Chapter 65 - The Sinking Citadel
A shoulder-mounted missile fired from the gunship’s side hatch streaked straight into the dreadnought's boarding bridge.
The explosion blew Vance off his feet and severed the hydraulic clamp. Steel shrapnel shrieked through the air, shearing through the railing three inches above Daniel's head. The force of the detonation threw Daniel backward onto the wet deck, his ears ringing with the deadening silence of concussive trauma.
Through the smoke, he saw Chassis Nine—the Elena double—descending on a rapid-repel cable from the gunship, armed with an automatic carbine, her eyes fixed entirely on Julian.
"The line ends here, Daniel!" she yelled over the roar of flames. She hit the deck with fluid, unnatural grace, unhooking her harness in a single motion. Her movements were too smooth, too coordinated, devoid of human friction.
Daniel rolled, firing two rounds straight into her center mass.
The bullets struck her heavy coat with dull thuds. She didn't flinch. Kevlar-reinforced synthetic fiber absorbed the impact, but the kinetic force drove her back half a step. She leveled her carbine at Daniel’s head.
"You were always so sentimental," she sneered, her voice carrying that exact cadence of the woman who had promised to love him at the altar before the fake silicone belly tore open and exposed the truth. "You wept for an unborn child that never existed. You chased a ghost across Europe. And now, you die protecting copies."
"They're not copies," Daniel growled, lunging forward. He didn't use the gun; he went low, tackling her around the knees to offset her balance on the tilting deck.
They crashed against the safety barrier. Daniel slammed an elbow into her jaw. The skin split, but beneath the torn tissue, there was no red blood—only an amber-tinted biological fluid and the metallic glint of high-tensile subdermal mesh.
"What are you?" Daniel breathed in horror.
"A placeholder," she whispered, her robotic fingers closing around Daniel's throat with bone-crushing pressure. "Until the vault opens."
A deafening crack echoed through the gantry.
A high-caliber sniper round from Vance’s team aboard the dreadnought punched clean through Chassis Nine’s temple. Her head snapped back, the synthetic optical sensors in her eyes flashing brilliant blue before dying out completely. Her iron grip slackened, and her limp frame tumbled over the railing, plummeting into the flaming sea two hundred feet below.
May you like
"Daniel!" Vance yelled, clutching his bleeding shoulder as he scrambled to the edge of the severed bridge. "The rig’s core is going critical! Jump, or you drown with the ashes!"
---
