Chapter 64 - Boarding the Bastion
The heavy hatch swung outward with a hollow groan. Cold air, smelling intensely of iron shavings and ozone, rushed into the capsule.
No armed strike team stood on the gangway. Instead, an old man in a grease-stained wool coat and heavy leather deck boots stood leaning heavily on an iron cane. Behind him stood two figures clad in nondescript dark tactical gear, carbines held low across their chests, their visors down.
The old man had thinning white hair slicked back by sea spray, a jagged scar running from his ear down into his collar, and eyes that held the hard, unyielding glint of flint.
"Lower the weapon, Emma," the old man said, his voice raspy, shredded by decades of rough weather and smoke. "If we meant to put a bullet in you, we wouldn't have wasted four tons of jet fuel pulling your pod out of the Dover swell."
Emma did not lower the gun. "Who are you? Where is Francis?"
The man chuckled dryly, a sound like gravel grinding in a drum. "Francis Laurent hasn't walked under the open sky since the winter of twenty-seventeen. But he built this place. The Bastion. And he left orders that the moment the girl reached eight years and forty-eight hours, she was to be brought to the cradle."
He took a step backward, gesturing toward the metal corridor extending into the rig’s interior. "My name is Miller. Chief Engineer under your father before the family decided to sell the empire to foreign syndicates. Come inside. The North Sea will freeze the marrow in your bones in ten minutes."
Emma kept the pistol leveled as she stepped over the threshold, pulling Lily firmly behind her. The two armed operators flanking Miller didn't move an inch, standing like statues in the dim yellow illumination of the loading bay.
"Why was the party the trigger?" Emma demanded, her voice cutting through the hum of the platform's generators. "Why did my mother refuse Lily a gift? Why did she tell her to stop calling me 'Mom'?"
Miller stopped at the blast doors at the end of the catwalk, turning his weathered head. His expression was not cruel, but infinitely weary.
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"Because, Emma," Miller said, sliding a magnetic keycard into the heavy console, "your mother was never your mother. And Lily was never meant to be your daughter."
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