Chapter 112 Hundred and twelve
Occupying a five-mile-wide, sterilized durasteel sphere with an army of ten thousand wastelanders went exactly how you would expect.
It was beautifully, violently messy.
Within twenty-four hours, the pristine, white-marble promenades of Neo-Angeles were covered in tire tracks, oil spills, and the soot of a thousand barrel fires. The Revers had parked their massive, spiked choppers right in the middle of the holographic botanical gardens, completely ignoring the synthesized chirping of digital birds.
Jax had claimed a sleek, geometric quartz fountain as his personal armory, sharpening his phased gear-axe on the edge of the basin.
"I feel bad for the floors," Jax grunted, spitting the end of a cigar onto the glowing smart-glass. "It's like tracking mud into an operating room."
"Get used to it," Dax said, walking past the mercenary leader. The President of the Iron Wolves hadn't taken his heavy leather cut off, though he had finally washed the dried blood from his face. "We aren't leaving. This is our forward operating base now."
Dax took the massive, transparent grav-lift back up to the Founder’s Spire.
When the doors chimed open to the penthouse, the sterile silence of the dead Founder was gone. The room had been transformed into a chaotic hacker's nest. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by gutted terminal panels, stripped fiber-optic cables, and my newly repaired data-deck.
Leo and the Code-Born kids were asleep on the plush, white synthetic-leather couches nearby, utterly drained from catching the falling city the day before.
"Tell me we have life support, Ghost," Dax said, stepping over a pile of stripped wire and handing me a scavenged canteen of water.
"We have air, and we have water," I said, taking a long drink and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. "But it's a mess, Pres. The entire architecture of this Ark was biologically tied to Silas. When his heart stopped, the central server initiated a lockdown. I'm having to manually bypass millions of lines of Founder code just to keep the lights on and the hydroponic bays from venting into the atmosphere."
Dax crouched down beside me, his amber eyes scanning the global holographic map still glowing in the center of the room. The crimson dots representing the other Arks the Mariana Trench, Neo-Tokyo, Antarctica, and Europe were no longer just blinking. They were pulsing with a synchronized, steady rhythm.
"They're talking to each other," Dax observed, his tactical mind never shutting off.
"They're doing more than talking," Captain Reyes said, stepping out of the shadows near the panoramic window. She had stripped off her heavy white-and-gold Paladin armor, opting for a sleek, dark tactical suit she’d found in the Ark's armory. Her jagged scar looked stark under the harsh quartz lighting.
"I've been monitoring the deep-sea telemetry from the Mariana ping," Reyes continued, pulling up a secondary display on the glass. "Silas called them the World Council. They operate on a rigid, hierarchical threat-response protocol. Silas failed to format us, which means his sector has been marked as compromised."
"So they're going to send another fleet?" Dax asked, completely unfazed.
"Worse," I said, my fingers flying over my keyboard as I decrypted a fresh packet of data pouring in from the coastal sensors. "The Ark in the Mariana Trench isn't an aerial fortress like Neo-Angeles. It's designated as Abyssal-One. It's a high-pressure, deep-sea manufacturing hub. And they aren't sending drop-ships."
I hit a key, throwing the coastal radar onto the main holographic projector.
The western coastline only thirty miles from our grounded crater was lighting up like a Christmas tree. But the signatures weren't in the sky. They were emerging from the ocean.
"Massive kinetic displacements detected in the Pacific," I read the data, my blood running cold. "They're crawling out of the surf. Thousands of them. Heavy, pressurized armor. Completely amphibious."
Dax stood up slowly, his hand instinctively dropping to the hilt of his Phase-Knife. "How long until they hit the perimeter?"
"They're not marching," Reyes said, her voice tight. "They're riding the weather."
Before Dax could ask what she meant, the massive, reinforced glass windows of the penthouse rattled violently. It wasn't an explosion. It was thunder.
We all looked out the window.
The sky, which had been clear since we destroyed the Nullity, was suddenly turning a bruised, violent black. A massive, unnatural storm front was rolling in from the ocean at terrifying speed. But it wasn't a normal hurricane. The clouds were thick with dark, swirling localized gravity-wells, and the lightning illuminating the storm was a harsh, sickly green.
"Weaponized weather," I breathed, staring at the sheer scale of the manipulation. "Abyssal-One isn't just sending troops. They're bringing the ocean to us. They're using the storm to flood the Dead Zone and drown the Ark."
Dax didn't hesitate. The brief moment of peace was officially over.
He tapped his earpiece, broadcasting on the open Vanguard frequency.
"Tank! Jax! Commander!" Dax's voice roared through the pristine halls of the Ark and down into the muddy crater. "Vacation is over! We have a Class-Five hostile weather event rolling in from the coast, carrying amphibious heavy armor! Seal the lower bulkheads! Get the bikes off the ground floors! Man the upper parapets!"
"Blood on the asphalt, King!" Jax’s voice barked back through the static. "Or water, I guess! We're on it!"
Dax turned back to me, the feral, adrenaline-fueled grin returning to his face.
"Ghost," Dax said. "Silas's old drone-tank turrets on the exterior of the Ark. The ones we smashed through to get here."
"The kinetic cannons?" I asked, scrambling to my feet. "They're offline. And even if they weren't, they fire standard plasma. That won't do much against heavy, deep-sea pressurized armor."
"Then we don't fire standard plasma," Dax said, looking over at the sleeping Code-Born kids. "Wake up the batteries. We're going to rewire this entire floating city into the biggest Origin-Code shotgun the world has ever seen."