Three hundred wealthy guests watched a maid stop Vanessa’s attack with one hand, never realizing the woman in the gray uniform had once been trained to dismantle dangerous threats. / Chapter 127 / 130

Chapter 127 - Ghosts of the Deep Trench

Naomi chased the fleeing machine through a labyrinth of narrow, pressurized corridors lined with heavy geothermal steam pipes. The walls groaned continuously, the metallic hull of the station screaming under the unbalanced pressure of the collapsed transit tunnel behind them.

She could hear the warning sirens of the station blaring in an ancient, recorded voice:

*“STRUCTURAL FAILURE IMMINENT. SECTOR SEVEN PRESSURE: EXCEEDED. TIME TO TOTAL HULL COMPACT: FIVE MINUTES.”*

Ahead, the synthetic reached the blast door of the primary deep-sea escape hub. It slammed its palm onto the emergency quarantine lock, intending to seal Naomi and Julian in the flooded sectors behind it.

Naomi didn't try to shoot the door controls. She threw her combat knife with terrifying velocity.

The blade pierced clean through the synthetic’s right wrist, pinning its hand to the door console two inches away from the lockdown key. The machine let out a synthetic screech of processing error, its head snapping back toward Naomi.

She closed the distance in three strides. Without slowing down, she delivered a brutal flying knee strike straight to its damaged chest plate, driving the synthetic through the safety glass of the control booth. They both tumbled into the dry, climate-controlled sanctum of the station’s observation bridge.

The machine slashed with its silver blade-hand, slicing through Naomi’s flight suit and carving a line of red across her shoulder. Naomi didn't even flinch. She grabbed the severed end of an exposed high-voltage terminal cable hanging from the shattered ceiling and rammed the raw, sparking copper wires directly into the open knife wound in the synthetic’s chest.

Twenty thousand volts of raw geothermal energy surged into the machine's central processor.

The prototype convulsed violently, its liquid silver skin boiling away into toxic gray smoke as its internal circuits turned to slag. It went rigid, sparks blasting from its mouth and eyes, before collapsing onto the deck plate like a sack of broken iron.

Naomi stood over the smoking wreck, her chest heaving, blood dripping from her shoulder and ribs onto the cold linoleum floor.

Julian stumbled through the doorway a moment later, pale and soaking wet, his eyes wide as he looked at the central command console of the bridge.

"Naomi... look at the main screen," he whispered.

Naomi wiped the sweat and blood from her eyes and looked up.

The central tactical terminal was active. It wasn't displaying transit maps. It was displaying live satellite uplinks from London, Paris, and Philadelphia.