Read Chapter 26: Impact Day

The warning came not as a sound but as a pressure change, a fist of air slamming into Elias’s ears a full second before the floor jumped beneath him. He was mid-crawl in the flooded comm room, knee-deep in water that tasted of copper and rust, sealant gun in hand, and then the world bucked like a struck animal and threw him against the wall.

The lights stuttered. One bank died outright, leaving the corridor in sodium-orange emergency glow. Somewhere above them, deep in the rock and steel that wrapped the bunker’s spine, something groaned—not the familiar complaint of settling machinery, but a long, sustained scream of metal being asked to be something metal was never meant to be.

The asteroid had hit.

Elias shoved himself up from the water, his ribs screaming where the impact had caught him. His earpiece crackled, then resolved into Petra’s voice, taut and clipped. “Elias. Seismographs are off the scale. We’ve got a magnitude—I don’t know. It’s off the scale.” A pause, then, quieter: “The surface is gone. It’s all gone.”

He didn’t have time for that grief. The water around him was moving wrong now, sloshing in a direction that wasn’t the natural flow of the leak. He sloshed toward the breach, pressing his palm against the conduit where the bullet had torn through. The pressure was dropping—which meant somewhere lower in the system, demand was spiking. Or the line had fractured again.

“Petra,” he said, forcing his voice flat. “I need a status on the outer shell. Cracks, breaches, anything reading particulate.”

Seismic dust was the thing he feared most. An impact that close would throw tens of thousands of tons of pulverized rock and radioactive ejecta into the air, and if the outer shell had cracked—even a hairline fissure, even a seam popped by the shockwave—the bunker’s filtration would choke within minutes. The lower levels would flood with death in powder form.

Petra’s voice came back, strained. “Reading three pressure anomalies. Two are venting atmosphere into the service shaft. One’s larger—south bulkhead, lower deck. It’s showing as a stress fracture, not a full breach. But it’s growing.”

Growing. Of course it was. The shockwave hadn’t finished with them yet. The asteroid had struck, yes—but the seismic energy was still rattling through the mountain’s bones, finding every weak point, every compromised seam.

Elias made a decision. The comm room leak was sealed enough; the water was chest-deep but stable, and the pumps could handle it if the filtration stayed clear. But if the south bulkhead cracked wide open, they’d be breathing rock dust within the hour.

He grabbed his toolkit and moved.

The lower deck was chaos. A secondary collapse had taken part of the corridor ceiling, and mercenaries and residents alike were clawing through the rubble, some dragging injured, some just running. The air was thick with that fine, gray talc that meant a breach was already bleeding particulate into the environment. Elias pulled his filter mask over his face and pushed past them.

The stress fracture was worse than Petra had reported. A spiderweb of cracks radiated from the junction where the bulkhead met the floor slab, each line weeping a thin stream of gray dust. The sealant he carried could patch pinpricks, maybe a crack as wide as a finger. This was a hand-span wide in places, groaning, flexing, alive.

Behind him, someone screamed. He didn’t look.

He dropped to his knees, wrench in hand, and began to assess whether the structural braces could take tension if he redistributed the load. Not a repair—a stabilization. A way to buy an hour, maybe two, until the seismic waves settled.

“Elias.” Roth’s voice, thin and urgent in his ear. “The ground hasn’t stopped moving. I’m reading aftershocks. Big ones.”

“How big?”

“Big enough that this fracture is going to blow before you finish that patch job.”

Elias looked at the crack, then at the brace plate he’d been about to bolt over it. Roth was right. There wasn’t time.

He keyed the channel to the techs on the upper level. “I need a containment spray. The industrial kind, rated for seismic settling. Someone get down here with two canisters, now.”

A voice came back, shaky. “Sir, the storage bay is—the storage bay partially collapsed. We can’t reach the rack.”

Of course. Of course.

Elias pressed his palm flat against the crack. He could feel the air moving through it, a thin, desperate exhalation from the bunker’s lungs. On the other side of that slab was a landscape that no longer existed—a surface scoured clean, an alpine meadow turned to glass and ash.

Silva’s voice cut in. “Elias. You need to know something.”

“Not now.”

“It’s Kruger.” Silva’s voice was flat, controlled. “He was in the maintenance tunnel, the one running alongside the south bulkhead. The collapse took him. We can hear him screaming, but the rubble is too dense to move him fast.”

Elias’s hand stayed on the crack. He could feel the vibration through the metal, the aftershocks reshaping the mountain around them. Kruger. The man who’d taken him hostage, threatened his people, tried to cut his own deal for a seat on the station. The man who had the same breath in his lungs as the rest of them, was now drowning in rock and dust twenty meters away.

“Can you see him?” Elias asked.

“There’s a gap. He’s stuck behind a fallen support beam, trapped by the legs. His face is—” Silva stopped. “He’s not going to make it if we don’t move a thousand kilos of steel.”

Elias felt the crack flex under his palm, spitting a fresh bloom of dust into his face. The fracture was widening, and with it, the margin for any heroics was closing to zero.

“I could reroute the alarm system to the exterior emergency beacon,” Silva said slowly. “It’s a classified channel. Connected to Baumgartner’s contacts. He’s been demanding that all along. It won’t save him, but it will let him die knowing his insurance policy is out there, that his conspiracy doesn’t die with him.”

Elias blinked. “Do it.”

“It’s a lie.”

“Yes,” Elias said. “Do it anyway.”

A moment of silence, then Silva’s voice, quiet. “You’re a worse man than you look, Vogt.”

The crack beneath his palm gave a sharp, dry snap. Elias grabbed the brace plate and jammed it into the widening seam, wedging it with a raw bolt, praying to whatever physics still governed this decaying world that it would hold long enough.