This whole situation just went to hell in short order.

She didn’t know what to do, but for a moment she took her time thinking about it. Then she hit the starter and turned her boat around to head for the closest assault boat. She didn’t know what the hell had happened to Weston, but she needed the gear he’d gotten off that cursed ship.

She was heading for it when suddenly all three of the assault boats got a mind of their own and turned in unison, heading for the shore.

Not knowing what else to do, Lyssa followed suit.

The craft she was following were amphibious assault craft. She’d seen enough of them in the last few months of the war. They were designed to be launched from carrier task groups for large-scale assaults on enemy beachheads, though it was pretty clear that these had been upgraded.

The ones she’d ridden in the war weren’t fully automated, for one thing.

As they reached the shore, she found her attention drawn away from the assault landers to a yellow shape moving jerkily under the surface of the water. She watched it warily from a distance as it rose up from the depths and then breached near the shore. She recognized it as a utility loader, but it was bigger than any she’d seen before.

Water sluiced off the construction yellow steel as the machine lumbered up onto the shore and turned around.

Lyssa let out a breath of relief when she recognized the armor sitting in the pilot’s compartment of the big machine.

“Captain,” she growled, “you are the biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever worked with, and I’m a former Marine who joined the damned NYPD. Do you have any idea how many assholes you meet between those two groups?”

Eric just looked back at her with his head cocked to one side, silent for a long moment before he chose to speak.

“Lyss, until you’ve dealt with politicians and reporters, you don’t know the meaning of the word.”

She shook her head as she beached the boat and climbed up over the bow, jumping to the bank. “You get what you needed?”

“I got what I could,” he answered as he popped open the crash bars holding him into the pilot’s position of the loader. “Was interrupted before I could get it all.”

As Eric pulled himself out of the machine, dropping to the soft bank, she turned and looked back over Long Island Sound. There, out in the middle of the water, the keel of the Odyssey still rose out over the waves. It was now smoking like the tube of a cannon that had just been fired, but it was still surprisingly intact.

“You get them all?”

Eric considered for a moment, “I think so. They’re tough, but they can’t take an overpressure wave much better than we can. I’ll deploy drones to make sure, but yeah, I think I got them all.”

“Good.”