Chapter 60 - The Abyss and the Signal
Ethan fought the paralysis with every ounce of willpower he had, tears streaming down his face as he watched through the pod's reinforced porthole.
Naomi stood on the partially submerged gantry, water already swirling around her waist. The catastrophic pressure of the Atlantic groaned through the submarine’s hull, the steel plates rippling like paper as rivets shot out with the force of bullets.
She reached the manual emergency lever. She clamped both hands around the rusted iron bar, her bandaged hand bleeding afresh into the surging seawater. With a primal scream of effort, she threw her entire body weight backward.
The heavy hydraulic pins disengaged with a resounding *CLANG*.
The escape pod’s thrusters roared to life. A massive bubble of compressed gas launched the craft backward out of the *Aethelgard's* collapsing hull and into the pitch-black ocean abyss.
Through the porthole, Ethan saw Naomi being swept back by the torrent of water, her figure illuminated by the pod’s exterior thruster flare. But she didn't drown in the flood—she caught a safety cable and hauled herself toward a secondary emergency atmospheric tube just as the submarine split in two behind her, a colossal ball of flame and collapsing metal swallowed by the deep.
Inside the rising pod, the main navigation screen flickered violently as they shot toward the surface at forty knots.
*Ascent phase initiated. Time to surface: 4 minutes.*
Clara sobbed beside Ethan, clutching her brother’s arm as the paralysis slowly faded from his fingertips. "She saved us... Ethan, she saved us again..."
Ethan clenched his jaw, staring out into the black water below, refusing to believe she was gone. "She’s Generation Nine. She survived Philadelphia. She survived Marcus. She survived the sub. She’s not dead."
Suddenly, the pod’s central communications console—which should have been dead after the submarine’s purge—chirped with an incoming, highly encrypted military transmission.
Ethan lunged for the screen. "Naomi?!"
The display did not show Naomi.
Instead, a high-definition video feed cleared through the static. The background was not the ocean, nor a military vessel. It was an opulent, sunlit greenhouse filled with white orchids—the private winter conservatory of an estate somewhere in the Swiss Alps.
Sitting in a high-backed velvet armchair, a glass of amber scotch in one hand and an oxygen tube beneath his nose, was an older man with gray hair, sharp blue eyes, and an unmistakable crescent-shaped scar above his left eyebrow.
Julian Whitmore took a sip of his scotch, looked straight into the camera, and smiled faintly.
May you like
"Hello, Ethan. Hello, Clara," the dead man said calmly. "I see Naomi completed her final test. Now, let us discuss who really runs this world."
Before Ethan or Clara could utter a single word, the pod’s collision radar screamed an ear-splitting alarm: a massive shadow was descending from the ocean surface directly above them, blocking their ascent.
