With most of the mass of the ship hidden from the real-world universe, the Odyssey’s structural integrity would have been much more effectively strengthened. It was still a near miracle that his ship was in as few pieces as it was, but at least there would be things they could salvage, things they could use.

“So how are we getting over to that?” Lyssa asked from where she was sitting on a cement embankment.

Eric glanced across the waterline and nodded to the south. “There’s a marina. We’ll steal a boat.”

“Commandeer.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m a police officer, I don’t steal boats,” she told him simply. “I commandeer them.”

Eric snorted but nodded as he gestured. “Whatever you say, Officer.”

The Odyssey was resting in fifty feet of water, the keel section rising out of the depths at a thirty-degree angle and overhanging the sound at its apex. The remaining habitat cylinder was against the city coastline about a mile and a half south, resting amid the shattered wreckage of what appeared to be a few multimillion-dollar yachts.

He wasn’t concerned with the habitat cylinder, however. The materials that he, and the city, would need were in the keel of the ship. He just hoped that the majority of it was intact.

“Wait here,” he told Lyssa as he maneuvered the boat alongside the wrecked keel of the Odyssey. “She’ll have taken on water, and you don’t have a suit.”

“Will any of it be any good after that crash?” she asked, not for the first time.

“I lived. The hardware I’m going after is a lot sturdier than I am,” he replied. “If CM was up on impact, the gear should be intact.”

He reached out and grabbed a protruding piece of steel, peeled from the hull by either an internal explosion or perhaps something blowing through from the other side, and pulled himself up. Jumping would have been easier, but it would have destabilized the boat, and he didn’t see the need to dunk his companion.

Eric crawled into the ship through the hole, hopping down into what was once a storeroom. He looked around, noting the scattered food packets, and knew he was a fair distance from the ordnance supply and the Museum. Unfortunately, both were well below the waterline.

Well, nothing to be done about it. Let’s get to work.

Somewhere above him Eric heard a scraping sound, the grinding of metal on stone and the hammering blows of heavy feet on his decks.

Shit. Must have picked up some hitchhikers on the way down . . . or since she came to a rest. He shifted his grip on the Priminae GWIZ and made his way across the slanted deck of the storeroom to the interior corridor.

The corridor led down into a darkness so pitch-black that he had to use his suit’s active night vision mode. There just wasn’t enough light to amplify with the passives. So Eric walked down into a green-bathed hall, warily clearing each room and branch corridor he passed. But he had checked three rooms before he thought to turn the dial down on the GWIZ, and Eric thanked whatever gods looked out for fools and Marines that he hadn’t fired a shot off in close quarters at the previous setting.