He had naturally considered the exact same thing.
If they severed the local network, they could at least cut off the hacker's access and stabilize Asset 07's chaotic vitals.
He gritted his teeth and opened his mouth to give the order.
"Who dares sever it?"
The low, lethally calm voice sliced through the room.
The chaotic, panicked control center instantly fell into a dead, suffocating silence.
Nicholas lifted his gaze, sweeping a cold, predatory look over the crew. "Whoever severs the connection is destroying the evidence."
Kaelen stiffened. "Mr. Blackwood, we are only trying to guarantee your safety."
Nicholas scoffed, a dark smirk playing on his lips. "Guarantee my safety? Or use the system crash as a convenient excuse to scrub the digital footprints of whoever orchestrated this hit?"
Kaelen violently flinched.
The words he was about to say died in his throat.
He stared at Nicholas, his pupils shrinking in stark terror.
It was only in this exact second that Kaelen realized a horrifying truth: The Sterling Sovereign was not an ignorant bystander.
He knew exactly what a system reboot would accomplish.
Yes, cutting the network would stabilize the Augment.
But it would also permanently vaporize the Ghost Frequency Overlay that had bypassed their security.
The infiltration route, the identity of the traitor who had authorized the hit, the evidence of an internal mutiny-
All of it would be permanently wiped, leaving behind an unsolvable mystery.
Cold sweat erupted across Kaelen's spine. He swallowed hard, his face cycling rapidly between shades of green and white. "You misunderstand, Mr. Blackwood. We... we absolutely did not intend that."
The Sovereign had drawn his line in the sand.
He wanted a full investigation.
He was never going to let the ship's administration sweep a literal assassination attempt under the rug.
The technicians shrank back,
abandoning any thought of cutting the network. They kept their heads down, staring blankly at their moniters. The oppressive tension in the room was suffocating Content̃TM
The fifteen-minute access timer continued its merciless countdown.
Serena kept her entire focus locked on Asset 07.
She moved seamlessly-placing needles, mixing serums, injecting compounds.
It was a masterful performance designed specifically for the terrified men watching through the monitors.
To the naked eye, it was a desperate battle to suppress a rogue biological weapon. The data fluctuating on the screens perfectly validated her physical actions. Everything looked exactly as it was supposed to.
But in reality, Serena had already covertly downloaded Asset 07's entire neural framework into her microchip.
And while she was copying the data, she weaponized the Sentinel Target-ID Module for her own use.
She couldn't simply delete the target lock.
If she cut it forcefully, the external hacker would immediately detect the breach and scorch the earth, deleting the final traces of the origin signal.
Instead, she isolated the execution pathway targeting Nicholas and seamlessly rerouted it into an empty digital void.
It was like taking a venomous snake that was striking at its prey and flawlessly slipping it into a bottomless maze with no exit.
The hacker would see their command still running flawlessly.
But the actual assassination protocol had been permanently caged in a dead end.
The Biometric Monitoring Display
told a different story for the
audience. To the technicians, it looked as if The Panacea was painstakingly dismantling the target lock, line by line.
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Watching the lethal red spikes steadily collapse, the crew thought her medical prowess was bordering on the supernatural.
But beneath that smokescreen,
Serena was riding the very neurat pathways of the target lock straight back to the hacker, silently planting an undetectable tracking virus into their mainframe...