Chương 214: Eminent Domain (01/18/2016)

DATE: Monday, January 18, 2016 LOCATION: Gladsheim Pyramidal Complex, Antarctica LOCAL TIME: 11: 47 AM PST (Coordinated) Two miles beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the air smelled of ozone, crushed fern, and hot gold. Beyond the towering obsidian glass of the Gladsheim command center, a synthetic, plasma sun hung suspended from a cavernous rock ceiling, casting a sickly yellow light over a sprawling, humid jungle.

Just at the edge of the tree line, half-swallowed by prehistoric cycads, the rusted, skeletal fuselage of a 1940s Martin PBM Mariner flying boat lay rotting in the humid earth. It rested exactly where Admiral Byrd's panicked pilot had crash-landed it sixty-nine years ago. Inside the pyramid, there was no mechanical hum. The walls—seamlessly fused, hyper-compressed black basalt—pulsed with thick, natural veins of gold that brightened and dimmed in rhythm with the Earth's telluric tides.

Valiant Thor stood perfectly still before a floating, localized gravity well holding a massive sphere of liquid mercury. Not a single thread of his charcoal, mid-century suit was out of place. He watched the mercury violently stretch and contort. Deep within the liquid metal, thirty-six crimson flares shot across a rendering of the Caribbean plate, plunging toward a cluster of blue light on the ocean floor just off the western coast of Cuba. Then, the mercury snapped.

A localized sonic boom cracked through the chamber. The liquid sphere exploded outward, turning into a storm of razor-sharp silver shrapnel. Thor didn't flinch. The droplets froze three inches from his unblemished face, suspended by the room's automated inertial dampeners, before raining down onto the basalt floor like heavy hail. From the shadows, a wet, tearing sound echoed.

Indrid Cold stepped into the ambient yellow light, his unnervingly wide mouth stretched so far that the skin at the corners of his lips split, though no blood fell. He had no pupils, only spheres of reflective black glass. Cold didn't speak with his mouth; the words manifested as a freezing vibration directly behind Thor's sternum. Total waveform collapse. The entire swarm… inverted. Cold knelt, running a pale, elongated finger through the puddle of mercury on the floor.

The metal responded to his touch, climbing his skin and reforming into a jagged, three-dimensional lattice—a perfectly scaled model of a Kozyrev spiral, laced with a quartz and bismuth matrix. Thor looked down at the silvery lattice.

"A diamagnetic mirror."

"A temporal centrifuge," Cold hummed, his smile widening.

"They occupied the Cuban anomaly. Chad and his engineers took the ancient, dormant infrastructure of Tamoanchan and retrofitted it with a Tartarus Grid. The ocean is locked." Thor crushed the mercury map with a wave of his hand. He turned his back on Cold, walking to the obsidian glass. Below, stretching into the humid mist of the subterranean oasis, thousands of sleek, seamless silver discs rested in heavy basalt cradles. Dead quiet. Waiting.

"Plasma is bound by resonance," Thor said, his voice completely flat.

"But human power is bound by paper. By infrastructure. He has hidden behind a corporate veil for years to maintain his anonymity. We will use that veil to suffocate him." Cold tilted his head. He raised a hand, and the mercury slithered up the pedestal, expanding into a massive, multi-paneled high-definition screen. On the center panel, the Oval Office. President Harrison sat behind the Resolute Desk. His eyes were milky, staring blankly at the wall.

Beside him stood the White House Chief of Staff—a tall, impeccably dressed man whose shadow on the wall behind him did not match the shape of his body. The Chief of Staff wrapped his hand over Harrison's, forcing the President's fingers around a heavy gold pen, pressing it firmly to a stack of executive orders. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Thor watched the pen move across the paper.

"Tell me it is done." Cold dragged a finger across the mercury, and the surrounding panels flared to life, broadcasting live feeds from across the North American continent. On one screen, armed federal engineers were snapping heavy padlocks onto the public utility junctions of the Hexagonal Ley Lines. On another, Coast Guard vehicles were blocking the gates to Rubidoux's deep-water ports, freezing the transcontinental maglev train in its tracks. Then came the central panels.

Global financial tickers tracking Archstone Capital.

"Watch the liquidity evaporate," Cold smiled, his pupil-less eyes reflecting the rapidly scrolling numbers.

"The transcontinental logistics network is air-gapped. The SEC has halted all trading on every front company linked to Archstone. Their domestic clearing accounts are frozen." Thor watched the numbers flatline. In less than three minutes, Chad and his empire were completely cut off from the traditional banking system.

"Without his transcontinental maglev and the Hexagonal Ley Line cargo hubs, the North American supply chain will experience a catastrophic infarction," Cold projected, triumphant.

"Food distribution will fail. The U. S. Dollar will become worthless. The domestic economy will shatter." Thor's face remained entirely impassive as he watched the silent strangulation of the empire Chad had spent years building.

"The United States is the last human stalwart on this planet. A fortress we could not break from the outside," Thor said, his voice dropping to a glacial chill.

"So we use their own bureaucracy to burn it from the inside out."

"He is no longer a titan of industry," Cold agreed.

"He is a cornered animal hiding in a submarine trench. And his nation is bleeding out."

"Sign the second order," Thor commanded, looking out at the silver discs.

"Send the Atlantic Fleet. Crack the dome, drown the city, and finish him before he realizes what we have done." DATE: Monday, January 18, 2016 LOCATION: The Draven | Caribbean Sea, 40 Nautical Miles West of Cuba LOCAL TIME: 1: 12 PM EST Inside the seamless, pewter-colored cabin of the Lazar Sport Model, the silence was absolute. The Draven hovered in the crushing, ink-black abyss two thousand feet below the surface, perfectly still.

But the augmented reality displays projected across the curved bulkheads were bleeding red. Woz stood before the primary data terminal, his hands hovering over the smooth interface.

"It's gone, Chad," Woz said, his voice unusually hollow.

"All of it. The SEC halted Archstone. Homeland Security is locking out the public exchange points on the Hexagonal Ley Line borders, and they've frozen Rubidoux's port licenses. The U. S. Dollar is in freefall." Dr. Marcus Sterling slumped against the navigation console.

"President Harrison just committed political suicide a year before the elections. The food distribution networks will fail in less than a week. They are collapsing the United States from the inside out."

"Let them," I said, my voice perfectly level. Woz looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes wide.

"Chad, the fiat economy is going to zero. The country is going to starve."

"No, they aren't," I replied, adjusting my black baseball cap.

"The Aesir are using human laws to suffocate my companies. But human laws cut both ways. My family is legally air-gapped. And so is the American public." I pointed to the sprawling map of the American Midwest, where thousands of miles of Hexagonal Ley Lines were highlighted in vibrant green.

"They locked the doors on the public utility junctions, but they physically lack the ability to destroy the Roman concrete protecting our internal network," I said softly.

"When the grocery store shelves empty next week, the people will simply return to their personal Palladiums. They will grow their own food and trade their surplus. They won't use the U. S. Dollar. They will use Fractal Shares. The Aesir think they are starving the country into submission, but they just forced the entire population onto a decentralized, post-fiat survival grid." Elon, who had been quietly running diagnostics on the gravity-wave amplifiers, looked up with a sharp, brilliant grin.

"The Aesir thought they were cutting us off from the world. All they did was force humanity to graduate to a multi-planetary economy." I turned away from the monitors, looking down through the transparent deck of the ship at the glowing, fractal streets of Tamoanchan.

"We don't need Rubidoux's surface ports anymore. The gantry cranes and heavy equipment are already down here," I said.

"The surface workforce is going to continue working via their Aegis headsets. We've just transitioned." Before Marcus could reply, a synthesized alarm cut through the cabin—a low, bone-deep vibration that rattled the soles of my boots against the deck plating.

"Sonar contacts," Woz said, his hands flying across the terminal as the financial data vanished, replaced by tactical radar.

"Multiple high-speed acoustic signatures dropping through the thermocline. The Tartarus Grid is holding the etheric perimeter, but these aren't plasma constructs." I gripped the edge of the navigation terminal.

"JAY, transparent hull. Tactical overlay." The pewter-colored bulkheads of the Sport Model instantly dissolved into panoramic glass, revealing the crushing darkness of the Caribbean abyss. Bright crimson AR silhouettes bloomed in the dark water, projecting the massive physical contacts holding station two thousand feet above us.

"The United States Atlantic Fleet," Marcus said, his breath hitching.

"They aren't pinging us with communication buoys. The USS John Warner is preparing to fire."