“None,” Cédric repeated. “You can take a look at the grid charts once we’re back on the ship. But trust me, I’d remember. I’ve been maintaining the cable almost since it was laid.” He carefully extracted the splice housing from the mud with his prehensors. “Something else. The enclosure doesn’t look like any type Planétaire’s used in the past. It’s very similar, yes. Not identical.”

Marius produced a confused frown. “Do you think it has some connection to the service failure?”

“No. You saw where a dredge frame tore up the cable. That was unmistakable.”

“Then what are you trying to say?”

“I’m not certain.” Cédric paused. “But this is a damned mystery.”

Marius’s frown deepened. “Do we tell Gunville about this now or later?”

Cédric silently withdrew a hand from the sleeve of his hardsuit and flipped a switch on the radio console illuminating its inner hull’s chest piece. The diver-to-surface channel opened up with a faint hollowness that he always associated with holding a paper-cup-and-string telephone to his ear in childhood.

“Now,” he said at last. “We’d better let him know right away.”

In the Africana’s monitoring operations room, Captain Pierre Gunville already knew.

His eyes circles of bright green fire in a smooth, mocha brown face—at fifty-two years old, Gunville was sufficiently vain to pride himself in a complexion free of lines, wrinkles, or sagging skin—he stood watching an alarm light flash on a signal column in front of him, sliding his right forefinger over a rudimentary mustache, and silently mouthing the words to a folk ballad he’d learned long, long ago. Its expression of a heart captured by desire, of grace through love’s devotion . . . not in the five hundred years since the song’s composition had anything surpassed it.

“Belle qui tiens ma vie, captive dans tes yeux, wui m’as l’ame ravie, d’u souris gracieux . . .”

“Sir, Dupain’s hailing on the transceiver.” Seated with his back to Gunville, one of the half dozen handpicked crewmen at the consoles glanced over from the marine radio’s surface station, his earphones pulled down off his head. “How do you want me to respond?”

The red alarm light continued its steady blinking. Gunville stood in his customary place at the operation room’s rear, moved his finger back and forth over the faint dash of hair above his upper lip, and whispered remembered verses of song. He’d been growing the mustache for less than a week, and it was at the irksome stage where it was neither here nor there—an adolescent’s whiskers. But Jacqueline had told him she found mustaches appealing on men of his type, though she hadn’t elaborated on just what type that was, and by her lack of specificity might as well have said she found it appealing on a mulâtre . Gunville could read between the lines and accept social enlightenment for the theatrical prop it was. Still, he had to admit to being beguiled by the siren. And everything balanced out in the end. Gunville would show her the fullness of his passion, then leave her stung by his spite.