Chapter 123 - Impact on the Black Keel
We crashed into the dark water of the corvette’s secondary deck, our tactical gear instantly heavy, dragging us toward the submerged steel floor. Emergency red floodlights flickered intermittently along the ceiling, casting blood-colored ribbons across the churning surface.
The corvette was groaning in agony. Above us, the hull plates buckled inward as the *Leviathan*’s forward magnetic docking clamps latched onto our starboard flank. The sound was like a freight train grinding its iron wheels against raw granite—a prolonged, shrieking screech of tearing steel that vibrated directly through our bones.
"Marcus!" Reyes surfaced, coughing out brackish water, his tactical helmet knocked askew. He cleared his eyes and pulled his secondary weapon—a suppressed SIG Sauer MPX—from its chest holster, checking the chamber. "The corvette's back is broken. In less than three minutes, this ship is going straight to the bottom of the trench."
"We're not going down with it," I said, wiping salt from my eyes and racking the bolt of my water-drenched carbine. "The *Leviathan* didn't just ram us to sink us. Clara came out on the forward deck because she needs something physical from this bridge."
"The abort cipher," Reyes realized, his pupils dilating in the red emergency glow. "Sterling didn't have the master key. You took the flash drive from the encrypted console before the bridge flooded!"
I touched the sealed waterproof pouch clipped to my tactical vest. The cold cylinder of the high-security quantum key rested against my ribs. It held the cryptographic root keys to the *Leviathan*’s autonomous neural network. Without it, Clara had control of the vessel’s local navigation and weapon systems, but she couldn't fire the tectonic payload locked in the ventral launch tubes—the weapons capable of triggering seismic ruptures along the San Andreas fault line.
"She’s boarding," I said.
A heavy, hydraulic thud echoed directly above our heads, followed by the distinctive, high-temperature hiss of a thermite lance eating through the overhead hatch. Bright sparks showered down into the flooded corridor, hissing violently as they hit the water.
"Form up on the watertight bulkheads," I ordered Reyes in a whisper, gesturing toward the starboard escape trunk. "She has the exoskeleton and kinetic armor. Center-mass shots won't do shit. Aim for the hydraulic conduits at the knees and the unarmored cervical ring at the base of the helmet."
"Copy that, Master Chief," Reyes muttered, his teeth clenched against the cold.
The overhead hatch gave way with a thunderous clang. The massive circular steel plug dropped into the waist-deep water, sending up a massive splash.
Through the steam and smoke, three figures dropped through the opening. They weren't standard syndicate mercenaries; they were augmented combat divers wearing sealed pressurized suits, carrying bullpup underwater carbines with underslung acoustic stun projectors.
Before their boots could settle on the submerged deck, I broke the surface and fired.
Three double-taps from my carbine cracked out in rapid succession. The green tracer rounds sliced through the steam. The lead diver took two 5.56mm penetrators directly through his acrylic faceplate; his visor shattered, his suit pressurized air violently venting into the water in a pink, bubbling froth as he collapsed.
Reyes fired in tandem, his suppressed 9mm rounds chewing through the throat seals of the second diver. The third man swung his acoustic projector toward me, but I surged through the chest-deep water, grabbed the hot barrel of his weapon, forced it upward into the ceiling, and drove my combat knife straight upward beneath his jawbone through the soft neoprene neck ring.
He stiffened, convulsed, and went slack.
"Marcus!" Reyes shouted.
A heavy mechanical foot landed on the steel catwalk above the hatch.
Clara dropped through the opening like a meteorite. The kinetic shockwave of her armored landing blasted water ten feet high, knocking Reyes off his feet. She didn't raise her coilgun; she lunged forward with inhuman speed powered by the exoskeleton's pneumatic rams, her armored fist slamming into my chest plate with the force of a battering ram.
My ceramic plate shattered. The breath exploded from my lungs as I flew backward through the flooded corridor, crashing through an aluminum storage rack and slamming hard into the reinforced steel frame of the primary reactor trunk.
I fell into the water, fighting for air, blood welling in the back of my throat.
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Clara walked through the water toward me, the servomotors of her suit whining rhythmically. She reached down, ripped the waterproof pouch from my tactical vest with effortless mechanical power, and inspected the encrypted flash drive in her steel-plated palm.
"Thank you, Marcus," she purred, tilting her head as she looked down at me. "Always providing for your family. Just like with the Tahoe house. You build the foundation, and I take the deed."
