The ocean didn't splash. It shattered.
The Icarus hit the water with the sound of a god screaming. It was seventy tons of aluminum and ambition slamming into the San Francisco Bay at terminal velocity.
Jason was thrown against the instrument panel. His forehead split open on a pressure gauge.
Cold.
Instant, biting cold.
The cockpit glass cracked—a spiderweb fracture spreading inches from his face. Seawater hissed through the seal, spraying the bridge with a freezing mist.
"Seal it!" Jason roared, spitting blood.
O'Malley was already moving. The big Irishman slammed the heavy watertight bulkhead shut, sealing the bridge from the rest of the ship. He spun the wheel lock until his knuckles turned white.
CLANG.
The ship groaned. Rivets popped like gunfire somewhere in the aft fuselage. The floor tilted violently to the left.
"She's drowning, Jason!" Howard Hughes was fighting the yoke, his feet braced against the console. "The nose is too heavy! The reactor shielding is dragging us down!"
Jason wiped the blood from his eyes. The world was tilting. The murky green water rose past the viewport, swallowing the sky.
"Level her out!" Jason shouted. "Blow the ballast tanks!"
"We don't have ballast tanks!" Hughes screamed back, his eyes wide with panic. "This is an airship, you lunatic! We have gas cells! If I blow them, we lose lift and sink like a stone!"
"We are sinking!"
Jason looked at the depth gauge. The needle was spinning.
20 feet. 30 feet.
The hull creaked—a deep, metallic moan that vibrated through the floorboards. The pressure was crushing the aluminum skin meant for high altitude, not deep sea.
"Contact!" Hemingway yelled from the intercom. "Above us!"
Jason grabbed the periscope handles. He yanked it down.
The optics were foggy, but the image was clear enough to stop his heart.
Above the waves, piercing the fog, were searchlights. Not the yellow beams of oil lamps.
Red lasers.
A grid of crimson light swept across the surface of the water, hunting.
"Destroyers," Jason whispered. "Three of them."
They weren't US Navy ships. They were sleek, black hulls painted with silver stripes. The Silver Legion had stolen the Pacific Fleet.
And the lights? That wasn't 1920s tech. That was thermal imaging.
"They're tracking the reactor heat," Jason realized. "Alta gave them the Gates-Tech sensors. They can see the radiation bloom through the water."
WHUMP.
A depth charge hit the water fifty yards to their starboard.
The explosion was muted underwater, but the shockwave wasn't. It hit the Icarus like a sledgehammer.
Jason was thrown to the floor. The lights flickered and died, replaced by the eerie blue glow of the emergency chemical sticks.
"Leak in Sector 4!" O'Malley shouted, checking the damage board. "We're taking on water in the cargo hold!"
"We have to dive," Jason scrambled up. "If we stay shallow, they'll peel us open like a tin can. Hughes, take us down to sixty feet!"
"I can't!" Hughes was weeping now, wrestling with the controls. "We're too heavy! If we dive, we won't stop! We'll hit the bottom and crumple!"
"Why are we heavy?" Jason demanded. "We stripped the armor!"
"The Vault!" Hughes pointed aft. "The cargo hold is full of lead and gold! Five tons of it! It's an anchor, Jason!"
Jason froze.
The Vault.
His liquid assets. The gold bars he had raided from the Federal Reserve. The accumulated wealth of the Standard Oil empire, melted down into ingots. It was the money he was going to use to rebuild America. To buy armies. To bribe warlords.
It was the only power he had left.
"Jason!" Sarah's voice cut through the chaos.
He turned. She was huddled in the corner, wrapped in a blanket, shivering. The red emergency light painted her face in shadows.
"Drop it," she said.
"That's the future," Jason said, his voice tight. "That's how we fix this."
"You don't have a future if we drown in the next thirty seconds!" she screamed.
Another depth charge. Closer this time.
The hull shrieked. A pipe burst overhead, spraying hydraulic fluid onto the map table.
Jason looked at the periscope. The red laser grid was locking onto their position. The destroyers were turning for an attack run.
He looked at O'Malley.
"The cargo release," Jason said. "Where is it?"
"Manual lever," O'Malley pointed to a yellow handle on the bulkhead. "By the airlock."
Jason stumbled toward it. The ship tilted further. The nose was dipping. They were beginning the death spiral.
He grabbed the yellow handle. It was cold steel.
O'Malley put a hand on his shoulder.
"Boss," O'Malley said softly. "That's five hundred million dollars. That's the empire. If you pull that, we're just refugees."
Jason looked at the handle. He thought of the boardrooms in New York. The power lunches with Rockefeller. The feeling of invincibility when he checked his bank balance on the iPhone.
He looked at Sarah. She was coughing, blue lips trembling.
He looked at Hughes, terrified out of his mind.
He looked at the depth gauge. 50 feet. Critical crush depth approaching.
"I don't need an empire," Jason gritted his teeth. "I need to breathe."
He yanked the lever.
CLUNK-WHOOSH.
The mechanical latches on the belly of the Icarus disengaged. The massive bomb-bay doors groaned open against the water pressure.
Then, gravity took over.
The ship lurched violently upward.
Jason was thrown against the wall.
Through the floor-mounted viewport, he watched it happen.
Gold bars. Stacks of them. Pallets of silver ingots. They tumbled out of the cargo hold like glittering rain. They caught the faint light of the surface searchlights as they fell.
It didn't look majestic. It looked like garbage being dumped from a barge.
Millions of dollars. The GDP of a small nation.
Gone.
Sinking into the black silt of the San Francisco Bay.
Jason watched it fall until the darkness swallowed it. He felt a strange sensation in his chest. A hollowness.
He was broke.
For the first time since he woke up in 1907, Jason Underwood was poor.
"We have buoyancy!" Hughes shouted, his voice cracking with relief. "She's rising! I have control of the planes!"
"Don't rise!" Jason yelled, snapping back to the present. "Dive! Use the lift to push us down! Get us under the thermal layer!"
Hughes shoved the yoke forward.
The Icarus, now five tons lighter, responded. The nose lifted, then leveled out. The dive planes bit into the water.
They slipped deeper.
60 feet.
70 feet.
Above them, the water turned white.
BOOM.
A depth charge detonated exactly where they had been ten seconds ago. The shockwave rattled the ship, knocking dust from the ceiling, but the hull held.
"We're under," Hughes whispered, watching the gauge. "Thermal layer at eighty feet. The cold water will mask the reactor heat."
Jason slumped against the bulkhead. He slid down until he was sitting on the wet floor.
He looked at his hands. They were empty.
"We're alive," O'Malley said, offering him a hand.
"Yeah," Jason said. He didn't take the hand. He just stared at the dark viewport. "We're alive. And that's all we are."
"Sonar is dead," Hemingway's voice came over the intercom. "I'm in the tail gunner seat. I can't see a damn thing. We're flying blind, Jason."
Jason stood up. The grief for the gold was gone, replaced by the cold logic of survival.
"Tesla," Jason keyed the mic. "Report."
"The reactor is stable," Tesla's voice was calm, almost bored. "But the coils are singing. The water pressure is affecting the magnetic containment."
"Can you give us eyes?" Jason asked.
"Eyes? No," Tesla said. "But ears... perhaps. The reactor pulses. If I modulate the frequency, we can bounce a magnetic wave off the seabed. Like a bat."
"Do it," Jason said. "Because if we hit a rock at this speed, we don't just sink. We crack open."
He walked to the pilot's chair. Hughes was shaking, his knuckles white on the wheel.
"Howard," Jason put a hand on his shoulder. "You're doing great. Just keep her steady."
"I'm flying a zeppelin underwater, Jason," Hughes giggled hysterically. "It's impossible. Physics says we should be dead."
"Physics works for us now," Jason said. He looked at the dashboard.
The red light—the one linked to the Gates code—was blinking again.
Fast. Urgent.
TURN LEFT.
Jason stared at it.
"Left?" Hughes asked. "Why?"
"Because he knows," Jason said. "Turn left, Howard. 20 degrees."
Hughes hesitated, then turned the wheel.
The ship banked sluggishly.
Through the side viewport, a dark shape loomed out of the gloom. A massive underwater ridge of jagged rock.
If they had gone straight, they would have been gutted.
"Jesus," O'Malley crossed himself. "The robot saved us."
"He didn't save us," Jason said, watching the red light pulse. "He's preserving his ride."
The light blinked again.
BRIDGE AHEAD.
Jason looked forward into the inky blackness.
"The Golden Gate," Jason whispered. "We have to go under it to get to the ocean."
"That's a choke point," O'Malley warned. "If I were Pelley, that's where I'd put the net."
"He did," Jason said grimly. "And probably worse."
He checked his pistol. It was wet, useless. He holstered it.
"Get ready," Jason told the crew. "We just paid the toll with the gold. Now we have to pay with blood."
The Icarus hummed, a silver ghost drifting through the graveyard of the bay, heading toward the mouth of the ocean.
Toward the trap.