Chapter 54 - Protocol Omega
"She's painting us with fire-control radar!" Chen screamed from inside the pilothouse. "Multiple lock warnings! Phased array illumination from target's dorsal modules!"
"Countermeasures, deploy chaff and flare!" I shouted, sprinting back inside the bridge. "Execute evasive roll starboard! Hard right rudder! Weapons Officer, authorize CIWS to full automatic!"
Before the destroyer’s Gatling guns could unleash their protective wall of tungsten, a blinding burst of blue-green light flashed from high in the night sky.
A high-altitude satellite laser-link cracked through the cloud deck, terminating precisely on our mast's hardened receiver. The encrypted main tactical screen flickered, tearing through the jamming that Martha’s vessel had deployed.
"Incoming priority override!" Martinez gasped, his fingers flying across the comms board. "Source: Flag Command, Pentagon Deep Vault. It's Admiral Vance!"
The massive central holo-display materialized the stern, weathered face of Admiral Vance. He wasn't in his dress blues; he was in service khakis, standing in an underground command bunker surrounded by joint chiefs and cyber-warfare officers.
*"Captain Eleanor,"* Vance's deep, authoritative voice boomed through the speakers, cutting through the chaos like a battle horn. *"Do not engage with kinetic surface fire. The vessel beneath you is not a prototype—it is the 'Aegis-Null', the primary autonomous node for the automated Atlantic deterrent system she stole thirty years ago. If you breach her outer pressure hull with torpedoes, her fail-deadly core will detonate a high-altitude nuclear EMP that will black out the entire Eastern Seaboard!"*
"Admiral, she’s locking weapons on my bridge!" I reported, refusing to flinch. "I have two hundred sailors aboard this ship. I will not stand down while she threatens my crew!"
*"Listen to me carefully, Eleanor,"* Vance said, his eyes burning with an intense, tragic urgency. *"The four words I whispered to your parents in that auditorium—'She knows the truth'—was the trigger. It forced her to come out of hiding to recover the encryption keys buried in that safehouse. But she doesn't have the final launch cipher. It's not in the Dayton vault. It was never in Dayton."*
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"Where is it, Admiral?" I demanded.
Vance looked at me with an expression of devastating grief and pride. *"It was encrypted into your naval biometric profile the day you received your commission at Annapolis, Captain. You are the only living key to the Aegis-Null. She isn't here to destroy you. She’s here to take you alive."*
