Olga’s exhausted eyes locked onto the glowing screen of her terminal. The file wasn't a bank ledger. It wasn't a biometric code. It was a terrifyingly simple, automated countdown timer.
"Marcus," Olga whispered, her blood running cold as the adrenaline violently spiked back into her system. "Pantheon wasn't just an orbital satellite network."
Cross glanced at the screen, his face draining of color. "Sterling’s servers are at the bottom of the ocean. We destroyed the uplink. The satellites are dormant."
"Sterling didn't build Pantheon. Arthur Vance did," Olga analyzed, her fingers flying across the keyboard to trace the origin of the automated timer. "Arthur knew a localized server could be destroyed. He knew an orbital array could be shot down. The satellites were a delivery mechanism, but they aren't the weapon. The weapon is physical."
"What physical weapon?" Natalia asked, leaning forward, the thermal blanket dropping from her shoulders.
"The transatlantic fiber-optic trunk line," Olga said, the terrifying realization locking into place. "When I dove down to sever the Aegis submarine’s wire, I saw the main junction box. Arthur didn't just tap the cables to broadcast to space. He infected the physical infrastructure of the global internet grid. The countdown timer is a localized, automated failsafe buried in the deep-sea junction box itself."
Olga brought up the schematics she had downloaded from the sub. "If this timer hits zero, the junction box will detonate a localized EMP charge. It won't destroy the cable. It will permanently fuse the fiber-optic nodes into a closed-loop broadcast state. The entire global internet will become a massive, untraceable neuro-linguistic transmitter. Every smartphone, every television, every digital screen on Earth will simultaneously broadcast the psychological wipe."
They had fifty-eight minutes to stop the end of free will.
"We are three hundred miles away from the junction box coordinates," Cross stated grimly, pushing the stealth helicopter’s engines to their absolute maximum velocity. "I can get us there in forty-five minutes. But Olga, you left your atmospheric diving suit on the Aegis submarine. It’s sitting at the bottom of the ocean. You can't dive three thousand feet without it."
"I don't need a suit," Natalia said quietly, her dark eyes filled with absolute resolve. "My bio-hacked physiology can withstand the crushing pressure and the freezing temperatures for exactly five minutes before my organs fail. That’s enough time to dive, smash the junction box, and surface."
"No!" Olga turned fiercely in her seat. "I am not letting you sacrifice yourself. The pressure will crush your lungs!"
"I am a weapon, Olga," Natalia smiled softly, placing a hand on her sister’s shoulder. "Let me be the shield this time."
They flew in agonizing, tense silence. The helicopter tore across the brightening morning sky, the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean stretching out below them in terrifying indifference.
The timer hit 15:00.
"We’re over the coordinates," Cross yelled, hovering the chopper twenty feet above the choppy, freezing swells.
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Natalia stood at the open side door. She wore a sleek, hydrodynamic combat suit. She didn't carry a plasma torch. She carried a heavy, dense block of C4 explosive with a three-minute pressure fuse.
👉 "I'll see you on the surface, sister," Natalia said, and dove perfectly into the dark, churning abyss.
Natalia hit the freezing Atlantic water with the precision of a fired bullet. The shock of the sub-zero temperature registered in her bio-hacked brain, but she ruthlessly suppressed the pain receptors. She engaged a specialized, hyper-oxygenated breathing apparatus Commander Cross had scavenged from the chopper’s emergency supplies, designed for short-term, extreme-depth insertions.
She swam downward.
The pressure built instantly, a physical, crushing weight pressing against her ribs, her skull, her eardrums. Standard human physiology would have collapsed at five hundred feet. Natalia pushed past a thousand.
The ocean grew pitch black, the sunlight completely swallowed by the abyss. She turned on a small, high-intensity halogen beam mounted on her shoulder. The beam cut through the dark, illuminating the microscopic marine snow drifting in the current.
Two thousand feet.
Her genetically enhanced muscles began to scream in agony. The nitrogen in her blood was compressing dangerously. Her vision blurred at the edges, a creeping darkness threatening to overwhelm her consciousness.
I am not a ledger. I am a sister. Olga’s words echoed in her mind, a localized anchor of humanity keeping her tethered to reality.
Three thousand feet.
The ocean floor materialized in the harsh halogen beam. Half-buried in the pale silt was the massive transatlantic fiber-optic cable, converging into the heavily armored, titanium junction box. It hummed with immense, terrifying power, a faint red LED light pulsing steadily on its surface. The countdown.
Natalia landed on the silt, her movements sluggish under the immense pressure. She had exactly two minutes of oxygen left, and her organs were beginning to systematically shut down from the cold and the crush.
She crawled toward the junction box. Her fingers, numb and clumsy, pulled the block of C4 explosive from her harness. She slammed the explosive directly onto the titanium casing of the automated EMP failsafe mechanism.
She twisted the pressure fuse. Three minutes.
It was done. The physical destruction of the junction box would sever the corrupted node permanently, preventing the global broadcast.
But as Natalia pushed off the ocean floor to begin her ascent, her bio-hacked body finally reached its absolute breaking point. A massive, localized cramp seized her entire right side. The breathing apparatus slipped slightly from her mouth, a microscopic bubble of precious oxygen escaping into the dark water.
She couldn't swim.