Page 72 of The Captain
“White copies. Ten to starboard.”
I could feel my jaw in my face. The way it wanted to lock and grind. I let my tongue push against a back molar and counted quiet. One. Two. Three.
Waiting was hard. I’d seen women do it—on piers, in kitchens, in parking lots outside armories—holding coffee cups like talismans while a mission ate time they couldn’t touch. I hadn’t planned on being one of them.
Loving a military man meant letting the word “go” outrank your name sometimes. It meant making room for compartments you didn’t get keys to, trusting the part of him that came back would still fit the drawer where he’d left his things.
He treated risk like currency. I treated breath that way. Could I spend mine while he spent his and call it a shared life?
“Dominion Hall, Sector,” the voice said after a beat. “We have motion. Bearing one-eight-five, speed variable. Cross-current.”
The room leaned toward the sound together. Even the machines.
On the center screen, a smear of darker green moved where green shouldn’t move that way. Not a whale. Not a ray.
“White-Lead, do not spook,” McGuire said, low, not into my channel. Then louder, professional: “White-Lead, hold your angle and let the field do its work.”
Field. The word made the hair on my arms lift. We put fields around animals sometimes—sound curtains and slow arcs of boats that teach a humpback where the channel is.
This wasn’t that. I didn’t ask.
“Copy,” White-Lead said. “Holding.”
“Sector, Blue,” Marcus again, the grin audible. “The fish is rolling.”
Fish. Um hmm.
“Wait,” Langford said, the first time his voice crossed our net. Calm. Quiet. The kind ofwaitthat turns men into instruments.
The room went very still.
I thought of the little Kogia’s ribs under my palm, the soft lift when a breath picks a body. I set my fingers on the edge ofthe table as if it was her flank. “Breathe,” I told myself, muttered down.
A soft tone sounded, not the kind of beep that means mistake. Something else. Anticipation computed. A buoy icon pulsed. Two more answered like a heartbeat finding rhythm.
“Now,” Langford said.
Something moved through the water that I couldn’t hear but everyone else could. The screens blinked. The smear jumped, jerked, tried to remember what its own body was. A gasp went around the room.
“Target slowed,” Sector said, and the room exhaled like a choir. “Repeat, target slowed.”
“Blue team, you are green,” McGuire said. No triumph. Authority like a hand on a shoulder. “Boarders in.”
Boarders. As if the ocean were a house.
I didn’t like any of the words. I liked the man whose mouth had saidminewith his breath doing that steady soldier thing it does. I hoped he was okay.
“Blue-Three in,” a new voice came—Jacob’s, clipped down to the muscle, all the heat taken out for work. “Blue-Four in. Lines good. Vis okay. Current mild on the bottom. Mark’s thirty out.”
I could see it without wanting to: dark water, a smear of mechanical thought ahead, two men dropping into something that could decide not to be friendly, the way a rip decides not to be friendly when it forgets you’re a body and thinks you’re freight.
“Copy, Blue,” Sector said. “We have you. Keep your tethers clean.”
“Clean,” Jacob answered.
I put my hand flat on the table again. The speakers went busy without getting louder.
“White to Blue, your shadow is drifting east,” someone said. “Compensate.”
