Chapter 43 — The Eastern Fuse
Miles away, in the damp, suffocating darkness of the Eastern Transit Line, Mira pressed her back against the freezing rock wall. Her fingers were slick with sweat as she stripped the heavy copper wiring from a salvaged Specter plasma core, splicing the line directly into the ancient iron rails of the mining track.
Beside her, forty miners stood in absolute, terrifying silence, their breath frosting in the cold air. They carried a mismatched assortnt of old pulse rifles and pneumatic mining picks, their eyes locked onto the dark tunnel ahead where the iron tracks vanished into the mountain.
"Mira," the old shift lead whispered, his hand trembling as he held a portable seismic scanner. "The vibrations are changing frequency. They’re accelerating. The automated rail-car just cleared the outer blockade at Sector Three. It’s coming down the line at ninety kiloters an hour."
"Is the secondary array prid?" Mira asked without looking up, her teeth biting through a piece of synthetic insulation tape to expose the wire.
"The fuel cells are buried under the gravel at the three-way junction, just like you wanted," the old man rasped, nodding toward a spot fifty ters up the track where a cluster of glowing blue cylinders lay hidden beneath heavy piles of crushed slag. "But if we blow it too early, the blast wave will travel right back down this tunnel and cave the residential blocks in on top of our families."
"We won't blow it early," Mira said, finally twisting the final copper lead onto the manual detonator switch. She stood up, snapping the power cell into her pulse rifle with a definitive, tallic click. "We wait until we can see the glare of their headlights."
A low, howling whistle began to echo through the ventilation pipes of the tunnel—the sound of displaced air being shoved forward by a massive kinetic body moving at high speed through a enclosed space. Then ca the rhythm: thud-thud-thud-thud. The ancient iron rails beneath their boots began to chatter and scream against their concrete ties.
Through the thick sulfur haze of the eastern line, a single, blinding halogen eye cut through the dark. The automated Dominion rail-car erupted into view—a massive, unyielding block of reinforced corporate iron, its front fitted with a heavy cow-catcher plow designed to smash through mining barricades, its sides lined with viewport slits where the barrels of heavy enforcer rifles were already tracking.
"Hold your fire!" Mira yelled over the roaring engine, her hand hovering over the iron detonator lever. "Hold the line!"
The rail-car was a hundred ters away. Eighty ters. Fifty.
She could see the white-and-gold armor of the enforcers inside the viewport slits, their weapons flashing as they opened fire blindly into the dark tunnel, their kinetic rounds sparking off the stone walls inches above the miners' heads.
"Now!" Mira scread.
She slamd the lever down.
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