Chapter 45 - Infiltration of the Stratosphere
Forty minutes later, the sub-level bunker beneath Apex Tower hummed with an ominous, subterranean vibration.
Mateo sat before a monolithic console of liquid-cooled supercomputers, his small hands dancing across the tactile arrays. Álvaro's secret transmitter was a masterpiece of black-budget engineering, capable of pumping terabytes of encrypted telemetry directly into the upper ionosphere.
Beside him, Lucía calibrated an auxiliary terminal, rerouting commercial satellite networks to mask their ping.
"I have him," Mateo breathed, his hazel eyes reflecting cascading waterfalls of green code. "I'm inside Marcos's optical feed."
Through Mateo’s screen, a terrifying vision materialized: the curved quartz glass of the chamber, Cassian Cross standing before an array of global strike coordinates, and the control panels of *The Sovereign*.
"He's being held in the Central Core Deck," Mateo reported quickly. "Cassian is preparing to initiate the Global Sovereign Protocol. He's going to use Marcos’s neural processing power to override the orbital defense grids of every major sovereign nation simultaneously."
"How much time do we have?" Lucía asked, her knuckles white against the metal desk.
"Eighteen minutes before the full uplink achieves critical parity," Mateo said. He closed his eyes, pressing two fingers against his left temple. "Marcos. Can you hear me?"
Ten thousand meters above the Earth, inside the amniotic fluid, Marcos’s fingers twitched.
The golden circuitry on Marcos’s skin flared violently. Through the damp glass, Marcos’s lips parted, and a low, digital chime reverberated through the dreadnought’s sound system.
*Mateo,* Marcos’s thought projected across the ionospheric bridge. *I’m overriding the localized safety protocols in the coolant lines. But Cassian has dead-bolted the airlocks. You can’t reach me by conventional aircraft.*
"I don't need a conventional aircraft," Mateo replied through their shared bio-link, a fierce smirk crossing his features. "Álvaro kept an unmanned sub-orbital prototype drone in the Apex emergency hangar. I've already hijacked its autopilot."
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Lucía turned to her son in sheer astonishment. "Mateo, you can't pilot an experimental hypersonic drone remotely while maintaining a deep neural bridge!"
"I don't have to pilot it, Mom," Mateo said, his eyes glowing with an eerie, reflective intensity identical to his brother's. "Marcos is going to guide it in from the inside."
