Chapter 102 - The Quivering Core
"Mommy?" she whimpered, her fingers curling into the collar of my torn jacket. "It hurts... it feels like buzzing bees in my skull. Make it stop... please, make it stop."
"I’m here, baby. I’m right here," I choked out, pulling her small, shivering body into my chest with an iron grip. I pressed my cheek against her blazing forehead. Her pulse was racing at an inhuman speed, hammering against my collarbone like the frantic wings of a trapped bird. "Look at me, Clara. Just look at my eyes. Don't look at the lights."
Around us, the cockpit of the hijacked gunship shrieked with crimson warning alerts. The viewport groaned against atmospheric pressure as the coastal storm clawed at the fuselage. Outside, those monstrous pillars of silver-white light continued to tear through the clouds, carving incisions of pure, synthetic energy from the horizon straight into the heavens.
Julian was on his knees before the secondary navigation console, his fingers bloody as he furiously ripped away paneling, trying to override the craft’s locked transponder.
"The flight computer is being hijacked by the ground-based resonance arrays!" Julian yelled over the deafening scream of the turbine engines. Blood trickled down his temple, mixing with the soot on his jaw. "Arthur’s automated relays recognized her! The moment Clara’s biometrics spiked, the entire continental defense grid reassigned this vessel as an unpiloted courier! It’s guiding us directly into the primary uplink facility!"
"Then break it!" I roared, shielding Clara's head with my forearm as the cabin bucked violently. A shower of electrical sparks rained down from the ceiling racks. "I didn't crawl out of the graves of the Sterling dynasty just to deliver my daughter back into their machines! Shut it down, Julian!"
"I can't manually disengage the fly-by-wire without dumping the main reactor coils!" Julian’s voice cracked with a terrifying realization. "If I drop the coils, we lose thrusters! We fall five thousand feet into the Appalachian ridge!"
"Then we fall!" I snarled, looking down at my daughter.
Clara’s eyelids fluttered. The silver sheen that had masked her pupils was fighting the soft, honey-brown hue of her natural eyes. Every time the silver flared, her back arched in agony; every time the brown returned, she wept against my neck, crying for the nursery songs I used to sing to her before Arthur Sterling arranged her staged death.
"Eleanor, listen to reason—" Julian began, his face pale with horror.
"You spent three years letting me believe she was buried under six feet of dirt while you served your father’s boardroom!" I spat, my voice laced with venom that cut through the thunder outside. "You don't get to preach about reason! Clara is dying right now because that network is feeding on her consciousness! Cut the power, or I will put a bullet through the core myself!"
Clara gasped, her tiny hand gripping my thumb with impossible, hydraulic force. Her fingernails dug into my flesh until blood welled up.
"Mommy... the man in the mountain..." she whispered, her voice layered with an eerie, harmonic double-tone that chilled me to the marrow. "He’s waking up. He’s taking the keys... he says the First Mother must bleed on the altar to seal the pact..."
"No one is touching you, Clara," I swore, kissing her sweaty hairline. "Julian! Cut the damn engines!"
Julian stared at me, his hollow, guilt-ridden eyes locking onto mine for half a second. He saw no fear in me—only the feral, untamed savagery of a mother who had already traversed hell and was ready to tear down the world with her bare hands.
"Hold on to her," Julian whispered.
He grabbed the heavy fire ax mounted to the bulkhead, swung it with every ounce of his remaining strength, and buried the blade straight into the center of the superconducting reactor conduit.
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A blinding flash of cyan light detonated across the cockpit. The scream of the jet engines died instantly into a hollow, sickening whistle of rushing wind. Weightlessness seized my stomach as the nose of the gunship plunged downward, hurtling into the pitch-black abyss of the storm-lashed mountain ridge below.
***
