1.Danae
Red. Yellow. Blue.
Red for the medical clearances. Yellow for the dive logs. Blue for the discrepancies, the folder that didn't exist five days ago and is now the thickest of the three.
I count them at the desk. Then I count them again, because the first count is reflex and the second one is real.
"Dani."
Iliana is in the doorway of the site office with a peach in her hand and sunburn across her nose. She's been standing there long enough to watch me count twice.
"Twenty two minutes," I say. "The harbormaster closes for μεσημέρι."
"I know what time it is." She comes in. She doesn't sit. "I hear the medical cabinet grew a new lock."
"And the key went for a walk." I sling the case across my body. Red, yellow, blue, once more at the door, because a door is where things get left behind.
"Ask me. I'll have it open in four minutes."
"I know you would." I take the peach out of her hand. She's been handing me fruit out of her pocket since we were nine. "Then it's your cabinet and my signature. There's a word for that, Ilia, and the word isn't independent."
She lets that sit. In twenty two years Iliana has never asked me a question she hadn't already half verified. It's why she summoned me. It's about to make this worse.
"The Aegaeon motion," she says. "Tell me it's today."
"It isn't."
"Dani."
"The cargo discrepancy is real." I give her that part first, and fast, because it's the part she wants and I need her holding it when the rest lands. "The recovered section doesn't match its own manifest. The weight receipts are wrong. The seals were recrimped. Somebody opened that hold and closed it again. It needs one more chain of custody document before it's a weapon instead of a theory. I'm filing something else first."
"What?"
I could go around it. I've never once managed that with her.
"A motion to freeze the fleet's diving licences. All of them, on stamp, pending independent medical review."
She doesn't explode. With Iliana, the deeper the hit, the quieter she goes.
"I brought you here to take Aegaeon apart."
"You brought me here as surveyor of record. The record includes your medical logs, and your medical logs are wrong." The peach is warm in my hand. I'm nine years old and thirty one at the same time. "Not sloppy wrong. Patterned. Fitness clearances issued at intervals that ignore your own exposure tables. Symptoms opened and struck through in the same hand. Bottom times that should have half your divers in a chamber. All of it signed off by one medical officer. Including, five days ago, a clearance he wrote for himself."
"You've been here five days."
"And it took five days to be sure. It usually takes me two." It's out before I can stop it. Her mouth does something complicated. "That's how hard someone is working to hide this."
The wrist timer ticks against the quiet. Fourteen minutes.
"Eleven names on tomorrow's roster," I say. "If one of them dies down there, Aegaeon doesn't need to win anything. And my signature is on this operation now."
Iliana looks past me at the water, at the barge, at the whole salt and steel kingdom she bled nine days in May to keep. When she looks back there's no anger in it, which is worse.
There's arithmetic.
"File it," she says. "And God help you if you're right."
Outside, the cicadas are already sawing at the heat.
The yard smells of diesel and hot rope. Under that is the iron breath the sea gives off when something enormous is being pulled out of it in pieces. Down at the water the crane barge squats over the dive site like a patient animal. Ninety metres under it, where the blue goes black, the Ionic lies on her ledge.
Twelve minutes. Gravel. Stamp before μεσημέρι. Chain of custody Thursday. Who locked the cabinet. Who strikes out a symptom in the same hand that wrote it.
The speakers crackle overhead. It's the sonar watch, flat and bored, a man reading numbers he's decided not to be afraid of.
Advisory. Seismic acoustic contact, wreck site. Hull settlement confirmed against retrieval baseline. Cumulative list three degrees. Monitoring continues.
Three degrees.
I keep walking. Eleven names. One signature under all of them, and the last one he wrote was for himself.
A man steps into my path.
Not near it. Into it. He fills the gravel lane between the last container and the harbormaster's steps the way a hull section fills a crane sling. I stop, because the alternative is walking into a wall that breathes.
He's big. That registers first and matters least, because my eyes are already doing what they do.
The whites of his eyes are shot red, burst at both corners, the way they burst on a man who has been coughing at depth. His skin has gone grey under the tan. In his right hand there's a tremor, fine and fast, pressed flat against his thigh with the stillness of a man who has practised hiding it.
He looks the way the wreck sounds over the speakers. Something enormous, settling where it shouldn't.
I read this man this morning.
Not his face. His symptoms. Bleeding in the eyes, struck through. Pallor, struck through. Tremor, right hand, struck through. One hand, one pen, one clearance dated five days ago.
Signed by the patient.
"Miss Vasileiou." His voice is nothing like his hands. It's a scalpel laid flat on a tray, level and clean and cold enough to fog. "Before you climb those steps, we should talk about what you think you're about to file."
Eleven minutes.
The finding I came here to file has just stepped into my path. And it knows my name.
