Cutting Edge

Fisheries based in Cedric’s native France sent their vessels here. As did companies in Japan, Korea, China, Germany, and the Netherlands. Most were licensed for deepwater operations in the Gulf of Guinea, but there were enough illegal ships that would trawl the spawning grounds nearer the coast, where tight zoning rules had been placed on commercial fishing… the Chinese being the worst offenders.

Cedric knew environmental impact was part of the reason for the restrictions. Fishing accounted for two thirds of Gabon’s economic production, and low yield had been a problem in recent years. But another serious concern was protecting the submarine fiberoptic network that represented a cooperative investment of nearly a billion dollars for local businessmen and their foreign partners in the broadcasting and telecommunications industry.

Unfortunately, policing the seaways was an impossible challenge for Gabon. A runt of a nation, its navy consisted of five hundred men, a couple of patrol boats, and the same number of amphibious hovercraft. This paltry force could not by any stretch keep up with poachers who were skilled at evasion and equipped with state-of-the- art countersurveillance apparatus.

The damaged cable Cedric and Marius been sent down to examine had been terribly mangled — evidence that it had gotten raked up from its shallow burial trench by bottom dragging gear, most likely the saw-toothed iron plow bar of a clam and oyster dredge. At that stage, the cable’s surrounding nylon yarn would have been easily shredded and gashed. Cedric could see how the breach could go as deep as the third layer of armor. He could further imagine a shark attack, or series of shark attacks, finishing the destructive work once the outer armor was compromised.

Which still left him with a significant unanswered question. The goblin… what would have brought it here now, attracted it to a lifeless cable?

A moment later his puzzlement deepened. The shark had continued hovering in the water several yards away like a clock hand pointed to the numeral six, its nose down, its tail fins aimed toward the surface. Cedric saw it lunge straight for the seabed now, its thick, horny snout appendage drilling deep. Sediment billowed up in a turbid cloud. The goblin darted back up and sliced a rapid circle around the spot where it had struck, row upon row of fangs spiking from its open mouth. Then it speared into the sand sheet again, prodding the thick silt and muck, churning more of it from the bottom with repetitive jackhammer thrusts.

“Je ne comprend pas,” Marius said over the pilot-to-pilot. “Our ugly friend’s in quite a froth.”

Cedric was thoughtful. “We need to have a look at what’s agitated it.”

“Are you sure? I don’t know I’d want to approach the creature if it was in a sedate mood.”

“We saw a repeater in the cable about forty meters back. They’re spaced fifty meters apart. Unless my estimate’s off by a long throw, we’ll find another over by the shark.”

“You think that could be what’s making it act up?”

Cedric’s shrug went unseen inside the bulky aluminum alloy shell of his hardsuit.

“The laser pump’s an expensive contraption, Marius. I’d just as soon spare it from becoming an hors d’oeuvre,” he said. “Besides, it may be holding a residual charge. That could prove your idea about the cable attracting it to be half right. Or less wrong, anyway. And I figure you’d enjoy the chance to call me an ass.”

“In this case, I’ll settle for thinking you one.”

Cedric chuckled a little. “Is your POD toggled on?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then we won’t have to get too close. You saw how it turned from us before.”

Marius fell silent, conversely indicating his doubts weren’t at all quieted. But Cedric was reassured by how well the protective oceanic device had performed on the goblin’s approach. Designed to irritate the same sensory organs that allowed sharks to home in on their kills, the POD emitted a 360-degree electrical field that had apparently caused their unwelcome welcomer sufficient distress to make it avoid them.

“Come on,” Cedric said. “I’ll lead the way so you won’t be the first of us to get chewed to pieces.”

Before Marius could finish voicing his sarcastic thank-you, Cedric depressed the pedals inside the hardsuit’s oversize Frankenstein boots — he’d never been told what to properly call the encasements for his feet — and activated his thruster unit.

Its motors engaged with a gentle kick. There were two blade-driven thrusters oriented for horizontal movement, another pair for vertical propulsion, any of which could be used singly or in combination to allow full omnidirectional control. Now all four whirred to life at once.

As the motor vibrations steadied to a faint pulse, Cedric lifted off the seabed in underwater flight, his body remaining in an upright position. Marius swept along behind and to port, careful to stay wide of his backwash.

They closed distance with the shark in a rush and immediately caught its awareness. It withdrew from the sandbank and swung around to regard them, its small round eyes cold and alert, gleaming in its ghastly head like chips of black mirrored glass.

The men assumed stationary hovers, their horizontal propellor blades slowing.

“Why hasn’t your friend left?” Marius said.

“Our friend,” Cedric amended. “Give it a chance to react to our electronic security blanket.”

The shark kept watching them, turned in their direction, stilled by their intrusive presence.

After several long moments it lunged.

Cedric released a gasping exhalation. He heard Marius blurt a stream of invective in his earbud. Its stiletto- toothed mouth agape, the shark came on fast, straight — and then veered away with a lashing herky-jerky motion barely three meters from where the two men hung suspended over the sandbank.

Cedric watched it disappear from sight, felt the knot in his stomach loosen, and took a deep breath of the hardsuit’s recycled oxygen.

“Tell me something,” Marius said. The scratchy tremor in his voice was not due to any transmission breakup. “What’s the effective range of our PODs?”

“Seven meters.”

“The shark should have been informed of that specification, don’t you think?”

Cedric grunted in response and thrust forward through the water. Marius followed. Seconds later they reached the churned up patch of seabed that had been the target of the goblin’s battering frenzy, eased off their footpads, and made a floating descent.

Cedric had scarcely alighted when he saw evidence that his suspicions had been on the mark. Plucked from the unsettled deposits was a cable segment with a lumpish bulge in it, often described as resembling a snake that had swallowed a rodent — a repeater case. It must be what had aroused the goblin’s attention, he thought. No great surprise there, though Cedric made a mental note to corner one of the ship’s cable technicians and find out for sure whether the component could hold a charge despite a widespread systemic power failure.

He was still examining the length of cable when something unusual did catch his eye. Very unusual, in fact.

Cedric looked down at it a moment, baffled. Not far from the repeater, a section of the cable remained partially buried under a thin layer of sand and clingy vegetation. He reached down to clear the material away with his robotic prehensor claws, his fingers working actuators inside the manipulator pod. Then he scrutinized his discovery from a graceless bent-at-the-knees position — the hardsuit’s limited number of hydraulic rotary joints did not permit bending at the waist.

“Marius, come have a peek,” he said.

Beside him, Marius assumed a comparably awkward stance to look at the watertight rectangular box.

“A splice enclosure,” he said. “I didn’t know the wire had old repairs.”

“It doesn’t. Or it shouldn’t. None.”

“You’re positive?”

“None,” Cedric repeated. “You can take a look at the grid charts once we’re back on the ship. But trust me, I’d remember. I’ve been maintaining the cable almost since it was laid.” He carefully extracted the splice housing from the mud with his prehensors. “Something else. The enclosure doesn’t look like any type Planetaire’s used in the past. It’s very similar, yes. Not identical.”

Marius produced a confused frown. “Do you think it has some connection to the service failure?”