Chapter 64 - The March on the Capital
We moved on foot through the decaying shadows of Arlington, crossing the Key Bridge under the cover of a freezing mist.
Washington D.C. was a ghost city. Abandoned vehicles littered the avenues, their headlights dead, doors hanging wide open where panicked civilians had fled on foot hours earlier. But the streets weren't empty.
High-altitude hunter-killer drones glided silently beneath the low cloud ceiling, their sensor pods bathing the marble facades of Georgetown in invisible infrared beams. On the ground, four-legged automated combat chassis—unmarked, matte-black prototypes straight out of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency black-budgets—patrolled the intersections with mechanical precision.
"Tartarus has taken full control of the autonomous defense perimeter," I whispered, pulling Bradley into the alcove of an abandoned brick brownstone as a patrol unit clattered past, its twin rotary barrels scanning the fog. "They're not protecting the city from an external invasion. They're keeping people out. Securing the perimeter around the West Wing."
"How do we breach?" Bradley asked, checking the magazine of his sidearm. "The street-level checkpoints are suicide. A mosquito couldn't cross the Ellipse without getting vaporized by kinetic point-defense systems."
"We don't cross the Ellipse," I said, pointing down toward a storm drain iron grate recessed into the curb. "During the Cold War, the Army Corps of Engineers built an auxiliary routing tunnel connecting the old naval communications hub in the Navy Annex to the subterranean levels of the Treasury Department."
Bradley raised an eyebrow. "That tunnel was condemned in '74. It’s flooded, unmapped, and probably choked with toxic gas."
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"Then it’s the only door my mother didn't lock," I replied.
I took the butt of my rifle, wedged it into the iron grate, and heaved. The metal groaned, rusted hinges breaking with a sharp snap, revealing the pitch-black abyss beneath the city. Without looking back, I dropped into the dark.
