Chapter 63 - Breaching the Surface
Two miles away, the surface of the North Atlantic ruptured.
The reconnaissance sled broke the waves amid a torrential rainstorm, airborne for a split second before slamming into the churning black swells. Naomi hit the quick-release clasp on her harness and rolled into the water, her senses instantly calibrating to the environment.
Fifty-knot winds. Gale-force swells. Ambient temperature four degrees Celsius.
She treaded water with effortless, rhythmic strokes, coughing up a mouthful of brine before scanning the horizon. To the east, hidden within the low-hanging fog and rain squalls, sat the dreadnought—a ghost vessel running almost completely dark, emitting only a faint thermal signature against the freezing sky.
Naomi reached behind her neck, touching the base of her skull. The neural interface that Marcus had tried to burn out was pulsing with a dull, rhythmic thrum. It wasn't a malfunction; it was an active handshake signal.
*Julian Whitmore.*
Her tactical training files—the deep-coded doctrines she had believed buried in the ashes of the Philadelphia black site—were beginning to decrypt. Julian had never been just an employer. He had been the director of the Chimera project, the shadow architect who had bought her file from the military tribunal after she dismantled the rogue task force seven years ago.
He had placed her in Whitmore House in the gray dress of a domestic servant not to hide her, but to keep his most lethal weapon dormant beside his children until the day he called the pieces home.
"Protocol broken," Naomi whispered into the howling storm, her voice as hard as granite.
May you like
She turned and began swimming toward the steel wall of the dreadnought with relentless, predatory purpose.
***
