She looked at the biometric scanner glowing faintly beside the maintenance latch. Cross said it would only open to the creator.
But Olga was a forensic accountant. She knew that every ledger had a backdoor, and every lock had a master key. Elena had built this machine twenty-eight years ago. She had synthesized the DNA sequence to lock it.
"I am my mother’s daughter," Olga whispered to herself.
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She pulled a specialized, heavy-duty tactical knife from her suit's sheath. She didn't stab the lock. She pulled off her thick diving glove, exposing her bare hand to the freezing, crushing water. The pain was instantaneous and agonizing.
👉 With a ruthless, unbreakable resolve, Olga pressed the blade into her own palm, drawing fresh blood, and slammed her bleeding hand directly onto the Vault's biometric scanner.
The biometric scanner on the belly of the titanium obelisk flared a brilliant, blinding crimson. The machine analyzed the fresh blood instantly freezing in the pressurized ocean water.
For two agonizing seconds, the system stalled. Olga’s DNA was an exact 50% match to Elena’s, but the Genesis Protocol was designed to require absolute perfection. However, Olga hadn't just bled on the scanner. She had analyzed the micro-fluctuations in the scanner's optical laser.
Using her waterproof hacking terminal, Olga forcefully injected a localized feedback loop into the scanner's optical relay, tricking the machine into reading her 50% match twice in a fraction of a millisecond. 100%.
The heavy titanium latch gave a deafening CLACK.
The maintenance hatch irised open. Olga didn't hesitate. She hauled her freezing, bleeding body up into the pitch-black belly of the Mother's Vault, dragging her hacking terminal behind her. She slammed the hatch shut just as the internal airlock engaged, rapidly pressurizing the chamber and draining the seawater.
Olga collapsed onto the steel grating, gasping for air as her high-pressure suit hissed, equalizing the atmosphere. The internal lights of the server room flickered on—a terrifying, pulsing red.
She was inside the brain of the monster.
Massive, liquid-cooled server towers surrounded her, humming with the power of ten billion dollars and the biometric data of half the globe. The sheer scale of the architecture was breathtaking. It was the most perfect, beautiful, and evil ledger ever created.
But she didn't have time to marvel at it. A massive mechanical groan echoed through the titanium walls. The submarine had reached a depth of 500 feet. It was rapidly approaching the surface.
Olga crawled over to the central mainframe console. She plugged her terminal directly into the core matrix.
ENTER OVERRIDE CIPHER.
She didn't know the cipher. But she knew how her mother thought. Elena was arrogant. She viewed herself as a god.
Olga began running a brute-force forensic decryption, cross-referencing every date, every financial anomaly, and every psychological profile she had memorized from the Thorne Syndicate files.
Suddenly, the entire submarine rocked violently, throwing Olga against a server rack. The sound of metal groaning under immense external stress echoed through the chamber.
It wasn't the ocean pressure. Someone had attached to the top of the obelisk.
"Victor," Olga hissed.
Victor Kaelen hadn't fled the US Navy. The Architect had launched a localized, high-speed boarding torpedo from his stealth destroyer in the chaos, latching directly onto the top hatch of the Mother's Vault.
The sound of plasma cutting-torches began to melt through the ceiling of the server room. Sparks rained down on the supercomputers.
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Victor was breaching the sub to destroy the Genesis Protocol manually.
👉 As the molten titanium gave way and the top hatch blew open, Victor dropped into the server room, raising a heavy assault rifle—only to find Olga standing directly in front of the core mainframe, holding a dead-man's switch.
Face Victor Kaelen landed heavily on the steel grating, his immaculate silver suit replaced by a sleek, black tactical infiltration rig. He raised his assault rifle, the laser sight painting a red dot directly onto Olga’s chest.
"Step away from the console, Olga," Victor commanded, his breathing heavy, his pale eyes wild with a desperation he had never shown before. "The US Navy is boarding my destroyer. I have lost my empire. But I will not let that Russian witch have the world."
Olga didn't move. She held a thick bundle of exposed fiber-optic cables ripped directly from the core mainframe. In her other hand, she held her heavy tactical knife, the blade resting a millimeter above the glass wires.
"If I cut this bundle, Victor, the liquid-cooling system instantly vaporizes," Olga said, her voice terrifyingly calm amidst the blaring red alarms. "The servers melt down, and the Genesis Protocol is permanently erased. The ten billion dollars you’ve been hunting for thirty years burns with it."
Victor’s finger trembled on the trigger. He was a creature of greed. He couldn't stomach the physical destruction of that much wealth.
"Don't do it," Victor hissed. "I can extract the data. I can rebuild."
Before Olga could respond, the submarine breached the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The violent, sudden shift in gravity threw them both off balance. The obelisk bobbed heavily in the storm-tossed waves, the massive external broadcast antennas automatically deploying from the hull.
The top hatch—the one Victor had just melted through—suddenly went dark as a shadow eclipsed the moonlight.