Chapter 60 - The Mother’s Reckoning
The rail-cannons roared.
Heavy kinetic darts traveling at hypersonic velocities tore through the obsidian floor tiles, vaporizing glass and steel into lethal clouds of shrapnel. Michael tackled Lucas behind the thick pedestal of a secondary navigation terminal as rounds hammered the cover, peeling back layers of armor plating like wet paper.
"Lucas! The secondary power junction!" Michael yelled over the roar of rushing wind outside the buckled canopy. "Can you bypass the neural harness from the manual ground tap?"
"I need thirty seconds!" Lucas shouted, pulling an acoustic probe and an insulated wire kit from his tactical pouch. "Keep those exoskeletons off me!"
Michael didn't answer with words. He dropped his empty rifle, drew the heavy service sidearm he had taken from Vance’s security detachment, and broke cover.
He ran not away from the fire, but diagonally across the tilting bridge deck, using the rapid descent of the falling dreadnought to his advantage. The Archon was pitching nose-down at an angle of thirty degrees; loose debris, shattered monitors, and bodies were sliding across the polished floor toward the forward observation windows.
Michael slid on his knees down the slick deck, firing three rounds upward into the exposed knee joint of the nearest exoskeleton guard. The heavy hydraulic fluid sprayed across the glass, and the armored giant collapsed with a mechanical shriek. Michael kicked the guard’s falling rail-cannon into the path of the second operative, knocking him off balance, then sprang to his feet, lunging up the steps of the observation dais.
The Chairman drew a sleek, suppressed automatic pistol from his tailored jacket, his face twisted in aristocratic fury. "You stubborn, obsolete dog!" he spat, firing twice.
One bullet tore through Michael’s left shoulder; the second grazed his neck, opening a crimson furrow that sprayed hot blood across his collar.
Michael didn't even flinch. He closed the distance like a depth charge rising through the dark, slamming his entire body weight into the Chairman. Both men crashed through the ballistic partition, tumbling onto the obsidian floor directly beside Eleanor’s suspended harness.
The Chairman’s pistol skittered across the floor, sliding toward the edge of the shattered viewport. The older man clawed desperately at Michael’s face, but Michael seized the Chairman by the throat with both hands, driving him violently into the deck.
"Twenty-four years," Michael growled, his voice a gravelly roar from the bottom of an iron coffin. "Twenty-four years I listened to the rust on my cell walls, wondering why my country left me to die. It wasn't my country. It was parasites like you."
"Dad! I’ve got the bypass!" Lucas screamed from the terminal.
With a shower of blinding blue sparks, Lucas plunged a copper grounding spike directly into the primary junction box. The violet glow coursing through Eleanor’s neural leads flashed brilliant white, then extinguished completely.
The physical shock tossed Eleanor from the suspension harness. She hit the deck hard, gasping for air as if she had just breached the surface of an icy ocean after drowning for a quarter of a century.
"Eleanor!" Michael released the Chairman’s throat and reached out to catch her.
Her hands, cold and trembling violently, reached up to grip his face. Her fingers smeared his own blood across his cheekbones. She stared into his scarred, weathered face, her eyes wide with an impossible mixture of grief and sudden, incandescent recognition.
"Michael..." she sobbed, her voice breaking through the screaming wind that was now tearing into the bridge through hairline fractures in the panoramic glass. "You came back for me."
"I never stopped rowing, Ellie," he choked out, pressing his forehead against hers.
"How touching," a venomous voice snarled from five feet away.
The Chairman was back on his feet, his tailored suit ripped to shreds, blood streaming from his broken nose. But his right hand was no longer empty. In his palm was a black titanium detonator with a singular, glowing amber toggle.
"You broke the keel, Mercer," the Chairman whispered, his lips parting in a grotesque, blood-soaked grin. "You ruined forty years of planning. But the orbital lance doesn't need the Archon's engines to fire. It only needs the primary uplink."
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He pointed the detonator at the forward glass. Outside, dropping down through the churning thunderclouds at supersonic speed, the dark, jagged shape of an orbital kinetic projectile was descending like the spear of an angry god.
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