Chapter 49 - The Admiral's Fall
The blades clashed with a shower of white-hot sparks.
Sterling was younger, uninjured, and trained in modern lethal close-quarters combat, but Michael Mercer had survived twenty-four years of solitary isolation, carrying the rage of a stolen life.
Sterling slashed at Michael's throat; Michael ducked, catching the Admiral's wrist in an iron grip, driving his elbow into Sterling’s nose. Bone shattered with a wet crunch.
Sterling screamed, stabbing downward into Michael’s thigh. Pain flared like a white sun in Michael's brain, but the veteran didn't even blink. He twisted the Admiral’s wrist until the bones popped, forcing the knife from his fingers.
"This is for the crew of the *Acheron*," Michael growled, slamming his fist into Sterling's ribs.
"Wait—Mercer, think of the future—"
"And this," Michael whispered, his eyes burning with absolute, uncompromising judgment, "is for my son."
Michael drove the heel of his combat boot into Sterling’s chest, propelling the Vice Admiral over the edge of the catwalk. Sterling fell sixty feet, his body slamming onto the pressurized casing of the basalt conduit, his life extinguished instantly.
Below, Lucas reached the reactor control grid. His fingers flew across the emergency valves.
"Dad! The extraction arms are reversing!" Lucas yelled, coughing blood. "The core is locking back in! But the containment seal is fractured! The pressure from the tectonic shelf is bleeding into the cavern!"
All around them, the ancient basalt walls began to moan. Massive fissures, twenty feet wide, cracked across the obsidian ceiling. Thousands of tons of rock began crashing down into the dry-dock.
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And above them, thirty-six thousand feet of Atlantic Ocean was preparing to crush everything to dust.
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