Chapter 70 - The Avalanche of Echoes
She rose to her feet, wiping the blood from her jaw with the back of her sleeve, and kicked open the blast door leading to the dreadnought’s storm-swept flight deck.
"Run!" she commanded.
The North Atlantic wind hit them like a wall of ice. Rain lashed their faces as they scrambled across the pitching metal deck toward an Apex sub-orbital tilt-rotor transport sitting parked on the magnetic pad.
Behind them, internal explosions rattled the ship’s hull—Naomi’s thermite charges had finally breached the auxiliary fuel stores. The dreadnought was listing heavily to the port side, sea foam crashing over the lower rails.
Ethan hauled Clara into the transport’s passenger cabin while Naomi vaulted into the cockpit. Her hands flew across the avionics console with practiced ease. The twin turbine engines roared to life, their massive composite blades spinning up into a blur of raw power.
"Engines green," Naomi called out over the howling gale. "We're leaving."
She pulled the collective lever back. The transport surged off the magnetic pad, banking hard into the storm just as the dreadnought beneath them shuddered in a cataclysmic eruption of fire and smoke.
Inside the cabin, Ethan collapsed into the pilot’s jump seat, his neck bruised from her grip, but his heart racing with survival. "We set course for Switzerland. We finish Julian where he sits."
"The coordinates are locked," Naomi said, steadying the aircraft through the turbulent clouds.
Then, without warning, every flight control on the dashboard went limp.
The navigation screens flickered from emerald green to crimson. The avionics locked up completely, the automated fly-by-wire system freezing out Naomi’s inputs. The transport banked sharply forty degrees to the north—away from the European mainland, steering straight toward the barren, uncharted dead zones of the Arctic Circle.
"The controls aren't responding," Naomi said, her voice dropping into deadly focus as she fought the mechanical linkages. "We’ve been remotely intercepted."
The cockpit radio hissed to life with a crackle of static.
It wasn't Julian’s deep, calculating voice that came through the speakers.
It was a smooth, mocking, feminine purr—a voice dripping with aristocratic venom that should have been dead beneath the debris of the Philadelphia highway weeks ago.
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"You really thought my heel was the only thing I had to lose, didn't you, maid?" Vanessa Sterling’s voice echoed chillingly through the cabin. "Julian thinks he owns the sky. But he forgot who built the cage."
Below the transport, the radar flashed with an ominous warning: an armed interceptor wing was closing in from the storm clouds directly above them.
