Chapter 8 - The Shattered Ice
“No!” Daniel screamed.
He fired three consecutive rounds from his Glock into the electronic lock mechanism of the airlock door. Sparks showered across the floor, but the magnetic bolts remained locked in place.
Inside the chamber, a mechanical siren began to howl—a high-pitched, pulsing warning that bathed the blue room in flashes of emergency amber.
On the ceiling above the quartz capsule, heavy bronze valves began to turn with a terrifying mechanical hiss. Greenish-yellow fumes began to curl from the drainage spouts along the upper perimeter.
“Vance!” Richard barked into his radio. “Clear the room. Seal the outer blast door behind us!”
The four contractors turned toward the secondary exit at the rear of the chamber, preparing to escort Richard into the extraction tunnel that led to the surface.
“Daniel, the yellow cable!” Sophia screamed, pointing to the thick conduit running through the floor beneath their feet. “The acid pumps are running on the secondary transformer! Cut the main feed!”
Daniel didn't hesitate. He dropped the empty pistol, grabbed the heavy iron walking cane from his father’s hands, and wedged the titanium tip beneath the heavy aluminum junction box that fed the yellow power conduit into the airlock wall.
Using the cane as a lever, Daniel threw the entire weight of his body against the iron shaft.
With a sickening screech of tearing metal, the junction box ripped free from the concrete.
Daniel grabbed the thick, high-voltage line with his gloved hands and pulled with everything he had, tearing the wiring directly out of the terminal blocks.
A blinding blue arc flash exploded in the corridor.
The blast threw Daniel backward onto the concrete, the smell of ozone and scorched leather filling the air.
Inside the chamber, the amber lights instantly died. The mechanical whine of the acid pumps ground to a violent, shuddering halt. The bronze valves froze in place.
Richard spun around, his face purple with rage. “Idiots! The manual release! Turn the overhead valves manually!”
The contractors hesitated, looking up at the hissing, leaking acid lines above their heads. None of them moved.
“I pay you to follow orders, you cowards!” Richard screamed, drawing a compact revolver from his coat pocket and leveling it at the contractor nearest to him.
That second of hesitation was all Arthur Blackwood needed.
The old man, who five minutes ago could barely lift his feet through the snow, stepped over his fallen son. He grabbed the emergency fire axe mounted in the wall recess beside the airlock door—a heavy, steel-headed tool meant for breaching industrial bulkheads.
With a primal scream that echoed all the way up the ninety-foot elevator shaft, Arthur swung the axe.
The steel head struck the manual emergency pressure release valve on the exterior of the airlock.
The hydraulic pressure holding the blast doors shut hissed violently as the hydraulic fluid sprayed across the floor. The heavy glass doors slid open six inches, losing their seal.
Arthur threw his shoulder into the gap, forcing the heavy doors wide open, and stumbled into the chamber.
“Arthur, stay back!” Richard shouted, turning the revolver away from his contractor and pointing it directly at his brother’s chest.
Arthur didn't stop. He didn't look at the gun. He looked past Richard, past the armed guards, straight at the frosted quartz capsule.
“You stole thirty years of my life, Richard,” Arthur said, his voice dropping into a register of terrifying, calm clarity. “You stole my wife. You stole my son’s mother. And you thought I was too broken to see the end of it.”
Richard pulled the trigger.
The gunshot inside the enclosed, tiled chamber was deafening.
The bullet struck Arthur squarely in the left shoulder, spinning him halfway around. Blood bloomed across his woolen sweater like a dark carnation.
Arthur didn't fall.
He took one more step forward, swung the fire axe with his remaining good arm, and smashed the heavy steel blade directly into the control terminal of the liquid nitrogen system.
The pressurized cryogenic tanks ruptured with an earth-shattering roar.
A wall of white, sub-zero vapor exploded outward, instantly dropping the room's temperature to eighty degrees below zero.
Richard screamed as the liquid nitrogen vapor washed over his lower legs, the extreme cold shattering his trousers and freezing the skin of his shins instantly to bone. He collapsed onto the frost-covered floor, dropping the revolver into the expanding pool of boiling liquid gas.
The four contractors didn't wait for further orders. They broke for the rear extraction tunnel, scrambling over one another to escape the expanding white cloud of nitrogen.
Daniel lunged into the room, staying low beneath the rising vapor. He grabbed his father around the chest and dragged him backward through the airlock into the hallway, where Sophia was already waiting with the emergency trauma kit.
“Dad! Dad, look at me!” Daniel shouted, pressing his hand against the bleeding shoulder wound.
Arthur was coughing violently, his breath misting in the cold, but his eyes were wide, clear, and fixed on the center of the room.
The white fog slowly began to settle, drawn into the low floor vents.
And there, through the clearing mist, the quartz capsule stood revealed.
The thick layer of frost that had coated the curved glass for thirty-two years had been shattered and cleared away by the cryogenic shockwave.
Daniel looked through the glass.
His heart stopped beating entirely.
Inside the capsule lay a woman.
She was dressed in a dark velvet evening gown from the autumn of 1992. Her hands were folded peacefully across her abdomen. Her dark hair was arranged in elegant, cascading waves across a satin pillow.
Her skin was not the gray of a decayed corpse. It was a pale, alabaster porcelain, perfectly preserved by the advanced chemical bath that filled the lower reservoir.
She looked thirty-two years old.
She looked as though she had fallen asleep five minutes ago.
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And tucked beneath her folded hands, visible through the pristine quartz glass, was a leather-bound journal bearing the gold-embossed seal of the House of Vane.
***
