The Carrier groaned like a dying whale.
Marcus was thrown hard against the rusted side of a market stall. The metal plates of his armor screamed as they scraped against the steel.
Above them, the remaining neon signs sparked and died.
"Hold on!" Marcia yelled, grabbing the edge of a toppled crate.
The ship lurched again. It wasn't a roll from the waves. It was a violent, unnatural shudder that vibrated through the soles of Marcus's boots, straight up his spine.
The klaxon wailed. BZZZZT. BZZZZT.
Panic erupted in the hangar.
The scavengers who had been scrambling for the glowing capacitors seconds ago were now screaming, trampling each other to get to the reinforced bulkheads.
"Narcissus!" Marcus yelled over the din. "Anchor the line!"
The iron giant didn't hesitate. He drove his massive new hydraulic leg straight into the deck plating. The battleship piston hissed, locking him in place.
He reached out with his heavy arms, grabbing Marcia and Lucilla, shielding them from the crushing wave of panicked bodies.
Marcus tapped his Neural Link.
"JARVIS," Marcus gritted his teeth. "Report! Did Nero fire the main guns?"
His Gold UI flooded his vision with a schematic of the Carrier. Red warnings flashed across the screen.
[Negative, Boss. Nero's frigate is five miles away. He didn't fire. He laid a trap.]
The holographic display zoomed out, showing the ocean surrounding the ship.
It was littered with hundreds of tiny, glowing red dots.
[We are in a Ghost Wake.] JARVIS explained, his digital voice cold. [Under the cover of the morning fog and the ash fall, the frigate seeded our heading with magnetic proximity mines. We just sailed right into the field.]
Marcus looked toward the massive, open launch doors at the far end of Hangar Bay 2.
Through the fog, he saw it.
A geyser of black water erupted near the bow. It shot two hundred feet into the air.
BOOM.
The sound arrived a second later, a concussive slap that rattled Marcus's teeth. A mine had just grazed the outer armor belt.
"We have to stop the ship!" Lucilla screamed, clinging to Narcissus's arm.
"We can't," Marcus said, his eyes scanning the UI. "We're a hundred-thousand-ton aircraft carrier. It takes three miles just to slow down. If we cut the engines now, we drift. We'll hit a dozen of them."
He looked around the chaotic hangar. He needed a terminal.
"Decimus!" Marcus ordered. "Get the Legion to the bulkheads! Seal the blast doors!"
He sprinted toward a rusted data terminal built into the wall of the Hangar Control booth.
He didn't bother typing.
He ripped the cover plate off the terminal, exposing the glowing fiber-optic cables. He grabbed a handful and jammed them directly into the port at the base of his skull.
Zzzzt.
The Neural Link engaged.
Marcus didn't just see the ship. He felt it.
He felt the massive screws churning the water at the stern. He felt the sluggish response of the rusted rudder.
He overrode the Boatman's helm controls in the Spire.
"JARVIS," Marcus thought, his mind expanding into the ship's network. "Give me the map. Overlay the mines on my visual."
[Overlay active. Boss, this is a needle thread. The gaps are less than forty meters wide. The Carrier is thirty-eight meters at the beam.]
"Then we don't scratch the paint," Marcus grunted.
He opened a ship-wide intercom channel. His voice boomed through every speaker on every deck.
"This is the Warlord. Brace for evasive maneuvers. Engineering, push the port screws to one hundred and ten percent. Starboard, cut to fifty."
Deep in the bowels of the ship, the massive engines roared in response to his digital command.
The Carrier leaned heavily to the right.
Through the launch doors, Marcus saw a cluster of three red spheres bobbing in the gray water dead ahead.
He waited.
"Hold..." Marcus whispered to himself, feeling the momentum of the massive ship.
"Hold..."
[Distance: 100 meters.]
"Now!" Marcus commanded the ship. "Hard to port! Full reverse starboard!"
The Carrier groaned in protest. The metal of the hull shrieked as the massive rudder fought the current.
The ship drifted sideways.
It slid past the three mines. Through the hangar doors, Marcus watched them glide by, less than ten feet from the rusted hull.
The scavengers in the hangar watched in terrified silence as the explosive spheres bobbed past the open bay.
"We cleared them!" Marcia yelled.
"Not yet," Marcus said. His neck muscles were corded with strain. He was sweating profusely.
He threaded the needle again. And again.
He drove the Carrier like a massive, sluggish race car, using his God-Tier AI to calculate drift, current, and the precise magnetic pull of the mines.
He slalomed through the Ghost Wake.
"Last cluster," JARVIS announced. [Clearing the field in 400 meters.]
Marcus let out a breath. He began to ease the rudder back to center.
The scavengers started to cheer. They were through the worst of it.
But JARVIS didn't cheer.
[Boss.]
The AI's voice was suddenly sharp. Alarmed.
[Micro-anomaly detected. Sonar ping off the starboard quarter. Depth: 20 meters.]
"A mine?" Marcus asked, his heart sinking.
[Negative. It's not magnetic. It's thermal-homing. It's moving at 60 knots.]
Marcus's eyes widened. He looked at the holographic map.
A single, fast-moving bright white line was streaking toward the Carrier.
"It was a funnel," Marcus realized aloud.
Nero didn't lay the mines to sink them. He laid them to force the Carrier into a single, predictable, narrow path.
So he couldn't miss.
"CIWS turrets!" Marcus commanded. "Fire at coordinate—"
[Negative, Boss.] JARVIS cut him off. [The target is swimming twenty meters below the waterline. The deck guns can't depress that far. It's a stealth torpedo.]
"Brace!" Marcus screamed over the intercom. "Torpedo impact! Starboard aft!"
He ripped the cables from his neck.
He threw himself to the deck, covering his head.
Two seconds later, it hit.
It wasn't a massive, ship-breaking explosion like the mines would have been.
It was a sharp, focused CRACK.
It sounded like a massive whip snapping against the steel.
The shudder was deep. It traveled through the bones of the ship, shaking dust from the ceiling.
The emergency lights flickered, but the main power held.
Silence returned to the hangar, save for the hum of the engines and the terrified whimpering of the scavengers.
Marcus pushed himself up off the deck. His head spun.
The radio on his belt crackled.
"Warlord," Scylla's voice was tight. "Damage report from Engineering. We took a hit below the waterline."
"Are we sinking?" Marcus asked, grabbing the data terminal to steady himself.
"No," Scylla rumbled. "The outer armor belt held the brunt of it. The inner bulkheads are sealed. We're taking on water in Sector 7, but the pumps are handling it. We're stable."
A cheer went up from the scavengers near the comms panel. They had survived a frigate attack.
But Marcus didn't cheer. He frowned.
"Sector 7?" Marcus asked. He tapped his UI. "JARVIS, what is in Lower Deck 7?"
[Accessing ship schematics.]
The holographic map zoomed in on the aft section of the ship. The damaged area pulsed red.
[Damage report: Lower Deck 7 contains the primary desalinization plant. Water Purification and Hydroponics.]
Marcus froze. His blood ran cold.
[Boss...] JARVIS said quietly. [They didn't hit the engines. They didn't hit the armory. They hit the water tanks. The primary fresh water reserves are contaminated with seawater and currently draining into the bilge.]
Marcus stared at the glowing red schematic.
He realized Nero's brilliance.
Nero knew he couldn't sink a fully powered aircraft carrier in a straight fight. The CIWS turrets would shred him.
So, he didn't try to sink them.
He decided to starve them.
"How much drinking water do we have left?" Marcus asked softly.
[Calculating current reserves against a population of 5,200.] JARVIS replied. [At minimum rationing, you have enough fresh water for thirty-six hours. After that, people start dying of dehydration.]
Marcus looked around the hangar.
He looked at the five thousand scavengers. He looked at the refugees of his Legion. He looked at Marcia, who was brushing shattered glass from her coat.
"How bad?" Marcia asked, walking over to him. She saw the look on his face.
Marcus looked out the open launch doors. Through the fog, the distant coastline of Italy was still burning, sending black ash into the sky.
Rome was hundreds of miles away. A week's journey by sea.
"Bad," Marcus said, his voice flat. "He killed our water supply."
Marcia's eyes widened. "Thirty-six hours?"
"If we're lucky," Marcus said.
He turned away from the terminal. He walked back to the center of the hangar, his boots heavy on the steel deck.
"We can't make it to Rome," Marcus said, his jaw tightening. "We'll be a ghost ship by the time we get there."
He brought up a map on his Gold UI. He traced a line from their current position to the nearest point on the Italian coast.
Not Rome.
"Set a course," Marcus commanded, tapping his comms to the Spire. "Hard to port."
"Where are we going?" Scylla asked over the radio.
Marcus looked at the burning horizon.
"We have to make landfall by tomorrow," Marcus said. "We're invading early. Set course for Naples."