Chapter 106 - The Permafrost Gate
The *Isbjørn* slammed its reinforced prow into the ice shelf with a sickening shudder that rattled the teeth in our skulls.
Outside, the Arctic gale raged at forty below zero. The whiteout was absolute; the sky and the earth had merged into an opaque wall of howling, driving frost. But half a mile up the sheer granite face of the Nunatak peak, a massive rectangular incision glowed with the dull, sickly amber of sodium floodlights.
The Permafrost Gate.
"Movement on the ramparts!" Vance yelled through the blizzard, his voice barely audible over the screaming wind.
Two automated 30mm CIWS gun emplacements, mounted on heavy steel pylons at the mouth of the vault, began to traverse toward our position, their hydraulic servos whining through the sub-zero air.
"Thermal tracking!" I yelled, dropping into a snow drift and pulling Clara beneath me. "Vance, the targeting array is on the left gantry!"
Vance didn't hesitate. He dropped to one knee in the deep powder, stabilizing his heavy rifle against an ice boulder. Two shots rang out, flat cracks swallowed instantly by the roaring tempest. Half a second later, a shower of blue sparks erupted from the left turret's optical dome, followed by the screech of metal as the automated gun locked up, spinning blindly before pointing into the snow.
"Second one's tracking us!" Vance roared.
"Clara, run to the maintenance trench!" I commanded, shoving her forward into a deep trench carved by the vault's exhaust heat.
I stood upright, directly in the line of fire.
The second turret’s radar array locked onto my chest. The twin barrels hummed, preparing to cycle five hundred rounds of armor-piercing depleted uranium through my flesh.
*BEEP. BEEP.*
A high-pitched tone echoed from the biometric scanner embedded in the outer perimeter wall. The camera reticle swept over my face, measuring the distance between my pupils, the bone structure of my brow, the pulse rate in my carotid artery.
*BIOMETRIC MATCH: STERLING, EMILY. SOVEREIGN LINEAGE DETECTED.*
The barrels abruptly snapped vertical. The red targeting lights turned to a calm, clinical green. The blast doors, three-foot-thick plates of titanium-reinforced steel crusted in millennia-old ice, began to groan inward with the sound of grinding mountains.
"She didn't lock the door," Eleanor said, stumbling out of the storm, her teeth chattering so hard her lips were bleeding. "She unlocked it for you. She wants you inside."
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"I know," I said, stepping past the frozen mechanisms of the gate, my rifle raised. "Because monsters never believe they can die until you cut their throats."
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