"Hey, Pah-treeeeeees-ia."

Perito and Patricia were working on SubLorraine, getting it ready for the Engineering inspections. Patricia was standing on a ladder using Kevlar cloth and resin to patch the holes in the vertical stabilizer, while Perito was doing the maintenance check on all the through-hull fittings.

"What is it, Perito?" She was working the substrate up slowly, being careful to eliminate any air pockets that could collapse under pressure.

"What's this nuevo instrument package? Was it something you added for the Amoco job?"

The fumes from the resin were strong, and she should've had the doors open and a fan blowing. They were making her groggy. "What package?" The hydrocarbon detector had been there for years. She shook her head violently to clear it and backed down the ladder.

Perito was crouched under the submersible by the instrument bay, a recessed pocket that was at the rear of the hydrophone housing. Occasionally SubLorraine was hired for research tasks, and she had the bay and interface to handle specialized packages-everything from seawater chemistry sensors to a laser line scanner used to image the bottom in low-visibility conditions.

Perito had a screwdriver in his hand and was about to remove the restraining clamps to get at the strange box.

"Stop!" she said. She tried to say it as quietly as possible, but the intensity in her voice came through, and he jerked, banging his head on the hull.

"Owwwwwww! What did you do that for?"

She didn't answer him but crouched, frozen. What to do, what to do? One part of her wanted to pull Perito from the room and run, screaming. She looked closer.

"Why did you think it was an instrument package-besides the fact that it's in the instrument bay?"

He started to reach up toward the bay and she intercepted his hand. "Best not to touch it, I think. It's a bit of a jury rig."

"Uh, there's a pressure transducer on the side. A Micron MP49."

She leaned over to view it and nodded. The transducer was just a small stainless-steel circular face on the exterior of the box, but Patricia recognized it. She had a box of them in a cabinet in the corner of the sub pen. They were used in every hex of New Galveston to monitor the water displacement in the float chambers. The higher the pressure, the greater the water displaced. They weren't terribly sensitive,but they could measure pressure to a quarter of a pound per square inch.

A thin-wire aerial ran down the side of the box beneath the transducer.

Unbidden, the memory of a gravelly voice came to her. "The idea is for them to vanish, not to cause more headlines." She shuddered. Submarine goes down. It doesn't come up. Well, it's happened before.

She held herself still, hoping Perito didn't smell the sudden tang of nervous sweat. "Right. I'll need to fiddle with it in a little bit, but I've got an errand for you right now."

"Si?"

"Yeah. The lithium hydroxide cartridges are ready from the recyclers. I'd like you to take the boat over and get them, plus a kilo of activated charcoal."

"What about the through-hulls?" He held up the clipboard. The checkmarks only went halfway down the list.

"They close for lunch and I was hoping to start the engineering inspections this afternoon. You'll just make it, if you scramble. I'll finish the checklist."

"H'okay, jefe." He handed her the clipboard.

She followed him to the door. "Um, Perito, did you go out for dinner last night?"

He swallowed. "I did. I couldn't find anyone to watch the pen, but I locked it well. We were only gone for thirty minutes."

"We? Toni?"

"Claro que si."

"Ah. Okay. See you shortly."

Perito left, nodding to the cop standing guard outside the door. She looked at the policeman for an instant, considering, but when she heard the motor on the company runabout fire up and pull away, she locked and bolted the door.

Giddy and a bit numb, she crouched before the submarine and said aloud, "How do I detonate thee? Let me count the ways. I detonate thee by the depth to which you descend, by lapse of time, by the distant caress of a digital radio signal, and by the passion of a tamper switch."

She longed to call Major Paine and the NGPD Bomb Squad but thought, if they were watching, it would only take the arrival of more police to make them detonate it from afar, no matter how much they would prefer an ambiguous implosion beneath the waves. And she was not prepared to lose SubLorraine.

She licked her lips and moved, before fear froze her in place.

She used a pneumatic abrasive wheel to cut through the Kevlar composite, neatlyseparating the hydrophone housing from the instrument bay. Then, supporting the bay, she pulled the short bolts holding the tail of the bay to the titanium hull, and slid it backward, along the hull. She looked into the gap, at the instrument bus connector.

Thank god. They hadn't connected her instrument bus to the device. The cable pulled clear out of the now open end of the composite structure, and the entire thing lowered in her hands, the clamps still clasping the device tightly to the Kevlar enclosure. She kept it level, worried there might be a mercury tilt switch, and peered into the sawed-open end.

She swallowed. There was the gleam of a contact switch just visible between the case of the device and the top of the instrument bay. If she'd unbolted the box using the instrument restraining clamps, the switch would've popped out, closing a circuit or opening one-she didn't know which-but she was certain of the result.

When Thomas hears about this, he is going to kill me.

She set the assembly carefully down in the corner, cushioned on a pile of rags, then ran back and unbolted one of the floor panels, practically throwing it to the side, out of her way. Refracted sunlight painted flickering mosaics across the bottom of the sub and pen's ceiling.

If there was a timer, and she had to assume there was one, how much longer did she have? And how much pressure was the detonator set for? Surely greater than twenty feet-the submarine could still be in the harness; otherwise, when it went off.

That could scarcely be interpreted as an unfortunate accident. Yet, if they knew about her upcoming schedule of hex inspections, they'd know she could easily do several days without ever getting below two hundred feet.

She grabbed a roll of duct tape and a two-kilo lead ballast weight used to trim the submarine when carrying extra equipment. I would've set it at twenty-two psi, just over fifty feet. She strapped the weight to the smooth bottom of the assembly, passing the tape several times around.

And if they set it to go off the minute it hits the water?

She envisioned a system of strings hung from the bottom of the sub and run to the door, allowing her to lower it from a distance. She looked at her watch. And I could run out of time rigging something like that.

She lowered the assembly slowly to the water's surface, through the gap in the floor. The lead weight touched the water first and she held her breath as liquid covered the device itself.

She let go and it dropped quickly, fluttering side to side and starting a slow spin, like an unusually stable autumn leaf dropping from a tree. She stared at it a moment, frozen, then shook her head. Idiot! She scrambled back until she was off the temporary floor panels, then stood and ran for the door.

I've got to open it before the pressure wave-Her ears popped hard, and water geysered into the pen from the open floor panel, and then the floorboards were ripping up, bent and twisted, and the main sub-pen doors blew out, blasted open by air and water.

She found herself jammed into the corner near the smaller door, wet and twisted.

She was having trouble seeing and realized that blood was running into her eye from a cut on her forehead. The small door flew open and a piece of the lock bounced off the floor in front of her; then the policeman who'd been guarding her door charged through, his gun drawn.

Oh, great. Shoot the bomb.

That'll learn it.

She didn't let them put her in the ambulance until they had four NGPD officers standing guard around the pen and she'd taken a quick look at SubLorraine. The submersible seemed fine. The pressure wave was generated far less than what it took routinely in a deep dive, and it had barely moved. She left a note for Perito to run a complete systems check.

Then, with a splitting headache, she let them put her in the ambulance-a hovercraft that did the run over to St. Joseph's in less than two minutes.

She didn't know if it was a slow day in the ER or the escort of four uniformed police officers, but she spent remarkably little time waiting. They took skull X rays and blood, peered in her eyes and ears, thumped her rudely all over her body, asked a million annoying questions, made her pee, stitched up her forehead, and finally transferred her to a private room.

She tried to nap, but just when she fell asleep, they woke her up to make sure she didn't have an epidural hematoma, or the bad dreams would return. It was almost a relief when Major Paine arrived to chew her out.

"It's all very well for you, but you wouldn't be the one having to tell Thomas the news. We have one instruction for police officers who find bombs. Can you guess what it is?"

Patricia was trying to look contrite. "Vacate the area and call the Bomb Squad?"

"Exactly. I don't care how expensive or irreplaceable your submarine is, you are not. What would they have done at the school, at your apartment building, in the assembly?"

The sob surprised her, half laugh, half cry. The tears and runny nose followed immediately.

Major Paine's face went from angry to distressed. "Hey, now. Uh, there's no need for tears-"She held up her hand, tried to speak, but couldn't. She made a grasping gesture toward the box of tissues at the bedside table.

He plucked several from the box and handed them to her.

When she'd blown her nose and wiped her face, she said, "Sorry. It's not what you said. It's how you said it."

He frowned, puzzled. "Perhaps. I was a bit too-"

"No! It wasn't that. For a moment there, you were channeling my father. Word for word, almost, with the same facial expression. It took me by surprise, that's all."

She blew her nose. "I'm sorry about the bomb, but SubLorraine is Dad's legacy. If they'd seen the Bomb Squad hovercraft pull up, I'm sure they would've blown it remotely."

"Dammit, you don't know that. If we'd been able to disarm it, we could've traced the components. Hell, even if it'd gone off, we'd have microtags to trace, but you sank those along with all the other components. What am I to do with you!"

She couldn't help smiling.

"It's not funny!"

She covered her mouth with her hands. "Sorry. You're doing it again. That was his expression. 'What am I to do with you!' Well, it's a bit like crying over spilt milk, isn't it? What about the things you can do, like seeing if somebody saw something? Perito was there continuously except for a thirty-minute window last night."

"We're on that." He sat down suddenly on the corner lounger and stuck his feet out. "Here." He took something from his breast pocket and flipped it through the air.

It landed on the blanket between her legs.

She picked it up. It was a disposable pager-a three-by-two-inch piece of plastic barely an eighth of an inch thick.

Paine rubbed his face with both hands. "It was my daughter's. We just bought her a phone so she doesn't need this anymore, but the account is good for another three months. I gave Thomas the number over a secure line, so he can send you messages. It's not encrypted, but as long as he uses random phones to call you, it's secure enough."

She squeezed the dot in the corner. The surface opaqued, and an alphanumeric message appeared.

YOUR HEART STILL SAFE IN MY KEEPING.

MINE IN GRAVE DANGER.

NO MORE BOMBS PLEASET.

She smiled foolishly at the words, then looked up at Major Paine. "These are waterproof, right?"

Paine nodded. "Yeah. Don't know about pressure-proof, but the battery and electronics are embedded. They're supposed to last a year, but Mildred always lost them before the battery could run down."

"When did you talk to him?"

"Right before I came here. He was not happy about the bomb. He suggested protective custody."

He must be upset. "But only suggested, right?"

Paine shrugged. "I came back with extended hospitalization, under guard. He liked that."

"How nice for him. When will the doctors let me out of here?"

Paine laughed, one short bark. "How long have you known Thomas?"

She glared at him. "I told you. Less than a day and a half before he went to Houston."

"He told me you wouldn't go for either of those options. So he told me to ask you to go the 'nice hotel where the guests don't necessarily show up on the registry.' "

"He wants me to disappear. On my own."

Paine nodded. "Apparently he likes that better than you being an open target."

He knows me. That was nice. And maybe he could join me there.

"It's a thought," she said. "It's definitely a thought."

There was a steady stream of visitors: teachers from Art of Learning, some assembly members, even Mrs. Fong with her grandson as interpreter. She thanked them for their flowers and cards and pleaded headache rather than go through the whole mess again and again. Finally she got the sympathetic staff to refuse visitors, saying she was sleeping, and to intercept the phone calls.

In late afternoon Major Paine sent her a woman police officer who arrived in the hospital room carrying a large suitcase and what looked like a tackle box.

"Dawlink, such things vee gonna do for you." She shut the door behind her and held out her hand. "I'm Officer Bowers y Romero. Call me Liz."

Liz, after hours, was one of the corps members of the New Galveston Companiade Noche, a semipro theatre company. "Though it spills over into the day job. The detectives call me in all the time when someone has to go undercover and needs to change their image." She prodded Patricia from the bed and made her stand out in the middle of the room.

"Okay. The hospital gown is nice, I like the color, it shows off your legs, but the lines are all wrong." Liz untied the strings at the back, stepped in front of Patricia, and held out her hand.

Patricia pulled the gown off and handed it to her, standing there in panties. Her instinct was to cross her arms in front of her breasts, but she let her hands hang down by her side and raised her chin.

Liz walked slowly around her. "Mmmm. You're a tiny thing. Flat-chested, short.

Yeah, we can do this, no problem."

She opened the suitcase on the bed and pulled out a large underwire bra. It wasn't empty. "Here. I use this mostly to dress small men as women, but you won't need the hip pads that go with it. You ever want bigger tits? They're overrated, but men like 'em for some reason."

She helped Patricia put it on, adjusting the straps and hooks. The falsies were some sort of gel pack, with a tendency to sag convincingly. "Here, slide your own tits up on top, and let the gel pack push up. There-cleavage. Works much better on you than guys. Hair and muscle. We can go with a low-cut dress."