'Drives?' Greywolf puts his arm around Delaware. 'I've got nothing against drives.'

There's a ripple of laughter, shared conspiratorially, then stowed away.

Anawak hesitates. 'Well, to come back to that business about happy endings…'

Everyone looks at him.

'You could ask whether humanity deserves to stay alive. But there is no humanity, only people. Individuals. And there are plenty of individuals who could give you a stack of good reasons as to why they should live.'

'Why do you want to live, Leon?' asks Crowe.

'Because…' Anawak shrugs. 'That's easy, really. There's someone I'd like to live for.'

'A happy ending.' Johanson sighs. 'I knew it.'

Crowe smiles at Anawak. 'Don't tell me it all ends up with you falling in love?'

'Ends up?' Anawak thinks. 'Yes. I guess in the end that I've fallen in love.'

The conversation continues, voices echoing in Weaver's head until they fade in the noise of the waves.

You dreamer, she tells herself, you hopeless dreamer.

She's alone again.

WEAVER IS CRYING.

After an hour or so the sea starts to calm. After another hour the wind has dropped sufficiently for the towering peaks to flatten into rolling hills.

Three hours later she dares to open the pod.

The lock releases with a click, lid humming as it rises. She is wrapped in freezing air. She stares out and sees a hump lift in the distance and disappear beneath the waves. It's not an orca: it's bigger than that. The next time it surfaces, it's already much closer, and a powerful fluke lifts out of the water.

A humpback.

For a moment she thinks about closing the pods. But what good will that do against the immense weight of a humpback? She can lie prone in the pod or sit up – if the whale doesn't want her to survive beyond the next few minutes, she won't.

The hump rises again through the ruffled grey water. It's enormous. It lingers on the surface, close to the boat. It swims so close that Weaver would only have to stretch out a hand to touch the barnacle-encrusted head. The whale turns on its side, and for a few seconds its left eye watches the small frame of the woman in the machine.

Weaver returns its gaze.

It discharges its blow with a bang, then dives down without creating a wave.

Weaver clings to the side of the pod.

It hasn't attacked her.

She can scarcely believe it. Her whole head is throbbing. There's a buzzing in her ears. As she stares into the water, the buzzing and throbbing get louder, and they're not inside her head. The noise is coming from above, deafeningly loud and directly overhead. Weaver looks up.

The helicopter is hovering just above the water.

People are crowded in the open doorway. Soldiers in uniform and one person who's waving at her with both arms. His mouth is wide open in a forlorn attempt to drown the rattling rotors.

Eventually he'll manage it, but for now the helicopter wins.

Weaver is crying and laughing.

It's Leon Anawak.

Nothing is the way it used to be.

A year to this day the Independence sank. I've decided to keep a diary, one year on. It seems we humans need the symbolism of dates to start something new or end it. Sure, the events of the past few months will he chronicled by a host of other people, but they won't be recording my thoughts. I'd like to be able to look back some day and reassure myself that I haven't misremembered.

I called Leon in the early hours of this morning. Back then we had the choice of burning, drowning or freezing. He saved my life twice. After the Independence went down, I was as close to death as ever: drenched to the bone in Arctic water, with a broken ankle and no real prospect of being fished out of the sea. The Zodiac had a survival kit on board, but I would never have managed to use it on my own. To add to our problems, I blacked out almost as soon as we escaped. My brain still refuses to replay that final sequence. I remember tumbling down the ramp and the last thing I see is water. I woke up in hospital, with hypothermia, pneumonia, concussion and a craving for nicotine.

Leon's doing well. He and Karen are in London at present. We talked about the dead: Sigur Johanson, who never made it back to Norway and his house by the lake, Sue Oliviera, Murray Shankar, Alicia Delaware and Greywolf Leon misses his friends, especially on a day like today. That's humans for you. Even in our mourning we rely on fixed dates, temporal anchors where we can deposit our grief. When it's time to unlock our pain, it seems smaller than we remembered. Death is best left to the dead. The talk soon turned to the living. I met Gerhard Bohrmann recently. A nice man, affable and relaxed. After his experience, I'm not sure I'd ever want to go near the water again, but he takes the view that nothing could top La Palma. He's making lots of dive trips in an effort to assess the damage to the continental slopes. Yes, humans can venture under water again.

The attacks came to a halt soon after the Independence sank. At around that time the SOSUS arrays picked up some Scratch signals that were audible from one end of the ocean to the other. A few hours later, a rescue squad arrived at the seamount to liberate Bohrmann from his underwater cave, only to find that the sharks had disappeared. Overnight the whales returned to their normal routine. The worms vanished, as did the armies of jellies and all the other toxic creatures: crabs stopped invading the coast. Little by little the oceanic pump has eased back into action, in time to save us from an ice age. Even the hydrates are stabilising, or so Bohrmann tells me. To this day Karen doesn't know what she saw at the bottom of the Greenland Sea, but her idea must have worked. The Scratch signals coincide with her encounter with the queen. The Deepflight's computer logged the time at which she opened the pod to release Rubin's body, and not long afterwards the terror ceased.

Or was it merely suspended?

Are we using our reprieve?

I don't know. Europe is slowly recovering from the chaos left by the tsunami. Epidemics still plague the east coast of America, though the devastation is decreasing, and the serums have started to work. That's the good news. On the downside, the world is still reeling in confusion. How can mankind begin to heal its wounds when its identity is in pieces? The established religions can't offer any answers. Christianity is a case in point. Adam and Eve had long since handed over to the building blocks of evolution. The Church had no choice but to accept that mankind was born of proteins and amino acids, and not the archetypal human couple. Christianity could cope with that. What counted was God's intention to create us. It didn't especially matter how He did it, provided it happened in accordance with His plan. God does not play dice, as Einstein put it. Plans devised by God were inherently guaranteed to succeed. His infallibility was by definition a priori!

Even when speculation started about intelligence on other planets, Christianity managed to keep pace. After all, wasn't God at liberty to replicate creation as often as He liked? There was nothing to say that alien life-forms had to resemble humans to be part of God's plan. Mankind was called into being as the perfect species for the specific environment created on God's Earth. Other planets had different environments, so it was reasonable to expect that alien life-forms wouldn't be the same. In any event, God created each different life-form in His image, which wasn't a contradiction, but a metaphorical turn of phrase. God's creatures didn't literally conform to His appearance, but to the vision in His mind's eye when He called them into being.