The briefing room on the Hyperion was functional rather than impressive—a wide table, a central holo-projector, and enough chairs for senior staff plus anyone Raynor decided needed to hear what was coming. The lighting was deliberately flat, designed to keep everyone alert rather than comfortable.
Jake stood near the back, arms crossed, watching as the holographic display rendered the target in slowly rotating detail.
The facility was built into the surface of a barren moon designated KL-2. No atmosphere worth mentioning. No settlement within three systems. The kind of place the Dominion used when they wanted distance between their work and anyone who might ask questions about it.
Matt Horner handled the tactical overview with the precision Jake had come to expect from him. Clean delivery. No wasted words.
"The station is partially underground," Horner said, highlighting the surface structures with a sweep of his hand. "Two main access points—a landing pad on the northern face, and a cargo lift on the western ridge. Below ground, at least three levels of research labs, connected by a central corridor. Garrison is light—estimated forty personnel, mostly science staff with a security detachment."
"Lightly defended doesn't mean undefended," Raynor added from the head of the table. "Dominion science stations always have teeth. They just hide them better."
Tychus leaned back in his chair, boots propped on the edge of the table. "So what's the play? Drop in, grab the data, get out before anyone notices?"
"We split the approach," Raynor said. "First team hits the landing pad—draws attention, keeps security busy. Second team enters through the cargo lift and accesses the research levels."
His gaze shifted to Jake. "You're on the second team."
Jake nodded. Underground work suited him. Tight corridors, limited personnel, environments where sensing ability mattered more than raw firepower.
"Rules of engagement?" someone asked.
"Science staff—don't shoot unless they shoot first," Raynor said. "Security is fair game. Primary objective is the data core. Whatever Project Thorn is, the answers are in there."
The briefing continued for another twenty minutes—logistics, timing, extraction protocols. Jake absorbed the tactical details while a separate part of his mind kept turning over that name.
Thorn.
The familiarity was stronger now. Not a memory, exactly—more like the shape of one. A briefing room not unlike this one, years ago. Dominion insignia on the wall. A voice he couldn't place discussing operational parameters that had been classified beyond his clearance at the time.
He'd been adjacent to it. Close enough to catch fragments. Not close enough to see the whole picture.
That bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
They deployed six hours later.
The moon's surface was a wasteland of grey rock and black dust, illuminated by the pale light of the planet it orbited. The dropship came in low and fast, using the terrain to mask its approach. Jake sat in the cargo bay with four Raiders—all veterans, all quiet, all doing the same pre-mission checks they'd done a hundred times before.
The cargo lift entrance was exactly where the intel said it would be—a reinforced platform set into the ridge face, designed for heavy equipment transfers. The controls responded to the override codes Horner had extracted from the intercepted signal.
The platform descended in silence.
Below the surface, the station was cold. Not the recycled chill of a ship—genuine cold, the kind that came from minimal climate control in a facility that prioritized function over comfort. The corridors were narrow, lined with conduit and bare metal, and lit by strips of pale blue emergency lighting that gave everything a clinical, sterile quality.
Jake's senses expanded the moment they dropped below ground level. Five floors of facility spread out beneath him—he could feel the layout through the minds inside it. Clusters of personnel on levels two and three. A denser concentration on level four—security, probably, responding to the diversion the surface team was creating.
"Level four's heavy," Jake said quietly. "Security is consolidating there. Levels two and three are lighter—research staff, mostly."
The Raider sergeant—a woman named Voss with close-cropped hair and a scar that ran from her jawline to her ear—glanced at him. "How do you know that?"
"I can feel them."
A beat of silence. Then Voss nodded, accepting it the way soldiers accepted anything that kept them alive.
"Data core?" she asked.
Jake reached deeper. Searching not for minds, but for absence—for the kind of shielded space that housed sensitive equipment. Level five. Bottom floor. Fewer minds, but the ones that were there had the particular quality of people who were guarding something important.
"Bottom level. Four, maybe five guards."
"Then that's where we go."
They moved through the upper levels without contact. Jake led from the front, guiding the team through corridors by tracking the positions of station personnel and routing around them. It was the most sustained use of his sensing ability he'd attempted since leaving Mar Sara, and it came easier than expected—a constant, low-level awareness that didn't spike into strain as long as he kept the focus passive rather than active.
Phase 2 of whatever was happening to him. He could feel the difference. The abilities hadn't grown dramatically—he wasn't throwing people around or reading thoughts. But the baseline had risen. What used to require deliberate effort now came naturally. What used to cause pain now caused mild fatigue.
Progress. Whether he wanted it or not.
They reached level five without firing a shot.
The data core was behind a reinforced door at the end of a long corridor. Two guards stood outside—armored, alert, but not expecting an approach from the interior stairwell.
Jake held up a closed fist. The team stopped.
He studied the guards through his senses. Two minds, both focused outward—watching the corridor ahead, not the stairwell behind them. Professional, but working from the assumption that any threat would come from the surface.
Jake turned to Voss. "I can give you a window. Three seconds, maybe four. Both of them will lose their footing."
Voss raised an eyebrow. "How?"
"Doesn't matter how. Can your team work with a four-second window?"
Voss looked at her squad. Four soldiers with suppressed rifles, all nodding.
"Yeah. We can work with that."
"On my mark."
Jake extended his focus toward the first guard—the one on the left, slightly closer. He found the man's center of balance and prepared a precise disruption. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to break his stance.
Then he shifted to the second guard. Held both targets in his awareness simultaneously. His vision wavered at the edges—the dual focus straining a pathway that wasn't built for it yet.
He couldn't do this for long. A few seconds at most.
"Mark."
He pushed. Both guards stumbled at the same moment—not dramatically, but enough to pull their weapons offline and break their line of sight on the corridor. The one on the left staggered into the wall. The one on the right dropped a knee, trying to recover.
The Raiders moved.
Four seconds. Suppressed fire. Both guards down before either recovered enough to raise an alarm.
Jake leaned against the stairwell wall, breathing harder than the effort should have warranted. A thin trace of warmth at his nostril told him the nosebleed was back—minor, barely worth noticing, but there.
Two targets at once. He'd done it.
Barely.
But he'd done it.
The data core was smaller than Jake expected—a single room with banks of storage servers lining the walls and a central terminal that hummed with the steady pulse of active processing. Voss's tech specialist went to work immediately, plugging in extraction hardware and beginning the download.
Jake stood guard at the door, but his attention was drawn to the terminal screen. Data scrolled past too fast to read in detail, but fragments caught his eye between the lines of code and file headers.
Subject classification: Psionic Index 7+.
Neural restructuring protocol—Phase 3 integration.
Controlled exposure: Zerg biological agents.
Jake's chest tightened.
He leaned closer. Scrolled manually. The files were organized by project designation, and the name was stamped across every header.
PROJECT THORN.
Subheadings branched beneath it. Test protocols. Subject logs. Field deployment parameters.
And one folder, buried three levels deep, labeled with a designation he recognized.
His designation.
His Dominion operational code. The one assigned to him during his Ghost training. The one that appeared on mission orders and classified briefings and the kinds of documents that normal soldiers never saw.
It was here.
In a research station he'd never been to, in a project he'd never been briefed on, filed under protocols that described exactly what had been done to him inside that hive.
Jake's hand hovered over the terminal.
Controlled exposure.
The phrase burned in his mind like a brand.
They hadn't just sent him on a mission.
They'd sent him to be taken.
"Download's at sixty percent," the tech called out.
Jake pulled his hand back from the terminal. His expression hadn't changed—the same controlled mask he'd worn through a thousand briefings and a hundred operations. But beneath it, something fundamental had cracked.
Not broken.
Cracked.
The kind of crack that let in a very specific, very cold kind of light.
"Get everything," Jake said. His voice was level. Steady. "Every file. Every log. Every byte."
Voss glanced at him. Whatever she saw in his face made her nod without question.
"You heard him," she told the tech. "Everything."
The download completed four minutes later. They extracted the drive, scrubbed the terminal, and moved for the exit.
Jake didn't look back at the screen.
He didn't need to.
The words were already carved into his memory with a precision that would never fade.
Controlled exposure.
The Dominion had fed him to the Zerg on purpose.
And now he had the proof.