Chapter 67 - Kinetic Countermeasure
"I am not your weapon," I said, my voice dropping an octave, cold and unyielding.
Eleanor’s smile faded, replaced by an expression of mild disappointment. "You still think you have a choice. The scramjets have already deployed the shroud. Within thirty minutes, every communication satellite belonging to the United States, Russia, and China will be dead. Tartarus will be the only operational neural network on the planet. World trade, global defense, logistics, power grids—they will all answer to this terminal."
She gestured toward the master interface behind her. "Arthur thought he was leaving a legacy of oil and pipelines. How utterly small. We are going to govern the digital nervous system of human civilization. Sit at the terminal, Elena. Enter your biometric key. Take your seat as the sovereign."
"Bradley, on my mark," I murmured over the tactical radio channel.
"What did you say?" Eleanor’s eyes narrowed.
"I said," I barked, pivoting on my heel, "I don't serve monarchs!"
I swung the rifle barrel away from Eleanor and fired a three-round burst directly into the primary liquid-nitrogen manifold feeding the quantum core.
The high-pressure coolant line ruptured with an explosive hiss, spewing sub-zero gas across the central servers. Alarms shrieked through the chamber as the master displays flashed yellow, then violent amber.
"Kill them!" Eleanor screamed, stepping backward toward an armored blast door behind the dais.
From the shadows of the upper balconies, four heavily armed mercenaries—clad in unmarked, pressurized combat suits—opened fire with high-caliber automatic weapons. The marble pillars around us shattered under a hail of kinetic rounds.
"Cover!" Bradley yelled, diving behind a reinforced steel console and returning fire.
I rolled across the floor, dodging a spray of armor-piercing bullets that gouged deep furrows into the obsidian floor. I came up on one knee, brought my rifle to bear, and dropped the first mercenary from the catwalk above. His body fell thirty feet, crashing onto the shattered server rack below.
"The uplink is rerouting!" Bradley shouted, firing another burst toward the balcony. "The nitrogen rupture didn't kill the main system! She’s initiating a manual orbital lock!"
Across the room, Eleanor stood behind the reinforced ballistic glass of the emergency escape module, her fingers flying across a secondary terminal.
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"You fool, Elena!" her voice blared through the chamber's intercom. "If you destroy the grid, you blind the entire hemisphere! You plunge the continent into the stone age!"
"Better the dark," I snarled, slamming a fresh magazine into my receiver, "than living in your cage."
