Chapter 58 - Fire on the Mountain
Claire reacted with blinding, vicious efficiency.
She twisted Hayes’s wrist with both hands, fracturing the radius bone with a sharp, sickening snap.
Hayes screamed in agony as the detonator slipped from his limp fingers.
Claire caught the device in mid-air with her left hand, instantly locking her thumb beneath the spring-loaded dead-man switch.
"Julian! I have the switch!" Claire yelled down into the steam-choked void. "Where is the manual release?!"
"The large red wheel behind the pod!" Julian shouted back, his voice strained as he sprinted up the service stairs toward her.
Hayes dropped to his knees, clutching his shattered wrist against his chest, tears of pain cutting tracks through the soot on his cheeks.
"You're insane..." Hayes hissed, panting heavily. "You can't vent the pressure in time... the core is collapsing!"
"Shut your mouth," Claire growled, keeping her thumb clamped securely onto the switch while she assessed the pod's life support monitors.
Her father’s vital signs were spiking erratically as the ambient temperature inside the chamber climbed past dangerous levels.
Thomas appeared at the top of the stairs, his weapon drawn, keeping Hayes pinned to the deck with a single cold glare.
"I’ve got the traitor," Thomas said, planting his combat boot firmly onto Hayes’s back. "Get your father out of that coffin, Claire."
Claire moved behind the glass enclosure, grabbing the massive cast-iron pressure wheel.
The metal was scorching hot, searing the palms of her tactical gloves the moment she gripped it.
Gritting her teeth against the blinding pain, Claire threw all her weight into the turn.
The wheel groaned, the rusted gears resisting her efforts as the emergency countdown hit sixty seconds.
"Come on!" Claire roared, the veins in her neck bulging as she channeled every ounce of strength she possessed.
Julian reached the platform, instantly throwing his hands onto the wheel beside hers.
"Together on three!" Julian yelled. "One... two... pull!"
With a deafening screech of tortured iron, the valve finally broke its seal and spun open.
A massive rush of freezing nitrogen gas vented through the ceiling conduits, instantly smothering the geothermal heat and plunging the chamber temperature down twenty degrees in seconds.
The shrill wail of the core meltdown alarm suddenly shifted, dropping into an intermittent warning chime.
"Core pressure stabilizing," the automated computer voice announced calmly over the speakers.
Julian slumped against the railing, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"We did it," Julian breathed, wiping sweat and blood from his forehead. "The core is safe."
"The core is safe, but the mountain's structural integrity is gone," Thomas pointed out, pointing up toward massive hairline fractures spreading across the granite ceiling.
Deep, groaning tremors shook the floor beneath them as the outer tunnels began to cave in under the shifted weight.
"We have to move," Claire said, looking at the release levers on Richard Vance's cryo-pod.
She hit the emergency defrost sequence.
The hiss of depressurization filled the air as the thick glass panel slowly slid upward.
Claire reached out with a trembling hand, touching the warm, living skin of her father’s shoulder for the first time in twenty-four years.
His eyes flickered beneath the heavy lids, and a faint, raspy breath escaped his lips.
"Claire...?" the old man murmured, his vision unfocused in the flashing lights.
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Before Claire could speak, Hayes let out a wild, deranged laugh from the floor.
"You think you saved him?" Hayes wheezed, looking up through his matted hair. "You just triggered his final protocol."
