Jon Harrison's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Jon climbed the stairs to his workshop, balancing a field monitor he'd pulled from the depot's perimeter fence. The decryption rig had been running for eighteen hours, sorting through intercepted defense signals. He needed to see what the automated systems had recorded before the breach. The monitor's cracked screen flickered when he connected it to the decryption rig. Footage loaded in jerky frames—security feeds from a tower at the depot's northwest corner. Jon fast-forwarded through empty corridors until movement appeared. Something massive dragged itself through a blast door, metal screaming as claws peeled it back like tin. The creature moved past three different corridors, ignoring them completely. Then it stopped at a junction where an old pulse projector hummed with residual charge. The thing circled the equipment twice before tearing through the wall toward the next EM source. Jon rewound the footage, comparing timestamps to the depot's power grid map. Every turn the creature made aligned with active electrical systems. It hunted the strongest electromagnetic signatures, moving from the backup generators to the turret control stations to the encrypted server banks. The data center wasn't random—it was the brightest beacon in the entire facility. He pulled out his frequency analyzer and cross-referenced the signals his relay had intercepted. The defense grid broadcasted on three primary channels, but the server room used a fourth—higher frequency, tighter encryption. That's where the creature would go next. Jon disconnected the monitor and shut down everything in the workshop except the decryption rig. He'd need to crack that fourth channel fast, or whatever Project Cerberus had created would destroy the only thing standing between him and those classified files.