Chapter 86 - Blood Under Pressure
"You can't go," Victoria said immediately, stepping between me and the blast door. Her eyes burned with fierce intensity. "Julian, it's a trap. She doesn't care about Richard. She’s using him as bait to draw you out of the reactor room's armored envelope. The moment you step into Sector 4, her strike teams will saturate the corridor with nerve agent."
"She’s right, Julian," Croft added, pulling an encrypted flash drive from his vest pocket. "Arthur's instructions were explicit. The core must be inserted into the cradle. The Syndicate's global assets will be wiped clean within seven minutes of initialization. Richard Vance chose his path thirty years ago when he took Eleanor’s hand in marriage. His life is a negligible variable."
I looked down at the lockbox in my hand, then at the frozen video frame of my father's broken face.
Richard Vance was weak. He was greedy, arrogant, and had tried to steal his own father’s estate before the funeral flowers had even wilted. But he was still my father. And beneath the layers of his pathetic ambition, I remembered the man who had taught me how to cast a fly line in the mountain creeks of Vance Ridge before the rot took him.
"Grandpa didn't teach me to be like them," I said quietly, checking the chamber of the shotgun and slinging two spare magazines onto my chest rig. "If I sacrifice him to burn their money, then Eleanor wins. She proves that Arthur’s bloodline is just as monstrous as hers."
"Julian, you're throwing away forty years of planning for sentiment!" Croft snarled, his aristocratic composure cracking for the first time.
"No," I replied, turning to Victoria. "I’m changing the rules of engagement. Victoria, can you reroute the dry dock's internal fire-suppression halon gas into the Sector 4 ventilation shafts?"
Victoria paused, her tactical instincts overriding her fear. Her eyes flashed with understanding. "Yes. If I override the environmental scrubbers from the primary terminal, I can flood Sector 4 with inert gas in less than ninety seconds. But anyone caught without a rebreather drops unconscious in twenty seconds flat."
"Grab two rebreathers from the maintenance lockers," I commanded, clicking my tactical radio onto our private frequency. "Croft, stay at this terminal. If I don't signal in twelve minutes, insert the key and sink this damn mountain. But not a second before."
Croft stared at me, his prosthetic eye whirring softly as it recalibrated. Slowly, a ghost of an approving smirk touched the corner of his lips. "Arthur would have called you an idiot, Julian. And then he would have given you a bigger gun."
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Croft turned to a reinforced weapons locker beneath the console and punched an override code. The door slid open, revealing an experimental Vance-Tech magnetic rail-carbine.
"Take it," Croft said. "It doesn't use gunpowder. It shoots depleted uranium flechettes at Mach 5. In close quarters against mechanized body armor, it doesn't leave survivors."
