Chapter 41 - THE SIEGE OF MOUNT WEATHER
The nationwide broadcast ignited a firestorm across the country. Through the surviving telemetry monitors on the command wall, we watched as the violet web began to fracture. In Chicago, Dallas, and Philadelphia, police officers and citizens united, physically blocking the automated wreckers and pulling the server cables from local cell towers. The grip of the Sovereign Directive was slipping.
But inside the bunker, Vance was desperate.
"Override the local fail-safe!" Vance screamed into his private comms, watching his screens turn red with civilian revolt. "Route the final burn code through the Mount Weather emergency backup uplink! Do it now!"
"He's trying to burn the system from the federal mountain bunker!" Sarah cried. "If he initiates that uplink, the satellite will trigger an irreversible power surge through every connected vehicle's electronic control unit—it will literally cause the engines to self-destruct and explode into flames while people are still trapped inside!"
"How do we breach that vault?" I demanded, staring down Vance through the ballistic glass.
"We can't breach the glass," Sarah said, pointing up toward the ceiling. "The fire suppression system! It's charged with pressurized halon gas to protect the servers from electrical fires! If I trigger a false thermal alarm inside the vault, the system will dump thirty pounds of compressed halon into that sealed room in five seconds!"
"He'll suffocate in less than two minutes," I said.
"Unless he opens the door," Sarah answered grimly.
She hammered the override commands into the console, bypassing the security safeguards and spoofing a thermal overload inside Vance's glass enclosure.
Instantly, high-pitched sirens wailed inside the vault. The yellow warning strobes flashed, and with a deafening roar, the ceiling vents opened, discharging a dense, suffocating cloud of white halon gas directly over Vance’s head.
Through the glass, we watched Vance drop the encrypted hard drive, clutching his throat as the pure halon displaced every molecule of oxygen in the airtight room. He hammered on the release panel, his face turning purple, his eyes bulging in sheer panic.
May you like
He looked at me through the glass, his hands trembling as he reached for the emergency manual release lever.
With his last ounce of strength, he threw the lever down. The pneumatic seals hissed open, and Vance collapsed onto the floor of the pit, gasping desperately for air.
