"They tapped the cable manually," Olga observed, illuminating a thick, secondary wire running from the submarine’s external maintenance hatch directly into the severed junction box on the sea floor. "If I cut the Aegis wire instead of the main trunk line, I sever the uplink without destroying the global internet grid."
She maneuvered toward the maintenance hatch. But as she raised the plasma torch, the massive submarine suddenly groaned. The localized sonar array on the belly of the sub flared to life, washing over Olga with a powerful, vibrating acoustic pulse.
They had found her.
"Warning! Torpedo tube doors opening!" Natalia screamed over the comms.
Olga knew she couldn't outrun a torpedo in a cumbersome diving suit. She had three seconds before she was vaporized. She didn't flee. She propelled herself directly upward, slamming her heavy titanium suit against the submarine's maintenance hatch.
She bypassed the plasma torch entirely. She drew her tactical hacking terminal from a waterproof pouch, jamming the hardwire connection directly into the sub’s external diagnostic port. She didn't try to hack the torpedoes. She audited the internal comms array of the submarine.
Inside the Aegis submarine, the elite, brainwashed crew suddenly heard a localized broadcast overriding their tactical headsets.
"Aegis crew," Olga’s voice echoed through the dark metal corridors of the sub, crystal clear and commanding. "Director Sterling is dead. The Haven has fallen. You are holding a nuclear payload for a ghost. If you fire that torpedo, you trigger a localized thermal cascade that will detonate your own reactor."
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...
It was a bluff—a massive, calculated lie based on the psychological profiles of private mercenaries. Aegis operatives were ruthless, but they were deeply paranoid about self-preservation.
👉 The torpedo tube doors violently halted their rotation, freezing open as a fierce, armed mutiny erupted inside the control room of the submarine just inches above Olga’s head.
The muffled, violent sounds of gunfire echoed through the thick titanium hull of the submarine, vibrating directly into Olga’s pressurized suit. Her forensic bluff had worked flawlessly. The Aegis mercenaries inside, brainwashed by Arthur Vance’s ideology but driven by the primal fear of a nuclear meltdown, had turned on their commanding officers.
"The torpedo sequence is aborted," Cross confirmed over the comms, watching the sonar data from the trawler above. "The sub’s internal command structure is collapsing. Olga, cut the wire now!"
Olga ignited the plasma torch. The blinding blue-white flame roared to life in the crushing dark, instantly vaporizing the freezing seawater around it. She drove the superheated blade of plasma directly into the thick, armored Aegis wire connecting the submarine to the transatlantic junction box.
The heavy wire hissed, boiled, and violently snapped in two.
"Uplink severed," Olga gasped, her heart pounding as the massive submarine suddenly went entirely dark, its power grid intentionally tripped by the mutinying crew inside to reset the systems. "Pantheon is offline."
"Get out of there, Olga," Natalia warned urgently. "The mutiny won't last long. Once they realize the reactor is stable, they’ll reboot the defense grid."
Olga engaged her vertical thrusters, ascending rapidly through the pitch-black ocean. The pressure gauge on her suit ticked backward, the crushing weight of the abyss slowly lifting. She broke the surface of the freezing Atlantic, bobbing in the violent swells as Cross navigated the stealth trawler alongside her.
The hydraulic crane hauled her heavy suit onto the deck. Natalia immediately began unlatching the titanium helmet.
"We stopped the broadcast," Olga said, breathing heavily the crisp, freezing ocean air.
"We delayed it," Natalia corrected grimly, handing Olga a towel. "Sterling is dead, and the sub is crippled. But Arthur Vance’s master drive indicated there are multiple redundancy uplinks hidden around the globe. If we don't find the central server hosting the Pantheon code, Aegis will simply try again."
Cross stared at his encrypted sonar display, his face pale. "We have a bigger problem right now. The Aegis submarine didn't just sit there. Before you cut the wire, it managed to transmit a localized distress signal. And it wasn't aimed at Washington."
"Where did it ping?" Olga demanded, shedding the heavy diving suit.
"The North Sea," Cross typed rapidly on the console. "Coordinates point to an abandoned, deep-water oil rig eighty miles off the coast of Scotland. Aegis has a black site there. And based on the massive power signatures radiating from that rig, it’s not just a prison. It’s the primary Pantheon server farm."
Olga looked out at the dark, churning ocean. They had cut one head off the hydra, only to find the heart beating furiously in the freezing waters of Europe.
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...
"Set a course," Olga commanded, her eyes burning with absolute, cinematic resolve. "We’re going to burn that rig to the waterline."
👉 But as the trawler banked hard into the waves, Natalia suddenly collapsed onto the steel deck, her bio-hacked nervous system violently short-circuiting as a hidden, dormant code inside her DNA was remotely activated from the North Sea.
"Natalia!" Olga screamed, dropping to the wet steel deck and catching her sister as the bio-hacked clone began to seize violently.
Natalia’s eyes rolled back, her body rigid, a terrifying digital stutter corrupting her movements. The veins in her neck pulsed with a sickening, unnatural blue hue. She wasn't having a medical emergency; she was being remotely hacked.