Chapter 57 - Sins of the Patriarch
"A weapon," I said, my finger tightening around the trigger, "belongs to whoever owns the patent. A soldier belongs to the people standing behind her."
Arthur didn't flinch. His expression hardened, the warm, grandfatherly veneer stripping away in an instant, revealing the granite-cold operator beneath.
"Kill her," he said.
The six Aegis-One bodyguards moved with terrifying speed, but I had already initiated my dive.
I threw myself laterally over the edge of the tiered console as a hail of submachine-gun fire shattered the glass screens where I had been standing a fraction of a second before. Shards of polarized glass rained down on my back as I hit the lower deck, rolling into a tight crouch behind the main hydraulic housing.
I didn't fire my rifle. In close-quarters combat inside a sunken rotunda, a long barrel was a liability.
I drew my sidearm with my right hand and my combat knife with my left.
The first contractor rounded the hydraulic pillar, moving in high-ready stance. I swept his front leg out from under him with a low kick, drove my blade into the gap between his neck and shoulder armor, and used his falling body as a human shield as the second contractor opened fire.
Three 9mm rounds thudded into the dead man’s plate.
Before the shooter could adjust his aim, I fired twice through my shield’s armpit, putting two hollow-point rounds through the second contractor’s throat. He collapsed backward, clutching his neck, his boots drumming against the metal floor.
"You're wasting your life, Elena!" Arthur’s voice boomed over the rotunda's PA system. He had stepped up to the command platform, shielded behind a three-inch curved sheet of ballistic polycarbonate. "You think the people in Washington will give you a medal for this? If you stop me, they will bury you in a black site! They will make sure no one ever learns that the Carter family brought the republic to its knees!"
"I don't care about the medal, Arthur!" I shouted back, ejecting my spent magazine and slapping a fresh one home. "I care about finishing the mission!"
I unpinned a flashbang from my vest, cooked it for one second, and banked it off the curved ceiling above the remaining four contractors.
*BANG.*
The blinding detonation echoed violently in the enclosed concrete pit. Two of the contractors stumbled, disoriented, their hands flying to their ears. I broke cover, moving like an executioner through the white smoke.
Two shots to the chest of the third man. One shot through the visor of the fourth.
The fifth contractor lunged at me with a combat knife, his blade slicing through the shoulder strap of my vest, cutting deep into my deltoid. Pain flared white-hot across my shoulder, but my training overrode the shock. I trapped his wrist, spun inward, and snapped his elbow across my shoulder joint with a sharp, sickening *CRACK*. As he screamed, I drove my knife upward under his chin, ending the struggle instantly.
The sixth contractor turned to flee toward the upper exit, but a single rifle shot echoed from the southern entrance of the rotunda.
The contractor dropped, a neat hole drilled through the back of his helmet.
I looked up.
Standing at the top of the tiered stairs, leaning heavily against the railing, his face white as chalk and a smoking M240 machine gun cradled in his bloody hands, was Vance.
"Told you..." Vance gasped, coughing up a spatter of red onto the floor. "Told you I’d clear your lane."
"Vance, get down!" I yelled.
Behind the ballistic glass of the command platform, Arthur Carter pulled a heavy, stainless-steel revolver from inside his suit jacket—a .44 Magnum, the same weapon he had kept in his nightstand throughout my childhood.
He didn't aim at Vance. He didn't aim at me.
He pointed the barrel directly at the primary mainframe server rack beneath the console.
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"If I can't command the new order," Arthur whispered, his finger tightening on the trigger, "then no one will."
***
