One of the larger screens lit with a recorded image of the mostly submerged Hobo. I could see myself lying on the deck with my arms in the circular hole, in the process of hauling Clay from the water. Behind me, George Walker crouched beside one of the inflatable stretchers in his orange jumpsuit, his grey head bent towards the young man we’d just pulled from the flooded ship. His back was to the waves lapping at his heels, and he couldn’t see the questing, whip-thin tentacles feeling their way towards him, razor hooks glossy and wet in the last of the rusty sunlight.

“Stop!” I didn’t want to see what happened next. Instead, I called for a real-time view of the crashed ship.

The Hobo was a dark shape just beneath the surface. You could see the pattern of the waves change as they rolled across her and broke at the shallowest point, which was at her rear, just above the engines. She was completely submerged now, but she hadn’t fully sunk. She was still holding out.

“There’s no chance he might be alive?”

“None.”

“His monitors. Maybe they got detached. Maybe—”

“No.” The Trouble Dog sounded genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry.”

I knuckled my eyes. I wanted to crawl into bed, pull the sleeping bag over my head and pretend this day had never happened.

I had known George Walker for three years. In that time, he had been as much of a fixture of this ship as the continuous whirr of the air conditioning, or the reliably bad coffee in the mess. And now he was gone. He had died on my watch.

The rules in these situations were very clear, and the captain always bore responsibility for the safety of his or her crew. Before we’d set foot on the Hobo, I should have ordered a deep scan of the surrounding water, and a full risk assessment of any species found. And then, when we were down there, I should have kept George in sight the whole time. It mattered little that the attack had been so swift that even the Trouble Dog had been unable to react in time to save him; when we got back to Camrose Station, there’d be an inquiry, and I’d be lucky to escape without a severe reprimand. In the worst case, if they judged the failure to conduct a full inventory of nearby marine life a contributing factor to his death, I might even lose my command.

Right now, though, none of that seemed to matter. Walker was dead, and I felt the pain of his loss like an icicle lodged in my chest. The only bitter crumb of comfort to be had was that whatever had happened to him, the telemetry report indicated it had been quick.