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Of course, Menlim didn’t go by “Shadow” here, or even Menlim.

He went by a human name, Jacobus Laningdale, which meant nothing to me, but made Revik grimace when he heard it. I saw a frown touch Balidor’s lips as well, although no one spoke aloud while we listened to Surli’s transmission.

When I gave Revik a questioning look, he just shook his head. I felt the darker thread of irony in his light, and a flicker of disgust, too.

It’s from a book,is all he said.

What book?

He gazed around at the others sitting at the table, shaking his head.Before your time. It doesn’t matter, Allie.

Balidor told me later it was the name of a fictional character who proposed wiping out billions of people using a weaponized disease. The book was popular a few decades following First Contact, and while the book hadn’t spelled out seers as the alien race being depicted, many who read it assumed he’d been talking about seers.

It ignited a lot of controversy as a result. It also became the “bible” of some anti-seer groups, especially after World War II.

When I asked Revik about it that night, he told me Menlim would find the name ironic. Apparently he was big on using scriptural names during the First World War, as well as literary references from obscure texts?references very few people would catch. According to Revik, even the name “Menlim” had some meaning from non-canon versions of the seer myths. The original Menlim was a semi-mythical seer sorcerer credited by some with causing the Second Displacement via dark magics he’d visited upon the old Sarhacienne king.

I admit, details like that unnerved me?partly because they allowed me to see into Menlim’s mind more than I really wanted, but mainly because they reminded me how closely Revik had been tied to Menlim all those years.

Revik actuallyknewhim.

Menlim had practically been a father to him.

Fighting not to think about that now, and the risk we were taking, letting Revik anywhere near a construct of the Dreng, I felt my face tighten underwater.

I adjusted my goggles as I tried to push the worry out of my mind.

Turning in the water, I looked at Revik where he floated next to me in the dark silence of the pre-dawn ocean. I knew our suits would hide any residual body heat, well enough to keep us from being noticed by passing infrared scans, but I still felt weirdly exposed, maybe just because there was nothing around us for miles but water.

In addition to infrared, virtual capability and GPS, the goggles had small transmitters we were only to use in case of emergencies?meaning, if we needed to be picked up because we got ID’d, or something went wrong and we couldn’t get into Dubai at all.

For now, we switched off everything but the infrared, relying on hand signals to communicate, which were somewhat imprecise, given where we were.

I heard the ship long before I saw it, and well before Revik began signaling to me with his hands. Even so, I followed the motion of his fingers via the infrared.

Get ready,he gestured smoothly, if slower than usual.The window is small.

I nodded, watching as he checked the harness holding us together. He’d hooked the thing onto my belt and a pair of rings attached to a second harness I wore around my chest. I knew it was a nervous tic for him to be checking it now, since we’d already each done it twice, but I just floated there, letting him check the rigging all over again anyway.

Once he’d done that, he checked the rigging holding the penguin to his own suit.

By the time he’d finished, the sound was getting louder.

The boat chewed inexorably through water, at first south of us, and then, when we positioned ourselves for the connect, it began to pass over us, too. By then, I could see the long line of metal and the white wake stretching in a line behind it.

I watched Revik aim the harpoon-like gun, or “penguin,” as Wreg and Dante called it. They’d been the masterminds in rigging that thing up, so I guess they got to name it, too. It was based on a combat pick-up Wreg had used with helicopters in the past, modified by Dante to work underwater.

Revik and I both practiced with it on the deck, as well as in the water by the ship.

For this part of things, I was just back up, though.

Only one person needed to fire the thing.

I’d been warned it had a good kick, big enough to get picked up by sonar, if they had their machines calibrated finely enough. Even so, I flinched when Revik fired it, and panicked when a fleet of organic flyers (swimmers?) came at us from the belly of the ship, presumably to check out what we were.

Wreg and Dante planned for that, too.

The gun sent out two hard pulses of interference, meant to confuse the sonar of the flyer/swimmers into thinking we were something other than what we were?another ingenious enhancement by Dante. It must have worked, because all six of the little machines I saw buzzing towards us went around us and then past us, descending deeper into the dark water.