Chapter 124 - The Abyssal Leviathan's Maw
She turned her back on me, confident that the blunt-force trauma to my chest had ended the fight.
"Clara..." I wheezed, my hands slipping into the dark water, fingers brushing against the cold steel of an unexploded flash-bang grenade pinned beneath the debris of the collapsed rack.
She didn't stop. "Drown quietly, big brother. When the *Leviathan* fires its primary pulse into the Mendocino Fault at midnight, Whispering Pines will be sitting on the only stable granite shelf in northern California. The entire West Coast financial sector will burn, and Tartarus will build the new empire from the ashes. And you gave us the keys."
She began to ascend the ladder toward the breached deck above.
"Hey, Clara," I coughed, spitting a mouthful of blood and seawater onto the flooded floor.
She paused on the third rung, glancing back over her armored shoulder with mild amusement. "Yes?"
"You forgot the pin."
I didn't throw a flash-bang. I threw the high-yield magnetic limpet charge I had pulled from the dead diver's harness—its red arming timer already blinking down from three seconds.
The charge hit the magnetic spine plate of her exoskeleton and locked on with an audible click.
Clara's eyes went wide behind the clear faceplate. "You bastard—"
The limpet charge exploded.
The detonation underwater was catastrophic. Water is virtually incompressible; the shockwave multiplied the blast force ten-fold. Even three yards away, the overpressure slammed me under the surface, ringing my eardrums like iron bells.
The blast tore the heavy hydraulic lines along the exoskeleton's spine, spraying superheated synthetic fluid into the water. Clara screamed as the suit's automated fail-safes seized, locking her joints in rigid agony. The mechanical power severed, she plunged back into the flooded deck with a massive crash, the dead weight of three hundred pounds of disabled titanium dragging her under.
"Reyes! Move!" I roared, dragging myself out of the water, coughing and heaving.
Reyes stumbled out from the shadows, bleeding from a shrapnel cut across his forehead, but functional. He grabbed Clara’s dropped coilgun from the floating debris and leveled it at the struggling figure in the water.
Clara’s helmet was cracked. She had managed to pop the manual emergency latch on the exoskeleton’s chest, scrambling out of the crushed armor like a spider crawling from a broken shell. She was soaked, her face pale, blood streaming from her nose, but her eyes burned with pure venom. In her hand, she still held the master key drive.
"You can't stop it, Marcus!" she screamed, scrambling up the ladder with frantic, desperate speed. "The launch sequence is already automated! In twenty minutes, the reactors reach critical threshold!"
She squeezed through the upper hatch and slammed the secondary pressure dog shut behind her.
"Marcus, the corvette is listing twenty degrees to port," Reyes shouted over the groaning of the dying hull. "The *Leviathan*’s docking clamps are the only thing holding us to the surface. If we don't cross over onto the dreadnought right now, we're going down to the seabed with this wreck!"
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"Then we board," I said, checking my carbine's chamber. "We take the bridge of that monster, we pull the physical control rods from the reactors, and we settle this debt once and for all."
We scrambled up the ladder, following the trail of hydraulic fluid and blood into the roaring teeth of the storm.
