Alarms screamed throughout the facility. Explosions rocked the foundations, while automatic gunfire echoed through the corridors. Red lights flashed like inverted lighthouses warning of imminent doom. Faceless men in unmarked fatigues, advanced body armor, and wielding cutting-edge weapons, moved with drilled military precision, heading toward unknown objectives like an unstoppable juggernaut.

Another explosion, this one closer. Half his cameras were dead, and the facility map showed red in nearly every entrance. He’d locked the elevators out of this level after the first infiltrations had begun. But what had happened everywhere else first was almost worse. The enemy had spared no one, not civilians, nor even their dependents. They had all been gunned down with equal, brutal, efficiency.

It was the end.

  The end of this project, the end of his country, the end of centuries of expanding democracy.

Or so he thought.