Chapter 73 - The Submerged Leviathan
Elena didn't wait for Julian to make his choice. She knew the Montgomery men: when pressed between survival and their mother’s venomous apron strings, they always cracked.
Elena lunged sideways, slamming her hip into the steel handrail while swinging the bottom corner of Maya’s heavy carrier directly into Victoria’s outstretched wrist. The gun went off—the suppressed *thwip* spitting a round harmlessly into the cast-iron deckplates—before the weapon tumbled through the grating, splashing into the dark depths of the flooded pen thirty feet below.
Victoria lunged with her bare hands, her long, diamond-encrusted fingers clawing for Elena’s throat. "I’ll drown her myself! I’ll crush her with my bare hands!"
"Elena, look out!" Julian cried out, but he didn't grab his mother. He stood petrified, his hands shaking at his sides.
Elena dropped low, ducking beneath the matriarch's wild grasp, and drove her steel-toed combat boot squarely into Victoria’s knee. The joint bent backward with an audible *snap*.
Victoria shrieked, collapsing against the gantry rail, clutching her ruined leg. "Julian! Help me! Kill her! Julian!"
"He’s not your puppet anymore, Victoria," Elena breathed, scooping Maya’s pod back into her arms. "And you are out of moves."
Suddenly, the air pressure in the cavern dropped drastically. A deafening pneumatic hiss echoed from below as the primary boarding ramp of the *Montgomery Sovereign* began to retract automatically.
"The automated departure protocol!" Julian shouted, snapping out of his daze as he looked down at the docking bay. "The submarine thinks the facility has suffered a structural breach! It’s sealing its hatches and initiating an emergency deep dive! If that outer sea-lock opens while we’re on the gantry, the water pressure will crush us!"
"Then we board it!" Elena barked.
"What? Are you insane?" Julian yelled over the rising roar of the submarine's massive electric turbines. "That vessel is fully automated by my father's sovereign code! We don't have the command credentials!"
"I don't care about the credentials, Julian! It’s the only hull between us and fifty fathoms of freezing Atlantic water! Move!"
Elena vaulted over the safety barrier, landing hard on the rubberized non-skid surface of the submarine’s dorsal casing twenty feet below. The impact jarred her ankles, sending a jolt of white-hot agony through her lower back, but she rolled to her side, keeping Maya’s pod pressed firmly against her abdomen to absorb the shock. Maya let out a muffled whimper, her tiny hands flailing inside the climate-controlled chamber.
"Elena! Catch me!" Julian scrambled over the rail, tumbling ungracefully onto the curved hull behind her.
High above them on the gantry, Victoria dragged herself up against the railing, her bloody face contorted into a hideous sneer. "You won't survive the deep, Elena! Alistair left a dead-man's hand inside the reactor core! If you seal that hatch, you’re locking yourself in a steel coffin!"
Elena looked up at the ruined queen of the Montgomery empire. "Then we’ll see who rots first, Victoria."
Elena scrambled to the open conical conning tower hatch, dragging the baby pod behind her. Julian tumbled in right behind her, his breath coming in jagged, wheezing sobs.
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Elena grabbed the heavy manual locking wheel above her head and hauled it down with all her strength. The hydraulic seals hissed shut. The dog-latches clicked into place.
Outside, the cavernous sea-gates opened. Millions of gallons of ocean water rushed into the dry dock, submerging the *Montgomery Sovereign* entirely, dragging them down into the pitch-black abyss of the continental shelf.
