So they spent the evening in the clammy noisy submarine warehouse, Ely and his friends rummaging for equipment Nirgal could use. And spent the night on short narrow beds in Ely’s boat, rocking as if in a big clumsy cradle.

The next morning they puttered through a light mist the color of Mars, pinks and oranges floating this way and that over slack glassy mauve water. The tide was near ebb, and the salvage crew and three of Nirgal’s escorts followed Ely’s larger craft in a trio of small open motorboats, maneuvering between chimney tops and traffic signs and power-line poles, conferring frequently. Ely had gotten out a tattered book of maps, and he called out the street names of Sheer-ness, navigating to specific warehouses or shops. Many of the warehouses in the wharf area had already been salvaged, apparently, but there were more warehouses and shops scattered through the blocks of flats behind the seafront, and one of these was their morning’s target: “Here we go; Two Carleton Lane.” It had been a jewelry store, next to a small market. “We’ll try for jewels and canned food, a good balance you might say.”

They moored to the top of a billboard and stopped their engines. Ely threw a small object on a cord overboard, and he and three of the other men gathered around a small AI screen set on Ely’s bridge dash. A thin cable paid out over the side, its reel creaking woefully. On the screen, the murky color image changed from brown to black to brown.

“How do you know what you’re seeing?” Nirgal asked.

“We don’t.”

“But look, there’s a door, see?”-

“No.”

Ely tapped at a small keypad under the screen. “In you go, thing. There. Now we’re inside. This should be the market.”

“Didn’t they have time to get their things out?” Nirgal asked.

“Not entirely. Everyone on the east coast of England had to move at once, almost, so there wasn’t enough transport to take more than what you could carry in your car. If that. A lot of people left their homes intact. So we pull the stuff worth pulling.”

“What about the owners?”

“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people when we can, and charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re not on the register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and such. Here, look — we’ll see what that is.”

He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah. Refrigerator. We could use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”

“What about the house?”

“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But not this morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”

They puttered away. Ely and another man continued to watch the screen, arguing mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even before the flood,” Ely explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a couple hundred years, ever since the empire ended.”

“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.

“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and all the little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time ago.”

Finally Ely killed the engine, looked at the others. In their whiskery faces Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy anticipation. “There then.”

The other men started getting out underwater gear: full wet suits, tanks, face masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Ely said. “He was a giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker, one without feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a complete helmet. “There’s booties of his too.”

“Let me try them on.”

So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the wet suits, sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the tight collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the left side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it was very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other divers, named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right then, for one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him on the side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”

“I will.”

Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly felt huge. Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an agony — a fatal blow — how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a minute, two? Rolling in agony, in the dark…

He pulled himself out of an intense recreation of Eric’s end, feeling shaken. They got a breathing rig attached to his upper arm and face mask, and abruptly he was breathing cold dry air, pure oxygen they said. Ely asked again about going down, as Nirgal was shivering slightly. “No no,” said Nirgal. “I’m good with cold, this water isn’t that cold. Besides I’ve already filled the suit with sweat.”

The other divers nodded, sweating themselves. Getting ready was hard work. The actual swimming was easier; down a ladder and, ah, yes, out of the crush of the g, into something very like Martian g, or lighter still; such a relief! Nirgal breathed in the cold bottled oxygen happily, almost weeping at the sudden freedom of his body, floating down through a comfortable dimness. Ah yes — his world on Earth was underwater.

Down deeper, things were as dark and amorphous as they had been on the screen, except for within the cones of light emanating from the other two men’s headlamps, which were obviously very strong. Nirgal followed above and behind them, getting the best view of all. The estuary water was cool, about 285 K Nirgal judged, but very little of it seeped in at the wrists and around the hood, and the water trapped inside the suit was soon so hot with his exertions that his cold hands and face (and left ribs) actually served to keep him from overheating.

The two cones of light shot this way and that as the two divers looked around. They were swimming along a narrow street. Seeing the buildings and the curbs, the sidewalks and streets, made the murky gray water look uncannily like the mist up on the surface.

Then they were floating before a three-story brick building, filling a narrow triangular space that pointed into an angled intersection of streets. Kev gestured for Nirgal to stay outside, and Nirgal was happy to oblige. The other diver had been holding a cable so thin it was scarcely visible, and now he swam into a doorway, pulling it behind him. He went to work attaching a small pulley to the doorway, and lining the cable through it. Time passed; Nirgal swam slowly around the wedge-shaped building, looking in second-story windows at offices, empty rooms, flats. Some furniture floated against the ceilings. A movement inside one of these rooms caused him to jerk away; he was afraid of the cable; but it was on the other side of the building. Some water seeped into his mouthpiece, and he swallowed it to get it out of the way. It tasted of salt and mud and plant life, and something unpleasant. He swam on.

Back at the doorway Kev and the other man were helping a small metal safe through the doorway. When it was clear they kicked upright, in place, waiting, until the cable rose almost directly overhead. Then they swam around the intersection like a clumsy ballet team, and the safe floated up to the surface and disappeared. Kev swam back inside, and came out kicking hard, holding two small bags. Nirgal kicked over and took one, and with big luxurious kicks pulsed up toward the boat. He surfaced into the bright light of the mist. He would have loved to go back down, but Ely did not want them in any longer, and so Nirgal threw his fins in the boat and climbed the ladder over the side. He was sweating as he sat on one bench, and it was a relief to strip the hood off his head, despite the way his hair was yanked back. The clammy air felt good against his skin as they helped him peel the wet suit off.