Chapter 62 - The Leviathan’s Wake
The freezing Atlantic gale tore across the tilting flight deck of the *Aegis Sovereign*, carrying with it the deafening roar of displaced seawater. Fifty yards off the starboard beam, the black-hulled dreadnought continued its monstrous ascent. Water cascaded from its sloped, radar-absorbent armor plating in torrential cataracts, revealing an expanse of reinforced titanium and composite alloy that seemed less like a vessel and more like a floating fortress torn from the seabed.
Julian stood frozen, the earpiece pressed tight against his ear. The voice of David Mercer—the man he had spent weeks mourning, hunting, and finally believing he was saving—had lost every shred of paternal vulnerability.
"Target acquired," the synthesized baritone of the dreadnought’s automated hail boomed across the water, amplified through low-frequency maritime transmitters that vibrated straight through Julian's ribcage.
"Julian! Move!"
A hand seized the collar of his tactical rig, violently yanking him backward just as a pair of automated railgun turrets on the dreadnought’s superstructure rotated with hydraulic precision. Vanessa hit the deck beside him, dragging him behind the twisted remains of a severed crane assembly. A microsecond later, a supersonic kinetic slug tore through the exact spot Julian had occupied, vaporizing the steel bulwark into molten slag and spraying white-hot shrapnel into the churning sea.
"He played you," Vanessa shouted over the screaming wind, her knuckles white around her sidearm. Her face was smeared with carbon soot and sea spray, but her eyes were razor-sharp. "The old man didn't just survive Meridian’s collapse—he orchestrated Eleanor’s downfall so she wouldn't contest his claim over the lattice!"
Julian wiped saltwater from his eyes, his mind racing through lines of architecture. The public encryption keys he had transmitted hadn't gone to an open ledger. David had rerouted the handshake through the dreadnought’s centralized root node.
"The beacon on the lighthouse wasn't an SOS," Julian said, his voice dropping into the cold, calculated focus that had kept him alive through fifty-eight floors of corporate warfare. "It was an authorization handshake. By using my biometric signature to bypass Eleanor’s kill-switch, I handed him the master encryption keys to every tier-one financial grid on the planet."
Below their feet, the deck groaned sickeningly. The *Aegis Sovereign* was taking on thousands of tons of water every minute, its stern slipping inexorably into the black swells.
Across the water, the deck hatches of the dreadnought hissed open. High-velocity assault skiffs, unmanned and guided by thermal-tracking optics, dropped cleanly into the surge, engines screaming as they turned toward the dying carrier.
"Julian," Vanessa said, checking the remaining battery on her EMP sidearm. "We have about four minutes before this ship goes under, and our father has sent an automated execution squad to make sure we drown with it."
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Julian tapped his datapad, bypassing the scorched internal bus to hook directly into the emergency ballast controls of the carrier's forward launch bay. "Then we don't try to survive the ship. We use its death to take their eyes out."
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