Chapter 51 - The Voice from the Deep
The radio hissed with malicious warmth, the woman’s voice hanging in the freezing air of the turbine bunker like a hangman’s noose.
*“Your father will be so pleased to see you again. Step onto the dock, or we detonate the city.”*
My breath seized in my throat. My father had been dead for six years—or so I had believed until the minute Samuel Bellini’s hidden archives started bleeding into our synchronized heartbeats.
"Laura, don't move," Marco snarled, stepping directly between me and the open blast doors. His hand clamped around his sidearm, knuckles white, his chest heaving. The purple luminescence tracing his collarbone flared in tandem with mine, our dual pulse surging to over a hundred and twenty beats per minute.
"Who the hell is that, Silas?" Marco barked, eyes locked on the lake.
Silas did not look back. His trench coat whipped violently in the sub-zero gale rushing through the shattered doorway. The ancient mafia fixer reached up to touch the scar tissue along his neck, his jaw rigid.
"Dr. Helen Vance," Silas whispered. "Richard’s sister. Your aunt, Laura."
A cold tremor rippled through my spine. "My aunt died in an explosion in Geneva before I was born."
"She faked her death forty years ago to join the Council's apex tier," Silas said, pulling a heavy tactical remote from inside his coat and slamming a sequence into its rubberized keypad. "She isn’t speaking to negotiate. Those dreadnoughts didn't sail through the St. Lawrence Seaway overnight. They’ve been lying dormant on the lakebed for months, waiting for Samuel’s primary circuit to pass to an organic host."
*“Thirty seconds, Laura,”* the radio crackled again, Helen’s tone chillingly clinical, like a surgeon counting down general anesthesia. *“The resonance anchors beneath Navy Pier and the Loop are already primed. If your pulse trace leaves the line of sight of Leviathan-1, the seismic harmonics will shatter Chicago’s foundation down to the bedrock.”*
"She’s bluffing," Marco said through clenched teeth, though his eyes betrayed raw fury. "She wants Prototype Zero. She won't level the city if her prize is standing inside it."
"She doesn't need the city, Marco," I said, my medical training overriding the terror paralyzing my limbs. I looked at the console screen. The biometric readouts were cascading in blinding red lines. "She only needs our telemetry. Look at the uplink. The moment our implants synced, we became living transmitters. If we die, the data discharges into their grid anyway. If we surrender, they dissect us."
A sharp ping sounded from the water.
Through the blizzard, the three black monoliths offshore cut through the whitecapped waves. The lead vessel—a wedge-shaped leviathan clad in radar-absorbent obsidian plating—swung a massive spotlight toward the breakwater. A beam of searing white light skewered the darkness, blinding us instantly.
From its flank, half a dozen high-speed assault skiffs dropped into the churn of Lake Michigan, skimming over the black water at terrifying speed.
"They're coming for extraction," Marco said, cocking his weapon. "Silas, tell me this ruin has a secondary exit that doesn't lead directly into their crosshairs."
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"Samuel didn't build exits," Silas replied darkly, turning toward the iron floor plates near the dead turbine. "He built kill zones. Help me lift this."
***
