The Silver Minute: Part 3

Thorne didn’t hesitate. He was already dying from the lack of air, a slow death. The dark liquid now pooling beneath the door was fast, acidic, and promised a painful one. The threat of corrosion instantly overrode the hypoxia.

His suit, while highly resilient, was not rated against unknown corrosives. If it breached the joints or the integrated comms, he’d be blind, deaf, and melting.

He lunged for the small, circular panel, snatching the silver key from the velvet cushion. It was cold, heavy, and ornate—completely useless for the door mechanism itself. As his fingers closed around the key, the panel hissed and began to retract, sealing shut.

“Good choice,” the voice observed from the viewport, its tone shifting to a dry, scholarly admiration. “Survival first. Though I do wonder, Mr. Thorne, what you think a house key is going to do for you in a vault designed to withstand a bunker buster.”

Thorne ignored the taunt, pulling himself away from the door. He pressed his back against the opposite wall, his tactical light focused on the spreading stain. The dark fluid was sizzling now, not with heat, but with chemical reaction, eating away the anti-corrosive sealant on the polished floor tiles. The smell—sulfurous, metallic—clogged his already protesting sinuses.

Gasp. Zero seconds. His lungs screamed. His mind was a frantic kaleidoscope of white noise and blurry images. The inert gas purge was complete. He was operating purely on adrenaline and the last molecule of oxygen dissolved in his blood. He had moments before his nervous system shut down.

He looked down at the key. It was a beautiful piece of useless anachronism. A private collection, far from here. A clue, not a tool.

The antagonist, however, was providing a different kind of tool—panic.

“The liquid is a mixture of Fluorosulfuric and Antimony Pentafluoride. It will eat through the floor in exactly two minutes and twenty seconds, exposing the lower service levels,” the voice supplied helpfully. “A messy end, but effective. Your suit will last another twenty seconds, tops. Now, you have the key, Thorne. What is the value of a prize you can’t carry out?”

Thorne’s tactical training, buried deep beneath the haze of hypoxia, finally asserted itself. He wasn't trapped. He was being funneled. The killer didn't want him dead immediately; they wanted him to choose his method of execution.

He looked back at the main vault door. Three feet of steel. Unbreakable.

He looked at the floor, where the acid was spreading, starting to melt the grout lines between the tiles. Two minutes. A hole would be melted through to the shaft below.

He looked at the viewport, the sliver of reinforced glass where the voice originated. The one weak spot.

Grabbing the handle of the kinetic pistol, Thorne didn't aim for the glass. He didn't have the air for the recoil, and the round wouldn't penetrate the reinforced viewport anyway. Instead, he slammed the butt of the weapon against a small, unassuming conduit box mounted next to the main vault door, a box labeled "ENVIRONMENTAL OVERRIDE."

The box shattered. Wires and blinking relays sprang into view.

“A childish reaction, Thorne,” the voice sighed. “Vandalism. Do you think that’s going to stop—”

Thorne didn't try to disable the system. He ripped two thick, sheathed wires—a red and a blue—pulled them taut, and jammed the silver key between the exposed copper ends.

A blinding blue spark erupted, followed by the violent, gut-shaking CRACK of an overloaded circuit.

The whirring of the air purgers instantly cut out. The heavy atmosphere shifted. Thorne sucked in a thin, desperate breath—not oxygen, but stale air from the corridor, pulled back into the room by the rapid short circuit of the ventilation system. He’d killed the purge, restoring the pressure balance, and bought himself perhaps thirty seconds of consciousness.

The voice exploded into static, then cut out entirely.

The victory was fleeting. The silver key, still fused between the scorched wires, had saved him from suffocation but had triggered a secondary, more catastrophic failure.

A deep, resonating GONG echoed through the chamber, followed by a mechanical roar. The main vault door, the three-foot-thick steel monolith, wasn't opening. It was sealing itself further. Emergency lockdown sequence initiated.

And beneath his boots, the acid had finally burned through the floor, creating a jagged, smoking hole the size of a dinner plate. Thorne had seconds to decide: wait for the door to crush him, or jump into the darkness below.