Chapter 80 - The Matriarch’s Ransom
Before Victoria could protest, I slammed the dual amber levers forward and punched Arthur’s override code into the terminal: *PRODIGAL-ZERO*.
The hull shuddered violently. A concussive blast of compressed air and ballast nitrogen detonated from the dorsal vent nozzles, directly beneath the belly of the breach pod that was clamped to our roof. The shockwave tore through the pressurized seam between the two crafts.
Above us, an agonizing screech of tearing metal rent the air.
Through the comms, Eleanor’s composed facade slipped for half a second. A sharp intake of breath echoed over the speaker, followed by the blare of depressurization sirens on her side of the line. "Julian! You suicidal little—"
The audio cut into static. The breach pod’s magnetic locks blew out under the localized pressure differential. Outside our forward viewport, the dark shape of Eleanor’s boarding vehicle tore loose, spinning into the ink-black trench water, trailing a ribbon of hydraulic fluid and shattered docking rings.
"We severed their seal!" Victoria yelled, bracing herself against the nav-console as our submarine plummeted nose-first into the oceanic abyss. "Depth is dropping rapidly! Six thousand feet... six thousand five hundred! Julian, structural integrity warning! We’re exceeding Arthur's safe-test parameters!"
"Arthur didn't build safe machines, Victoria. He built survivable ones," I gritted out, fighting the heavy yoke as gravitational forces pinned us back against our seats.
Behind us, the massive hull of the *Ares Leviathan* opened its forward floodlights. Two luminous beams, like the eyes of an ancient sea demon, sliced through the abyssal gloom. Sonar alarms pinged wildly across my radar board. Four high-speed torpedoes had just exited the carrier’s ventral tubes.
"They're acoustic homing warheads," Victoria said, her voice dropping into the icy operational calm of an operative facing certain doom. "Impact in thirty seconds. Decoys are dry."
"Look ahead," I said, pointing through the viewport into the swirling blackness.
Emerging from the sheer rock wall of the continental shelf was a colossal structure—an unnatural geometric silhouette carved directly into the basalt seabed. It was an underwater citadel, reinforced with ribbed obsidian pylons and covered in four decades of bio-luminescent deep-sea growth.
A single green beacon flashed at its central airlock.
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"Station Erebus," Victoria whispered, her eyes wide with shock. "The forgotten vault Arthur constructed during the Cold War. It’s real."
"It's not just a vault," I said, locking our navigational thrusters onto the homing beacon. "It's Grandpa’s graveyard for anyone who ever tried to rob him."
