Kaplan was flat on his face, groaning, blood already running from his forehead. Grigor crouched over him grabbed his head with both hands, and smashed it against the concrete once, twice, three times before turning it sideways with its cheek against the floor. Then he got a knee on his neck and pressed.

Kaplan flailed. Some wheezing noises escaped his throat as he gasped for breath. Grigor kept his knee in place. After three minutes, he shuddered and voided his bowels and died.

Grigor went through his pockets and took his keys, wallet and phone. Then he dragged the body over to a corner and left it behind the water heater. The blood from his broken skull left swipe marks on the concrete.

Grigor was careful to avoid them as he returned to the stairs.

The North Pacific

Li Quang was in the final stage of his hour-long descent, his vertical lift thrusters rotated downward, their propellers stirring up a fine cloud of sediment as he hovered thirty feet above the seabed.

Thus far the dive had been happily uneventful. Hoping that would continue, he switched on the DSV’s incandescent belly strobes and overhead floodlight in preparation for touchdown. Their brightness devoured the softer radiance of his driving lamp, casting a column of blazing light onto the bottom. Small underwater creatures scuttled into the carpet of silt, fleeing the sudden brilliance.

Li checked his instruments. The water’s density reduced and distorted his depth perception, giving him what pilots call a two-and-a-half-dimensional field of view. Hazardous objects could seem nearer or farther, and larger or smaller than they were. He would keep one eye on the terrain and one on his digital panel.

At the moment his visual input and electronic readouts were in sync. The terrain below him was flat and regular. There were no discernable ridges or rocky protrusions in the immediate vicinity. No long lines of seamounts as he had seen in the Trench, some forty feet tall and spewing superheated white water like chimneys. The huoshanshi, or volcanic stacks, would have melted the PVC on his cameras and probes had he gotten too close.

Li skimmed forward, a hand on the joystick. After several hundred yards, he jogged to his right, northward, and went on in that direction until the fiber-optic cable trench came into sight below.

Hovering above it, he nodded to himself and typed a message into his computer for the technicians aboard the Lucky Gift. Then he cut his thrusters and released ballast.

At 05:17 Pacific Daylight Time, Li settled onto the ocean floor with a soft bump. The mission was right on schedule, his tiny vehicle perpendicular to the lightwave cable. He could see it straight ahead through his bubble-like viewport, stretching on seemingly without end.