Chapter 95 - Shadows in the Hull
My pulse spiked. An internal transponder?
Before Vane could turn her suspicious gaze toward me, the heavy pressure doors of the medical bay violently hissed open. Two guards rushed in, weapons drawn, but behind them, stepping through the shadows of the pressurized corridor, was a figure that made my breath catch in my throat.
He wore black tactical gear, his face obscured by a Kevlar balaclava until he reached up with gloved hands and pulled it down. He was lean, scar-tissue running along his jawline, eyes sharp and predatory.
"Arthur?" I gasped.
Arthur Ashford—my estranged uncle, a man declared dead in a suspicious plane crash over the Andes twelve years ago. The family black sheep whom Julian had always warned me never to search for.
"Get away from the pod, Vane," Arthur said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. In his right hand, he held a heavy-caliber sidearm pointed directly between Vane’s cold eyes; in his left, a detonation controller blinking with a steady green light.
"Arthur Ashford," Vane sneered, though she subtly stepped back from her console. "The prodigal exile. I assumed our cleaners dealt with you in Bogota."
"Your cleaners were sloppy," Arthur replied, not shifting his aim for a millisecond. "Just like Julian was sloppy, and just like you were sloppy leaving Clara unattended in the secondary triage room back at the cliffside depot. She planted my homing tag on your ventral ballast while you were busy reading her the riot act."
I stared at Arthur, stunned. During the chaotic extraction on the cliff, when a paramedic had shoved me toward the launch, a rough hand had slipped a coin-sized metallic disc into my palm with a quick whisper: *Stick it to the hull if you want Noah to live.* I had jammed it into the exterior hydraulic valve during the embarkation without knowing who was pulling the strings.
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"You brought a private armada to Directorate waters?" Vane hissed. "You cannot defeat the Twelve, Arthur. You are an obsolete relic of an expired bloodline."
"Maybe," Arthur smirked. "But obsolete relics still know how to blow the bulkheads."
