Chapter 50 - The Threshold of the Void
The explosion blew us out of the drainage culvert and into the shallow, sulfurous waters of the salt marsh.
We hit the mud hard, coughing, our lungs burning from the residue of freon and cordite that clung to our gear. Behind us, a massive column of black smoke and venting white steam roared into the midday sky from the refinery's ventilation shafts, signaling the total collapse of the subterranean complex.
Vance rolled onto his back, gasping for air, clutching his tactical terminal to his chest. He tapped the cracked screen frantically with trembling, muddy fingers.
"Vance... report," I croaked, spitting out mouthfuls of brackish water as I forced myself onto my hands and knees. My ribs felt cracked, my neck was burning from the graze of David's bullet, and every muscle in my body screamed in protest. "Did the signal sever? Did the kinetic rods drop?"
Vance stared at the screen for five agonizing seconds, the wind whipping the tall marsh grass around us.
"The uplink to the twelve orbital nodes... it severed at T-minus twelve seconds," he whispered, his voice shaking with disbelief. "The kinetic strikes didn't launch. The targeting vectors collapsed. The tungsten penetrators remained locked in their atmospheric deployment cradles."
I collapsed back into the mud, closing my eyes, letting the heat of the Texas sun beat down on my battered face. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the silence returned. No sirens. No gunfire. No mocking transmissions.
"We did it," Vance breathed, letting his head drop back against the salt grass. "It's over, Major. The Obsidian array is dead in the water."
"No," I whispered, opening my eyes to stare at the vast, empty expanse of the blue sky above. "David said Tartarus had two architects. He was just the builder."
Before Vance could respond, a low, thrumming vibration shook the earth beneath our bodies.
It wasn't an aftershock from the explosion.
Out across the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, five miles off the coastline, the surface of the ocean began to churn violently. A massive, unregistered sub-surface vessel—larger than any naval submarine in the Western fleet, its hull coated in radar-absorbent obsidian plating—surfaced through the waves like a leviathan rising from the deep.
On Vance's terminal, a new transmission illuminated.
It didn't come from the destroyed refinery. It came from an encrypted frequency originating directly from within the United States Department of Defense's highest command bunker in Virginia.
The message bypassed all tactical firewalls, appearing on the cracked glass in glowing crimson text:
`SUBSURFACE ASSET "LEVIATHAN" DEPLOYED.`
`SECONDARY ARCHITECT: ONLINE.`
`OVERRIDE CODE ACCEPTED: "ARTHUR-CARTER-ALPHA-01."`
`MESSAGE: "YOU ALWAYS WERE MY FAVORITE SOLDIER, ELENA. THANK YOU FOR PROVING THAT DAVID WAS NEVER FIT TO INHERIT THE EMPIRE. RETURN TO HEADQUARTERS FOR YOUR NEXT ASSIGNMENT."`
I stared at the screen as my blood ran colder than the liquid nitrogen that had just buried my brother.
Fifty miles away, in the secure tactical tent where my father was supposed to be weeping in cuffs, the satellite tracking feed showed his security detail's biometric monitors flatlining simultaneously.
My father hadn't been fooled by David.
May you like
David had been auditioning for *him*.
And out on the shimmering water of the Gulf, the massive black submarine's primary launch silos began to open, one by one.
