"Miller, get those haulers moving down the lower drainage line right now!" James shouted, his voice cutting sharply through the rising din of panic. "Do not wait for us!""I'm not leaving you four behind to turn into charcoal!" Miller rasped back, his weathered hands gripping the steering column of the lead transport truck so hard his knuckles turned white. "Sterling’s spotters are already painting the ridge!""If you don't clear the trench, everyone dies," James said, stepping right up to the driver's window and locking eyes with the old smuggler. "Get the civilians to the secondary bunker. That's an order."Miller stared at him for a hard second, spat a curse into the footwell, and slammed the gearshift forward. "If you don't show up in twenty minutes, James, I'm coming back with a heavy wrecker and dragging your corpse out myself!"The convoy roared to life, tires spinning wildly in the sulfurous mud before

 "The circuit bridges are cross-linked!" Kael yelled over the deafening shriek of tearing metal, his fingers bleeding as he jammed the final copper shunt into the jury-rigged terminal box. "If this thermal loop doesn't ignite the moment the main power line snaps, we’re just building an expensive tomb for ourselves!""It’ll ignite," James barked, his eyes darting toward the flickering overhead fluorescents as a massive, low-frequency vibration rattled the concrete floor beneath their boots. "Noah, are the remote triggers locked to the primary transformer?""Locked, encrypted, and set to auto-detonate the second the incoming telemetry registers a pressure spike!" Noah gasped, clutching his bleeding nose with one hand while desperately hammering the final execution command into his ruined tablet. "They're in the upper atmosphere, James! Less than forty seconds!"A thunderous explosion ripped through the outer courtyard,

 "How long until the primary feedback loop hits critical threshold?" James shouted over the deafening, bass-heavy roar of the sub-basement river. The rushing industrial runoff surged against his shins, icy and laced with chemical scale, threatening to sweep his legs out from under him."Three minutes!" Kael yelled back, his fingers flying across the cracked, flickering interface of his diagnostic slate. Sparks spat from the handheld device, illuminating his pale, sweat-streaked face in jagged flashes of orange and blue. "If the thermal regulators don't vent the excess current into the primary intake manifold, the whole basement is going to vaporize before we even make it to the drainage junction!""We don't have three minutes!" Ethan roared, his massive shoulders heaving as he braced his uninjured arm against a rusted concrete pillar to keep from being washed away. His damaged combat harness let out a pathetic, high-pitched whine, leaking