Chapter 13: Ill-Intent

A knock sounded at his suite door.

Julius pressed a small button on the arm of his chair. The magnetic locks clicked softly, and the heavy oak-paneled door slid back.

Commander Raymond Croft stepped into the foyer, removing his peaked cap. His gray eyes swept the luxurious room with quiet respect before settling on Julius.

"Pardon the intrusion, Mr. Vance," Croft said, his tone crisp and professional.

"What is it, Raymond?" Julius asked, gesturing to the opposite leather chair. "Sit. Have a drink."

Croft shook his head politely. "Thank you, sir, but I’ll keep it brief. Chief Santos and I have just concluded the sixty-day environmental survey. We wanted to deliver the report personally."

He handed a slim, leather-bound tablet to Julius.

"The drainage flumes on the southern face are operating at sixty percent capacity," Croft reported. "Even with this unnatural volume of water, the sheer height of our basalt cliffs ensures the surface structures remain seventy meters above peak swell. The sea barrier in the bay has suffered zero structural degradation."

Julius swiped through the diagnostics. Power consumption was optimal. The geothermal vents were producing a steady baseline of clean electricity, with the nuclear reactors idling quietly in reserve.

"And the personnel?" Julius asked.

"Moral is extraordinarily high, sir," Croft said, a faint, almost bewildered smile breaking across his weathered face. "The civilian staff... they see the feeds from the mainland. They know what’s happening out there. To them, you aren’t just an eccentric billionaire who built an off-grid research station. They think you’re a prophet. The men are calling this place the Ark."

"Let them call it whatever keeps their discipline intact," Julius said, handing the tablet back. "What about the perimeter?"

Croft’s expression instantly hardened back into that of an elite military commander.

"That’s the second part of my report, sir. Radar picked up a rogue vessel three hours ago. A fifty-foot civilian trawler, out of Iceland. It was drifting dead in the water, pushed south by the storm currents. Our early warning suite flagged it forty miles out."

Julius looked up, his eyes sharp. "Survivors?"

"Thermal scans showed seven heat signatures huddled inside the wheelhouse. Starving, freezing. They had no weapons, no automated systems. Likely fishermen who got caught out at sea when the harbors washed away and were trying to find land."

"What did you do?"

"Followed standing protocol, sir," Croft replied without hesitation. "We didn’t broadcast our position. We dispatched two long-range reconnaissance drones to shadow them. The storm battered their hull against a sea shelf twelve miles north of our outer acoustic buoys. The boat capsized twenty minutes later. All signatures lost."

Julius didn’t flinch.

In his former life, dying slowly in a hospital bed surrounded by crying family members, he might have felt a twinge of pity for innocent fishermen drowning in the cold Atlantic. But this world wasn’t his home. These people were characters in a celestial death match, and mercy on an island designed for two thousand souls was a luxury that invited ruin.

If you rescue seven today, you must rescue seventy tomorrow. And when seven hundred show up at your gates, they will butcher you for your canned beans.

"Good," Julius said calmly. "Keep the active search radars low-profile. Let the automated passive sonar handle target tracking. I don’t want a stray radio frequency advertising that this rock has power to the mainland."

"Understood, sir," Croft said, placing his cap back on his head. "We’ll maintain strict emissions control."

Croft turned and exited, the heavy door sealing behind him with an airtight hiss.

Left alone once more, Julius picked up his smartphone.

He opened the satellite telemetry map. Across the eight continental landmasses, the rain was still falling with unholy fury.

The lowlands were gone. Bangladesh was entirely underwater. The Netherlands had ceased to exist. Florida was a forgotten memory beneath the gray Atlantic. The surviving human populations—millions of shivering, desperate refugees—were fleeing en masse toward high-altitude plateaus and mountain ranges: the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas.

And right along those migratory routes, buried beneath hundreds of meters of solid granite and basalt, sat Julius’s eight regional contingencies.

He clicked a sub-menu on his phone labeled [Project Sirens: Master Telemetry].

Eight green indicators pulsed softly across the globe:

Site 1: Canadian Shield — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Site 2: Patagonian Andes — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Site 3: Swiss Alps — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Site 4: Ahaggar Massif — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Site 5: Siberian Bedrock — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Site 6: Inland Karsts — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Site 7: Western Outback — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Site 8: Queen Maud Land — 100% Operational. Stockpiles Pristine.

Every single one of them was humming with silent power, their automated life-support systems idling, their pantries packed with decades of rations, and their master overrides slaved exclusively to the black device in his hand.

The distress beacons were still silent. Julius hadn’t activated them yet.

Not yet.

The players weren’t desperate enough. The rain was still drowning the weak. Only when the cities were completely submerged, when the food stores were entirely depleted, and when the mighty SSS-rank champions were crawling through the mud, starving and freezing, would he turn on the lights.