She Joked That Everyone Forgot Her Birthday

The sight of Lindqvist’s burning flagship sent a wave of icy fury through my veins. The black water was littered with floating debris, burning oil slicks that refused to die in the freezing air, and the silent, frozen forms of men who had answered Nicholas’s call.

"They used acoustic mines," Nicholas said, his voice flat, dangerously devoid of inflection as he brought the *Sovereign Shadow* to a dead stop behind the shadow of a towering blue iceberg. "The corvettes bottlenecked them in the fjord mouth."

"Can we slip past them?" I asked, scanning the radar display. The four corvettes were patrolling in an interlocking grid, their active sonar pinging every five seconds with a rhythmic, sickening resonance.

"No," Nicholas said, unbuckling his harness and standing up. He moved to the rear gear locker, pulling out two heavy, white-camouflage alpine suits and tactical climbing harnesses. "The hydrofoil sits too high on their thermal sweeps now. But the fjord walls have an ancient subterranean intake tunnel thirty feet above the sea line—an old ventilation duct for the Cold War submarine pens."

"We climb?" I looked at the towering, vertical wall of sheer black basalt, coated in centuries of glacial ice.

"We scale the ice wall in the dark," Nicholas confirmed, strapping an ice axe to his pack. "Or we sit here and wait for them to spot our wake."

Twenty minutes later, the freezing Arctic wind tore at our thermal gear like a pack of starving wolves.

We had scuttled the interceptor on a remote gravel shelf, leaving it partially submerged to prevent detection. Now, we hung suspended by thin titanium cables two hundred feet above the raging, ice-choked fjord, our crampons digging into the hard blue ice of the cliff face.

My shoulders burned with agonizing fatigue. Every breath tasted of frozen iron, searing my lungs. Below us, the searchlights of the Tribunal’s corvettes swept the water in long, pale fingers, occasionally illuminating the sheer drop beneath our boots.

"Ten meters more, Elena," Nicholas’s voice crackled through our throat-mic link. He was climbing three feet above me, setting the ice screws with mechanical perfection. "The intake grille is directly ahead."

I kicked my right boot into the frozen crust, hauling my weight upward. My fingers, even inside high-grade heated gloves, were beginning to lose sensation. But the fire inside my chest kept my arms moving.

We reached the rusted iron intake grate. Nicholas pulled a high-speed miniature plasma torch from his chest harness. The blue-white flame cut through the half-inch iron bars with a blinding, contained hiss, dropping the severed metal into the snow ledge.

Nicholas slid through the opening first, turning immediately to catch my hands and haul me into the darkness of the ventilation shaft.

We collapsed together on the frozen concrete floor, our breath coming in ragged, white clouds.

We were inside Site 9.

The tunnel ahead of us was vast, carved directly out of the mountain bedrock by Soviet and American engineers during the height of the Cold War. Rusting yellow pipes ran along the curved ceiling, their surfaces coated in decades of frost.

From deep within the bowels of the mountain, a heavy, rhythmic mechanical thrum echoed through the stone floor.

"The secondary generators are online," Nicholas whispered, pulling his rifle into his shoulder as he rose into a low tactical crouch. "The impostor is inside the inner sanctum. He’s powering up the vault’s primary decryption core."

"Then we don't have much time," I said, chambering a round into my submachine gun.

We moved silently through the labyrinth of abandoned corridors, following the thick, newly laid power cables that the Tribunal had snaked across the concrete floors. The walls were splattered with fresh tactical paint, signs of a hostile takeover that had taken place only hours before.

At the end of a long, vaulted corridor lined with blast doors, we stopped at an observation balcony overlooking the main submarine docking bay.

The sight took my breath away.

The bay was massive—an underground cathedral carved out of solid bedrock, large enough to house three full-sized nuclear submarines. Floating in the central basin was a colossal, matte-black subterranean research platform.

And on the central dais of the platform, surrounded by twenty heavily armed Tribunal mercenaries, stood the man with Arthur’s face.

Before him sat the legendary Sixth Vault—not a room of gold bars or stacked cash, but an enormous, spherical containment vessel forged from black tungsten and platinum, humming with raw, terrifying electromagnetic energy.

Beside the sphere, strapped to a stainless steel medical gurney, was a man I never expected to see.

An emaciated, gray-haired man with hollow cheeks, his body hooked to an array of medical monitors.