I stretched my arms and let myself settle into the soothing pressure, about a foot under the surface. Ahhhhh, that’s better. Enough of that gravity bullshit. I balled myself into a fist, counted to four, straightened out, and shook my legs. Damn. Mobility problems. Too much crap. Which, naturally, the SBS guys called “systems.” Of course, gear doesn’t weigh anything once you’re in the water, but there’s still a limit to how many protuberances you want on your eighteen square feet of body surface. The closed circuit rebreather-which didn’t make any tattletale bubbles-was lighter than a normal tank, but it was big, and they’d loaded me up with all this other gear, including a full-face mask by Ocean Reef-I think we can call it a helmet-with unslashable woven steel hoses and securing straps around your forehead so enemies couldn’t yank it off. There was also a night-vision system with protruding flylike eyes that swiveled in and out of my field of view. It seemed jerry-rigged and jury-built, and my whole left forearm was covered with what looked like a black-jade scaled wrist cuff, with the OLED screen and big keys with excitingly geometrically styled raised icons. The trickiest deal on it was the synthetic aperture LIMIS, that is, Limpet Mine Imaging Sonar. The speakers were on the Gotengo, of course, but each of us could see the picture on our heads-up screen, shifted so that it corresponded to our own point of view. Supposedly the pings were disguised, and too low for most countersonar systems to hear anyway. Still, the resolution was great. You could see, or rather hear, a beer can on the ocean floor a quarter-mile away. Then there was the adaptive-beamformer communications system, and the beacon system that ID’d and located me, which also included five ’trodes taped to my chest that monitored my heart rate and blood pressure and, for all I knew, my sperm count. And they’d mandated those new tiny thin superspringy fins that kill your knees, and then the worst thing was that the supposedly ballistic wetsuit was way too stiff. Don’t worry about it. Breathe. Ahh. Okay. Depth fourteen feet, temp sixty-four degrees, and pressure 1.3 ATM. Check, check, and check. Location, 17.22° North, 63.1° West. Current, east by northeast at five miles per hour. Littoral floor depth, thirty-one feet. Estimated travel time to the reef was creeping up on fifty minutes. I squinted at the heads-up display. It showed a hundred-foot area in three dimensions, on an xyz axis with me at zero. There were four views, like on 3-D AutoCAD software. And right now it showed way too many blips. Lots of snapper around. I switched it to standard mode, which was supposed to edit out anything under shark size, and everything disappeared except the six blue dots for the other divers and the big green one for the Gotengo.

Djoong djoong dhoong djoong, Megalon went. Get in formation, he meant. Djoong djoong djoong djoong. I finned myself to the right and forward. Three blips came up even with me, as though I were the leader, although I wasn’t. Ana was the nearest on my left and Megalon was nearest on the right. Breeeeep, Ana’s wrist thing went in my ear. It meant, “Jiga here, all okay.” I hit two keys meaning “Jed 3 here, all okay.” The others sounded off.

Get ready to rumble, I thought. A flock of sphinx moths fluttered around in my stomach.

Even when we got close to the targets, and even though the system knew Jed 1 ’s height and weight, they probably wouldn’t be physically different enough for us to tell one from another. Which was the reason we weren’t carrying underwater firearms, although they do make guns that shoot steel rods instead of bullets and Megalon even had some. But there wasn’t any point when the mission was to bring the subject back very alive. So that was that.

Yesterday we’d gone over our moves with one of us holding the target from behind and the other tying him up, I could at least see how it could be done. In fact, they said, more manpower would be superfluous. Still, there Gonnng!

It meant everybody was ready and all was clear. There was a pause and then it gonged again, higher, meaning “Let’s go.” I twisted the handlebar and felt the vibration of the silent propeller and, sluggishly, the DPV started to move, dragging me behind it. Forward, I thought. Once more into the breechclout. Stick your courage in the screwing place. I settled into the slipstream. The ridged silt bottom scrolled under me faster and faster. A school of emerald-green palometas darted in front of us and turned around and away, in sync, like trained pigeons. Forward. The current seemed stronger than the arm thing said it was. Or maybe I’d just gotten soft. Spending all that time counting money. During the test runs the SBS guys had been pretty dismissive of my diving skillz. But since they’d all spent more than a couple tours defending our freedom by slogging through ninety-degree half-crude-oil diarrhea in the Persian Gulf and digging unexploded ordnance out of boiling wreckage, I’d tried to take it in stride. Thank God Marena didn’t have enough diving experience to play SEAL. Still, she’d refused to stay onshore.

Come on. You can do this. No sweat, blood, or tears. Forward! Forward drag! Trails of water swooshed around me like Japanimation speed lines. When you head into pure blackness you start to feel that you’re not going horizontally, but falling. Moving, moving… youch.

Damn. Still having crotch trouble. Ignore, ignore.

Okay. Think. Jed 1 ’s boat’s set up for diving. So the support line’ll probably come off the windward side. The port side. Hmm.

Mainly by luck, the two guys Ana called her “conventional tecs”-that is, digital-and-paper-trail investigators-had gotten us a good picture of the Megalon. They’d gone over a list of all the over-thirty-footers registered in Jed 1 ’s “active zone,” the area he could reach in less than a day of surface travel, and they’d come up with sixty-eight possible boats and their locations. And I’d just cross-checked those with the biomaps and in less than five minutes I’d picked out the right reef. It was a not-very-well-known stand of Dendrogyra cylindricus, that is, pillar corals, which are food sources for a few types of nudibranchs, including Lasidorus greenamyeri, the possibly eusocial type that Johnny Greenamyer had first described in the June issue of the Journal of Malacological Studies. Anyway, then Ana’s tecs interviewed some local skippers and they’d said that most of the reefs had died over the last ten years but there was a half-mile or so at the southern end of one of them, three miles offshore, that was still alive and almost pristine. Then the ex-SBS people had taken the Gotengo out there and after only forty minutes of eavesdropping Ogra’s voice print had turned up on the wave-form monitor.

We were all pretty thrilled, considering. Megalon was glad that Jed 1 would be diving and not just sunbathing on deck. “It’s a lot safer to grab him underwater,” he said. “Most of the issues occur during boarding attempts.” Also, when he’d asked whether it was possible that Jed 1 would kill himself rather than get captured, I’d said it was a possibility. So they didn’t want to give him any time.

Megalon said that in the old days-meaning, say, ten years ago-it would have been tough to pinpoint a human target in such a large area of dark ocean. But now the Boat Service was using piezoelectric transducers that sent the data to a Kurzweil program that zeros in on human-made sounds, specifically on the distinctive rhythm of UBA breathing. Unless they held their breaths, we’d know where they were.

The Blue Sun wasn’t a known smuggling boat and nobody on board was likely to be armed. Even so, Ana had started off insisting that I couldn’t go along, and there’d been a lot of back-and-forth about how my Sacrifice Game skills were too valuable to warrant putting me at risk and everything. But I kept sticking to my spiel about how my Game stuff wouldn’t be valuable for very long if the whole planet got sucked into nonexistence, and how Jed 1 ’s interrogation was still in the future, and if something went wrong with it we’d need all the other information we could get. If Jed 1 spotted us and got back to his boat and we had to try to negotiate, he’d respond better to me than to anyone else. Maybe he’d even let us take him in. Or even if Jed 1 resisted to the bitter end, he still might blurt out something to me that he wouldn’t say to other people, or-and of course this was grabbing at straws-maybe I’d just notice something that the others wouldn’t pick up on, something in his behavior that might give us a wisp of a hint of a ghost of a clue to the Domino Cascade.