My Daughter Was Beaten, Locked Away, and Threatened by Her Millionaire Husband’s Family—When They Laughed at Me and Said My Military Rank Didn’t Frighten Them, I Slowly Turned Around and Made One Move They Never Expected. / Chapter 65 / 100

Chapter 65 - The Rupture

The .45 caliber hollow-point round didn't strike Sterling. It shattered the reinforced bronze fitting of the cryogenic cooling conduit.

A volcanic explosion of liquid helium at minus-three-hundred degrees Fahrenheit erupted into the center of the dais. The supercooled gas instantly expanded, creating a blinding, violent whiteout that dropped the ambient temperature in the command pit by eighty degrees in less than two seconds.

The contractors on the catwalk fired blindly. High-velocity 5.56 rounds spattered across the steel flooring, ricocheting with deafening clatter, but the sudden cloud of dense, freezing fog ruined their thermal optics and night-vision sights.

"Move!" I barked, lunging through the freezing fog.

I grabbed Abigail by the tactical harness, throwing her behind the heavy steel frame of the primary holotank pedestal just as a burst of automatic fire chewed through the floor where she had been standing.

"Abby! The terminal!" I roared over the gunfire. "Sever the physical uplink to the satellite conduit! I'll buy you three minutes!"

"I'm on it!" she screamed back, pulling a physical bus cable from her kit and slamming it directly into the master diagnostics port of the primary terminal. Her fingers became a blur over the keyboard, entering the counter-encryption keys we had stolen from the safehouse on the Potomac.

Through the freezing haze, I saw a silhouette moving toward the secondary console.

Sterling.

He wasn't running. He was dragging Claire Vance by her hair toward the biometric authorization plate. Claire was kicking, screaming against the tape, but the old general possessed the terrifying, wiry strength of a man driven by absolute fanaticism.

"You're too late, Frank!" Sterling’s voice cut through the frost. "The transfer is ninety-eight percent complete! All she has to do is touch the glass!"

A contractor dropped from the access ladder ten feet in front of me, raising a suppressed carbine.

I didn't hesitate. I drove my shoulder into his chest, taking him to the deck. We slammed against the icy steel. His rifle discharged into the air, the rounds punching harmlessly through the suspended ceiling tiles. I brought the heel of my combat boot down hard on his wrist, shattering the joint, seized his discarded carbine, and fired a three-round burst through his tactical vest before he could draw his sidearm.

Rolling to my knee, I sighted the catwalks above.

Two more Aegis mercenaries were maneuvering along the perimeter railing, trying to get an angle on Abigail’s workstation. I squeezed the trigger—two controlled pairs. The first contractor flipped over the railing, plummeting forty feet to the concrete floor below. The second scrambled backward, pinned behind a structural I-beam.

"Abigail! What’s your status?!"

"Firewall breached!" she shouted, the illumination from the terminal screen reflecting off her frost-covered face. "He’s using a polymorphic cipher! Every time I cut a node, the master server routes through a secondary relay! I can't stop the launch from here—the command isn't originating from this room!"

I swung my rifle toward the dais.

The fog was beginning to clear, sucked away by the massive environmental ventilation fans overhead.

Sterling had Claire Vance pinned against the primary console. He had stripped the tactical glove from her right hand and was forcing her palm downward toward the glowing blue glass of the biometric scanner.

*BIOMETRIC MATCH DETECTED: VANCE, CLAIRE E.*

*COMMENCING SOVEREIGN AUTHORIZATION SEQUENCE...*

"Arthur, stop!" I yelled, stepping out of cover, the carbine leveled at his chest.

Sterling had his service pistol pressed against the base of Claire’s skull.

"One more step, Frank, and I paint the console with her brains," Sterling whispered, his eyes wide, wild, and utterly consumed by madness. "The system requires a living pulse to initiate. But it only requires it for ten seconds. If she dies after the pulse is read, the protocol doesn't care."

On the main holotank, a crimson progress bar was filling:

*AUTHORIZATION: 78%... 84%... 91%...*

Claire Vance looked at me. Through the tears, through the terror, something primal broke in her eyes. For months, she had believed she was the spider at the center of the web. She had believed her son Julian was an instrument of her will, that Abigail was an insect to be crushed beneath her heel, that the world was something she could buy, control, and discard.

Now, she was nothing more than a piece of meat being pressed against a scanner by the real monster she had funded.

She looked past me, straight at Abigail.

A mother looking at a daughter. A monster looking at the girl she had tried to destroy.

Claire Vance did the only unexpected thing of her entire wretched life.