Chapter 100 - The Resurfacing Titan
We burst back into the airlock chamber just as the entire titanium foundation of the facility groaned under an unfathomable, shifting weight. The grated floor buckled upward, throwing us against the curved hull of the *Triton-IV*.
"Get inside! Now!" I shoved Miller up through the lower egress hatch, scrambling in right behind him as Dawson sealed the hydraulic dogs and initiated the emergency undocking sequence.
The mechanical capture arms released with a violent, shuddering bang. The *Triton-IV* tumbled backward into the freezing water column, its thrusters screaming at maximum pitch as millions of tons of shattered basalt and titanium collapsed into the abyss below. The ancient Holloway installation, along with the forty-year-old lies of Dayton, was swallowed whole by an avalanche of black rock and boiling silt.
"Ascent thrusters at maximum!" Dawson shouted, his hands locked on the pitch trim as the submersible rose like a rocket through the darkness. "We’re riding the thermal plume up! Five minutes to surface!"
"Miller, establish comms with the *Vanguard*!" I ordered, strapping myself into the command seat. "Tell them we’ve neutralized the weapon, but we have incoming hostiles on the surface!"
Miller tuned the radio transceiver, but all that came through was a deafening wall of static, punctuated by the unmistakable, thunderous booms of heavy naval artillery echoing down through the water column.
"I can't raise them, Captain!" Miller said grimly. "The acoustic interference is too thick! But there’s something else on the sonar... something huge rising beneath us!"
I leaned forward, staring at the primary active sonar sweep.
Rising out of the shattered trench behind our tiny submersible was not the strike craft we had neutralized. It was a massive, subterranean cradle—a titanic, prehistoric naval structure thousands of feet across, shaken loose from its ancient bedrock tomb by the collapsing trench. It was ascending at an impossible rate, pushing an enormous wall of water directly toward the surface.
"Surfacing in ten seconds!" Dawson yelled. "Hold on!"
The *Triton-IV* breached the Atlantic surface with a violent, rolling crash, bursting into the freezing night air. Rain and sea spray lashed against the quartz viewports as we bobbed violently among twenty-foot swells.
Through the salt-streaked glass, the sight that greeted us was sheer nightmare.
The USS *Vanguard* was dead in the water three miles off our starboard bow, its forward superstructure ablaze with orange fire, its main guns still spitting defiant salvos of five-inch shells into the freezing rain. Surrounded by three colossal, stealth-hulled guided-missile cruisers bearing no national insignias, my ship was fighting for its life.
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And between the *Vanguard* and the enemy fleet, the ocean surface began to dome upward into a mountain of churning white foam.
Out of the boiling sea, rising like an armored leviathan from the deep, an ungodly steel prow hundreds of feet tall broke through the waves, casting an immense, terrifying shadow over the burning battlefield—bearing an ancient naval registry number that belonged to no nation on Earth.
