"He can't win," Jack's voice was a low, tense growl in the Sanctuary's command center. On the main screen, the tactical feed showed Lin Feng being relentlessly, brutally forced back by the black-armored fury of Nemesis. "He's fighting a memory. She's fighting a target. It's a fatal asymmetry."
Sophia Cohen stood beside him, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. She was watching her sister, a perfect, beautiful killing machine, trying to murder the man who was fighting to save her. The agony was a physical thing.
"The cure is ready," she said, her voice a tight, strained whisper. "But I need a window. Just a few seconds of silence in her mind."
Jack's eyes were already on his console, his fingers a blur across the holographic interface. "A few seconds is a lifetime in a server room, but on a battlefield..." He trailed off, his mind racing. "The EMP. It's our only shot. It will fry every non-shielded system in that chamber, including our own comms and the Vanguard's HUDs. For that window, they will be blind and deaf. But so will Adler's control signal."
He looked at Sophia, his expression grim. "The pulse will last, at best, two minutes before Adler's system can reboot. But I can't guarantee how long the psychic window will be open. You might have the full two minutes. You might have two seconds. It's a goddamn crapshoot."
"It's the only chance we have," Sophia said, her face set with a terrible resolve.
She turned to Professor Brandt, who stood by a terminal connected to the Sanctuary's medical bay. "Professor. Prepare the remote injection protocol. The moment the EMP hits, you fire."
In the white marble cathedral of the battle, Lin Feng was on his last legs. His armor was a ruin, one pauldron torn away, his visor cracked. A deep gash from a vibro-blade smoked on his chest plate. He was on one knee, his breath a ragged, painful gasp. Nemesis stood over him, her own armor unscratched, her red, glowing eyes a promise of imminent death. She raised her vibro-blades for the final, decapitating strike.
"EMP activating... now!" Jack's final, desperate shout came over the comms.
The world went white and silent.
A wave of pure, electromagnetic force washed through the chamber. Every light, every humming server, every glowing visor in the room went dead. The Vanguard's armor systems seized up, locking them in place like statues. Lin Feng's own Restraint device went dark, the violet hum in his chest silenced.
And Nemesis... froze.
Her vibro-blades, inches from Lin Feng's neck, powered down with a soft, final hum. Her body, a paragon of lethal grace, went rigid, then began to tremble. Adler's screaming, constant command, the psychic noise that had been her entire reality, was gone. And in that sudden, terrifying silence, the ghost of Anna Cohen, the girl in the machine, began to wake up.
A choked, human sound, half-sob, half-scream, escaped her lips. Her head twitched, her movements no longer the precise actions of a machine, but the agonized spasms of a mind at war with itself. "Make it... stop..." she whimpered, the first words she had spoken in years.
"The window is open!" Sophia yelled. "Professor, FIRE!"
In the Sanctuary, Brandt slammed his palm down on his console. Half a world away, a single, tiny, almost invisible drone that had clung to the ceiling of the chamber, unnoticed in the chaos, detached. It shot down, a silver needle in the dark, and buried its payload in the soft tissue of Anna's exposed neck. The two-stage cure began to flood her system.
One minute, seventeen seconds. That was the time on the backup chronometer when Adler's systems rebooted. The red lights in Nemesis's eyes flickered back to life. But the girl was still fighting. The cure was a fire in her veins, warring with the virus, while the ghost of her own soul fought the machine.
She screamed, a sound of both human and machine, a being tearing itself apart from the inside out. Then, with a final, shuddering gasp, she collapsed, a marionette with its strings cut, and lay still on the cold, marble floor.
Silence returned to the chamber. No one knew if they had just saved a girl, or killed a monster.