Cédric cut his thrusters, turned his head, glanced through his faceplate at Marius, and saw he’d also come to a dead stop in the water. Then he reminded himself that faceplate was the wrong word. The correct term for the clear hemispheric panel was dome port. Just as the hardsuit’s exterior was called a pressure hull, and the glovelike hand sockets were called manipulator pods. A man who put great value on precision, Cédric knew it was also somewhat inexact to say that he and Marius Bouchard were functioning as divers—or that their suits were, in fact, suits at all. Both men would be more aptly considered pilots operating anthropomorphic underwater vehicles, submersibles that could descend to six hundred meters—two thousand feet, as Cédric’s American instructors would measure it—beneath the ocean’s surface.

The nomenclature had been a headache to learn, but for Cédric it was an important reminder. The world below was a world apart, and his hardsuit had more in common with a spacesuit than an ordinary diving rig. Indeed, his ability to walk the seabed was as remarkable as an astronaut’s to stride across the pitted surface of the moon. He did not want to let caution slip and forget for a moment what damage the crushing pressures of the deep would wreak on vulnerable human bodies.

Cédric stood motionless. He’d already located and videoed the source of the problem that had prompted an emergency repair call to the Africana, a medium-tonnage cable ship Planétaire Systems Corporation had contracted to maintain its undersea fiberoptic lines. But sights like the one now before his eyes gripped him with a kind of joyous awe, and were what truly pulled him to the cold depths. That he earned an excellent wage was only a convenient, if fair, rationale for doing a job he would have paid every last euro of his own to carry out.

Perhaps twice his size, the goblin came closer, cutting a slow circle through the dusky water. Cédric watched as its orbit tightened to within seven meters of him and suddenly broke, the goblin turning away, its abrupt change of direction propelled by a chopping flick of its tail.

The hardsuit’s mini-POD seemed to be working perfectly.