She washed out of the Navy!” my sister sneered after exposing my burn scars at a military fundraiser, but the moment a four-star admiral draped her jacket over my shoulders and saluted me, my father realized he’d made a terrible mistake…

The C-130 screamed through the sub-zero turbulence over the North Atlantic, the violent buffeting rattling the interior aluminum ribs of the fuselage like teeth in a skull.

I sat strapped into a webbed jump seat, the titanium chassis of the *Exo-Vanguard* atmospheric diving suit secured directly in front of me with heavy-duty ratchet tie-downs. It looked like an armored sarcophagus—jointed limbs reinforced with liquid-polymer rotary bearings, a bulbous dome of transparent quartz glass, and a tether harness rated for four thousand pounds of tension.

Opposite me sat Master Chief Diver Rafael Mendez, a veteran of thirty years in the deep-salvage community, chewing an unlit cigar as he checked the secondary oxygen manifolds.

"You're out of your damn mind, Morgan," Mendez shouted over the roaring drone of the four turboprop engines. "You survived an engine-room blowout that burned sixty percent of your torso, walked into high society to expose your old man, and now you’re dropping into an Arctic trench in a prototype trash can."

"If I stay on the surface, Mendez, those sailors drown in the dark," I answered, tightening the Kevlar undergarment over my chest. The scar tissue along my collarbone throbbed in the bitter cabin chill, tight and stinging, a permanent reminder of what happens when shortcuts meet high pressure. "Did the sonar buoys get an exact fix?"

Vance stepped into the cargo bay from the cockpit, bracing himself against the bulkhead as the plane hit a severe pocket of thermal downdraft.

"A P-8 Poseidon dropped active sonobuoys ten minutes ago," Vance said grimly. "The *Viper* isn’t on the bottom. She’s wedged."

I looked up. "Wedged?"

"An underwater basalt sea-mount," the Admiral explained, unfurling a hydrographic bathymetry map onto the titanium footplate of my suit. "She struck a volcanic shelf at eleven hundred and forty feet. Her stern—where the breached reactor chamber is located—is hanging out over the abyss. The shelf drops straight down to nine thousand feet. She’s teetering on a three-degree incline. One shifted pocket of seawater, one air bubble moving forward, and the entire boat slides off the cliff."

"Which means no heavy salvage vessel can drop an anchor line or attach a docking collar," I calculated instantly. "Any external force applied to the hull will break the friction lock and send her down."

"Exactly," Vance said. "The only way to save the crew is to manually connect an external emergency high-pressure blow hose to the forward salvage manifold on the submarine’s nose. You blow the forward trim tanks from the surface using an emergency nitrogen compressor lowered from an icebreaker. If you can force fifty tons of sea water out of the bow, her center of gravity shifts forward onto the basalt shelf. She stabilizes."

"And if the manifold valve jams?" Mendez asked.

"Then Morgan has to crawl into the free-flooded anchor locker, bypass the hydraulic linkage, and dog the valve open by hand," Vance said, his gray eyes burning into mine. "While the boat is groaning under twelve hundred feet of ocean."

"A walk in the park," I muttered, standing up and stepping into the open lower torso of the *Exo-Vanguard*.

Mendez and two crewmen immediately stepped forward, swinging the heavy titanium leg housings around my thighs, the hydraulic latches snapping shut with loud, authoritative clangs. The integrated telemetry monitor on my wrist flickered to life: internal atmospheric pressure at one atmosphere, scrubbing systems nominal, core temperature holding at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

The green warning light near the rear cargo ramp turned amber. The cabin depressurization alarm wailed, a high-pitched siren cut off only by the sudden deafening roar of sub-zero wind as the rear hydraulic ramp groaned open.

Below us, framed by jagged ice floes drifting across the pitch-black ocean, lay the Denmark Strait. Hovering over the coordinates was the Coast Guard cutter *Healy*, its massive halogen searchlights carving twin funnels of blinding white through the freezing sleet.

"Drop line is rigged to the *Healy*'s primary crane!" Mendez roared, securing the bulbous quartz helmet over my head and twisting the locking ring until the triple-cam seals locked.

My audio feed hissed alive, Vance’s voice coming through the bone-conduction headset inside my helmet. "Morgan. Your father was taken into federal custody twenty minutes ago at Apex headquarters. He tried to shred the quality control logs for the *Viper*’s batch steel."

I reached up with the articulated manipulator claw of my suit, clicking the magnetic locking tool into place. "Tell him to watch the news, Admiral. His bill is coming due."