The crimson emergency lighting cast long, skeletal shadows across the Sentinel Facility’s command hub. The hum of the fans had become a sustained, aggressive drone, the only sound capable of cutting through the near-absolute silence of our digital fortress.
"They are at the perimeter fence, Leonard," the Genesis System stated, its voice now stripped of its usual clinical detachment, sounding tight with computational strain. "Ten minutes is optimistic. My sensors indicate infiltration teams breaching Sector Gamma perimeter in ninety seconds."
I gripped the edge of the Monolith terminal, my expensive suit feeling suddenly like armour I might need to fight in. The memory of the previous night’s chaos—the stock crash, the media acquisition, the sheer scale of the spending—was overlaid by the
