shoulder and said, 'I thought you were used to boats!'
'Boats, yes,' said the dwarf. 'Seas, no. I learned to sail on Lake Geneva.'
'Oh.' Mute turned to Magnusson. 'You okay?'
The magician nodded. Now that the peaks of the San Juan Islands were in sight, he was busily conjuring watcher spirits and sending them to search the archipelago. The first, he directed towards the hide on Battleship Island, where Paul Santos had camped. If Fletcher had found it, he might well be taking advantage of its rather primitive comforts; if not, then much of Santos's equipment might still be there, including his cameras and computers. Magnusson dispatched another four watchers to the larger uninhabited islands in the archipelago, but without much hope: even at high tide, there were more than a hundred islands and another few hundred rocks large enough to make good hiding places, and the heavily forested areas provided good cover for astral vision as well as the normal spectrum and infra-red, especially for a heavily-cybered man trained in evasion.
Mute powered down the multi-fuel engine and started up the quieter electric motor, slowing the boat down to little more than walking speed as they sailed into Haro Strait. Zurich stopped retching long enough to toss a microskimmer drone off the boat, while 8-ball stared at the 3D map on his commlink screen. 'Orcas Island… Skull Island… Deadman Island… Cemetery Island… Victim Island… Massacre Bay… Smallpox Bay… Deadman Bay… Suicide Cliff… another Skull Island… hell, who had the naming rights to this place? Edgar Allan Poe?'
'Do we know where Santos was killed?' asked Mute.
'I've run a simulation of the tides,' said Zurich. 'He must have been either killed or dumped in the water for the current to have carried him where it did, but without an exact time of death, all I have is probabilities. Sorry.'
'Battleship Island's over there,' said Magnusson, pointing at a tall pine that resembled a mast. 'Could his body have come from near there?'
'From the north side… it's possible. More likely it was further east, in deeper water.'
Mute nodded, and headed northeast to circle the island. Magnusson's watcher spirits returned, but none had anything to report. Gloomily, the magician asked Mute to stop the boat close to shore so that he could astrally project into the camouflaged hide and search it, and then the forest, more thoroughly: watchers, he knew, wouldn't recognize a clue unless they were given a detailed description beforehand, and he didn't want to send the water elemental he'd bound to his service on a job he could do at least as well himself. He sat down in the seat next to Mute's, adjusted his floatation vest and fastened his seatbelt; then, his consciousness flew towards the island, leaving his physical body behind.
Zurich looked at his commlink at the datafeed from his microskimmer. 'Anyone else get the feeling we're looking for a needle in a couple of hundred haystacks? What if he's not even here any-' He stumbled as a wave hit the boat. '-ulp-'scuse me-' He leaned over the gunwale and opened his mouth to throw up, then yelled in pain and staggered backwards. 8-Ball stared at him, and saw the finned tail of a flechette protruding from his cheek, which was bleeding profusely.
'Shit!' he yelled, as Zurich keeled over. 'The bastard must-'
Mute turned around, and kicked her boosted reflexes into high gear so that the world seemed to slow down as if its batteries were running low.
'-beee riii-g'
She flung off her vest and hastily grabbed her spear gun.'-tuuunnndddrrruuusss-'
– and dived into the sea, activating the oxygenating spell tattooed on her body in the same instant as Thresher's heatseeker rocket hit the Nightrunner's engine and the explosion blew the stern of the boat to splinters. • • •
Magnusson looked around the hide-an artfully camouflaged tent roughly the size of a small van, with the cameras and other gear leaving just enough floor space for a troll-sized inflated mattress and sleeping bag. It didn't quite have the aura of a happy home, but there was no astral residue from violence or death inside the shelter, suggesting that Thresher probably had never found the place and that Santos had left it voluntarily…and probably not very long before his murder, if Magnusson was any judge. The scientific equipment still had the psychic patina of something often used with great care as well as eagerness, and even a certain degree of love. As he left the shelter, trying to follow the faint astral impressions of Santos's footprints, the professor found himself regretting that he hadn't known the parazoologist better.
He was halfway to the shore when the shock hit his astral body, sending it reeling in pain. • • •
Mute drew her smartlinked Fukubi with her right hand, and scanned the area for a heat trace from Thresher's weapons. She spotted the contrail from the rocket before she saw the well-disguised shape of her human target; Thresher had dropped the launcher tube and swum away from it, then unslung his M24A3 and fired.
A needle-sharp flechette tore through Mute's lightly armored bodysuit and into the flesh of her right shoulder. The rangefinder in her cybereyes told her that the SEAL was nearly fifty metres away, much too far for either of her weapons to be of much use; she returned fire with the Fukubi anyway, in the hope of spoiling his aim, but none of the shots came within a metre of hitting him, and they had lost most of their force before they even came close.
Thresher grinned as Mute swam towards him as fast as she could, weaving through the water like a dolphin and being careful to present the smallest possible target and squeezing off single shots in the hope of distracting him. She knew the carbine's mag held thirty shots, but she could only hope that he didn't have enough ammunition left that he could waste it. If she could just get close enough to fire the speargun… • • •
8-Ball sprayed a bandage onto Zurich's face, sealing the puncture made by the flechette and stopping the blood loss, then hooked the medkit up to his friend's biomonitor before dragging him over to where Magnusson's meatbody was floating. His inflated vest kept him the right way up, but he'd had to ditch his backpack, gunbelt and most of his weapons to keep his face above water. It hadn't been an easy choice.
Unlike Zurich, the magician had been sitting far enough from the explosion that he didn't seem to have been badly wounded-the back of his seat had absorbed most of the fragments, and 8-ball had cut him free of the wreck before it sank. Magnusson was still staring sightlessly at the dark clouds above him when the rain began to fall onto his face and Zurich's, and onto 8-Ball's hairless scalp. The dwarf checked the pulse in his throat yet again, unsure whether there was anything else he could do to help any of them, and sighed with relief when the magician suddenly turned to face him. 'What happened?' asked Magnusson.
'He shot Zurich, then blew up the boat,' said the dwarf.
'Mute?'
'Went after him. Took the power head and your talisman.'
Magnusson nodded. 'Can you make it back to shore? We're sitting ducks here.'
'I'll try. You?'
'I'll see if Mute needs help.' He cast an Oxygenate spell on himself, commanded his bound elemental to sustain it, and slipped out of his lined coat and flotation vest and into the depths.
The magician's astral vision allowed him to see underwater more clearly than even the best cybereyes, though the sea was teeming with life that shone in the astral like fireflies. Thresher, by contrast, was little more than a shadow, so heavily cybered and modified that he barely had a recognizable aura; only the murderous intent he radiated made it clear that he was actually alive. Magnusson cast a stunball spell at him; Thresher, his adrenaline pump having already kicked in, remained utterly unfazed. His next shot hit Mute below the collarbone, but she continued to press on, watching the rangefinder reading superimposed on the crosshairs on her retinal display as she closed the distance between herself and her target. Thirty-eight metres… thirty-seven… thirty-six…
Magnusson cast a levitation spell on Thresher's carbine, trying to wrest it from his grasp. The SEAL managed to retain his hold on the weapon, but the magician did succeed in deflecting the gun upwards so that the next burst missed Mute, and in distracting him while she swam near enough to fire the speargun. Thresher looked towards her an instant too late to dodge the dart, and it slammed into his chest hard enough to detonate the power head. Flechettes ripped into his armored wetsuit and toughened orthoskin at point-blank range, missing his heart but tearing a hole in his left lung.
Thresher released his grip on the rifle and clapped a hand over the bubbling wound, trying to hold it shut. As Mute neared, he drew his underwater pistol and fired the last three rounds, hitting her twice. Then he drew his fighting knife while he waited for her to come within melee range-but instead of returning fire, Mute drifted down towards the sea floor. Thresher watched her until he was convinced she wasn't merely feigning unconsciousness, then activated the jets in his leg and shot up towards Magnusson, spearing him in the stomach. • • •
8-Ball sighed with relief as his flailing feet finally touched wet sand. The inexpert swimmer staggered the last
