"Why the Launch Base?" he asked.

"No single group controls that," she said. "That's a part of all of our dreams - get the hyb tanks down from where Ship left them in orbit."

"It's still a Merman project."

"It is all Merman. We will say our piece there. Everyone will hear it. Then all will know what a few people may be doing."

Brett stared straight ahead. He knew he should feel elation at their escape. He was in the biggest vessel he had ever seen, rocketing along the wavetops at more than eighty knots, faster than he had ever gone before. But unknowns crowded in on him. Keel did not trust the Mermen. And Scudi was Merman. Was she being honest? Had he heard her real reasons for wanting him to avoid the radio? He looked at Scudi. For what other reason could she help him escape?

"I've been thinking," Scudi said. "If no word has reached them, your family will be sick with worry about you. And your friend, Twisp. Call Vashon. We'll make do. Maybe my suspicions are foolish."

He saw her throat pulse with a swallow and he remembered her tears over the heaped bodies of the Islanders.

"No," he said, "we should go to your Launch Base."

Again, Brett concentrated on the sea ahead of them. The two suns lifted heat-shimmers off the water. When he had been much younger, seeing the Island rim for the first time, the heat shimmers had created images for him. Long-whiskered sea dragons coiled above the ocean surface, giant muree and fat scrubberfish. The shimmer play now was nothing but heat reflected off water. He felt the warmth on his face and arms. He thought of Twisp leaning back against the coracle's tiller, eyes closed, soaking up the heat through his hairy chest.

"Where is this base?" he asked.

She reached up and turned a small dial below the overhead screen. Beside the dial, an alphanumerical keyboard glowed with its own internal lights. She typed HF-i, then LB-1. The screen flashed 141.2, then overprinted a spray of lines with a common focal point. A bright green spot danced at the wide outer arc of the lines. Scudi pointed at the spot.

"That's us." She pointed to the base of the spray. "We go here on course one forty-one point two." She pointed to a dial with a red arrow on the console in front of them. The arrow indicated 141.2.

"That's all there is to it?"

"All?" Scudi smiled. "There are hundreds of transmitter stations all around Pandora, a whole manufacturing and servicing complex - all to insure that we get from here to there."

Brett looked up at the screen. The spray of lines had pivoted until the bright green dot lay centered on course. The 141.2 still glowed in the lower left corner of the screen.

"If we require a course change, it will sound a klaxon and show the new numbers," she said. "Steeran homing on LB-one."

Brett looked out across the water beside them, seeing the spray kicked up by the foils, thinking how valuable such a system would be to Vashon's fishing fleet. The sun burned hot on him through the plaz, but the air felt good. Rich topside air blew in the vents. Scudi Wang was at his side and suddenly Pandora didn't seem to be the adversary that he'd always imagined. Even if it was a deadly place, it had its measure of beauty.

Shadow Panille covered the dead Mute. He washed his hands in the alcohol basin beside the litter. The rest of the room bustled with the clink of steel instruments against trays. Low-voiced, one-word commands and grunts came from several busy groups of doctors and med-techs. Panille looked back over his shoulder at the long row of litters strung down the center of the room, each one surrounded by medics. Splashes and blotches of blood stained gray gowns and the eyes above the antiseptic masks looked more tired, more hopeless every hour. Of all the survivors brought in by the pickup teams, only two had escaped physical harm. Panille reminded himself that there were other kinds of harm. What the experience had done to their minds ... he hesitated to think of them as survivors.

The Mute behind Panille had died under the knife for lack of replacement blood. The medical facility had been unprepared for bleeders on such a tremendous scale. He heard Kareen Ale snap off her gloves behind him.

"Thanks for the assist," she said. "Too bad he didn't make it. This was a close one."

Panille watched one of the teams lift a litter and carry it toward the recovery area. At least a few would make it. And one of his men had said they were herding together the few fishing boats that had escaped and fled the drift. Panille rubbed his eyes and was immediately sorry. They burned from the touch of alcohol and started streaming tears.

Ale took him by the shoulder and led him to the sink beside the hatchway. It had a tall, curved spout that he could get his head under.

"Let the water run over the eyes," she said. "Blinking helps the rinse."

"Thanks."

She handed him a towel. "Relax," she said, "that's the last of them."

"How long have we been at it?"

"Twenty-six hours."

"How many made it?"

"Not counting those in shock, we have ninety still breathing in recovery. Several hundred with only minor injuries. I don't know. Fewer than a thousand, anyway, and six still under the knife here. Do you believe what this one told us?"

"About the sub? It's hard to write it off to hallucinations or delirium, considering the circumstances."

"He was clear-headed when they brought him in. Did you see what he managed to do with his legs? It's too bad he didn't make it; he tried harder than most people."

"Both legs severed below the knees and he managed to stop the bleeding himself," Panille said. "I don't know, Kareen. I guess I don't want to believe him. But I do."

"What about the part about the sub rolling upside-down before its dive?" Ale asked. "Couldn't that mean somebody just lost control of the machine? Surely no Merman would do something like that deliberately."

"That patient" - Panille waved towards the litter behind them - "claimed that a Merman sub deliberately sank their Island. He said he saw the whole thing, the sub came directly up through their center and -"

"It was an Islander sub," she insisted. "Must've been."

"But he said ..."

Kareen inhaled deeply and sighed. "He was mistaken, my dear," she said. "And to avoid serious trouble, we'll have to prove it."

They both stepped aside as two attendants carried the litter with the dead Mute out the hatchway, bound for the mortuary. Kareen began to recite what Panille knew would become the Merman line: "He was a Mute. Mutes don't have all of their faculties, even under the best of circumstances."

"You've been spending too much time with Gallow," Panille said.

"But look at what we had to work with here," she said. Her voice bordered on a whisper. Panille didn't like it, nor did he like the turn of conversation. Frustration and fatigue brought out a side of Kareen Ale that he had not known existed. "Missing parts, extra parts, misplaced parts." She gestured with a whimsical wave of her hand. "What their medical people do for an anatomy class boggles the mind. No, Shadow, it must have been an Islander sub. Some interior score they were settling. What could any of us gain by such an act? Nothing. I say we should have a drink. Just have a drink and forget it. How about it?"

"What he described was not an Islander sub," Panille insisted. "What he described was a kelp sub, with cutters and welders."

Kareen pulled him aside, as a mother might take a troublesome child aside during WorShip. "Shadow! You're not making sense. If Mermen sank that Island, then why go to all the trouble to man the pickup teams? Why not just let them go? No, we worked hard here to save what we could. Not that it mattered."