The Mafia Boss Caught the Housekeeper in His Forbidden Room — Until He S...
The Mafia Boss Mocked a Waitress in a Foreign Language—Her Reply Left Hi...
I found the first needle on a Thursday afternoon, tucked in a compartmen...
Sterling’s breath hitched. A faint, red flush was already creeping up his neck. He dropped the glass, the crystal shattering on the floor.
👉 "You arrogant fool," Sterling choked out, his throat rapidly swelling as he lunged for the terminal. "The uplink isn't broadcasting from this building!"
Sterling collapsed heavily onto the plush carpet of the VIP lounge, gasping for air as the synthetic anaphylaxis paralyzed his respiratory system. Olga didn't spare him a glance. She sprinted to the sleek, militarized quantum terminal and drove her ceramic pistol directly into the screen, shattering it.
But Sterling’s dying words echoed in her mind. The uplink isn't broadcasting from this building.
The terminal in Washington was merely a decoy—a localized remote control. The true broadcast station for the Pantheon satellites had to be massive, heavily fortified, and capable of transmitting a quantum-resonance frequency to low-earth orbit without detection.
Olga tapped her encrypted comms. "Natalia, abort! Sterling was a decoy. We need to find the true uplink!"
Natalia burst into the VIP lounge a moment later, having effortlessly incapacitated the guards outside. She looked at the gasping Director on the floor. "Where is the signal coming from?"
Olga plugged her air-gapped laptop into the shattered remnants of Sterling’s terminal, aggressively auditing the routing data of the aborted launch sequence. "The data isn't pinging to a terrestrial satellite dish. It’s routing downward. Into the ocean. He’s using the transatlantic fiber-optic deep-sea cables to piggyback the signal to a mobile naval platform."
"A submarine," Natalia realized, her bio-hacked mind processing the tactical nightmare. "Aegis hijacked a nuclear submarine to act as an untraceable, mobile broadcast station. If they transmit from deep water, we can't hit them with an airstrike."
"And they can launch Pantheon from anywhere on Earth," Olga finished, closing her laptop. "We have to sever the undersea cable before the submarine can transmit the payload."
They left Sterling convulsing on the floor, slipping out of the gala through a service elevator just as Aegis medics rushed the room.
Four hours later, under the cover of a pitch-black night, Olga and Natalia stood on the deck of a heavily modified, unmarked stealth trawler off the coast of Virginia. Commander Cross piloted the vessel, navigating through the treacherous, freezing swells of the Atlantic.
"The primary transatlantic trunk line runs directly beneath us," Cross yelled over the roaring wind, pointing to the sonar display. "The Aegis submarine has tapped into the cable at a depth of three thousand feet. They are currently siphoning the Pantheon code from Sterling’s servers and uploading it to their orbital array."
Olga zipped up a massive, high-pressure atmospheric diving suit—a cumbersome, heavily armored rig designed for extreme deep-sea repairs. "If I manually sever the trunk line at the junction box, the transmission fails, and Pantheon goes dark."
"You’re diving three thousand feet into the abyss to cut a military-grade fiber-optic cable with a plasma torch?" Cross asked, shaking his head. "Olga, if the Aegis sub detects your thermal signature, they will crush you with a single torpedo."
"Then I’d better cut fast," Olga said, locking her heavy titanium helmet into place.
The Mafia Boss Caught the Housekeeper in His Forbidden Room — Until He S...
The Mafia Boss Mocked a Waitress in a Foreign Language—Her Reply Left Hi...
I found the first needle on a Thursday afternoon, tucked in a compartmen...
The hydraulic crane lifted her over the side of the trawler, plunging her into the violent, freezing black water. She sank like a stone into the crushing depths, the only light coming from the twin halogens mounted on her suit.
👉 But as Olga reached the sandy ocean floor and illuminated the massive, snake-like undersea cable, she realized with absolute horror that she wasn't alone in the dark.
The twin halogen beams of Olga’s atmospheric diving suit cut through the crushing, pitch-black abyss, illuminating the massive transatlantic fiber-optic cable half-buried in the silt. But hovering directly above the cable junction box was a terrifying, monolithic silhouette.
It was an Ohio-class nuclear submarine, painted in radar-absorbent matte black. The Aegis broadcast station.
Olga’s heart hammered against her ribs, the sound deafening inside the heavy titanium helmet. The sheer scale of the submarine was paralyzing. It hung in the water like a sleeping leviathan, heavily armed and entirely invisible to the world above.
"Olga, do you see the junction box?" Natalia’s voice crackled through the encrypted underwater comms, distorted by the immense pressure.
"I see it," Olga breathed, gripping her specialized plasma cutting torch. "But the sub is parked right on top of it. They have proximity sensors active. If I ignite the plasma torch, the thermal spike will trigger their automated defense grid before I can cut through the armored casing."
"You have to find a blind spot," Cross advised frantically. "Audit the hull."
Olga didn't panic. She engaged her suit's micro-thrusters, hovering inches above the silty ocean floor, moving with agonizing slowness to avoid triggering acoustic alarms. She glided directly beneath the massive belly of the nuclear submarine.
Her forensic mind scanned the schematics of standard naval architecture she had memorized. Aegis had hijacked a US military vessel, which meant it still possessed standard military flaws.