A great blunt-faced fish was rushing up toward him. Its head was encased in skull-armor, smooth and round like a cannonball, split by massive jaws in which Tanner saw not teeth, but two razor-ridges of bone chewing at the water, scraps of flesh fluttering from them. Its body was long and tapered, without contours or a fanning tail; its dorsal fin was low and streamlined, merging with its tailbone like some fat-bodied eel.

It was more than thirty feet long. It came at him, its mouth big enough to bite him in half without effort, its tiny little eyes stupid and malevolent behind their protective ridge.

Tanner howled with idiot bravery, brandishing his little knife.

Bastard John streaked across Tanner’s view, coming up behind the dinichthys, and butted it hard in the eye. The huge predator swerved with frightening speed and grace and snapped at the dolphin. The slabs of bone in its mouth crunched together and grated.

It veered violently and shot after Bastard John. With rushes of displaced water, little ivory lances streaked past as the newt-people fired their strange weapons at the dinichthys. It ignored them and bore down on the dolphin.

Tanner kicked violently away, his legs spasming as he raced toward the clinging diver. As he swam he looked around him and saw, to his horror, that the massive bone-plated fish had gone deep, despite Bastard John’s attempts to goad it, and was doubling back from below, heading straight for Tanner.

With a last kick, Tanner touched the rough metal of the pipe and scrabbled for the diver. Tanner stared at the dinichthys, his heart hammering as the monstrous thing powered toward him. The suckers of his tentacles anchored him to the shaft. He waved the knife in his right hand, praying for Bastard John or the newt-men or the armed divers to reach him. With his left he reached out for the trapped man.

His fumbling hand reached into something warm and soft, something that gave to his fingers in a horrifying way, and Tanner snatched his hand back. He glanced up for a second at the man beside him.

He looked into a faceplate full of water, and a wide-eyed white face, eyes protuberant, mouth distended and still. The leather in the center of the suit had been gouged away, and the man’s stomach was torn from him. Entrails waved in the water like anemones.

Tanner moaned and snapped away, sensing the dinichthys below him, kicking out fearfully, slashing ineffectually at nothing as with a sudden vicious tide the ridges and scales swept past him, tons of muscle flexing, the sound of bone on bone jarring through the water. The pipe shuddered as the corpse was snatched from it. The snub-skulled hunter zigzagged away through the inverted forest of Armada’s keels, the dead man dangling in its jaws.