Chapter 66 - The Shattered Mirror
Sterling roared in agony, his reflexive instinct jerking his hand backward. The hammer of his sidearm fell, the round tearing through Claire’s shoulder rather than her skull.
The sudden movement broke the biometric contact.
*AUTHORIZATION FAILED: BIOMETRIC LINK SEVERED.*
*RE-ENTER MASTER CIPHER.*
"You stupid bitch!" Sterling snarled, pistol-whipping Claire across the face with the heavy frame of his sidearm. She collapsed to the floor of the dais, bleeding and unconscious, but the sequence was broken.
That half-second was all I needed.
I closed the distance in three strides. I didn't fire—my carbine had run dry on the last burst. I used the weapon as an impact tool, driving the steel muzzle straight into Sterling’s chest. The impact cracked his ribs, knocking him off balance and sending his service weapon skattering across the metal grating.
Sterling hit the deck hard, but he rolled with the instinct of an old combat veteran. He came up with a combat knife drawn from his belt, the six-inch serrated blade flashing in the cold light.
"You never understood the big picture, Frank!" Sterling wheezed, blood flecking his lips as he circled me. "You were just a hammer! You thought honor was a strategy! Honor is a luxury for the nations that win!"
He lunged.
The blade cut through the left sleeve of my combat jacket, slicing into the flesh of my bicep. Pain flared white-hot, but pain was just information. I stepped inside the arc of his second strike, trapping his right wrist with my left hand, driving my right elbow straight into the side of his jaw.
Bone cracked. Sterling stumbled, but his grip on the knife didn't loosen. He threw his entire body weight into me, driving us both against the master terminal.
Behind us, Abigail was screaming over the keyboard: "Dad! The sub-orbital arrays! The override failed—he had a secondary relay set to auto-fire if the dual-key failed!"
On the overhead monitors, the camera feeds switched to the exterior of the nunatak.
High above the ice sheet, the snow-covered mountain peak was opening. Two massive steel silos, disguised as natural rock formations, were splitting apart. Deep within the silos, twin kinetic-energy bombardment platforms—the dreaded *Project Odin*, sub-orbital tungsten rods capable of striking any coordinate on earth with the power of a tactical nuclear weapon without radioactive fallout—were igniting their solid-fuel boosters.
"You can't stop it!" Sterling laughed through a mouth full of blood, struggling against my grip on his knife hand. "The fail-safe is kinetic! The rods are targeted on the three primary power distribution hubs: Chicago, Dallas, and Philadelphia! The grid falls whether I'm alive or dead!"
I twisted his wrist until the tendons screamed. The knife dropped, ringing against the deck.
I grabbed Sterling by the throat with both hands, lifting him off his feet and slamming his spine against the edge of the holotank.
"Where is the abort code, Arthur?" I demanded, my thumbs pressing into his carotid arteries. "Give me the abort code!"
"There... is... no... abort..." Sterling choked out, a ghastly, triumphant smile stretching across his purple lips. "The future... belongs... to the strong..."
"Dad!" Abigail yelled from the console. "He’s telling the truth! There's no abort software in the local terminal! The control sequence has been transferred to the telemetry pod on the missiles themselves!"
The floor beneath us shook violently.
The solid-fuel boosters had ignited. Through the structural observation ports in the ceiling, twin pillars of blinding orange fire lit up the Arctic sky. The kinetic platforms were ascending, screaming toward the upper atmosphere at Mach 7.
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In six minutes, they would reach their sub-orbital apogee.
In twelve minutes, the tungsten rods would descend, turning the American power grid into molten slag.
