The shrill wail of emergency sirens tore through the cavernous gloom of the Inner Genesis Cathedral. It replaced the dying hiss of Osric’s pyrolyzed remains with raw clockwork panic.
Across the raised altar dais, every backup status display was flashing an aggressive, strobing amber. Thick high-pressure channels snaking beneath the stone pavers began to shudder wildly. It rattled against their floor brackets as thousands of liters of high-pressure fluid rushed into the deep drilled shaft injectors. Five thousand meters below the surface of the North Atlantic, the bedrock of the Bermuda Void Atoll groaned under the awakening torque of four heavy-duty seabed anchors.
Arthur Vance didn’t hesitate. He pivoted smoothly on his heel. His composite combat boots cleared the circle of gray ash where the Sovereign Chimera Order’s patriarch had crumbled moments before.
“Valerie, status on the main tracking data feed!” Arthur commanded through the squad comms. His voice cut cleanly through the blaring klaxons, level and cold and exact, fully stripped of panic.
Valerie’s breathing was ragged over the hum, the sound of her tactical gauntlets clattering against a portable scanner console echoing from the cathedral threshold. “Arthur, it’s a dead-man trigger! Osric’s wired chassis was hardwired directly into the central reactor’s emergency SCRAM override! When his neural tracking data flatlined, the system didn’t shut down. It interpreted his death as an enemy work-yard breach! The magnetic holding bottle on the cold-fusion reactor is decoupling. The four sub-dark rock earth-shaking rams have engaged their automatic drilling cycles!”
