-40 DEGREES

CHAPTER 4

DECEMBER 24TH

THE APEX [GRANT OMNICORP HQ]

ABSAROKA RANGE, MONTANA.

Cassian Grant was standing at the head of the table long enough to land a plane on. Behind them, a floor-to-ceilign wall of glass looked out over the Montana wilderness which looked like a black void of pine trees and jagged rocks.

But inside the boardroom, the temperature was perfect, humidified seventy-two degrees.

Twelve men and women sat around the table. They were the Global Resilience Committee, a sanitized name for the people who actually ran the planet. A Saudi Prince, a Russian Oligarch and several U.S senators and politicians.

They looked bored. Skeptical, some of them swirling their scotch in their crystal tumblers, checking their watches.

Cassian stood perfectly still, hands resting on the edge of the obsidian table. He was wearing a suit that cost more than the average American made in a decade.

"You came here tonight, asking for something you thought was impossible. But impossible..." he paused. "Is nothing. It's for those afraid of looking life in the eye. Let's begin the show gentlemen,"

He tapped the table and the surface lit up, projecting a holographic sphere of the Earth into the centre of the room. It was a beautiful, terrifyingly detailed blue marble.

"What you will see next," he swiped his finger across the hologram, the digital clouds swirling at his command. "Will shock you."

He killed the hologram with a snap of his fingers and the room plunged back into the warm, dim lighting.

"I am not offering you a shield," He said, eyes scanning the faces of the most powerful people on Earth. "I am offering you a sword."

"If you'll follow me to the terrace," Cassian said, gesturing to the glass doors.

The guests stood hesitatingly, murmuring. Waiting by the door were a dozen assistants, each holding a thick, charcoal-gray military parka.

"Please," Cassian said, slipping one on over his bespoke suit. "It gets brisk."

The Russian oligarch laughed a harsh, barking sound. "We are in Montana in December, Grant. We know what cold is."

Cassian smiled. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of a shark sensing vibration in the water. "Do you?"

They stepped out onto the observation terrace. The wind was manageable here, protected by windbreaks. But below them was a simulated valley, biodome the size of a football stadium, illuminated by a massive floodlight and sealed under a geodesic glass roof.

Inside the dome, it was summer. Lush green trees swayed in a gentle breeze and a small man-made lake rippled inside it.The telemetry on Cassian's tablet read a comfortable 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Watch the valley." Cassian commanded, before he tapped a single icon on his screen: INITIATE.

High above the atmosphere, in the silence vacuum of Low Earth Orbit, the Aether Array satellites shifted their alignment and the solar panels flared like cobra heads

A beam of ionized energy which was invisible to the naked eye plunged down through the atmosphere.

It hit the dome with distortion, causing the air inside it to shimmer, as if reality itself was bending.

The barometric pressure inside the dome dropped from 1013 millibars to 800 in three seconds.

The result was instant, violent physics.

The water in the lake didn;t just freeze, it detonated. The surface cracked like a gun as the ice expanded faster than the liquid could displace. It was awe-striking and terrifying.

The lush green trees didn't wither. They shattered as the sap inside their trunks froze instantly, exploding the bark outwards in a shower of icy shrapnel.

A flock of birds, released for the demonstration, simply stopped flying. Their wings froze mid-beat, muscles seizing in the absolute zero shock before they dropped from the air like stones, hitting the frozen ground like dull thuds.

75 degrees Fahrenheit.

0 degrees...

-60 degreees...

It took forty-five seconds.

The valley below them was no longer in that summer state. It was a white, silent tomb.

On the terrace, the silence was deafening. The Russian Oligarch was no longer laughing. He was gripping the railing, knuckles white. The senators and the prince were trembling, pulling the parka tighter around their tuxedo. They watched their breaths plume in the air, suddenly aware of how thin the line was between comfort and death.

Cassian, thus, had been right when he said he was selling them a sword.

He turned his back on the destruction and looked at his guests.

"Gentlemen, bidding starts at 700 billion dollars."

He didn't wait around talking to them. He had an important business to attend to, which was why he got into the elevator right after. And standing alone in the descending steel box, the charm evaporated from his face. The polite face of the salesman dissolved to reveal the cold, almost reptilian look underneath. He rolled his neck, cracking the tension.

B1...B10...B20...

The numbers on the display dropped rapidly. He was descending from the boardroom to the engine room, the bunker.

The doors opened on B-30.

The warmth was gone now. The air here was recycled, sterile and this smell of Ozone and hot electronics. Armed guards in white tactical gear snapped to attention as he passed, but Cassian didn't register them

He strode down the hallway and passed a retinal scanner without breaking stride. Then he walked into the Combat Information Center [CIC] which was a cavern of blue light and humming servers. Dozens of analysts sat in concentric rings, their faces bathed in the glow of monitors tracking weather patterns, satellite orbits, and data streams.

Vane, his Head of Security, was waiting for him. Vane was a former SAS operator who had traded his morals for a stock portfolio. Tonight, he looked pale,

"Sir," Vane said, falling into step behind him. "We lost contact with A12."

Cassian stopped. He turned slowly to face Vane. "Lost contact?"

"Signal is dead. Biometrics are flatline. We think he's dead."

"Show me."

They walked to the main tactical screen. "Pull up the thermal feed from the Northern Star Express. Rewind ten minutes."

The screen flickered, resolving into a ghostly, monochromatic view of the train moving through the dark. Heat signatures appeared as white blobs against the black background.

Cassian watched the vestibule car.

He saw two white shapes. One was A12 which he recognised by the tactical movement patterns.

The other was unknown.

The struggle between the two blobs had been brief, but brutal. The unknown heat signature moved with a terrifying speed. A block, Grapple. A knee strike that Cassian could almost feel. And then, the unknown figure threw A12 out the door like a bag of trash.

The white blob of A12 tumbled into the snow and rapidly began to cool, fading into the gray background.

Cassian stared at the screen, feeling a cold, sharp annoyance like a mathematician finding an error in a complex equation.

"A12 was a Tier-One operator. Who threw him off?"

"Unconfirmed," Vane said, tapping the tablet. "We're running facial rec on the station feeds, but the subject kept his head down. Passenger manifest doesn't flag anyone with that combat profile. We have a ghost on board."

"And what are my options," Cassian asked, turning away from the screen, hands clasped behind him.

"We can derail it," Vane suggested. "Remote switch at Mile Marker 88."

"That will be messy," Cassian countered immediately. "A derailment at speed leaves debris. Bodies. Forensic evidence. The NTSB will be crawling over it by morning. I need that laptop gone, not scattered across the mountainside."

He looked at the large map of the Western United States. The red line of the train track snaked through the Absaroka mountains.

It was entering the Dead Zone. A sixty mile stretch of track with no cell towers, no roads, and deep, treacherous ravines.

Perfect, Cassian thought as his eyes narrowed.

"We don't need to derail it," he said. "We just need to stop it."

He pointed to the Dead Zone.

"Activate Project Absolute," Cassian ordered. "Redirect the Array. Focus the beam directly over the tracks at Silver Creek Pass. I want you to drop the pressure until the diesel in the engine turns to ge;. Freeze the train in its tracks."

"And the passengers?" Vane asked.

"Collateral," Cassian said, waving his hand dismissively. "The cold will take care of them. Hypothermia is a quiet death."

He turned to Vane, eyes hard and dead now.

"Deploy Vector Zero. Team Alpha. Send them in on the stealth choppers once the storm hits."

"Mission parameters?"

"Recover the laptop," Cassian said, counting on his fingers. "Eliminate Ms. Lia and bring me the unidentified blob that threw my man off the train. I'll put him to good use."

He didn't know the man was his own son. He didn't know he was looking at the only person in the world who shared his DNA. He just saw a variable that refused to zero out.

"But if this ghost refuses to cooperate, make sure to leave no meat on his bone."

LOW EARTH ORBIT

High above the planet, in the silence of space, the satellites rotated on their axis.

Massive solar panels expanded, drinking in the starlight. The focusing lenses shifted, locking onto a set of coordinates deep in the Montana mountains.

A beam of invisible energy, silent and terrible, shot down towards earth.

Below, the clouds over the Absaroka Range began to swirl. They darkened, bruising purple and black, heavy with unnatural moisture.

Cassian, who'd been watching the whole thing, was standing in the center of the CIC. He picked up a bottle of water and took a sip.

"Let it snow," he whispered.