The Phantom Frequency: The Secret of Hangar 4

Part 1

The graveyard shift at Naval Base San Diego always smelled like ozone and stale coffee. It was 0300 hours—the dead of night, the witching hour, the time when the world held its breath. The only sounds in the communications room were the low, rhythmic hum of the server banks and the soft click-clack of my fingers against the console.

I was Chief Petty Officer Dasha Rivera, and officially, I was monitoring shipping lanes along the Pacific Coast. Unofficially? I was being babysitted. Warehoused. Kept out of sight like a cracked lens until the brass figured out if I was still useful or just another casualty of “Cobalt Dusk.”

I rubbed the bandage on my temple. The headache was back—a sharp, white-hot spike driving itself behind my right eye. It was always there, a reminder of the operation that left a hole in my memory where three days of my life used to be.

“Easy, boy,” I whispered.

At my feet, Ghost shifted. He was a Belgian Malinois, seventy pounds of coiled muscle and silver-gray fur that looked like smoke solidified. Technically, he was a military working dog. In reality, he was the only thing keeping me tethered to the ground. He didn’t have a leash; he didn’t need one. He was glued to my shadow.

Suddenly, Ghost’s head snapped up. His ears, sharp triangles of velvet, swiveled toward the main array. A low, vibrating growl started deep in his chest—a sound I felt through the floorboards of my boots more than I heard.

“What is it?” I asked, my hands freezing over the keyboard.

Ghost stood up, every hair on his spine standing at attention. He was staring at the dormant frequency bands—the channels that hadn’t seen traffic since the Cold War.

Then, the console lit up.

It wasn’t a roar; it was a whisper. A signal cut through the static, weak and fragmented, bleeding through on a frequency that had been dead air for twenty years. My heart hammered against my ribs. I adjusted the gain, isolating the noise, scrubbing the static.

Beep. Beep-beep. Beep.

It wasn’t random interference. It was a pattern. I ran the encryption protocol, but the system spat back an error. Unknown Protocol. I tried an older key, one from the early 2000s. The screen flashed green.

Coordinates locked in. And then, a single word, repeating in a loop, ghosting across my monitor in glowing green text:

SURVIVOR. SURVIVOR. SURVIVOR.

I stared at the screen, the breath caught in my throat. The coordinates pointed north. Specifically, to the Alameda Naval Air Station—or what was left of it. The base had been decommissioned in 2004 after a massive fire gutted the infrastructure. It was supposed to be a ghost town, a heap of concrete and rusted rebar waiting for developers who never came.

But the timestamp on the signal? It wasn’t twenty years old. It was created twelve minutes ago.

I reached for the secure line to call Commander Lockhart, my hand hovering over the receiver. My training screamed protocol, but my gut screamed trap. The encryption pattern… the spacing between the data blocks… I’d seen it before. I saw it in the nightmares that woke me up screaming. I saw it during Cobalt Dusk.

Ghost whined, a high-pitched sound of distress that snapped me back to the room. I made a choice. I didn’t just log it. I copied the raw data to my personal encrypted drive, slipped it into my pocket, and then I dialed the Commander.

---

Commander Lockhart looked like he’d been starched and pressed straight out of the womb. Even at 0330, his uniform was impeccable, his silver hair perfectly coiffed. He stood over my station, his face a mask of bored indifference as I played the audio.

“Equipment malfunction,” he said, cutting the audio before the loop finished.

“Sir, with respect,” I said, standing rigid. “I ran the authentication three times. The timestamp is current. The encryption is military-grade, specifically a variation of the Trident protocol used by—”

“Used by units that don’t exist anymore, at a base that doesn’t exist anymore,” Lockhart interrupted, his voice smooth and cold. “Alameda has been dead for two decades, Chief. It’s a pile of rocks. There is no power, no transmitter, and certainly no ‘survivor’.”

“The coordinates point to Hangar 4, Sir. That specific structure doesn’t appear on the public decommissioning maps, but the signal is triangulation-locked to that grid.”

Lockhart’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve been digging into classified archives?”

“I used available clearance to verify the grid, Sir.”

He sighed, the sound of a disappointed parent. He stepped closer, dropping his voice to a patronizing register. “Rivera, look at me. You’re recovering. The doctors said there would be… episodes. Cognitive processing errors. Obsessive pattern recognition.”

My hands balled into fists behind my back. He was playing the ‘crazy card.’ The bandage on my head throbbed. “I am not hallucinating a digital signal, Commander.”

“Aren’t you?” He reached past me and killed my monitor. The screen went black, taking the green glow of the word SURVIVOR with it. “Go home, Dasha. Get some sleep. Let the techs run a diagnostic on the array in the morning. That’s an order.”

I held his gaze for a second too long—insubordination flirting with the edges of my discipline. “Aye, aye, Sir.”

Ghost followed me out, his nails clicking sharply on the linoleum. The cool night air of the parking lot hit me like a slap. I didn’t get in my car immediately. I leaned against the hood, shaking. I wasn’t crazy. I knew I wasn’t. But Lockhart’s dismissal had been too quick. Too rehearsed.

I pulled out my tablet. The base Wi-Fi didn’t reach the far lot, so I tethered it to my phone. I needed to see Alameda.

I pulled up the satellite imagery. Cloud cover. I checked the history. Cloud cover yesterday. Cloud cover last week. For three years, every satellite pass over that specific grid of the California coast was obscured by “weather anomalies” or “data corruption.”

That wasn’t weather. That was a blackout.

I looked down at Ghost. He was sitting on the asphalt, staring intently at the empty space beside my car, tracking something invisible with his eyes. His head tilted left, then right, watching a phantom drift by.

“You see it too, don’t you?” I whispered.

Ghost had been the only thing I brought back from Cobalt Dusk. The lab we found him in… it wasn’t on any map. He had a barcode tattooed inside his ear and tags that read Project Sentinel. When I found him, he wasn’t cowering. He was guarding a door that led to nowhere.

I got in the car. I couldn’t go home. If Lockhart was covering this up, my access would be cut by morning. I needed to get to the physical archives at the Naval Intelligence Office before the sunrise shift change.

---

The sun was just bleeding gray light over the horizon when I walked into the Intel library. I kept my head down, flashing my badge at the sleepy petty officer at the desk. I moved to the back terminals, the legacy systems that weren’t fully integrated into the cloud.

I typed in Alameda Naval Air Station – Decommissioning Manifest 2004.

The screen flickered green. Lists of equipment scroled by. Generators, fuel tanks, desks, chairs. Routine junk. Then I searched for personnel transfers.

Dr. Astrid Novak. Dr. Elias Bannerman. Dr. Jay Chen.

Top-tier physicists. Quantum communication specialists. All stationed at Alameda in 2003. All transferred to a unit called “Project Threshold” two weeks before the fire.

I typed Project Threshold.

ACCESS DENIED.

I tried a backdoor query, referencing the budget codes.

SECURITY ALERT. TERMINAL LOCKED.

A loud, piercing beep echoed through the quiet library. My badge, clipped to my chest, buzzed. Deactivated.

“System maintenance,” the guy at the desk called out, barely looking up from his coffee. “You might want to log off, Chief.”

It wasn’t maintenance. It was a tripwire.

I walked out fast. My phone vibrated in my pocket. A text from Lockhart: Report to my office. 1000 hours.

I ignored it. I drove straight to my apartment, my eyes checking the rearview mirror every few seconds. A black sedan was two cars back. It turned when I turned. It stopped when I stopped.

Surveillance.

I parked around the block and cut through an alley to get to my building. Ghost was tense, pressing his body against my leg, guiding me. When we got to my door, he stopped and growled—a low, menacing rumble directed at the wood.

I drew my service pistol, checking the chamber. I unlocked the door and kicked it open.

Empty. My small apartment was exactly as I left it. But Ghost wouldn’t cross the threshold. He paced the hallway, hackles raised.

I stepped inside, scanning the room. Nothing seemed out of place until I looked at the floor by the door. A plain white envelope lay there. No stamp. No name.

I picked it up with my sleeve, avoiding fingerprints. Inside was a single index card. The handwriting was elegant, looping script.

They are listening for you, too.

I flipped the card over.

This is your eighth attempt, Dasha. Remember the wall.

My blood ran cold. Eighth attempt? What the hell did that mean? The room started to spin. A flash of a memory that wasn’t mine hit me—fire, blue and cold. A wall made of rippling liquid silver. Ghost barking at a man who didn’t have a face.

I grabbed the table to steady myself. The headache spiked so hard I almost vomited.

“Eighth attempt,” I whispered.

I looked at Ghost. He was sitting by the window, staring out at the street. The black sedan was parked down below. Two men in suits were getting out.

“We have to go,” I said. “Now.”

I didn’t pack clothes. I packed survival gear. My tac-vest, spare mags, a burner phone, cash, and the encrypted drive. I grabbed Ghost’s tactical harness. He stepped into it willingly, knowing the drill.

We went out the fire escape. I knew the surveillance teams would be watching the front and the car. They wouldn’t expect a Chief Petty Officer to hotwire a beat-up pickup truck three blocks away, but desperation brings back old skill sets.

We hit the I-5 North. I wasn’t going to Lockhart. I wasn’t going to the doctors. I was going to the source.

---

The drive to Alameda took six hours. The further north we went, the worse the weather got. By the time we hit the outskirts of the old base, a dust storm was raging. The sky was a bruised purple, the wind whipping sand and grit across the windshield until visibility was zero.

It felt like the world was trying to push me back.

I killed the headlights and drove the last mile using night-vision goggles. The base loomed out of the dust like a skeleton. Rusted hangars, collapsed towers, fences topped with razor wire that sang in the wind.

I hid the truck behind a collapsed maintenance shed. “On me, Ghost.”

We moved on foot. The wind howled, masking the sound of our boots. We reached the perimeter fence. The signs were faded but legible: US GOVERNMENT PROPERTY – NO TRESPASSING – BIOHAZARD.

Biohazard? For a fire?

I used bolt cutters on the chain link. We slipped through.

The base was a graveyard of concrete. We moved tactically, cover to cover. My GPS showed us getting closer to the coordinates of the signal.

Hangar 1… Hangar 2… Hangar 3…

And then, nothing.

According to the base layout I’d memorized, Hangar 4 should be right in front of me. Instead, there was a pile of rubble. A collapsed roof, twisted girders, char marks. It looked like a bomb had hit it.

“It’s gone,” I muttered, the wind stealing my voice. “It’s destroyed.”

But Ghost wasn’t looking at the rubble. He was pulling at my vest, dragging me toward the side of the collapsed structure. He was whining, that high-pitched sound again.

“What?” I asked.

He barked at the air.

I stepped closer to the ruin. The wind died down for a split second, and in that silence, I heard it. A hum. Low frequency. Electronic.

I activated my flashlight, the beam cutting through the dust. I walked around the perimeter of the collapse. There was a service door, half-hinged, hanging off the frame. It looked ancient, rusted shut.

But when I touched the handle, the rust flaked away like powder. Underneath, the metal was warm.

I pulled. The door groaned but opened.

I stepped inside, weapon raised. “Navy Security! Identify yourself!”

Silence.

I swung the light around. My breath hitched.

The outside of the hangar was a ruin. But the inside?

The inside was pristine.

The cavernous space was intact. No fire damage. No rubble. The floor was polished concrete. Overhead, high-bay LED lights flickered with emergency power. And in the center of the room, sitting on a table that looked like it belonged in a sci-fi movie, was a radio beacon.

It was pulsing. Beep. Beep-beep.

“It’s real,” I whispered.

Ghost trotted forward, his nails clicking on the floor. He stopped in the middle of the hangar, sniffing the air. Then, he did something that made the hair on my arms stand up.

He watched a set of footprints appear on the dusty floor.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Fresh boot prints, appearing out of thin air, walking away from us, leading toward the back wall.

“Ghost, heel,” I commanded, my voice trembling.

We followed the invisible walker. The footprints led straight to the back wall of the hangar—a solid sheet of riveted steel. The tracks went right up to the metal… and continued.

The toes of the last boot print were half-merged into the steel wall.

I reached out, my hand shaking. I expected cold, hard metal.

My fingers passed through the wall like it was smoke.

A jolt of electricity shot up my arm. I yanked my hand back, gasping. The air around the wall shimmered, rippling like heat off a highway.

Suddenly, a voice crackled over the radio beacon behind me. It wasn’t the robotic loop anymore. It was a man’s voice. Urgent. Terrified.

“Rivera? Is that you? You’re early. The breach isn’t stable yet!”

I spun around, aiming my weapon at the empty room. “Who is this? Show yourself!”

“I can’t,” the voice replied, static tearing at the edges of the words. “I’m standing right in front of you, Dasha. You just can’t see me yet. Look at the drone. Look at the timestamp!”

I looked at the table next to the beacon. There was a drone there—sleek, matte black, no propellers. I glanced at the control pad.

Mission Clock: T-Minus 10 Minutes. Date: November 28, 2004.

My blood turned to ice. The date was wrong. It was twenty years ago.

“Who are you?” I screamed into the empty hangar.

“I’m the one who sent the signal,” the voice said. “And you need to run. VEX is coming. They know you’re here.”

Before I could ask who VEX was, the hangar doors behind me slammed shut with a deafening boom. The emergency lights turned red.

Ghost snarled, facing the wall—the wall that I had just put my hand through.

Something was coming through the metal. A shape. Humanoid, but distorted, stretching out of the steel like it was made of latex.

“Ghost, attack!” I yelled, but for the first time ever, my dog didn’t move. He was whimpering, backing away, tail tucked.

The figure fully emerged from the wall. It was wearing a hazmat suit that flickered in and out of existence. It raised a hand, pointing a weapon that looked like a tuning fork.

“End of the line, Subject 8,” the figure distorted.

I raised my pistol and fired.

Part 2: The Echo Chamber

My bullet didn’t ricochet. It didn’t thud into flesh. It passed straight through the hazmat suit like a stone through water, sparking against the steel wall behind the figure.

The figure didn’t flinch. It just shimmered, the image distorting into static.

“Don’t shoot!” the voice on the radio screamed, tearing through the static. “That’s a temporal echo! It’s not real! Run, Dasha! The containment team is breaching the main doors!”

Ghost didn’t wait for my command. He slammed his shoulder into my thigh, driving me toward the back of the hangar. A section of the floor near the wall was sliding open—a hidden maintenance lift I hadn’t seen seconds ago.

“Go!” I yelled, diving into the dark opening just as the main hangar doors blew inward.

Debris rained down. Bright, white searchlights—blinding and clinical—swept the space where I had just been standing. I hit the bottom of the chute, rolling to absorb the impact. Ghost landed silently beside me.

We were in a tunnel system. But unlike the dusty, abandoned ruins above, this was alive. Cables ran along the ceiling like thick, black veins, pulsing with a rhythmic blue light. The air smelled of ozone and ionized copper—the smell of a thunderstorm trapped in a bottle.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

Ghost sniffed the air, then took off down the corridor to the left. I followed, weapon raised, checking my corners.

As we ran, the headache that had plagued me for months exploded. It wasn’t just pain anymore; it was images. Flashbacks that weren’t mine. I saw myself wearing a lab coat. I saw myself screaming as blue fire consumed the room. I saw myself dying.

I stumbled, bracing myself against the wall. “Get it together, Rivera.”

We reached a heavy blast door. It looked impenetrable, sealed with a biometric lock that required a handprint. I hesitated. My access had been revoked. I was a fugitive.

Ghost barked once, sharp and demanding.

I placed my trembling hand on the scanner.

IDENTITY CONFIRMED: DR. RIVERA. WELCOME BACK.

Doctor?

The heavy bolts retracted with a hiss of hydraulics. The door swung open.

I stepped into a laboratory that shouldn’t exist. Banks of servers hummed. Holographic displays floated in the air, showing complex geometric maps of… reality. And in the center of the room, sitting in a wheelchair facing a wall of monitors, was a woman.

She spun around.

I froze. I knew her face from the files I’d stolen, but she looked decades older. Her hair was white, her face a roadmap of deep lines and scars.

“You’re late, Dasha,” Dr. Astrid Novak said, her voice raspy. “But you made it further than the last one.”

“The last one?” I kept my gun leveled at her. “Give me one reason not to arrest you right now, Doctor. You’re supposed to be dead.”

“And you’re supposed to be a communications officer with a concussion,” she countered, wheeling herself closer. “Put the gun down. If VEX finds us, we’re both dead. For real this time.”

Ghost trotted up to her, resting his head on her knee. She scratched behind his ears with a familiarity that made my stomach churn. “Hello, Sentinel. Good boy.”

“He knows you,” I said, lowering the weapon slightly.

“I built him,” she replied. “Or rather, I designed the genetic modifications that allow him to anchor himself across dimensions. He’s the only reason you’re still sane.”

“Start talking,” I demanded. “What is this place? What was that signal?”

Novak sighed, pointing to the main screen. It showed the hangar above us, but it was split into twelve different feeds. In one, the hangar was empty. In another, it was on fire. In a third, it was a bustling military hub.

“Project Threshold,” she said. “Twenty years ago, we didn’t just break the sound barrier; we broke the reality barrier. We opened a door to a parallel dimension. The fire wasn’t an accident. It was the universe trying to reject the graft.”

She tapped a key. A file opened. It was a video log.

I watched a younger version of Novak—and a younger version of me—standing in front of the shimmering wall in Hangar 4. We were laughing. We looked happy.

“You were the lead researcher, Dasha,” Novak said softly. “Dr. Dasha Rivera. You weren’t military. You were a physicist.”

“That’s impossible. I have memories. Boot camp. Deployment. My parents…”

“Implants,” she cut in. “Constructed memories to fill the gaps. When the breach destabilized, it fractured you. It shattered your timeline. Part of you was thrown into this reality—the ‘Prime’ timeline where the project failed. Another part of you… remained.”

The headache spiked again. Survivor. Survivor. Survivor.

“The signal,” I whispered. “It’s me.”

“It’s the version of you trapped on the other side,” Novak confirmed. “She’s been trying to reach you for years. But the breach is only permeable during an ‘Alignment.’ Like tonight.”

“And the note in my apartment? ‘Eighth attempt’?”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve found the signal,” Novak said, her eyes sad. “It’s the eighth time you’ve come here. The eighth time you’ve tried to remember. The previous seven times… VEX caught you. They wiped your mind, reset your ‘cover story’ as a Chief Petty Officer, and put you back on monitoring duty to see if you’d do it again.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. My life… my trauma… the ‘accident’ during Cobalt Dusk… it was all a loop. A cruel, unending experiment.

“Who is VEX?”

“Quillin Vex,” she spat the name. “Department of Defense Liaison. In my timeline, he was a bureaucrat. In this one? He’s the jailer. He doesn’t want to close the breach, Dasha. He wants to weaponize it. He’s been letting it stay open, bleeding radiation into our world, because he’s harvesting tech from the other side.”

Suddenly, the red emergency lights began to pulse. A siren wailed—a low, mechanical scream.

“They’ve found the bypass,” Novak said, turning back to her console. “They’re coming.”

“We need to leave.”

“I can’t go,” she gestured to her legs. “I’m just the archivist. But you… you have to finish it. You have to close the door.”

She handed me a heavy, metallic device. It looked like a complex hard drive wrapped in copper coils.

“This is a containment key,” she said. “The Mark 7 Stabilizer. But it’s broken. It lacks the quantum signature to lock the breach.”

“So it’s useless?”

“Here? Yes. But on the other side… the successful timeline… your counterpart has the other half. If you combine them, you can seal the breach permanently.”

“You want me to walk into that wall?”

“I want you to trust the dog,” she said. “Ghost can navigate the slipstream. He sees the path. Go to the interface in Hangar 4. Wait for the alignment. When the wall ripples, jump.”

The blast door behind us began to sizzle. Sparks showered down as a plasma cutter sliced through the locks.

“Go!” Novak shouted. “Break the loop, Dasha!”

I looked at her one last time, then looked at Ghost. “Lead the way, buddy.”

We ran.

We scrambled up a maintenance ladder, lungs burning, emerging back into the hangar—but on a catwalk high above the floor. Below, the scene was chaos.

Men in black tactical gear—VEX operatives—were swarming the floor. In the center, standing by the shimmering wall, was a man in a gray suit. He looked calm, bored even. He was holding a device that was sucking energy from the breach.

“Stabilize the aperture!” Vex shouted. “I want a extraction team ready to cross over in five minutes!”

He was going to invade the other timeline.

Ghost nudged my leg. He was looking at a specific point on the wall, near the roofline where the shimmer was most intense.

“We have to jump from here?” I asked. It was a thirty-foot drop.

Ghost barked.

I took a breath. “Okay. Trust the dog.”

I vaulted over the railing.

We fell. The wind rushed past my ears. The ground rushed up to meet us. But we didn’t hit concrete.

We hit the shimmer.

It felt like diving into a pool of ice water. The air was sucked out of my lungs. The world turned inside out—colors inverted, sounds became colors, gravity twisted sideways. I felt my body stretching, tearing, putting itself back together.

And then, silence.

I hit the floor hard, rolling to a stop.

I looked up.

I was in Hangar 4. But it wasn’t abandoned. It was beautiful.

Bright, clean lights. Scientists in white coats moving with purpose. The hum of advanced machinery.

And standing over me, offering a hand, was a woman.

She had my face. But she didn’t have the bandage. She didn’t have the haunted look in her eyes. She looked strong. Whole.

“took you long enough,” the Alternate Rivera said, smiling. “We have work to do.”

Part 3: The Zero Point
The shock of seeing myself—my real self, the one who hadn’t been broken by twenty years of lies—was almost paralyzed.

“Breathe,” Alternate Rivera (Alt-Dasha) said, hauling me to my feet. “The temporal sickness passes in a few seconds.”

Ghost shook himself off, sending a spray of dimensional static into the air. He trotted between us, nuzzling Alt-Dasha’s hand, then mine. He was the bridge. He loved us both.

“We don’t have much time,” Alt-Dasha said, walking briskly toward a central console. “The alignment is peaking. Vex—your Vex—is trying to force a hard breach. If he succeeds, he won’t just invade this timeline. He’ll collapse both of them. We’ll all cease to exist.”

She picked up a device from the table. It was identical to the one Novak had given me, but the coils were silver instead of copper.

“You have the receiver?” she asked.

I fumbled in my pack and pulled out Novak’s device.

“Connect them,” she ordered.

I snapped the two halves together. They clicked with a satisfying magnetic lock. The device hummed, the coils glowing a brilliant, blinding blue.

“This is the Master Key,” Alt-Dasha explained. “It creates a localized quantum vacuum. It doesn’t just close the door; it welds it shut. But it has to be deployed from your side. The breach originated in your timeline. It has to end there.”

“If I go back…” I started, the realization hitting me.

“If you go back and seal it, the connection is severed,” she finished. “We won’t be able to communicate. The signal stops. The timelines separate forever.”

I looked at her. I looked at this clean, successful world where I was a respected scientist, not a broken soldier. “I could stay here.”

Alt-Dasha looked at me with infinite sadness. “You can’t. Your biological signature is tied to the Prime timeline. If you stay here past the alignment, you’ll destabilize. You’ll fade away.”

She placed a hand on my shoulder. “You are the survivor, Dasha. You survived the fire. You survived the memory wipes. You survived the solitude. You are the strongest version of us.”

A siren blared in this reality too.

“The breach is opening!” a technician shouted. “Incursion detected!”

I looked at the wall. The shimmer was turning red. Vex was coming through.

“Go!” Alt-Dasha shoved me toward the interface. “Take Ghost. He belongs with you. He’s your anchor.”

I grabbed the Master Key. “Thank you.”

“Good luck,” she whispered.

I grabbed Ghost’s harness. “One more time, buddy.”

We ran back into the storm.

We exploded back into my reality, flying out of the wall and crashing onto the dirty concrete of the abandoned hangar.

The scene had changed. It was a war zone.

Vex’s men had set up a perimeter. A massive machine was drilling into the fabric of the breach, tearing the hole wider. The noise was deafening—a screeching, tearing sound like metal screaming.

“She’s back!” a guard yelled.

“Kill her!” Vex screamed from the control deck. “Don’t let her near the aperture!”

Bullets chewed up the concrete around me. I scrambled behind a rusted generator, clutching the Master Key. Ghost was a blur of motion, launching himself at the nearest operative, dragging him down.

I checked my weapon. Three rounds left.

“Ghost! Cover!”

The dog released the guard and sprinted to me.

“We need to get to the center,” I yelled over the noise. “Right where that drill is!”

It was fifty yards of open ground. Suicide.

Suddenly, the ground shook. The breach was reacting to the drill. A pulse of energy knocked the guards off their feet. Gravity fluctuated. For a second, we were all floating.

“Now!”

I pushed off the generator, floating in the micro-gravity. I used the debris as stepping stones, propelling myself toward the center. Vex saw me. He pulled a sidearm and fired.

The bullet grazed my shoulder. The pain was sharp and real, grounding me.

I slammed into the drilling machine. I jammed the Master Key into the heart of the breach—right into the glowing, unstable red tear in the air.

“NO!” Vex screamed.

I twisted the activation dial.

INITIATING LOCKDOWN.

The Master Key screamed. A wave of blue energy exploded outward. It hit the drilling machine, vaporizing it. It hit Vex’s equipment, shattering the glass.

The red tear turned blue, then white. It began to shrink.

The suction was incredible. The wind roared, pulling everything loose toward the wall—dust, debris, the unconscious guards. I wrapped my arm around a steel pylon, holding on for dear life. I grabbed Ghost’s harness with my other hand.

“Hold on!” I screamed.

The wall rippled one last time. I saw Alt-Dasha on the other side, standing calm amidst the storm, giving me a final salute.

And then, with a sound like a thunderclap, the wall solidified.

The wind stopped. The light died.

I fell to the floor, gasping for air.

The hangar was silent. The Vex operatives were groaning, picking themselves up. Vex was standing near the wall, staring at the solid steel. He walked up to it and pounded his fist against it.

“Gone,” he whispered. “It’s all gone.”

He turned to look at me. His eyes were empty. He knew it was over. The breach was sealed. The source of his power—and his leverage—was cut off.

Lockhart burst through the main doors with a squad of MPs. Real MPs.

“Secure the area!” Lockhart barked. He looked at Vex, then at me.

He walked over to where I was sitting, clutching Ghost. He looked at the device fused into the wall—now just a lump of inert metal.

“Report, Chief,” Lockhart said, his voice quiet.

I looked up at him. The headache was gone. For the first time in twenty years, my mind was silent. The memories were settling—the soldier and the scientist merging into one.

“Mission accomplished, Sir,” I said. “The signal is terminated.”

Epilogue

They tried to bury it, of course.

Vex was reassigned to a radar station in Alaska. The operatives were sworn to secrecy. The official report said Hangar 4 suffered a structural collapse due to “seismic activity.”

They offered me a medical discharge. Full pension. “Psychological trauma,” they called it.

I took it.

I stood outside the fence of the Alameda base one last time. The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple. The dust had settled. It looked peaceful now. Just an old airfield, sleeping by the bay.

I touched the bandage on my temple. The scar was fading.

I knew the truth now. I knew that somewhere, across a veil I could no longer touch, another version of me was living the life I was supposed to have. She was happy. She was safe.

And that was enough.

I looked down. Ghost was sitting beside me, watching a seagull fly overhead. He leaned his weight against my leg, solid and warm. He had lost his ability to walk between worlds—the spark in his eyes was just a dog’s spark now. He was grounded, just like me.

“We’re okay, aren’t we?” I asked him.

He looked up and wagged his tail.

We walked away from the fence, leaving the ghosts behind. The military hides secrets, yes. But some secrets… some secrets heal themselves.