The facility was dead.
No lights lit up the dark corridors.
No mechanical heartbeat to pretend the building still lived.
Darkness ran down the corridors like water in a drained vein, leaving only the slow drip from burst pipes and the wet hush of cooling blood slicking the floors.
On the top floor, the control room waited like a sealed coffin.
Engineers had built it to a doctrine of certainty.
It was made from poured, steel-laced concrete; a door whose hinges rode a nested ladder of bolts; a frame collar that swallowed blast pressure; laminated glass thick enough to shrug off grenades and rifle fire and the panic of men with nothing left but their triggers.
The hallway leading to it narrowed into a kill lane with recessed gun ports and anchor points for shields.
There were two interior locks, a magnetic bar, and a manual crank accessible only from the inside. Nothing alive had been designed to cross that threshold once the door fell home.
