The heist was over. The keys had been stolen. But now came the part that Viktor, watching from his dacha, enjoyed the most. The part where the thieves tried to fly the plane.
Or in this case, sail the ship.
The Ship of State—a massive, complex vessel built over centuries—was now under the sole command of Rex Thorne. And his first order of business wasn’t to check the course; it was to purge the crew.
He called them the “Deep State.” The engineers who kept the engines running, the navigators who knew the charts, the lookouts watching for ice. He fired them all. He replaced them with “loyalists”—actors, friends, people whose only qualification was that they clapped when he spoke.
And so, the ship began to accelerate.
Marcus watched from the shore, his stomach tightening. He saw what was happening below decks. With no one manning the helm, the systems were failing. The lights flickered. The food distribution stopped.
But on the upper decks, it was chaos.
The passengers, realizing that no one was flying the plane, didn’t band together. They turned on each other. Emboldened by the Captain’s rhetoric, some began to throw their neighbors into the icy water, cheering as they drowned. Others were locking their rivals in their cabins, hoarding the remaining food, threatening to enslave anyone who didn’t wear the Captain’s colors.
It was a “Lord of the Flies” scenario playing out in the grand ballroom of the Titanic.
And on the bridge? Thorne stood at the wheel, half-asleep, drunk on his own reflection in the glass. His new “command staff”—the sycophants and the amateurs—were too terrified to speak.
The radar was screaming. The icebergs—economic collapse, global war, civil unrest—were documented, charted, and visible to the naked eye. The old laws of maritime safety, the “guideposts” that had kept the ship safe for generations, were being ignored. “Full speed ahead,” Thorne muttered, dreaming of his tower in Moscow.
Marcus looked at the other ships nearby—the courts, the generals, the “adults in the room.” They saw it. They knew the collision was inevitable. They knew the math.
And yet, they sat on their hands. They wrote memos. They filed lawsuits that would be heard long after the ship was at the bottom of the sea.
The solution was simple. It was brutal, but it was necessary. Someone—anyone—just needed to walk onto the bridge, punch the Captain in the jaw, and take the damn wheel. They needed to turn the ship.
But no one moved. They were paralyzed by the “spirit of the law” while the Captain used the “letter of his authority” to drive them all into the dark.
They were going to hit the ice. And as the hull groaned under the strain, Marcus realized the tragedy wasn’t the crash. The tragedy was that they were watching it happen in slow motion, and everyone was too polite to start a mutiny to save their own lives.