Chapter 63 - The Descent Through the Vents
The blast doors behind us groaned under the concussive assault of the gunships outside, while the interior server banks began popping like firecrackers as the electrical fire raged out of control. Freon gas rolled across the floor in thick, freezing white waves, dropping the room's temperature below zero within seconds.
"The service conduit!" I pointed toward the low, reinforced steel hatch Harrison’s phoenix key had unlocked. "Lily, crawl through! Don't look back, sweetheart, just crawl straight!"
Lily didn't cry. The terror of the past weeks had forged an unnatural stoicism in the six-year-old. Clutching the original, battered floral handbag to her chest, she scrambled into the narrow, dark tunnel on her hands and knees. Clara followed instantly, turning onto her back within the tight confines of the duct to provide rear security with her sidearm.
I fired my last magazine at the remaining guards scrambling across the catwalks, tossed the empty slide aside, and dove headfirst into the conduit just as a fragmentation grenade bounced across the server floor.
*BOOM.*
The shockwave slammed into the conduit entrance, hurling a gale of blistering heat, smoke, and jagged shrapnel down the shaft. The steel duct buckled around us, screaming as the mountain's structural braces shifted.
"Keep moving!" Clara’s voice was strained, muffled by soot and dust. "The grade is sloping downward!"
We slid and scrambled through the pitch-black shaft, descending at a steep forty-degree angle. The friction tore at our clothes and burned our skin, but the rumble of collapsing concrete above us forbade any hesitation. The entire High Ridge installation was imploding. Cynthia had activated the facility’s emergency purge to bury the evidence of her treason and incinerate us along with it.
After what felt like an eternity of choking darkness, the metal shaft ended abruptly. We spilled out, one after another, tumbling down a steep scree slope of broken gravel and industrial waste, landing in a damp, vast subterranean cavern.
Water dripped from towering stalactites forty feet above. The air smelled of wet sulfur and diesel exhaust.
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Ahead of us, cutting through the center of the cavern, lay two glistening ribbons of steel: the Vance Syndicate’s private heavy-gauge rail line, disappearing into an unlit tunnel that carved straight through the northern mountain range toward the coast.
And fifty yards down the tracks, an armored industrial locomotive was already spooling up its massive turbodiesel engines, the exhaust vents glowing cherry-red in the dark.
