My family told everyone I failed. I sat quietly at my sister’s promotion ceremony…

Walked around the briefing table and extended his hand. General. He said.

Eyes steady. The floor is yours. The room was so quiet the hum of the fluorescent light sounded like static in my ears.

I sat at the head of the strategic command briefing room where I had once been denied entry by rank. Now seated by necessity. Across from me were representatives from the military investigation bureau and base security command.

Their faces were stony. Their notebooks open but untouched. I laid out my hypothesis calmly.

The breach wasn’t intentional sabotage. It was a cascade. A sequence of reckless decisions and misjudged steps that began with an anonymous email.

One sent not with the intention to betray but to provoke. And in doing so triggered a minefield. I presented metadata, system trails and a digital breadcrumb that began with Erica’s email and ended with a leaked classified file.

They didn’t dispute my logic but they did one worse. General Hammond appointed an internal task force comprised not of experts or outsiders but my own family. I was to lead the team as primary analyst and field coordinator.

My father, Colonel Roy Walsh would manage campaign intel archives from past operations. He still had restricted access from his advisory post-retirement role. Erica was to trace internal system vulnerabilities and access points.

And my mother, with her old training as a combat medic and a side specialty in biological trace evidence was assigned to assist forensic recovery from the laptop left behind in the tech bay. It was like being thrown into a theater piece where every actor knew their role but none wanted to share the stage. The first task force meeting was frigid.

My father opened with a briefing. Eyes glued to the screen rather than anyone in the room. He spoke in clipped tones like he was reading an obituary.

Erica presented her segment next. Short, efficient, sterile. Her voice carried no inflection.

She didn’t look up once. Only my mother occasionally glanced between us like she was watching her children turn into people she no longer recognized. But I wasn’t there for warmth.

I was there for results. And then the breakthrough came. While combing through an archival node tied to Erica’s server scans, our security AI flagged a dormant Trojan embedded in a 2017 operations archive.

It had never been activated, just tucked into the shell of a logistics file. The date stood out. 2017.

That was the year I clashed heads with Derek Glade, a fellow strategist during a joint effort in Mosul. He’d wanted an aggressive sweep through civilian zones to eliminate hostile presence. I’d blocked it, demanding a phased containment strategy.

It was the right call. But it made me a liability to him and a symbol of what he considered bureaucratic weakness. Derek wasn’t just a grudge holder.

He had once held temporary encryption override for the campaign servers. If he’d planted the malware back then, it could have slept unnoticed until someone, like Erica, accidentally triggered it by accessing the wrong pathway. That’s when my mother silently handed me a folder.

From Candlestrike, she said. You left it behind when you shipped out. I read it…