Chapter 124 - The Drowned Chasm
Water was rising.
It gurgled up from beneath the bent plates of the floorboards, cold as liquid ice and smelling of ancient brine, sulfur, and burning electrical insulation.
Naomi unlatched her five-point harness, dropping heavily onto the listing deck of the cockpit. She hissed through her teeth as a sharp flare of agony shot through her left side—two cracked ribs, possibly three. She ignored it, her training locking the pain into a compartmentalized corner of her mind.
"Julian," she rasped, reaching over to check his vitals.
Julian was slumped forward against his restraints, a dark smear of blood running from his hairline into his collar. Naomi pressed two fingers to his carotid artery. The pulse was rapid but strong. She reached up, unclipped his harness, and dragged him back into the crew compartment before the pooling water reached his face.
"Wake up," she ordered, lightly tapping his cheek with the back of her gloved hand. "Whitmore. Wake up now. We don't have time for a concussion."
Julian groaned, his eyes fluttering open under the dim emergency red lighting of the broken cockpit. "Did... did we make it to London?"
"We made it to the bottom of the Atlantic," Naomi said grimly, unscrewing the tactical weapons locker behind the pilot seats. "Vance collapsed the main line behind him. Car 01 cleared the sector before the charges blew, but we’ve crashed into the Mid-Atlantic Geothermal Substation—an auxiliary maintenance station built into the tectonic shelf."
She pulled out two subcompact magnetic-carbine rifles, four spare magazines of armor-piercing rounds, and a pair of pressurized rebreather units.
"Can we reach the surface?" Julian asked, struggling to his feet while clutching his bruised shoulder.
"The escape pods here are rated for benthic ascent," Naomi said, loading a round into the chamber of her carbine with a sharp, practiced *clack*. "But Vance knows this facility exists. He knows Arthur had access to the transmission codes. If he suspects we survived the collapse, he won't have left this station empty."
Right on cue, the heavy pneumatic blast doors at the far end of the maintenance dock hissed.
Through the shattered quartz glass of Car 02, Naomi saw five silhouettes emerging from the mist of pressurized steam. They moved with the eerie, unnatural fluid precision that she recognized all too well.
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They weren't human guards. They were Vance’s synthetic vanguard—Generation Ten prototypes, their skin coated in liquid silver dermal armor, their mechanical eyes burning with cold, predatory cerulean light.
***
