Cédric remained watchful. Shoulder mounted in front of his thruster pack, his xenon lamps played over the veering goblin’s long body. He noticed a pink lacing of blood vessels under its smooth, whitish gray skin. Noticed racks of sharp white teeth on its protrusible jaws, thrust out of its open mouth on reflex like jagged springloaded clamps. Noticed tiny lidless eyes on either side of the thick, flat growth of meat and bone bulging from its snout . . . eyes that passed over him with an interest he couldn’t have described and an attitude it was impossible to gauge. There was expression in them, yes, and intelligence, but of a trackless alien variety.

Cédric could see why the Japanese fishermen who’d discovered the species had chosen its name: Tenguzame, goblin shark. He decided right then that it might be the most spectacularly hideous creature he’d ever seen—with the possible exception of his songful operations manager topside.

“Just look at that thing, will you?” he said over his communicator. Though the words to Marius hardly required secrecy, he had used their closed subchannel. It was something of an amusement. Gunville couldn’t resist eavesdropping from the ship’s control room, and Cédric couldn’t resist thwarting him. “I expected we might run into bulls or tiger sharks . . . didn’t think these monstrosities climbed above six hundred leagues.”

“It must have been drawn to the cable.” Marius’s digitally transmitted voice was free of distortion. “Wouldn’t be the first time, judging by the number of teeth we saw in the segment that went bad.”

“That’s no explanation.”

“Why not?”

Cédric hesitated a moment. Though a good and dependable fellow, Marius had been on the job less than a year, and his occasional obtuseness could be a frustration. It was true sharks sought out hidden prey with specialized sense organs, nerve-filled pores called ampullae of Loranzini that detected the electrical fields radiated by creatures of the deep . . . and every other living thing, for that matter. And while the fiberoptic strands at the core of the submarine lightwave cable gave off virtually no stray emissions, the current flowing through the copper tube around the fiber—in these older repeatered systems, anyway—did indeed generate a low-frequency field that would sometimes confuse a shark into mistaking a segment of cable for a potential meal.

This, of course, presumed the SL was functional, unlike the ruptured cable that had caused a partial telecommunications failure for many thousands of the region’s broadband-reliant users. And there Marius’s supposition strayed from logic.

“The wire’s dead. Shorted-out,” Cédric said, trying to check his impatience. However slow on the uptake Marius might be, some allowance had to be made for his relative inexperience on the job. “There isn’t any voltage to stir up the beast’s appetite.”