Outside the barracks now. The stairs to the main deck were vertical as a ladder. The stern of the Sea Wolf was underwater. A gray foam of water boiled over the main deck. The stern gate and ramp were already under the surface of a sea black as oil. The men who had been on watch were smears on the trawl deck, dismembered masses rolling into the sea.

The engines were laboring. Were they jammed in reverse? They were pulling the ship underwater, pulling it down into the sea.

Then the seawater reached the engine compartment. The engined stuttered, whined—and failed. The ship went dark, except for a dull amber indicator aft of the wheelhouse, the armored mind shielded from the rest of the ship’s systems.

He felt it: that bumblebee sound. He could not hear it, over the ringing in his ears, but he felt it—a vibration in his skull.

Son was pulling at him, yelling something. Pointing to the rail. Jump!

He did.

The compression came again as he was in midair. It seemed to arrest, for just a moment, his arc down toward the black water, yanking him back toward the ship. Then he was shoved farther out, tumbling through the air.

He came to in the water. He was faceup, looking into the sky. The stars were dim, struggling against a light that blotted them out, orange and red and hot white at the edge of his vision. His arms and legs moved on their own, pushing against the water to keep him afloat.

Tilting his head down, he saw the Sea Wolf. Most of the trawl deck was underwater now, the gantry jutting from the sea. As he watched, the Sea Wolf’s bow and fo’c’sle angled upward toward the stars.

Fire on the water illuminated the hardened steel of the wheelhouse. The recoilless rifle turned one way and then another. An eye, searching for the thing in the air that had destroyed the ship. It fired once, then again.

Son! Eiko twisted in the water, searching the surface. There—ten meters away. But facedown. Eiko swam to him, turned him over with a struggle. Dead weight. Dead. No—now he coughed up water, convulsed. His eyelids flickered, opened. He began to move his arms and legs, supporting his own weight in the water. Eiko let him go.

They watched together as the wheelhouse of the Sea Wolf began to slide under the water. The recoilless rifle fired again into the air, and again, twisting wildly, and then was still. The water was nearly at the watertight door of the wheelhouse now. And then past it. Past the recoilless rifle. The bow rolled upward, turned a half circle, and was gone.