The boat laboured past and faded northward on a bored drone, listing awkwardly with the weight of its prize, not even that close to us in the end.

Neurachem showed me the dead bottleback in silhouette against the blue lit surface of the water, still trailing thin threads of blood into the water.

The massive torpedo body rolled sluggishly against the bow wave, the flukes trailed like broken wings. Part of the dorsal flange had been ripped loose at some point and now it flogged back and forth in water, blurred at the edges with ragged lumps and tendrils of tissue. Loose cabling tangled alongside. Looked as if they’d harpooned it a few times—whoever had chartered the boat clearly wasn’t that great a fisherman.

When humans first arrived on Harlan’s World, the bottlebacks didn’t have any natural predators. They were the top of the food chain, magnificently adapted marine hunters and highly intelligent, social animals.

Nothing the planet had evolved recently was up to killing them.

We soon changed that.

“Hope that’s not an omen,” murmured Sierra Tres unexpectedly.

Brasil made a noise in his throat. I vented the emergency chambers on the buoyancy jacket and snapped the grav system back on. The water seemed suddenly colder around me. Behind the automatic motions of course check and gear trim, I could feel a vague, undefined anger seeping into me.

“Let’s get this done, guys.”

But the mood was still with me twenty minutes later when we crept into the shallows at the base of Rila, pulsing at my temples and behind my eyes.

And projected on the glass of my scuba mask, the pale red route-pointers from Natsume’s simulation software seemed to flare in time with the ratcheting of my own blood. The urge to do damage was a rising tide inside me, like wakefulness, like hilarity.

We found the channel Natsume had recommended, eased through with gloved hands braced against rock and coral outcrops to avoid snagging.

Levered ourselves up out of the water onto a narrow ledge that the software had tinted and flagged with a slightly demonic smiling face. Entry level, Natsume had said, shedding his monkish demeanour for a fleeting moment. Knock, knock. I got myself braced and took stock. Faint silvery light from Daikoku touched the sea, but Hotei had still not risen and the spray from the maelstrom and nearby wavecrash fogged what light there was. The view was mostly gloom. Angelfire sent shadows scurrying past on the rocks as another firework package burst somewhere to the north.

Thunder rippled across the sky. I scanned the cliff above for a moment, then the darkened sea we’d just climbed out of. No sign we’d been noticed.

I detached the dive helmet’s frame from the mask and lifted it off. Shed my flippers and flexed the toes of the rubber boots underneath.

“Everybody okay?”