Chapter 1089: Moonlight Waltz (1).
The wave hit like judgement.
It rose beneath the wrecked flagship and then climbed, a vertical mountain of black water that swallowed the horizon. Men screamed, ropes snapped, fires hissed out under a flood of salt. The carriers hadn’t expected the ocean to answer. They found themselves drowning in their own arrogance.
Cain planted both boots on the steel as the deck tilted. Water sluiced past his knees then his waist, cold and furious. He had expected everything: guns, batteries, machines. He had not expected the sea to choose a side.
"Now," Susan said, voice flat with a ferocity that belonged to someone who had been given one last thing to do and was going to do it. She hauled herself forward, blood and smoke in her hair, eyes sharp. "Now we move."
Cain looked at her. For the first time since the first dawn of this war, he let the thought pass that this wasn’t just about breaking machines. It was about making a decision that would leave fewer ghosts. He had always liked the moral clarity of a blade: clean, immediate. This—this was mud, and tide, and chance.
He moved without ceremony. He gathered the remaining fighters and their injuries into a line, his voice steady, not ornamental. "Follow me. Not to victory. To a place we can breathe."
They ran across a deck that had turned into a river. Men, those who could, followed; those who couldn’t shouted instructions, shoved explosives, lit flares to draw enemy fire. Cain ignored the fireworks and the chaos. He had a single destination: the carrier’s bridge.
The carriers were slow to respond. Their AI had been designed for precision, not for rage. Algorithms failed when the inputs were wrong. Steve’s voice came over the static, small and bright. "Some of their targeting nodes are frying. I can see it. Logic loops breaking. You’re doing something the coders didn’t plan for."
"Good," Cain said. He did not let relief touch his voice. Relief was a thing for people who survived. He wanted something sterner: a plan that left fewer questions. "Exploit it. Burn their circuits if you can. Make them blind."
Susan hacked forward, a crude blade of human will. She reached an emergency panel and slammed it open, tore wires with hands that hurt her. Sparks bit her forearms. "Cain—this will slow them, but it’ll make them desperate. They’ll launch everything they have."
"Then let them be desperate," Cain said. "Desperation makes mistakes."
They reached the ladder to the bridge. Men fell. Men rose. The sea churned like an animal that had been rudely woken. Cain climbed as the world tilted. Above them, through the portholes, he could see the city platforms—those city-sized platforms—turning like machines of an empire. Drones rose from their bays like hornets.
The bridge door blew inward in a storm of glass and water. Men stumbled in, coughing, bullets peppering the polished floor. A single officer, the bridge commander, turned and found Cain at his throat before he could form a command. The man’s eyes were full of the bureaucratic certainty that had fed their war. That certainty bled away in a noise like wind through metal.
"Where’s Hunter?" Roselle’s voice slashed through Cain’s ear as she dropped beside him, twin blades at her back, her face a slate of intent. Roselle had been quiet since the first fires. Quiet had been dangerous in her. Quiet meant she was listening. Cain had been counting on her listenership: she hears things that others miss.
"No sign," Cain answered. The lack of Hunter’s presence pulled at his chest like a missing tooth. Hunter had always been the slow, constant gear in their machine. If Hunter wasn’t moving, someone had stopped him. "We move. We take the bridge. We break their eyes."
They did. They took it in a sweep that was more animal than army. Soldiers who were not idiots fell back; the rest met the blade. Cain did not relish the taking. He moved because things needed moving. He did what had to be done.
On the bridge, amid blinking consoles and steaming floors, a single screen remained operational, thin as a throat and sharp as a lie. It showed a map of the eastern armada, their positions, and a string of names—corporations, ministries, and an old family crest Cain recognized and had expected to see buried in his past: the Daelmont sigil. The Daelmonts had been a quiet hand in the city for years, trading in loans and influence and promises that smelled like rot.
Cain’s gut tightened. Not because the Daelmonts were powerful—they were—but because they had been his people once, a tie he had cut with a blade and a promise. The sight of their name here felt like a wound opened again.
"What’s their move?" Roselle asked.
Steve’s voice was a thin thread. "They’re consolidating—launch bays opening all along the armada. But—" static— "there’s a command node. One primary uplink, coordinated. If you cut the uplink, it cascades. The carriers will go blind or self-seal. You can strangle them with one wire."
Cain stared at the node. One wire. One decision. It was the type of clean interference he preferred; it cut across the thousands of petty cruelties and made a choice that altered many lives in a single motion.
"Who’s at that node?" Susan asked.
Cain heard himself say the thing he had avoided saying for years: "A name. Daelmont Holdings. Their private fleet."
Silence then, not the charged kind but the obvious sort: everyone knew what Daelmont meant. They also knew what it might mean to turn their knives at a family that had the power to buy armies.
Cain shrugged off the thought. "Daelmonts or no, we pull the wire."
Roselle’s eyes measured him, then pointed at the console. "You do it."
Cain’s hands were steady on the uplink console. The wire was a small thing, a literal cable threaded through a panel. He could have cut more than that. He could have sent a chain reaction that gutted the armada’s command structure. He could have left the Daelmonts exposed and their finances broken.
Instead he did something simpler: he unplugged the uplink. No theatrics. No speeches. Just the simple, final click of disconnection.