Chapter 34 - Firefight in the Abyss
"Access granted!" Lin declared, her fingers slamming the enter key just as a squad of heavily armored mercenaries poured out of the stairwell doors at the end of the hall.
"Contact left!" Vance roared, opening fire with precise, suppressing bursts that forced the vanguard of the enemy squad to dive behind steel bulkheads for cover.
The narrow corridor instantly erupted into a deafening symphony of flashing muzzle fire, screaming ricochets, and the acrid smell of burnt gunpowder.
"Fall back to the server room threshold!" I ordered, firing two rapid shots that dropped the lead mercenary before he could shoulder his weapon.
We scrambled backward through the blast door just as Lin triggered the emergency closure sequence. The massive three-ton steel door slammed shut with a bone-jarring crash, sealing off the hallway and locking out the incoming enemy assault teams.
"Are we secure?" Vance asked, breathing heavily as he checked his ammunition magazine.
"Physically secure, but our clock just accelerated," Lin answered, her eyes locked onto the central terminal display. "They're attempting to initiate a remote hard-wipe of all core servers to erase their operational history."
"Not on my watch," I stepped up beside her, slamming my hand onto the master override console. "Give me root privileges."
"You're locked out without a biometric master key," Lin warned.
"Use my father's old backdoor encryption protocol," I replied coldly, remembering the digital signatures I had extracted from Lawson & Vance's private servers back in Austin. "The architects of these global syndicates all use the same legacy codebases. They think they're untouchable, but their arrogance is their vulnerability."
Lin stared at me for a split second, then rapidly input the sequence.
On the screen, the red warning banners flashed amber, then turned solid, triumphant green.
"We're in!" Lin shouted over the pulsing alarms. "Downloading all core intelligence files, financial routing tables, and global agent rosters directly to Task Force Vanguard secure servers."
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"And the Janus communications grid?" I asked.
"Completely neutralized. They're blind, deaf, and entirely cut off."
