"I know, but it's been a week, and I think we might let up a little bit-the good doctor seems to be handling things down there. She's the expert."

"Respectfully disagree, Captain," said Kranuski. "We can't afford to relax our guard, not with them aboard. Whatever Dr. Quinn down there may think, it's too dangerous."

Richard Kranuski had many disagreements with Coombs about how the ship should be run, and increasingly strong support among the weary, makeshift crew, but Coombs did not think the XO would mutiny-bad as things were, it hadn't yet come to that. Terror was a great bonding agent. "If Langhorne feels safe enough to bunk down there all alone," he said, "I should be able to manage a quick look-see." He patted his sidearm. "I still got the old peashooter."

"Like that'll do you any good if-"

"Nothing will do us any good, Rich, if it comes to that. At some point, we just have to trust to fate."

"It wasn't fate brought those things aboard," remarked Alton Webb from the plotting table.

"Stow it, Lieutenant," Kranuski said sharply, reining in his man. To Coombs he said, "Well… it's your call, Captain."

"Thanks for reminding me." Coombs ducked away through the hatch.

Descending the companionway, he deliberately quickened his pace, not giving himself time to think. Alice Langhorne's work area was in the old mission control room, the deck that had once housed the submarine's nuclear launch systems. It was stripped now, an empty shell on the third deck of the command-and-control module-the boat's forward section. The hatch was sealed off and plastered with red caution tape. Someone, probably a teenager, had scrawled, Abandon hope all ye who enter here, beneath a large skull and crossbones. Using his command access key, Coombs opened the door.

Half the lights were out in there; it was dim and clammy as a dank basement. In the center of the room was a small glass coffin bathed in lamplight, with a dead girl inside. She was blue, blue of flesh as well as of dress, with glossy black hair fanned out around her head. The scene was funereal, eerily dreamlike.