Chapter 48 - The Singularity Protocol
The entire station began to groan under the renewed, catastrophic weight of the Pacific.
Cracks were spreading across the massive quartz viewing domes. Miles beneath the surface, a single structural failure meant that hundreds of thousands of tons of sea water would punch through the facility at the speed of a jet airliner.
"Rachel! The escape pod!" Lily cried, pointing toward an auxiliary pressurized pod anchored to the emergency service platform thirty yards across the crumbling gantry.
Rachel carried Lily, dodging chunks of concrete and sheared steel girders falling from the vaulted ceiling. The air was filling with boiling steam as coolant lines severed.
As they reached the access ramp of the spherical escape pod, a heavy iron hand slammed down onto Rachel’s shoulder from behind.
Rachel spun, dropping Lily inside the pod and swinging her shotgun with one hand.
The weapon was caught mid-swing in an iron grip that bent the steel barrel like licorice.
Standing before her was Daniel Vance.
He was barely recognizable as human. Half of his skull had been reconstructed with crude, experimental surgical plates; his left arm was an exposed hydraulic piston assembly, and his right eye was replaced by a twitching, crimson optical lens. The explosion on the surface had not killed him; the Chairman’s automated recovery drones had dragged his half-dead corpse down into the trench and rebuilt him into a mindless, cybernetic attack dog.
"You... took... my... billions..." Daniel wheezed through a ruined, steel-plated jaw, his crimson eye focusing on Rachel with psychotic hatred.
"Daniel," Rachel breathed in utter revulsion. "You really are a dog now, aren't you?"
With a mechanical roar, Daniel lunged forward, his hydraulic fingers wrapping around Rachel’s throat, lifting her off the deck and slamming her against the pod’s outer hull. The sheer force drove the air from her lungs, spots of black exploding across her vision.
"Lily... belongs... to the machine!" Daniel screamed, his fingers tightening, crushing her windpipe. "She was mine to sell!"
From inside the escape pod, little Lily Vance looked at her father.
She did not hide. She did not cower under a blanket. She did not beg for food or apologize for existing.
Her eyes, once filled with the haunting terror of a caged animal, burned with an ancient, terrifying clarity. Lily reached down into the tool kit beside the pod door and pulled out the heavy industrial flare gun Arthur had stashed in the survival gear.
Stepping out onto the threshold of the pod, Lily looked directly into the single biological eye of the man who had chained her by the neck.
"Bark like a dog, Daddy," Lily said, her voice steady and ice-cold.
She shoved the muzzle of the flare gun directly into the exposed hydraulic machinery of his open chest wound.
May you like
And pulled the trigger.
***
