Seaf Commando S-36578 VS The Iowa-class battleships.

The dawn over the strait came in bands of pewter and rust, and Seaf Commando S-36578 watched it from the ridgeline with the patience of a man who had learned long ago that the sea keeps its own ledger. Below him, five silhouettes carved white wakes across the open water — The Iowa-class battleships, steaming in echelon, their turrets already questing through the haze like the heads of hunting dogs. Illinois led with lazy indifference, her gray-white camouflage blurring into the mist. Iowa held the center, deep blue-gray and rigid as a drawn blade. Wisconsin's bright blue stripes snapped in the wind, eager. New Jersey wore the stars and stripes across her hull like a citation. And Kentucky, scarred and half-finished, trailed with her red-and-black tiger stripes, green stars glinting where armor should have been whole.

S-36578 keyed his comm. "Alice, confirm feed."

The autocannon's scope bloomed with overlay data. Five capital-grade signatures. Range, twenty-two kilometers. Closing.

"Understood," he said to no one. "We do this by the book."

The book was simple. Make them commit. Make them look left while the ground opened under their right. He had spent the night burying charges along the channel narrows — honest decoys, obvious enough that a disciplined commander would mark them and maneuver around — and beneath the obvious ones, deeper, quieter, the real thing. The Honest Feint was not deception for its own sake. It was a conversation in which the enemy was invited to be clever.

He triggered the first decoy.

A cluster of charges erupted amidships of the formation's apparent path, throwing water three hundred meters high. Wisconsin answered instantly, turrets slewing, her main battery roaring with a frequency that shook the ridgeline. Illinois yawned — visibly, somehow, even at distance — and loosed a lazy broadside that walked toward the shore, deconstructing a cliff face into gravel. Iowa never fired. Iowa was reading the water. S-36578 respected that.

"Come on," he murmured. "Be clever."

Iowa turned. Not toward the decoys — away from them, angling the formation wide to the east, threading the gap where the channel deepened. Exactly the maneuver a first-rate commander would choose. Exactly where the buried charges waited.

He waited three more seconds. Two. The formation's leading edge entered the kill zone.

"Orbital, this is S-36578. Barrage, grid seven-niner. Sever east."

The sky tore open. The 380mm barrage came down in a curtain, not on the ships but behind them and ahead of them, walls of fire and displaced sea sealing the channel's mouth and its throat. Escape routes closed like a fist. And then the buried charges answered — a second, deeper detonation that lifted the sea itself, breaking the formation's geometry, throwing Iowa's bow into a hard sheer and forcing Kentucky to spend her own superstructure, plates peeling away in sacrificial sheets, to shield New Jersey from the worst of the blast.

The battleships were not broken. They were battleships. But they were committed, channeled, and for eleven seconds, predictable.

S-36578 went prone behind the rock lip, shouldered Alice, and began to fire.

The autocannon spoke in a steady, unhurried cadence — one round, adjust, one round, adjust — each impact a precise punctuation against the chaos of the barrage. He did not aim at armor. He aimed at what armor protected. Illinois's secondary directors. Wisconsin's fire-control mast. The joint where Kentucky's hasty weld held her starboard belt. Iowa, still fighting her sheer, took a round through a forward turret ring, and the turret ground uselessly against its stops. New Jersey, the veteran, was already answering, her salvo walking toward his position with unnerving accuracy — a shell throwing rock and dust across his shoulders, and he rolled, reset, and kept firing, because the method was the method.

Wisconsin's fury became her undoing. She turned broadside to bring every gun to bear, abandoning the discipline of the formation for the satisfaction of volume. For a moment the ridgeline vanished in fire. S-36578 was already gone, three meters left, prone in a fresh crater, and Alice found Wisconsin's exposed barbette in the gap between her own muzzle flashes.

The round went in clean.

The detonation climbed out of Wisconsin's deck in a column of blue-white light, and her bright stripes went dark. She heeled, still firing, firing, until her guns pointed at the sky and then at nothing.

Illinois, finally awake, loosed her full broadside — and the deconstruction effect carved the entire ridgeline into dust. S-36578 felt the concussion strip the air from his lungs. He lay still. He let her believe it. She turned, lazy again, toward the wounded Wisconsin.

He rose from the ash with Alice hot in his hands.

"Orbital. Final. Grid seven-eight, center mass."

The second barrage did not sever escape. It simply arrived, on top of the formation, in the exact center of the geometry he had spent the entire engagement shaping. Iowa, disciplined to the last, tried to order the withdrawal. The order never finished. The barrage and Alice's final, pinpoint burst found New Jersey's magazine together, and the veteran's long career ended in a single, terrible, symmetrical bloom.

Kentucky, still shielding, still spending herself, took the last of it — her unfinished hull folding, green stars scattering into the sea like coins thrown for the dead.

When the smoke thinned, Iowa alone remained upright, turretless and burning, and S-36578 walked down the slope with Alice across his back, unhurried, methodical, already composing the after-action report. He did not gloat. He had simply done the work in the right order: decoy, commit, sever, fire. The sea kept its ledger. This morning, it had balanced.

Four of the five queens of the Pacific lay broken in the channel, and the fifth burned quietly against the mountain's reflection, and the commando's helmet stripe caught the first true light of day.