Chapter 97 - Torpedoes in the Dark
The escape pod was an egg-shaped titanium sphere built for four passengers, tucked into the auxiliary emergency gantry. Arthur shoved me inside, then turned back to seal the inner airlock.
"What are you doing?!" I cried, clutching Noah against my chest inside the cramped interior. "Arthur, get in!"
"Pod only has life support for two if we need to surface under stealth conditions," Arthur said, his eyes devoid of fear, locked onto mine with fierce determination. "Besides, someone has to manually decouple the magnetic launch locks from the outer maintenance bay. The automated release was fried in the explosion."
"No! You can't stay!"
"Listen to me, Clara," he commanded, his voice cutting through Noah's cries. "Your mother died protecting the cipher in your blood. I spent twelve years underground building a resistance network capable of tearing down the Sovereign Directorate. We have a ship waiting at the coordinates pre-loaded into this pod's nav-computer. The captain's callsign is *Valkyrie*. Find her. Give her the key."
"What key?!" I shouted desperately.
Arthur reached into his tactical vest, pulled a heavy, tarnished silver signet ring from his finger, and slipped it onto my thumb. "The ledger of the Twelve. Everything Julian stole, everything Eleanor hid, everything the Directorate buried. It's stored in the quantum matrix inside this ring. Without Noah's biological signature, it won't unlock. You are the only mother who can authorize the purge."
Before I could reply, he slammed the emergency launch sequence button on the exterior bulkhead. The heavy inner hatch rotated, locking with a definitive, airtight thud.
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Outside the tiny observation viewport, Arthur gave a single, solemn nod. He pulled the manual decoupling lever.
A violent surge of compressed nitrogen threw the pod backward, launching us out of the belly of the dying *Nadir* into the pitch-black void of the ocean deep.
