Chapter 130 - The Sister's Price
Before I could reach for her arm, Sarah slammed the manual seal on the conduit hatch, cutting herself off on the other side of the reinforced blast glass.
"Sarah!" Clara screamed, throwing her small hands against the heavy glass, tears cutting tracks through the soot on her cheeks.
On the other side of the viewport, the water was already up to Sarah’s chest. She didn't look at Clara; she looked directly into my eyes. With a swift, mechanical movement, Sarah reached into her jacket, pulled out the secondary keycard she had stolen from Eleanor's silver tray, and jammed it into the ballast manual override.
Through the glass, I saw her lips move against the roar of the drowning facility:
*You brought this on yourself, Eleanor.*
Sarah wrenched the override lever down with both hands.
A massive shudder tore through the walls of the escape capsule. Beneath our feet, the hydraulic launch clamps retracted with the force of an artillery shot. The water outside the conduit exploded into a raging vortex of white foam and black brine as the primary ballast valves opened, sucking the remaining air and wreckage into the deep shelf abyss.
I grabbed Vance by the tactical vest, dragging him backward into the cramped, padded interior of the two-person capsule. He fell onto the floorboards with a groaned curse, his boots tangling in the release harnesses.
"Clara, get in!" I yelled, scooping the little girl up and shoving her into the rear survival cradle, locking the five-point harness over her trembling chest.
The capsule’s automated voice blared from the cockpit console:
*BALLAST CLEARED. ESCAPE VELOCITY CALCULATED. WARNING: PAYLOAD EXCEEDS OPTIMAL MARGIN BY FOURTEEN PERCENT. LAUNCHING IN FIVE... FOUR...*
Through the thick observation port of the pod’s hatch, I saw Sarah standing in the rising torrent. She had raised Vance’s rifle, aiming it not at the rising water, but down the corridor toward the private lift where Eleanor had fled.
The lift doors on Eleanor's private shaft suddenly groaned, buckling inward under the catastrophic pressure differential Sarah had created by opening the ballast valves. Seawater smashed through the lift's observation seam, shattering the reinforced quartz, flooding the elevator car where Eleanor Sterling stood in her pristine black suit.
For one fraction of a second, before the water consumed them both, I saw Eleanor’s face through the swirling glass. For the first time in her life, the matriarch of the Sterling dynasty was screaming—her mouth open, her severe silver chignon tearing loose into the churning black tide, her hands clawing uselessly against the glass of the descending car.
And Sarah was smiling.
*THREE... TWO... ONE. IGNITION.*
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A hammer of kinetic force slammed into my chest, pinning me to the steel floor of the capsule as the solid-fuel booster fired. The pod shot forward into the launch tube, rocketing upward through the frozen throat of the oceanic trench at six hundred miles per hour.
***
