Chapter 91 - The Hand at the Hatch
I flew through the air, clearing the smashed banquet table, and slammed hard into the base of the command dais.
The impact knocked the breath from my chest, but the adrenaline surging through my veins drowned the pain. I scrambled up the steel ladder rungs, the shears clenched tight in my jaw.
Miriam saw me coming. Her right hand snapped out, reaching for the sidearm holstered on her hip, but the sheared electrical conduits in her torso caused a lethal stutter in her synthetic reflexes.
I drove the points of the shears straight down into the master console, driving the heavy steel blades deep into the central processor array.
A blinding cascade of golden sparks erupted from the dashboard. The hydraulic controls went dead. The pitch of the leviathan leveled out violently, throwing Miriam against the control harness as the downward thrusters choked on severed data.
*"MANUAL OVERRIDE DETECTED,"* the ship's system croaked through blown speakers. *"DESCENT HALTED. BALLAST UNCONTROLLED. ASCENT SEQUENCE ENGAGED."*
The massive vessel began to shudder as emergency gas generators fired along the keel, pushing millions of gallons of water out of the emergency chambers. The ship groaned, stopped its descent, and began to claw its way backward toward the upper depths.
Miriam stared at the smoking console, then up at me, blood trickling from the corner of her lips. Her aristocratic composure was utterly shattered.
"You've killed us both," she whispered in horror. "The decompression... the hull cannot survive an uncontrolled emergency ascent with a compromised spine!"
"Then we'll meet my father on the surface," I said, cold fury in my eyes.
Before she could strike, Nicholas appeared behind her. With a single, brutal strike using the butt of his weapon, he slammed the butt of the rifle into the base of her cybernetic neck.
Miriam collapsed, unconscious, into the tangle of broken wires.
"We have to get to the secondary pressure capsule in the bow!" Nicholas yelled, pulling me away from the ruined dais. "The whole lower deck is buckling!"
We sprinted through the tilting, flooding corridors, water spraying through ruptured seams in the ceiling, freezing our skin as we fought toward the escape hatch at the forward prow.
The metal walls shrieked. The ascent was violent, tearing plates off the hull as the ship rocketed toward the surface of Lake Michigan like a breaching whale.
We reached the small emergency airlock in the bow. Nicholas slammed the interior hatch shut, spinning the manual dog-wheel with frantic desperation.
"Equalization holding!" Nicholas gasped, slumping against the hatch. "When we breach the surface, the emergency beacon will transmit. If anyone is left alive on the Chicago shore, they'll see us."
Through the thick quartz porthole of the forward hatch, we could see the black water lightening to navy blue, then to murky gray. We were only fifty feet from the surface.
We were going to make it.
And then, with a sickening, metallic clank that made the entire forward compartment shudder, something hit the exterior hatch of our pod.
Nicholas and I froze.
Slowly, terrifyingly, the heavy external mechanical wheel of the hatch began to turn from the *outside*.
Through the thick, frosted quartz glass of the outer hatch door, a face pressed against the surface from the freezing, pressurized water.
It was not a diver. It wore no oxygen mask.
It was a woman's face, staring directly at me through the ice-cold water—identical in every feature, every bone structure, every millimeter to my own.
Her hair was long, dark, and braided down to her waist.
And as her lifeless, synthetic eyes locked onto mine through the glass, her cold blue lips moved against the viewport, mouthing three words that chilled my blood far more than the lake ever could:
May you like
*"I have him."*
And beneath her pale hand on the hatch wheel, she held up a severed silver chain—the wedding ring of my father.
