Chapter 58 - Fracture of Flesh and Iron
The mechanical clatter of the ceiling turrets cycling armor-piercing ammunition broke the standoff into sheer, unadulterated violence.
"Scatter!" Michael roared, lunging sideways and grabbing Lucas by his tactical vest.
A hail of 20mm tungsten rounds ripped through the deck plates where they had stood a fraction of a second earlier. Sparks cascaded like waterfalls of white-hot phosphorus. The concussive blasts within the enclosed titanium corridor blew out the inner auditory membranes of everyone present, turning the screaming battle into a muffled, nightmarish dream of muzzle flashes and tearing metal.
Maya dropped into a sliding split, firing both semi-automatic shotguns upward into the traverse ring of the starboard turret. The heavy solid-copper slugs shattered the turret’s hydraulic rotation motor, sending it spinning wildly out of control as it spewed deafening streams of fire into the ceiling bulkheads.
"Get to cover!" Lucas yelled, firing three rapid-fire rounds into the chest plates of an advancing Iron Guard mercenary. The composite ceramic armor absorbed the kinetic impact, but the staggering force pushed the operative back just enough for Lucas to kick a severed high-voltage cable across the mercenary's wet boots. Arcs of blue electricity engulfed the guard in a spasming halo of fire.
The Chairman did not run. He stepped backward with measured, theatrical grace, using the carbon-fiber leash to drag Eleanor behind the reinforced blast doors leading toward the Archon’s command bridge.
"Eleanor!" Michael screamed.
He rose from behind a buckled titanium girder, bringing his assault rifle to his shoulder. He pumped four rounds into the mercenary squad leader who had flanked Maya, dropping the soldier with a clean shot through the visor seam, then charged headlong into the teeth of the incoming fire.
Bullets hammered Michael’s ballistic vest like sledgehammers swung by demons, cracking two of his ribs and knocking the wind out of his lungs in a sickening gasp. But the phantom pain of twenty-four years of solitary confinement, the ice-water nightmares of the sunken Acheron, had long since killed Michael Mercer's capacity to care about his own flesh. He was an officer of the United States Navy who had been declared dead in 1999, and he had come to claim the only thing that had ever made him human.
He vaulted over the smoldering corpse of an armored guard, driving the butt of his weapon into the face of a second mercenary, then snatched the dropped sidearm from the floor and fired through the narrowing gap of the sliding blast doors.
Inside the bridge airlock, Eleanor twisted with feral desperation. Despite the iron cuffs binding her wrists, she drove her sharp elbow backward into the throat of the Chairman’s personal aide, sending the man sprawling across the control console.
"Michael! Sub-level four!" she shouted, her voice cutting through the roar of decompression sirens. "The acoustic baffle! Break the keel!"
The heavy three-inch blast door slammed shut with a vacuum seal that hissed like an angry viper, severing visual contact.
"Dad!" Lucas came sliding in beside him, his face streaked with sweat and cordite. Behind them, Maya was methodically finishing off the remaining Iron Guard mercenaries, her expression an emotionless mask of tactical precision, though her hands shook faintly as she reloaded her twin weapons.
"The bridge is sealed from the inside," Maya said, her voice strained against the screaming klaxons. "Standard bypass codes won't work. The Chairman has engaged the lockdown override. In twenty-four minutes, the Archon crosses the continental shelf."
On the floor ten feet away, Admiral Vance was dragging his bloody leg along the deck, clawing toward an emergency escape hatch. Lucas turned on his heel, his boot coming down with brutal weight across Vance’s shattered knee.
Vance shrieked, clutching the steel grating, his four-star dignity completely erased by raw, primal agony. "Mercer... please... the Chairman... he’s completely severed from the chain of command! He never intended to hand the Archon back to the naval board! He’s going to cleanse the surface world!"
Michael walked over, knelt down, and leaned into Vance’s face until their noses were inches apart. "What did she mean by 'break the keel'?"
"The... the acoustic baffle," Vance wheezed, his gray eyes rolling in his head. "The Archon’s ion drives... they aren't stable in the lower atmosphere. She designed a central resonance chamber along the ventral keel to absorb the harmonic vibration. If you detonate the emergency ballast charges in sub-level four... the entire propulsion grid will shear itself in half."
"If we do that," Lucas pointed out grimly, "this city of iron falls from the sky."
May you like
"Then we make sure it falls into deep water," Michael said, his eyes blazing with cold fire. "Maya, take the maintenance crawlways to sub-level four. Lucas, you're with me. We’re blowing that blast door with Vance’s biometric thumb."
***
