"You've got the Elephant Arms Apartments and that school and the garden thing and this sub and that boat. Don't tell me you're not rich."

It must look like riches to you. "Yeah, I've got that stuff, but I also don't make that much from them. I've got over thirty people working for me, and they all have salaries, health plans, and retirement packages. And if I don't keep bringing in money with jobs like this, the whole mess breaks down." And I don't even want to think what happens to them if I die out here.

"Oh." Toni tried to stretch and her long arms hit the bulkhead before she'd even started. "D-dammit! This thing is so tiny!"Patricia reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "Shhhh. Here, trade places with me." She swung the seat toward Toni and squeezed past her, hoping she wouldn't freak as Patricia crowded her even more. Toni moved into the seat quickly.

Patricia lifted Toni's feet up onto the edge of the cushion and turned the chair a full one-eighty, so she faced, and actually stuck out into, the acrylic nose of the sub.

This far off the coast the water was relatively clear, free of silt in the top hundred feet of the water column. When you sat in the front of SubLorraine, you didn't feel like you were contained in a narrow steel culvert-you felt suspended in an enormous green-blue vault.

The water was changing color, gathering more blue as the amount of suspended silt dropped and the visibility increased. It was far less confining than the backseat, like sitting in an enormous cathedral, the moving waves above defracting shafts of light down into the vast space like the glow of stained glass touched by the sun.

"Try deep breaths, now. Deep breaths." Toni shuddered and then visibly relaxed, taking Patricia's advice and breathing deeply. There was a med kit aboard, but short of major pain medication, Patricia didn't think there was anything she could use to tranquilize Toni. Make a note: add Valium to the first aid kit. Also, screen for claustrophobia in future employees.

"I've no intention of dying out here. I'm way behind on the routine inspections of the Strand submerged structures and I've got to get back by Wednesday, for a shift of playground duty."

"What? Don't you have people to work there?"

Patricia grinned to herself. That's it. Get her out of her own head. "We're always shorthanded. Sing me that song," Patricia said. "The one I homed on."

"Huh?" Patricia could see Toni's reflection, surprised, distorted. " 'DNA Blues'?" Toni asked.

"Is that what it was?"

Toni nodded.

"Sing it now."

The dome acted as an acoustic reflector, focusing sound back at Toni's body and adding an almost tactile resonance to anything she said while in the seat. Toni started out weak and tentative but strengthened as she felt the reflected vibrations.

Patricia had wanted to distract Toni, to keep her calm, but it ended up helping Patricia, too. She hadn't realized how tense she was.

Big surprise, that.

When Toni finished, Patricia could see a smile flash in Toni's distorted reflection.

"Nice. Very nice," Patricia said, earning another brief glimpse of teeth. "I'mgoing to need to use the sonar set now."

"Do you want me to move?" There was some anxiety in Toni's voice.

"No. Just hand me the headset. You can work the controls for me." It would be awkward, but it had the double advantage of keeping Toni in the less claustrophobic nose and giving her something to do.

"What are we doing?"

"Looking for a..." Miracle? "...a decoy. Well, not exactly a decoy-some nice noisy traffic heading our way that can hide our sonar signature. Sort of a moving screen." Patricia took the headphones from her and told her how to kick the nose around until they were pointed back toward the coast. The hydrophone for the passive sonar sat in an acoustically transparent dome on the keel of the hull directly beneath the pilot's seat. The lockout hatch and the fan duct distorted sonar reception from the aft quarter and Patricia wanted as much range as possible.

"Okay. That handle right under the edge of the seat is the hydrophone direction control. I want you to twist it around until it's pointed about plus thirty."

"Plus thirty. How can I tell?"

"Look. There's a dial and a pointer."

Toni tilted forward. "I didn't see you do this."

"You do it long enough, you don't have to look. It clicks every five degrees."

Patricia checked the headset. "Turn the volume up a little." She reached past Toni and took the clipboard wedged between the O2 tank and the bulkhead, then put the headphones fully on.

"Now... we listen."

There were seventeen candidates in the first ten minutes. By the end of the half hour, there were only two. Of the other fifteen, six were going into port, five were fishing boats rattling their nets across the bottom, and four were fast transports, moving at over forty knots. They were noisy enough, with their turbines and water jets, and they were going in the right direction, but even if the sub could intercept one, they couldn't keep pace long enough for it to hide them.

The remaining two were diesel-powered with big screws whose bearings changed more slowly than the rejects. One of them had an odd hull sound, far in excess of the other, and Patricia had a notion about it. "There's our boy," she said. "But we're going to have to haul ass to catch them."

"What is it?"

"I think it's an oceangoing tug pushing a string of barges to the Strand. Maybe raw materials for the Industrial Park. Maybe beach sand for Playa del Mar. We needto change places, Toni."

Toni kept her voice brisk. "Right, then. Let's do it." Her shoulders were hunched up again, though, as she squeezed past Patricia.

Patricia strapped in, then powered up and eased SubLorraine back to the surface. Sycorax was south of them, perhaps seventeen nautical miles, but moving very slowly, playing a waiting game.

"Here we go."

After their time of quiet, the turbogenerator sounded like God's own coffee grinder, filling the interior with noise. For the five minutes necessary to spin the flywheels up, Patricia couldn't check on the whereabouts of the Sycorax either; the noise overwhelmed her one hydrophone. What she could do, however, since she was on the surface, was get a good GPS fix and take a listen on the VHF radio.

"-below me. Stand to and prepare to be boarded. I repeat, submarine below, open your hatches and prepare to be boarded."

"Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!" Patricia leaned forward and craned her head.

Distorted by the thin wash of water overhead, a large orange-and-white shape hung above. As she watched, a dark blob detached itself from the larger shape and dropped, splashing into the water about twenty feet ahead of them. When the bubbles cleared Patricia saw a wet-suited figure kicking his way toward the sub.

"What is it?" Toni asked, reacting to Patricia's voice.

Patricia kicked the thruster in, pushing the lever all the way up to the stop while she gave the sub full port rudder. They surged forward, and she felt Toni grab the back of her seat to keep from falling.

"INS helicopter."

The diver jerked to a stop and kicked back for a moment before he realized the sub was turning away from him. Then he was gone, well behind them.

"HEAVE TO IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE," the voice on the VHF said.

The flywheels were only up to forty percent and Patricia was wondering how long she could push it when a sheet of bubbles cut through the water in front of her like a bead curtain.

She didn't bother to shut off the turbogenerator. She just pushed the stick all the way forward and prayed the safety interlocks would work.

There was a heavy thud that shook the entire hull as the float-operated flap valve on the snorkel intake flipped shut onto a jet engine sucking several hundred cubic feet of air a minute. The sudden vacuum sucked exhaust gas back up into the combustion chamber, stopping the turbine dead. Red lights came on and alarmssounded, but the fan kept thrusting. When the nose of SubLorraine was fifteen feet under and the stern barely awash, there was a loud bang, as if someone had struck the hull with a ballpeen hammer, and then another.

Then the sub was deeper and the only things that comforted Patricia were that the gauges weren't showing any water in the engine compartment and those bastards didn't dare drop explosives while their diver was in the water.

The sub pointed straight down now. Toni perched on the back of Patricia's chair and moaned, while Patricia hung in her seat, the seat belt pressing into her bladder with painful intensity. She shut down the thrusters and let SubLorraine coast deeper, gaining speed.

"It's going to be all right, Toni. Deep breaths."

"That's easy for you to say!" Toni's voice was shrill with more than a hint of panic.

They'd probably found the sub visually, Patricia thought. This far out, the water was clear enough that, looking down from altitude, the helicopter spotted SubLorraine's shape even a hundred feet underwater. She was going to fix that. The bottom here was just under three hundred feet and she was going to get right down on it.

"Patricia-could we level out anytime soon?"

"It's all relative. Become a fish. Surrender the chains of planar thinking.

Jeez-surface dwellers!" They passed one hundred feet, and Patricia picked up the sound of turbines and water jets to the south on the passive sonar. Sycorax was headed their way.

Toni was muttering, "I'm not a fish. I'll never be a fish. I eat fish. And I like gravity under my butt, too."

Patricia called up the instrumentation menu and enabled a water-temperature readout in the corner of her panel-67 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping very slowly, perhaps a tenth of a degree for every ten feet down. The gulf is a soupy mass of water, hot-to-warm, but you get deep enough and you can find cold water underneath. Sometimes there's a gradual transition between the cold and the hot, and sometimes it's sharp as a knife. Patricia was hoping for the knife.

The sub passed two hundred feet and she rolled it ninety degrees without changing the nose-down attitude. The hull was creaking, sharp popping sounds that were probably audible all the way to Houston, as the pressure increased. Patricia wasn't worried about the hull-it was designed for half a mile of water column-but the noise worried her.

Apparently it bothered Toni, too, because every time the hull popped, she whimpered."Don't worry, girl. The noise is a normal adjustment to pressure changes."

Toni muttered, "Normal for you maybe."

Patricia adjusted the hydrophone on the passive sonar. The Sycorax was still coming on strong.

Then it stopped, the sound cut off sharply to nothing.

Patricia looked at the temperature readout-48 degrees Fahrenheit. "Yes!"

Toni cursed again as Patricia pulled the nose up sharply, headed due east, and kicked the thrusters back up to forty-five percent.

" 'Yes,' what? What is it with the 'yes' already?"

"We've got a thermocline and we're under it. A thermocline reflects sound. Our sound, underneath, doesn't make it to the surface. I can't hear the Sycorax either, but we can rise above the thermocline to check them. They can't drop below to check us. We can make progress without them tracking us."

"What about that helicopter?"

"We're too deep now for them to track us visually."

The hull popped again and Toni whimpered. "Too deep."

"I've had this sub over two thousand feet down, Toni. The hull sounds are normal adjustments to changes in pressure."

Toni didn't speak for a moment, and when she did she said haltingly, "If you say so."

Just don't spaz on me, girl.

Patricia didn't want to tell her their real problem. Patricia's original plan had been to close with some noisy and heavy surface traffic that was slow enough for the sub to match speed-then keep it between them and the Sycorax, a sonic barrier. Now, though, since they hadn't been able to fully charge the flywheels, they didn't have the reserves needed to reach the barges she'd identified earlier.

She called up the charts again and plugged in the GPS data she'd acquired on their brief stay topside, looking for anything, something that might give them an edge.

"What's that?" Toni asked after Patricia had centered the chart on their current location. She stretched her arm over Patricia's shoulder to indicate a small square south of them that read "DP52: submerged structure: surface clearance 50 feet."

Patricia didn't answer her for a moment. From the mouths of babes. Finally Patricia said, "It's an oil rig."

Patricia closed on the rig slowly. She didn't want to come this far only to crack open the nose on a massive steel column. The rig towered above them, ranging from fifty feet of surface water at the truncated end of its mostly salvaged derrick to its legs, buried in silt and sand at 295 feet. The sub, approaching at a depth of 230 feet, was well below the majority of its mass.

"As it is above, so it shall be below."

Toni, looking over Patricia's shoulder, said, "What are you talking about?"

"Refugees." She gestured.

There were fish everywhere. Schooling horsehead jacks, ling, solitary grouper, three swordfish cutting through shimmering clouds of pinfish, and a hammerhead shark cruising the outer edge of the schools. Patricia felt Toni's breath on her ear as the girl craned forward to get a better look.

The rig, sea life, water, everything, was painted in shades of blue, the other colors of sunlight filtered out by the water column like a painting from Picasso's blue period. As they cleared a massive triangular brace and entered into the deep shadow between two of the rig's legs, Patricia switched on the two floodlights that tipped SubLorraine's wings. Fish, suddenly painted vivid hues of yellow, orange, and red, scattered, fled to monotone anonymity beyond the beams' scope.

"Ohhhhhhhh," sighed Toni. "Do it again."

"Later," Patricia said. "Hang on tight, we're going up." She pulled the stick back and heard items sliding down the floor of the chamber as the sub climbed to the vertical. The thermocline held here beneath the rig, but she was moving the sub slowly, stealthily, and merely noted the temperature rise as she passed two hundred feet.

Toni swore for a moment beneath her breath, and Patricia spared a glance behind-now below-her.

"Give a girl some warning, why don't you!" To keep from first sliding, then falling to the back of the sub, Toni had braced her feet and was pushing her back against what had been the ceiling, chimney-style, one hand on the back of Patricia's seat, the other holding on to one corner of the sleeping bag she'd been sitting on, which dangled down the length of the sub toward the lockout chamber.

Patricia turned back around, quickly, worried that she'd run into something, but the space beneath the platform was vast. Even though the riser assembly led down through the middle of the space, they were nowhere near it. She let her head drop back against the headrest, easing the strain from her neck. The sub was pointed straight up now and the rest of the loose gear had slid or dropped to the lockout chamber hatch.

"There. Do you see it?""That shiny thing?"

The bubble was a flat mirror, reflecting the floodlights back down at them, increasing steadily in brightness as they rose. There was a crosscurrent, but the bubble was sheltered from it by the massive beams that formed its walls, and the silver surface seemed flat as glass. Without changing their orientation, Patricia killed the thrusters and let the sub coast upward, slowing. When they were ten feet short, she stopped them dead with reverse thrust.

"Wave in the pretty mirror," she told Toni.

Their reflections, distorted by the curved acrylic nose, stared back at them, doppelgangers suspended above in an outlandish electric light fixture. Patricia pumped a small amount of water from the forward ballast tank and the sub crept upward. Their reflection grew as well, dropping slowly to meet them until, at the last, even Patricia began to worry what would happen when the two subs collided, but, of course, they didn't. Instead, the acrylic nose of its reflected twin and the mirrored surface rippled out in circle after circle of distortion around a widening hole.

"Why so slow?" Toni asked.

"Didn't know how much clearance there was. Didn't want to break anything."

The chamber above had at least six feet of clearance between the surface of the water/air interface and the lowest of the steel beams above. Patricia could've risen normally, in a horizontal configuration, but at least now she knew there were no nasty surprises waiting to smash them from above. She pumped water from the rear trim tank and the stern began to rise.

"Well, what now?"

"We're going to run the turbogenerator to recharge the flywheels," Patricia said.

"Oh! Cool. You're going to use the bubble for air so we don't have to surface."