Chapter 28 - Torpedoes in the Dark
"Brace for evasive maneuvers!" Claire commanded.
At 32,000 feet below the surface, evasive maneuvers were an invitation to catastrophic hull collapse. A single wrong turn, an overstressed thruster, and the unimaginable pressure of the ocean would breach the submersible’s skin instantly.
Claire slammed the port thrusters into full reverse while angling the vertical dive hydroplanes down sixty degrees.
The *Nautilus-IV* plunged nose-first into a narrow seismic trench, scraping past towering basalt pillars that rose from the seabed like the teeth of a giant beast.
Behind them, the supercavitating torpedo—traveling at over two hundred knots inside an artificial air bubble—sliced through the water. It missed the *Nautilus-IV* by less than twenty yards, slamming directly into the basalt canyon wall above them.
*BOOM!*
The underwater explosion created a massive concussive shockwave. Even through the specialized hull, the impact slammed Claire and her team against their restraints. The exterior camera displays flickered and filled with static as tons of fractured rock and underwater sediment collapsed into the trench.
"Hull integrity down to eighty-two percent!" Hayes shouted over the wailing alarms. "Port ballast tank micro-fractured! We can't survive another shockwave!"
"We won't need to," Claire said with lethal composure. "Deploy the acoustic decoys and kill all active emitters. Hayes, arm the magnetic penetration torpedoes."
"Decoys away! Running silent!"
The *Nautilus-IV* became a ghost in the dark.
The Orion submersible, believing it had crushed the American intruder beneath the rockfall, slowly turned its massive searchlights back toward the Acheron Vault.
Claire used the falling debris cloud as tactical cover. She piloted the *Nautilus-IV* through the zero-visibility murk with surgical precision, guiding the vessel by memory of the trench’s bathymetric contours.
"Target locked on the Orion sub's auxiliary propulsion pod," Claire whispered. "Fire."
Two compressed-gas torpedoes shot from the *Nautilus-IV*’s forward tubes. They didn't produce an explosive blast; instead, they carried localized shaped-charge thermite warheads.
Ten seconds later, the torpedoes impacted the Orion vessel’s stern.
A silent, blinding flash of white-hot thermal fire burned through the Orion sub's propulsion housing, slagging the drive shafts and flooding its propulsion bays with seawater. The massive enemy craft tilted sideways, its thrusters dead, drifting helplessly into the trench bed like a paralyzed leviathan.
"Target neutralized," Hayes breathed, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. "Propulsion disabled. They're grounded."
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"Move us to the secondary airlock," Claire ordered, unclipping her harness and standing up. She grabbed her tactical assault rifle, specially sealed for pressurized atmospheric combat. "Suit up. We're going inside."
***
