The silence in the lab was heavier now, charged with the weight of realization. Wallace held the USB drive, a tiny object containing potentially world-altering data—or perhaps just a sophisticated trap. The photo of Robert Thorne stared up at him from the open case, a younger Thorne smiling stiffly alongside four other men, all wearing the same anonymous gray jumpsuits of the now-defunct Seabrook listening post.
He slid the USB drive into a quarantined laptop—one not connected to his main network or the outside world. He was a man who understood the paranoia of data security. If the pursuers knew where he lived, they likely had the technical capability to track his digital footprints.
A file directory popped up, sparse and cryptic: MANIFEST.TXT and a main folder simply labeled PROJECT_MAELSTROM.
He opened the text file first. It contained only coordinates and dates, stretching back fifteen years. The coordinates pinpointed various remote ocean locations—the deep Atlantic, the Arctic Circle, the Challenger Deep.
He opened the PROJECT_MAELSTROM folder. It contained a series of highly compressed video files and several data logs. He clicked the first video file.
The video was grainy, shot from a submersible's camera in the pitch black of the deep ocean. The timestamp was two weeks prior. What the camera captured made Wallace forget the biting cold and the exhaustion.
The video showed a massive structure on the ocean floor, something sleek and metallic, half-buried in the silt. It wasn't natural. It was engineered on a scale Wallace had never seen in any publicly released designs. It hummed with a low, visible energy field. A large, circular emblem was visible on the side—not the ouroboros, but a stark, geometric design that looked like two interlocking triangles.
Wallace scrubbed through the footage. In a subsequent video, the structure seemed to activate. A section of the hull shimmered, and a smaller, faster object—a drone or capsule—launched from it, vanishing into the darkness above. The accompanying data logs were a torrent of numbers: energy readings, navigation telemetry, and some kind of communication stream in a binary code that made no sense to him.
This wasn't just old government secrets. This was active.
A sudden, aggressive ringing shattered the lab's silence. It was the black satellite phone from the Pelican case.
He snatched it up, his hand hovering over the 'answer' button. The screen displayed only UNKNOWN ORIGIN. He decided caution was for dead men and answered.
“You have the package.” The voice was the same synthesized monotone from the dock loudspeaker. It was calm, clinical, and completely without inflection.
“Who is this?” Wallace demanded, gripping the phone tighter.
“You are in possession of highly classified assets. The retrieval team is currently delayed due to your poor decision making. We know exactly where you are, Mr. Wallace Thorne.” The inclusion of his last name made his blood run cold. They knew his family link to Robert.
“What do you want?” Wallace asked, keeping his voice steady, his eyes on the photo of his boss.
“We want the drive returned. The phone and case are irrelevant. Place the drive in the public library book drop-off on Elm Street in exactly one hour. No police. No tricks. If you comply, you live. If you fail, the consequences will be severe. We have eyes on your property.”
The line clicked dead.
Wallace ran upstairs and pulled back a blind in his living room window, peering through the darkness toward the access road. He couldn’t see anyone, but that meant nothing. They were professionals.
He had exactly sixty minutes.
He weighed his options. The data on the drive hinted at an operation that went far beyond Robert Thorne’s little consulting firm. It felt global, perhaps even extra-governmental. They had built something enormous in the deep ocean and were using those capsules for something.
He ran back to the lab, pulling the USB drive from the secure laptop. He couldn't just hand it over. Not after seeing what he saw. Not after they chased him through the marsh. He needed leverage.
He had the perfect plan. He just needed five minutes and a fiber-optic splice tool.
He drove his car out of the garage and onto the dark road. He didn’t head toward the library. He headed toward the communication hub just outside of town—an old relay station he knew had an exposed fiber line.
The stakes had just gone interstellar, and Wallace was no longer just a data analyst. He was a player in a game he didn't understand, and the only rule he knew was survival.
Wallace’s hands were steady on the wheel despite the adrenaline singing through his veins. The ominous promise of “eyes on your property” lingered in his mind, making every shadow seem hostile. He risked a glance at the satellite phone on the passenger seat. UNKNOWN ORIGIN. Whoever they were, they were organized, ruthless, and highly capable.
He couldn't just hand over the drive. The video footage he had skimmed hinted at technology decades beyond public access. If he simply returned the asset, he was as good as dead—a loose end who knew too much about Project Maelstrom and its deep-sea secrets. He needed leverage, a bargaining chip that proved he wasn't just some dockside thief, but a technically savvy adversary who could expose their operation to the world.
He sped toward the outskirts of Seabrook, to the local communications hub. The location was a bland, unassuming concrete building surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. It was the main conduit for all internet traffic leaving the immediate county and joining the national backbone network.
His plan was risky, bordering on suicidal. He intended to physically tap into the fiber-optic line feeding the main building and siphon off a temporary, encrypted duplicate of the data from the USB drive onto his secure server, making the information accessible should anything happen to him. It was a digital dead man's switch.
He parked his car half a mile down the road, cutting the lights, and proceeded on foot, carrying only a small backpack with specialized equipment. The night air was still cold, but he was sweating.
The fence was an easy climb; the security lights only covered the entrance gate, leaving the rear perimeter shadowed and dark. He moved along the back of the building until he found the utility box where the primary fiber bundle entered the ground.
Working quickly under the faint glow of the distant lighthouse beam, he popped the utility cover. Inside, a spaghetti of orange conduit housed the delicate glass threads carrying the lifeblood of modern communication. His hands, still numb from the marsh water, fumbled with the delicate instruments.
He used a cleaver and a fusion splicer to expose a single, redundant strand of fiber. The process required microscopic precision. He stripped the coating, inserted the fiber ends into the splicer, and watched the tiny arc of light fuse the connection. He then linked his small, custom-built Network Tap device to the spliced line.
The device whirred to life. Now he just had to connect the USB drive to his tap and initiate the transfer.
He plugged the Pelican case’s USB drive into his tap device. A progress bar appeared on a small LCD screen: Initiating Secure Duplicate Protocol.
The transfer speed was agonizingly slow. The data was heavily encrypted, and the tap had to decrypt and re-encrypt the data stream on the fly. He watched the seconds tick by, each one stretching into an eternity. He was acutely aware of the ticking clock the synthesized voice had given him. He had twenty minutes left until the library drop-off deadline.
A car engine rumbled in the distance. Wallace froze, flattening himself against the cold concrete of the building. The vehicle slowed as it approached the main gate. Headlights swept across the front of the facility. It was a local sheriff's cruiser, just making its routine patrol. The cruiser stopped for a moment, then moved on down the road, its taillights vanishing into the night.
Wallace let out a sharp breath. 12% complete.
He looked at his watch. The timeframe was too tight. The transfer would take at least another hour at this rate. He couldn't make the library drop-off and finish the upload. He had to choose: comply with the demand and save his life, or secure the data as leverage and risk immediate assassination.
He chose leverage. He ripped the USB drive from the tap device. The progress bar vanished. He had the original data, and the tap was halfway through creating a mirror backup that would stay in the system, inaccessible to anyone but him without the specific encryption key he held.
He packed up his gear in seconds and scrambled back over the fence. He abandoned the library idea entirely. He needed a new plan, and he needed a secure location—somewhere public but with anonymous escape routes.
As he got back into his car, the satellite phone rang again. It was the same UNKNOWN ORIGIN ID. He answered, his voice tight.
“I’m not making the drop,” Wallace stated, pulling onto the road and accelerating rapidly.
A beat of silence on the other end. The synthesized voice was gone, replaced by a colder, more human tone
“A regrettable decision, Mr. Thorne.” The voice was smooth, educated, and chillingly calm. “We value efficiency. Since you insist on complicating matters, we will proceed with the alternative retrieval method.”
"What does that mean?" Wallace asked, a knot forming in his stomach.
"It means," the voice said just before the line went dead, "that your home security system has just been disabled, and the retrieval team is currently inside."
Wallace slammed on the brakes, turning the car in a screeching U-turn. His lab—his sanctuary, his life’s work—was exposed. He had traded one form of danger for a much more immediate, personal threat. The race was now back to his house, where the stakes were no longer just about secrets and data, but about surviving the night.
No comments:
Post a Comment