The sound of the drone was no longer just noise; it was pure pressure, a metal SCREAM that scraped the frozen valley. Julian didn't wait. He didn't look back at the cabin, which was already venting the heavy, sweet reek of expensive scotch into the night.
He smashed the door outward with his heel. The splintering wood was a muffled snap beneath the crushing deep snow, and he plunged into the arctic air.
The Link terminal was dead weight. Five kilograms of complex, ice-cold metal pressed against his sternum. It felt less like a tool and more like a bomb he was carrying. Inside, the circuits hummed with a sick, suppressed energy. Every feeling told him to sprint blindly across the open snow toward the trees, but the Link demanded the impossible: be gentle. Every move had to be careful, every step soft, every turn slow. He had to run like glass.
"Due east, Julian. Now." Eliza's voice was right behind him—a short, steady command. She carried the heavy Drive case, the bulky, essential power cell and data storage, slung awkwardly over her shoulder. She was a quick, dark shape in the deep gloom. "Gentle. Don't shake it loose."
He was breathing hard in the cold. His broken ribs stabbed him every time his foot sank and pushed off the snow. Running was a bad fight. His heavy boots punched through the soft snow to hit the hard ice underneath.
The resistance was exhausting.
Steady. Steady. It was the only thought that mattered. The Link's dampeners were shot, weakened by the magnetic shockwave from the Chronos Key override. If a main connection snapped inside, the Link would execute its failsafe: a thermal purge that would wipe the data, shatter the terminal, and leave a crater ten meters wide.
They were running across a snowfield with a live grenade.
The Drone Hunt
Behind them, the high-pitched drone intensified. The sound went from an approach to a frantic, searching whir, cutting back and forth over the now-empty cabin.
"It's confused," Eliza panted, pulling even with him. Her movements were faster, more agile. "The generator's cooling thermal signature and the vaporized alcohol are mixing. It sees heat, it smells humans, but it has no visual lock."
Julian didn't look. His focus was locked tight on the immediate target: a dark, jagged boundary of pines about three hundred meters away. Those trees—heavy, dark, and thick—promised cover, but they also promised trip hazards and impossible, rough terrain.
"How long do we have with the scotch?" His voice was hoarse, the act of speaking a burning effort on his lungs.
"The cold is eating the vapor fast. Maybe forty seconds of good thermal cover. We have to be deep under the canopy before it figures out the heat trail is moving."
He pushed harder. He ignored the fire in his side, forcing his legs to keep the piston-like motion steady despite the deep snow drag. The Link was getting dangerously cold now, pulling heat from his body, turning his chest numb. Through the thick glass of its display, even with the system mostly dormant, a small, ominous red light began a silent, insistent flash: STABILITY: CRITICAL.
"The Link is failing quicker," Julian warned, shifting the five kilos again. He tried to move the entire load to his stronger shoulder, distributing the weight away from his aching forearms.
"It's the voltage regulator. That magnetic spike was too much for the comms board, but the data core is separate. We just have to keep it in one piece until we can get stable power into it."
The drone's noise changed, suddenly sharper and more predatory. The confused WHIR became a focused SHRIEK, performing sweeping, linear passes over the open ground. It had solved the thermal confusion, confirmed the targets were mobile, and was now hunting for two large, warm masses running through the sub-zero air.
"It's hunting the trail! Split now!" Julian yelled, diverting his path suddenly toward a low outcrop of black, ice-slicked shale that sliced through the white snow.
Eliza peeled off instantly, disappearing into the shadows cast by the outcrop. The maneuver was textbook—presenting two heat sources to force the drone's targeting matrix to divide its attention and confirm one target before hunting the other.
The Escape
Julian scrambled up the shale outcrop. The rough stone provided solid grip, a brief moment of easy running, but the abrupt vertical movement sent a sickening jolt through the Link. The red warning light flared instantly, and a faint, high-pitched WHINE—too quiet for the drone to detect, but horribly loud in the silent night—began radiating from the terminal's aluminum casing."
"Hold together. Just a little further," Julian thought, his teeth gritted tight, as he adjusted his posture to absorb the shock of landing back in the snow on the downhill side.
He burst past the outcrop, completely ignoring the searing pain in his ribs. The tree line was within his reach now—less than thirty meters. The pines were thick, black, and towering, promising a dense, chaotic field of branches that would break the drone's thermal vision.
As he reached the first massive pine, the drone made its choice. Its shriek peaked, and the beam of its thermal sensor sliced across the open field, confirming the heat trail near the outcrop. The sound locked onto Eliza.
"It has me! Go! Get the Link deep into the canopy!" Eliza's cry was swallowed by the pine branches.
Julian froze. He started to turn, ready to drop the Link and run back, but the raw, cold logic of the situation hit him like a punch: the data was the mission. If he failed it now, they both died for nothing. He forced himself forward, shoulder-checking the low-hanging, needled branches and crashing into the trees.
The effect was instantaneous. The canopy above was a thick, organic blanket. The drone's scream dropped fast to a distant roar, lost somewhere over the open field. The ground was bad—less snow, but now it was slick, black moss, frozen roots, and jagged rocks hidden by a thin powder. He wasn't running anymore; he was scrambling, desperate to find a hold.
He didn't stop until he was a full twenty meters in, hidden under a tight bunch of old pines. He dropped to his knees, gently setting the Link down on a flat rock with a little snow on it.
He started shaking, a hard, uncontrollable tremor from the cold, being dead tired, and adrenaline draining out. His lungs burned, and every breath felt like inhaling broken glass.
Eliza arrived moments later, sliding down a small, hidden slope. Her face was a pale mask of being totally drained. The Drive case was still grabbed tight. She collapsed next to him, gasping for air, every breath ragged and painful.
The drone kept circling the area they had just left. Its system was overwhelmed by the confused signals near the rock outcrop.. They had bought minutes of safety from the air.
"Status," Julian managed, fighting the nausea.
Eliza was already examining the Link, her gloved fingers gingerly tracing the casing. "The WHINE is the core bleeding voltage. That magnetic key spike was catastrophic. It's draining the backup faster than we predicted. The ninety minutes is gone. We're down to thirty, maybe thirty-five, before it hits critical power minimum and purges."
Julian reached out, his hand numb, touching the angry red light. "The data? Destination_Theta_1?"
"It's saved. Secured inside the Link. But we can't touch it, can't even interface with the main system, not like this. Any attempt to connect now, without stable power and a shielded environment, will trigger the failsafe."
"So we have thirty minutes to find a controlled environment, or we ran from the cabin and risked our lives for nothing." Julian pushed himself back against the thick, insulating bark of the pine tree.Eliza looked up. Her eyes caught the faint moonlight filtering through the branches, casting ghostly shadows."We have the destination address, Julian. Destination_Theta_1. If Sterling is expecting that data, he needs a way to receive it. He needs ground support. Which means we just survived his aerial drone, only to sprint directly toward the expected landing zone of his extraction team."
She opened the Drive case, the heavy metal lid revealing the familiar array of indicator lights and complex wiring. The brief rest was over.
"We can't stop here. We're moving toward the problem now. The new goal is to locate where his ground team is converging. We either hijack their power source to stabilize the Link, or we intercept their final transmission."
Julian looked at the Link, the angry red light pulsing a death warning. He looked out at the impenetrable forest. "How do we find them? We're blind out here."
"We're not," Eliza whispered, tapping the Link terminal. "The Link is desperate. It's still broadcasting a low-frequency connection attempt to Destination_Theta_1. If we power up the Drive case and use its integrated radio to triangulate the nearest receiving station, we can find his ground crew."
Eliza has a plan to use the Drive case to triangulate Sterling's ground team. Given the extreme time constraint and the terrain, what is the single biggest immediate danger they face the moment they power up that radio?