Chapter 41 - Fire on the Mountain
The ascent was a violent blur of g-force and freezing wind.
The moment my combat harness clipped into the winch, the gunship surged upward into the boiling belly of the storm clouds. Below us, Vance Ridge looked like an open, bleeding wound. The farmhouse, its roof sheared away, glowed from within as fire from fractured gas lines began to lick up the timber walls. The old barn, the well house, the hundred-year-old oak trees where I had played as a boy—all of it shrank into a ring of encroaching shadows.
A streak of blinding white light tore across the darkness from the tree line.
"Missile lock! Flare deployment!" the pilot's synthetic voice barked over the cabin intercom.
The gunship shuddered violently as twin clusters of magnesium countermeasures erupted from its belly, turning the rain into a cascade of molten stars. The incoming surface-to-air missile detonated fifty yards off the port stabilizer, the concussive blast slamming me against the cabin bulkhead as the winch pulled me inside the pressurized hull.
The cargo bay door slammed shut, cutting off the deafening tempest with an airtight hiss.
I collapsed onto the non-skid floor, gasping for air, the titanium cylinder clutched against my ribs like a life preserver.
Across the bay, strapped into a heavy steel restraint chair, sat Sterling. His acoustic hood had been removed. His face was gray, sweat dripping from his hollow cheeks as the neuro-paralytic drug bound his nervous system. But despite his paralysis, his bloodshot eyes tracked the titanium cylinder in my hands with a hungry, desperate mania.
"You have no idea... what you've done," Sterling hissed, his voice barely a rattle in his throat. "You think... Evelyn Cross... is your savior? She was Arthur's executioner."
I looked up, my chest heaving. Evelyn was standing at the tactical display table in the center of the cabin, reviewing a holographic terrain map of the Appalachian corridor. She didn't turn around.
"Don't waste your breath, Sterling," she said calmly.
"Tell him!" Sterling choked out, a drop of bloody saliva trailing down his chin. "Tell the boy why his father... why my brother Richard... went crazy! Tell him who signed the authorization order to burn the vault in '94!"
Evelyn finally turned, her cold slate eyes fixed on Sterling. "Your brother Richard lost his mind because he was weak, Sterling. Just like you. He wanted to monetize the network. Arthur asked me to cut his access. If that broke your brother's sanity, the fault lies in his greed, not my ledger."
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She walked over to me, kneeling until she was at eye level. She pointed at the titanium cylinder.
"That cylinder contains the biometric key to the bedrock beneath Black Ridge," she said quietly. "Vault Zero isn't miles away. It sits twelve hundred feet directly below your grandfather's study."
