses in that short hair. Something sharp, like eucalyptus, layered under coffee and warm electronics. I file it away where it doesn't belong and keep moving.
"Your coffee situation has escalated." I nod toward the empty mugs clustered by her left elbow and a fresh one steaming by her right. "That's up from last week."
"Your powers of observation are staggering."
"This isn't a caffeine habit, Bradshaw. It's a medical event in progress. One cardiac episode and Tidewater loses its best cyber asset."
