When an experimental bioweapon called the Cascade is deployed against an enemy destroyer, the ship goes silent without a single explosion. Command calls it a success and sends in a recon team to confirm there are no survivors. They are wrong. What the marines find is not victory, but a war crime. The weapon did not kill its targets. It transformed them, leaving conscious bodies trapped in reshaped flesh that refuses to die. As military leadership moves to bury the evidence and deploy the weapon again, combat journalist Ralamander Vashish is forced into a classified operation where truth itself becomes a threat. When biological immortality begins to spread beyond the battlefield, the war changes. Orders collapse, systems fail, and the line between weapon and witness disappears. PERSISTENCE is a military science fiction thriller about secret weapons, moral collapse, and what happens when death is no longer guaranteed.