Chapter 65 - Under the Marble Rotunda
The subterranean tunnels beneath Washington smelled of sulfur, stagnant water, and decaying concrete.
For two hours, we crawled through knee-deep mire, navigating by the faint green phosphorescence of night-vision optics. Above us, the muffled rumble of surface detonations echoed through the stone—the military’s futile attempts to retake the perimeter from the outside, crushed by Tartarus’s automated network before they could even deploy armor.
Finally, the tunnel gave way to a reinforced blast door stamped with the Department of the Treasury seal. The electronic lock was dead, fried by an EMP pulse, but the emergency hydraulic manual release hung loose.
Together, Bradley and I threw our weight against the steel lever. The locking bolts retracted with a deafening metallic screech.
We slipped into the sub-basement corridors. Here, the architecture transformed from crude 1950s masonry to sleek, polished obsidian composite panels. The air was pressurized, tasting of pure, recycled ozone. Glowing blue data lines ran along the baseboards, pulsing in unison like the arteries of a living creature.
"We’re inside the PEOC," Bradley murmured, keeping his weapon tucked into his shoulder pocket. "The Presidential Emergency Operations Center. But this... this isn't government issue."
The walls were lined with cryogenic cooling tubes and high-density quantum processors that hummed at a frequency that set my teeth on edge. At the end of the corridor, heavy double blast doors stood half-open, casting a cold, sterile white light across the pristine floor.
I stepped forward, my boots making no sound on the reinforced composite.
The main chamber was vast, domed like an underground amphitheater. Holographic projections hovered in mid-air, displaying the live tactical status of the forty polar scramjets. They hadn't struck population centers. Instead, they had detonated in the ionosphere, deploying a cascading particulate cloud of graphene-coated micro-reflectors that was blinding every orbital satellite on Earth.
Sitting at the center of the command dais, behind a minimalist glass desk, was a woman.
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She wore a tailored charcoal-gray suit, her silver-streaked hair swept back with aristocratic elegance. In her hand, she held a delicate china teacup, steam rising from the porcelain rim.
"You're twelve minutes behind schedule, Elena," Eleanor Carter said, without looking up from her tea. "I expected better from my finest creation."
