44: Chapter 44 Family Secrets Exposed, Inheritance Rights Discarded

Those were old memos from around the time of the merger between Northrop and Grumman.

Her mind was sharp, and she had possessed a photographic memory for numbers since she was a child:

Northrop Grumman was formed in 1994 through the merger of two previously independent aerospace companies, Northrop and Grumman.

The legal proceedings for the deal were carried out cleanly and flawlessly,

and her grandfather, Frederick Hopkins, had completed the acquisition in the name of the private investment firm he started in the 1940s.

The critical part came in 1997,

just three years after the merger, Northrop Grumman presented the official service plan for the b-2 bomber.

Three years.

From zero to service,

no, one couldn't even call it "from zero,"

because before her grandfather gained control, the two companies, Northrop and Grumman, had each spent decades working on stealth technology and flying wing designs, yet those past decades had yielded no results.

After twisting the two companies into a single rope, it took only three years for this project—wilder than Lockheed and Boeing combined—to come to fruition.

She was twenty-three at the time, and this timeline raised a question that any intelligent person would have:

What exactly happened during those three years? How did her grandfather manage to do it back then?

So she put down all the memos, walked through the courtyard corridor, and found her father.

Her father was sitting by the window in the manor's study reading a book, the evening sunset gilding his white hair.

She brought these two questions to him, her tone one of pure academic curiosity, much like when she would ask questions of her professors while submitting papers at Princeton.

Then she saw that look that changed everything.

Daniel Hopkins put down his book and looked at her.

His face did not move once throughout the entire process, but she saw his pupils contract,

not the natural contraction one sees when exposed to bright light, but an extremely slow, almost heavy contraction, a fading of all warmth from the center toward the inner layers.

He stared at her for a very, very long time. Outside the window, the palm trees in the backyard cast shadows across the entire courtyard.

Then he spoke to her in a tone completely incongruous with that afternoon: "Some things... are like poisonous flowers."

"They are bright and dazzling on the surface, but the moment you touch them, you will die."

She did not press for more. At twenty-three, she was sharp enough to extract ninety percent of the information from a single silence.

Her father wasn't refusing to answer her; he was afraid. What he feared wasn't the knowledge itself, but the chain reaction that would follow the question—one that even he couldn't suppress.

From that day on, everything changed. The unspoken understanding she had maintained with her father for over twenty years began to disintegrate at an irreversible speed.

Her father no longer discussed Northrop Grumman-level planning with her; he canceled the liaison meetings for the various military branches for the next quarter that she was scheduled to manage; from that autumn on, her father stopped calling her into his study alone.

And then, finally, a month before she graduated from graduate school, her father rewrote his will, transferring control of Northrop Grumman to Charles and leaving her behind in the family estate, which was embroidered with the Hopkins family crest.

A single sentence. A single look. A warning line sealed beneath family secrets. Just like that, she was pushed down from the peak.

...

Diana stopped in front of the sandstone fireplace. The morning light poured in through the glass courtyard windows, dyeing the entire inner courtyard a faint reddish-gold.

She pulled the front of her robe together with her hand. Ten years... Only now, standing in this central courtyard where a kill order had just been issued in the early hours of the morning, did she finally feel she had some clues.

She looked at the smoldering dark red embers in the fireplace, and that date emerged in her mind: April 1997.

In that single month, two events that appeared completely unrelated, yet whose every detail was intertwined with the other, occurred: the b-2 bomber officially entered service, and the fifty-year-long abnormal deficit in hydroelectric resources at the Hoover Dam suddenly ceased.

Before that, for fifty full years starting from the Roswell rumors in July 1947, the Hoover Dam's hydroelectric resources had been evaporating into unknown circuits at a rate of 20% to 30% for water power and 30% to 40% for electricity.

Such a magnitude of energy consumption could never be any conventional project. She had previously thought this was just corruption, some kind of massive grey project under the federal budget, a secret left behind by her grandfather that needed to be shielded and covered up.

But now, seeing an old guy like Edward Warren willing to risk his life by hitching his wagon to a space rocket maniac to investigate it, seeing Walsh use the entire Department of Homeland Security budget as a cover just to dig a thousand meters deep... She wasn't blind.

The Hoover Dam matter was definitely connected to the b-2 bomber. And that connection wasn't some shallow causality like "using excess hydroelectric power to build a factory."

That strange time window, the 1947 Roswell rumors, synchronized with the start of the Hoover Dam hydroelectric anomaly that same year; something unknown happened during that time, running until it ended in 1997, which precisely locked onto the same year as the B-2 officially entering service.

Her grandfather was able to condense dozens of patents and hundreds of design teams from the two old companies into something that had never appeared in human aviation history within three years... Something must have happened between then that she didn't know about, something so classified that her father feared it would bring disaster upon himself.

And she continued to think further. The dam. The power deficit. The overlapping service year of the stealth bomber. When her father was in his twilight years, he had ordered her to kill everyone investigating this line. These three clues were like three strings pulled tight from different directions in her mind, humming at the same resonance point.

She had not yet seen the shape of the black hole at the center, but every vibration of the strings pointed in the same direction: what her father feared was never corruption or military procurement kickbacks within the defense circle.

For any century-old military-industrial family in the Lighthouse Country, those things were just a layer of grease. Dirty, but not fatal.

What could make her father erase all intimacy from his eyes, cause the inheritance to suddenly flip, and make him fear her, could only be something that brought destruction upon contact. An absolute prohibition deeper than death.

And now, no matter what was hidden beneath that prohibition, Edward, Walsh, and Musk already knew. Walsh was dead, but the other two were still alive. And they already knew.

...

California, twelve miles east of Los Angeles, the Starlink closed testing base.

On Google Maps, this area was just a grey square that had been intentionally blurred, marked with "Private Property, No Trespassing."

The nearly six square miles of desert hills were wrapped in two layers of high-voltage pulse fencing and three layers of passive infrared sensor arrays; any unauthorized aircraft, from civilian drones to low-orbit reconnaissance satellites, would be locked onto and warded off by an automatic frequency jamming system the moment it entered the edge of the airspace.

Inside the base, there were only a few low, prefabricated concrete buildings; from the outside, they were no different from ordinary industrial warehouses, but walk into any one of them, and you would find it filled with independent experimental chambers built to the highest standards of electromagnetic shielding.

Over the past seven days, Edward and Musk had not left this area for a single step.

Musk's gunshot wound on his right arm was healing quickly. The sniper bullet had only grazed the outside of his forearm, leaving a nearly four-inch-long gash; it hadn't hit the bone or severed any major nerves, and the bleeding had been stopped and the stitches completed within less than an hour after the shootout.

By the seventh day, he had already removed the bandages, leaving only a new, dark red scar on his arm.

He could move normally, pick up a coffee cup, and slide his fingers rapidly across a touchscreen. For someone who worked at least sixteen hours a day, an injured hand couldn't affect his productivity; at most, it just made him frown occasionally when pulling at the scar while typing.

The first batch of Warren Family security forces, who had driven overnight from Nevada, arrived on the perimeter of the base the morning after the shootout.

Three black armored SUVs, an armored van loaded with weapons and equipment, and over twenty private security personnel wearing unmarked dark grey combat uniforms—these men were elites Edward had pulled from the security network the family had accumulated over three generations, and each of them had at least eight years of service in the military or law enforcement agencies before joining the Warren Family.

They did not attempt to enter the core area of Musk's testing base but instead quietly set up positions on the perimeter, forming two complementary lines of defense with Musk's tactical squad.

Seven days was enough time for the two men to confirm one thing: the storm had temporarily passed.

Musk's private reconnaissance satellites had not captured any suspicious gathering activities within a thirty-mile radius of the base over the past week.

Signal intelligence intercepts had also not picked up any encrypted instructions pointing to follow-up pursuits related to the shooting incident.

The sniper had not appeared again, and the attention of those people in the Deep State seemed to have been diverted by some temporarily unknown factor, or perhaps they were also waiting, waiting for the next opportunity with a higher chance of success.

But Edward knew this wasn't the end. It was just halftime.

The morning sun rose from the direction of the San Bernardino Mountains, dyeing the desert hills around the base, covered in low shrubs and weathered rocks, a dusty golden yellow.

Inside the largest prefabricated concrete building in the center of the base, which had been converted into a comprehensive space serving both tactical command and temporary living functions, one wall featured a full-coverage satellite monitoring screen array, another wall had several cots placed against it, and in the middle stood a long iron table occupied by various encrypted communication devices and paper maps.

Edward Warren stood in front of the iron table, having changed into a clean set of casual clothes, similar to what he had been wearing when he held the meeting at the fishing cabin at Gold Lake, but the bags under his eyes were deeper than they had been then.

His chief of staff, Raymond Carter, was not by his side; Raymond was currently holding down the fort in Las Vegas, remotely maintaining the Warren Family's daily operations in Nevada via encrypted channels, but his security captain, a retired Army Ranger Lieutenant Colonel named Coleman Brian, was standing beside him, concisely reporting the estimated arrival time of the second batch of security forces coming from Nevada.

Musk walked over from the other side, holding a cup of freshly brewed black coffee. He was wearing a dark blue work jacket with the SpaceX logo, and a piece of a dark red scar was visible beneath the cuff of his right arm.

He set the coffee cup on the iron table, glanced at the security personnel beside Edward who were dressed in casual clothes but whose standing postures clearly bore traces of military training, and then spoke in a half-teasing tone.

"These Retainers of yours..." He used the word Edward had used in the Lighthouse Country, his pronunciation a bit stiff, but the meaning was intact, "Their assembly speed is about half a day slower than my special forces, but there are twice as many of them."

"Is this what you call making up for quality with quantity?"