"I'm not sure that helps us. Unless you're just hoping it parts at this exact moment?"

"Not exactly. Time to change places, again."

Toni's eyes widened for a moment. "Uh, do we have to?"

"Well, we can stay with the Sycorax and wait until she docks at el Infierno."

"The hell you say."

"Exactly."

They traded places carefully.

Toni sounded surprised when she said, "I have definitely been in this piece-of-crap submarine for too long."

"What makes you think that, my dear?"

"We just traded places without me banging the shit out of some part of my body."

Patricia laughed. "Here goes."

Sycorax was headed up the channel at a sedate five knots, keeping her bow wake down in the enclosed waterway. Patricia brought the thruster on-line and pushed SubLorraine forward, first matching Sycorax's speed, then pulling ahead, putting slack in the towrope. When she was even with Sycorax's water-intake grate above, Patricia threw the thruster into full reverse.

Overhead it seemed like the hull of the Sycorax suddenly accelerated and they watched the rope come back overhead, then go wire taut. The submarine jerked forward, and behind her Patricia heard Toni fall backward, cursing. Through the port, Patricia saw the rope part from the grate. She shut the thrusters off immediately and pushed the control stick forward.

She'd trimmed SubLorraine to negative to help keep her from rising into Sycorax 's hull and now she coasted gently downward.Toni scrambled back up, saying, "Did it work? Oh, it did. I figured it must have.

Everything else we've done that's worked has caused me to bang myself painfully somewhere."

Patricia waited, watching the fathometer drop: thirty feet, forty, fifty; then she engaged the thrusters at ten percent and banked to the west. They passed under one of the great floating walls, moving from an ethereal blue light-filled space to dark green shadow. Above them, the great open hexes loomed, like giant honeycombs two hundred feet across. The seawall was made up of two rows stretching off in either direction. Large pipes, over fifty feet in diameter, dropped into the depths, OTEC intakes pulling cold water from over three thousand feet below.

The water was clear and the pipes in the distance looked like some surreal forest with a canopy of linked hexes above.

Beyond the wall a different canopy stretched, a barely translucent tight mesh that defined the floor of one of the mariculture lagoons. Here Patricia brought SubLorraine back up, to right beneath the canopy, and pushed the thrusters up to ninety percent.

"Won't they hear us?" Toni asked.

"Doubt it. Don't care. We're out of their jurisdiction and the barrier should block our signature. I doubt they're listening anymore, but even if they were, they'd have to plow through four hundred feet of seawall to come after us. They certainly can't track us by drone or helicopter with this overhead. And I want a bath so bad I would... well, really bad."

It took them another forty-five minutes to traverse the Strand, moving under lagoons and floating walls, twisting around OTEC pipes and hexes that dropped deep into the water, their increased submerged volume indicating how high above the water they rose. Occasionally they'd hit one of the directed outputs from the OTEC plants, jets of mixed warm and cold water used to keep the Strand in its present location-outside the EEZ and in water deep enough for OTEC operation-and the current would slew them around.

Finally, they were in the clear water of the municipal lagoon, boat traffic of all kinds crossing the surface above them, from little water taxis to hovercraft ferries to a giant cruise ship whose keel stuck down so far they had to drop another thirty feet to clear it.

Patricia had Toni pack up her belongings while she steered a course to the marina where Toni's parents' boat was berthed. Toni peered over Patricia's shoulders and then pointed up at one of the hull silhouettes lining one of the foam-buoyed fingers of dock. "There. That's the one, on the end of the T-slip where we get all the wake from outside the marina. That's why it's the cheap berth."

Patricia brought SubLorraine to the surface parallel to the forty-five-foot ketch and gave it a last nudge over. "Go, girl. I'm not hanging out here a minute longerthan I have to."

She almost wavered when the hatch opened and the fresh, salt-laden air hit her nose and she could suddenly tell how smelly the interior of the submarine had become.

Toni boosted herself up through the hatch, then reached back for her backpack.

She looked liberated, the captive released. Patricia knew the look. She'd seen it a thousand times on refugees leaving the Abattoir with a work permit, free. No mires atras-don't look back.

"I'll call you," Patricia said. "By the way, if anybody asks, you were shacking up with a hot date. You weren't on the Terminal Lorraine."

"Right. Be careful." Toni flung her backpack over the lifelines on her parents'

boat and jumped, rocking SubLorraine slightly. Patricia took one more deep breath of clean air, then dogged the hatch.

Come on. It's only for a little bit more.

She put SubLorraine back under by force of thrusters and diving planes, letting the buoyancy pumps catch up slowly. If she were returning from a normal trip, she would've been on the surface, strapped to Terminal Lorraine, and sailing or motoring across the lagoon to her own hex, a waterside module in the outer ring of the Matagorda subdivision.

She turned on the Gertrude and hoped that Perito was listening.

"Perito," she transmitted, using the lowest power setting.

There was a long silence and she thought he wasn't there, was at supper or out drinking cerveza con sal with his friends.

But then the voice came back, hesitant, surprised, "Patricia?" His accent rendered it Pah-treesia, which Patricia had always liked.

"Well, it's not the Easter bunny."

"Gracias a dios! It's been three days!"

Every hour of that time settled on Patricia like a leaden shroud. "It's been longer than that. I want you to shut the door on the pen and drop the harness. Entiendes?"

"Si. Cuando?"

"En seguida. I'm right under your extremo." She brought the sub beneath a silvery rectangle framed by silhouetted dock modules and waited for the harness to appear. It took a moment. The lighting changed on the rectangle above and then a moment later, the harness frame splashed down through the surface, trailing bubbles as it sank.

Patricia eased SubLorraine into it, then flooded the tanks, settling the wings ontothe harness arms and tightening the cable. "Okay, Perito. Hazlo."

As the cable lifted the sub, she shut everything down, locking the console with a password. It broke the surface, then lifted into a rectangular space lit with flickering strokes of light coming under the door, muted and twisted by the water. Perito waved at her, one hand on the crane controls. She smiled, very glad to see his wide mestizo face.

She ached to move, to be out of the sub, but waited until Perito moved another sling under the rear portion of SubLorraine, stabilizing it. He walked forward again and gave her an "okay" sign.

The air in the pen smelled sweet and clear when she opened the lockout hatch.

For good measure, she opened the top hatch to let air circulate through the sub.

Perito brought a reinforced floor panel from the stack at the head of the pen and put it across the water gap, resting it on both side docks. She lowered herself through the lockout hatch and onto the panel before Perito brought the plastic step stool.

She ducked out and crouched there, taking deep, deep breaths of wonderful, clean air.

"Are you all right, Patreecia?"

"I'm fine. I'm better than fine-I'm alive."

"Where is la rubia? Her parents have been here every day."

The anxiety on Perito's face told Patricia a bigger story. Perito had recommended Toni for the job, and Patricia was surprised that he hadn't asked about Terminal Lorraine first. "I dropped Toni at her parents' boat. She's okay, but I don't think she's ever going to get back in a submarine."

Perito's shoulders, raised and tense, dropped back down. "The Engineering Office has been calling about the inspections." He looked around and suddenly jumped. "Madre de dios! What did you do to the tail?"

She turned. The hole in the vertical stabilizer was vivid, fracture cracks radiating through the plastic.

"Well, we were shot at."

"And?..."

She reached back in the sub and took out her satphone and workstation. "And I've been three days in the sub, and it stinks and I stink and I really don't want to talk about it right now. However, I would like you to put the rest of the floor plates down and bolt them. And if you have to leave the pen for any reason, I want you to find someone else to watch it."

Perito looked around, staring at the door as if something hostile was about to come through it. "Okay. And Terminal Lorraine?" he asked."The INS has it. Hopefully, I'll get it back." With a groan, Patricia began walking, dreading the four flights of stairs up to her apartment. "Anybody asks, I'm not back, okay?"

"Mis labios estan sellados."

She nodded tiredly and started up the stairs from the pier to the hex proper.

"How long will we need to leave el submarino oculto?"

"Hablaremos manana."

"H'okay, boss."

She called Moses using Celeste's phone, a cheap voice-only model with the most basic of encryption sets. Unlike mainland phones, though, this model didn't have its encryption keys held by the FBI.

"Bill Moses," the voice said.

"You really shouldn't stay at the office so late."

"Patti! Where are you?"

"A neighbor's. Did you get the video?"

Moses let out a breath, sharp, almost a bark. "Who didn't get the video is more like it. It's been all over the Web and print news, and Channel Seven ran the whole clip on the eleven P.M. show, Technicolor yawn and all."

Patricia closed her eyes and groaned. "What was the reaction in the assembly?"

"To the bodies or the vomiting?" Moses was on the New Galveston Assembly, the twenty-nine-member council that ran the city. Patricia was his alternate for the Matagorda District.

"Very funny."

"We were discussing the new industrial regs when Sylvia got the download and she interrupted the session. You weren't the only one to throw up, you know. Paul Nagoya messed up his trash can.

"That idiot Landers wanted to know why you'd sent something so gross and actually proposed a motion to censure you. Before that fight started, though, Major Paine pointed out the significance of the weapons used and things really got nasty."

Major Paine was the New Galveston police commander. "You know what a tightrope we walk out here, especially with the federal government in general but with the INS in particular."

"Yeah. Why was Major Paine there?""The new industrial regs. He's got to enforce whatever changes we come up with. He was asked to consult. Where have you been?"

"You don't want to know. Okay, maybe you do, but I'm still trying to put it behind me. I'm going to have to talk to the INS. The bastards took my boat, but I got back here with my crew and SubLorraine."

"Did you break any laws?"

"I ignored a call to be boarded, but it can be argued my radio was off and I didn't receive it. They shot at me once, too, but I can also argue that I didn't know who was doing it and ran to save my life. We were in the sub at the time."

"Actually shot at you?"

"Warning shots first, then direct shots when I dove. I can show you the hole in the vertical stabilizer."

Bill whistled softly. "I'm glad you're all right. We can work with those circumstances, I guess. Why did you ignore their call to be boarded? Did you think they were the ones who sank the Open Lotus?"

"I didn't know and I wasn't going to take the chance."

"Hell, there's lots of precedents for running from the law because of reasonable fear of harm. Even if we admit you heard the call to be boarded."

"Well, I believe you, but the Emergency Immigration Act's search-and-seizure provisions make it really hard to get something back from the INS once they've grabbed it."

"So you want to talk to them and ask them nicely?"

"Yeah. But on our turf, not theirs. I won't go mainland for it and I sure as hell won't go out to the Abattoir."

She could hear Moses nod, his cheek rubbing the receiver. "Right. I'll suggest a conference room here at the assembly, and if necessary, we'll fall back on Major Paine's offices. In either case, I'll be there as your attorney and we'll record."

"Not before tomorrow, though, okay? I've got to sleep."

"You got it."

Patricia woke up rested, clean, and in her own bed but, alas, not alone. Sharp hard things poked her in the back, and she rolled away from them with a groan and sat up.

A small black girl, dressed like Patricia, in panties and an oversized T-shirt, whimpered in her sleep and shifted, questing blindly for the missing warmth with herknees and elbows.

Why me? Patricia looked blearily at the clock on the bookshelf above her bed.

Six-thirty. She'd been asleep for six hours and, despite bad dreams, would gladly have slept for four more, but she knew she wouldn't. Once awakened she'd never been able to manage the trick of going straight back to sleep.

I'm being punished.

Her bedroom was a loft over the bathroom with waist-high bookshelf walls running around the three open sides, separating it from the rest of her apartment, a large open space with twenty-foot ceilings. There were skylights showing dim light above the main floor and one long expanse of window on the far wall opening onto a riot of greenery.

Patricia pulled the covers up over the sleeping girl. Then she stumbled down the stairs, one hand on the wall, and turned back to enter the bathroom, closing the door to keep from waking the child. After using the toilet, she eyed the bath, but she'd spent over an hour in it the night before, washing off the accumulated stink of nearly three days in the sub, leaving it only when her water-soaked hands, puckered and soft, began to remind her of the bodies in the Open Lotus.

She contented herself with brushing her teeth for five minutes before pulling a pair of neatly folded shorts from one of the many drawers built under the stairway. The dirty clothes hamper was empty, so Celeste had been through already.