Chapter 60 - The Shattered Hull
"You've doomed us all!" Helen screamed, clawing at my face as the console erupted in showers of electrical sparks.
The reversed acoustic current slammed back into the ship’s primary array. Outside the viewport, the massive acoustic pulse cannons tore themselves apart under the violent harmonic backflow, their housings exploding into bursts of underwater fire.
The entire four-hundred-foot dreadnought groaned, a horrifying sound of twisting structural steel, as the hull buckled under the sudden displacement of water pressure.
"Laura!" Marco yelled.
He had neutralized the last guard, but the structural failure was already spreading. A massive hydraulic support beam snapped from the ceiling, crashing down onto the deck between us.
A heavy, automated emergency blast door dropped with a thunderous boom, severing the command platform from the rest of the bridge—separating me from Marco.
"Marco!" I screamed, slamming my hands against the thick, reinforced glass window of the blast door.
On the other side, Marco threw his entire weight against the reinforced barrier, his face contorted in panic. He fired three rounds into the locking mechanism, but the heavy composite barely scratched.
Through the glass, our dual implants began to scream.
*HARMONIC TETHER SEVERANCE: 30 SECONDS TO VENTRICULAR COLLAPSE.*
The purple light beneath his skin was flickering violently, matching the agonizing spasms shooting through my own chest. The fifty-meter proximity rule was failing—the blast door's electromagnetic shielding was severing our bio-link.
"Laura, hold on! I'll find another way around!" Marco shouted, his voice muffled by the sound of incoming water rushing into the lower compartments.
"Marco, no! The ship is sinking!" I cried.
Then, behind me, the hiss of pressurized air cut through the alarms.
In the back of the sanctum, a towering, central cryogenic cylinder—one that had been cloaked in shadow and concealed behind heavy obsidian baffles—slowly pressurized. The frost-covered glass slid upward, dumping hundreds of gallons of freezing preservative fluid onto the deck.
Helen, lying battered against the console, looked up and began to laugh—a broken, hysterical sound.
"It's too late, Laura," she wheezed. "He was never dead."
From the interior of the pod, a tall, gaunt figure stepped out into the flashing amber light. He was wrapped in a synthetic harness, cables connected directly to his carotid arteries and his wrists.
He opened his eyes. They were the exact, piercing shade of hazel as mine.
My father.
Richard Vance looked at me through the steam, his expression utterly devoid of warmth, devoid of madness—filled only with absolute, chilling calculation.
He raised his hand. In his palm was an identical obsidian master unit to the one buried in my ribs, but his device was glowing with a blinding, blinding white frequency.
"Hello, Laura," he whispered, his voice resonating directly inside my skull. "Thank you for bringing me the second half of my heart. Now... let us complete the transfer."
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The ship lurched violently to a forty-five-degree angle as the hull gave way, freezing lake water beginning to explode through the floor beneath our feet.
*“RESONANCE COLLAPSE IN THREE... TWO...”* the automated computer announced into the darkness.
