“Once forensic has finished mapping DNA residuals, we’ll have a better picture.”

“Right. Let’s see the last couple of rooms.”

Alik had been expecting another gas-giant moon, or maybe a comet station, something exotic. Instead the portal door opened into a cabin on the Jörmungand Celeste. The huge ocean liner was the most famous on Earth—not hard considering it was about the only one left. All it did was sail around the oceans on the most leisurely course possible without ever making landfall, but taking in the coastlines of every continent.

He went outside to stand on the private deck belonging to the Lorenzo cabin and instantly regretted it as he was ambushed by tropical humidity. “Sonofabitch.” The ocean was a deep gray-blue nearly twelve meters below, with vivacious whitecaps cresting the larger waves. Alik was dressed for New York winter in a nice real wool suit. The Bureau still hadn’t let go of J. Edgar’s dress code, and he stuck with it because of the peripherals that could be discreetly incorporated into the suit fabric. But a cooling circuit wasn’t one of them. Every centimeter of his skin was immediately layered in sweat. “Where the hell are we?” he asked Shango.

“Approaching Cape Town from the east,” it said. “The coast will be visible tonight, local time.”

Salovitz was fanning his face with his hand, looking at the swell with disapproval. Neither of them could feel any motion; the Jörmungand Celeste was way too big for the waves to affect it.

“If you were going to dump a body, this is the room I’d use, not the Antarctic,” Salovitz said.

“Good point. What’s left?”

The tropical island. Alik rolled his eyes as another gust of heat and humidity sluiced over him. He took his suit jacket off as soon as they went through the portal door. It was against Bureau protocol; as well as peripherals, the fabric was lined with a decent armor weave. It made him a sitting duck to a sniper, but he decided to risk it.

The island was where the Maldives used to be—a beautiful coral archipelago in the Indian Ocean whose only industry was tourism. They were beautiful because they were so low-lying, a few meters at best, giving them broad, pristine beaches and secluded lagoons. That didn’t go well for the indigenous population in the late twenty-first century when the ocean level started rising. The rest of the world built sea defenses and tidal barriers to protect their crumbling shorelines and inundated coastal cities. The Maldives didn’t have that kind of money, not even with the microfacture revolution brought about by home fabricators and printers, which liberated so many from absolute poverty.

The archipelago claimed the crown of Atlantis and slowly sank beneath the waves. A true tragedy for a UN World Heritage Site.

Then along came astute developers in massive airships with portals fixed underneath. Torrents of desert sand poured down out of the sky, mixed with genetically modified coral seeds. New islands rose up and stabilized.