Chapter 36 - The Ghost Fleet of Geneva
Before Alexander Sterling could comprehend the seven-year-old’s words, Lily hurled the brass shell casing with all the strength in her small arm directly at the high-voltage breaker panel mounted on the wall three feet to Sterling’s left.
The casing struck the exposed industrial copper busbar.
A deafening, blinding arc of blue electricity exploded from the panel with the force of a stun grenade. The sudden flash of 10,000-lumen light instantly overloaded the night-vision optics built into the mechanized operatives' helmets, blinding their sensors with whiteout noise.
"FIRE!" Rachel screamed.
She moved with superhuman speed. Rachel closed the thirty-foot distance in three explosive strides, dropping low beneath Sterling’s line of fire. Her combat knife flashed in the dark, severing the hydraulic feed tube at the knee joint of the first armored soldier. As the massive soldier collapsed under his own dead weight, Rachel seized his assault rifle from his mechanical grip, swung the barrel around, and emptied a forty-round armor-piercing magazine point-blank through the under-chin seam of the second operative's helmet.
Brain matter and hydraulic oil sprayed across the concrete walls.
"Die, you old bastard!" the third operative roared, raising his heavy minigun toward Arthur and Lily.
Arthur Vance did not flinch. With a roar of ancestral rage, the sixty-eight-year-old titan grabbed a four-foot steel pry-bar leaning against the wall and rammed it with crushing force directly into the spinning barrels of the minigun.
The heavy steel gears jammed instantly. The electric motor whined and detonated, blowing the operative’s mechanical arm into twisted fragments of carbon fiber and meat. Arthur tackled the screaming soldier to the ground, slamming his heavy fist into the fractured visor until the glass gave way to blood.
Sterling, clutching his blinded eyes, fired wildly into the dark corridor. "Suppressive fire! Fall back to the dam outlet! Detonate the charges!"
"Not this time, Sterling!" Rachel emerged from the smoke like an avenging demon. She threw herself onto Sterling, driving him into the stone floor. Her hands locked around his throat, pinning him beneath her.
The datapad flew from Sterling’s wrist, skittering across the bloody floor toward Lily.
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"The timer..." Sterling choked out through blood-frosted teeth, his hands clawing uselessly at Rachel’s iron grip. "You can't... stop it... The master terminal... is on the submersible platform... at the dam! If you kill me... the fail-safe... launches in six minutes!"
Rachel leaned down, her lips brushing Sterling’s ear, her voice colder than the grave. "Then you are going to walk us there. And if you make a sound, I will peel the skin from your fingers one joint at a time."
