Chapter 67 - The Fractured Sovereign
David ascended the steel spiral staircase of the control tower three steps at a time, making no more sound than a falling leaf.
The sniper inside the cabin was still frantically trying to recalibrate his thermal scope through the white-hot interference of the burning diesel ditch. His spotter was leaning out the window with laser rangefinders, shouting into his headset.
"Target bloom is too hot! We're blind on the southern rail! Move the perimeter teams inward!"
David kicked the heavy glass door off its track.
The reinforced glass exploded inward in a thousand diamond fragments. The spotter spun around, drawing a sidearm, but David’s right hand caught him by the throat, driving him backward through the shattered window frame. The man tumbled forty feet down onto the frozen gravel siding without a cry.
The sniper lunged for his short-barreled shotgun, but David’s boot struck the weapon, sending it clattering across the control console.
David slammed the operative onto the main terminal board, pinning him by the throat with his forearm. He pressed the barrel of his ceramic pistol against the man’s temple.
"Call off the track interdiction," David commanded, his voice vibrating with a terrible, absolute stillness.
The operative spat blood against the shattered console. Beneath his tactical balaclava, his eyes widened not with terror, but with a fanatical, sickening reverence.
"You really are him..." the operative choked out, his chest rattling beneath David's crushing weight. "Subject Zero-One. The Sovereign prototype."
"Cancel the interdiction, or I paint this board with your brain," David hissed.
"It doesn't matter if you kill me, David," the man whispered, coughing violently. "You think Arthur is hunting you because he wants to preserve the Board's secrets? You think this is about money?"
The soldier let out a gurgling laugh.
"Arthur is dying. His cellular matrix is collapsing into degenerative dementia. The Cardinal genome he used to build the Genesis project was harvested from his own marrow thirty years ago... but it was flawed. Every clone he grew afterward died of premature organ failure before their twentieth year. You were the only one who stabilized. You are the only vessel whose immune system didn't reject the synthetic sequence."
The words hit David like physical blows.
"What are you saying?"
"He doesn't want to capture you to interrogate you," the soldier gasped, his fingers clawing at David’s wrist. "He has an automated surgical theater waiting on his private transport train on the main line. He doesn't want Maya... he wants *you*. He needs your bone marrow, your spinal fluid, and your frontal lobe to perform an autologous neural graft. If he doesn't harvest you within seventy-two hours, his brain will liquefy."
The operative smiled a hideous, bloody grin.
"And he brought the one person you could never pull the trigger on to make sure you submit."
On the master rail console, a red warning light flashed. An incoming override signal was descending from the high-speed main line:
`PRIORITY CLEARANCE // STERLING EXECUTIVE EXPRESS 0-1`
`INTERCEPT VECTOR CONFIRMED // CLOSING ON FREIGHT 4402`
Through the shattered window of the tower, David looked westward down the track.
Emerging from the swirling blizzard at ninety miles per hour was not a military convoy, but a sleek, armored, chrome-and-black luxury train—the private rolling fortress of the Sterling Genesis Board. It was on a parallel switch track, surging forward to box the slow-moving freight train against the sheer mountain wall.
David did not kill the soldier. He slammed the butt of his weapon into the man’s temple, knocking him unconscious, then turned and vaulted over the broken rail of the platform.
May you like
He plummeted twenty-five feet, landing with a bone-jarring roll on the roof of a passing freight car, his boots locking into the corrugated steel walk as the train accelerated into the dark throat of the Black Ridge Mountain Tunnel.
***
