Chapter 82 - The Ghost Protocol Breach
The canopy of pine trees swallowed us whole, black boughs scraping the roof like skeletal fingers. Every bump in the logging road jolted the rover violently, but Noah had ceased crying. It was as if his tiny body understood the lethal stakes; he simply clung to his blanket, his luminous eyes wide and fixed on my face in the greenish glow of the tactical HUD.
On the passenger seat, the military-grade tablet I had snatched from the estate’s terminal began to chirp rapidly with incoming encrypted packets.
*GLOBAL RED NOTICE: ACTIVE.*
*SUBJECT: CLARA VANCE (FORMERLY CALLAWAY).*
*OFFENSE: TERRORISM / ESPIONAGE / THEFT OF RESTRICTED GENETIC ASSET.*
*BOUNTY: $50,000,000 LIVE EXTRACTION OF SUBJECT BRAVO (NOAH).*
Fifty million dollars. Eleanor hadn't just called in local mercenaries; she had broadcast Noah’s biometric signature across the dark web's private military exchange. Any contracted gun between Montreal and Miami with a thermal scope was now hunting us.
"Look at me, Noah," I murmured, tearing my eyes away from the screen to adjust the straps on his carrier. "They can put every dollar on Earth on your head. They still have to go through me."
A sudden alert blipped on the rover’s rear-facing radar. Two high-speed signals were descending from the northern ridge. Not choppers—drones. Lightweight, high-velocity autonomous hunter-killers armed with anti-material munitions.
I saw the first strike before I heard it. A streak of blue-white phosphorus scorched the tree trunks thirty yards to my right, felling a hundred-year-old pine that smashed across the trail in a spray of splintered wood.
I didn't tap the brakes. I stomped the throttle, aiming the steel bull-bar straight at the narrower end of the trunk.
The collision felt like slamming into a brick wall. The airbags nearly deployed, the front suspension groaned in mechanical agony, but the bumper snapped the timber, throwing the rover airborne for a terrifying split second before slamming back onto the dirt.
In the rearview mirror, through the shattered ballistic window, the first drone banked low, its chin-mounted optic glowing malevolent crimson as it aligned for a direct kill-shot on our engine block.
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I grabbed the passenger-side flare launcher from the emergency kit, cracked the driver's side window an inch, and fired the thermal flare straight behind the vehicle. The magnesium flare ignited directly in the path of the drone’s optical sensor. The machine’s automated collision avoidance panicked, jerking violently upward straight into the thick branches above. It disintegrated in a fireball of magnesium and shredded carbon fiber.
One down. But on the radar screen, the second drone wasn't attacking. It was hovering high above the clearing, painting our coordinates directly to a ground convoy intercepting the road ahead.
