“You knew who I was the whole time?”
“I surveyed this ground forty years ago with your grandfather, Clara,” General Eleanor Mercer answered softly, stepping toward the bottom of the stairs:
“In nineteen-forty-four, under Title 50 War Powers, your grandfather, **Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior**, was commissioned by the Department of the Navy to bore forty miles of subterranean pre-Cambrian crystalline schist beneath North America.”
“He built **Conduit Ten**.”
“The classified, electromagnetic-shielded, pressurized analog command artery running eighty feet beneath this continent, connecting the naval communications redoubts at Great Lakes and Norfolk straight into the nuclear retaliatory continuity crypts beneath the Supreme Court of the United States.”
“Inside that conduit were placed forty-eight titanium transit cylinders containing the physical, analog mechanical targeting release matrices for our nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent.”
