“Indeed.”

“I’m so glad you understand. Our underwriters have been blowing very cool in this last financial year, I can tell you, and even switching the log-graph off is going to make them suspicious. You can turn that trick only so many times, believe me. Ah… here and here…”

The captain held his clipboard up for her to sign the release papers. She took off one glove, picked up the stylo and scribbled her name. She was dressed in insulated combat fatigues and knee boots; a warm, ballisticised fur cap covered her head, the ear-pads clipped up. She and the captain were standing on deck near the bow of the grounded port hull; its single hemi-door had swung open and a ramp had been extended from the interior to the shallows. The first of the two big six-wheel All-Terrain trucks fired into life and rumbled slowly out of the hull, down the ramp, through the water and up onto the white-sand beach. The deck beneath them shifted as the vehicle’s weight was transferred from hull to land.

The AT’s grey and green camouflage flickered uncertainly for a few moments as it adjusted, then settled to a suitably nondescript set of interleaved shades that exactly matched the colour of the sand and the shadows under the trees. A heavy stub-nosed cannon sat stowed above one of the two cab hatches.

The captain turned over a couple of pages. “And here and here, please,” he said. He shook his head and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “If only the fjord was a little wider!” He stared concernedly at the mouth of the fjord, as though willing the ridge-straked slopes of the mountains to draw back from the dark waters. He sighed, his breath smoking in the cold, still air.

“Yes, well,” Sharrow said.

The second All-Terrain lumbered out of the front hull section and onto the beach, making the hull bob again. Zefla waved from one of the vehicle’s roof hatches.

“And one last one here…” the captain said, folding the flimsies back over the clipboard. Sharrow signed again.

“There,” she said.

“Thank you, Lady Sharrow,” the captain said, smiling. He put his gloves back on and bowed deeply. The sunglasses he hadn’t needed when they’d surfaced fell out of a pocket in his quilted jacket. He stooped to retrieve them, his gloves making the operation difficult.

He straightened to find her smiling bleakly at him, holding her hand out. He stuck the sunglasses in his mouth, the clipboard under his armpit and took one glove off again. He shook her hand. “A pleasure, Lady Sharrow,” he told her. “And let me wish you all the best in…” his gaze flicked round the quiet forests and the tall mountains, “… whatever you may be undertaking.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, see you in four days’ time, unless we hear from you,” he said, grinning.

“Right,” she said, turning away. “Until then.”

“Good hunting!” he called.

Sharrow made her way down a thin, metal ladder to the hull’s interior, where the sub’s deck crew were getting ready to retract the ramp and close the door again; she checked there was nothing left behind, then walked down the ramp to the shore, her boots sinking into the sand.

Just as she turned to look back at the gaping round mouth of the hull, a white jet of steam flew up into the air behind it from the submarine’s conning tower. The shriek of the vessel’s emergency siren shook the air above the beach, then cut off as the white feather of the steam plume stood, just beginning to drift in the air. The men in the mouth of the opened hull section froze. A voice boomed out above them; the captain’s, breathless and panicky. “Air alert!” he shouted through the speakers. “Aircraft coming! Repeat; aircraft approaching! Abandon the hulls! Scuttle both!”

“Shit!” Sharrow said, spinning on her heel.

The men in the hull swarmed up the ladder to the deck; Sharrow clambered into the cab of the second AT. Zefla was standing on her seat, head and torso out of the hatch above, watching the seaward skies through a pair of high-power field-glasses. Feril was at the vehicle’s wheel, poised and delicate amongst the AT’s chunkily business-like controls.

“Fucking hell,” Miz’s voice said over the Comm, “that was quick. Thought they didn’t bother much with the surv-sats these days.”

“Maybe we were misinformed,” Sharrow said, glancing at the android as the AT in front sprayed sand from its six big tyres and lumbered up the beach for the rocks bordering the saplings and grass at the edge of the forest. “Follow MIZ,” she told Feril. The android nodded and slipped the vehicle into Drive.

The truck lurched forward, following the leading AT towards the trees. Sharrow looked back through the side window to watch the last few crewmen jump from the sub’s beached section to the main hull, then saw the water froth round the rear of the fat boat as the vessel abandoned both hulls and powered astern, surrounding itself with foam. The small figures sprinted along the hull and disappeared down a hatch, swinging it shut. The submarine surged back through its own wake, starting to turn and submerge at the same time; the grounded hull section bobbed in the wash while the jettisoned starboard hull rolled back and forward, gently rising and falling in the waves.

“There’s no fucking way into these trees!” Miz yelled.

“Then make one,” Sharrow told him.

“No,” they heard Dloan’s calm voice say. “Look.”

“Hmm,” Miz replied. “Narrow…” The leading AT swivelled right.

“Zef?” Sharrow said, glancing up. “Zef?” she shouted.

Zefla ducked down, shaking her head, her hair gathered up inside a combat cap. “Nothing yet,” she said, grabbing an intercom stalk and clipping it to her ear as she stood again.

The AT in front of them bounced over rocks and charged across the grass towards the trees, tyres gouging scooped trenches in the grass and spraying earth back at them as it climbed over springy saplings and pressed between the taller trunks beyond. Clods and stones thumped and whacked into the sloped chin and screen of their AT.

Sharrow glanced back; the submarine was submerged save for its tower, sinking rapidly into the swirling water as it continued to swing out astern from the shore.

Miz and Dloan’s AT shouldered its way between the trees, slowing.

“Got it,” Zefla said through the intercom. “Single plane. Low; looks big… fairly slow.”

“Think they saw us?” Sharrow asked as Feril manoeuvred the snout of their AT to within a metre of the vehicle in front.

“Difficult to say,” Zefla said.

Miz was turning his vehicle into a small clearing to the right, the ATs mottled camouflage darkening as it burrowed deeper under the overhanging branches.

“No sign they’ve seen us…” Zefla said quietly.

“That’s about as far as we go,” Miz said. The leading AT rolled to a stop; Feril halted theirs immediately behind. Sharrow reached into the footwell and unzipped a long bag with a crude anti-aircraft symbol scrawled on it. She pulled a missile-launcher out and stood up on the seat, swinging the hatch back and sticking her head and shoulders through.

The plane was a lumpy black speck, low over the water. Where the sub had been there was just a patch of disturbed water near the abandoned floating hull. The plane’s image enlarged in the missile-launcher’s sight, went briefly fuzzy then came sharp; she flicked the safety off.

Then something waved in the sight, close and un-focused and partially obscuring the aircraft. Sharrow frowned and looked away from the launcher’s sight; some of the young trees behind them had risen up again after being caught under the ATs, forming a thin screen between them and the shore.

She squinted back into the sight and watched the plane’s silhouette tilt and thicken. It was a flying boat, about the size of an ancient heavy bomber; pairs of engines high on each wing root and a V-strutted float near the tip of each wing. Six small missiles, under the wings. The plane banked slowly, almost languorously away. She tracked it until it disappeared behind the trees.