Internal Affairs - Part One

A missing convoy. A murdered scientist. A phrase buried inside a dying man's warning.

The danger lies not only in what can be seen, but in what has been deliberately kept out of sight.

Former United States Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael C. Holt, now reduced to an NCO role within the multinational peacekeeping task force known as Rainbow Initiative, is sent to investigate the disappearance of a classified convoy near the hardened borders of the American safe zones. What begins as a routine recovery operation soon exposes something far larger: stolen containment technology, false-flag violence, dead scientists, and a trail of encrypted references leading across the Pacific.

Half a world away, Declan A. Byrne, Michael's oldest friend and a senior Australian intelligence analyst, uncovers the same pattern inside classified channels. A defector. A vanished prototype. A phrase repeated in dead languages, refugee ledgers, and encrypted files.

From the ruined edges of North America to the urban corridors of Australia and the unstable coasts of Southeast Asia, Michael and Declan are pulled into a conspiracy buried beneath humanitarian missions, intelligence failures, and the fragile politics of survival.

And somewhere inside the chaos lies a question neither man is ready to answer:

When survival itself becomes a system, who decides who gets to live?