Chapter 45 - The First Fracture
The tension in the chamber snapped like a frayed steel cable.
Before Eleanor’s guards could raise their rifles, Dante moved. His draw was blindingly fast, honed by twenty years of surviving syndicate ambushes. His custom .45 barked twice, the heavy hollow-point rounds shattering the knee joints of the two closest automated legionnaires, dropping them instantly onto the glass floor.
"Move!" Dante roared, grabbing Claire by the tactical vest and shoving her behind the heavy steel support pillar of the elevator frame just as a hail of armor-piercing rounds chewed into the concrete where they had stood.
The subterranean chamber erupted into deafening thunder. Claire pressed Leo against her chest with her left arm, using her body as a biological shield while drawing her suppressed SIG Sauer with her right. Leaning out from the pillar, she fired three rapid shots, drilling Eleanor’s chief tactical officer through the visor slit of his helmet. The man collapsed, his weapon clattering into the reactor pool below.
Across the room, Eleanor had already retreated behind a set of blast-resistant pneumatic screens rising from the dais. "Kill the parents!" her voice blared through the overhead PA system, stripped of all motherly pretense. "Preserve the child’s brainstem and vascular tissue! The biometric matrix only requires viable cellular integrity!"
"She's completely insane!" Claire yelled over the roar of gunfire, ducking as a burst of high-caliber rounds showered them with concrete splinters.
Dante dropped an empty magazine and slammed a fresh one home with the heel of his palm. "We knew that when we landed! Where is the manual override for the reactor cooling grid?"
Claire glanced at the glowing schematic reflected in the glass floor beneath their boots. "The auxiliary control panel is on the lower catwalk, twenty feet down! If we flood the cooling chambers with raw seawater, the emergency fail-safes will force the reactors into a thermal scram! The entire facility will lose primary power, including the transmitter keeping the Second Fleet awake!"
"I'll draw their fire across the central gantry," Dante said, pulling two tactical smoke grenades from his belt. "You take the maintenance ladder behind the elevator shaft and get down to that panel."
"Dante, no—there are ten of them covering that gantry!" Claire shouted, grabbing his sleeve, her eyes wild with terror not for herself, but for him.
Dante looked at her, his scarred face illuminated by muzzle flashes and the ominous crimson glow of the reactor pools below. He reached down and gently brushed his thumb across baby Leo’s cheek. The boy was crying now, the concussive sound waves penetrating his ear protection, but the moment Dante touched him, the tears slowed.
"They're shooting at a Don, Claire," Dante said, a ghost of a lethal smirk touching his lips. "They're going to need a lot more than ten. Move!"
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Dante pulled the pins on both smoke canisters, hurled them onto the central bridge, and launched himself out from behind cover, firing with terrifying, surgical precision into the boiling white fog.
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