Chapter 17 - The Final Transmission
Lucas’s hands hovered over the enter key. The red dots danced across his father’s chest, steady, merciless.
Michael didn’t look at the guns pointed at his heart. He kept his eyes locked on Lucas.
“Lucas,” Michael said, his voice steady, devoid of fear. “A sailor’s first duty isn’t to save himself. It’s to keep the signal alive. Press it.”
“Shut him up!” Sterling snapped, stepping back into the corridor.
“Press it!” Michael roared.
Lucas slammed his palm down onto the enter key.
A high-pitched tone screamed through the console speakers as the transmitter kicked into full power. Overhead, the massive antennae array hummed violently, sending hundreds of thousands of watts of encrypted radio waves surging into the atmosphere. The audio recording of the *Acheron’s* final moments—Sterling’s voice authorizing the fatal strike—exploded across every speaker, every bridge, and every naval command center in the hemisphere.
Gunfire erupted.
Michael hurled himself sideways, knocking Callahan behind an armored server rack as bullets shredded the computer monitors into clouds of sparks and plastic shrapnel. Michael returned fire, dropping two of the advancing mercenaries before a heavy round caught him in the shoulder, spinning him into the wall.
“Dad!” Lucas screamed, diving toward him across the glass-strewn floor.
“I’m fine! Lucas, stay down!” Michael coughed, blood staining his teeth as he clutched his wound, firing his remaining rounds to suppress the doorway.
Footsteps retreated rapidly down the concrete corridor—Sterling and his surviving men were fleeing toward the extraction helicopter waiting on the fort’s outer parade ground.
Suddenly, through the shattered console, amidst the smoke and the static of the open broadcast channel, the radio transceiver hissed to life.
It wasn't Callahan’s fleet response. It wasn't the Pentagon.
A low, deep, mechanically altered voice crackled through the emergency speaker, speaking directly onto the unjammable civil defense frequency:
*“Commander Carter. This is Vanguard Deep. The broadcast is received. But you forgot rule number one, Commander... Sterling was never the man holding the leash. Look outside.”*
Lucas and Callahan froze.
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Michael dragged himself to the observation slit of the bunker, looking out into the bay.
Through the parting fog, less than five hundred yards off the shoreline, an unmarked, black-hulled warship—one that didn't exist on any naval registry in the world—silently surfaced from the black depths, its automated main battery slowly swiveling toward the bunker...
