Chapter 64 - The Phantom Fleet
Before Nicholas could answer, the navigation radar on the console emitted a sharp, rhythmic ping.
Then another.
And another.
Sarah looked up from bandaging my wrist, her eyes widening. "Clara... the screen."
I pulled myself up, gripping the edge of the console to steady my shuddering limbs. The green phosphor screen of the sweep radar, which had shown nothing but empty water and sea clutter for the last two hours, was suddenly alive with blips.
Six vessels.
They weren't approaching from the Chicago shoreline behind us. They were already out here, cutting through the towering swells of Lake Michigan in a dead-straight intercept course. They had been waiting for us in the blinding rime of the northern basin.
"They aren't Coast Guard," Nicholas said, his voice hardening as he forced himself off the cot, dragging his injured leg across the deck. He reached the console, his gaze locked on the telemetry readouts. "Coast Guard cutters don't run at forty knots in a sea state five."
*"You shouldn't have damaged your diagnostic link, Clara,"* the radio crackled. The voice was distorted now, fractured by the cut I had made into the filament, sounding less like me and more like a chorus of overlapping, synthesized tones. *"Mother thought she could hide you by severing the dorsal tap. She always was a sentimental fool. But the bloodline ledger doesn't lose inventory. Ever."*
A blinding beam of light pierced the howling blizzard outside.
Fifty yards off our port bow, a massive, matte-black hull sheared through the crest of a fifteen-foot wave, sending an avalanche of spray and crushed ice smashing against our cabin windows.
It was a stealth interceptor—the same unmarked, angular predator craft Arthur Sterling had deployed during the raid on the Calumet railyard.
High-intensity searchlights snapped on, instantly turning the interior of our wheelhouse into an interrogation cell. The glare was so absolute that Sarah cried out and threw her arms over her face.
"Engines full!" Nicholas shouted, lunging for the dual throttles.
"No!" I caught his arm. "Look at the radar! They’ve boxed us in. If we run forward, we hit the shoals of South Fox Island. We’ll tear the bottom out of the hull!"
"Then what do we do?!" he roared over the screaming wind and the roar of the interceptor's twin turbines. "We can't outgun them! Sarah won't survive another containment cell, and if they take you back into the core, they’ll wipe whatever is left of your mind!"
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I looked through the ice-glazed windshield at the black leviathan bearing down on us. On its foredeck, hydraulic clamps were already swinging into position—grapples designed to lock onto our hull and drag us into their belly.
"We don't outrun them," I said, a terrifying calm settling over the tremor in my bones. "We give them what they're pinging for."
