The command crackled through her earpiece, a ghost of a voice shredded by static but sharpened by authority. It was a State Department liaison, his panic a thin, useless veneer over the ice of political calculation. Drop the girl. Disengage, I repeat, drop the girl.

Master Sergeant Anya Vance didn’t so much as twitch. Through the Schmidt & Bender scope of her MK13 Mod 7, the world had been compressed, all its chaos and noise distilled into a single, silent equation. Three hundred yards of sun-bleached Arizona dust. The whipping wind out of the west, a steady three miles per hour. The elevation, the humidity, the spin of the Earth. And the terrified, jackhammer heartbeat of a little girl in a faded pink dress, a pistol pressed to her temple.

The diplomat’s voice was a swarm of angry hornets in her ear, buzzing about cross-border treaties and ink that hadn’t yet dried on paper in some air-conditioned room in D.C. He didn’t see the tremble in the girl’s lip. He didn’t see the dead-eyed placidity of the cartel enforcer holding her, a man smoking a cigarette like he was waiting for a bus.

Vance saw everything.

She exhaled, a slow, measured release of air into the pause between her own heartbeats. It was a sacred space, that fraction of a second. A pocket of absolute stillness where the universe held its breath.

Crack.

The sound was a dry snap, almost insignificant against the vast, empty landscape of the Sonoran Desert. Three hundred yards away, the target’s head recoiled with a violent, final punctuation. A delicate pink mist bloomed against the gray cinderblock wall behind him, a grotesque flower of bone and brain. The girl, suddenly weightless, stumbled and then ran. She didn’t look back.

There was no applause. No congratulations crackling over the comms. Only the heavy, rhythmic thud of boots rushing the rooftop of the abandoned warehouse behind her. She didn’t turn. She knew the sound.

The muzzle of an M4 rifle pressed into the base of her skull, cold and hard.

“Weapon down, Vance.”

It was Lieutenant Commander Sterling, the SEAL platoon leader. His voice wasn’t angry. It was worse. It was resigned, heavy with the weight of what she had just done. The sound of a man watching a carefully constructed house of cards collapse.

“You just started an international incident,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the sudden quiet.

Anya lowered her hands from the rifle, releasing the bolt with a soft, metallic sigh. She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on the distant spot where the girl had vanished, a tiny splash of pink against a world of brown and gray.

“I finished one,” she whispered.

Six hours later, she wasn’t a hero. She wasn’t even a soldier anymore. She was cargo, shackled to the deck of the USS Justice, waiting for the darkness of the Pacific Ocean to claim the day.

The darkness in the brig wasn’t empty. It was a physical presence, heavy and absolute, pressing against her eyelids. It smelled of stale sweat, hydraulic fluid, and the faint, bitter tang of institutional cleaning supplies that never quite managed to erase the scent of human misery. Master Sergeant Anya Vance—former Master Sergeant—sat on the cold steel floor, her back braced against the unyielding bulkhead.

The handcuffs, standard-issue hinged Smith & Wesson M100s, bit into the meat of her wrists. They were too tight, a final, petty cruelty from the master-at-arms who had read her charge sheet—Conduct Unbecoming, Disobeying a Direct Order—with a self-righteous sneer. She didn’t struggle against them. Pain was a familiar companion, a focusing mechanism. It kept the mind sharp when the world went soft.

The USS Justice, a guided-missile destroyer out of San Diego, sliced through the churning swells off the coast of Oregon. A massive Pacific storm system, the kind the weather forecasters called a “Pineapple Express,” was bearing down on them. The vibration of the ship’s powerful gas turbines was a constant, low-frequency hum that traveled up her spine, a mechanical mantra. To anyone else, it was just noise. To Vance, whose life had been a study in the intricate machinery of death, it was a diagnostic tool. The port turbine was running a fraction rougher than the starboard, a subtle, almost imperceptible vibration in the reduction gear. Thrum, thrum, hiss… thrum, thrum, hiss.

She closed her eyes, letting the rhythmic pulse of the ship carry her away from the steel cage. In her mind, she wasn’t here. She was back on the warehouse roof. The wind was three miles per hour, full value from the west. The air was hot and dry. The girl was in the pink dress. The target was lighting another cigarette. Drop the girl.

The memory was shattered by a violent, tectonic shudder that threw her sideways. Her head cracked hard against the bulkhead, a starburst of white-hot pain erupting behind her eyes. The ship groaned, a terrifying, metallic scream of steel being tortured past its yield point. It was a sound she knew from combat demolitions, the sound of something fundamental giving way.

Then, a sudden, profound silence.

The engine hum died. The ventilation fans spun down with a final, mournful sigh. The lights, which had been a single, dim bulb in the corridor, flickered once, buzzing like angry hornets, and then vanished completely.

Absolute black.

The darkness was different now. It wasn’t the passive dark of a windowless room; it was the active, suffocating black of a dead machine deep underwater.

“Guard!” Vance called out. Her voice was steady, the practiced, unshakable tone of a senior NCO who had controlled chaos for fifteen years, from dusty streets overseas to domestic standoffs. It was a voice that expected to be obeyed.

No answer.

“Petty Officer Evans, sound off!”

Nothing. Only the eerie, unnerving sound of something small and metallic rolling across the deck outside her cell. A pen? A spent casing?

Then came the second impact. This one wasn’t a mechanical failure. It was explosive.

The shock wave punched through the hull, a percussive blow that vibrated through the floor so hard it rattled Vance’s teeth. The Justice listed violently to starboard, a sudden, sickening lurch that felt like the world tilting on its axis. Vance slid across the floor, her shackles clattering against the steel deck until she slammed into the cold, unyielding bars of her cell.

Explosion. Starboard side, near the waterline. CIC is compromised. The tactical assessment was automatic, a reflex etched into her brain.

She scrambled to her knees, ignoring the blooming bruises on her hip and shoulder. “Evans, open the damn door!” she yelled, her voice swallowed by the groaning of the ship.

A beam of red light cut through the darkness outside the cell. It wasn’t the ship’s emergency lighting. It was a tactical flashlight, the kind mounted on a helmet rail.

Vance pushed herself to her feet, gripping the bars. “Master-at-arms, is that you?”

The beam swung toward her, a blinding crimson spear that forced her to squint, her vision exploding in a web of after-images. She tried to make out the silhouette behind the light. The figure didn’t move like a sailor, rolling with the ship’s list. It moved with the fluid, predatory grace of an operator. But the gear was wrong. The silhouette wasn’t the familiar profile of a standard-issue M4 carbine. The weapon was shorter, more compact. A bullpup design. A P90, maybe. Mercenaries.

The figure glided toward the cell. Vance didn’t flinch. She didn’t back away. She held her ground, her muscles coiling like springs.

“You’re the sniper,” a voice said. It was American, but distorted, filtered through a comms system and a full-face mask. The tone was flat, professional.

“I’m a prisoner,” Vance corrected, her voice low and tight. “And this ship is sinking.”

“Correct,” the voice replied. The figure raised the weapon. A small, red laser dot appeared, dancing on Vance’s forehead like a nervous insect. “You were supposed to be transferred to Leavenworth. Change of plans. You’re being liquidated.”

Vance stared down the barrel of the gun. She didn’t beg. She didn’t plead. Her mind was a cold, clear machine, calculating. Distance: two meters. Obstacle: steel bars. Threat: MP7 submachine gun. She’d misidentified it at first. Options: zero.

“Do it,” she said, her voice a dare.

The ship lurched again, even more violently this time, as a rogue wave hammered the wounded hull. A solid wall of freezing Pacific water smashed into the corridor from a ruptured stairwell, a roaring cascade of white foam and black sea. The gunman, caught off guard, was knocked from his feet. The shot went wide, the bullet sparking harmlessly against the steel frame of the door. The gunman was swept away into the churning darkness, his flashlight spinning wildly, its red beam cartwheeling through the underwater chaos before vanishing.

Vance was thrown back against the rear wall as the water surged into her cell. It was breathtakingly cold, a physical shock that tasted of salt, diesel, and rust. It rose to her waist in seconds. The Justice was taking on water fast. She was trapped in a steel box, chained, on a sinking destroyer in the middle of a hurricane.

She scrambled back to the cell door, pulling frantically at the lock. It was dead. The electronic keypad was shorted out, useless. The manual override was a wheel on the outside, where the gunman had been swept away. The water reached her chest, then her shoulders.

Panic was a luxury she couldn’t afford. Panic got you killed. She took a deep breath as the cold, oily water lapped at her chin. She reached down to her belt line. They had taken her knife, her bootlaces, her belt. But they had been sloppy. They had missed the small, stiff piece of wire she had painstakingly pulled from the underwire of her bra three hours ago, a tiny sliver of hope she had tucked into the seam of her trousers.

She submerged herself in the black, swirling water. She worked entirely by feel, her fingers numb with cold. The handcuff keyhole was a tiny, elusive target. Her lungs began to burn, the pressure building behind her ribs. The ship groaned around her, the long, mournful song of a dying leviathan.

Click.

The left cuff popped open.

Vance surfaced, gasping, her head breaking the surface into a pocket of air only a foot high. She coughed, spitting out a mouthful of seawater. She had one hand free. She didn’t waste time on the other cuff. She needed leverage, not freedom.

She grabbed the bars of the sliding cell door. The water pressure inside and outside the cell was nearly equalized, but the door was immensely heavy. She planted her feet against the back bulkhead and pulled with every ounce of strength she had. It didn’t budge.

“Come on,” she snarled, the words gurgling as water filled her mouth. “Not like this.”

She needed a lever. Her eyes scanned the floating debris in her cell. A plastic tray. A roll of toilet paper. Useless. Then she looked at the dangling handcuff on her right wrist, the loose steel bracelet. An idea, desperate and brutal, formed in her mind.

She jammed the open, swinging part of the broken cuff into the narrow gap between the sliding door and its frame. The hardened steel bit into the softer metal. Using the attached chain as a handle, she torqued it with everything she had left.

Metal screeched against metal, a high-pitched, agonizing sound that was barely audible over the rush of the water. The door moved. An inch. Two inches. It was enough.

Vance forced her body through the gap, the raw edge of the steel scraping skin from her ribs. She dragged her shackled right hand through after her, the metal catching and tearing at her flesh. She tumbled out into the flooded corridor, gasping, coughing up saltwater and bile.

She was free of the cage, but she was still three decks below the waterline, and the ocean was still pouring in. As she pushed herself to her feet, shivering uncontrollably, water dripping from her matted hair, she saw a body floating face down near the stairwell. It was Evans, the young petty officer.

Vance waded over to him. She didn’t need to check for a pulse. His neck was bent at an angle that defied life. She reached for his holster. It was empty. The mercenaries had been thorough.

“Great,” she whispered to the dead man.

She checked his tactical vest. One M84 flashbang grenade. A handheld radio, its screen cracked and certainly fried by the saltwater. And a key ring heavy with brass keys. She took the flashbang and the keys, stuffing them into her pockets.

Above her, the sound of automatic gunfire erupted. Not the wild spray of panicked sailors, but disciplined, rhythmic bursts. Three rounds, pause. Three rounds, pause. The SEALs. Sterling’s team was engaging the enemy.

Vance looked at the dangling handcuff on her right wrist, a grim bracelet of her former life. Then she looked up the dark, treacherous stairwell leading toward the main deck. She wasn’t a Master Sergeant anymore. She wasn’t a hero or a traitor. She was a ghost.

And ghosts were hard to kill.

She began to climb.

The water wasn’t just rising; it was hunting. It chased her up the ladder, a freezing, greedy sludge that slapped against her neck and tried to pull her back down into the dark. The Justice groaned again, a deep, tectonic screech of metal shearing under the immense pressure of the ocean. The destroyer was listing heavily to starboard now, a good forty degrees, turning the corridor she had just escaped into a treacherous slide into the abyss.

She couldn’t use the main stairwell. The rush of incoming water was a solid, thundering cascade, a wall of force that would smash her ribs and pin her to the deck. She needed another way up. The ship’s schematics, memorized years ago during a training exercise, materialized in her mind. Auxiliary maintenance ladder. Aft of the brig, near the intake valves.

But she couldn’t go unarmed. The gunman who’d tried to execute her… he had been swept away when the hull breached. His body, and his weapon, had to be down there somewhere.

Vance took a breath, expanding her lungs until they pressed against her ribs, and submerged herself in the black, swirling soup of the flooded corridor.

Below the surface, the world was a silent, chaotic ballet. Debris drifted past her face: clipboards with soggy papers, a lone combat boot, the shattered remains of a coffee mug. She forced her eyes open, the salt and diesel fuel stinging them raw. The strobing red emergency light from a surviving fixture in the corridor pulsed through the murky water, creating disorienting, dancing shadows.

There.

Five meters down the sloped deck, caught on a jagged piece of ruptured piping, the mercenary’s body bobbed like a grotesque marionette, his limbs swaying in the unseen currents.

Vance kicked off the bulkhead, propelling herself through the water with an efficiency stripped of all panic. She reached the body. The man was dead, his eyes open and vacant, staring up at a ceiling that was now a wall. She didn’t look at his face. She looked at his chest. The MP7 was still attached to a single-point sling, tangled around his neck and the pipe he was snagged on. Vance grabbed the weapon. It was stuck. The sling had caught fast.

Her lungs began to burn, the first insistent warning sign of CO2 buildup. She planted her boot on the dead man’s chest for leverage and yanked the weapon hard. The fabric of the sling tore with a soft rip. The body, freed from its anchor, drifted away and sank into the darkness below.

Vance clutched the submachine gun to her chest and kicked furiously for the surface.

She broke through, gasping, coughing up a mixture of bile and seawater. The pocket of air in the top of the corridor was thinning, growing hot and thick with the smell of electrical ozone. The water was now only a foot from the overhead cabling and pipes. Time was running out.

“Move,” she commanded herself, her voice a ragged whisper.

She waded toward the maintenance ladder, the water dragging at her sodden fatigues like a physical weight. Every step was a battle against the shifting gravity of the dying ship. She reached the ladder, a narrow vertical chute leading to Deck Three. She slung the MP7 over her back and began to climb, the cold metal rungs biting into her bare hands. Her muscles screamed, the lactic acid from the cold and the adrenaline dump turning her arms and legs to lead.

She hauled herself up rung by rung, the black water chasing her heels. At the top of the chute, she reached the hatch. It was a heavy, circular steel wheel. And it was sealed.

Condition Zebra. During general quarters, the crew locked down all watertight fittings to prevent progressive flooding. If the sailors on the other side had followed protocol, this hatch was dogged down tight.

Vance braced her shoulder against the wheel and heaved. It didn’t budge.

“Come on,” she hissed through gritted teeth, the effort sending a fresh wave of pain through her bruised ribs. She hammered the steel wheel with the heel of her hand. Nothing. She was trapped. Below her, the water had already swallowed the lower half of the ladder. It was lapping at her boots.

She pressed her ear against the cold steel of the hatch. Silence. No, not silence. A vibration. Faint, but unmistakable.

Footsteps.

She pulled the MP7 around from her back. She worked the charging handle, her fingers clumsy with cold, and checked the chamber. A round was seated. Heckler & Koch engineering. It would fire, even soaking wet. She flicked the selector switch to semi-auto.

She raised the muzzle to the ceiling of the small chute and fired three rounds into the steel plating next to the hinge mechanism. Ping. Ping. Ping. The sound was deafening in the confined space, a series of sharp, metallic cracks that echoed in her skull.

She waited. Ten seconds that stretched into an eternity.

Then, the wheel above her groaned. Slowly, reluctantly, it began to spin counterclockwise. Someone was opening it.

Vance dropped into a crouch on the highest rung of the ladder, leveling the weapon at the growing gap. If it was a friendly, she’d identify herself. If it was a hostile, she’d drop them before they could register her presence.

The hatch swung open with a hiss of equalizing pressure. A face appeared in the circle of dim light from the corridor above. It wasn’t a SEAL. It wasn’t a mercenary. It was a kid, a machinist’s mate, barely twenty years old, his face smeared with grease and raw terror. He was holding a large pipe wrench like a baseball bat.

“Don’t shoot!” he screamed, his eyes wide as saucers as he stared down the barrel of the MP7.

Vance lowered the weapon instantly. “Clear the hole, sailor.”

She scrambled up through the hatch, rolling onto the blessedly dry deck of the engineering passageway. Without pausing, she spun around and slammed the heavy hatch shut, spinning the wheel until the dogs locked securely into place, sealing off the rising water below.

She collapsed back against the bulkhead, breathing hard, her body shaking from cold and exertion. The sailor stared at her, his eyes darting from her wet prison-issue fatigues to the handcuff dangling from her wrist, to the stolen submachine gun in her hands.

“You’re… you’re the prisoner,” he stammered.

“Master Sergeant Vance,” she corrected, pushing a dripping strand of wet hair out of her eyes. She stood up, her bare feet cold on the linoleum. “Who are you?”

“Petty Officer O’Malley. Engineering.” He looked fearfully at the hatch she had just sealed. “Did… did everyone make it out down there?”

Vance stood up, her movements stiff. She ejected the magazine of the MP7, checked the round count, and slammed it back into place. It was nearly full. “No,” she said, her voice flat. “Just me.”

O’Malley paled. “The captain… the bridge is gone. They hit us with something. A missile, I think. We’re blind. I was trying to get to the emergency generator room, but there are… guys. With masks. And guns.”

Vance grabbed his shoulder, her grip firm, steadying him. “Listen to me, O’Malley. Are the SEALs engaging?”

“I heard shooting. On Deck One, near the mess. But… it stopped.”

Stopped? That wasn’t good. SEALs didn’t stop shooting until the threat was neutralized, or they were.

“Where is your headset?” Vance asked.

“Lost it. In the flooding.”

“Okay, O’Malley, listen carefully,” Vance said, her voice dropping into the familiar cadence of command. “You’re going to stay here. Find a maintenance locker, a storage closet, anything with a lock. You get inside, you lock it, and you don’t open it for anyone unless you hear the code word ‘Albatross.’ You got that?”

“Where are you going?” he asked, his voice a frightened whisper.

Vance looked down the long, empty corridor. The emergency lights bathed the hallway in a sinister, pulsing crimson glow. Shadows stretched long and distorted, turning familiar shapes into monstrous forms.

“I need eyes,” she said. “And I need to find my team.”

She moved past him, her bare feet silent on the floor. She was ten meters down the hall when she froze.

A sound. It wasn’t the chaotic rattle of a firefight. It was a distinct, soft, metallic thip… followed by the heavy, wet thud of a body hitting the floor.

Suppressed fire. Subsonic ammunition.

Vance pressed herself into the recess of a doorway, her back flat against the cold steel. That wasn’t a sound of panic. That was the sound of a professional clearing a room. They weren’t just sinking the ship. They were sweeping it clean.

She looked back at O’Malley, holding a single finger to her lips in a universal sign for silence.

The door at the far end of the corridor, the one leading to the mess decks, slowly creaked open.

Vance raised the MP7. The hunt had begun.

Vance shoved O’Malley into the deep shadows of a circuit breaker alcove, her eyes already adjusting to the gloom. She was fighting blind, outgunned and out-geared. The enemy had the advantage of technology, of planning, of surprise. She had only the advantage of terrain—this dying, groaning labyrinth of steel was her home turf.

The door at the end of the corridor hissed open. Two distinct beams of infrared light, invisible to the naked eye, sliced through the steam that now filled the hallway. They swept the space with disciplined, overlapping precision. Vance didn’t need to see the lasers to know they were there. She felt the subtle change in air pressure, and she recognized the deliberate, rolling gait of men who knew how to move under the weight of full combat gear.

She shrank back into the shadows of a recessed pipe junction overhead, pulling her knees to her chest. She was barefoot, soaking wet, and freezing, but her heart rate was a steady forty-five beats per minute. The cold was a focusing agent.

The point man moved past her hiding spot. He was geared for war. A high-cut maritime helmet, quad-tube panoramic night vision goggles, and a plate carrier slick with rain and sea spray. He didn’t check the deep corner above his head. He was looking for armed sailors, for organized resistance, not for a ghost in the pipes.

Vance waited for the second man. The interval was standard. Five meters. As the second operator passed directly beneath her, Vance dropped.

She didn’t shoot. A gunshot, even suppressed, would alert the rest of their team. She wrapped her legs around his torso in a vice grip and drove the jagged, broken edge of the handcuff on her wrist into the soft gap between his helmet and his tactical vest.

He thrashed, a guttural sound of surprise and pain escaping his mask. He reached for his sidearm, but she already had the leverage. She twisted, using his own forward momentum to drive him hard into the bulkhead. There was a sickening crunch as his windpipe collapsed under the pressure of her forearm. Vance rode him to the floor, keeping his dying body between her and the point man.

The first operator spun around, his weapon raising, but he hesitated. In the dark, through the monochrome world of his NVGs, all he saw was a tangled shape. Without thermal identification, he couldn’t take the shot without risking hitting his partner.

That single second of hesitation was all Vance needed.

She raised the MP7 over the dying man’s shoulder and fired two rounds. Thip. Thip. The subsonic rounds were barely more than a cough. The point man’s head snapped back, his high-tech helmet no match for a round to the face. His body crumbled to the deck, the heavy gear clattering loud against the steel plates.

Silence returned to the corridor, broken only by the gurgling, fading breath of the man beneath her. Then that, too, stopped.

“Stay put,” she whispered into the darkness where O’Malley was hiding.

Vance went to work with the cold efficiency of a battlefield scavenger. She stripped the point man of his helmet. The GPNVG-18s—the panoramic night vision goggles—were intact. She pulled them on. The weight was unfamiliar, but the view was a godsend. She flipped the switch.

The world exploded into startling clarity. White phosphor, crisp and high-definition. The oppressive darkness of the ship was gone, replaced by a ghostly, hyper-detailed landscape. She could see the steam venting from cracked pipes, the dark pool of blood spreading on the deck, the faint heat signature of O’Malley shivering in the alcove.

She checked the dead man’s rig. No radio—encrypted comms only, a closed network. But she found what she needed: two spare magazines for the MP7 and a Ka-Bar combat knife sheathed on his vest.

“O’Malley,” she said, her voice a low murmur. “Lock the hatch behind me. Do not open it for anyone but me.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She moved toward the heavy blast doors leading to Main Engineering.

The central engineering bay was a cavernous space, a cathedral of pipes and turbines that spanned three decks. Vance entered on the uppermost catwalk, lying prone on the grating and peering down through the mesh. The emergency lights below cast long, dancing shadows, turning the massive engines into slumbering beasts. The water was rising here, too, sloshing around the knees of a group of men standing on the turbine housing.

There were twelve of them. Crew members—engineers, firemen, electricians. They were zip-tied, forced to their knees in a neat, orderly line. Standing over them were four more mercenaries. They weren’t interrogating. They weren’t bargaining.

“Row check,” one of the mercs said, his voice carrying up to the catwalk, chillingly calm and professional. “No prisoners. Clean the board.”

Vance’s grip tightened on the MP7. She ranged the distance. Thirty meters. Four targets. But she couldn’t take the shot. Not with a submachine gun. The bullet deviation at that range was too high. And if she missed a headshot, if she only wounded one of them, the hostages would be dead before she could cycle another round.

“Please,” one of the engineers begged, his voice thin with terror. “We can help you with the reactor. If the cooling fails, it’s going to—”

Thip.

The engineer collapsed forward into the oily water. Vance flinched, a muscle in her jaw twitching. It wasn’t a battle. It was a liquidation.

Thip. Thip. Thip.

Systematic. Efficient. The bodies slumped forward, one after another. Vance forced herself to watch, burning the image into her memory. She needed to know the enemy. They didn’t panic. They didn’t gloat. They simply worked. This wasn’t a band of pirates looking for ransom. This was a tier-one element, a professional paramilitary force. They were erasing the crew to hide something.

As the executioners moved on, sweeping toward the lower control room, Vance scanned the area they had just cleared. Something on the far side of the catwalk, near a large ventilation intake, caught the white glow of her NVGs. It was a tactical vest, discarded in a hurry. Beside it lay a rifle.

Vance moved, low and fast, sprinting across the catwalk while the noise of the rushing water below masked her footsteps. She reached the gear. It was a SEAL plate carrier. The patch on the front, a darker shade of camouflage with the trident emblem barely visible, was unmistakable.

She picked up the rifle lying next to it. A MK18 Mod 1. Standard SEAL issue. She checked the chamber. It was fouled. A catastrophic double-feed jam. The bolt was stuck halfway open, a mangled brass casing wedged grotesquely in the action. Whoever had been carrying this had tried to clear it in a panic and failed, making it worse.

There was no body. Just the bloody vest and the useless rifle. Vance checked the name tape stitched inside the vest.

STERLING, LT. CMDR.

She looked at the blood spatter on the metal grating. It trailed away from the vest, a series of dark droplets leading not toward an exit, but deeper into the ship, toward the officer’s mess. Sterling was alive. Wounded, unarmed, and hunted.

Vance stripped the six spare magazines from the vest. 5.56mm ammunition. Useless for her current weapon, but gold if she could find a working rifle. She shoved them into her scavenged belt rig. She left the jammed rifle. It was dead weight.

Below her, the water level had reached the main turbine housing. The ship groaned, a long, mournful sound that vibrated through the soles of her bare feet and up into her chest. The Justice was dying.

Vance stood up. She had eyes. She had a weapon. And now she had a direction. She tapped the side of her helmet, adjusting the focus on the panoramic goggles.

The predator had become the prey. But the prey had just put on its fangs. She moved toward the blood trail, a ghost in the machine.