Chapter 71 - The Trigger of the Dead Lineage
The countdown glared in predatory crimson against the obsidian console: *00:00:07... 06...*
Elena did not hesitate. The sickening truth of Alistair’s confession—that the monster standing before her had orchestrated the violation of her body, that Maya was not Julian’s child but his own—did not freeze her blood; it set it ablaze. Every maternal instinct she possessed condensed into a singular, fatal point of kinetic rage.
She leveled the combat shotgun and pulled the trigger.
The deafening boom shattered the cavernous silence of the glass bastion. Double-ought buckshot tore through Alistair Montgomery’s right shoulder, shredding his bespoke silk lapel and spinning him violently backward into the primary telemetry bank. A shower of turquoise sparks and shattered polymer rained across the floor as the patriarch crashed into the console, his fingers clawing uselessly at the shattered glass screen.
*00:00:03... 00:00:02...*
"Julian! Grab the baby!" Elena roared, pumping the slide. The spent red plastic hull flew through the air, smoking in the cold sea damp.
Julian remained paralyzed, his face hollow, his skin gray as ash. His gun hung limp in his fingers, pointing at the grated deck. The world he had built—his dynastic pride, his golden pedigree, his very identity as the beloved prince of the Montgomery empire—had dissolved into an obscene farce. "My... my sister?" Julian whispered, his lips trembling in a horrific stutter. "She’s... she’s my sister?"
"Snap out of it, you coward!" Elena screamed, lunging forward.
Before her boots could bridge the gap to the glass incubator, Victoria Montgomery surged from the wreckage of the floor like a viper drawn from venom. Blood poured from a jagged laceration across the matriarch's temple, but her eyes blazed with feral, unhinged malice. She didn't reach for Julian or Alistair; she lunged straight for the biometric cradle holding infant Maya.
"If she carries his blood and not yours, she burns with the rest of you!" Victoria shrieked, her lacquered nails raking toward the emergency umbilical cord attached to the incubator's oxygen intake.
"Don't touch her!" Elena pivoted on her heel, swinging the heavy stock of the shotgun like a sledgehammer. The reinforced composite slammed directly into Victoria’s jaw with a sickening crunch. The older woman spun through the air, crashing hard against the tempered plate-glass observation wall that looked out over the black, churning Atlantic.
A low, subterranean groan shook the entire structure.
On the smashed pedestal, Alistair, choking on his own blood, dragged his mangled arm across the secondary fail-safe toggle. "You... you cannot stop... the Sovereign," he wheezed, a bloody froth bubbling between his porcelain veneers. "The protocol... is hardwired..."
*00:00:00.*
Across the bay, the monolithic black hull of the *Montgomery Sovereign* roared to life. Four hydraulic missile silos split open along the spine of the nuclear-class submarine, venting plumes of pressurized white steam into the freezing gale. But because Elena's blast had obliterated the targeting telemetry, the automated system initiated a catastrophic emergency vent.
The submarine’s primary ballast tanks detonated their high-pressure air reserves with the force of a naval bombardment. A hundred-foot geyser of black salt water erupted directly against the base of the Cape Elizabeth glass bastion.
The cliffside trembled. The massive sheets of laminated glass shuddered, shrieking under millions of foot-pounds of shearing force. Hairline fractures, glowing blue from the terminal backlights, branched across the towering panoramic walls.
"The bedrock is shearing!" Julian finally screamed, terror breaking through his catatonia as seawater began spurting through the seams in the concrete ceiling. "Elena, the sea tunnel—it's collapsing!"
Elena dropped the empty shotgun, hooked her arm around the base of Maya’s pressurized glass transport pod, and tore it free from its magnetic clamps. The baby let out a sharp, piercing cry as the internal battery kicked in, illuminating her tiny, perfect face beneath the acrylic dome.
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"Run!" Elena ordered, her voice cutting through the roar of cascading seawater and shattering glass.
Behind them, Alistair dragged himself onto his knees, pulling an ivory-handled automatic from his ankle holster. His bloodshot eyes locked onto the back of Elena’s skull. "She stays... in the vault!"
