Chapter 52 - The Coldest Lie
The vault lights died instantly, plunging the cavern into suffocating blackness.
A fraction of a second later, the emergency sirens shrieked to life, drenching the steel walls in pulsing crimson light.
A gunshot echoed through the chamber, followed by the wet crunch of bone meeting Kevlar.
Claire moved on instinct, dropping low and rolling to her left as hot lead tore through the space where her head had just been.
She did not fire blindly into the red strobes, knowing Thomas was in the line of fire.
"Hostile down!" Thomas’s voice bellowed through the wailing alarm.
Claire came up on one knee, raising her rifle as the flashing red light illuminated two bodies wrestling on the steel grating.
Thomas had spun inside Hayes’s arm, knocking the suppressed pistol aside with his forearm.
Hayes, moving with shocking speed for a man of his age, drove a tactical blade toward Thomas’s throat.
Claire lunged forward, slamming the butt of her rifle directly into Hayes’s shoulder.
The admiral grunted in agony, the knife slipping from his grasp and clattering down through the grated walkway into the darkness below.
Thomas threw a brutal right hook that connected squarely with Hayes’s cheekbone, sending the old man sprawling against the primary console.
"Stay down!" Claire shouted, leveling the rifle barrel an inch from Hayes’s forehead.
Hayes lay against the console, spitting blood onto the diamond-plate steel, but he was laughing.
"You really think... you've won?" Hayes wheezed, his bloody teeth gleaming under the red emergency lights.
"Give me one reason why I shouldn't put a round through your eye right now," Claire demanded, her knuckles white.
"Because the moment my heart stops, this entire mountain seals from the outside," Hayes gasped, smiling through the blood.
Julian stepped out from the shadows near the secondary terminal, holding a portable tablet.
"He's not bluffing, Claire," Julian said, his eyes scanning the streaming code on the screen.
"Whose side are you on, Julian?" Thomas growled, picking up Hayes's dropped sidearm from the deck.
"My own," Julian replied without looking up. "As always. But dying in a nuclear tomb isn't on my schedule today."
Julian spun the tablet toward Claire, showing a digital countdown rapidly scrolling toward zero.
"Hayes initiated the facility's dead-man protocol the second he breached the outer airlock," Julian explained.
"Twenty minutes until the ventilation shafts are flooded with liquid nitrogen," Hayes said, his voice dripping with malice.
"You sick bastard," Thomas snarled, aiming the pistol at Hayes’s chest.
"Only my biometric override can abort the sequence," Hayes said, his gaze locking back onto Claire. "And I will only give it after you unlock the ledger."
Claire looked down at the man who had raised her after her father's supposed death.
Every kind word he had ever spoken to her was a lie constructed to build the perfect, obedient soldier.
"You're a coward, Hayes," Claire said softly, lowering the rifle just slightly.
"I am an architect, Claire," Hayes spat back, pulling himself up against the console. "Your father was weak. Margaret was greedy. But I... I built the empire."
Suddenly, the heavy blast doors at the far end of the gantry hissed open.
May you like
Heavy tactical boots thundered across the metal catwalk outside the control room.
"Backup," Thomas hissed, diving behind a cluster of server racks as high-caliber rounds shredded the reinforced glass.
