Chapter 33 - The Cold War Bastion
I fired the suit’s thruster pack, fighting against the violent updrafts of boiling thermal vents. The seismic anchors of the vault had already sheared through thousands of tons of bedrock; the entire facility was tilting at a twelve-degree angle into the central trench. If it slipped completely before I aborted the sequence, it would plunge into the untracked bottom three thousand feet down, taking any chance of disarming the purge system with it.
*TIME REMAINING: 05:58.*
I slammed the magnetic clamps of the atmospheric suit onto the vault's primary maintenance portal. The hydraulic locks resisted, frozen by four decades of hydrostatic pressure and calcification. Drawing the high-frequency thermal lance from the exterior rack, I sparked the magnesium tip.
A brilliant blinding white flame hissed beneath the icy water. Slag and liquefied iron erupted in clouds of bubbles, burning through the secondary locking pins. I wedged the titanium pry-bar into the access seam and heaved with the full pneumatic power of the suit's servo-motors.
With a groan that vibrated through my chest plates, the outer door cracked.
A rush of displaced water sucked the rig forward into an unlit airlock vestibule. I dragged myself inside, hauled the outer door shut, and hit the mechanical blowout valve.
Compressed air—stored in reserve tanks that had miraculously held their seal since the Ford administration—shrieked into the chamber. Millions of gallons of frigid water were forced down into the lake through the floor grates until the atmosphere stabilized at two atmospheres.
I cracked the seals of my diving helmet. The air smelled of ancient hydraulic fluid, copper, ozone, and the dead chill of a long-abandoned bunker.
I unlatched the heavy armor plates, stepped out of the diving shell in my tactical drysuit, and drew my sidearm.
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The emergency lights inside the facility weren't dead. They were glowing a dull, angry crimson, pulsing in cadence with an automated siren that echoed down endless steel corridors:
*SECURITY BREACH DETECTED. RETROGRADE PURGE IMMINENT. T-MINUS 04:15.*
