Chapter 56 - Scuttling the Citadel
"We're locked in!" Vance shouted, testing the manual wheel of the blast door. "The hydraulic dogs are frozen electronically!"
"The AI knows we're here," Rebecca said, twisting the extraction handle with all her strength. The mechanical locks of the quantum drive resisted, internal pins grinding against the casing. "It’s preparing to purge the CIC with Halon gas to eliminate biological contaminants."
High-pressure vents along the ceiling hissed, thin white plumes of oxygen-depleting gas beginning to swirl into the chamber.
"Rebecca, we've got thirty seconds of breathable air!" Vance yelled, coughing as the heavy gas settled over the deck plates.
"Cover your face!" Rebecca drew her sidearm, loaded a specialized tungsten-core armor-piercing round, and fired point-blank into the mounting brackets of the quantum drive.
The ricochet screamed off the bulkheads, but the shattered bracket yielded. Rebecca yanked the heavy drive free from the pedestal. The holographic displays flickered violently, lines of code dissolving into static.
`CRITICAL HARDWARE FAULT.`
`AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION COMPROMISED.`
`VESSEL DIVING UNCONTROLLED: DEPTH 120 METERS... 150 METERS...`
The deck tilted down at a terrifying thirty-degree angle. The *Njord* was plunging into the subterranean canal's abyssal trench, entirely out of control.
"Vance! The primary ballast control!" Rebecca pointed toward a manual emergency panel recessed behind an amber safety cage. "If we blow the forward ballast manually, we can force the bow up and breach the surface before we hit the continental drop-off!"
Vance lunged across the tilted deck, smashing the glass cage with the butt of his shotgun. He grabbed the twin red levers and hauled down with his entire body weight.
High-pressure air shrieked through the ballast pipes, a violent, bone-rattling roar that shuddered the entire hull. Outside, millions of cubic feet of compressed air displaced the water in the forward tanks.
The submarine groaned, its titanium ribs protesting under the violent torque as the bow swung upward.
"The blast door!" Rebecca yelled, wedging the captured quantum drive into her tactical pack. "The ballast blow cracked the hydraulic line—hit the manual bypass!"
Vance kicked the manual bypass valve. The massive steel blast door hissed open six inches—just enough.
"Go! Go!"
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They squeezed through the gap, scrambling up the sharply inclined companionway toward the escape trunk in the sail. Above them, through the open hatch, they could hear the roar of the Arctic tempest.
The *Njord* surfaced like an angry whale, breaching the churning waves of the polar sea outside the mountain with catastrophic force, throwing sheets of freezing spray sixty feet into the night sky.
