Chapter 99 - The Override Sequence
The reaction was instantaneous and apocalyptic.
The obsidian cylinder didn't conduct the alien power; it inverted it. A blinding flash of pitch-black light erupted from the contact point, accompanied by a sound like a thunderclap trapped inside an iron vault.
The crystalline appendages on Julian’s back shattered into a million harmless shards of smoking ash. Julian let out a ragged, purely human scream as the neural connection was violently severed, his body collapsing forward into David’s arms like an empty marionette whose strings had been cut with a torch.
"No!" Eleanor shrieked.
She lunged forward, her manicured fingers clawing for the fallen obsidian key on the bloody parquet. But she was too slow.
Hayes stepped through the shattered doorway, his combat shotgun leveled from the hip.
*BOOM.*
The heavy 12-gauge slug struck the floor six inches in front of Eleanor’s knees, gouging a deep crater into the polished oak and showering her emerald dress with splintered wood and lead.
"Step back, ma'am," Hayes growled, his voice trembling with twenty years of suppressed fury. "Or the next one takes off that pretty diamond necklace."
Eleanor froze, kneeling in the wreckage of her ballroom, her hair coming undone, looking up at David with a mixture of hatred and utter bewilderment.
David gently lowered his brother to the floor. Julian was breathing—shallow, ragged, but human. The pale blue light in his eyes had died, leaving behind only the dull gray of shock and total exhaustion.
"David..." Julian coughed, a thin trickle of normal, dark red blood escaping his lips. "The... the ceiling..."
David looked up.
The leaded glass dome above the ballroom was buckling. The three-thousand-foot needle-craft anchored to the roof of the bunker wasn't docking anymore; it was self-destructing. The resonance inversion from the obsidian key was traveling through the umbilical conduits, turning the craft's crystalline hull from translucent blue to a violent, unstable crimson.
"The whole facility is going down!" Hayes roared, grabbing David by his uninjured arm. "The bay is coming in, sir! We have ninety seconds before the ceiling fails!"
"David..." Eleanor whispered from the floor. She wasn't looking at the crumbling glass above. She was staring at the black cylinder resting in David’s hand. Her voice had lost its mechanical resonance; it was small, withered, and pathetic. "David... please. You are a Vance. You carry the name. You cannot let the legacy end in this water."
David stood over his mother. His uniform was torn, soaked in his own blood and his brother’s blood, his medals tarnished by cordite and grease.
"The legacy was dead the moment you traded our father’s honor for an alien leash, Eleanor," David said, his voice completely devoid of mercy.
He didn't raise his weapon. He simply turned his back on her.
"Hayes, take Julian," David ordered. "Carry him to the surface elevator."
"David!" Eleanor screamed, scrambling on her hands and knees across the glass-strewn floor, grabbing his boot. Her hands, once so terrifyingly strong, were weak, trembling, her fingernails breaking against the heavy leather of his combat tread. "You can't leave me here! I made you! You are nothing without this house!"
David didn't even look down. He pulled his boot from her grip, the heavy rubber sole leaving a smear of mud across the hem of her emerald gown.
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"You didn't make me, Mother," David said as the first fracture split across the glass ceiling, letting loose a torrent of black ocean water. "The Army did."
***
