Chapter 107 Hundred and seven
The final three thousand miles cost us everything but our lives.
We drove through the day, into the night, and through the next dawn, a relentless, roaring machine of iron and exhaust. We lost three heavy scav-crawlers to the mud. We lost a dozen Revers choppers to blown gaskets and overheating Origin-Code combustion cycles. Whenever a vehicle died, it was stripped of its weapons and abandoned in the glowing dirt, its crew hauled onto the nearest functional rig.
Nobody stopped. Nobody slept.
I rode in the passenger seat of my father’s Dreadnought-Crawler, my cracked data-deck hardwired into the rig’s telemetry sensors. Beside me, Chen Wei’s hands were white-knuckled on the heavy steering yoke, his eyes bloodshot and fixed on the horizon. In the back, Leo and the exhausted Code-Born kids were huddled together, drawing whatever ambient energy they could from the passing terraformed jungle.
Outside, Dax rode the vanguard. The Interceptor was covered in a thick layer of grey ash, but the Speedrun King never let off the throttle.
"The air is changing," Captain Reyes crackled over the comms from her gunner’s hatch. "The bioluminescence is dying. The Origin-Code terraforming hasn't reached this far west. We're entering the Dead Zone."
She was right. The massive, crystalline trees of the mutated jungle were thinning out, replaced by blackened, petrified husks. The glowing blue mud turned back into hard, cracked, vitrified glass.
And the sky ahead of us wasn't black or blue. It was bleeding a sickly, volcanic orange.
< DESTINATION: NEO-ANGELES. DISTANCE: 12 MILES. TIME TO MANTLE DETONATION: 03 HOURS, 14 MINUTES. >
"We're three hours to zero," I announced over the open channel, my throat raw. "The ambient temperature is spiking. The fault lines are already fracturing."
"Form up!" Dax bellowed, his voice hoarse but unbroken. "Wedge formation! Heavy iron in the center! We don't know what kind of perimeter they have left!"
We crested the final, towering ridge of blackened earth.
My father slammed the heavy hydraulic brakes of the Crawler. Around us, the Iron Wolves, the Revers, and the surviving Paladins rolled to a slow, staggered halt. The collective roar of a thousand engines settled into a low, vibrating growl as everyone stared out through the windshields and visors.
Neo-Angeles wasn't a city. It was an execution block.
Resting in the center of a massive, artificially excavated crater was the Ark. It was a perfect, gleaming sphere of white and gold durasteel, easily five miles in diameter, hovering ominously just inches above the bedrock. It looked like a pearl resting in a sea of charcoal.
But it wasn't the floating city that made my breath catch in my throat. It was what anchored it to the ground.
Surrounding the floating sphere were six Prime Forges. But these weren't the mobile, treaded war machines we had fought in Coldwater. These were stationary, colossal drilling rigs. They were towering, skeletal towers of black iron, plunging massive tungsten-carbide drill shafts directly into the earth's crust.
"They aren't just drilling," my father whispered, reading the thermal feedback on the Crawler’s dashboard. "They're injecting superheated plasma directly into the tectonic fault. They are intentionally causing a localized extinction-level eruption to propel that sphere into orbit."
"Look at the base of the drills," Reaper pointed out, scoping the massive structures through his sniper rifle.
I pulled up the optical feed. The base of each massive Prime Forge was glowing with an intense, sickly purple light. The Founders were pumping the raw, highly volatile sub-ether directly from the earth's core to fuel the drills.
"The Genesis Protocol," Reyes breathed, jumping down from the Crawler and walking to the edge of the ridge. "If those drills breach the mantle, the thermal shockwave will vaporize everything within a two-thousand-mile radius. Coldwater. The glowing jungle. All of it."
Jax chewed on his dead cigar, resting his massive, phased gear-axe on his shoulder. "So we break the drills. Simple."
"It's never simple, mercenary," the Paladin Commander said, stepping up beside him. He pointed a gauntleted finger at the crater floor. "Look at their defensive line."
Between our ridge and the six towering Prime Forges lay a flat, two-mile expanse of vitrified glass. And it wasn't empty.
Guarding the Ark was the absolute last of the Founders’ old-world automated army. Thousands of sleek, white-and-gold drone tanks hovered over the glass. Swarms of automated gun-ships circled the perimeter like angry hornets. And standing in perfect, mathematically precise formations were hundreds of hulking, eight-foot cybernetic Sun-Guards.
"They consolidated everything they had left," Dax said, dismounting his Interceptor and walking up to the edge of the ridge. He surveyed the army, the massive floating sphere, and the six apocalyptic drills.
"Mia," Dax looked back at me, his amber eyes completely devoid of fear. "Can you hack the drills?"
"Not from here," I said, jumping down from the Crawler cab and pulling my data-deck. "The Founders' systems are closed-loop, and the ambient electromagnetic interference from the drilling is scrambling long-range signals. I have to physically hardwire my deck into the main control terminal at the base of one of those Forges to initiate a shutdown sequence."
"Which means we have to punch a hole through that entire army and get you to the base of a drill," Tank noted, racking his EMP shotgun with a heavy, metallic clack.
"Not just one drill," my father corrected, his face grim. "The Forges operate on a synchronized, fail-deadly network. If you shut down one drill, the other five will automatically accelerate to compensate. You have to sever the main thermal-sync hub. It's located directly beneath the center of the hovering city."
I looked at the massive, gleaming sphere hovering in the center of the crater.
"You want me to walk under the Ark?" I asked, my hacker's brain rapidly calculating the sheer insanity of the route. "There's an army in the way, and a floating continent hovering over the terminal."
"We don't walk," Dax corrected, a slow, terrifying smile spreading across his face.
He turned to face the exhausted, battered, and dirt-covered army of the Open World. The Revers, the Paladins, and the Wolves all looked at their President.
"Three hours!" Dax's voice boomed across the ridge, cutting through the heat and the ash. "In three hours, the old men in that floating ball of metal are going to burn our world so they can run away to the stars! I say we cancel their flight!"
Jax roared, raising his gear-axe. "Blood on the asphalt!"
"Paladins!" the Commander shouted, raising his phased plasma rifle. "For the true Dawn!"
"We hit them in a single, unbreakable spearhead!" Dax commanded, climbing back onto his Interceptor and revving the engine until the exhaust spat blue Phase-fire. "Tank, Jax, you take the heavy iron and shatter their frontline! Reaper, Sienna, keep the gun-ships off our backs! Reyes, you and the Commander protect the Code-Born!"
Dax locked eyes with me. "Ghost. You ride with me. I'm taking you straight to the center of the world."
I swung my leg over the Sovereign, pulling my bandana over my nose. The Origin-Code in my veins flared to life, syncing with the steady, pulsing heartbeat of the engine beneath me.
"All units!" Dax roared, dropping his visor. "Drop the hammer!"
The Iron Wolves poured over the ridge like an avalanche of iron and fury.
The final battle for the earth had begun.