Chapter 120 - Into the Chitin Core
Before Eleanor’s bio-mechanical appendages could whip through the air to intercept him, David hurled himself beneath the cradle, sliding across the blood-slicked obsidian floor straight toward the lower gantry.
*"Insolent child!"* Eleanor screamed in his mind.
Three segmented tendrils of black alloy snapped downward from the sphere, piercing David's right thigh and tearing through the carbon-fiber brace on his left shoulder. Agony exploded through his nervous system—a blinding, white-hot fire that felt like liquid nitrogen being injected directly into his veins.
David didn't stop.
Gritting his teeth until his gums bled, he used the momentum of the strike to pull himself forward, snapping the tendrils with a violent roll. He came up against the primary console of the scuttle railgun, his vision swimming with gray static and blood.
The console was ancient. It was a remnant of his father's original, human design—an analog interface of brass, switches, and a deep-recessed biometric palm scanner framed by heavy steel rivets.
Above it, a red mechanical display flashed a single, repeating prompt:
**SOVEREIGN PROTOCOL: OMEGA-SCUTTLE**
**GENETIC CALIBRATION REQUIRED: ARCHON-01**
**WARNING: TECTONIC RUPTURE IMMINENT**
"David! Stop him!" Eleanor shrieked.
From the operating table, Arthur suddenly convulsed. The mechanical sleeve encasing his heart ignited with a surge of dark, violet lightning. His body arched off the table, his limbs snapping outward with grotesque, unnatural strength as the parasitic cables forced his broken body to stand.
Arthur was no longer his brother. He was a puppet, his eyes glowing with the same dead violet light as Eleanor’s, his jaw slack as he lunged toward David with fingers tipped with calcified, razor-sharp bone.
"David... help me..." Arthur’s voice whispered from the mouth of the abomination.
David brought his sidearm up with his left hand and fired five hollow-point rounds straight into Arthur’s center mass.
The kinetic impacts staggered the puppet, black fluid spraying across the steel console, but the entity didn't fall. It swung a massive, chitinous arm, smashing David across the face, sending his helmet flying, and pinning him flat against the scuttle terminal.
Arthur’s hands clamped around David’s throat, his fingernails digging through the flesh toward the carotid artery.
"You... shouldn't... have... come... to... the... party..." the puppet croaked, a sickening parody of Arthur's voice from the Washington ballroom.
David looked up into the dead, glowing eyes of his brother.
With his remaining strength, David didn't try to break the choke. Instead, he drove his right hand—dripping with his own Archon-coded blood—straight down onto the palm scanner of the console.
The terminal hissed.
A dozen pneumatic needles punched through the meat of David’s palm, drawing his marrow directly into the core of the firing mechanism.
**ARCHON-01 VERIFIED.**
**MASTER OVERRIDE ACCEPTED.**
**DISENGAGING DOCKING RESTRAINTS.**
**CHARGING KINETIC COMPACTOR.**
A siren began to wail—not an alien screech, but the deep, deafening, mechanical roar of an American emergency klaxon from the height of the Cold War.
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Beneath the floor, the massive, three-hundred-foot magnetic railgun—anchored to the very core of the trench—began to whine as three gigawatts of geothermal energy surged through its superconducting coils.
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