My stepmother thought I was broke, so she treated me like her personal baggage handler and laughed as she sent me to Economy

Tracers tore through the hangar air, stitching burning lines into the corrugated steel walls and chipping chunks of frozen concrete from the deck. Clara fired from the high ground of the aircraft stairs, dropping the two operatives nearest the fuel lines before they could breach the fuselage.

I hit the hangar floor in a rolling dive, coming up behind an auxiliary power generator. Bullets pinged violently against the thick steel housing, sending showers of hot copper sparks into the freezing wind.

"Clara! Cover the starboard flank!" I yelled over the deafening clatter of automatic fire. "Keep the jet's APU running! If they seal those blast doors completely, we're buried alive!"

Arthur Vance was crawling toward the base of the hangar's main support pillar, where an emergency override console was set into the rock face. Even under heavy fire, the patriarch of Vance Aerospace moved with the tactical awareness of an old war dog. He wasn't a defenseless old man mourning his wife; he was the architect who had built this mountain redoubt with his bare hands.

"Lucas!" my father bellowed across the din, using my name with a strength I hadn't heard from him since childhood. "The sub-floor junction! Cut the secondary relay!"

I knew precisely what he meant. This hangar hadn't just been engineered to store high-altitude interceptors; it was built to purge infiltrators.

Dodging beneath a volley of suppression fire, I sprinted across the open tarmac toward the emergency breaker panel located beside the surrogate’s mobile pod. A rogue mercenary stepped out to cut me off, raising his rifle. Without breaking stride, I fired two rounds through his knee, dropped low, and drove my shoulder into his torso, sending him skidding across the ice.

I reached the breaker panel, ripped the plexiglass cover off, and slammed down the heavy red lever marked *HYDRO-PURGE.*

High above us, the industrial fire-suppression nozzles embedded in the frozen rock ceiling groaned to life. But it wasn't water that poured down upon the treacherous operatives—it was high-pressure liquid foam mixed with cryogenic coolant.

The turncoats screamed as the blinding, super-cooled white deluge engulfed their perimeter. In sub-zero temperatures, the chemical foam hardened into solid, suffocating rock-ice within seconds, freezing their weapons in place and cementing their boots to the deck.

The command operative fell backward, flailing as the instant freeze locked his legs into the floor. Arthur reached the pillar console, smashed his palm onto the biometric scanner, and yelled into the master intercom:

"Sanctuary protocol disengaged! Auxiliary defense—lethal authorized!"

From the hangar ceiling, four automated point-defense turrets descended on hydraulic lifts. Their twin rotary barrels spun up with a terrifying, high-pitched whine. Within three seconds of sweeping the room, the surviving traitors dropped their weapons and raised their hands in unconditional surrender.

Silence fell over the hangar, broken only by the crackle of burning electrical panels and the dying, electronic twitching of the Eleanor surrogate.

I walked slowly over to the shattered pod, my gun still raised. The cybernetic surrogate was smoking, blue fluid leaking from its ruptured cranial plating. Its synthetic voice was slowing, warping down an octave.

"You... cannot... stop... the dawn," the machine gargled. "She... already... has... the carrier."