Chapter 53 - The Leviathan Unshackled
Below them, in the churning, steam-choked cauldron of Berth Seven, the *Njord* began to move.
It did not wait for the gantry cranes to clear. The colossal submarine blew its high-pressure ballast tanks with an ear-splitting hiss, shedding thousands of tons of water as it tore away from the mooring clamps. Steel cables as thick as a man's torso snapped like dry twine, whipping through the mist and slicing through industrial catwalks.
"Vance! Evacuate the boarding team to the skiff!" Rebecca screamed into her comms. "The submarine is executing an autonomous emergency dive!"
"*We're already pinned!*" Vance’s voice crackled with severe static. "*Cross’s private security survivors rallied on the upper crane platform! They’ve got heavy machine guns zeroed on our egress route! If we run for the skiff, we’re fish in a barrel!*"
Rebecca dropped Cross to the floor. "Get on your feet."
"Why bother?" Cross sneered, leaning against the shattered terminal. "We're four hundred feet up. The elevator cables are severed, the caldera is rupturing, and the *Njord* is about to submerge into the deep canal. Even if you kill me, you die here, Admiral. You die a traitor who launched a ghost fleet."
"You're coming with me," Rebecca said. She drew a pair of high-tensile flex-cuffs from her tactical vest and lashed his wrists behind his back with brutal efficiency. "You spent five years profiting from the money I earned with my blood. You're going to live long enough to stand trial before the Joint Chiefs and tell my father exactly what kind of fool he was."
She grabbed the extraction harness slung over her shoulder—a tactical descent rig designed for shipboard repairs. Hooking the high-strength carabiner into the heavy steel ring of the observation deck’s exterior maintenance rail, she dragged Cross toward the emergency maintenance hatch.
"What are you doing?!" Cross shrieked, his voice climbing an octave as he realized the drop beneath them. "That’s four hundred feet of sheer drop into boiling brine!"
"Then hold your breath," Rebecca said.
She kicked the emergency release. The glass quartz pane shattered completely, falling inward and outward in a glittering curtain of shards. The polar air and sulfurous heat of the subterranean basin blasted into the room with hurricane force.
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Rebecca wrapped her arm tightly around Cross's chest, kicked off the sill, and dropped into the abyss.
The friction brake on the tactical descent line screamed, smoke pouring from the ceramic pads as they plummeted through the darkness. Beneath them, Berth Seven was an apocalyptic landscape of fire, boiling steam, and tracer rounds.
