She draws down the throttle. The soft hydraulic whine fades.

"Sorry," she says. "I just thought—"

"Fuck, Len, you of all people! You trying to drive him off? You want him blasted into the fucking stratosphere when that thing goes off?"

"I'm sorry." When he doesn't respond, she adds, "I don't think he's out here. Sonar—"

"Sonar's not worth shit if he's on the bottom."

"Mike, you're not going find him rooting around here in the dark. We're blind this far out."

A wave of pistol clicks sweeps across her face. "I've got this for close range," says the machinery in Brander's throat.

"I don't think he's out here," Clarke says again. "And even if he is, I don't know if he'd let you get close after—"

"That was a long time ago," the darkness buzzes back. "Just because you're still nursing grudges from the second grade..."

"That's not what I meant," she says. She tries to speak gently, but the vocoder strips her voice down to a soft rasp. "I only meant, it's been so long. He's gone so far, we barely even see him on sonar any more. I don't know if he'd let any of us near him."

"We've got to try. We can't just leave him here. If I can just get close enough to tune him in..."

"He couldn't tune back," Clarke reminds him. "He went over before we changed, Mike. You know that."

"Fuck off! That's not the point!"

But it is, and they both know it. And Lenie Clarke suddenly knows something else, too. She knows that part of her is enjoying Brander's pain. She fights it, tries to ignore the realization of her own realization, because the only way to keep it from leaking into Brander's head is to keep it out of her own. She can't. No: she doesn't want to. Mike Brander, know-it-all, destroyer of perverts, self-righteous self-appointed self-avenger, is finally getting some small payback for what he did to Gerry Fischer.

Give it up, she wants to shout at him. Gerry's gone. Didn't you tune him in when that prick Scanlon held him hostage? Didn't you feel how empty he was? Or was all that too much for you, did you just look the other way instead? Well here's the abstract, Mikey: he's nowhere near human enough to grasp your half-assed gestures of atonement.

No absolution this time, Mike. You get to take this to your grave. Ain't justice a bitch?

She waits for him to tune her in, to feel her contempt diluting that frantic morass of guilt and self-pity. It doesn't happen. She waits and waits. Mike Brander, awash in his own symphony, just doesn't notice.

"Shit," hisses Lenie Clarke, softly.

"Come in," calls Alice Nakata, from very far away. "Everybody, come in."

Clarke boosts her gain. "Alice? Lenie."

"Mike," Brander says a long moment later. "I'm listening."

"You should get back here," Nakata tells them. "They called."

"Who? The GA?"