LOCATION: AIRBORNE (FALLING), DOWNTOWN DAR ES SALAAM.
ALTITUDE: 150 METERS AND RAPIDLY DECREASING.
SHIP STATUS: CRITICAL POWER FAILURE.
The shockwave from the Leviathan's plasma blast hit us like a solid wall of super-heated air.
The silver Dragonfly Scout was hurled backward off the roof of the PSPF Tower. My stomach leapt into my throat as gravity seized the two-ton vessel, dragging us down toward the churning, toxic red waters of flooded Dar es Salaam.
"The rotors are dead!" I screamed over the deafening roar of the collapsing skyscraper above us. The control sticks were completely unresponsive. The EMP effect from the plasma discharge had fried the main battery.
We were falling like a stone.
"Tyler, do something!" K-Ray shrieked from the cargo bay, tumbling against a crate of ammunition as the ship went into a terrifying tailspin.
"Juma!" Nayla screamed, her hands pressed against the glass-mesh windshield. She wasn't looking down at the water. She was looking up at the inferno we had just been blown out of.
The top ten floors of the tower were vaporized. A massive, cascading avalanche of burning concrete and melted steel was raining down around us. And somewhere in that falling debris was the Silver Sovereign.
"He's gone, Nayla! Brace for impact!" Colonel Volkov roared, grabbing the back of her harness and pulling her forcefully into her seat.
Analyze. Adapt. Dismantle.
We didn't have power, but we still had physics.
"I can't restart the engines!" I yelled, my hands flying over the manual override switches. "But I can unlock the rotor pitch!"
If a helicopter loses engine power, it doesn't automatically drop like a brick. If you disengage the transmission, the upward rush of air through the falling blades causes them to spin naturally—a principle called autorotation. It converts the potential energy of the fall into kinetic energy in the rotors, creating just enough drag to soften the crash.
I grabbed the manual clutch lever beneath the console and yanked it backward with all my strength.
CLACK-WHIRRR.
The obsidian blades, free from the dead engine, caught the rushing wind. They began to spin, screaming in protest as the aerodynamic drag fought our terminal velocity. The violent tailspin straightened out. We were still falling too fast, but we weren't going to atomize on impact.
"Hold your breath!" I commanded.
We hit the crimson water.
THE DROWNED STREETS
The impact was brutal.
The Dragonfly slammed into the flooded intersection of Samora Avenue. A massive geyser of thick, glowing red water exploded over the windshield. The kinetic shock threw me violently against my harness, the straps biting deep into my bruised ribs.
For three agonizing seconds, the ship was completely submerged in the toxic crimson tide. The world outside the glass-mesh went entirely dark red.
Then, physics delivered a miracle.
Buoyancy.
Archimedes' principle dictates that the upward buoyant force on a submerged object equals the weight of the fluid it displaces: F_B = \rho V g. Thanks to Juma's molecular reconstruction back at Project Eden, the silver-nano hull was perfectly, hermetically sealed. We had a massive volume of trapped air inside the cabin.
The Dragonfly bobbed back up to the surface, violently rocking like a cork in a storm, before finally stabilizing.
We were afloat.
I gasped for air, my hands shaking as I unbuckled my harness. I looked frantically around the cabin. "Sound off! Is everyone in one piece?"
"I am intact," Volkov grunted, rubbing his heavy jaw. He immediately checked the seal on the side hatch. "The hull holds. We are not taking on water."
"I think my arm is broken," K-Ray whimpered from the floor, clutching his wrist against his chest.
I looked at the co-pilot seat.
Nayla was staring blankly out the windshield. The silver veins beneath her skin were pulsing with a frantic, erratic rhythm, mirroring her shock.
"He saved us," she whispered, her voice entirely hollow. "Tyler... Juma took the whole blast."
I unbuckled and reached over, gently taking her face in my hands. "Nayla, listen to me. Juma is a hyper-dense kinetic sink. He survived the magma chamber of Kilimanjaro. A plasma blast won't vaporize him."
"But the building..."
I looked up through the glass canopy.
The PSPF Tower—or what was left of it—was groaning. The structural integrity of the lower floors, weakened by the Leviathan's scythe and the plasma detonation, finally gave way.
With a sound like a dying continent, the massive skyscraper collapsed inward, thousands of tons of concrete and steel plunging into the flooded red streets with a cataclysmic splash.
A tidal wave of crimson water surged down the avenue, tossing the Dragonfly high into the air before dropping us back down.
"If he survived the blast," Volkov said grimly, steadying himself against the bulkhead, "he did not survive the drop. The machine weighs over a ton, Engineer. He will sink straight to the bottom of the flooded district, buried under fifty stories of rubble."
I stared at the churning, boiling red water where the tower used to be. Volkov was right. Even if Juma was alive, he was trapped at the bottom of a toxic ocean, crushed under a mountain of steel.
And we couldn't swim down to get him.
Because we weren't alone in the water.
ACOUSTIC SHADOWS
A horrific, metallic screech echoed through the drowned city canyons.
Through the windshield, I saw the Deep-Trench Leviathan pull itself over the ruins of a submerged bank building. Its massive, rusted metal plates dripped with the glowing red algae. Its multifaceted eyes scanned the surface of the water, searching for the silver insect that had defied it.
"Tyler," K-Ray whispered, terrified to even breathe loudly. "It's looking for us."
"Kill the power," I ordered immediately. "Shut down the HUD, the emergency lights, everything."
I ripped a panel off the dashboard and manually disconnected the backup battery. The cabin plunged into the dim, eerie red glow filtering in from the bioluminescent water outside.
"The Crimson Rot is aquatic," I whispered to the team, my engineering mind switching to stealth protocols. "In water, acoustic waves travel four point three times faster than in air. That thing doesn't need to see us. It's hunting by sonar and vibration. If we start the engines, or even drop a wrench on the floor, it will pinpoint us instantly."
We sat in absolute, terrifying silence.
The Dragonfly drifted slowly down the flooded avenue, carried by the gentle current of the crimson tide. We floated past submerged cars, rusted traffic lights, and the decaying, barnacle-encrusted remains of Dar es Salaam's commercial district.
Two blocks away, the Leviathan slipped silently into the water.
The massive beast sank beneath the surface, leaving only a faint, glowing red wake.
"It submerged," Nayla mouthed, her eyes wide with terror. She gripped her silver energy bow, though she hadn't manifested the string. She knew her viral code was useless against the Asian terraforming strain.
"We are sitting ducks," Volkov whispered, drawing his combat knife. "If it comes up beneath us, it will snap this ship in half."
"We need to get out of the open water," I whispered back, looking at the towering, half-submerged buildings on either side of us. "If we can drift into one of those parking garages, the concrete walls will mask our acoustic signature."
"We have no propulsion," Volkov pointed out.
I looked around the cabin. "Then we row."
I pulled the heavy, metallic lid off a storage crate and handed it to Volkov. I grabbed an unspent, brass artillery shell casing from our Kikuletwa ambush supplies.
"Nayla, open the top emergency hatch," I instructed quietly. "Just wide enough for the Colonel and me to stick our arms out. Paddle slow. Do not splash."
Nayla unlatched the heavy glass-mesh hatch above our heads. The smell of the Crimson Rot poured in—a foul, metallic stench like rusted iron and decaying kelp.
Volkov and I stood on the center console, sticking our upper bodies out of the roof hatch.
We began to paddle.
THE TIDE-STALKERS
Every dip of the brass casing into the red water felt like ringing a dinner bell. I moved with agonizing slowness, slicing the makeshift paddle into the thick, glowing algae and pulling us toward a dark alleyway between two massive office buildings.
Below us, the water pulsed.
A massive, glowing orange heat signature drifted directly beneath the hull of the Dragonfly. The Leviathan was passing underneath us, deep in the trench of the flooded street. The water temperature spiked, causing a foul-smelling steam to rise around the ship.
I held my breath. Volkov froze, his makeshift paddle suspended an inch above the water.
The orange glow slowly faded as the Leviathan continued down the avenue, its sonar missing our silent, drifting vessel.
"It's gone," I exhaled a microscopic breath of relief. "Keep paddling. Into the alley."
We guided the silver ship out of the main street and into the narrow, dark canyon between the skyscrapers. The water here was stagnant, choked with floating debris and rusted office furniture.
"Look," Nayla whispered from inside the cabin, pointing to the side of the building to our left.
It was an old parking structure. The first three floors were completely submerged, but the fourth-floor ramp was sitting just at the waterline, creating a perfect, concrete dock.
"Paddle for the ramp," I murmured to Volkov.
We angled the ship, the silver hull bumping gently against the concrete edge of the fourth-floor parking deck.
I climbed out of the roof hatch and jumped onto the wet concrete, tying a mooring line to a rusted steel girder. Volkov followed, keeping his combat knife drawn.
We helped Nayla and a pale, shivering K-Ray out of the ship.
"We need to find high ground," I said, looking at the dark, cavernous expanse of the parking garage. "Somewhere we can set up a comms relay. We have to figure out how to kill that crab, and then we figure out how to dig Juma out of the rubble."
"Tyler," Nayla said, her voice tight.
She wasn't looking at the dark garage. She was looking at the ceiling.
I followed her gaze.
Clinging to the concrete ceiling above us, perfectly camouflaged against the shadows and the dripping red algae, were five figures.
They weren't monsters. They were human.
But they were wearing armor crafted entirely from the rusted, barnacle-encrusted shells of dead Crimson-Rot creatures. They held sleek, silent spearguns aimed directly at our heads.
Before Volkov could raise his knife, one of the figures dropped from the ceiling, landing silently on the concrete just ten feet away.
It was a woman. Her face was painted with streaks of glowing red algae. She leveled a heavy, pneumatic harpoon gun directly at my chest.
"You make too much noise, mainlanders," the woman said, her voice a raspy, salt-scarred whisper. "The Leviathan hears the silver boat. Give me one good reason I shouldn't feed you to the Tide to save my own people."
I slowly raised my hands, letting my wrench dangle from my belt.
"Because," I said, my voice perfectly steady, "I'm the engineer who's going to help you kill it."