Chapter 98 - The Mirror Room
The blast doors at both ends of the catwalk slammed shut with a deafening hydraulic crash.
"Ambush!" Richter yelled, drawing his sidearm.
From the overhead maintenance gantries dropped four heavy combat droids—not mechanized infantry, but cybernetically enhanced operatives whose limbs moved with terrifying pneumatic force.
I didn't waste time firing at their armored chest plates. I drew two high-explosive thermite charges from my vest, slapped them against the reinforced glass of the nearest coolant distribution manifold, and dragged Richter behind a steel bulkhead.
"Cover Clara!" I screamed.
*BOOM!*
The manifold ruptured in an apocalyptic geyser of super-cooled nitrogen and boiling steam.
The shockwave blasted the cybernetic operatives across the catwalk, their hydraulic joints freezing and snapping under the sudden drop of three hundred degrees below zero. The metal catwalk shivered, buckled, and sheared away from the wall.
"Jump!" I yelled.
We plummeted twelve feet through the ruptured decking, crashing down onto the intermediate service platform of Deck Two.
I landed on my boots and rolled, absorbing the impact, keeping Clara completely shielded within the curve of my torso. She didn't cry. Her small hands gripped the fabric of my tactical vest with ferocious strength.
"Mommy," she whispered into my ear, her voice calm with an unnatural clarity. "The door is behind the glass. Uncle Julian is bleeding, but his eyes are wide open."
I looked ahead.
We had fallen directly into the anteroom of the central hub—the chamber Richter had called the Mirror Room.
The doors were parted six inches, illuminated from within by a pale, golden radiance.
Richter pushed himself up from the floor, his broken arm hanging uselessly at his side. "This is it, Claire. Whatever happens in that room... you cannot let Beatrice initiate the sequence. If the Seven Rings lock, every child connected to the grid will have their minds burned away."
I checked my weapon. One magazine left in the primary. Six rounds in the reserve.
I didn't hesitate. I kicked the golden doors wide open and stepped into the sanctum.
The Mirror Room was a colossal spherical amphitheater lined entirely with seamless, curved mirrors. In the center of the room, suspended above a circular abyss of swirling black cooling fluid, hung a massive spherical cradle of interwoven titanium and optic filaments.
Strapped into the central chair inside the cradle was Julian.
He was stripped to the waist, his torso covered in surgical incisions that had been sutured with glowing silver thread. A massive neural crown was clamped to his skull, forcing his eyes wide open. He was conscious, his chest heaving with agonizing effort, but his pupils were locked in catatonic paralysis.
Standing beneath the cradle, dressed in an impeccably tailored white maritime coat, was a woman whose silver hair was pinned with absolute geometric perfection.
She looked scarcely forty years old, despite the thirty years that had passed since her presumed death. Her face was an older, sharper, colder reflection of Julian’s own features.
"You took your time, Claire," Beatrice Vance said, not turning around, her voice echoing perfectly across the mirrored surfaces. "I expected a mother with your tenacity to arrive before the nitrogen cycle cleared."
"Let him go, Beatrice," I said, my voice dead and level, raising my pistol to line up on the back of her head.
Beatrice turned slowly, a chillingly radiant smile spreading across her aristocratic lips.
"And shoot the woman who designed your life?" she asked softly. "You think you chose to marry Arthur's son, Claire? You think your meeting with Julian at the trial was coincidence? You think Clara’s birth was an accident of love?"
She waved her hand toward the mirrored walls.
May you like
With a click, the mirrors shifted, becoming transparent screens displaying thirty years of surveillance footage: my childhood, my graduation, my wedding day, the birth of my daughter, and every heartbeat of my grief beside an empty grave.
"You were bred to be the Mother, Claire. Now, surrender the child, and take your seat beside your husband."
