The freezing, pitch-black water of the subterranean lake slammed into Marcus like a wall of solid ice.
The shock instantly punched the air from his lungs in a single, violent gasp. He didn't have time to hold his breath. He didn't have JARVIS to calculate his descent trajectory or deploy thermal optics to light his way.
He was entirely blind, drowning in the absolute dark.
The heavy, brass-buttoned naval coat wrapped around his body like a wet lead blanket. It dragged him downward with terrifying speed, past the broken, sparking metal of the collapsed catwalk falling around him.
Marcus fought the panic. He kicked his heavy, melted combat boots violently against the water.
His head broke the surface.
He sucked in a massive, ragged breath of cold, sterile air, choking on a mouthful of freezing water. He coughed violently, treading water in the pitch black.
"Marcia!" Marcus roared. His voice bounced off the massive, invisible concrete cavern walls, echoing back to him as a hollow, terrified sound.
"Here!" Marcia yelled from the darkness to his left. She was coughing violently, thrashing in the water.
A few feet away from her, the broken blue Amp bobbed to the surface, casting a faint, sickly glow over the churning black water. It illuminated Marcia's pale face. She had lost her shotgun in the fall.
Lucilla surfaced beside her, screaming in pure panic. She flailed wildly, slapping the water, her heavy coat pulling her under.
Marcia grabbed the terrified mechanic by the collar and hauled her head back above the surface. "Stop fighting!" Marcia yelled, treading water for both of them. "Breathe!"
Marcus spun around in the freezing water. The blue light barely reached him.
He looked for the massive, hulking shape of his brother.
"Narcissus!" Marcus screamed.
Nothing.
The water where the twelve-foot Iron Dog had fallen was perfectly still. There was no thrashing. There was no mechanical roar.
"He sank!" Marcia yelled over Lucilla's panicked sobbing. "Marcus, he's two tons of steel! He sank like a stone!"
"We have to swim to the edge!" Marcia continued, her teeth chattering violently from the cold. "If we stay here, we freeze to death in ten minutes!"
Marcus didn't move toward the edge of the reservoir.
He stared at the black, smooth surface of the water where Narcissus had vanished.
The Warlord's math kicked in. It wasn't JARVIS's cold calculation. It was the analog logic of a Warlord who had torn a dying friend out of a broken golden shell in the Syrian desert.
He had turned Narcissus into this Dreadnought. He had bolted the heavy battleship steel to his chest. He had given him the massive hydraulic legs made of anchor chains to fight the Board's mechs.
Marcus's upgrades were drowning his brother.
"I'm not leaving him," Marcus said. His voice was absolute iron.
He grabbed the thick lapels of his heavy naval coat. He ripped it open and violently shrugged it off his shoulders, letting the heavy, waterlogged garment sink into the abyss.
He abandoned the Warlord aesthetic for pure, desperate survival.
"Marcus, no!" Marcia screamed. "You don't have air! You can't lift him!"
Marcus didn't listen.
He took a massive, hyperventilating breath, filling his burning lungs to maximum capacity. He closed his eyes against the stinging cold.
He jackknifed his body forward and dove straight down into the pitch-black, freezing water.
The churning ripples on the surface slowly faded, leaving only Marcia and Lucilla floating in the eerie blue light of the broken battery.
Underwater, the silence was absolute. The cold was a physical agony that instantly cramped the muscles in Marcus's calves and forearms.
He kicked downward, harder and faster.
Without JARVIS's thermal optics, his eyes were useless. It was like swimming through liquid ink. He had to rely entirely on his hands.
The water pressure built rapidly. It pushed painfully against his eardrums with every foot he descended.
Ten feet. Twenty feet. Thirty.
His lungs began to burn. The initial adrenaline spike was fading, replaced by the terrifying, primal need for oxygen.
He swept his hands wildly in front of him, feeling nothing but freezing water.
Forty feet. Fifty.
His hands finally slammed hard against the smooth, perfectly flat concrete floor of the main reservoir.
He had hit the bottom.
Marcus pushed himself along the concrete, blindly sweeping his hands through the freezing muck that coated the floor. He scraped his knuckles against sharp, rusted debris from the catwalk above.
His chest heaved instinctively. He fought the urge to open his mouth. He had less than thirty seconds of air left.
Where is he?
Marcus swam faster, his fingers dragging across the concrete.
Then, his right hand slammed hard against something cold, ridged, and massive.
It wasn't a concrete pipe. It was a thick, riveted plate of battleship steel.
Marcus scrambled forward in the dark. He found a massive hydraulic piston. He found a thick, heavy anchor chain.
He had found the Iron Dog.
Narcissus was lying flat on his back, pinned directly against the bottom of the subterranean lake by his own massive, two-ton weight.
Marcus grabbed the giant's thick chest plate.
He pulled with every ounce of analog Warlord strength in his body. His boots scrabbled against the slick concrete floor. The muscles in his back screamed in protest.
It was useless.
He couldn't move two tons of dead iron. The Warlord's Warlord math was absolute. A man cannot lift a battleship anchor underwater.
Marcus felt the thick, heavy gaps in Narcissus's armor.
Water had flooded the giant's chest cavity. The massive hydraulic pistons in his legs and arms were completely dead. The Warlord's Dreadnought was a massive, high-tech tomb.
Marcus's vision began to narrow. The edges of his sight turned a fuzzy, static grey.
His lungs were screaming. His diaphragm spasmed violently, demanding air. He had ten seconds left before he instinctively inhaled the freezing lake.
He couldn't lift Narcissus. He couldn't drag him.
He had to jump-start him.
Marcus let go of the chest plate. He reached out and felt for the heavy, rusted access port bolted directly over Narcissus's mechanical heart—the central power core Marcus had wired himself back on the Carrier.
He jammed his fingers into the gap between the thick steel plates, prying the access port open.
Marcus pressed the palm of his left hand directly against the exposed, wet wiring of the Dreadnought's core.
He didn't have JARVIS to carefully modulate the power flow. He didn't have an insulated glove.
He had pure, raw, unmitigated nanite energy.
"Live," Marcus thought, his mind screaming through the hypoxia.
He tapped into his Neural Link, opening the floodgates to the Warlord's battery.
He sent a massive, uncontrolled EMP shock directly from his left arm into the giant's mechanical heart.
The blue arc of electricity was blinding in the pitch-black water.
It didn't just hit Narcissus.
The raw electrical current violently arced back through the freezing water, slamming directly into Marcus's body.
The shock was agonizing. It tore through his nervous system like liquid fire. His muscles instantly locked. His jaw clamped shut so hard his teeth nearly cracked.
He was electrocuting himself in fifty feet of freezing water.
The static grey at the edge of his vision rapidly swallowed his sight. The cold vanished, replaced by the searing white heat of the electrical surge.
His lungs finally gave out.
Marcus's mouth opened involuntarily in the dark.
The freezing, black water rushed in.