The rest of it was silent, thank goodness, but her memory readily filled in the images and she shivered again. She half expected them to emerge from the murk outside and press their mangled hands and bodies against the port.

Toni's face was clearly lit from the glow of the screen and Patricia watched her frown increase in intensity; then she saw her entire body flinch back from the screen.

"Jesus!"

Toni was silent long after the video stopped playing. Finally she asked, "We're not going back there, are we?"

"No!" Patricia was surprised at the intensity in her voice. She was the one who talked about keeping quiet after all. She whispered, "No. Definitely not."

"It was horrible, but why is it dangerous to us?"

Patricia pressed the headset back to her ears again. The outboard motors were still revving, possibly keeping station with Terminal Lorraine after dropping men aboard to search the boat. She pictured faceless men rummaging through every compartment aboard SubLorraine and felt like some sleazebucket was groping her in a crowd.

She answered Toni's question. "Did you hear me talk about the shell holes in the wreck? The machine-gun holes? The standard armament on a Witch Class Fastship-that thing that was coming after us-is fifty-caliber machine guns and twenty-five-millimeter cannon."

In the earphones, the Sycorax revved up its turbines and Patricia picked up the sound of its wake deepening."You're saying the INS sank her?"

She pronounced it "ins" as in "ins and outs." She'd been an "out" all her life, so it made sense.

"It's possible. I don't know. I'm not taking the chance. I'll apologize all they want once we're safe on the Strand, but I don't want to deal with them out here. Not without witnesses."

"Why would they do that?"

"Kill us? Or sink that ship?"

Toni waved her hand irritably. "Sink the ship."

"I don't know. Maybe they didn't know they were in the hold. Maybe the crew fired on them. But she was deliberately sunk. There was no other reason for cannon fire at the waterline. And the only reason to sink her would be to keep it quiet."

Toni muttered something.

"What?"

"I said I wouldn't put it past them. I've heard stories," Toni said.

The bearing on the Fastship shifted and Patricia tweaked the settings on the hydrophone, refining the angle. As it moved, the frequency changed, first dropping, then raising again. "Doppler shift. She's coming back."

Toni's eyes widened. "The Fastship?"

"Well, it's not Santa Claus."

The bearing stopped changing and Patricia knew they were retracing the boat's path, the old ship channel. Then she heard a ping, strong and loud, about twenty-five kilohertz.

"Dammit! They're actively sounding the bottom and we're right in their path."

The titanium hull would return a strong, distinctive signal.

Patricia swung the seat forward and kicked the engine in-only ten percent power at first, since SubLorraine was chewing through as much silt as she was water. The nose came up and the sense of dragging stopped. Patricia pushed the thruster to ninety percent and cut starboard, to the southeast, and they came out of the silt cloud into the murky green. If the Sycorax had passive sonar, they'd hear SubLorraine for sure. At ninety percent thrust, the engine hummed like a loud dishwasher and the blade tips cavitated enough to be audible.

Patricia risked one active sonar pulse, forward, and got a strong return at five hundred yards. It was the old stone breakwater lining the ship channel on the north end of Pelican Island. She pulled the nose up until the gauge showed 105 feet of surface water."What's happening?" Toni asked, a hint of panic in her voice.

"I'm running for Galveston."

"Huh? You can go submerged all the way to the Strand?"

"Not New Galveston." New Galveston was the official name of the Strand. "Old Galveston. Drowned Galveston."

The bearing on the Fastship had been changing as they continued up the channel, but now it stopped shifting. "Shit! They've turned toward us. They must have passive sonar."

She dropped the thrusters back to ten percent and banked hard to port, changing course forty-five degrees. At ten percent thrust the sub's noise signature would vanish into the background wash of surface waves and shrimp clicks. Unfortunately, their speed would also drop to less than two knots. Patricia didn't want to use any more active sonar. That'd be like ringing a bell and shouting "come and get it!"

The bearing on the Fastship began shifting slightly and Patricia hoped they were headed for that last contact. She was looking for the old ship channel between Pelican Island and Galveston proper, a deep, narrow channel.

The water clarity was not great, but at their current speed Patricia saw the breakwater in time to avoid running into it. She cut further port, following the breakwater west. Bearing separation on the INS Fastship increased and she felt slightly better.

A weed-shrouded tower with navigation markings loomed out of the gloom and she cut hard to starboard, cutting up over the corner, then dropping down into the old ship channel, pushing down to 130 feet.

The noise signature from the Fastship disappeared, cut off by high sides, and Patricia pushed the thrusters up to fifty percent, figuring that if she couldn't hear them, then they couldn't hear the sub.

She was tempted to shut down, pull out the sleeping bags, and stick there, on the bottom, until they went away. With the lithium hydroxide cartridges that they'd added, they had enough life support for five and a half days. They were more limited by power since they'd have to surface to recharge the flywheels, but still, even at their current reserves, they could stay on the bottom for a day and a half before they had to start hand-cranking the circulation fan to pump air through the CO2 absorbent.

But at the end of the five days she and Toni would still be here, deep inside the EEZ and two hundred miles from home.

After ten more minutes Patricia shut the thrusters off and pulled back on the stick, rising thirty feet from momentum alone. When she swept the hydrophone around, the Sycorax's turbines showed up immediately, fifteen degrees starboard of the stern, which meant they'd given up on the other bearing and were heading out."What's happening?"

"The Fastship is moving out to sea." Patricia put the hydrophone on speaker.

The whine of the turbines filled the sub with loosely organized white noise. Patricia shifted the phone slightly and the noise diminished.

"And now?"

It came after a moment, a clear high-frequency ping. "That's the Lorraine.

Heading for home." Patricia checked back on the other bearing. "Shit. Less separation. They might be shadowing her-waiting for us to come back."

She dropped back into the channel. Two more minutes at fifty percent brought them to the end of the channel where the bridge crossed over to Pelican Island.

Without slowing she raised the sub out of the channel and cut port, up above the docks, past the container gantries, and into the rail yard.

She kept the sub ten feet above the tracks, weaving between old boxcars and switch towers. She kept checking the passive sonar, but what bits of noise she got were scattered and reflected by the many flat surfaces around them.

"Look out!"

Patricia had already pulled the nose up. A nasty tangle of telephone poles and high-tension wires blocked the edge of the yard at Avenue E and they barely cleared it, rising above the sheltering buildings before she cut power.

"Backseat driver." Patricia kept the power down and coasted fifty feet above the bottom. On the sonar, the Sycorax's turbines were revving up again and her bearing shifted, then became constant.

"Dammit! They heard us. I bet they have a navy sonar operator."

She dropped down into Avenue E on the other side of the telephone-pole tangle and kept it low, barely ten feet off the street, trying to maximize the acoustic barrier of the drowned buildings. She ran at twenty-five percent, fast enough to keep moving, but slow enough that she could avoid any obstacles that twenty years of currents had put across the street.

After a bit she cut across to Avenue J and continued southwest past rows of skeleton trees and caved-in Victorian houses, then into the downtown area where some buildings reached as high as the surface.

As soon as the sub was among them, she rose forty feet, drifting along dark windows. She heard Toni shift forward behind her to get a better view. SubLorraine tilted slightly and Patricia corrected with the stick.

"I don't care where you sit, Toni, but pick a place and stick with it. The trim gets out of whack when you move forward or back." She kept her voice soft.

There was a sharp tang to Toni's sweat, overwhelming her deodorant, and whenPatricia looked back at her, Toni's eyes were wide open and her mouth a thin line.

"Is this okay?" Toni asked, her voice tentative.

"It's fine," Patricia said. "There's a sleeping bag tucked under my seat base. It makes a fair butt pad." Patricia pumped some water out of the forward trim tank.

The tendency of SubLorraine to nose down ceased.

She used the headphones to check her bearing on the Sycorax. The turbine/water jet noise was breaking up as they put more and more submerged buildings between them and it.

She pushed the thrust up to ninety percent and ran at eleven knots.

"Won't they hear us?" Toni asked, an edge of panic in her voice.

"The ambient noise in this area is particularly high-surf against the old buildings.

With luck our noise profile will be blocked and distorted by the buildings and lost in the background roar."

"Hopefully?"

Patricia looked back at Toni and grinned a grin she didn't feel. "Hopefully."

She had other worries. They were dropping below twenty percent on the flywheels, and the sub was going to have to surface at some point to run the turbogenerator. The noise profile running full out was bad enough, but the noise from the turbogenerator could be heard through water a good thirty miles if you had the right equipment-and it was clear the Sycorax did. Worse, the exhaust plume was two times hotter than boiling water, and it would stick up into the air like a giant arrow pointed right down on them-a glowing finger on any IR scanner.

SubLorraine covered another seven nautical miles before Patricia got a positive ID on Sycorax. The cruiser had moved outside of Galveston, deeper into the gulf, and was paralleling the island, moving roughly in the same direction as the sub and about fifteen nautical miles away. Patricia had been stopping every five minutes to listen and now that she had them, there was the possibility that they had SubLorraine, but their bearing didn't change.

She tried to locate the Gertrude ping from Terminal Lorraine and finally found it, but not where she'd hoped. After five minutes of listening, she confirmed the worst.

It wasn't headed toward the Strand-it was headed back toward the coast. Shit, they've impounded her.

Considering the range, Patricia thought twenty percent thrust-four knots-would be safe. She put the compass on south-southeast and slowly descended to a hundred feet of surface water once they were past the old shoreline and out into the historic gulf. They still had ten percent of usable PE in the flywheels, and that meant a half hour at their current consumption.

Patricia engaged the autopilot and turned the seat ninety degrees. This put hershoulder right next to Toni's knee. She slumped in the seat and put her feet up on the bulkhead. "So, what's to eat?"

Toni's mouth dropped open and her eyes went wide. "Eat?"

Patricia wasn't really hungry but she was worried about Toni. "Yeah. Eat. Food, preferably. I'm wasting away here." She wanted to give Toni something to do, to take her mind off the tiny quarters.

"How can you think of food now?" Toni's voice rose in pitch, but her shoulders dropped, relaxing some.

Good, good. "Well, I pay attention to my stomach and there it is-hunger."

Toni rolled her eyes and turned away. "If I get you something to eat, will you tell me what the hell is happening?"

Ignorance isn't bliss. "Sure."

Toni put together cheese and crackers. "I figured the cheese would spoil first.

We can switch to peanut butter later." She sliced the cheese using the cardboard cracker box as a cutting board-neat quick strokes with a stainless steel rigging knife. As she worked, the crease between Toni's eyes slowly eased.

Better. Patricia called up a chart of the northwest gulf. "Okay, here we are, just off old Galveston, about sixty miles from the Houston dikes. We've got enough fuel to get to New Galveston." She pointed at the dot representing the Strand, about 160 nautical miles from their current position, just outside the EEZ. "But, we've got to avoid the INS until we're in international waters and, frankly, I'm not sure if it's safe even then."

Toni nodded, chewing mechanically.

"The Sycorax has pretty good sonar equipment and that airborne drone. If they keep after us, they'll find us every time we surface to spin up the flywheels. On the other hand, by the time they get to us, we can be submerged again and, hopefully, safe." Unless they have torpedoes or depth charges.

"How long can we stay submerged? And breathe, that is."

"Well, that's the crux of it. We've got about five days of life support. We can make it on that, but not if we have to creep along to avoid making too much noise. If we could run full out on the surface, we'd make it in by tomorrow, but we'd be sitting ducks." Patricia put air between her cheeks and gums and squeezed it out, making a quacking sound.

Toni blinked, surprised. "Are you sure they're really after us?"

Patricia reviewed the data in her head. "I'm sure they're after us. I'm not sure whether they just want to talk to us and check our papers, or whether they want to kill us and keep us from telling anybody else what we've seen." What I saw. MaybeI should've left her aboard and run for it. Maybe they would've left her alone.

Patricia looked at Toni's face, smooth, untouched by the hand of time. And would you like to be the one to tell her parents if they didn't? "I don't want to risk it."

Toni shrugged. "Well, if they just wanted to question us, we look guilty as hell, running like this."

Patricia shook her head. "I look guilty. It's my name on the registry. Unless you left your ID aboard, they have no idea who you are." Unless they dust the boat for prints.

"Oh."

An alarm sounded-a light tone. Patricia sighed and shut down the thrusters.

"What was that?" Toni asked.

"We're below five percent on the flywheels. We're going to have to surface and run the turbogenerator to get anywhere."

SubLorraine drifted slowly to a stop and listed slightly to port as she lost dynamic stability. Patricia shifted her weight to starboard and closed her eyes. With the engine off and the gain turned down on the sonar speaker, the only sounds were the faint whirring of the circulation fan and, because Patricia was close to her, the sound of Toni's breathing.

"Aren't we going to surface?"

Patricia opened her eyes again. "Eventually. The longer we wait, the farther away they'll get. That's my hope. That's my plan."

"Why do you even do this?"

"What are you talking about?"

Toni shrugged. "You're richer than Midas and you take on these stupid jobs for Amoco when you've got all that stuff back on the Strand."

Patricia sighed. "I am not richer than Midas. And I got a good rate for this job."