Chapter 34 - Black Sky Protocol
The Gulf of Mexico at 0300 was a sheet of obsidian glass, undisturbed by the fury of the storm that had raged hundreds of miles to the west.
I broke the surface of the warm water without a splash, my closed-circuit rebreather leaving no trail of bubbles. Through my night-vision visor, the coastline of Galveston appeared as a silhouette of dead high-rises and dark oil refineries. The national blackout had already begun. The eastern power grid had collapsed three hours prior, exactly according to Eleanor’s schedule.
I slipped out of my flippers, buried them in the sand beneath the low-water line, and activated my encrypted localized locator.
*Beep. Beep.*
Two hundred yards up the dunes, hidden beneath the shadow of a decaying sea wall, an idling matte-black combat vehicle flashed its infrared markers. It was a Ghost-class autonomous reconnaissance carrier, left behind by the Vanguard sleeper cell I had mobilized before leaving for Tartarus.
I approached from the blind spot, my hand resting on the grip of my rifle.
"Vanguard Six," a gravelly voice whispered from the brush.
"Standing in the gap," I answered the countersign.
A figure emerged from the salt-cedar bushes—Master Sergeant Kelly Vance, the son of the Admiral, a sniper who had pulled me out of three different ambushes in the Levant. His face was painted in matte-black and gray camouflage cream, his eyes steady behind his ballistic glasses.
"Good to see you breathing, Major," Vance said, offering a single, firm grip of wrists. "We thought Tartarus swallowed you whole."
"They tried," I said, climbing into the passenger seat of the carrier. "Where are we?"
"All military bases in Texas have been placed under federal receivership by Hayes' proxy commanders," Vance said, shifting the vehicle into gear. The electric motor hummed silently as we tore across the coastal highway, running without headlights beneath the dark canopy of the starless sky. "Civilian law enforcement has vanished. The Texas Rangers tried to secure the state capitol in Austin, but an Obsidian private security battalion moved in with armored personnel carriers two hours ago. They've cordoned off the entire western county."
"And the Carter estate?"
Vance glanced at me, his jaw tightening. "It's the regional command hub, Emily. They aren't hiding anymore. They've established a two-mile exclusion zone around your family's ranch. Automated sentry turrets, drone swarms, patrol dogs. Jake was seen at the gates twelve hours ago, escorted by private contractors. But Arthur..."
"What about Arthur?"
"The old man tried to hold an emergency press conference at his Austin headquarters to declare the whole thing a rogue military exercise. He thought he was still in control. Obsidian operatives snatched him off the steps in front of thirty reporters. They dragged him back to the ranch."
I looked out the window as the dark pine forests of central Texas began to replace the coastal marshes. My father had spent forty years building a family empire on pride, arrogance, and the absolute conviction that he was the apex predator of the modern world. Now, his own wife and son had turned his kingdom into a fortified slaughterhouse, and he was nothing more than an inconvenient hostage.
"Eleanor is preparing to initialize the Chimera payload," I said, checking my tactical magazines. "She needs the localized server array beneath the ranch to broadcast the master handshake to Hayes' fleet."
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"We're three people, Major," Vance said calmly. "Against an entire mercenary brigade."
"We're not three people," I said, looking into the rearview mirror as three more stealth transports emerged from the darkness of the highway behind us, their infrared running lights blinking in sequence. "Vanguard doesn't leave its commanders behind. Let's go home."
