Chapter 81 - The Gunship Over the Chasm
The spotlight blinding Naomi cast razor-sharp shadows across the bucking plates of the Svalbard facility. The downdraft from the massive stealth tiltrotor beat against her skin like frozen needles, churning pulverized snow and seawater into an opaque vortex. Beneath her boots, the sixty-degree pitch of the floor was accelerating; rivets sheared with the acoustic report of high-caliber rifle fire, and fifty-foot cryo-stasis canisters tumbled like bowling pins into the frothing Atlantic breach below.
Vanessa’s fingers dug into Naomi’s forearm, not with malice, but with the frantic, hysterical terror of a drowning animal. "Naomi! Pull me up! Don’t let me fall!"
Naomi didn't look at her. Her gaze was locked on the silhouette framed in the open side-bay of the black gunship above. The voice had not belonged to Julian Sterling, nor had it belonged to any familiar ghost from Philadelphia. It was flat, synthetically modulated, yet carried an inflection Naomi recognized from her earliest indoctrination at Site Nine: the Overseers of the Apex Council.
"Ethan!" Naomi roared over the turbine roar.
Across the splintered platform, Ethan Whitmore was clinging to an anchor bollard with one bloodied arm, his sidearm trained on the gantry above. "I'm still here! But the bedrock is gone—the whole shelf is sliding into the trench!"
"Get to the emergency winch line behind the secondary gantry!" she commanded. Then, with a single, brutal surge of kinetic power honed from a decade of surviving things no human should endure, Naomi hoisted Vanessa Sterling clean off the edge of the fracture and slammed her onto the remaining slab of reinforced decking.
Vanessa collapsed, gasping, her designer thermal coat ruined, her face pale as lard. "Who is that up there? Julian told me we had total air supremacy!"
"Julian lied to you, Vanessa. He used you as bait to pull me ten thousand miles away from Pennsylvania," Naomi said coldly. She unclipped her tactical grapple from her utility belt and slotted a magnetic piton into the launcher.
A twin-barrel rotary cannon beneath the gunship’s chin whined as its electric motor spun up.
"Evasive!" Naomi yelled.
A hail of 20mm armor-piercing rounds stitched a line across the steel floor, vaporizing concrete and turning the gantry railing into shredded shrapnel. Naomi dove sideways, tucking into a tight roll that carried her behind a hydraulic pump station just as the spot she had occupied disintegrated into dust.
The tiltrotor drifted forward, angling to drop an extraction cage—or a firing squad.
"They don't want prisoners," Ethan shouted, crawling behind Naomi’s shelter, his breath coming in ragged white plumes. "Naomi, if Whitmore House is already under siege, we have to hijack that bird. It’s the only transport with the range to cross the Atlantic before Julian breaches the lower foundation."
"Hijack it?" Vanessa shrieked from where she cowered against an overturned steel locker. "Are you insane? That’s a military prototype! You're a maid!"
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Naomi turned her head slowly, her cold amber-brown eyes pinning Vanessa to the spot. "I haven't been just a maid for a very long time, Miss Sterling. Stay down, or the next round cuts you in half."
Naomi raised her grapple gun, calibrated the pneumatic pressure for sub-zero steel, and aimed directly for the landing gear strut of the roaring gunship hovering fifty feet over the yawning abyss.
