50 miles off New Zeand’s storm-blurred coast...

  Georgia y half-submerged in choppy grey water, her ship deployed as a skeleton of her rigging was stripped to its bare essentials and wrapped around her. Smoke curled from exposed completely cooked components in front of her. The sea hissed angrily around her—not from waves but from the unstable surge of energy bleeding off her crippled wave motion engine.

  Inside her maintenance shell, warning sigils flickered red across crystalline dispy panels.

  “Come on… damn you. Lock into the phase channel already.”

  She sat amid the cracked remains of her turbine ring, hands buried deep in the guts of her own heart, forcing power cells back into alignment with tools made for dockyard crews, not battleships. Every spark that leapt from the coil made her flinch. She wasn’t afraid of pain.

  What truly scared her was never being able to fly again.

  A shudder ran through the hull. One of the capacitors finally clicked into sync, the phases of AC current were running in phase finally.. The light on the central core shifted from red to amber.

  “Almost there,” she whispered, biting a screwdriver in her mouth.. “Don’t make me call South Dakota to tow me like some rust-bucket barge.”

  She reached back, flicked a breaker, then another. A sharp crack echoed through the shell as something overloaded — but the engine core’s low thrum returned.

  “…Got you,” she exhaled, slumping against the panel.

  Georgia took a breath of fresh air and the air was almost too clean, taking a deeper breath her lungs started to burn slightly. “Damn it what is on fire!”

  Outside, the storm hadn’t let up. But Georgia’s eyes flicked upward, her gaze narrowing. and brought up a series of tactical windows. Her drones — modified recon units she’d personally tuned… Dialing the camera in on the turret ball was a pain in the ass, and usually required a clean room and everything.

  She waved a hand across her vision and a feed of slightly transparent monitors appeared in front of her one feed, a wedge of Sakura Empire silhouettes broke formation and slipped into cloud cover.

  On another, the Eagle Union's carrier group cut across the horizon, fnked by escort cruisers and destroyers.

  “They’re already jockeying for position,” she muttered. “The hell’s Enterprise doing that far north?”

  She tapped in an override. “Drone Wing Nine, shadow the Sakura fleet. Prioritize signal masks and active scans. I want eyes inside their formation.”

  Static crackled. Then a ping.

  One of the drones had just locked onto a massive heat bloom.

  Georgia’s brow furrowed. “That’s… too big for a battleship.”

  She adjusted the range.

  A Siren signature.

  “Of course,” she sighed. “Because nothing’s ever simple.”

  Her eyes flicked toward the map of the Coral Sea.

  Wave motion engine at 4% power.

  Time to move.

  Rain tapped rhythmically against her flight deck, masking the tension crackling across every open channel. Enterprise stood alone on the command ptform, her cloak whipped sideways by the wind as carrier crews scrambled below, prepping flight ops.

  Her expression was hard. Focused. One hand rested against the railing, the other hovering over her headset’s controls.

  “Recon flights are still blind past grid five,” Hornet’s voice crackled in. “Heavy cloud cover and interference. We’ll lose pnes if we push further.”

  “Understood. Hold pattern until I say otherwise.” Enterprise replied, eyes scanning the map slowly rotating around the table in front of her.

  The Sakura fleet had to be around, they were maybe a day or two out from battle.

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  A sudden ping fshed in the upper corner of the dispy — a secure burst transmission.

  GEORGIA — PRIORITY SIGNAL

  Enterprise’s eyes narrowed. She tapped the icon. Georgia’s voice came through the comm, slightly distorted by static.

  “Got visual on the Sakura vanguard. Coordinates transmitting now. Four heavy hitters, three CVs. One of them might be Akagi — hard to confirm. But there’s more. Siren energy signature, big one, masked behind the weather system. Might be piggybacking off their comms grid.”

  Enterprise’s pulse quickened.

  “Can you verify?”

  “Negative. I’m running low power — engine’s only at 4%. I can’t chase it. But whatever it is… it’s not there to watch.”

  Enterprise looked over her shoulder, watching as her strike aircraft taxied to the forward catapults, engines glowing.

  “Understood. Patch the data through, I’ll have Helena give it a look over.