Chapter 77 - The Drowned Vault
I leaned out from behind the nitrogen tank, double-tapping a third contractor advancing through the smoke, then pulled an incendiary grenade from my tactical harness.
"You never understood the mission, Vance!" I shouted back, pulling the pin with my teeth. "Father didn't build this place to rule! He built it to serve as a shield!"
"A shield for sheep!" Vance screamed. "Look what the sheep did to him! They forced him into retirement, stripped his security clearances, and let him rot in a farmhouse while mother had to beg for social standing among second-tier bureaucrats! We took what was rightfully ours!"
"You sold his soul for table scraps!"
I hurled the grenade. It bounced across the grating, landing squarely beneath the automated turret's power inverter. The resulting chemical explosion showered the silo floor in blinding magnesium fire, cutting power to the turret and sending its targeting lasers spinning wildly into the ceiling.
Under the cover of the white smoke, I advanced.
I moved with the cold, methodical rhythm drilled into me across ten years of clandestine deployments. One contractor tried to flank me from behind a hydraulic accumulator; I ducked his sweep, drove the muzzle of my carbine under his chin, and fired. Another panicked and retreated toward the elevator; a single round between his shoulder blades ended his retreat.
In ninety seconds, the staging floor was quiet, save for the hiss of severed hydraulic lines and the relentless, digital cadence of the terminal countdown: **02:15... 02:14...**
I didn't take the stairs to the command bridge. I scaled the maintenance ladder running up the outside of the missile's launch rail, coming up behind the pulpit's armored glass enclosure.
Vance was frantically typing into the console, his hands shaking, his eyes bloodshot with stimulant abuse and terror. Beside him sat a silver briefcase—the Dead Hand controller.
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I kicked the glass emergency door off its magnetic catch. The heavy door swung inward with a crash, and Vance spun around, leveling a gold-plated semi-automatic pistol at my chest.
We stood five paces apart, our weapons leveled at each other's hearts, while below us, the missile's auxiliary turbines began their high-pitched, deafening spool-up.
