"Let it go or lose your hands!" Elias snarled, dropping to one knee and leveling his rifle back toward the approach vector. Three rapid, deafening muzzle flashes illuminated his grim, soot-streaked face as he caught a Coalition vanguard dead in the center of his sights, dropping the armored soldier before the man could bring his shoulder-mounted cannon to bear. Noah’s fingers scraped frantically across the cold, grease-slicked iron plating, his bare skin locking onto the corner of the telemetry deck just as a heavy armor-piercing round pierced the deck an inch from his thumb, screaming off into the abyss with a sound like tearing tin. "I can't lose this data!" Noah screamed over the roar of the wind, his voice cracking with a hysteria born of exhaustion and absolute desperation. "Every synchronization string we pulled from the Spire is cached in this housing! If this terminal goes dead, the global broadcast goes un-sequenced! We die down here

 "Let them wake up after we make it off this rust-bucket alive!" Elias snarled, pivoting on his heel and dragging Noah through the shredded hatchway of the lower torpedo bay as a fresh volley of heavy-caliber pulse fire chewed through the corrugated steel bulkhead right beside their heads, showering them in a blinding spray of molten metal sparks and jagged shrapnel. "We can't just run!" Noah shouted back, his voice straining to be heard over the deafening whine of the torpedo bay's emergency ventilation fans and the steady, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of heavy armored boots closing in from the catwalk behind them. "If I don't anchor the sync string right here, the Coalition's offshore relay will override the global broadcast before we even reach the flagship!" "If you don't run right now, your brains are going to paint this wall!" Elias yelled, shoving Noah violently ahead of him through a narrow service corridor that smelled po

 "That bought us three seconds," Elias snarled, grabbing Noah by the collar of his jacket and hauling him around a sharp, ninety-degree junction just as a concentrated beam of blue-white plasma melted the steel corner where they had been standing a heartbeat before. Molten iron dripped like thick, glowing honey from the scorched overhead conduit, sizzling against the diamond-plate deck with a sharp, acrid stench of vaporized zinc. Noah’s breath hitched, his boots catching on a loose cable tray, but Elias didn't break stride; he hooked his arm beneath Noah’s shoulder, lifting his weight effortlessly as they sprinted down the steeply descending service ramp. "Keep your head down and your boots moving!" Elias barked, his voice grating like gravel in a cement mixer as he checked the digital ammunition counter on the side of his carbine. "Two rounds left in the mag. If another patrol cuts us off at the lower drainage slui

 The air here was thick, suffocating, and reeked of stagnant industrial runoff and decaying organic matter, a heavy physical weight that pressed against their chests as they scrambled off the metal grating onto a slick concrete promenade. "Movement at the upper gantry!" Noah hissed, his fingers frantically working the dented casing of the telemetry deck as a shower of sparks spat from its side. "They didn't lose our trail at the junction. Three—no, four combat units. Heavy armor, kinetic dampeners. If they drop a mortar down this shaft, we are officially vapor." Elias slammed the empty magazine out of his carbine, letting the polymer clip clatter uselessly onto the wet concrete before reaching into his chest rig for his last reload. "Let them try. The acoustics in this spillway are a nightmare; if they fire an explosive charge down here, the back-blast will collapse the entire drainage vault right on top of their own helme

 "Thermal sweep?" Noah shrieked, his voice climbing an octave as he violently yanked a dangling bundle of multi-colored wires out of the smoking side of his telemetry deck, jamming them blindly back into a sparking terminal block. "Elias, that isn't a casual patrol sweep, that is a localized carbonization grid! They aren't trying to capture us anymore; they are literally planning to bake this entire drainage vault until our boots fuse to the floorboards!" "Then I suggest you stop rewiring your pocket-calculator and start finding us a way out of this concrete oven!" Elias roared back, not waiting for a reply as he squeezed the trigger of his carbine in three rapid, controlled bursts. The muzzle flash cut a violent, jagged tear through the subterranean gloom, illuminating the slick, dripping walls of the drainage sluice with strobing flashes of orange fire. High above them, suspended from a cat's cradle of rusted iron chains and o