Cutting Edge

ONE

It was the goblin that led them toward disaster.

Cédric Dupain was at first merely curious as their strange caller glided into his probe lights — though fascination was quick to snare him. One of his job’s strongest lures was its promise of the unexpected, and Cédric took pleasure in discovery even when it was accompanied by considerable risk. He had been at his profession for over a decade, longer counting his three consecutive tours with the French Navy. All those years, so many dives, and nothing he’d encountered in the depths had yet given him real cause for fear.

Cédric cut his thrusters, turned his head, glanced through his faceplate at Marius, and saw he’d also come to a dead stop in the water. Then he reminded himself that faceplate was the wrong word. The correct term for the clear hemispheric panel was dome port. Just as the hardsuit’s exterior was called a pressure hull, and the glovelike hand sockets were called manipulator pods. A man who put great value on precision, Cédric knew it was also somewhat inexact to say that he and Marius Bouchard were functioning as divers — or that their suits were, in fact, suits at all. Both men would be more aptly considered pilots operating anthropomorphic underwater vehicles, submersibles that could descend to six hundred meters — two thousand feet, as Cédric’s American instructors would measure it — beneath the ocean’s surface.

The nomenclature had been a headache to learn, but for Cédric it was an important reminder. The world below was a world apart, and his hardsuit had more in common with a spacesuit than an ordinary diving rig. Indeed, his ability to walk the seabed was as remarkable as an astronaut’s to stride across the pitted surface of the moon. He did not want to let caution slip and forget for a moment what damage the crushing pressures of the deep would wreak on vulnerable human bodies.

Cédric stood motionless. He’d already located and videoed the source of the problem that had prompted an emergency repair call to the Africana, a medium-tonnage cable ship Planétaire Systems Corporation had contracted to maintain its undersea fiberoptic lines. But sights like the one now before his eyes gripped him with a kind of joyous awe, and were what truly pulled him to the cold depths. That he earned an excellent wage was only a convenient, if fair, rationale for doing a job he would have paid every last euro of his own to carry out.

Perhaps twice his size, the goblin came closer, cutting a slow circle through the dusky water. Cédric watched as its orbit tightened to within seven meters of him and suddenly broke, the goblin turning away, its abrupt change of direction propelled by a chopping flick of its tail.

The hardsuit’s mini-POD seemed to be working perfectly.

Cédric remained watchful. Shoulder mounted in front of his thruster pack, his xenon lamps played over the veering goblin’s long body. He noticed a pink lacing of blood vessels under its smooth, whitish gray skin. Noticed racks of sharp white teeth on its protrusible jaws, thrust out of its open mouth on reflex like jagged springloaded clamps. Noticed tiny lidless eyes on either side of the thick, flat growth of meat and bone bulging from its snout… eyes that passed over him with an interest he couldn’t have described and an attitude it was impossible to gauge. There was expression in them, yes, and intelligence, but of a trackless alien variety.

Cédric could see why the Japanese fishermen who’d discovered the species had chosen its name: Tenguzame, goblin shark. He decided right then that it might be the most spectacularly hideous creature he’d ever seen — with the possible exception of his songful operations manager topside.

“Just look at that thing, will you?” he said over his communicator. Though the words to Marius hardly required secrecy, he had used their closed subchannel. It was something of an amusement. Gunville couldn’t resist eavesdropping from the ship’s control room, and Cédric couldn’t resist thwarting him. “I expected we might run into bulls or tiger sharks… didn’t think these monstrosities climbed above six hundred leagues.”

“It must have been drawn to the cable.” Marius’s digitally transmitted voice was free of distortion. “Wouldn’t be the first time, judging by the number of teeth we saw in the segment that went bad.”

“That’s no explanation.”

“Why not?”

Cédric hesitated a moment. Though a good and dependable fellow, Marius had been on the job less than a year, and his occasional obtuseness could be a frustration. It was true sharks sought out hidden prey with specialized sense organs, nerve-filled pores called ampullae of Loranzini that detected the electrical fields radiated by creatures of the deep… and every other living thing, for that matter. And while the fiberoptic strands at the core of the submarine lightwave cable gave off virtually no stray emissions, the current flowing through the copper tube around the fiber — in these older repeatered systems, anyway — did indeed generate a low-frequency field that would sometimes confuse a shark into mistaking a segment of cable for a potential meal.

This, of course, presumed the SL was functional, unlike the ruptured cable that had caused a partial telecommunications failure for many thousands of the region’s broadband-reliant users. And there Marius’s supposition strayed from logic.

“The wire’s dead. Shorted-out,” Cédric said, trying to check his impatience. However slow on the uptake Marius might be, some allowance had to be made for his relative inexperience on the job. “There isn’t any voltage to stir up the beast’s appetite.”

Marius didn’t look surprised behind his bubbled acrylic dome port, and Cédric wondered for a moment if he might simply take amusement from hearing him state and restate the obvious. An odd thought, and improbable, but not out of the question. Could it be that he was being made a goat?

Cédric chased the question from his mind, having more serious matters to occupy it. Such as why the goblin at least appeared to be going at the cable. Ignoring him, it had swum off toward the sandbank on his left, assumed an almost vertical attitude in the water, and then angled its horny snout down toward the crippled fiber.

Cédric watched the shark resume stitching into the bottom sediment. He remembered that in the early days of submarine cable installation — around the late 1980s — it had been common to find dozens of shark teeth imbedded in sections of damaged line. That problem had been solved by encasing the cables in multilayered armor — a tough yet flexible sheath of plastic laminate steel wrapped in a thick nylon roving. The sharks would still bite, but their teeth rarely penetrated to the electrified copper.

Rarely wasn’t quite the same thing as never, though. As Cédric and Marius had discovered earlier.

Still, Cédric was convinced the shark attacks were only half the story, and that the initial cable fault could be blamed on drag trawlers or dredgers — long-line fishing vessels that dropped heavy nets down to the seabed for tuna, mackerel, cubera, and, in the case of the dredge boats, shellfish. In addition to Gabon’s domestic fleet, the boats came from countries as far to the north as Morocco, Nigeria, and Libya, and as far in the opposite direction as South Africa. They came, as well, from outside Africa’s continental boundaries — Europe and Asia in particular. Fisheries based in Cédric’s native France sent their vessels here. As did companies in Japan, Korea, China, Germany, and the Netherlands. Most were licensed for deepwater operations in the Gulf of Guinea, but there were enough illegal ships that would trawl the spawning grounds nearer the coast, where tight zoning rules had been placed on commercial fishing… the Chinese being the worst offenders.

Cédric knew environmental impact was part of the reason for the restrictions. Fishing accounted for two thirds of Gabon’s economic production, and low yield had been a problem in recent years. But another serious concern was protecting the submarine fiberoptic network that represented a cooperative investment of nearly a billion dollars for local businessmen and their foreign partners in the broadcasting and telecommunications industry.

Unfortunately, policing the seaways was an impossible challenge for Gabon. A runt of a nation, its navy consisted of five hundred men, a couple of patrol boats, and the same number of amphibious hovercraft. This paltry force could not by any stretch keep up with poachers who were skilled at evasion and equipped with state-of-the-art countersurveillance apparatus.

The damaged cable Cédric and Marius been sent down to examine had been terribly mangled — evidence that it had gotten raked up from its shallow burial trench by bottom dragging gear, most likely the saw-toothed iron plow bar of a clam and oyster dredge. At that stage, the cable’s surrounding nylon yarn would have been easily shredded and gashed. Cédric could see how the breach could go as deep as the third layer of armor. He could further imagine a shark attack, or series of shark attacks, finishing the destructive work once the outer armor was compromised.

Which still left him with a significant unanswered question. The goblin… what would have brought it here now, attracted it to a lifeless cable?

A moment later his puzzlement deepened. The shark had continued hovering in the water several yards away like a clock hand pointed to the numeral six, its nose down, its tail fins aimed toward the surface. Cédric saw it lunge straight for the seabed now, its thick, horny snout appendage drilling deep. Sediment billowed up in a turbid cloud. The goblin darted back up and sliced a rapid circle around the spot where it had struck, row upon row of fangs spiking from its open mouth. Then it speared into the sand sheet again, prodding the thick silt and muck, churning more of it from the bottom with repetitive jackhammer thrusts.

“Je ne comprend pas,” Marius said over the pilot-to-pilot. “Our ugly friend’s in quite a froth.”

Cédric was thoughtful. “We need to have a look at what’s agitated it.”

“Are you sure? I don’t know I’d want to approach the creature if it was in a sedate mood.”

“We saw a repeater in the cable about forty meters back. They’re spaced fifty meters apart. Unless my estimate’s off by a long throw, we’ll find another over by the shark.”

“You think that could be what’s making it act up?”

Cédric’s shrug went unseen inside the bulky aluminum alloy shell of his hardsuit.

“The laser pump’s an expensive contraption, Marius. I’d just as soon spare it from becoming an hors d’oeuvre,” he said. “Besides, it may be holding a residual charge. That could prove your idea about the cable attracting it to be half right. Or less wrong, anyway. And I figure you’d enjoy the chance to call me an ass.”

“In this case, I’ll settle for thinking you one.”

Cédric chuckled a little. “Is your POD toggled on?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then we won’t have to get too close. You saw how it turned from us before.”

Marius fell silent, conversely indicating his doubts weren’t at all quieted. But Cédric was reassured by how well the protective oceanic device had performed on the goblin’s approach. Designed to irritate the same sensory organs that allowed sharks to home in on their kills, the POD emitted a 360-degree electrical field that had apparently caused their unwelcome welcomer sufficient distress to make it avoid them.

“Come on,” Cédric said. “I’ll lead the way so you won’t be the first of us to get chewed to pieces.”

Before Marius could finish voicing his sarcastic thank-you, Cédric depressed the pedals inside the hardsuit’s oversize Frankenstein boots — he’d never been told what to properly call the encasements for his feet — and activated his thruster unit.

Its motors engaged with a gentle kick. There were two blade-driven thrusters oriented for horizontal movement, another pair for vertical propulsion, any of which could be used singly or in combination to allow full omnidirectional control. Now all four whirred to life at once.

As the motor vibrations steadied to a faint pulse, Cédric lifted off the seabed in underwater flight, his body remaining in an upright position. Marius swept along behind and to port, careful to stay wide of his backwash.

They closed distance with the shark in a rush and immediately caught its awareness. It withdrew from the sandbank and swung around to regard them, its small round eyes cold and alert, gleaming in its ghastly head like chips of black mirrored glass.

The men assumed stationary hovers, their horizontal propellor blades slowing.

“Why hasn’t your friend left?” Marius said.

“Our friend,” Cédric amended. “Give it a chance to react to our electronic security blanket.”

The shark kept watching them, turned in their direction, stilled by their intrusive presence.

After several long moments it lunged.

Cédric released a gasping exhalation. He heard Marius blurt a stream of invective in his earbud. Its stiletto-toothed mouth agape, the shark came on fast, straight — and then veered away with a lashing herky-jerky motion barely three meters from where the two men hung suspended over the sandbank.

Cédric watched it disappear from sight, felt the knot in his stomach loosen, and took a deep breath of the hardsuit’s recycled oxygen.

“Tell me something,” Marius said. The scratchy tremor in his voice was not due to any transmission breakup. “What’s the effective range of our PODs?”

“Seven meters.”

“The shark should have been informed of that specification, don’t you think?”

Cédric grunted in response and thrust forward through the water. Marius followed. Seconds later they reached the churned up patch of seabed that had been the target of the goblin’s battering frenzy, eased off their footpads, and made a floating descent.

Cédric had scarcely alighted when he saw evidence that his suspicions had been on the mark. Plucked from the unsettled deposits was a cable segment with a lumpish bulge in it, often described as resembling a snake that had swallowed a rodent — a repeater case. It must be what had aroused the goblin’s attention, he thought. No great surprise there, though Cédric made a mental note to corner one of the ship’s cable technicians and find out for sure whether the component could hold a charge despite a widespread systemic power failure.

He was still examining the length of cable when something unusual did catch his eye. Very unusual, in fact.

Cédric looked down at it a moment, baffled. Not far from the repeater, a section of the cable remained partially buried under a thin layer of sand and clingy vegetation. He reached down to clear the material away with his robotic prehensor claws, his fingers working actuators inside the manipulator pod. Then he scrutinized his discovery from a graceless bent-at-the-knees position — the hardsuit’s limited number of hydraulic rotary joints did not permit bending at the waist.

“Marius, come have a peek,” he said.

Beside him, Marius assumed a comparably awkward stance to look at the watertight rectangular box.

“A splice enclosure,” he said. “I didn’t know the wire had old repairs.”

“It doesn’t. Or it shouldn’t. None.”

“You’re positive?”

“None,” Cédric repeated. “You can take a look at the grid charts once we’re back on the ship. But trust me, I’d remember. I’ve been maintaining the cable almost since it was laid.” He carefully extracted the splice housing from the mud with his prehensors. “Something else. The enclosure doesn’t look like any type Planétaire’s used in the past. It’s very similar, yes. Not identical.”

Marius produced a confused frown. “Do you think it has some connection to the service failure?”

“No. You saw where a dredge frame tore up the cable. That was unmistakable.”

“Then what are you trying to say?”

“I’m not certain.” Cédric paused. “But this is a damned mystery.”

Marius’s frown deepened. “Do we tell Gunville about this now or later?”

Cédric silently withdrew a hand from the sleeve of his hardsuit and flipped a switch on the radio console illuminating its inner hull’s chest piece. The diver-to-surface channel opened up with a faint hollowness that he always associated with holding a paper-cup-and-string telephone to his ear in childhood.

“Now,” he said at last. “We’d better let him know right away.”

In the Africana’s monitoring operations room, Captain Pierre Gunville already knew.

His eyes circles of bright green fire in a smooth, mocha brown face — at fifty-two years old, Gunville was sufficiently vain to pride himself in a complexion free of lines, wrinkles, or sagging skin — he stood watching an alarm light flash on a signal column in front of him, sliding his right forefinger over a rudimentary mustache, and silently mouthing the words to a folk ballad he’d learned long, long ago. Its expression of a heart captured by desire, of grace through love’s devotion… not in the five hundred years since the song’s composition had anything surpassed it.

“Belle qui tiens ma vie, captive dans tes yeux, wui m’as l’ame ravie, d’u souris gracieux…”

“Sir, Dupain’s hailing on the transceiver.” Seated with his back to Gunville, one of the half dozen handpicked crewmen at the consoles glanced over from the marine radio’s surface station, his earphones pulled down off his head. “How do you want me to respond?”

The red alarm light continued its steady blinking. Gunville stood in his customary place at the operation room’s rear, moved his finger back and forth over the faint dash of hair above his upper lip, and whispered remembered verses of song. He’d been growing the mustache for less than a week, and it was at the irksome stage where it was neither here nor there — an adolescent’s whiskers. But Jacqueline had told him she found mustaches appealing on men of his type, though she hadn’t elaborated on just what type that was, and by her lack of specificity might as well have said she found it appealing on a mulâtre. Gunville could read between the lines and accept social enlightenment for the theatrical prop it was. Still, he had to admit to being beguiled by the siren. And everything balanced out in the end. Gunville would show her the fullness of his passion, then leave her stung by his spite.

“Sir—”

“I know. Dupain calls.” Gunville was disappointed by Andre’s skittishness. The find below had been anticipated. Only its timing had been at question. “You can tell him I’m busy with a mechanical problem at the aft crane. Or in the engine room. Or that I’m holding a conference, or napping in my cabin. I don’t care what you say. Just stall until this problem’s been solved.”

“Yes.”

Gunville looked at him.

“Another thing,” he said. “Contact the tether winch detail. I want to be sure there are no unassigned hands on deck except the tenders. No witnesses, comprendez-vous?”

After a moment’s hesitation, the radio man nodded, put the cans over his ears, and returned his attention to the console.

Gunville studied the back of his head. Andre was a likeable sort. Married, young children. Of Bantu descent, as had been Gunville’s mother. And he’d worked aboard the Africana for years. But the nature of the ship’s business had rapidly evolved, and it seemed Andre had failed to adapt. Gunville himself felt a great deal of stress, but also realized that he simply had to bear it, putting confidence in his new business alliance and their joint ability to execute contingency plans.

It was sad, he thought. So sad.

Andre would have to go, but at the same time he could not be allowed to move on elsewhere. Leaving him to become a casualty of change. A failure of evolution like poor Cédric and Marius.

Gunville took a mournful breath, reached down into his memory, and again began to move his lips in a low whisper: “Libre de passion, mais l’amour s’est fait maitre, des mes affections, et a mis sous sa loi…”

Immersed in the song’s romantic sentiment, finding comfort in its lyrics and melody, he soon felt very much better.

The yacht rolled over the calm, dimpled sea between the quays of Port-Gentil and the long band of oil platforms extending southward off the Gabonese coastline. These resources, trading port and near-shore petroleum fields, framed an economic success that gave the little nation’s citizens average head-for-head incomes surpassed only by South Africans among their territorially advantaged regional neighbors.

Though of high style, the yacht, or superyacht — as the vessel’s 130-foot length, structural enhancements, and sophisticated onboard technologies truly classed it — was not at all a conspicuous sight as it ran a gentle northerly course toward the Gulf of Guinea, waters abounding with giant blue marlin, tarpon, and other potential brittle-scaled, rubber-finned sportfishing trophies. Individual opulence sparkles amid general prosperity, and the few may taste rare luxury where there is common satisfaction — the queen bee in her honeyed chamber knows.

Inside the Chimera’s four spacious decks, every detail was of plush yet tasteful elegance. There were lacewood and sycamore finishes, walls covered with embroidered Canton silk damask, marble veneers imported from the stone quarries of Pordenone, Italy. On its exterior starboard quarter, a single touch of ostentation flared at the eye: a decorative painting of the ship’s mythological namesake, a creature with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and a sinuous serpent’s tail. In this particular depiction, the monster was shown breathing flames.

The owner of the yacht had an appreciation for fables, relishing the age-old stories for their grand scope, color, and subtext. He had much the same fondness for word-play. Constrained in manner, offering a dispassionate face to the world, he was a man who privately enjoyed the artful lark, the inside jest, the nuanced turn of phrase.

Etymologically, Chimera is the word root of chimerical, an adjective that can be used to describe something — or someone — of a nature that is deceptive and slippery to the mind.

In ichthyology, Chimera is a genus of fish, distantly related to the shark, that has existed in the world’s oceans for four hundred million years — a phenomenal triumph of survival attributed to its swimming at great, lightless depths beyond the safe reach of those who would hunt and trap it.

In genetic science, a chimera is defined as an organism spawned of two or more genetically distinct species. Chimeral plants are propagated by horticulturists and fancied by collectors. Laboratories have created mixed-species test rodents in vitro. Fueled by calls for artificially grown transplant organs and tissues, recombinant-DNA technologies have produced the means to spawn human-animal chimeras through manipulation of embryonic stem cells. Some have been given European patent approvals.

A man of disparate business interests, the yacht’s owner was the prime, and silent, financial backer for a Luxemburg-based biotech firm that held two species-joining patent claims. It was a minor gamble for him, a diversionary fling, but one that might yield profit over the stretch. And in this adventure, too, he saw subtle shades of meaning. Sometimes in his secret reflections, he would imagine himself the spawn of a paternal pig and mother rhea, a flightless bird of garish plumage. On these instances, he saw the comedy of life to be blacker than clouded midnight and as fiery-sharp as the point of a cauterizing needle.

Now he was a tolerable distance from such thoughts. On the large flying bridge of the Chimera he sat on an elevated mango-colored sofa to one side of the pilot-house, his right leg hung over his left, his thin fingers laced together on his lap, watching the slow slide of sea and shore through a panoramic curve of windows. He was dressed lightly for the torrid heat in a pale blue, short-sleeved, collared shirt; cream trousers; and tan deck shoes. Around his neck was a mariner link necklace with a small pendant charm, both of them hand-tooled out of silver from Bolivia’s cooperative Cerro Rico mines. Another of his quirkish notions, the ornament was a representation of the miner’s god, whose shrine occupied a niche behind the entrance to every dangerous sulfur-stinking shaft — a horned, squatted, vaguely wolfish being with a phallic thrust between its thighs, said to hold the power of life and death over the impoverished, ragtag campesino workers who labored to extract his mineral bounty, placating him with gifts of coca, tobacco, and pure-grain alcohol and honoring him with orgiastic celebrations of vice and excess.

Like many gods and monsters of folklore, this lord of the underworld was known by more than one name. Mountain villagers descended from the Inca called him Supai. Most Bolivian peasants knew him as El Tío. The sly uncle who cast a neutral eye on virtue and sin, caring only for tributes offered. A demon that desperate men had sainted in exchange for his inconstant favors.

The owner of the pleasure yacht knew, and he well understood.

He looked out the bridge’s sweeping windows, past the stations where his helmsman and engineers sat in their epauleted white uniform blouses. Looked out at the sun-stippled water and the crowded international harbor and the fixed oil platforms standing with their tall booms, derricks, and wellheads.

Here was wealth, he thought. Tremendous wealth, all visible right on the surface. But none of it interested him. The treasure that had made his migration to Africa something more than a flight from the wide nets of his pursuers, the continent’s greatest bounty, was the light pulsing through fine veins of glass that ran deep where the sun did not reach.

There was no chance in the world that he would let anyone stop him from tapping it.

“Casimir,” he said, his tone soft. “Are you ready?”

His pilot had a brief exchange in the Bandgabi tribal dialect with a man at the console beside him. Then he nodded.

“Yes,” he said, switching to English. “We’ve completed a modem upload-download test… real-time streaming telemetry and multimode sensors are online… everything checks.”

“Why haven’t you deployed, then?”

“Gunville. We were waiting for his confirmation.”

“And he’s given it?”

“Just now,” the helmsman said. “His men are in position aboard the Africana.”

The yacht’s owner unlaced his hands and fluttered one in front of him. He was eager to be rid of those glorified utility workers below.

“Take us on to the next stage,” he said. “Please.”

An instant later he felt the mildest of bumps run through the yacht, and focused his eyes on the monitor boards.

The killfish had launched from its chamber.

The deployment chamber in the Chimera’s lower starboard hold was little different from a torpedo tube, but the minisub housed within bore no resemblance to a conventional weapon or remote underwater vehicle. Nor was there was anything conventional about it.

What it looked like before ejection was a metal shoe-box with a considerable distension around the middle, as if it had been overfilled until its sides were pushed outward. As it left the chamber and its lateral, rear, and top stabilizer/orientation fins unfolded, its appearance grew closer to that of a fish with an egg-swollen belly.

Each of these comparisons was appropriate.

The killfish was full and, after a fashion, pregnant.

“What’s holding up Gunville?” Marius said.

“I don’t know,” Cédric replied. They were back on their closed voice link. “Andre told me that he’s gone to the engine room. Some kind of problem.”

“Bullshit. They’ve got phones in there, and he could reach for one if he chooses,” Marius said. “I’ll bet that son of a bitch is on the pot with his trousers around his ankles, serenading his true love.”

Cédric grinned. And fondling it, no doubt—l’e petite amour. He wasn’t about to argue Gunville’s case, though.

“We’ve been down at extreme depth for almost four hours,” Marius said. “Why push things to the limit? We should video the splice and call it quits.”

“Let’s not work ourselves into a premature snit. Five hours might be pushing.” Besides, Cédric thought, the repair technicians might prefer to receive live imagery from them, observe his curious find from angles of their own choice before lowering their grapple to raise the cable. “We’re bound to hear from the songbird any minute. Meanwhile, we can still do what you suggest, take some pictures—”

Cédric became distracted by a sudden movement at the far right periphery of his vision. He cocked his head inside the dome port for a better look, but it reduced his field of view just enough so he realized he’d have to turn his whole body.

He applied the slightest bit of pressure to his left footpad for a thruster assist and was nudged the opposite way.

A quick spin of his blades, and Marius shifted to face in the same direction. “Don’t tell me the shark’s returned in spite of our PODs being activated.”

“Probably not. Whatever I glimpsed didn’t seem that large.”

Cédric was quiet for a moment. There weren’t many forms of aquatic life down here that presented even the slightest hazard, but he was always on the lookout for an unusual specimen, making him an underwater equivalent of a bird-watcher, he supposed. Though it seemed a stretch to believe he’d have two exceptional sightings in a single dive, maybe he’d gotten fortunate. The Ogooué Basin was stocked full of unique tenants, including deepwater octopuses and nautiluses.

He scanned the underwater dimness, kicking his shoulder lamps to their brightest settings with the touch of a switch inside his hardsuit. Then his gaze fixed on a speedily approaching object about six meters distant at three o’clock.

He raised an arm to point. “Marius—”

“I see it,” his partner said. “What the hell is that thing?”

Cédric’s silence did not stem from any lack of desire to respond. He simply hadn’t the vaguest clue.

For an instant he entertained the thought that he really had lucked into another sighting. That whatever was coming toward them was a strange, wide-bodied fish to be imaged and subsequently identified for his personal archive of marine animals. As it got closer, however, he realized it was neither fish, nor cephalopod, nor any other type of living creature.

“I think — Marius, it looks like some kind of unmanned probe.”

“But that doesn’t make sense… we’d have been informed if one was operating in this area.”

Cédric was silent again. Marius was right, it didn’t make sense. Just as a splice that shouldn’t have been in the cable made no sense. Yet there it was lying uncovered on the seabed only a few steps from where he stood. And there in the bright fan of his lights was an autonomous underwater vehicle unlike any he’d seen in his entire diving career.

Then it struck him that it did resemble something he’d seen before — and that flash of sudden recall instantly branched off into another like electronic data through a signal splitter. Cédric’s first clear memory was of a fish he’d often spotted skimming through the sea grass while on a year-long Planétaire telecom project in the Caribbean. His second was of an article he’d read mentioning the same creature — a fish, family Ostraciidae — in one of the scientific monthlies he read with compulsive diligence. National Geographic’s French edition, perhaps, but that didn’t really matter. The important things for him were that the boxfish was distinguished by the hard outer carapace that deterred predators but also made its body rigidly inflexible… and that the boxfish’s means of locomotion, which gave it exceptional stability and maneuverability despite the unbending armor, had been studied by American military researchers interested in using it as a model for the steering and propulsion systems of future generation AUVs.

All this passed through Cédric’s brain in milliseconds, flashing along parallel but independent paths of recollection toward a sharp, startling convergence as he focused on the robotic craft bearing toward him. If he’d had time to consider them, the implications of what he saw might have caused a slow trickle of fear to filter through his surprise — but he didn’t.

When fear did overtake him it would be in a cold, blustering rush.

The AUV had closed to within five meters of the hardsuit pilot and leveled in a stationary position. Cédric noticed a small lenticular window on its underside, a nubby black projection at its front end, and did not like the looks of either.

Then an opening appeared on the starboard side of the vehicle’s flat hull. Cédric would never know whether the hatch, lid, panel, or whatever it was had recessed into the hull or sprung inward like a trap door — it happened too quickly for him to tell. The opening appeared. And before he could react, a compartment behind the opening released its implausible contents into the water.

The twenty or so dispersing spheres looked to him like metal ball bearings, although they were somewhat larger than racquetballs in size. Each of them had four tiny screw propellers — one on the upper axis, one on the lower, another two on opposite points across its diameter.

His eyes wide with amazement, Cédric thought crazily of a toy called a Pokéball he’d once gotten his youngest nephew for his birthday, something that opened up like an egg to release a little cartoon imp.

He was still thinking of it when the spheres assembled into tight cluster formation and came swarming toward the spot where he stood with his dive partner.

“Cédric… what’s going on?” Tension brimmed in Marius’s voice. “What are those things?”

Cédric couldn’t waste an instant with guesswork. He switched to the diver-to-surface freq.

“Africana, we have a situation,” he said.

He got an earful of silence in response.

“This is a mayday, Africana. Repeat, mayday, can you read?” he said.

More dead silence from topside.

“God damn it, come in, what’s wrong with you up there?”

Still nothing. And the rapidly moving spheres were almost on them.

Cédric abandoned the radio, looked at Marius. He had no shred of a plan in his head, and the knowledge that their thrusters weren’t designed for speed hardly inspired confidence one would come to him. But Cédric had been a navy man for a very long time, and he did not like it at all that the lens-shaped aperture and black projection on the minisub were reminiscent of the guidance and homing packets of seeker torpedoes.

The robotic swarm meant danger.

“We have to get away,” he said. The declaration sounded blandly, hatefully obvious. “Try to—”

They were the last words he managed to get out of his mouth before the spheres came swooping down on them.

He felt three quick, clapping thumps on the back of his thruster unit, a fourth against the POD encasing his right hand, followed by a fifth and sixth on his left. There were some hard claps to his chest and the side of his neck, and the next instant a staggering thump-thump-thump against his foot that almost threw Cédric off balance into the muddy sediment.

“My God!” Marius shouted over the comlink. “They’re sticking to us. Sticking!”

More of the obvious. The globes were clinging wherever they struck. Cédric could see them becoming affixed to the same areas of Marius’s hardsuit as his own, fastening themselves to its thruster pack and dome collar joint, bunching onto the prehensors of both extremities like crops of giant metal berries. He simultaneously realized they weren’t attaching to Marius’s upper arms and legs, points that had also escaped contact on his suit.

Again Cédric had no chance to wonder what this implied. He was far too cognizant that if either of their hulls suffered a breach, its internal environment would be displaced by sixty atmospheres of pressure — a compression so vastly beyond human tolerance that it would pulp its occupant’s internal organs and burst the very walls of his blood cells.

He felt another of the spheres hit his back. How many were on him now? Ten, twelve?

Beside him, Marius was close to panic. His arms rose and fell against heavy water resistance, rose and fell, flapping in what looked like slow motion as he tried to shake the spheres from his gripper claws.

Cédric knew he was scarcely further away from losing his composure.

“Marius, hold still, I’ll try to pull them off you,” he said. “We need to stay calm, try and get them off each other.”

Marius met his gaze through their rounded dome ports, gathered his wits enough to stop the furious paddling of his arms.

Cédric reached out to Marius with his lefthand prehensor, testing its mobility with his individuated finger control rings. He was somewhat amazed to find that he could still open and close it despite the weight of the spheres attached to two of its four stainless-steel claws.

He clamped the gripper around a sphere lodged at the base of Marius’s neck, gave it a strong tug. It didn’t budge even a little. He tugged harder, microelectromechanical sensors inside the control rings transferring his exertion to the claw as increased output. The sphere would not yield, and now Marius was screaming again, unnecessarily reminding him that it was sticking, it was sticking, the damned thing wasn’t coming off. Cédric could feel himself start to nervously perspire inside his suit and added a prying motion on his third try, straining the gripper’s servos to their limits.

The sphere finally detached from the collar joint — but by just the slightest bit. A few centimeters at most before clamping right back on, pulling along Cédric’s MEMS-AIDED gripper claw with a powerful attraction that jerked his arm up and out toward Marius.

All in a moment’s span his relief had budded, bloomed, and turned to ash gray wilt as fear blew through his heart in a killing frost. He could neither separate the sphere from Marius, nor himself from the sphere, which now joined them as if…

Cédric blinked with the last meaningful realization of his life. Another that seemed so glaringly evident, he could only wonder how it had not dawned on him much sooner.

“They’re magnetized,” he heard himself tell Marius in an almost matter-of-fact tone.

Marius’s eyes were full of terror and confusion behind his view port. In fact, it almost seemed to Cédric that his features had drawn together into a bold, hanging question mark.

Cédric was wondering just what sort of answers were expected of him when the spheres fastened to the hardsuits exploded, and the rushing sea took his thoughts.

“Well, Casimir? My curiosity pesters.”

“We have total success. The neodymium hunter swarm has acquired and neutralized its targets.”

The yacht owner’s eyes were brilliant ice. “Would damage imagery be too tall a request?”

Casimir’s attention held on the monitor and control boards.

“It could be done,” he said. “The killfish has been recalled beyond the outer edge of the blast zone, and its backscatter sensors show a high density of suspended particulate matter within the zone. But we could task it—”

“No need, bring it back in,” the yacht owner said. “Laziness of imagination is a common failing in this day and age, Casimir. We mustn’t allow ourselves to submit.”

“As you wish.”

The yacht owner reclined on his pale orange sofa, his bone-thin form barely impressing weight into its cushions.

“And his spirit moved upon the face of the waters,” he said in a near undertone. “Fiat lux.”

Casimir’s head turned briefly to regard him over a white uniform epaulet.

“What was that, sir?”

The yacht owner passed his fingertips through the air.

“Old words from an old and very fascinating story,” he said.