Chapter 75 - A Fracture in the Ranks
David didn't wait for Julian to retreat. He rolled across the floor, firing twice more. One round ricocheted off the console, shattering the holographic projector into a shower of sparks; the second struck the third operative in the center of his chest plate, driving him back against the pressurized door.
Julian lunged behind a reinforced partition, his hands frantically keying an alarm sequence.
Red emergency lights instantly strobed through the ceiling panels, accompanied by the low, pulsing groan of an automated klaxon: `SECTOR FOUR SECURITY BREACH. CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL ACTIVE.`
David lunged across the floor, scooping Maya into his left arm while firing the last two rounds from the magazine toward the doorway to suppress the approaching guards. "Leah! Up! Get up!"
Leah pushed herself off the blood-slicked tile, her hands shaking from the electric shock, but her grip on the infant was absolute. She scrambled behind the steel surgery table just as a burst of automatic fire chewed through the console above her head, raining hot plastic and copper fragments over her back.
David dropped the empty pistol and reached for the dead guard’s carbine, but a boot suddenly kicked the weapon away across the floor.
David looked up, his fists raised, ready to kill—only to stop.
Standing over the dead guard was not another soldier, but one of the senior technicians who had been standing beside the console. She had ripped off her medical mask. Her hair was streaked with gray, her eyes wide with terror and resolve.
"Down here!" she hissed, her voice cutting through the blaring alarms. "The maintenance conduit under Bay 3! Move, you fool, before Julian seals the bulkheads!"
"Who the hell are you?" David snarled, shielding Maya behind his thigh.
"I’m Elizabeth Vance," the woman gasped, pulling a magnetic override card from around her neck and swiping it across a floor hatch concealed beneath an equipment rack. "I worked with your mother thirty years ago. I thought we were curing hereditary disease—I didn't know we were breeding cattle! Julian has gone insane. He’s going to vent the cryogenic sectors to purge the facility! Go!"
The heavy steel hatch swung upward, revealing a dark, vertical shaft with an industrial service ladder plunging down into the bowels of the mountain.
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"David," Leah breathed, looking from the dark hole to the flashing blast doors down the hall, where the thud of heavy combat boots was rapidly approaching.
"Get in," David said. "Now!"
