Chapter 66 - The Genesis Memory
The sudden silence inside the concrete vault was deafening.
Outside, the blizzard roared like an angry beast denied its prey, but in here, surrounded by four-foot-thick walls of reinforced marine concrete, the only sound was the frantic ticking of our cooling engine and the lap of oily, black water against the slime-covered walls.
The cutter drifted to a halt, bumping against a rusted iron catwalk that ran the length of the interior docking bay.
"Is everyone alive?" I asked, my voice echoing hollowly in the darkness.
"I'm here," Sarah whispered, her small body trembling against the floorboards.
"I'm up," Nicholas grunted, pulling himself to his feet. He flicked on a waterproof tactical light, cutting a narrow beam through the damp fog hanging inside the bay. "The interceptors won't follow us in here. Their draft is too deep for the reef canal. But they’ll send boarding teams on rigid inflatables within five minutes."
"We need to find the power junction," I said, climbing out of the wheelhouse and stepping onto the slick iron catwalk.
My wrist was throbbing now—a dull, rhythmic ache that pulsed in sync with a faint violet glow leaking through the bloody gauze. The moment we had entered the concrete bunker, the voice in my head had stopped, shielded by the massive barrier of rebar and aggregate.
"Why the power junction?" Nicholas asked, helping Sarah up onto the platform.
"Because of what I saw," I said, turning to him in the flashlight's beam. "When I jammed the shears into the circuit, I didn't just cause a short. I tripped a playback cache. Nicholas, your mother didn't just hide me. She left something inside the protocol."
We climbed the rusted spiral staircase that hugged the interior wall of the tower, our boots clanging against the perforated iron. At the third level, we broke through a heavy fire door into what had once been the station's control room.
Racks of obsolete vacuum-tube machinery and dead radar consoles stood like sentinels in the dust. But in the center of the room, wired directly into an auxiliary battery bank that still showed a faint amber maintenance light, was a modern, ruggedized terminal bearing the Sterling-Vance corporate insignia.
"She knew we would come here," Nicholas murmured, shining his light on the terminal's screen.
The screen was awake.
In the center of the dark glass, a single prompt blinked in stark, amber letters:
**INPUT BIOMETRIC CIPHER: SUBJECT 0-ALPHA (CLARA)**
"Clara, don't," Sarah said suddenly, her eyes wide with terror as she pulled on my sleeve. "What if it’s a trap? What if it downloads whatever Arthur was trying to send through the radio?"
"Arthur didn't build this terminal," I said softly, looking at the worn leather glove resting beside the keyboard.
May you like
I recognized that glove. It was Italian calfskin, tailored, with an unmistakable floral monogram stamped into the cuff.
Elena Sterling had stood in this room.
