“I don’t know,” Cédric replied. They were back on their closed voice link. “Andre told me that he’s gone to the engine room. Some kind of problem.”

“Bullshit. They’ve got phones in there, and he could reach for one if he chooses,” Marius said. “I’ll bet that son of a bitch is on the pot with his trousers around his ankles, serenading his true love.”

Cédric grinned. And fondling it, no doubt—l’e petite amour. He wasn’t about to argue Gunville’s case, though.

“We’ve been down at extreme depth for almost four hours,” Marius said. “Why push things to the limit? We should video the splice and call it quits.”

“Let’s not work ourselves into a premature snit. Five hours might be pushing.” Besides, Cédric thought, the repair technicians might prefer to receive live imagery from them, observe his curious find from angles of their own choice before lowering their grapple to raise the cable. “We’re bound to hear from the songbird any minute. Meanwhile, we can still do what you suggest, take some pictures—”

Cédric became distracted by a sudden movement at the far right periphery of his vision. He cocked his head inside the dome port for a better look, but it reduced his field of view just enough so he realized he’d have to turn his whole body.

He applied the slightest bit of pressure to his left footpad for a thruster assist and was nudged the opposite way.

A quick spin of his blades, and Marius shifted to face in the same direction. “Don’t tell me the shark’s returned in spite of our PODs being activated.”

“Probably not. Whatever I glimpsed didn’t seem that large.”

Cédric was quiet for a moment. There weren’t many forms of aquatic life down here that presented even the slightest hazard, but he was always on the lookout for an unusual specimen, making him an underwater equivalent of a bird-watcher, he supposed. Though it seemed a stretch to believe he’d have two exceptional sightings in a single dive, maybe he’d gotten fortunate. The Ogooué Basin was stocked full of unique tenants, including deepwater octopuses and nautiluses.

He scanned the underwater dimness, kicking his shoulder lamps to their brightest settings with the touch of a switch inside his hardsuit. Then his gaze fixed on a speedily approaching object about six meters distant at three o’clock.

He raised an arm to point. “Marius—”

“I see it,” his partner said. “What the hell is that thing?”

Cédric’s silence did not stem from any lack of desire to respond. He simply hadn’t the vaguest clue.