Falling behind. Keep up. I twisted the left handlebar for a burst of speed and got back into the formation. Come on. Run silent, run deep. My heads-up display said we’d gone two thousand and fifty feet, so the Blue Sun was three hundred thirty-four feet away. Megalon sent out a series of short, A-flat beeps repeating a 2-3-2, 2-3-2 pattern. Damn, forgot what that meant. Getting groggy. I touched the SONIC CODES LIST button on my Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist TV. DESCEND, it said. I let some gas out of the buoyancy compensator and sank about ten feet. There was that cozy feeling of the sea hugging me closer. If you could just stay down here, you wouldn’t need the Celexa. Ahhhhh.

Around here the tips of the corals were usually about twenty feet from the high-tide surface, so Jed 1 would probably be down at this level or lower. Or he Bling grong, Megalon said. Time to switch off the headlights. We all slowed to a crawl. Jeddo-Sub-One probably wouldn’t even turn on his spotlight. It’s better to check out the nudis in the natural chemoluminescence of the ambient plankton. I switched off the lamp and the night-vision goggles automatically swung into position on the front of my mask, lighting up the silty seabed in that granular green.

Hmm. Not okay, I thought. “Not okay,” I beeped. The rows of red numbers on my mask’s heads-up display were way too bright. I fiddled with the keys. Hell. It’d take me more than a minute to type out the whole question “How do you turn down the bloody lights in your eyes?” in words. The keys were big, of course, like on a toddler’s keyboard, and each one had a distinctive shape that you could pick out with your fingertip, which, by the way, you could easily slip in and out of a slit in the thoughtfully designed electrically warmed glove. But the damn thing was still impossible. Should’ve brought slates. More than half the time new gadgets just slow you down. I typed another likely command. Nothing. Breep djoong breep, Megalon went in my ear, telling me to get it together. Breep breep breep breep breep, I typed back, meaning, roughly, wait a goddamn second. Jeez, this show’s running Marena about fifteen thousand dollars a minute, she’d just said she’d sold her last points in the movie, including sequels, video, most of the computer-game rights that weren’t based on the earlier Neo-Teo world, and she was still going into debt, so financially, at least, the EOE would work out for her, and then you don’t even tell us Oh, Okay. Got it. I dimmed the heads-up so that I could barely see it and ran through two reps of rage-abatement breathing. Cancel, cancel. Everybody’s doing their best. They’re professionals, they’re doing a good job, you’re doing a good job, you’re capable, you’re resourceful, and people like you. Okay.

I smell ’branchs, I thought. Can’t see anything that small, though.

Hmm.

On my heads-up display the six blue dots, my own team, were forty feet west, that is, behind me. Adequately close, I thought. The divers from the Blue Sun were too far away to separate and were just one big orange dot.

I switched off the night vision.

Making things out on a lampless night dive is like-hmm. Well, if you’ve done it, it’s like that. Otherwise I guess it’s a bit like standing at an open door in the dark with the light behind you and calling your dog, and somewhere he turns around and, maybe not over-hurriedly, ambles back, and you first make out the dirty emerald green of his eyeshine. Here I could just glimpse the peaks of a few digitate spires, the foothills of the sierra of sleeping coral.

Closer. Hold still.

Nudibranchs.

In the barely two lumens of light they looked dull blue with black stripes, almost exactly like Tambja mullineri.

But they were moving differently from any ’branchs I’d seen before. Almost like a school. I dropped one of my two-pound weights and let myself drift in the school’s-or schoolette, or I guess we can call it a class-I let myself drift in the direction they were headed, southeast, toward the tip of the reef. A little tune, soft but angry, started up in my ear, meaning that I was letting myself get unforgivably separated from the rest of the team. If Hmm. Orange dashes on my mask screen. What does that mean? No, wait, they’re out there. Streaks of lights, evenly spaced, and not Whoa. It was the support line from the Blue Sun, marked with a glowstick every fathom. Yikes. I put the DPV into reverse, backed up twenty feet, angled the thing down, and descended ten feet, toward where I guessed the anchor would be BEEP. DONG. DONG-DANG, BEEP.

Danger.

On the heads-up screen the three orange-for-hostile dots had separated into a wide triangle, with the closest vertex about twenty feet off. But they were also blinking, which meant that the divers’ locations were only approximate.

Coral giant’s-fingers about three yards high. Down another five feet. Colder. Following an undercurrent. I used the old trick of making my eyes like a microscope, crawling over the coral as if it were feeding time, going at it as if I were sucking out the polyps. A little on the late side, I was realizing that Sic’s unfamiliar body wasn’t used to diving, and wasn’t responding the way my original body would have, and so my kicks were awkward and out of sync with my amateur-night spasmodic-ass breathing. I focused on my heads-up display. The rest of the team was falling behind. The farthest of the dots was in a hard-to-read cluster that might have been hostiles. What were they up to? Still dealing with the guards? From the beeping I guessed that they thought I’d ditched my minder intentionally. But why weren’t they talking to me? Was I getting set up by my own team? No, too elaborate. They could’ve gotten rid of me anytime they wanted. Maybe one of them was working for the other side-some other side-and was going to assassinate me? It didn’t seem reasonable. More likely, the guard is more trouble than they’d thought. Or maybe some other people from Jed 1 ’s boat had showed up? That would explain the dot Huh.

There was a dark shape against the dull green coral. In wordless thought and in less than a second, I realized that he was less than five feet away, that he was facing me, that he saw me, and that he was reaching toward me, and, not from his masked face or his head, which was hooded, but just by some hitch in his movement that was as unmistakable and indescribable as the signature rhythm of your mother’s footsteps, I knew that it was Jed 1.

And almost before I knew it, we seemed to be hugging each other, slipperyly. I dropped my DPV but the harness was still attached. I got a hand on him. I couldn’t stop thinking of the scene in one of the later Oz books where the Tin Woodman meets his head. Don’t get distracted. That’s your problem, Jed, you’re always fuguing into a digression at the worst possible-Cancel that. Keep your eye on the bling. Supposedly it was another pretty big problem people had in combat, where they start thinking about some book or running some song they like or whatever and the next thing you know you’re sticking your head out of your trench. Coolitz, I thought. Strength and guile, I thought. In fact just guile.

Where was the rest of our team? Damn, the DPV was dragging us down. I managed to get my left hand in there and get the ’bener off and detach myself and slip partly loose from Jed 1. There was mist in my mask now and I couldn’t see the heads-up stuff clearly, but I could still infer from the shapes and from the sound cues that Jed 1 was finning the two of us away from the rest of the divers, his and mine, away from the reef, out into the deep water. I followed. I guess it’s pretty bathetic to say it was weird, but it was, I mean, there was this person with my mannerisms and my face, who was more obviously me than I was Click. He’d found my channel on his com link.