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…

I drove the *Exo-Vanguard*’s thrusters to their maximum output. The electric motors screamed, drawing power rapidly from the internal lithium-ion cells.

The wash of the submarine’s slipping hull created a terrifying downward vortex, pulling me down toward the black void of the trench. I fought the current with every ounce of thrust the suit possessed, my eyes locked on the heavy steel towing cable resting on the basalt ledge.

I reached the cable. The eyelet at the end was forged steel, six inches thick, weighing over four hundred pounds in the water.

Under normal conditions, an entire deck crew with winches was needed to move it. But the *Exo-Vanguard* was built for deep-sea engineering.

I braced my armored boots against the volcanic rock, locked the suit’s knee hydraulics, and wrapped both articulated arms around the hawser’s eyelet.

"Lift!" I screamed into the empty void of my helmet.

The hydraulic pumps inside the suit shrieked in mechanical protest. The load gauge on my heads-up display flashed from yellow to flashing purple: **115% MAXIMUM RATED CAPACITY**.

The titanium chassis of my suit groaned. Across my scarred chest and back, the skin burned as if I were back in that burning engine room, my muscles straining against the armored shell, forcing the machine to obey my will.

*Move, you piece of iron! MOVE!*

With a sickening scrape of steel on rock, the cable lifted from the silt.

I engaged the reverse thrusters, dragging the four-hundred-pound eyelet through the freezing water, stepping backward inch by agonizing inch toward the drifting submarine.

The *Viper*’s nose was rising. The stern was already falling off the shelf.

Ten feet.

Five feet.

The shadow of the submarine’s hull loomed over me like an eclipse. The bow mooring bitt was passing right in front of my face.

I fired the vertical thrusters, lifting the heavy steel eyelet over the top of the forward horn of the bollard.

The cable caught.

For a second, the cable hung slack. Then, the full eight-thousand-ton displacement of the falling submarine pulled the line taut.

*TWAAAANG!*

The steel hawser whipped straight like a guitar string, shedding ice and rust. The dead-weight anchor on the plateau dug into the basalt with an ear-splitting screech of grinding stone.