Part 1
Six hours before the USS Meridian slipped its moorings in Guam for what the public had been told was a relief run, a new lieutenant reported aboard with a duffel bag and a face that security cameras would forget. Her name on the transfer orders was Lt. Claire Halston—average height, regulation haircut, standard-issue uniform, no ribbons that drew attention. Admiral Marcus Wainwright glanced at the paperwork, looked her up and down, and made his verdict in a hallway full of officers: “Another last-minute body. Keep her out of the way.”
The Meridian cleared the harbor at dusk. Two hours later, the first warning came as a flicker across the combat information center: the ship’s internal network began routing packets to nowhere, choking the fire-control consoles and freezing the radar overlays. Then the real attack started. Fast boats punched through the swells without running lights, and the mercenary outfit calling itself Red Breaker opened up with heavy machine guns and shoulder-fired rockets, walking fire along the Meridian’s superstructure. The crew scrambled to return fire, but the remote weapon stations lagged, then went dead—like someone had pulled the plug from inside the ship.
Halston didn’t run to the rail with everyone else. She moved the opposite direction, down ladders and through hatches, ignoring the shouted orders. In the engineering access corridor she keyed a door with a code that no ordinary transfer should have known. The lock chirped green. Inside, she jacked into a maintenance terminal and stared at lines of encrypted commands racing across the screen. A tailored malware package was rewriting permissions in real time, isolating the weapons network from bridge control. Halston didn’t curse or hesitate; she typed a string of credentials labeled SIGMA-9, overrode the lockdown, and forced a partial reboot that brought a single gun mount back online. Above her, the Meridian’s deck cannon coughed once, twice—enough to push the closest boats off their firing line.
Still, the ship shuddered as something heavy clanged against the hull. A petty officer reported the nightmare: limpet mines, magnet-clamped below the waterline. With the ship’s divers pinned by incoming fire, Halston grabbed a rebreather, clipped a knife to her leg, and slipped into black water. She found the first mine by feel, fingers numb, and cut the trigger leads while hostile bubbles rose nearby.
When she surfaced, gasping, the admiral was waiting—furious, confused, and finally silent. Because in Halston’s dripping hand was not just a detonator lead… but a sealed comm device broadcasting a U.S. Navy encryption handshake from somewhere inside the Meridian. Who onboard was feeding Red Breaker their access—and what would they do next once they realized she’d found it?
Part 2
Admiral Wainwright took the comm device without a word and walked Halston into a secure compartment that didn’t exist on the ship’s deck plans. The door shut with a hydraulic sigh. Only then did he ask the question he should have asked first: “Who are you?”
Halston answered with a badge the size of a coin—unmarked except for a serial number and a stylized insect. “Federal Maritime Special Activities. Callsign: Mantis One.” It wasn’t a boast; it was a fact. “My unit doesn’t brief admirals unless the problem is already on your ship.”
They didn’t have time for arguments. The malware was still mutating, trying to regain control. Halston walked the ship’s cyber team through an emergency segmentation plan, isolating infected nodes and restoring manual control to critical systems. With one turret and the deck cannon back, the Meridian forced the attack boats to widen their circle. But Red Breaker didn’t retreat; they shifted tactics. A drone skimmed low over the waves, dropped a canister, and a cloud of thick smoke rolled across the water—cover for divers.
Halston called for two volunteers who could follow orders without needing a full explanation. She got Sergeant Daniel Kincaid, a blunt-force boarding specialist, and Petty Officer Maya Serrano, a compact electronics tech who could hotwire anything from a forklift to a satellite phone. The three of them geared up fast: suppressed carbines, wire cutters, a portable drive loaded with a counter-virus Serrano built on the fly.
Using the smoke as concealment, they launched a rigid-hull boat on the Meridian’s shadowed side and ran dark toward the source of the divers. Through night-vision, Halston spotted an “aid ship” riding low in the water—Red Breaker’s command platform, disguised with tarps and false markings. The mercy of the situation was also its danger: if the enemy believed the Meridian was helpless, their command ship would be close enough to control the fight.
They came aboard silent—Kincaid first, then Serrano, then Halston. Inside, the corridors smelled like diesel and wet rope. Two guards went down before they could shout. They found the communications room by following the heat of servers and the hum of power converters. Serrano jammed the door with a wedge; Halston plugged in the drive and started the upload.
That’s when the first twist hit. On the wall monitor, a live feed displayed the Meridian’s internal camera angles—engine room, armory, even the secure compartment where Wainwright had stashed the comm device. Red Breaker wasn’t just hacking from the outside. Someone onboard the Meridian was mirroring the ship’s security network in real time.
Then the second twist arrived with footsteps in the corridor and a familiar voice on the other side of the door. Not a mercenary’s accent. A crisp American cadence. “Lieutenant Halston,” the voice called, calm as a briefing. “Open up. You’re out of jurisdiction.”
Part 3
Kincaid put his shoulder to the wedge-braced door and whispered, “Friend of yours?”
Halston’s eyes stayed on the upload bar. “Not a friend.” She lowered her voice. “That tone means federal. Or someone pretending to be.”
The handle rattled, then stopped. The voice tried again, softer, more persuasive. “We can make this clean, Claire. Hand over the drive and come out. Admiral Wainwright doesn’t need to know you were activated.”
Halston’s jaw tightened at her first name—one that wasn’t on the transfer orders. She gestured to Serrano, who pulled a multitool and began popping open a ceiling panel. Kincaid took position by the hinge line, rifle angled low, ready for the first boot through.
The door exploded inward anyway—breach charge, professional, not improvised. Smoke snapped into the room. Kincaid fired two controlled shots and dragged a falling body out of the doorway. Another silhouette appeared, weapon up, and Halston saw the patch before she saw the face: a generic “contractor” logo, the kind used when agencies didn’t want attribution. The man behind it spoke into a throat mic as he advanced. “Package located. Initiate wipe.”
Serrano yanked a bundle of fiber from the server rack and jammed it into Halston’s laptop, giving the counter-virus a direct path. “Upload’s at eighty percent!”
Halston fired once, center mass, and the contractor dropped. More footsteps—three, maybe four—closing fast. She didn’t wait to admire her own work. “Plan B. Now.”
They climbed into the ceiling cavity, hands and knees on sharp metal, moving by touch while the room below erupted with gunfire and shouted commands. Behind them, Serrano’s drive completed its transfer and began executing: first disabling Red Breaker’s fleet coordination software, then corrupting the malware’s command-and-control channel. The enemy would still have guns, but they’d be fighting blind.
At the far end of the duct, Halston kicked down a service grate and they spilled into a narrow passageway. A ladder led to the deck. Wind and salt hit their faces as they emerged beside stacked cargo crates. The disguised command ship rocked under the wake of its own escort boats—boats that now spun uncertainly, searching for orders that weren’t coming.
Kincaid pointed. “Extraction?”
Halston glanced at the Meridian, a dark mass in the distance, its lights reduced to tactical minimum. She keyed a handheld and transmitted a burst code. The reply came instantly: a green strobe from the Meridian’s starboard side. Wainwright had listened.
They moved along the command ship’s rail toward the stern, but the contractors were already adapting. A spotlight stabbed across the deck, and a loudspeaker barked, “On your knees!” Bullets chewed into crates. Serrano stumbled, grabbed her shoulder, and kept moving.
Halston made a split-second call that no one else could make because no one else had her mission parameters. She pulled a compact satchel charge from her kit and slapped it onto the ship’s external comm mast base—the spine of Red Breaker’s operation. “Kincaid, carry Serrano. Jump on my mark.”
He didn’t argue. He hoisted Serrano and ran.
Halston waited until the escort boats were close enough to see her, close enough to hesitate. Then she detonated the charge. The mast folded like a snapped tree, showering sparks and tearing cables. The command ship’s deck lights died. In the darkness, she sprinted and dove.
Cold water swallowed her. The shock stole her breath, but training held. She kicked hard, surfaced just long enough to spot Kincaid already hauling Serrano into the rigid-hull boat, and then she climbed in, bleeding from a cut she didn’t remember earning.
They raced back to the Meridian as the enemy command ship began to burn—secondary fires racing through cable runs and fuel lines. Red Breaker’s boats scattered, leaderless, some turning on each other in confusion. The Meridian’s restored cannon fired twice, not to destroy but to warn, carving white water in front of the nearest pursuers until they backed off.
On deck, sailors swarmed them. A corpsman grabbed Serrano. Someone tried to clap Halston on the shoulder and thought better of it when they saw her eyes. Admiral Wainwright pushed through the crowd and held up the comm device she’d found in the water.
“We traced the handshake,” he said, voice flat. “It came from our own supply liaison—civilian clearance, contractor credentials. He tried to erase his access the moment your upload started.”
Halston nodded once. “He wasn’t the architect. Just the bridge.”
“Then who?”
Halston looked past him at the ocean where the command ship burned, lighting the clouds from below. “The bridge exists because someone paid for it,” she said. “And whoever paid will try again—somewhere quieter, with better cover.”
Wainwright’s anger softened into something like reluctant respect. “You saved my ship.”
“I did my job,” she replied. “And now I leave before people start asking for paperwork I can’t sign.”
He offered a salute anyway. This time, the crew followed. No cheers—just a heavy, unanimous acknowledgment, the kind earned when everyone understands how close they came to sinking.
Before dawn, a small helicopter lifted from the Meridian’s deck and disappeared into low cloud. Claire Halston sat inside without insignia, without a name that would appear in any official log. The only proof she’d been there was a sealed report in Wainwright’s safe and a mercenary fleet limping home without its eyes.
Some missions ended with medals. Hers ended the way they always did: with silence, new orders, and the promise that if another “impossible” problem surfaced, Mantis One would already be on the manifest—six hours before departure.
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