Chapter 54

# Day 16 - 21:10

The rec room felt like a swollen vein on the brink of rupture—over seventy women pressed shoulder to shoulder, sweat dripping down walls, mingling with the sharp tang of fear. Windows were blacked out; any attacker would see only a lifeless hull.

Zhao and Saanvi worked the entrance, scanning wrists and directing arrivals to three triage points. Aida’s station overflowed with trembling patients. Vivienne moved with mechanical precision, sleeves rolled up, eyes narrowed, the line flowing mercilessly. Mei-Lin in the back corner managed the weakest cases.

Aida caught Zhao’s eye just as two crew held down a writhing patient. The woman spat and struggled until Aida whispered something in her ear. Her fight drained away. Saanvi injected a sedative; the woman went limp and was carried off.

Zhao slipped to Vivienne. “Help me here,” she ordered. He held the wrist of a pale young woman while Vivienne checked lymph nodes and a rash. “Six,” Vivienne said, reading the dawn meter. “Panic spike. Keep her calm.” She patted the woman’s knee and moved on.

A tray of tea urns crashed, scalding liquid flooding the floor. Iqbal was there in seconds, applying burn patches with quiet efficiency.

At the far wall, Mei-Lin coaxed a crew member to swallow syrup. The woman retched. Mei-Lin met Zhao’s gaze, gave a brief, weary nod, then bent back to her patient.

Zhao searched for Sophie. When he asked Vivienne, she shook her head, mouthed “Not here,” and tapped her wrist.

Time warped. Zhao ferried supplies, held hands, wiped brows. The atmosphere settled into a dull dread. Two security women near the doors stood rigid, faces like stone.

The PA crackled. Verne’s voice: “Enemy approach confirmed. Three boarding boats in five minutes. Blackout protocol.”

Lights died to dim emergency LEDs. The crowd surged, then Elena climbed a chair and began a ragged Spanish lullaby. Her voice cut through the darkness, stilling the panic.

Mei-Lin’s hand found Zhao’s. He squeezed back. In the faint glow, they waited.

# Day 16 - 21:33

The first sighting came through the NVG monocle—four splinters of motion, low and flat against the black glass of the sea, each pushing hard wake as they knifed for the Blue Oasis. Verne tracked them from her post on the starboard catwalk, counting bodies: nine, maybe ten per boat, plus a pilot. Over thirty, as expected. The Red Solstice liked symmetry.

She keyed the comms mic, subvocal. “Maggie, it’s go.”

“Copy,” came the reply, so steady it could’ve been computer. Maggie was crouched behind a stack of inverted deck chairs, shotgun across her thighs, the tactical band on her wrist pulsing with each heartbeat.

Verne pivoted, tracing the boats’ approach. The bow runners fanned out, two on each side, covering the whole hull. The first boat cut hard at the midsection, lines already cast, grapnels snagging the aluminum rail with a shriek. Verne waited, counted three heads rising over the lifelines, then squeezed the trigger of the electrified coil Kim had left wired to the hull.

A blue-white arc snapped from stanchion to stanchion. The lead attacker seized and tumbled, hitting the water with a hiss. The two behind flailed, one latching a gloved hand to the rail, the other dropping out of sight.

Verne watched the afterimage burn on her retina, then drew the pistol and took the one still clinging: double-tap, head and chest. The body jerked, slumped, hung on the wire.

“Upper deck breached,” she said, moving down the line. Her boots slipped on the slick, salt-wet deck, but she had the advantage—she’d memorized every twist and tripwire in this corridor.

At the main stairwell, two more attackers vaulted the rail, fast and quiet. They’d learned from the first, low and ducking. Verne dropped flat, let them overshoot, then emptied the magazine at kneecap level. Both fell. She rolled, swapped mags, and kept moving.

On the port side, she could hear Maggie’s voice—low, guttural, almost a growl. “Two down, three more.” Then the roar of the shotgun, so close it rattled the glass in the bulkhead.

The attackers swarmed, a black tide in night-ops gear. They didn’t speak, didn’t even grunt, just flowed up and over, hands and boots and blades. The Red Solstice trained for this: no hesitation, no fear, just mission.

They split at the foredeck, half circling to the bridge, the rest cutting for the doors below. Verne pivoted, fired three rounds into the nearest, then watched the body flop, rolling on the deck. She caught a round in her own shoulder—hot, sudden, like a slap—then ducked behind a stanchion, breathing through her teeth.

“Hit,” she said, voice steady. “Not down.”

Maggie replied, “Hold your position.”

Verne watched the attackers regroup. A full team of six, clustered behind a flipped lounge chair, prepping a flashbang. She drew a bead, exhaled, and waited for the arm to rise. When it did, she tagged the hand, then the head behind it. The grenade bounced, went off with a muffled pop and a blast of blue smoke, but the team was already in retreat.

Verne grinned, blood oozing down her sleeve. “They’re rattled,” she said.

She keyed the interior PA. “Phase two. Dead-end corridors now. Move.”

A minute later, the hallways bloomed with smoke and gas—nothing lethal, but enough to blind and burn. The security team had scavenged every cleaning product and bug spray on board, mixed them into a toxic blend that crawled up the nostrils and stripped the lungs raw.

Verne retreated, pulling back along the mapped route. She passed two of her own, huddled in a supply alcove, eyes wide and faces streaked with tears. “Stay down,” she barked, and they did, curling in on themselves.

Another ambush: Maggie, holding the centerline, shotgun braced against her chest. She waited until the first attacker rounded the bend, then let fly, the round hitting mid-thigh and spraying the next two in line with gore. They crumpled, blocking the hallway. Maggie stepped over them, never breaking stride, and kept firing.

They fell back through three more chokepoints, each one narrower than the last. Every time the attackers regrouped, they hit a dead end, a rigged tripwire, or a barricade so dense it took minutes to cut through.

But they kept coming.

On the second deck, Maggie took a round to the ribs—a glancing hit, but enough to stagger her. She slammed into the wall, coughed blood, then switched the shotgun to her left hand and kept firing. Verne doubled back, covering the retreat, each shot measured and precise. The attackers were losing discipline now: yelling, cursing in Spanish and French, firing blind into the smoke.

Verne felt her own left arm going numb, blood slick down to her glove. She holstered the pistol, switched to the electrified baton, and moved forward, jabbing it into the nearest body. The woman screamed, convulsed, and fell. Verne kicked the helmet off, checked for signs of life—none—and kept moving.

They reached the final barricade: a wall of overturned tables and chairs, lashed together with bedsheets and wire, braced against the weight of bodies on the other side. Maggie and Verne both dove behind it, breathing ragged.

“How many?” Verne asked, gasping.

Maggie coughed, spat a clot of blood onto the carpet. “Ten left, maybe less. Not counting wounded.”

“Status?”

“Yellow.” Maggie held up her wrist; the LED blinked, slow and steady. “You?”

Verne checked her own. “Also yellow.”

Maggie grinned, teeth bloodstained. “Could be worse.”

The barricade shuddered as the attackers piled on. A knife blade punched through inches from Verne's face, twisting in the gap before withdrawing. Maggie fired her last shell, the click of the empty chamber echoing between them. Their eyes met as the makeshift wall bowed inward with a groan of metal and tearing fabric. Verne checked her pistol—two rounds left. Behind them, nothing but twenty feet of corridor and the locked door where the others huddled. Maggie nodded once, grim-faced, as the center of the barricade began to split.

# Day 16 - 21:40

Victoria went over the side thirty seconds after the first boarding boat launched, the rebreather mask pressed to her face and her body slicked with a thick film of neoprene, scentless and black as pitch. She hit the water clean, arms out, ribs compressed, the shock of cold only tightening her focus. She let herself drift, weightless, until the Blue Oasis was a shadow overhead and the chaos of the firefight blurred into muffled pops, distant and irrelevant.

She counted the seconds, feeling the pressure waves as the enemy craft zipped past. Three of them shot by on the surface, the next so close she saw the pale O-ring of the driver’s neck as he hunched over the throttle. She let her lungs go still, then dove, her fins kicking slow and even.

The Red Solstice cut a brighter, sharper line in the water, its hull backlit by the full-spectrum LEDs it used for underwater surveillance. But the bridge was arrogant—no one ever checked the blind spot right at the rudder, where the vibration made even sonar a mess of echoes.

She pulled herself under the lip of the hull, then snapped the grappling line onto a recess just aft of the prop. The impact vibrated up her arm, but the hook held. She spun the cable twice around her glove, then flipped herself up and over, bracing one boot in a hull seam. The current was a living thing, pressing her flat, but she clawed her way to the maintenance hatch, the lock a simple lever with a secondary code dial. Kim had briefed her: the bridge always defaulted to “last four,” which was usually the hull number. She tried it. It clicked.

Inside, the space was coffin-tight, pitch black, but she navigated by feel. She slithered through the crawlspace, up a ladder, and emerged in a room humming with batteries and coolant. The noise covered her entrance perfectly. She peered through a vent and saw the first target: a mechanic, hair buzzed to the skull, standing guard with a submachine gun slung across the chest. The mechanic was bored, foot tapping.

Victoria watched, measured the rhythm, then pressed the mag-knife to the vent grille and pushed. It snapped open. The mechanic turned, eyes widening, but too slow: Victoria planted her feet, grabbed the target’s wrist, twisted it to break the grip, then drove the blade just above the ear canal. The body dropped, limp. She stripped the weapon, checked the chamber—loaded—and slung it herself.

She moved quickly, efficiently: out into the corridor, then left, following the schematic burned into her brain. The Red Solstice was smaller than she'd expected, its layout stripped down and utilitarian—all those hours memorizing the schematics from the Blue Oasis crew's intel paying off as she navigated the automated vessel's skeleton crew quarters with practiced ease. She ducked into the main stairwell and counted the guards: two women in body armor, one posted at each end. The first didn’t see her until the butt of the SMG crunched her jaw; the second swung a nightstick, catching Victoria across the forearm, but Victoria shrugged it off, swept the legs, and choked her unconscious.

The taste of adrenaline was sharp in her mouth, and for a second she let herself savor it: the clarity, the pure certainty of the hunt.

She cleared the mess deck—six noncombatants eating or playing cards, eyes wide at the sight of her. She leveled the gun. "On the ground," she hissed. "Do it." They obeyed instantly, one woman fainting, the others ducking under the table. Victoria yanked open the row of equipment lockers lining the far wall, methodically stuffing each terrified crew member into a separate compartment. The last one fought, clawing at the door frame until Victoria slammed her head against the metal. Six locks clicked shut, six muffled sobs. She moved on.

Up to the officer’s cabins. Here, the guards were smarter, more disciplined. Two had pistols out and braced before she even rounded the corner. Victoria didn’t hesitate: she dropped to a knee, fired a burst, and saw both go down—one with a cratered sternum, the other clutching her thigh and shrieking. Victoria ignored the wounded woman, but as she passed, the woman grabbed her ankle, teeth bared. Victoria shot her in the face, point-blank. No room for mistakes.

She pressed on.

The crew corridors ran narrow, like trenches, every meter a potential kill box. Victoria moved fast, keeping close to the wall, finger steady on the trigger. Three more guards in succession: first a woman with a crossbow, then a pair of twins with matching scars above their brows, both swinging hatchets. She shot the first twin, then slammed the second into a bulkhead, dislocating her shoulder with a sickening crunch.

For a second, Victoria’s breath shuddered; she felt blood pooling under her sleeve, didn’t remember when she’d been hit. The pain was distant, but real. She kept moving.

At the bridge deck, the hatch was locked, manual only. She kicked the lever, metal bending, then ducked as a shotgun blast tore splinters from the frame. The security chief—Renata, a legend even before the world went to shit—stood just beyond, eyes like blue razors, mouth set in a tight, delighted smile.

Renata called out, “I knew you’d come yourself.”

Victoria laughed, the sound guttural. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

They squared off: Renata behind a massive metal riot shield braced against her shoulder, her free hand gripping a matte-black pistol. Victoria kept the SMG at low ready, calculating angles, searching for a gap.

"You look good, Vic," Renata said, eyes glittering above the shield's edge. "Better than last time."

Victoria's finger tightened on the trigger. "You came prepared."

The ship lurched. Victoria launched forward, SMG erupting in a storm of fire as Renata's shield rose to meet her.