Chapter 98 - Fire on the Rig
The blast knocked the overhead lighting grids completely loose, sending sparks showering down over the black granite table. Thick smoke poured in through the ventilation shafts as sirens screamed across the *Tartarus*.
The lead guard scrambled to bring his submachine gun to bear on me, but I didn't give him the chance. Moving with the blinding speed I had maintained through months of fighting for my family's survival, I vaulted over the conference table, caught the guard’s wrist, and twisted it until the bone cracked with a sickening snap.
I stripped the weapon from his grip before he hit the deck, pivoting and firing a controlled burst into the chest of the second guard who was raising his rifle from the shattered elevator threshold.
Both mercenaries went down hard.
"Harris, report!" I shouted into my comms, stepping over the fallen guards and taking cover behind a heavy structural pillar.
"Lower deck breached, boss!" Harris’s voice crackled through static over the gunfire echoing from the lower catwalks. "We've disabled their auxiliary generators! The automated defense cannons on the helipad are offline! We’re coming up the service stairs to reinforce you, but they’ve scrambled a quick-reaction force from the hangar deck—at least thirty hostiles!"
"Seal the stairwell!" I ordered. "Keep them pinned in the lower corridors. I have the council secured on the command deck!"
Inside the boardroom, the smoke was thickening rapidly. Two of the older councilmen were groaning on the floor, dazed by the concussive force of the breach. Vance, however, was already crawling toward a reinforced side panel near the rear observation deck.
He reached inside an open wall safe, dragging out a heavy, snub-nosed magnum revolver. His refined demeanor was completely gone, replaced by the feral, desperate rage of an apex predator realizing it had become prey.
"You arrogant little bastard!" Vance snarled, cocking the hammer as he brought the barrel up toward my head. "You think you can dismantle seventy years of work with a parlor trick and a stolen ring?!"
I didn't flinch. I leveled the captured submachine gun directly at his chest.
"The ring wasn't stolen, Vance," I said, stepping through the drifting cordite smoke. "It was inherited. And your seventy years of quiet tyranny ends today."
A sudden concussive roar shook the platform from above. The blast doors on the far side of the command deck buckled inward, blown off their heavy industrial tracks by an external thermite charge.
Through the roaring flame and smoke, four shadowy figures in high-altitude jump suits entered, their weapons held high. But they weren't Harris's men.
May you like
Their gear bore a different mark entirely—an emblem depicting an hourglass entwined with an iron serpent.
***
