Chapter 99 - The Abyssal Ignition: Fire on the North Atlantic
Claire felt her soul tearing in two. The agony in her chest was worse than any bullet, worse than any knife. But as Leo let out a soft, frightened whimper against her throat, the mother in her overtook the grief.
She turned on her heel and sprinted down the catwalk.
The Patriarch was still in his motorized chair, frantically attempting to input an override code to save himself, but Claire didn't even look at him. As she passed, she drew her secondary combat pistol and fired two rounds straight through the life-support battery on the back of his chair, leaving the tyrant choking in his own fading breath as the electrical fire consumed his cybernetic rig.
"Miller! Move!" Claire shouted as she burst into the lower access bay.
Miller was waiting at the hatch of an advanced deep-sea submersible craft, his submachine gun slung across his chest. "Where’s Dante?!"
"He’s giving us a chance," Claire choked out, shoving Miller into the vessel. "Seal the hatch! Now!"
Behind them, the deep bowels of the *Tartarus* groaned as massive explosions began to rip through the lower decks. Dante’s manual override had suppressed the nuclear warhead detonation, but the structural integrity of the massive stealth frigate was collapsing under the catastrophic failure of its steam turbines.
The submersible’s hatch hissed shut, locking with an airtight seal. Miller slammed the emergency release lever.
The craft decoupled from the mother ship, dropping like a lead stone into the freezing, pitch-black abyss of the North Atlantic just as the *Tartarus* split clean down the center in a massive underwater explosion of fire, steam, and twisted steel.
Through the reinforced porthole of the diving vessel, Claire watched the burning carcass of the flagship sink into the trench. A wall of shockwaves battered their hull, throwing them into darkness as the submersible drifted helplessly into the deep ocean currents.
May you like
Claire slumped to the deck, wrapping both arms around the two silent babies. She buried her face in their blankets and wept with a savagery that shook her entire body, mourning the man who had traded his life so they could breathe.
***
