[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/Y9sJ6mj.png[/img][/center]

For just an instant, Callie screwed her eyes shut.  [color=f7941d]“Solid copy, HQ; relaying.”[/color]

[color=f7941d][i]No sense in risking comms interception, plenty in the tank – same as before.[/i][/color]  Another small portal out, to Cristina and her radio.  [color=f7941d]“Obsidian, warning: ship’s about to lose stability.  Portal medevac is ordered and inbound; confirm collection point.”  [i]They just need to get close enough together.  They’ll manage that,[/i][/color] Callie affirmed to herself in a worried corner of her mind, even as she waited the precious moments for the response.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DWYSxIHnpI&t=109s]The rest of her went through the mental preparations to bring down two titans of war and, likely, kill thousands.[/url]

If it deepened the conflict, forced the Chinese to lean further into Arms Masters and the organisations that found or made them, in place of the ships and tanks and soldiers that those Arms Masters could so easily lay low…  Perhaps many, many more.

[color=f7941d][i]No other option – direct order.  Plus, the Navy’s here now; China need conventional forces to face them.  Can’t rely on AMs alone.  This won’t change that.[/i][/color]

So she thought.  Echoing and resonating across it: a prayer, its forms and tones half-buried and half-remembered, that those thoughts were true.

Letting the communication portal fall shut, Callie redirected her gaze and focus, the need to give her team as much chance as possible dictating the order of operations – namely, starting to sink the ship they [i]weren’t[/i] on first.  Charter picked out the details around [i]CNS Liaoning[/i]: the aircraft, the technicians rushing about to prepare them for their duel against Lotus Squadron, officers standing behind toughened glass on the bridge…  The waters stretching out beneath its visible hull.

And in those waters, ahead of the sections of hull that laid beneath them, formed a wide, net-like lattice of atom-width portal, bowed slightly upwards at either edge.

Two hundred kilometres away, Callie took a breath.  Then, with the tiniest motion of her hand, she slammed it back into the ship’s bow.

Steel came apart, diced into neat parallelograms that fell away into the sea and let the sea, in turn, rush in.  Where Callie met resistance, the result of the lattice finding some poor soul on the ship’s lowest decks before the explosion of oncoming water and rending shards knocked them out cold or worse, she adjusted fractionally downwards and carried on, dragging it along the length of the ship from front to back, ribbons of cleanly cut metal left in its wake…

That was the first second.  In the next, with a horrifying satisfaction and finality, she adjusted her wrist’s angle and dragged it back the other way.

By that next second’s conclusion, the [i]Liaoning[/i]’s hull no longer had a base.

Even under those circumstances, a ship the size of an aircraft carrier does not sink quickly.  (Callie knew that – the agency’s techs back at home did computer simulations testing exactly this application of her powers.)  The water simply has too much to subsume and push out of the way to swallow the hulk in an instant.  Nonetheless, as she dismissed the lattice and turned her focus away, Callie was aware that it was only a matter of minutes before the multi-billion-dollar construct, seaworthy moments ago, was consumed by the ocean.

Her sense of dread did not ease as she formed another, then did exactly the same to the hull of the carrier on which her teammates stood.

[color=f7941d]“Good effect on enemy naval assets,”[/color] Callie intoned quietly, gathering her energy once again to summon the portal that would, [i]would[/i], return said teammates to safety.  [color=f7941d]“Admiral…  Requesting broadcast to hostile fleet so they can task vessels for search and rescue as soon as possible.”[/color]

They, after all, were but a fraction of the lives aboard.

[@Digmata]