"That's one!" Miriam yelled from the rear, her voice cracking over the din of the burning drone as she dragged a crate of medical supplies further into the dark threshold of the bunker. "Farid, get inside! There's another one dropping down from the overpass!"Farid didn't hesitate. He vaulted over the threshold, his boots slamming hard onto the corrugated metal floor of the inner corridor just as a searing blue beam of superheated plasma scorched the stone archway where he had been standing a microsecond before. The air smelled instantly of ozone, scorched limestone, and fried circuitry."Door down! Seal it!" Laith roared, his hands already flying across the manual override lever mounted to the interior frame of the heavy steel slab.With a deafening pneumatic groan, the secondary bolts slammed home into their reinforced channels, cutting off the screech of the second hunter-drone outside. The sudden silence inside the subterranean corridor was absolute, ringing in their ears like a p

Laith didn’t answer Nabil. He dropped to his knees in front of the primary control deck, his fingers flying across the cold, alphanumeric interface keys with frantic, practiced precision. The keys clicked beneath his calloused fingertips like snapping bones."How bad is it, Laith?" Miriam called out from the far side of the chamber. She was already kneeling on the unforgiving steel grating, snapping open a reinforced trauma pack. Her hands were steady, though a thin smear of engine grease and dried blood marked her temple. Around her, three wounded resistance fighters groaned softly, leaning against the cold copper vanes of the core. "Give me a real number. Can we vent it?""We can’t vent it," Laith shouted back over the rising, rhythmic shriek of the core's charging capacitors. The sound was changing pitch, climbing an agonizing sonic ladder toward a frequency that made his teeth ache. "The primary exhaust valves are welded shut from the outside. Genesis automated systems locked the

"Hold the line, Farid!" Laith roared, his knuckles slipping on the vibrating edge of the pulse console as a massive shockwave rippled up through the floor grates. The entire platform beneath them shuddered, groaning like stressed iron under impossible weight."I'm trying, but they brought friends!" Farid yelled back, his voice instantly swallowed by the deafening, double-barreled roar of his automatic shotgun.The muzzle flash cut a violent, blinding arc through the semi-darkness of the vault, illuminating the oncoming swarm of Genesis elite shock troops pouring through the vaulted stone entry. Heavy ceramic-plated rounds chewed into the concrete pillars, sending stone dust and jagged splinters raining down over Miriam’s makeshift trauma station."Get down!" Miriam screamed, throwing her body over a wounded resistance fighter as a cluster of high-velocity micro-shrapnel pinged off the copper cooling vanes inches from her head. "Keep your heads down, I'm right here!"Across the chamber