The group walked around the clump of brain coral at a good distance. The smooth sand seemed primordial, undisturbed for millennia.

"Anything?" asked Moonfeather anxiously, tapping her gauntlet against her forearm controls to up the heat some more, and then further still.

"Over here!" cried Boomer, standing near a crack in the seabed, kicking at the silt. His scuffing had partially exposed a thick cable buried underneath the compressed sand. It led to the brain coral and stretched off toward the north.

"Toward those black mountains," said Silver, her voice echoing slightly in the confines of her helmet. "Odd that we can see them down here," she added softly, sliding the cable into her temple jack. "Should be far out of our range." With awkward fingers, she slid the other end into the communications jack of her radio.

"Thumbs, take point," said Delphia's voice over the Gertrude. "I'll cover the rear."

"And do what?" snorted Thumbs, fists on hips. "These things don't have any external weapons."

"To trip booby traps," said Moonfeather, walking away slowly.

His black helmet nodded, and he started moving off. "Accepted. At least it's a plan."

"Can't you throw a mana bolt or summon something if we get ambushed?" asked Boomer. "Magic should work under water."

"Sure. But through the metal of the suit? No."

"Excuses, excuses," he mumbled.

The land rose and fell before them in flat rippling dunes with dull monotony, the compressed sand providing an easy walk. And the minutes became hours as their battery power and air decreased with lethal regularity. Then they reached an expanse of rolling foothills, a mud swell running between them.

"The cable goes in this end," announced Thumbs, kneeling in the hard silt.

"And comes out Over here," said Delphia, unseen. "But the coating on this side of the cable is the kind they use on fiber-optics."

"Vulcanized rubber on this side," added Boomer.

"The junction box," breathed Silver. "Where the EM pulses from the coldframe are converted into maser signals. Nobody uses a combination of the two anymore, not for decades."

"Who cares whether they do or they don't?" stated Boomer urgently. "Let's find out where it goes and get there."

"Careful," warned Delphia. "The swell itself is probably armed and armored against intrusion."

"Hopefully the cable is vulnerable," offered Silver. "Supercomputer or not, it would be useless unless it could get to the data banks of the CDP, and that means terminals of some sort with access ports for inspections, repairs, and diagnostics."

"If you say so."

"Do it, girl. Go find the thing."

Bypassing the mud swell, Silver proceeded around the lump. "Ha! It's a top-hat style. The top is solid, but the bottom is open!" she said. "Maybe to vent off heat or allow the waters to cool the circuits. Whatever, the internal relays are plainly visible."

"Can you jack in?"

Silver opened the control panel of her sleeve and hesitantly started splicing plastic wires to her dead radio. She closed the lid of the service panel to help hold the fibers in place, then reached out and gently pocked the bare ends of the optic cables to the exposed ports of a transmodem. They slid in perfectly. Another triumph of Japanese standardization. She boosted power, activated a shield program, and tentatively attempted to access the data stream.

Silver's mind swirled under the explosion of data and instantaneously she was in, surrounded by a million copies of herself, reversed, backward, and inverted. A hundred datastreams silently thundered by, the lambent rivers of bytes traveling in both directions simultaneously. She reeled under the onslaught of impressions, and struggled to focus her attention on her own hands, the only non-reflective things in sight.

In here, everything was chromate, a billion endless mirrors reflecting in mirrors, in silvered pools of polished lightning. It was like the Matrix boosted on chips, a concept that made her temples throb. A neon aurora in the stainless steel sky, a coded menu shimmered above a reflective collection of nodes and relays. Oddly, the shiny ground under her was slightly dull, not as perfect as the rest of the landscape. Distorted from the minor heat of her presence? How sensitive was this thing? Tentatively, Silver tried moving further in and activating a sophisticated can opener when gray ICE suddenly hit her from every direction in a perfect globe. There was a jarring flash of brief pain.

"Drek!" cried Silver, staggering a bit. "It dumped me!"

"You okay?" asked Delphia, touching her metal shoulder with his gauntlet.

More annoyed than anything, she took a tiny sip of water from the nipple of the bottle inside her helmet. There wasn't much left. "I'll live," she sighed. "And I got inside. But it was too fast, too complex." Her gloves moved in the water trying to show them the polished visions in her mind. "It was wonderful," she whispered. "Beautiful! Ghost, I want to go back right now!"

"So do it," prompted Boomer.

She hung her head, the helmet staying motionless. "It would kill me. It's like breathing pure oxygen or running a V8 on straight nitrous oxide. Sounds great, till everything blows."

"Hey, that's arctic, kid," said Thumbs. "Were you able to get anything at all?"

Slowly, as if laying flowers on the grave of a friend, Silver disconnected the cables from the transmodem in the junction. "Yeah, I found stuff. Nothing direct, but I got a glimpse of the main menu."

"Is it . . . part of what we're after?" asked Boomer. "The Yamato?"

"No. It's a war computer, just like we thought."

Delphia threw up his armored arms. "Drek! A toy of some Carib League member? Or does it belong to Atlantic Security itself?"

"Don't know, but it's never been used, except in practice runs. There's no hot file, so that's a lock. And what it's protecting is about sixty klicks due north. Something really, really big."

She smiled even though she knew no one could see her face. "Something with atmospheric and temperature perimeters suitable for life."

"Yes!" cried Thumbs, doing a slow-motion jig. "We live!"

"If we can travel sixty kilometers in . . . four and half hours," retorted Boomer sourly. "Uphill with no roads."

"Have we got a choice?" inquired Moonfeather, her voice acid sweet.

"No," said Delphia. "Sixty in four, with thirty for getting lost. Cake. Let's go."

He lurched off for the black mountains, the others close behind. As they moved away toward the foothills, an albino crab scuttled out to see if they'd left anything edible in their wake.

26.

Cresting an arroyo near the top of the lowest mountain, the five gasping people in Jym suits stopped wheezing and inhaled sharply.

"Slot me!"

"Motherfragger!"

"A'i, carumba!"

"Yes! Thank the gods, yes!"

Towering undersea mountains stood proud and tall to the south, west and distant north of them, a half ring of protective granite rising klicks high into the ocean. To the east was an endless impossible nothingness, a yawning chasm in the ocean floor stretching beyond visibility. A ravine, an abyss larger than the Grand Canyon of the Ute Nation and the Marianas Trench in the Philippines combined. It was like looking over the edge of the universe and straight into hell.

Lamp pots shed brilliant white light on the thousands of hexacres of cultivated fields, with different types of submersibles tending the crops, bringing in harvests, relaying personnel in yellow Jym suits, and hauling about gigantic nets full of fish and crabs.

Dominating the center of the half valley was a double bubble: a large squat dome of transparent material with a smaller round dome set on top, a massive shaft of granite, a mesa, in the center, supporting both like a stalagmite tent pole. Inside the upper dome of clear material could be seen scaffolding and rigging similar to that used on oil fields. The large lower dome was squalid, filled with gray machines, pumps, and what looked like some kind of processing plants. On the ground level was a wall of interlocking granite slabs, thick and tall, ringing the floor of the dome, an inner wall of protection.

"Incredible," breathed Delphia. "Fantastic."

"Salvation," panted Thumbs.

"And how the frag do we get in?" demanded Moonfeather irritably. Boomer grunted a similar sentiment.

Silver pointed. "We'll use the backdoor. Follow me."

A colossal god towered above Old Dome, frowning with impatience.

Rolling up his sleeves, Shawn Wilson narrowed his eyes and stared down at his new domain. The lower level of the undersea bubblecity was mostly machines, storage and repair shops, the few housing complexes made from converted factories that had obviously been destroyed in the fighting. What fighting he didn't know yet, but anyone could see that a major battle, or maybe more than one, had been fought within the confines of the lower dome. And not that long ago, either.

The upper portion of the city was known as Old Dome, the other as Low Dome. Old Dome contained the remnants of what may have been a prototype city, though it was now in ruins.

Chewing on a stylus, Wilson walked around the colony-in-a-crater, studying the details and angles. The place was recreated with amazing exactness in the dynarama on the table. The model filled most of what was called his office here inside The Core, the granite mesa. The papier mache mountains stood at throat level, the undersea farms waving to holograph currents. Wilson gave a signal, and watched intently as pinkie-sized submarines came floating into the space behind the mountains to launch tiny torpedoes, and the city retaliated with a dozen burning lines. The slim lances of fire moving sluggishly outward like burning radio antennas rising from a car.

"Underwater lasers," said a norm in a lab smock, working a pocket computer. "Will those really work, sir?"

Standing in the great abyss, Shawn Wilson bent low to watch how the holograph workers abandoned their harvesting machines to get into the city. The procedure was slow and sloppy, endangering the whole operation. He made a mental note to see they got some practice on how to do an orderly retreat. "Yes, fire a static laser under water, and you get a backblast from the reflection that blows the weapon apart. Yes?"

"Of course," sniffed another of the labcoats.

Wilson didn't know their names yet, and had a feeling he wouldn't bother to take the trouble. He disliked them already. Dumber than trolls, if such a thing was possible. "Granite. So, instead, start with weak beams, spotter rays like we use on weapons to show where the bullet will go, then gradually increase the power into a pulsating beam flashing through the visible spectrum a million times every tick, and you counter the reflection problem, avoid a thermal backlash, and have an underwater energy weapon."

"The range is fragged," stated another lab coat.

"Slower than drek," added a third.

"Sussed," said Wilson, hands on knees as he watched the holo torps blink out in tiny flashes one by one. "But if the pirates didn't know about such things, their tactics wouldn't include a counter move, and we could tear their fleet apart."

"An edge," he said standing upright and looking over the assemblage of the lab staff. "That's all any good tactician needs. One single advantage and the other side loses."

"What about our submarine fleet, sir?" asked a woman, hands stuffed into her pockets, chewing a pipe. "We have the subs hidden inside the Bermuda Trench. There's a mesa out there just above crush depth. When the pirates arrive, we'll flank them, hit from both sides in a classic pincer movement."

"That's good," Wilson admitted, hoisting a thigh up on the edge of the table. "Very good, in fact. But not good enough."

"If I may ask, why not, sir?"

Wilson scowled. "Because I'd bet they either know about the existence of those subs, or have a strong suspicion. And without the element of total surprise, it's lambs to the slaughter."

"I must respectfully disagree, sir," she said, shifting the pipe stem to the other side of her mouth. "To spend millions installing energy weapons of doubtful function seems wasteful and pointless."

"Tough. I'm in charge." Shawn Wilson smiled thinly. "You don't like it? Talk to Barbara Harvin." Their faces went pale and apologies poured as there came a knock on the door.

"In!" he called, taking the chewed stylus from his mouth and prodding a minuscule fireball to expose the pea-sized tractor inside. "These explode? Who designed this drek, an ork?"

"Mr. Wilson?" said an ork guard, standing there uncertainly.

"That's me," he said, not turning to look. "What is it?"

The metahuman cleared his throat. "Sir, we've just received the report of a submarine detonating near The Cube in the polar plain."

"How unusual. However, why is Reclamation telling me this?" Wilson asked tartly. "Path the sub and add it to our fleet."

"The . . . our asset was not damaged, but recon teams conducting a search for survivors on the surface located two norms in a life raft. Escapees from the pirate sub that was destroyed. They claim there was a mutiny, which is how they escaped."

Turning about, Jake paused and frowned, glaring at the guard in cold formality. "A pirate mutiny? Impossible. They're lying. The cerebral bombs prevent such actions against their leaders."

The guard lowered his voice. "We agree, sir. I have taken it upon my own personal authority, due to the unique elements of their acquisition, to cancel the usual procedures of assimilation and have Security immediately begin their interrogation."

"Good. Tell me when they learn something solid."

"Certainly, sir." As the guard departed, Shawn Wilson turned back to the dynarama table. "Lock'n load, my fellow humans, let's double the number of pirates, add our own sub, and have somebody do a suicide run at the main dome and see that happens then. Chop-chop!"

The massive airlock doors in the granite walls parted with a loud hydraulic hiss, and a small gush of water poured out onto the ferroconcrete floor. Trundling in on rusty rails, the cargo box clanked and rattled through the locks and on deep into the maze of machinery before coming to rest at a padded buffer. The double doors closed with a strident boom and then hissed again, prominent wall gauges showing pressure being reestablished on the other side.

Squealing in protest, the hinged top of the rectangular container separated with an exhale of air, exposing a pile of wiggling fish inside. Instantly, the fish stopped moving as their bodies swelled to double, triple their original size, eyeballs bursting, pale blood pouring from their open mouths and gills. Computerized locks mechanically disengaged, and the container swung over to one side, disgorging its contents in an avalanche of still bodies. Sliding across a meter of floor, the fish disappeared into a funneled chute, bands of laser lights scanning the deluge. The digital readout climbed into the thousands before the appearance of five black Jym suits. Immediately, alarms began to howl.

"Motherfragger!" howled Boomer as they careened along the metallic chute, banging and clanging off the sides as they hurtled along with the cargo of dead sea life.

"Stay loose!" cried Delphia, looking over his boots at the others close behind him.

With brutal impacts, the suits landed sprawling on a conveyor belt covered with still swelling fish. It proceeded to move off with a jerk as skeletal arms reached out from slimy gimbals to neatly align the fish, while a different set of mechanical hands a few meters away began gutting and filleting them.

Struggling to her boots, Silver saw the flashing knives converge on her and raised her arms to protect her face. The whirling blades broke by the dozen against the armor of the Jym suit, the blades careening off to ricochet among the machinery on either side of the moving belt. Proceeding past the broken shredders, the Jym suits were whisked through a thundering curtain of steaming water and came out the other side into bright lights. As their faceplates dripped clear, they saw a score or more of chairs lining the moving belt, a double line of people, norms and metas, young and old, all wearing stained jumpsuits and hairnets, the knives in their hands paused in the act of chopping off the heads and tails. Further down the line, one side was sorting the filleted bodies into different boxes. The other group was separating the heads from the tails onto conveyor belts going in different directions.

A female ork screamed as the ebony Jym suits went past her. A teenage norm followed her lead, and soon the whole area was filled with wildly running people making as much noise as possible. A battered door in a macroplas kiosk flew open, and a fat norm with a frown and a stun baton stepped out.

"Shut the frag up," he bellowed. "I was trying to sleep!" Then he lost both the frown and the baton at the sight of the Jym suits and staggered backward to hit a red button on the wall. Bells started clanging everywhere.

"Pirates!" he shouted. "Attack 'em! Kill them!" Only he was alone by now, everybody else having scrambled for safety long ago.