Chapter 6 - Confrontation at the Pier
Slipway 9 was an abandoned relic of the old Todd Pacific Shipyards, an isolated concrete pier jutting out into the black, oily waters of the West Waterway. The fog had rolled in thick from the bay, reducing the yellow sodium-vapor lights along the perimeter fence to dim, ghostly halos.
A solitary dark blue sedan was parked near the edge of the rusted slipway, its engine idling with a wet, irregular purr.
I walked down the center of the pier, my footsteps echoing against the wet asphalt. The cold wind off the water whipped through my hair, carrying the sharp, familiar scent of creosote, diesel, and low-tide brine. I didn't hide my limp; I didn't try to soften the rhythmic, mechanical click of my knee hinge. I wanted him to hear me coming.
The driver’s side door of the sedan opened, and Derek stepped out.
He had abandoned his expensive tailored clothes for a crumpled rain jacket and dark corduroy trousers. His face was gray, sunken, and stubbled with thirty-six hours of unwashed beard growth. In his right hand, he held a heavy-duty military-grade ruggedized laptop, its screen glowing with a pale, cold luminescence.
“You came,” he said, his voice cracked and raw.
“You knew I would,” I replied, stopping fifteen feet away from him. “Shut the laptop, Derek. The pier is sealed. Harbor Island has one bridge out, and the Port Authority already has patrol boats across the channel.”
Derek let out a shrill, breathless laugh that sounded more like a cough. “You think I care about the bridge? You think I care about Marcus Vance or his federal marshals? My father went on CNBC an hour ago, Mara! He disowned me! He announced to the entire stock exchange that I had been removed from the board for gross negligence and mental instability! He sacrificed me to protect his stock price!”
“You sacrificed yourself the moment you altered those weld specs,” I said. “You tried to build a career out of stolen math and cheap steel.”
“It would have worked!” Derek shouted, taking a step toward me, his eyes bloodshot and wild. “It was forty million dollars in margin! The Navy would have accepted the revision! They always accept the revisions! Nobody checks the welds until the ship is already commissioned, and by then, the money is cleared and the liability is covered by insurance!”
He stopped, chest heaving, his fingers digging into the plastic frame of the laptop.
“I made you,” he hissed, his voice dropping into a vicious, trembling register. “Who were you before you met me? A crippled ex-sailor living in a run-down flat, reviewing cargo manifests for four hundred dollars a day! I bought your dresses! I put you in front of the people who mattered! I made you look like a normal, functional human being!”
I looked at him through the drifting mist. The wind blew a strand of hair across my eyes, and I slowly tucked it behind my ear.
“You never saw me, Derek,” I said softly. “Not once. You saw a prop. You thought that because my body was marked by fire and iron, I was weak enough to be used as a mirror for your tiny, fragile ego. You thought my silence was submission.”
“I gave you a home!” he screamed.
“You gave me a cage with a view of the harbor,” I countered, taking one slow, deliberate step forward. “And you forgot that before I was an analyst, I was a diver. I survived sixty atmospheres of pressure and freezing seawater while you were still failing corporate finance courses at your father’s alma mater.”
Derek’s face twisted in blind, impotent rage. He lifted the laptop with both hands, his thumbs hovering over the enter key.
“One keystroke, Mara,” he snarled. “I upload the *Proteus* acoustic logs to three public servers in Shanghai and Moscow. Your precious Navy Cross will become a federal indictment for your beloved Admiral Reddick, and your little hero story will turn into a geopolitical treason scandal. Now, you’re going to walk over to that car, you’re going to get in, and you’re going to tell the marshals that you gave me permission to use those algorithms!”
“Press the key, Derek.”
He froze. His thumbs hovered half an inch above the plastic keys.
“What?” he stammered.
“Press it,” I repeated, taking another step forward. My titanium pylon gave a clear, sharp *clink* against the wet concrete. “Do it. Upload a file that was intercepted and quarantined by the Defense Information Systems Agency at fourteen hundred hours today.”
Derek’s eyes darted frantically down to the screen of the laptop.
In the lower-right corner of his desktop, the little red connectivity icon wasn't green. It was flashing a stark, unmistakable blue: **NETWORK JAMMED - LOCAL RESTRICTED ACCESS ONLY.**
From the shadows behind the rusted mooring bollards twenty yards away, a man stepped out into the mist. James Reddick lowered a portable tactical radio back into his pocket, his cane resting firmly in the gravel. Behind him, four uniformed federal marshals and two Port of Seattle tactical officers materialized out of the fog, their weapons held at the low-ready position.
“You really don't understand naval systems, Halston,” James said, his deep voice carrying over the lap of the black water against the pilings. “You brought an unshielded satellite uplink into a port facility managed by Vanguard Horizon. We’ve been spoofing your MAC address since you crossed the Spokane Street bridge.”
Derek looked from James to the marshals, and then down at the useless brick of plastic in his hands.
A terrible, animal sound came from his throat.
He didn't surrender. Driven by the absolute, catastrophic collapse of his vanity, he lunged straight at me, swinging the heavy laptop like a club, aiming directly for my head.
Ten years ago, a jammed steel hatch weighing twelve tons had crushed my leg because I had chosen to hold the line for four trapped men.
Derek Halston did not weigh twelve tons. He had no mass, no discipline, and no leverage.
I didn't step back. I shifted my weight onto my mechanical right limb, planting the rubber-treaded foot firmly into the wet concrete, and brought my left forearm up to block the descending arc of the laptop. The hard plastic shattered against my wrist with a sharp crack, but my arm didn't give an inch.
Before he could recover his balance, I stepped inside his reach.
With the heel of my open right hand, I drove upward into his sternum—a simple, brutal damage-control strike designed to clear obstacles in close quarters.
The air exploded from Derek’s lungs in a wet, ragged gasp. His eyes rolled back, and he stumbled backward three steps before his feet hit the slick wooden bull-rail at the edge of the pier. His arms flailed wildly against the night air, his balance completely gone, and with a heavy, humiliating splash, he tumbled six feet down into the freezing, oily waters of the slipway channel.
The marshals immediately rushed forward, their flashlights cutting through the darkness, illuminating Derek as he thrashed helplessly in the eight-foot swell, gasping for air, coated in diesel scum and mud.
“Help!” he screamed, his voice thin and pathetic as he tried to claw at the slippery, barnacle-encrusted pilings. “Help me! I can’t swim with these clothes on! Help!”
James walked over to the edge of the pier, looked down at Derek for three long seconds, and then turned his head toward the senior marshal.
“Throw him a life ring,” James said mildly. “We wouldn't want him to miss his arraignment tomorrow morning.”
James then turned to me. He reached out and gently checked the sleeve of my coverall where the laptop had shattered.
“You all right, Mara?”
I looked down at the dark water where Derek was being hauled out by two marshals with a rescue gaff, coughing up bilge water, weeping openly, and shivering like a drowned dog under the glare of the tactical spotlights.
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“I’m fine, James,” I said, and for the first time in ten years, the words were completely, indisputably true. “Let’s go home.”
***