A $400,000 ROBOT knee locked while a nine-year-old boy was walking, and I caught him just before he hit the floor. But someone had already tampered with the evidence that would have exposed the truth.

The storm water was freezing, rising up to our waists as we dragged Dr. Kane through the narrow concrete culvert that emptied into the Elizabeth River. Above us, the muffled shouts of Lang’s contractors and the whine of surveillance drones resonated through the storm drains.

Owen didn't complain once. His small hands gripped the straps of my medical pack, his legs moving with mechanical consistency as my custom brace provided structural rigidity without binding.

"We're fifty yards from the river mouth," Alvarez wheezed, supporting Kane’s weight. "I have a naval special warfare safe house located across the channel in Norfolk, but every bridge between here and there is monitored by private security cameras tied to StrideCore’s facial recognition software."

"Victor Lang owns the smart-city infrastructure contract for Portsmouth traffic monitoring," Kane coughed, spitting up water. "He installed it three years ago. If our faces appear on any public camera grid, his private team will intercept us within four minutes."

"Then we don't use the bridges," I said, pointing toward the murky expanse of the river ahead. "We use the water."

At the mouth of the culvert, moored to a decaying wooden piling, was an old twin-engine Boston Whaler utility skiff belonging to the harbor maintenance department. Alvarez broke the ignition lock with a heavy screwdriver, crossed the solenoid leads, and the twin outboards sputtered to life with a low, throaty roar.

We tumbled aboard just as three black SUVs screeched to a halt on the pier fifty feet above us.

High-intensity searchlights pinned our boat in a blinding beam of white light. A loudspeaker boomed across the water: "Vessel occupants, kill your engines immediately! You are in possession of stolen defense property!"

"Hold on to something!" Alvarez shouted, throwing both throttles wide open.

The boat surged forward, its bow rising out of the churning water. Gunfire erupted from the pier—sharp, supersonic cracks of 5.56mm rounds tearing through the fiberglass gunwales and shattering the windshield into thousands of crystalline fragments.

Alvarez executed a hard starboard turn, throwing the skiff behind the massive steel hull of a mothballed container ship anchored in the channel. The container ship shielded us from direct fire, but the distinct high-pitched whine of two high-speed tactical interceptor boats echoed from downriver.

Victor Lang wasn't just using private security anymore. He had deployed StrideCore’s maritime prototype test vessels—two stealth-hulled chase crafts capable of fifty knots, equipped with forward-mounted searchlights and thermal imaging arrays.

"They're flanking us on both sides!" I yelled, shielding Owen behind the center console.

"Alvarez, look at the telemetry on this drive!" Kane shouted over the wind, opening the red Pelican case and connecting a ruggedized field tablet to the master storage drive. "The StrideCore interceptor boats use the same centralized fly-by-wire controller architecture as the X9 exoskeleton! Lang's engineers used the same open-port firmware library to cut development time!"

"Can you shut them down?" I demanded.

"I can't shut them down from here," Kane yelled, "but if I can transmit a broadcast pulse on the 5.8 gigahertz telemetry band, it will force their autopilots into the same torque-protection loop that locked Owen's knee!"

"How close do we need to be?" Alvarez asked, his hands steady on the steering wheel.

"Within thirty feet!" Kane answered. "We have to let them get right alongside us!"