Margo Holland's Arc

Chapter 14 of 14

Margo moved to the console, scanning the interface for system access. The screen showed three active programs—biometric monitoring tied to Chen, door sensors tracking every entrance, and an encrypted communication channel running to an external location. She pulled the Server Access key from her pocket and slid it into the maintenance panel beside the console. The panel clicked open, revealing a terminal with a blinking cursor. She entered her medical override codes and waited. The screen flickered, then granted access to the server room's secondary entrance—a reinforced door to her left that had been invisible against the wall. The lock disengaged with a mechanical thunk. She pushed through into a cramped room dominated by three tower servers and a filing cabinet tipped on its side, documents scattered across the floor. The hard drive she needed sat in the primary server, its casing scratched and marked with the number seventy-six. She yanked it free and shoved it into her pack. The scattered files caught her attention as she turned to leave. She knelt and grabbed a handful—deployment orders, contamination reports, facility schematics. One document showed a diagram she didn't recognize at first: a vertical steel structure with launch rails and reinforcement columns. The header read "Project Cerberus - Delivery System Integration." She flipped through more pages. They weren't hiding a contamination leak. They'd built a missile silo beneath the depot and used Lab Three's mutation research to develop a biological payload. The cover-up wasn't about burying her report—it was about concealing a weapon that could spread the mutation across entire regions. Margo stood, stuffing the documents into her pack alongside the hard drive. The console in Lab Three started beeping—Chen's heart rate spiking as the system detected her breach. She had maybe two minutes before whoever was monitoring responded. The Emergency Exit key would get her out through the research wing's back corridor, but Chen was still zip-tied to that chair. She looked at the server room door, then back at the scattered files on the floor. The officers who'd built this wouldn't let either of them walk away with proof. She pulled out her radio and called Doc Henson with coordinates for the emergency exit, then grabbed the lockbox from her pack and filled it with the five keys. She wasn't trading them for Chen's life. She was buying time to get them both out before the officers realized she'd already taken everything that mattered.