Chapter 90 - Echoes of the First Dawn
Valerie’s body convulsed violently.
A high-pitched, screeching shriek of digital feedback blasted from the chamber's audio monitors, blowing out the glass on three server consoles. The violet light surging through Valerie’s veins turned into a violent, sputtering amber.
"What did you do?!" Valerie gasped, her physical body buckling, her knees slamming onto the hard pedestal as the neurotoxin paralyzed her synthetic spinal implants. "You... you severed the ground!"
The neural link snapped with the force of a detonating artillery shell.
Julian was slammed backward off the pedestal, crashing onto the concrete floor of the chamber, gasping for air as if he had been pulled from the depths of the ocean. The blinding white data ocean vanished, replaced by the grim, flickering reality of the underground bunker.
"Guards! Kill them!" the Admiral roared, drawing his sidearm.
Before the contractor could pull the trigger, the entire subterranean facility was rocked by an earthquake-like tremor.
The cryogenic cooling lines connected to the particle accelerator ruptured with an ear-splitting bang. Supercooled liquid helium sprayed into the chamber in blinding white geysers of frost, instantly freezing the air and obscuring all visibility.
"Alarms! Pressure breach in Sector 4!" a technician screamed over the deafening klaxons. "The quantum array is feedback-looping into the main LHC beamline!"
Through the dense clouds of freezing fog, Vanessa dragged Julian to his feet. "Can you walk?!"
"The core..." Julian coughed, his vision swimming with digital after-images, his neural system shivering with residual shock. "The core didn't purge... she didn't lose the data, Vanessa... she rerouted it!"
On the pedestal, through the swirling clouds of freezing vapor, Valerie rose slowly to her feet. The left side of her face was completely slack from the neurotoxin, but her right eye burned with unholy, demonic rage.
In her right hand, she held the black silicon skull—the Sovereign Core—ripped physically from its magnetic suspension cradle, severed cables sparking violently against the metal platform.
"You think... you won?" Valerie croaked, her voice distorted through paralyzed vocal cords. "You only forced my hand. If I cannot govern the grid... I will salt the earth."
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She turned and sprinted through the secondary maintenance hatch toward the deep accelerator tunnel, disappearing into the twenty-seven-kilometer subterranean labyrinth.
"She's heading for the primary beam dump!" Julian yelled, wiping blood from his nose. "If she introduces that core into the active proton stream, the electromagnetic backlash will permanently burn out every transformer within five hundred miles!"
