Gallow wedged himself into the corner beside Zent, his gaze fixed on the display screens, which showed Island tissue melting away from the heliarcs.

"There is no Ship!" Gallow exulted. "You see! Would Ship allow a mere mortal to do such a thing?" He turned emotion-glazed eyes on Bushka at the controls. "I told you! Ship's an artifact, a thing made by people like us. God! There is no God!"

Bushka tried to speak but his throat was too dry.

"Take us back down, Iz," Gallow ordered.

"What're you doing?" Bushka managed.

"I challenge Ship," Gallow said. "Has Ship responded?" A wild laugh issued from his throat. Only Zent joined it.

"Take us down, I said!" Gallow repeated.

Driven by fear, Bushka's pilot-conditioned muscles responded, shifting trim ballast, adjusting planes. And he thought: If we get out fast, some of this Island may survive. Gently, he maneuvered the sub downward through the wreckage left by its terrible ascent. Plazports and screens showed the water around them dim with blood, a dull gray in the harsh illumination from the sub's exterior lights.

"Hold us here," Gallow ordered.

Bushka ignored the command, his gaze intent on the exterior carnage - inert bodies and pieces of bodies glimpsed in the murk. Raw horror everywhere around him. A little girl's dancing frock with white lace ruffles in an ancient pattern floated past a port. Behind it could be seen strung out the remnants of someone's pantry, half a lover's portrait pasted against a remnant stone box: outline of a smile without eyes. Beyond the sub's hot lights, blood rolled and streamed, a cold gray fog reaching down the currents.

"I said hold us here!" Gallow shouted.

Bushka continued to gentle the sub downward. A well of tears brimmed against his eyelids.

Don't let me cry! he prayed. Dammit! I can't break down in front of these ... these ... No word in his memory could label what his companions had become. This realization burned its change in him. These three Mermen were now lethal deviants. They would have to be brought before the Committee. Judgment must be made.

Nakano reached across Bushka and adjusted the ballast controls to bring the sub's descent to a stop. His eyes looked a warning.

Bushka looked at Nakano through a swim of tears, then shifted his gaze to Zent. Zent still held his left ear, but he watched Bushka steadily, smiling that cold-liver smile. His lips moved silently: "Wait till I get you topside."

Gallow reached across Zent's head to the heliarc controls.

"Take us straight ahead," he ordered. He snapped a polarized shield in place and sighted down the twin snouts of the bow heliarc.

Bushka reached to his shoulder and brought his chest harness into place, snapping it closed at his side. He moved with purpose, which brought a questioning stare from Zent. Before Zent could react, Bushka kicked loose the dive planes, skewed the control surfaces to starboard and blew the rear ballast tanks while he opened the bow valves. The sub surged over onto its nose and corkscrewed toward the bottom, spinning faster and faster. Nakano was thrown to the left by the force of the spin. Zent lost his needle burner while trying to grab for a support. His body was thrown against Gallow. Both men lay pinned between hull and control panels. Only Bushka, strapped in at the center of the spin, could move with relative ease.

"You damn fool!" Gallow shouted. "You'll kill us!"

His right hand moving across the switches methodically, Bushka snapped off the cabin lights and all but the exterior bow light. Outside the glow of that one beacon, darkness closed in, surrounding them with a gray murk in which only a few shreds of torn humanity drifted and sank.

"You're not Ship!" Gallow screamed. "You hear me, Bushka? It's just you doing this!"

Bushka ignored him.

"You can't get out of this, Bushka," Gallow shouted. "You'll have to come up sometime and we'll be there."

He's asking if I mean to kill us all, Bushka thought.

"You're crazy, Bushka!" Gallow shouted.

Bushka stared straight ahead, looking for the first glimpse of bottom. At this speed, the sub would dig in and make Gallow's warning come true. Not even plasteel and plaz could withstand a twisting dive into the rocky bottom, not at this depth and this speed.

"You going to do it, Bushka?" That was Nakano, voice loud but level and more than a little admiration in the question.

For answer, Bushka eased the angle of dive but kept the hard spin, knowing his Island-trained equilibrium could better withstand the violent motion.

Nakano began to vomit, gagging and gasping as he tried to clear his throat in the heavy centrifugal pressure. The stench became a nauseating presence in the cabin.

Bushka keyed his console for display of the sub's gas displacement. Notations showed ballast was blown with CO2. His gaze traced out the linked lines. Yes ... exhausted cabin air was bled into the ballast system ... conservation of energy.

Gallow had subsided into a low growling protest while he struggled to crawl out against the force of the spin. "Not Ship! Just another damn shit-eater. Gonna kill him. Never trust Islander."

Following the diagram in front of him, Bushka tapped out the valving sequence on the emergency controls. Immediately, an oxygen mask dropped in front of him from an overhead compartment. All other emergency oxygen remained securely in place. Bushka pressed the mask to his face with one hand while his other hand bled CO2 from the ballast directly into the cabin.

Zent began gasping.

Gallow moaned: "Not Ship!"

Nakano's voice gurgled and rasped but the words were clear: "The air! He's ... going ... to ... smother us!"

***

Maritime Court did not go at all as Queets Twisp had expected. Killing a Merman in the nets had never been an acceptable "accident" at sea, even when all the evidence said it was unavoidable. The emphasis was always on the deceased and the needs of the surviving Merman family. Mermen were always reminding you of all the Islanders they saved every year with their pickup crews and search teams.

Twisp walked the long mural-distorted hallway out of the Maritime offices scratching his head. Brett almost skipped along beside him, a wide grin on his face.

"See?" Brett said. "I knew we were worried for nothing. They said it wasn't a Merman in our net - no Mermen lost, nobody that wasn't accounted for. We didn't drown anybody at all!"

"Wipe that grin off your face!" Twisp said.

"But Queets ..."

"Don't interrupt me!" he snapped. "I had my face down there in the net - I saw the blood. Red. Dasher blood's green. Now, didn't it seem to you that they got us out of court too fast?"

"It's a busy place and we're small-time. You said that yourself." Brett paused, then asked, "Did you really see blood?"

"Too much for a few beat-up fish."

The hallway let them out into the wide third-level perimeter concourse with its occasional viewports opening out onto the surging sea and the spume flying past. Weather had said there was a fifty-klick wind today with chance of rain. The sky hung gray, hiding the one sun that had headed downward into the horizon, the other already gone.

Rain?

Twisp thought Weather had made one of its infrequent errors. His fisherman's sense said the wind would have to increase before any rain came today. He expected sunshine before sunset.

"Maritime has other things to do than worry about every small-time ..." Brett broke off as he saw the bitter expression on Twisp's face.

"I mean ..."

"I know what you mean! We're really small-time now. Losing that catch cost me everything: depth gear, nets, new stunshield charges, food, the scull ..."