Chapter 48 - The Dive into the Inferno
Daniel placed Lily gently into the arms of the dying Julian Vance.
"Guard her with your life," Daniel growled, his voice hollowed by absolute resolve. "If she turns silver again... you do what needs to be done."
Julian looked at Daniel with haunted eyes, pressing a trembling hand against his bleeding gut. "What about you, Daniel? You go in there without an atmospheric dive suit, the pressure will implode your skull before you even reach the cable."
Daniel picked up a heavy demolition charge from a dead soldier’s tactical vest. A grim, terrifying smile cut through the blood caked on his face. "They built me in a lab to be unbreakable, Julian. It’s time to see if Claire Vance got her money's worth."
Without another word, Daniel sprinted toward the reactor airlock.
He slapped the manual cycle valve. The inner pressure doors slammed shut behind him, and instantly, thousands of gallons of freezing, heavy-water coolant roared into the chamber.
The hydraulic pressure hit him like a solid concrete slab dropped from a skyscraper.
The air was violently crushed out of his lungs. Daniel’s eardrums ruptured instantly with sharp, agonizing pops, filling his mouth with the taste of copper. The ambient radiation in the water burned across his bare skin like boiling acid, turning his exposed flesh bright red.
His vision blurred into black-and-green static. Every instinct in his engineered physiology screamed at him to curl into a ball and die.
*00:09... 00:08...*
Through the murky, glowing water, he saw the quantum core—a pulsing cylinder of light suspended in the center of the flooded silo. Surrounding it was the dorsal launch tube, its magnetic locks disengaging. The buoy was seconds from firing toward the surface.
Daniel kicked his legs, his torn muscles screaming as he dragged his shattered body through the crushing depths. His vision was fading fast. He could hear his own ribs cracking under the atmospheric weight.
*One... two... three...* he counted in his mind, echoing Lily's voice. *Four... five...*
He reached the core. The thermal heat radiating from the device was so intense it blistered his hands instantly, but he locked his arms around the primary fiber-optic trunk.
He didn't have the strength to tear it. His fingers had no grip left.
With his remaining consciousness, Daniel jammed the primed demolition charge directly into the intake turbine beneath the core, wrapped his arms around the cylinder to hold it in place, and pulled the manual percussion pin with his teeth.
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*Ten.*
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