They closed distance with the shark in a rush and immediately caught its awareness. It withdrew from the sandbank and swung around to regard them, its small round eyes cold and alert, gleaming in its ghastly head like chips of black mirrored glass.

The men assumed stationary hovers, their horizontal propellor blades slowing.

“Why hasn’t your friend left?” Marius said.

“Our friend,” Cédric amended. “Give it a chance to react to our electronic security blanket.”

The shark kept watching them, turned in their direction, stilled by their intrusive presence.

After several long moments it lunged.

Cédric released a gasping exhalation. He heard Marius blurt a stream of invective in his earbud. Its stiletto-toothed mouth agape, the shark came on fast, straight—and then veered away with a lashing herky-jerky motion barely three meters from where the two men hung suspended over the sandbank.

Cédric watched it disappear from sight, felt the knot in his stomach loosen, and took a deep breath of the hardsuit’s recycled oxygen.

“Tell me something,” Marius said. The scratchy tremor in his voice was not due to any transmission breakup. “What’s the effective range of our PODs?”

“Seven meters.”

“The shark should have been informed of that specification, don’t you think?”

Cédric grunted in response and thrust forward through the water. Marius followed. Seconds later they reached the churned up patch of seabed that had been the target of the goblin’s battering frenzy, eased off their footpads, and made a floating descent.

Cédric had scarcely alighted when he saw evidence that his suspicions had been on the mark. Plucked from the unsettled deposits was a cable segment with a lumpish bulge in it, often described as resembling a snake that had swallowed a rodent—a repeater case. It must be what had aroused the goblin’s attention, he thought. No great surprise there, though Cédric made a mental note to corner one of the ship’s cable technicians and find out for sure whether the component could hold a charge despite a widespread systemic power failure.

He was still examining the length of cable when something unusual did catch his eye. Very unusual, in fact.

Cédric looked down at it a moment, baffled. Not far from the repeater, a section of the cable remained partially buried under a thin layer of sand and clingy vegetation. He reached down to clear the material away with his robotic prehensor claws, his fingers working actuators inside the manipulator pod. Then he scrutinized his discovery from a graceless bent-at-the-knees position—the hardsuit’s limited number of hydraulic rotary joints did not permit bending at the waist.

“Marius, come have a peek,” he said.

Beside him, Marius assumed a comparably awkward stance to look at the watertight rectangular box.

“A splice enclosure,” he said. “I didn’t know the wire had old repairs.”

“It doesn’t. Or it shouldn’t. None.”

“You’re positive?”