Location : Pacific Ocean, Approximately 500 miles from Los Angeles

Daedalus Labs really knew how to make a weapon. Ever since it calibrated, Iris had been opening and closing her hand, marveling at the raw precision of the tactile feedback, despite having an entire acoustic weapons system embedded in the forearm. It was like she had been living with a glove on and finally got to touch something real, except she knew it was realer than real, as far as humans were concerned.

It was nicer to think about than day two of Silvy’s hangover, after she decided the best cure was hair of the dog. She was sucking down electrolytes like a fish as they jetted across the ocean, chasing down the United Distribution Services vessel UDS-Blue Key. “You didn’t go home with that guy, did you?” Silvy asked.

“Oh for the last time, no. First off, I’m not interested in prettyboys no matter what they put on tv. Second, I couldn’t have gone home with him even if I wanted to, because I had to carry your drunk ass back to the room. Do you know how hard that is when you were flopping around and I only had one arm? Do you?”

Silvy cleared her throat and looked away as she mumbled, “Sorry.”

Iris rolled her eyes. “What’s our ETA?”

The plane responded, “Deceleration will begin in five minutes to match speed with the UDS-Blue Key. Then you will have approximately thirty seconds to exit the vehicle before we stall due to low speeds.” Switching to hover would let them keep up, but would also be the equivalent of shining a spotlight in their faces.

She sighed, and once again was glad she had an actual combat suit on for the first time in too long. Blacker-than-black rubber laced with a reactive fluid framework. It wouldn’t do much to stop a bullet, her sub-dermals were for that, but would protect her from getting thrown around, be it explosions or oversized blighted monsters. The only issue was the way it cupped her head. The suit had four prongs, like the fingers of a ring holding a gem, that held either side of her chin and up the back of her brain case. They looked ridiculous.

“Are you ready for this, Iris?” Silvy’s demeanor had changed, matured. Her eyes were still bloodshot, but she leaned forward to face her. “There’s people on this ship. They’re not going to care you’re serving a UAAF arrest warrant. They’re going to fight back.”

“I’ll give them their chance, and I’ll spare anyone I can. What else can I do? They’re terrorists.”

Silvy nodded slowly, then smiled. “Right. Do what you have to. Just make sure you keep yourself number one. Okay? And if another crazy bitch attacks you, I’ll be sure to blow her head off with another missile. Kay?”

“Hopefully before I lose an arm this time, right?” They both laughed and routine took over. They went over the mission briefing, the layout of the ship, the expected crew size and so on. In their last minutes, Iris pulled out the data deck transceiver she would need. Silvy put on her multi-feed interface and double checked her connection to it. That was the only way to commandeer control of the ship, so they needed it to work.

“All good. You ready to jump?” Silvy asked, tugging the headset up to look her in the eyes.”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Iris said, and grabbed her weapons. The plane had decelerated slowly, and only after it matched speed did it begin dumping altitude. They were coming down right on top of the UDS-Blue Key, the only blind spot they could conceive of. The plane gave the green light, and the fuselage opened up. The roof slid away and Iris rose from her seat. For a second, she looked down at the murky blue expanse of sea and the ship beneath her. The crew were like ants.

Then she strapped her pack on and jumped off the side.

The ship was moving faster than normal for a cargo ship, fuel was expensive and currents were free, but not fast enough that there was much wind as she dove. She shot past the deck like a hawk snatching a fish. Nothing more than a shadow to anyone patrolling. Another function of the suit, almost always useless weight, activated and blasted air into a series of inflatables. Enough to cancel out her density and buoy her back to the surface. From there, it was as easy as turning on her mag-clamps and climbing up the hull.

Blinking the salt water from her eyes, she switched to infrared and let the nearest crewman pass her by before slipping over the railing. The ship looked just like the dock footage, essentially a barge laden with multi-colored crates nearly as tall as the bridge in the back. She inhaled. Farm smells snuck along in the sea breeze. The same cocktail of chemicals and nutrients that had obscured the thermite package.

She got her mag-rifle out and shouldered it. This time, it had a concussive round option slung to the bottom for a non-lethal choice. Thankfully, cargo ships barely had any human crew. A camera would spot her eventually, but she just had to get the data deck to the bridge before they did anything crazy.

The door was locked. “Silvy, can you give me a hand? And I swear, if this door is also double sec–”

The frame clanged with extra deadbolts popping into place the moment a external device tried to contact it. “Sorry,” Silvy said as sirens began to blare across the ship. “Go fast?” she proposed.

Iris cut through the door, turning it into so many chunks of metal that she could kick in. “Anything I need to be worried about?” she asked, darting for the stairs up to the bridge.

“I’m detecting a few combat drones, maybe nothing more than standard security protocols. Careful you don’t get shot, they probably have penetrating rounds to deal with incoming missiles.”

Iris grabbed the railing to whip herself around, taking steps three at a time to get to the top. “Come on, this is a cargo vessel! Who shoots missiles at civilian vessels?”

“Around here? No one. The pirates are over in the Middle East, but UDS does everything standard everywhere. They’re a mega corp, what else would you expect?”

Iris couldn’t repeat the trick to actually get into the bridge, that door had reinforcement on par with her own sub-dermals. The wall next to it, not so much. “Gotta love design by board rooms,” she said, using her foot to shove the wall panel in.

Someone inside dumped their entire magazine on her. Full-auto, chemical propellants, straight to her center of mass. Made the bridge sound like fireworks had been set off. Iris’s reflexes had already been keyed up. Every single bullet broke against the edge of her micro-blade and became nothing more than scrap that pelted her combat suit.

“Ah, fuck,” the defender said. He tried to swap his magazine and reload. Iris shot him in the chest with a percussive round and dropped him. His gun spun away from him as he gasped for air and rolled.

“Are you suicidal or something?” Iris stepped into the bridge and tossed the data deck onto the control panel. It hummed as the processors maxed out and it began pinging between the control panel and Silvy in the plane above. A programming war marshaled, waged, and perished in the span of seconds. Before Iris had so much as planted her foot on the captain’s body to demand his surrender, the ship was in their control.

The captain put up his hands. In the data that came pouring out of the ship’s systems like water from a cracked reservoir she pulled his emergency medical file. It had his gender, his weight, and therefore the proper dosage. Rather than handcuff him, she shot him with a calibrated tranq dart. “Sleep tight,” she said, as she watched his pupils dilate before his eyes rolled up into his head and he went limp.

“Iris, we’ve got a problem. Two actually. No wait, three?”

“Is it going to be four next?”

“Depends on if you count the three combat drones as one problem or three…”

“Just tell me what happened.”

“Okay, well, the drones are still coming for you. After they got alerted, they went on independent action. Nothing I can do to stop them. That’s on you. Second, the ship is coming to a stop.”

“What? Shouldn’t it be rushing to the coast guard or something? They just got hijacked.”

“Well, they are terrorist associated, right? They’re probably hoping the drones can clean it up. I’ll switch to a circling pattern to stay in range of you. But the third problem is most of those cargo crates are fake. This ship was designed to hide a submersible dock, and they’re flooding the chamber right now.”

Iris stared out the window. She could see the machines coming for her. They didn’t fly, they moved like beetles, clinging to cargo crates and railings and walkways. She could only spot two of the drones, which meant the third was surely somewhere behind her and about to arrive. They looked like cockroaches and she could tell they would be about as difficult to put down. She sighed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just… I don’t suppose you could use one of the missiles to take out one of these things?” she asked, scanning in infrared to see where the human crew were going. Half seemed to be taking shelter at the prow of the ship, the other half were running down to get to the wet dock within the ship.

“I can do that if you want. Save you some time. What was the sigh for though?”

“If they’re going underwater, I’m going to have to follow them underwater.”

“So? I thought you liked swimming.”

“I like swimming, I don’t like diving. Especially when I sink. Remember?”

“You’ve got your combat suit. You’ll be fine. And if not, I’ll come save you. Easy peasy. I’m putting in the request for deep sea retrieval right now,” Silvy said.

Iris sighed again and watched as the third combat drone crawled down the window in front of her. Not a beetle of a centipede; old design, heavy weaponry. The kind of thing that could wrap itself around a tank and crush it, but only had steel to keep it together.

Iris glanced past it, to the mass of corrugated steel that hid the wet dock. The outer layer probably had something stupid packaged in it, like collector edition dolls of movie characters with oversized heads… which ironically was better shielding than the steel around the bridge.

She’d have to find the halls through the ship. “Silvy, can you put a line down the path those crewmen took?” she asked, and then opened fire. The steel centipede returned fire as she darted out of the way. A moment later, Iris sprang from the broken window, cleaved through the machine and landed atop the crates. The second penetrator missile slagged the second combat drone.

“Iris, we have a bit of a problem.”

“What?” she asked, most of her attention on sprinting across the swaying deck. The waves seemed to be getting stronger, bigger, even without wind to drive them. It made the top of the ship swing wildly from side to side, trying to toss her like a bucking bull. Only the drone seemed unaffected, but it wasn’t tagging her with its rifle fire either.

“I figured out why the ship is coming to a stop, and why it has a wet dock inside it.” She sounded hesitant.

Iris snarled, grabbing half of the slagged drone as she ducked down to the catwalk. “What? I assumed it was for smuggling.” Then she whipped the smoking mass at the remaining drone. The two bodies of steel slammed together, soaking up its bullets as she sprinted it. She stabbed the point of her micro-blade through the face of it, rolling over and ripping its guts in half.

“I mean, maybe technically,” Silvy said as the ship lurched even more. It almost felt like it had thrown anchor abruptly.

Iris sprinted down the path to the wetdock, breaking down every door in her way until she emerged onto the loading platform for the submersible. The whole chamber, roofed over by fake cargo crates, glowed yellow. The vessel cast a shadow across the roof, sitting atop the light as though it floated over a volcano. There were not many things that could be.

“Iris, I think we’re overtop a Leviathan ship.”