Chapter 32 - The Memory of a Man Who Never Was
The pain inside Daniel’s skull felt like molten solder being poured directly into his cerebral cortex.
He fell to his hands and knees on the wet roof of the pod, his fingers digging into the non-skid coating until his fingernails tore. Every breath tasted of iron and ozone. In the deep recesses of his consciousness, a firewall was crumbling.
He remembered holding Claire’s hand in a maternity ward, tears streaming down his face as a doctor handed him a swaddled infant. But now, when he strained to see the doctor’s face, there was only a featureless white surgical mask. When he tried to remember the name of the hospital, the sign outside was blank. When he searched his mind for the sound of his own mother’s voice from his childhood, there was nothing—only an endless, repeating string of alphanumeric code: *PX-774-CROSS-D.*
"Get up," Daniel commanded himself, slamming his fist into his own thigh to shock his nervous system with physical pain. "Get up! She’s your daughter!"
"Subject 7 is experiencing cognitive collapse," a voice blared from the sky.
It wasn't coming from the pod. It was booming from the long-range directional acoustic devices mounted on the hull of the advancing stealth leviathan. The voice belonged to the man on the observation bridge. It was Daniel's voice, but stripped of all the raw, bleeding humanity that Operative 7 had poured into every single heartbeat since he pulled Lily from the freezing surf.
"It is fascinating, isn't it, Seven?" the voice echoed across the churning waves, mocking and clinically detached. "You really believed you loved her. You believed you were a grieving widower fighting against a corrupt world. The synthetic grief we coded into your amygdala was our greatest breakthrough. You wouldn't have survived the drop from the cliff on Black Rock Island without it. Adrenaline requires conviction, Seven. And nothing breeds conviction like the delusion of fatherhood."
Below in the hatch, Lily was weeping, her hands clamped over her ears to block out the booming voice.
"Daddy!" she cried, but her eyes darted between Daniel's agony on the roof and the dark ship bearing down on them. She was torn between the nightmare she was hearing and the only protector she had ever known.
"Lily, don't listen to him!" Daniel roared, forcing himself back to his feet. His vision was swimming with red and green chromatic aberration, but his muscles—honed by millions of dollars of clandestine bio-enhancements he hadn't known he possessed—locked into place.
The titanium crane claw plummeted from the sky, descending toward the pod like the talons of an eagle.
Daniel didn't run. He sprang forward, grabbing the heavy tactical rifle from the dead operative he had slain moments before. He slung the weapon over his shoulder, reached into the pod with one long arm, and scooped Lily into his chest.
She fought him for half a second, her little fists hammering against his collarbone, but the moment his arms wrapped around her, shielding her from the biting spray, the primal recognition of his scent—smoke, sea salt, and familiar warmth—overwhelmed the terror. She buried her face into the crook of his neck, sobbing uncontrollably.
"Hold onto my neck, Lily! Hold on with everything you've got!" Daniel shouted.
The magnetic claw struck the pod with a deafening *CRANG*, crumpling the steel structure like an aluminum soda can. Powerful electro-magnets activated, hoisting the shattered hull toward the sky.
Daniel didn't wait to be crushed. He launched himself off the lip of the pod just as it rose, leaping six feet through the air onto the deck of an unmanned support skiff that had been towed behind the Coast Guard vessel. He hit the fiberglass deck hard, absorbing the shock with a combat roll, keeping Lily cradled against his ribs with his left arm.
The skiff rocked violently on the crest of an eight-foot swell.
High above, on the bridge of the warship, the man in the trench coat lowered his binoculars and sighed.
"Deploy the hounds," Daniel Prime ordered into his comm-link, swirling the ice in his glass. "Disable Seven. Do not damage the girl. Her retinas are the only encryption keys that will unlock Tartarus’s submerged vaults."
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From the subterranean belly of the stealth warship, two high-speed interceptor catamarans dropped into the water with a thunderous splash, their twin turbine engines whining as they kicked up rooster tails of white foam, cutting through the fog like black daggers aimed directly at Daniel’s heart.
***
