Chapter 28 - A Father’s Wrath in Steel and Fire
Daniel didn't lower his weapon. He didn't blink.
"You made one catastrophic mistake, Evelyn," Daniel said, his voice terrifyingly calm amidst the hum of the submarine’s nuclear heart.
Evelyn tilted her head, a patronizing smile returning to her lips. "And what mistake was that, Captain?"
"You assumed I would negotiate for my daughter’s life," Daniel said. "A father doesn't negotiate with monsters. He destroys them."
Daniel pressed the micro-EMP trigger inside Claire’s wedding locket.
A high-pitched, piercing shriek tore through the bridge's electronic architecture.
The EMP was not large enough to breach the submarine's massive main reactors, but it was perfectly tuned to the localized quantum frequencies of Evelyn's personal network. Every monitor on the bridge exploded in a blinding shower of sparks. The ballistic quartz viewport flickered as the automated polarization grids failed. The sterile white overhead lights shattered, plunging the bridge into deep, bloody emergency red.
The cybernetically augmented crewmen spasmed, their neural links instantly frying in their skulls, dropping them to the deck like puppeteer-severed marionettes.
Evelyn screamed—not in pain, but in sheer, unadulterated fury as her digital empire dissolved into smoke. "Kill them!"
She drew a customized, pearl-handled automatic pistol from her jacket, firing with lethal speed.
Daniel shoved Claire and Lily behind a heavy structural pillar, taking a round to his upper left shoulder. The impact spun him around, blood splattering against the ice-cold glass of the viewport.
The pain was incandescent, but Daniel didn't stop. He pushed off the pillar, closing the distance between them in two massive strides.
Evelyn aimed for his heart.
Daniel caught her wrist with his bare hand, twisting with terrifying torque. The pearl-handled pistol fired harmlessly into the ceiling before Daniel ripped it from her grip, his fingers wrapping around Evelyn’s throat.
He slammed her against the eight-inch quartz viewport with enough force to crack the inner anti-glare layer.
Outside, the dark, freezing water of the Arctic Ocean churned, illuminated only by the red emergency strobes of the dying bridge.
"Where is the launch sequence for the deep-submergence pod?!" Daniel growled, his face inches from hers, his fingers tightening like iron bands around her windpipe.
Evelyn choked, her face turning crimson, but her cold, arrogant smirk never completely vanished. "You... you can't... kill me, Daniel... My mind... is mirrored... in the Svalbard core..."
"Then you can go join it," Daniel whispered.
He didn't break her neck. He dragged her thrashing, kicking body toward the retinal scanner of the emergency escape bay on the bridge’s elevated bulkhead. He forced her face against the glowing green sensor.
*RETINAL SCAN CONFIRMED: DR. EVELYN VANCE. EMERGENCY DEEP-SUBMERGENCE POD PREPARED FOR DEPLOYMENT.*
The pneumatic hatch hissed open, revealing a three-person spherical submersible designed to withstand the crushing pressures of the deepest oceanic trenches.
Daniel threw Evelyn to the deck, his gun trained on her heart.
"Claire, get in!" Daniel yelled.
Claire stumbled toward the pod, holding Lily tight. Lily was crying hysterically, terrified by the screaming metal and flashing red lights.
"Daddy! Daddy, come on!" Lily sobbed, reaching her small arms out toward him.
"I'm coming, baby," Daniel said, keeping his eyes locked on Evelyn.
Suddenly, the floor beneath them violently shuddered.
A deep, deafening underwater explosion ripped through the stern of the submarine.
Hayes.
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Before he had died or fallen unconscious, the bastard had triggered Tartarus’s automated dead-man sequence, detonating the submarine’s secondary propulsion drives. The entire 400-foot vessel tilted violently at a thirty-degree angle, beginning its terminal plunge into the seven-thousand-meter abyss of the Molloy Deep.
***
