Chapter 7 - The Final Command
The electric surge threw Daniel backward against the central terminal. The current tore through him with a horrific crackle, throwing sparks across the slick metal floor before tripping the room's main circuit breakers.
Darkness plunged the room, illuminated only by the red emergency backup lights pulsing on the ceiling.
Daniel slumped to the floor, smoking, unconscious but still breathing erratically, his limbs twitching from the residual shock.
Maya coughed violently, dragging herself away from the water. Her hands were scorched and trembling, but her mind was crystal clear. She crawled over to the mainframe. The external drive was glowing purple, a digital progress bar frozen at 99.8%.
""Marcus!"" she cried out.
Marcus burst through the doorway, his gun drawn, instantly taking in the scene. He dropped to one knee beside the console, surveying the screen.
""It’s an encrypted transfer protocol,"" Marcus muttered, typing furiously on the auxiliary keyboard. ""The master handshake is being verified right now from an off-site terminal. If that last zero-point-two percent clears, the firewall collapses entirely!""
""Can we abort it?"" Maya asked, wiping sweat from her forehead.
""Not from this terminal. It’s hard-locked by an external root key,"" Marcus said, his teeth gritted. ""We have seven seconds before the handshake completes.""
Maya looked at the flashing drive. She looked down at Daniel's sidearm lying near her boot. Without hesitation, she snatched the weapon, leveled it at the central data core where the drive was plugged, and fired three consecutive rounds.
The high-caliber bullets obliterated the drive, the interface port, and the primary logic board in an explosion of sparks and shattered silicon.
The room fell dead silent.
The cooling fans slowly whined down to a halt. On the auxiliary monitor, the red transfer alert turned black.
CONNECTION SEVERED: HOST UNREACHABLE.
Maya collapsed against the console, her chest heaving. ""Did it work?""
""You killed the local link,"" Marcus whispered, staring at the destroyed drive. ""The transfer failed. But Maya... look at the network log.""
Maya turned her gaze toward the small surviving display on the wall. A single message was pinging back from the severed Macau connection. It wasn't an automated error report.
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It was a text transmission routed through a private satellite network:
IMPRESSIVE WORK, MAYA. BUT DANIEL WAS NEVER MY BEST MOVE. LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW.
