Chapter 95 - Blood on the Gantry
The smoke was alive with tracer fire. Bullets snapped past my ears, biting into the steel ribs of the silo with deafening clangs. A mercenary lunged through the fog, brandishing an automatic shotgun.
I didn't waste time bringing my rifle around. I closed the distance, slapping the barrel of his shotgun aside with my left forearm, driving the reinforced carbon-fiber knuckle of my tactical glove straight into his windpipe. The man gagged, stumbling backward. I stepped in, drew my combat knife in an ice-pick grip, and drove the blade beneath his chin, severing his brainstem in one fluid, brutal stroke.
Before his body hit the grating, I stripped his secondary fragmentation grenade, popped the pin, and tossed it into the open elevator cab behind him where three more mercenaries were attempting to deploy.
*Boom.*
The enclosed blast blew the elevator doors off their tracks and sent a shower of twisted metal and severed limbs cascading down into the missile abyss.
Above me, Abigail was moving along the high catwalk like an apex predator. She wasn't just defending herself; she was hunting. She moved between cover with precision, firing two-round double taps into any contractor who attempted to train their sights on me.
"Clear right, Mom!" Abigail shouted over the gunfire. "You’ve got two technical specialists at the umbilical console! They’re initiating the solid-fuel burn!"
I broke into a dead sprint along the catwalk. The Minuteman missile loomed above me, its massive rocket body humming with thousands of volts of auxiliary power. Warning strobes flashed amber, then blood red:
**IGNITION PROTOCOL: 04:00 MINUTES.**
Two men in white technician suits scrambled toward the emergency manual overrides, desperately trying to bypass the digital locks. As I rounded the gantry corner, the first technician reached for a sidearm.
I fired on the move. Three rounds entered his chest, dropping him instantly across the terminal keyboard. The second technician put his hands up, trembling violently, his eyes wild with terror.
"Step away from the board!" I bellowed, the muzzle of my rifle smoking an inch from his forehead.
"It's... it's automated!" he screamed, his voice cracking. "Sterling locked the terminal! The physical abort keys were taken to the master control bunker beneath the silo basin! You can't stop it from here!"
A burst of high-caliber fire suddenly punched through the technician's chest from above. The man collapsed, spraying crimson across the monitors.
I rolled backward behind the armored housing of the umbilical crane just as a hail of armor-piercing rounds ripped through the spot where I had been standing. Looking up through the smoke, I saw Victor Sterling standing on the hydraulic lift platform, descending toward my level, flanked by four heavily armored bodyguards carrying suppressed submachine guns.
"You really don't understand what we built here, General," Victor Sterling called out, his voice dripping with condescension. "The world is chaotic. It is messy. Weak politicians, entitled citizens, broken institutions. Harrison and I spent forty years cultivating the resources to reset the board. When those twelve missiles launch, the United States military will tear itself apart trying to identify the phantom strike. And from the ashes, our corporate alliance will dictate the new terms of global sovereignty."
"You forgot one variable in your equation, Sterling," I said, leaning out from behind the steel pillar, my eyes locking onto his.
"Oh? And what would that be?"
May you like
"A mother who promised her daughter justice."
I fired.
