DARPA engineer Mark Clyne is sent to an American
military airbase in
Chișinău, to investigate the death of Delta Force operator Chris Davis, who is part of the US Special Forces led by General James Orland to support the Moldovan government against the insurgents in a
civil war. The Special Forces soldiers are equipped with one of Clyne's creations, a line of
hyperspectral imaging goggles, which had captured images of an unknown entity that kills almost instantaneously. The
signal intelligence ops wrote it off as interference, but Clyne believes the sightings to be legitimate, while
CIA Case Officer Fran Madison believes the sightings to be local insurgency members wearing an advanced form of
active camouflage technology. She has orders from her superiors to retrieve any sample of it. Orland assigns Clyne and Madison to a Delta Force team led by Major Sessions on an
extraction mission to locate their missing Utah team at
Durlești. There they find Comstock, one of the few survivors of the team, hiding under a bathtub, before coming under attack by the invisible entities. The entities are impervious to small arms fire and explosives, and the group is forced to retreat, but their vehicles are flipped over by land mines, killing Comstock and forcing them to take shelter in an abandoned factory inhabited by another surviving Utah team member, Chen, and two Slovene siblings; Sari and Bogdan, whose father died surrounding it with
iron filings to protect them from the entities, known locally as "
Aratare". Establishing radio contact with the airbase, the team set up a rendezvous for extraction and construct
IED's and
grenades laced with iron filings, using them when they must evacuate the factory on foot after entities bypass the surrounding filings. Reaching an alternate extraction point at an abandoned plaza, the group barely manages to escape, but many troops sent to cover the landing zone, including Bogdan, are killed. The group are redirected to a Moldovan-controlled civilian bunker as the airbase was evacuated after being overrun by the entities. Using information gathered from Sari, Clyne deduces the apparitions are likely made of
Bose-Einstein condensate, and are incapable of passing through iron and ceramic materials, which explains Comstock surviving and the entities' inability to pass through
tank armor plating. Working overnight with Orland and surviving military engineers, he constructs ceramic armored suits and makeshift weapons capable of breaking down the condensate entities. The next morning, the remaining Delta operators, Clyne and Madison use
V-22s to leave for the Masrov
power plant, which Clyne believes can generate enough power for the condensate to work, and where all the entity encounters first started. While the troops mount an offensive distraction on the roof of the plant, Clyne and Madison descend into a laboratory underneath it. There they discover the former regime's scientists had mass-produced the condensate entities as molecular copies of human test subjects' remains, whose
peripheral nervous systems were hooked up to a central machine that keeps the copies alive, but they escaped when the facility was damaged during the civil war, leading to the current situation. With the battle above threatening to release the remaining condensates, Clyne manages to activate the
failsafe that deactivates them. He also unplugs the human remains from the machine, finally letting them die in peace. With the apparitions gone, the US and allied Moldovan military resume their work of taking control of the city from the insurgents while the
DoD considers
reverse engineering the condensate machine for wartime purposes. Clyne bids goodbye to Orland, Sari, and Madison, and is airlifted back home. == Cast ==