"Broadcast what?" Elias yelled over the shriek of the gale, grabbing Noah by the shoulder and hauling him upright before the younger man could slide through the gap in the guardrail. "Noah! Look at me. What is the flagship broadcasting?" Noah's eyes didn't focus on Elias's face; instead, they stared past him, wide and luminous with that terrifying indigo discharge. His lips parted, trembling violently as another spasm racked his frame. "It's not a signal anymore," Noah choked out, his voice cracking with dry panic. "It's a countdown. The Coalition High Command... they aren't evacuating. They're rigging the reactor core of the Goliath. They're going to blow the entire harbor to take the grid down with them!" "Are you certain?" Elias demanded, his grip tightening until his knuckles turned white against Noah's tactical jacket. "Think, Noah! Is this a hallucination from the frequency leak, or is it verified telemetry?" 

 "There won't be a world left to save," Elias finished, his voice dropping into a harsh, flat register that cut through the whistle of the salt-laden squall. "Move. Now." Noah pushed himself away from the crane assembly, his boots skidding slightly on the slick, rusted metal of the gantry. "Where are we going? The patrol boat at the pier is our only way out, and those guards are heading straight for it!" "We aren't running away anymore," Elias snapped, dropping into a low tactical crouch as he ducked behind a stack of empty shipping containers. He motioned sharply for Noah to follow. "If the Goliath goes up, the shockwave will level this entire peninsula. We have to board the flagship." Noah stopped dead in his tracks, his indigo-lit eyes widening in disbelief. "Board the Goliath? Elias, have you lost your mind? That ship is locked down tighter than a subterranean vault! There are three battalions of Coaliti

 "Then we get to a terminal," Elias said, his voice flat, absolute, and devoid of any room for argument. He popped up from behind the cover, his service pistol barking twice in rapid succession. Across the gantry, a Coalition heavy grunt in reinforced ceramic plating stumbled backward, his pulse-rifle clattering uselessly against the rain-slicked iron grating before he toppled over the edge into the churning green-tinted water below. "And you are going to write faster." "You make it sound like writing a grocery list!" Noah shouted back, dropping flat as a return volley of plasma bolts scorched the air inches above his scalp, searing the tips of his dark hair and filling the cramped space with the sharp, acrid stench of ozone and burnt keratin. He scrambled on his hands and knees behind Elias, his chest heaving as he clutched the modified telemetry deck to his chest like a shield. "If I push too much data through the auxiliary relay without a proper

 "Run fast?" Noah's voice cracked, the indigo discharge in his eyes flaring with such blinding intensity that it cast stark, violet shadows across the slick iron plates of the harbor gantry. A pulse-bolt tore through the space he had occupied half a heartbeat before, vaporizing a bolt-head and showering them in incandescent shrapnel. "You’re asking me to sprint across a fifty-yard dead zone while three Coalition gunners use us for target practice!" "I'm asking you to survive," Elias snapped, his shoulder slamming hard against the rusted housing of an industrial winch as he returned fire with three measured, rhythmic pulls of his trigger. The heavy report of his service pistol was instantly swallowed by the howling wind blowing off the oil-slicked waters of Port Horizon. Across the span, a Coalition sniper tumbled backward off an elevated catwalk, his rifle spinning wildly into the green-tinted foam below. "Move!" Noah didn

 "They're not just flanking, they're collapsing the span!" Elias shouted back, his hand shooting out to grab Noah by the tactical webbing of his vest and haul him bodily forward just as a massive slab of rusted iron grating detached from the gantry behind them and plunged into the churning green-black water below. The sudden drop in weight made the remaining structure violently whip back and forth, tossing both men off balance. Noah slammed hard into the corrugated steel bulkhead of the lower torpedo bay, the heavy telemetry deck slipping from his numb fingers and clattering loudly against the deck plates. "My rig!" he gasped, spitting a mouthful of bitter, salt-spray-tainted air as he scrambled to recover the device. "If the display housing cracks, the sync protocols are gone!" "Let it go or lose your hands!" Elias snarled, dropping to one knee and leveling his rifle back toward the approach vector. Three rapid, deafening muzzl