The blast of superheated steam roared into the office like a dying animal. High above the polished mahogany desk, the primary emergency lights flickered twice, died, and snapped into a violent, spinning red pulse."My grid!" Vance shrieked, his silver pistol falling from his trembling hand into the fresh ruin of concrete dust on the floor. "What did you do to my control relays?""I recycled them," Lin Feng said. He wiped a streak of grey soot from his neck with his glove, his face illuminated only by the rhythmic crimson flash of the ceiling strobes. "You said I lacked vision, Vance. I just widened the perspective."The heavy double glass doors behind them hissed loudly as the emergency pneumatic locks slammed into place. Beyond the reinforced glass, heavy boots hammered down the catwalk."Lin Feng!" Chen yelled, her back hitting the glass wall as she raised her sidearm toward the lock mechanism. "The security overrides just tripped! We have ten seconds before the armored squad clears

The dual main barrels of the siege tank glowed a blinding, thermal orange in the dark cavern."Get down!" the miner captain screamed, tackling two younger workers behind a steel slag heap.Lin Feng did not dive for cover. He reached out with his right hand, his spatial void expanding twenty yards across the concrete ramp."Chen! The treads!" Lin Feng shouted over the rising whine of the tank's turbine. "Deploy the heavy explosive charges behind the front sprockets!"Captain Chen sprinted low along the left reinforced wall, her pistol tucked into her belt as she hauled a heavy wooden crate from the supply pile Lin Feng had materialized earlier. "Cover me! The machine-gun nest on the upper catwalk is pinning the flank!""I have the catwalk!" the miner captain barked. He leaned over the slag heap, opening fire with his new automatic rifle. A hail of lead chewed into the upper steel railing, forcing the two Iron Corps gunners to duck behind their armor plate.Chen reached the edge of the

"That frequency is locked to an orbital relay," Chen said, her thumb tracing the edge of her sidearm holster as she squinted at Lin Feng's wrist terminal. "Sector Alpha doesn't have orbital clearance. Nobody down here does.""Vance does," Lin Feng said. He tapped the display once, killing the audio static. "The signal originates three hundred feet down. The deep subterranean transit line.""The old Cold War escape route?" Chen frowned, her eyebrows pulling together in disbelief. "That sector was condemned forty years ago after the geothermal vents cracked the lower rock floor. It is unmapped.""Which makes it the perfect back door," Lin Feng said. He turned toward the dark service tunnel behind the sub-station generators. "We leave the miners to secure the upper gates. If Vance reaches that launch site, he takes every piece of orbital tech in this mountain with him.""Wait," Chen said, grabbing his arm. Her grip was tight, her knuckles pale under the grime. "You are running headfirst

Lin Feng did not waste another word on General Vance.He drove the heavy combat knife cleanly through the neck seal of the exoskeleton. Vance’s eyes went wide, his bloody laugh cutting off into a wet rattle before his head slumped forward against the cold titanium collar."Lin Feng..." Chen whispered, pulling herself up by the gantry railing, her hand pressing against her cracked helmet. "The launch sequence is still counting down!"Lin Feng turned toward the heavy transport rocket, stepping straight off the catwalk onto the upper hull of the vessel. He placed both palms against the thick outer plating."Void harvest," he said.With a massive, roaring sound of displaced air, the rocket’s internal navigational computers, pristine energy cells, and high-density liquid fuel tanks vanished directly into his spatial inventory. Deprived of its power source and fuel, the sixty-ton rocket shut down instantly, its engines dying into silence."You took the whole power system?" Chen asked, blink

The wind screamed in their ears as thirty tons of steel dropped into pure darkness."Lin Feng!" Chen shrieked, her hands frantically clawing at the dashboard as loose gear floating in the cabin slammed against the ceiling.Lin Feng did not waste breath shouting. He reached out with both arms, slamming his palms against the interior metal roof of the land-cruiser. He opened his spatial threshold to its absolute maximum limit, targeting the thousands of tons of falling ice blocks plummeting alongside them."Absorb!" he roared.A massive gravitational suction erupted around the tumbling vehicle. The crushing wall of falling ice vanished instantly into his spatial dimension, clearing the air beneath them. Lin Feng turned his void downward, expelling a dense, continuous cushion of pressurized air and harvested snow directly into the floor of the cavern below.The land-cruiser hit the artificial snow cushion with a bone-jarring crash. The heavy shock absorbers groaned, the rear axle popping