Chapter 63 - The Third Faction
Martha stared at me for three long, agonizing seconds. The synthetic voice of the ship's proximity alarm counted down the closing distance of the outer wolfpack: *Warning. Target lock within nine hundred yards. Impact readiness in two minutes.*
"Behind the tactical display," Martha whispered hoarsely, her defiance cracking under the absolute certainty of incoming death. "The primary optical storage array. It’s bio-locked to my retinal scan. Release my right arm."
"Jackson, watch Kevin," I said. "If he twitches, put a round through his knee."
"Understood, Captain," Jackson growled, tightening his grip on his weapon.
I seized Martha by the collar of her tactical jumpsuit and dragged her toward the secondary command console. With one hand, I kept my sidearm pressed against her ribcage; with the other, I slammed her forward toward the optical sensor. The glass plate flared with a brilliant green luminescence as it scanned her dilated iris.
*Access granted: Project Chimera / Dayton Naval Biological & Cryptographic Division, 1994.*
A heavy steel panel beneath the console clicked open, sliding back to reveal a glowing hexagonal drive sealed inside a cryogenic containment sleeve. It was an off-grid quantum drive, completely divorced from any modern naval server—the only physical copy of the black-budget operations that had birthed me, used my supposed parents as handlers, and enriched a network of corrupt flag officers for three decades.
"Take it," Martha hissed, her voice trembling with genuine terror now as the deck began to shudder from the shockwaves of active pinging. "Take it and look at what your precious hero did to Sarah Cross."
*Sarah Cross.*
The name hit my heart like an electric jolt. My real mother.
Suddenly, the leviathan groaned violently. A deep, thundering boom echoed through the hull as an external shockwave rattled the light fixtures, sending shards of safety glass raining down from the ceiling displays.
"Torpedo impact off our port stern!" Jackson yelled, bracing himself against a bulkhead as Kevin shrieked like a wounded animal. "Ma'am, that wasn't a warning shot! That was a supercavitating acoustic warhead. They blew out our primary ballast controls!"
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The internal comms crackled to life again. But it wasn't Vance’s voice this time. A harsh, electronic distortion disguised the speaker.
"Attention rogue vessel and USS *Dauntless*. You are surrounded by elements of Task Force Obsidian. Admiral Vance has been authorized under Executive Order 13 to sanitize the operational zone. All personnel on board are designated hostile foreign combatants. Surrender is no longer an option."
