“Still pretending to be a soldier?” my brother laughed as my entire family humiliated me at our backyard barbecue, but seconds later, a V-22 Osprey landed outside, two officers saluted me, and my father finally realized he had no idea who his daughter really was. / Chapter 26 / 100

Chapter 26 - The Trap Springs

"We have to move, David," I urged, wrapping my arm under his shoulder and hauling him to his feet. He cried out in agony as his atrophied leg muscles bore weight for the first time in nearly a decade, his knuckles digging into my tactical vest for purchase. "The facility is destabilizing. The extraction sub is waiting at Module Four."

David shook his head violently, his breath hitching. "No... Emily... listen to me... you don't understand..."

Before he could finish, the monitors surrounding the central lab flickered from their green medical readouts to a static-filled white screen. A high-pitched audio feedback squeal tore through the speakers mounted in the ceiling, followed by a slow, mocking applause that resonated through the damp chamber.

"Touching. Truly touching, Director Carter," a voice drawled over the intercom.

The voice was smooth, cultured, entirely devoid of panic. It had the measured, calculating cadences of an academic who considered human lives to be nothing more than rounding errors in a defense procurement ledger.

I froze, dragging David behind the cover of the central console, my sidearm drawn and trained on the overhead speakers. "Identify yourself."

"You already know who I am, Emily," the voice replied. "Or at least, your father knew me before he lost his spine and tried to bury his paper trail. I am Dr. Alistair Vance. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense... and Chief Architect of Project Chimera."

My blood ran colder than the water swirling around my boots. *Vance.* The Secretary’s brother. The high-ranking civilian official who had authorized my deployment to the Pacific fleet only hours ago. He hadn't sent me here to rescue David. He had sent me here to deliver the final piece of the puzzle.

"You used Jake's shipping lanes," I spat, my eyes scanning the shadows of the room, looking for remote camera feeds. "You used my family to finance your illegal experiments, and when the oversight committees started asking questions, you set Jake up to take the fall."

"Jake was an idiot," Vance laughed, the sound cold and tinny through the speakers. "He was so desperate for his father’s approval, so desperate to prove he was a bigger man than David ever was, that he signed every end-user certificate I put in front of him without reading a single paragraph. But you, Emily... you were always the wild card. The decorated combat intelligence officer. The sister who wouldn't stop digging."

"I found him," I snarled. "And I'm bringing him to the surface. Your shadow network is finished, Vance. The Seventh Fleet is holding the perimeter above us."

"The Seventh Fleet believes this facility is an abandoned research station containing an unstable Soviet-era nuclear power cell," Vance countered smoothly. "In exactly eight minutes, a precision kinetic penetrator will be launched from an orbital platform under my direct command. It will strike this canyon, collapsing the tectonic shelf and burying Tartarus Deep beneath half a million tons of basalt. The world will mourn the tragic loss of Director Emily Carter, killed during a deep-sea survey accident."

The monitors shifted. The screen displayed an orbital countdown clock:

`07:59... 07:58... 07:57...`

"He didn't... bring me down here to study me, Em..." David rasped, his hand gripping my wrist with shocking, desperate strength. His fingernails bit into my flesh through the glove. "He... he needed the Chimera decryption key. It was burned... into my neural implant before Tartus... they couldn't extract it without... without an identical genetic match to stabilize the synaptic bridge."

David looked at me, horror dawning in his bloodshot eyes. "He didn't keep me alive to lure you into a trap to kill you. He needed your DNA to unlock the weapon."

Suddenly, the steel walls groaned. The floodlights overhead turned blood red.

From the ceiling of the containment room, four heavy automated turrets dropped down on pneumatic swivels, their twin minigun barrels whining as they spooled up to speed.

"Miller! Chen!" I roared into my radio. "Breach and clear! We're pinned down!"

"Director, we have heavy hostiles approaching the access tube!" Miller’s voice screamed through static and the roar of automatic gunfire. "The corridor is collapsing! We can't reach you!"

"Die with your family, Director," Vance’s voice purred over the comms. "It’s the only thing the Carters were ever good at."