Chapter 61 - BOARDING THE LEVIATHAN
Sarah moved swiftly to the primary terminal, pulling the Mount Weather decryption drive from its waterproof sleeve and slamming it into the main diagnostic port.
The master console immediately flashed amber: *EXTERNAL ANALOG OVERRIDE DETECTED — SECURITY PROTOCOL CHALLENGE.*
"Stop her!" Pendelton shouted, lunging forward with a concealed derringer slipping from his sleeve.
I moved faster. I caught his wrist, twisted the weapon from his grip with a sharp snap that dropped him to his knees, and threw him face-first onto the polished steel deck. Before the technicians could react, I swept the muzzle of my pistol across their consoles, sending monitors and keyboards crashing to the floor.
"Sit on your hands," I ordered the technicians. "One twitch, and you find out what high-velocity lead does in an enclosed steel room."
"Grant, it's requiring a multi-vessel verification key," Sarah said, her fingers flying across the master keyboard. "The *Aegis Vanguard* is linked to the other eleven ships in a cryptographic daisy chain. If I kill this server without the handshake, the fail-safe will detonate the local servers and permanently burn the public evidence."
"Where is the verification key?" I demanded, pressing my boot against Pendelton's shoulder.
The disgraced official spat blood onto the deck and laughed, a shrill, hysterical sound. "You're too late, Mercer! The key isn't stored in this room! It's split between the automated telemetry core in the ship's bow and the secondary transmitter on the main mast. You can't access both before the ratification clock hits zero!"
"Sarah, can you bypass it if we cut the main mast feed manually?" I asked.
She glanced at the streaming lines of code. "If the mast transmitter goes dark, the daisy chain collapses inward! The flagship will be forced into manual local reboot, and all twelve hulls will surface their encrypted logs to the open Coast Guard bands!"
"Keep working on the local override," I said, checking my sidearm's magazine. "I'm going up the mast."
"Grant, that mast is sixty feet above an open Atlantic gale," she said, looking up at me with real terror in her eyes. "And the ship's automated defense network is still hot!"
"Then I’ll be quick," I replied.
May you like
I grabbed the heavy wire-cutters from the technician's tool rack, racked the slide of my pistol, and kicked open the bulkhead hatch leading back out into the teeth of the storm.
***
