Still, the thing was, little Toni had a swollen throat. Whatever it was, pray to God that Tomaya didn’t end up like Toni. Or worse, turn psychotic like Felix.

“How does that happen to a little boy?” Ruto wondered as he tapped in the code for the pressure hatch that would let him into the Underwater Bay. Especially to a boy he’d known from the time the kid had been nothing more than a bump in his mother’s belly?

Neither of Felix’s parents had been crazy; if there had been a history of mental illness in their families, they’d have never been chosen for the Maritime Unit. Living as intimately as the Maritime Unit did, any physical or mental abuse would have been known to everyone. Felix had been loved and cherished his entire life.

“So where did this freaking murderer come from?” Ruto cycled the hatch, felt the pressure build, and undogged the interior door, stepping out into the Underwater Bay.

He stopped short as the hatch door closed behind him.

“What the hell?” The sight and the smell hit him at once. The bay reeked of . . . what did he say? Spicy? Musky? Pleasant and growy but alien and dank?

And the algae. The stuff was everywhere, lines like veins creeping across the bay floor, branching out, and thick where nodule-like growths emerged from the water. Ruto stepped over to the closest, stared down. He could see the trunk, if you could call it that. Thick at the base where it emerged from the water, it pulsed just the same as a pump. Ruto could see that it pushed water up through the trunk and along the stem on the floor. At each branch, the pulse of water was divided, the branches continuing to push the smaller and smaller pulse of water through additional branches to the ends where they radiated out like roots across the sialon.

And this was just one! Across the entire bay floor, the dendritically patterned veins of blue-green growth spread in a mazework across the sialon. At the nearest sub cradle, they traced up the track, onto the framework that supported the heavy craft. Here and there, the thin branches reached previous colonies, and now seemed to supply them with water. Those same colonies—that Ruto remembered as only being the size of a Port Authority 1 SDR coin—were now thick mats the size of a dinner plate.

The yellow submarine was splotched with them. Made it look oddly sick, as if a gleaming piece of equipment could.

Ruto stepped over the closest trunk, picked his way on tiptoe to the sub. Where Bryan Atumbo had been working to repair the bent propeller housing, a thick coat of the algae had grown around the disassembled parts.

“It’s only been two days,” Ruto cried.

His gaze traveled down the length of the bay. From one wall to the other, algae was growing out of the water, pumping, expanding.