Chapter 14: Blood and Code
Arthur finally snapped his zip-ties. He didn't hesitate. He lunged out of the shadows, grabbing a fallen mercenary’s rifle. The tycoon hadn't fired a weapon in years, but muscle memory took over. He laid down a suppressing fire, forcing Thorne and his men to take cover behind the central pillars.
"Marcus! Get to the elevator!" Arthur roared, firing short, controlled bursts.
"I'm not leaving you!" Marcus yelled back, firing blindly over the server rack.
"Maya! What are you doing?!" Arthur shouted, seeing Maya and Evelyn moving toward the primary terminal instead of the exit.
"Ending this!" Maya replied.
Evelyn's hands flew across the keyboard. Despite being frozen for two decades, her muscle memory for her own creation was flawless. Lines of complex code cascaded down the monitors.
"Accessing mainframes. Initiating Genesis Protocol: Zero," Evelyn muttered, her breath still pluming in the cold air. "Maya, I need your hand again. Two keys to arm the purge."
Maya placed her hand on the scanner while Evelyn placed hers on the adjacent panel.
"Warning," the automated female voice of the AI echoed through the room. "Total system purge initiated. Incendiary failsafes armed. Detonation in sixty seconds."
Thorne heard the AI. His face twisted in absolute rage. "No! You stupid, arrogant women! You're destroying the greatest weapon ever built!"
He drew a heavy revolver from his coat and stepped out of cover, aiming directly at Evelyn's back.
"Thorne!" Marcus screamed.
Marcus broke from his cover, sprinting across the open floor. Thorne pulled the trigger. The gunshot was deafening.
Marcus took the bullet straight in the shoulder. The force spun him around, dropping him to the concrete floor in a pool of blood.
"Marcus!" Arthur roared, a sound of pure paternal agony. He unleashed the rest of his magazine, hitting one of Thorne’s mercenaries in the chest, but his rifle clicked empty.
Thorne, untouched, aimed his revolver again, this time at Maya.
"Forty seconds to detonation," the AI announced calmly.
Thorne smiled. "Goodbye, Maya."
Suddenly, the lights in the server room completely cut out. Plunged into total darkness, Thorne fired blindly, the muzzle flash illuminating the room for a fraction of a second. The bullet shattered the monitor inches from Maya's face.
Clack. The sound of a heavy steel door bolting shut echoed in the dark.
Emergency lights flickered back on.
Arthur had abandoned his empty rifle, sprinted across the room, dragged his bleeding son into the heavy, reinforced blast-proof security airlock at the entrance of the room, and slammed the manual override.
Maya and Evelyn were inside the airlock with them.
Thorne and his two remaining mercenaries were locked on the outside, trapped in the server room with the countdown ticking.
Thorne slammed his fists against the bulletproof glass of the airlock door. "Open it! Sterling, you coward, open this door!"
"Twenty seconds," the AI chimed.
Arthur held his bleeding son, looking at Thorne through the glass. "You wanted the code, Victor," Arthur said coldly. "Keep it."
"Ten. Nine. Eight."
Maya held her mother tightly. They braced against the heavy steel walls.
"Three. Two. One."
The sub-basement shook violently. The incendiary charges placed inside every server rack detonated simultaneously. A blinding wave of fire and thermite engulfed the room, instantly vaporizing the hardware, the cryogenic pod, and Victor Thorne.
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The heat radiating through the blast door was intense, but the reinforced airlock held.
Project Genesis was dead.
