My father erased my name from his Navy retirement ceremony because he said his

The detonation wasn't on our level.

It was twenty feet above our heads, where Master Chief Miller had planted a directional breaching charge directly against the primary hydraulic manifold of *The Sovereign Mother's* ballast control line.

The ceiling shrieked as four tons of high-pressure seawater erupted through the ventilation grates in a deafening, blinding white cascade.

"Kill them!" Evelyn shrieked, firing her pistol.

The bullet grazed my shoulder, tearing through the fabric of my vest and biting into the meat of my collarbone, but the shock didn't stop me.

I dove across the table, tackling my grandmother to the floor. The silver pistol clattered away across the slick, flooded steel deck.

Grant moved like lightning, drawing his sidearm and dropping the two nearest guards with double-taps to the chest. Miller dropped through the ruptured ventilation hatch on a high-tensile fast rope, his combat shotgun booming in the enclosed space, blowing the remaining guards back into the hallway.

"Thomas!" Miller bellowed, dropping to his knees and severing my father’s zip-ties with a serrated blade.

My father surged to his feet, despite his broken ribs and battered face. He lunged forward, grabbing Evelyn by the throat before she could reach the fallen pistol.

"Enough, Mother," Thomas snarled, his voice trembling with thirty years of repressed fury. "The game is over."

"You... pathetic... worm," Evelyn choked out, her fingers clawing at his wrists. "You think... a little water... will stop the launch? The countdown... is automated!"

I whipped around toward the master tactical terminal.

Across the central screen, a timer was flashing in bright, angry amber:

**OMEGA PROTOCOL INITIATED: 02:00... 01:59... 01:58...**

**TARGETS: 32 CONTINENTAL SECTORS.**

"Maya!" Grant yelled, keeping his rifle trained on the access corridor as more security personnel began hammering on the exterior blast doors. "We can't shut it down from here! The terminal requires the biometric key of the Sovereign Commander!"

"Evelyn’s thumbprint won't work if she’s under duress," Thomas panted, pinning his mother against the bulkhead. "The system detects elevated heart rate and galvanic skin response. It has to be an uncoerced heir!"

"I am the heir," I said, stepping up to the console.

"Maya, no!" my father yelled, his eyes wide with horror. "If you log into that system, it will bind your neural signature to the fleet's mainframe forever! You'll never be able to leave these waters! That’s why I erased you! I gave up my career, my honor, my entire life so you could have a life under the sun!"

I looked at him—the man who had stood on that stage in Coronado and pretended I didn't exist. The man who had taken the world's scorn, who had let his fellow admirals whisper that he was a broken, bitter old tyrant who hated his own flesh and blood.

He hadn't hated me. He had sacrificed his name to give me freedom.