Chapter 74 Seventy four
The Old Metro Station in Coldwater had been abandoned since the '90s. To the average citizen, it was a ruin of graffiti and rusted turnstiles. To the Board, it was Black-Site 4, a subterranean interrogation facility where people like my father were turned into assets.
In the original timeline, we spent three chapters planning this raid. We scrounged for blueprints. We lost two Iron Wolves breaching the perimeter.
Tonight, we pulled the stolen Grey-Claw SUV right up to the service entrance.
"Guard shift change is in thirty seconds," Dax said, checking his watch. "Two men on the loading dock. One inside the booth. The camera on the northwest corner has a three-second lag."
"And the door code is 7734," I added, typing on my laptop as I connected to the station’s external node. "It hasn't been changed since the site opened."
I hit Enter.
The heavy steel shutters of the loading dock rolled up with a groan.
Inside, two guards were lighting cigarettes, expecting a quiet night. They froze as the black SUV rolled in, headlights blinding them.
They didn't even have time to reach for their radios.
Dax was out of the driver's seat before the car stopped moving. He moved with the fluid, terrifying grace of a man who had memorized the level layout. He didn't shoot them; he simply walked up to the first guard, stepped inside his guard, and disarmed him with a twist of the wrist that snapped bone.
The second guard went for his sidearm. Dax didn't look. He threw the magazine from the first guard’s gun. It hit the second guard square in the forehead, knocking him cold.
"Clean," Dax said, stepping over the bodies.
We walked into the station proper. The air smelled of damp concrete and electricity.
"This way," I said, bypassing the stairs. "The elevator shaft is faster. The maintenance ladder leads directly to Level 3."
As we descended the ladder, sliding down the rails in the dark, I accessed the facility’s PA system. I didn't want to just beat them. I wanted to break them.
"Attention, Black-Site personnel," I spoke into my headset, pitching my voice low. My words echoed through the entire facility. "This is a message for Commander Vance."
In the command center three floors down, I knew Vance was spilling his coffee.
"Who is this?" Vance’s voice crackled over the speakers, panicked. "This is a restricted frequency!"
"You're wearing a blue tie today, Vance," I said, reciting a detail I remembered from his autopsy report in Chapter 42. "And you're thinking about calling for backup from Sector 7. Don't bother. The Grey-Claws are already dead."
"How do you know that?" Vance screamed. "Security! Lockdown! We have a breach in the North Shaft!"
"We're not in the North Shaft," Dax whispered into my mic, his voice a growl. "Look behind you."
We kicked open the ventilation grate in the hallway behind the main security checkpoint.
The four guards stationed there were facing the other way, weapons trained on the North Shaft door.
"Knock knock," Dax said.
They spun around. Too late.
Dax opened fire with the stolen SMG. He didn't waste bullets. He tapped the trigger pop, pop, pop, pop. Four guards dropped, their knees shattered. We weren't killing the grunts this time; we were incapacitating them. We needed the chaos.
"He's a demon!" one of the guards screamed, clutching his leg. "He knew! He knew exactly where we were standing!"
We stepped over them, moving deeper into the facility.
"Level 3," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Processing."
That’s where they kept the coders. That’s where they kept my dad.
We reached the heavy blast door of the Processing Wing. It required a retinal scan and a voice print. In the old timeline, I had spent hours hacking this door while Dax held off waves of reinforcements.
Today, I didn't hack it. I walked up to the keypad.
"Override Code: Project-Ghost-Zero-Alpha," I said clearly.
The lock beeped green. ACCESS GRANTED.
Dax looked at me, impressed. "Dad's backdoor?"
"He wrote it into the base code twenty years ago," I smiled grimly. "He told me about it on his deathbed. I guess I'm using it a little early."
The door hissed open.
The room beyond was filled with rows of servers and a single glass cell in the center. Inside, a man sat hunched over a terminal, typing frantically. He looked thin, tired, but... sane. His eyes were sharp. He wasn't broken yet.
Chen Wei.
He looked up as the door opened. He expected guards. He expected torture.
He saw a girl in grease-stained coveralls and a man in a biker vest dripping with rain and blood.
"Mia?" he whispered, standing up. He looked at the guards groaning in the hallway, then back at me. "What are you doing here? How did you get in?"
"I'm here to pick you up, Dad," I said, walking to the glass. "Your shift is over."
"You can't be here!" he hissed, pressing his hand to the glass. "Vance... the Board... they have a contingency! If there's a breach, they gas the cell!"
"I know," I said. I pulled my laptop from my bag and plugged it into the door controls. "That's why I disabled the gas vents from the parking lot ten minutes ago."
I hit Enter. The glass door unlocked with a heavy thunk.
My father stepped out. He looked at me really looked at me. He saw the way I held myself. He saw the heavy pistol on my hip. He saw the lack of fear in my eyes.
"You've done this before," he realized, his scientific mind putting the pieces together. "The variables... they're wrong. You're too old. Your eyes... they've seen things that haven't happened yet."
"We're running a patch, Dad," I said, my voice cracking slightly. I wanted to hug him, to collapse into his arms, but we weren't safe yet. "We're fixing the bugs."
"Who is he?" my father asked, looking at Dax.
Dax stepped forward, offering a hand. "I'm the guy who's going to make sure you never see the inside of a cell again, Mr. Chen. We need to move. Vance is bringing the heavy mechs online."
"The Titan-Sentinels?" my father paled. "They're prototype! They're unstable!"
"They have a thermal exhaust port on the back of the left knee," Dax said, checking his magazine. "And a three-second reboot cycle if you hit them with an EMP."
He looked at me. "You brought the EMP grenades, right?"
I patted my pocket. "Do I look like an amateur?"
Dax grinned. "Let's go scrap some robots."
We moved toward the exit, my father stumbling between us, looking like he had woken up in a different universe.
"Wait," my father said, stopping near the server banks. "My data. The Origin-Code. I was working on the encryption keys. If we leave them, the Board will crack it in six months."
In the original timeline, the Board cracked it. That’s how the Red-Queen was born. That’s how the war started.
"Burn it," I said.
"What?"
"Burn it all down, Dad," I said, handing him a magnetized data-spike. "We don't need the keys. We are the keys."
My father looked at the spike, then at the server that held his life's work. He looked at his daughter, who had just walked through a fortress like it was a playground.
He smiled.
He jammed the spike into the mainframe.
WARNING: SYSTEM PURGE INITIATED.
The lights in the facility turned red. Alarms blared.
"Run!" Dax shouted.
We sprinted for the elevator, the sound of exploding servers behind us. We weren't just escaping; we were erasing the future.
The Board had spent twenty years building a weapon. We just bricked it in twenty minutes.
\[MISSION COMPLETE\]
\[TIMELINE ALTERED\]