The Divacross run

1 — Embassy Night

The alarms came on like knives.

Captain Marion Feloski reached the Cordiscan Federal Embassy vault in under a minute, boots slapping tile, breath steady. The vault door, six plates of armored ceramic, hung open a fraction, stuttering on its guides. Inside, cold blue light painted stacked memory caskets, sealed racks of diplomatic codes, and in the center cradle… nothing.

The data core was gone.

Feloski swallowed the anger the way he always had, push it down, make it fuel. “Kamal,” he said into his throat-comm, “status.”

“West service door breeched at 02:11,” Kamal replied, voice quick, young. “Security feed looped. Whoever did it brought their own ghost.”

“Delamon?”

“Infirmary hallway,” Delamon growled. “Two guards stunned, clean shots. No blood. Professional.”

Feloski stepped to the cradle. The air above it still shivered with the cold of a recent vacuum seal. “Mira?”

Mira Tal, compact, quiet, more reflex than body, jogged in beside him with a sensor wand. “Residual field suggests the core was lifted by mag-cradle. Light. Fast. They were in and out.”

“Lysa?”

“Skimmeryard reports a black hull cutting out through Kelanport’s river locks six minutes ago,” Lysa Hymal said, navigator’s voice controlled, all edges smooth. “No transponder. Heading for the inland seas.”

Feloski looked up at the ceiling where the embassy crest hung, a stylized cresting wave wrapped in five interlocking sigils for Cordiscan’s five intelligent species. This world was young in the Federation. Steal their core and leak it to an enemy bloc and you didn’t just embarrass a government, you put a target on a planet’s back.

“Suit up,” Feloski said. “We’re going after them.”

He turned, and almost walked into Kellan Dray, the embassy’s young liaison, hair slicked back, suit too crisp for this hour. Kellan’s eyes darted to the empty cradle and back to Feloski’s face. “Captain, tell me you have a tracking bead.”

“Tell me you had a clean guest list,” Feloski countered.

Kellan bristled. “We’re partners in this Federation, not suspects.”

“Then you won’t mind that I’m going to treat everyone like a suspect until that core is back in our hands.” Feloski pushed past him. “Kamal, pull every feed we have on traffic from the river to the inner sea.”

Kamal: “Already on it. And, uh… Captain?”

“Say it.”

“There’s a rumor, just a rumor, the Sable Compact has a runner in the kelp archipelagos. If the core hits their hands, it’s gone.”

Feloski paused at the door, listening to the embassy’s alarms pulse like a heartbeat. “Then we’ll cut the hand off at the wrist.”

 

2 — Skimmercraft

The embassy’s seafront hangar opened to a slate-colored dawn. Fog pooled on the river. Beyond the floodgates, the inland seas were a glass sheet broken only by stone spires and the black teeth of reefs. Wharves were fortified, everything on Cordiscan was fortified, because the world bit back.

On the apron waited three experimental skimmercraft, still smelling of factory sealant and hope.

Tidebreaker, Feloski’s command skimmer, was all blade lines and narrow stance, a laminar field generator stitched into a hydrofoil spine. Slipstream, Lysa’s partner craft, was smaller and meaner, thrusters tucked tight. Waveknife, Delamon’s hulking gun-skiff, mounted twin shock-net launchers and a belly full of bad ideas.

Mira ran her palms along Tidebreaker’s deck, calibrating the thalasson array. “Field balances are good. We can ride the skin at ninety knots if the seas hold.” She looked at Feloski. “If they don’t, we’ll find out fast.”

“Eels?” Kamal asked, not joking.

Feloski didn’t smile. “We’re crossing Divacross water.”

On Cordiscan, stories about the Divaracoss eels started as nursery warnings and ended as obituaries. Ancient predators twenty meters and more, armored scales like overlapping plates, electrical organs that could cook a skimmer from the inside out. They hunted by vibration, any rhythm in the skin of the sea was a dinner bell.

Lysa vaulted into Slipstream’s cockpit like gravity was a suggestion. “I’ll sing them a lullaby,” she said, flicking breakers, humming to herself. She had a habit of humming before things got dangerous.

Kamal took a jump-seat in Tidebreaker’s aft with his console on his knees. “I’ve got a stamp on that black hull. It spoofed a port-tug transponder, cute, but I salted the river locks last week because I’m paranoid in all the right ways.”

“Course?” Feloski asked.

“Downriver, then due east past the Shale Spires, threading Ghostwater Kelp. They’re headed for the Divacross Flats. After that, we lose the relief and it’s open water to the Meridian Straits.”

“Which is where the Sable Compact will be waiting,” Delamon said from Waveknife, checking a launcher bandolier, eyes on the horizon. Delamon was the kind of big that made rooms smaller around him.

Feloski nodded once, tight. “Move.”

The hangar doors lifted. Water breathed. Tidebreaker slid forward on her foils, caught the river’s skin, and lifted, smooth as a lie. Slipstream kicked sideways, eager. Waveknife took a heartbeat longer, heavy with weapons, then rose, nose low like a bull.

They shot the floodgates as the locks opened; three knives cutting to sea.

 

3 — Ghostwater

Fog closed around them like a hand.

“Thermals say four degrees up over the shoals,” Mira called. “We can ride that layer.”

“Do it,” Feloski said. The less energy they bled into the water, the less attention they drew below.

Kelanport’s lights vanished behind them. The river opened into a ragged expanse of gray water. Steelweed kelp rose in basins, each blade as wide as a man’s arm, laced with razor veins. The locals called this Ghostwater because sound went strange in it, the kelp ate echoes, turned sonar into trash.

“Kamal,” Feloski said, “give me the tide math.”

Kamal’s fingers ran. “Five-knot south drift, micro-seiches from the reef edge. The thieves are cutting across the grain to lose us—smart.”

Lysa’s laugh crackled over comms. “Smarter to be faster.” Slipstream leapt ahead, thread-weaving through kelp towers, palming cross-chop like a dancer. “I’ll sight them.”

“Don’t outrun your luck,” Feloski said. He meant it. Cordiscan made meals out of pilots who thought skill could bully a planet.

A klaxon chirped in Mira’s console. “Hold. Something big below, left quadrant. Low profile. Not an eel.”

Feloski angled Tidebreaker. The gray lifted, it felt like the sea itself breathing, then a hull surfaced ahead, black and slick, cutting a wake like a scalp wound.

“There,” Kamal breathed. “That’s our thief.”

The skimmer was narrow and long, hull sheathed in scabbed composite, spray throwing off its black sides in white knives. No lights. No name. Predatory in the way of something that knows it doesn’t need to brag.

The Captain opened the channel. “Unidentified craft. This is Captain Feloski of the Federation security team. Heave to.”

Silence. Then a voice, filtered and amused. “Captain Feloski. You should be in bed.”

“Sorel Vex,” Delamon grunted. “Pirate. The kind that smiles while counting your teeth.”

The voice chuckled. “Flattered to be remembered. You’re too slow for this sea, Captain.”

Feloski let his breath out slow. “Slipstream, herd them. Waveknife, port flank. No shots. We recover the core.”

“Copy,” Lysa said, all appetite. She slid Slipstream across the thieves’ bow with a flourish that was both insult and test. The black hull jinked to avoid her, too smoothly; whoever was on the stick knew water.

Mira said, “We can box them before the flats”

The water boomed.

Not from above. From below. Lysa’s hum cut off. Delamon swore once, ugly. Tidebreaker’s deck shivered under Feloski’s boots, a bass vibration deep enough to feel in teeth.

Mira’s eyes went wide. “Resonance spike. That wasn’t ambient. Somebody just rang the sea.”

Feloski tasted metal. “Talk to me.”

“Sounders show dish arrays deployed ahead, low-frequency emitters. They’re baiting the Divaracoss.”

Kamal’s voice cracked. “They’re going to throw eels at us.”

“Correct,” Mira said, already scanning. “They’re using a chord around forty hertz. It mimics the tremor eels associate with whale spawns. It reads like a banquet.”

On cue, something moved under Tidebreaker, a shadow like a shifting hill. Another answered, sliding from the kelp.

Lysa’s voice went tight. “I’ve got wakes. Big ones.”

“Kill externals,” Feloski said. “Laminar field minimum. Ride quiet.” He lowered Tidebreaker until their struts whispered along the skin of the sea, just enough lift to skate. The motor whine dropped to a whisper. Waveknife followed, heavy. Slipstream’s tone changed, Lysa knew how to make a craft disappear when she wanted to.

Sorel Vex’s chuckle hissed over the open channel. “You still with us, Captain?”

“For now,” Feloski said.

“Good,” Sorel purred. “The flats are beautiful this time of year.”

The dish arrays ahead pulsed again, calling the ancients up from their trenches.

 

4 — The First Breach

The first eel breached under the thieves.

It hit like a train exiting a tunnel at full speed—dark green plates erupting through gray water, mouth a delta of teeth, body longer than the thieves’ length. It rose, snapped, and came down. The black hull bucked, slammed sideways, recovered with a drift that would have flipped a lesser craft. Whoever piloted had reflex and ice.

“You have got to be kidding,” Kamal whispered.

“Eyes up,” Feloski said, which meant trust your instruments and your people, not your fear.

The second eel hit for them.

Mira saw the rise a fraction early, water lifting, a wrinkle in the flat, and shouted “Port!” Feloski banked Tidebreaker, laminar field whining, and the eel came out where they had been, purely on vibration memory, jaws washing past with the smell of copper and storm. Tidebreaker took the edge of the surge, slammed back to level. Delamon put Waveknife between them and the returning tail, shock-net launcher humming.

“Don’t!” Mira snapped. “Electric in the water will bring friends.”

Delamon growled but lifted his finger. The eel slid, blinked, and sank, its body the size of a transit car. Beneath the water, a flicker—organ glow. He had seen that glow in nightmare flashes as a young conscript on river patrol; he never forgot it.

“We can’t outrun them,” Lysa said, voice the tight tone she used on knifepoints. “We have to teach them we’re not food.”

“How?” Kamal squeaked.

Mira’s hands were already moving. “We go laminar, silent, no pulse, no rhythm, nothing that says ‘meat.’ We become the sea.”

“You can do that?” Kamal said.

“Once,” Mira said. “Maybe twice. After that, the generator coils melt.”

Feloski made the call. “Do it.”

The field around Tidebreaker changed, like a breath held. The craft’s vibration sank into the skin of the sea until the water stopped complaining around her hull. Waveknife’s field dropped a beat later. Slipstream went ghost-pale and vanished, only a faint V of wake like scratches on the water’s polish.

The eel rose again, this time exactly between Tidebreaker and Waveknife, mouth opening to a cathedral that smelled like drowned caves. It hesitated, no rhythm to chase, and slid away, churning the kelp instead.

“Go,” Feloski said. “Box them.”

They did. Tidebreaker took high left, Waveknife low right, Slipstream cut the thieves’ turn. For a heartbeat, black hull and blue hulls moved in one geometry that would have pinned Sorel Vex between reefs and eel teeth.

Then something hit Slipstream.

Not an eel, a volley from the thieves’ stern. Mira’s board flagged and died; for a jagged breath Feloski thought it was their own panel failing. Then he recognized the signature: EM scram jammers, dirty and short-range, the sort of thing you used when you didn’t mind blinding yourself to blind someone worse.

Lysa’s laugh cracked, turned to a swear. “They blacked me out.”

“Come right,” Feloski said.

“I can’t..”

The eel hit where Slipstream’s wake stuttered. Feloski caught a flicker—white water, blue hull, the hinge-snap of something massive, and then there was only foam and a scream of metal.

“Lysa!” Kamal shouted.

“Still here,” Lysa panted. “Lost my starboard foil. I’m throwing sparks.”

“Cut power two percent and ride dirty,” Mira said, thumbs hard on her board, voice steady because panic killed. “Give the sea back its rhythm, but the wrong rhythm. Make it think you’re a soft-rock outcrop.”

Lysa copied. Slipstream’s wounded wake smoothed. The eel went wide, confused and angry.

Sorel Vex’s voice came back on. “You should have stayed in bed, Captain.”

“You should have chosen a safer ocean,” Feloski said.

He could feel Sorel smile without hearing it. “There’s no such thing on Cordiscan.”

 

5 — Sea-Fort and Lies

They lost the thieves in the Shale Spires, fingers of stone stabbing out of the water, cutting the sea into sudden alleys, each lined with razors. Even with instruments up, every turn was guesswork and prayer.

“Dead zone,” Kamal said. “They knew this maze.”

Feloski set his jaw. “We refit at Fort Issel. Then we cut them off at the Straits.”

Fort Issel wasn’t a fort so much as a testament to paranoia, a hexagonal sea-citadel built by one of Cordiscan’s native species, the Issari, all buttressed towers and ironwood piers, bristling with lightning rods and anchored by chains thick as torsos. Issari banners snapped in the wind—braided kelp dyed crimson and black.

They were met on the south pier by Matriarch Issel-Hev, an Issari elder with a carapace like polished basalt and eyes that reflected the water’s gray. Beside her stood a human in a simple embassy coat: Kellan Dray. He’d beaten them here.

“Captain Feloski,” the Matriarch said, voice like rolling stones. “You bring storms with you.”

“Ma’am,” Feloski said, nodding to Kellan but not greeting him. “We need foil repairs and a field coil. We also need your eel charts.”

“We don’t chart predators,” the Matriarch said. “We remember them.” She gestured and an Issari acolyte produced a shell-plate etched with lines. “The Divaracoss are old. They return to places where the sea speaks in certain ways. Here, here, and here.” She tapped points across the shell. “Avoid their songs.”

“Songs?” Kamal asked.

“The sea sings to them through stone,” she said. “Volcanic throats, fault throbs, currents against kelp forests. Predators follow old music.”

Kellan’s smile was thin. “The Embassy appreciates your rapid response, Captain. How bad is it?”

Feloski studied him. “Bad enough you shouldn’t be risking a sea-crossing to watch it.”

Kellan spread his hands. “We’re all invested in returning that core.”

“Some of us more than others,” Delamon muttered.

Feloski kept his tone even. “We leave in twenty minutes.”

They patched Slipstream, bolted a spare foil with Issari help. Mira coaxed the laminar generator into one more miracle and wrapped the coil saddle in cooling cloth steeped in brine. Lysa strapped in with her usual wink but her eyes were bloodshot and hard.

Kamal boarded last, hauling a case he had not had before, one of the Issari shell-plates. He caught the Captain’s look and shrugged. “Souvenir.”

Feloski didn’t buy it. He filed the detail away.

As Tidebreaker cast off, the Matriarch lifted one clawed hand. “Do not strike the Divaracoss unless you must. They are older than your Federation. They will be here long after your politics rust.”

Feloski bowed. “I never intended to fight the sea, ma’am. Just thieves on top of it.”

She clicked her mandibles in what might have been amusement. “You’ll learn the sea considers everything part of itself.”

Kellan watched them go, hands at his sides, face neutral. The wind took the edge of his coat and flipped it, and Feloski saw, just for a sliver, a flat black antenna disk taped under the lining.

A beacon.

Marion Feloski didn’t say a word until the fort was a black tooth behind them and the water flattened into a lead plate.

“Kamal,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Open your souvenir.”

Kamal hesitated. Then he cracked the shell plate’s edge. Inside was not carved kelp lore. It was a slimline relay puck and a sheet of wave-keys on flexible film transmission schedules and frequencies. The kind you used to talk to a boat that didn’t want to be seen by anyone but you.

Delamon’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Kellan.”

Felsoki’s mouth went dry. The inside job given a name.

He keyed the fort frequency. “Issel-Hev. Pull Kellan Dray. He’s dirty.”

Silence. Then the Matriarch, calm. “He is already gone.”

 

6 — The Churn

The Meridian Straits were a throat of water where two inland seas fought and the wind joined in just because it could. Cordiscan pilots called it the Churn. Everyone else called it something they didn’t repeat in front of Issari elders.

Clouds stacked to the east, black on black. Thunder grumbled under the hulls like something alive.

“They’re pushing through now,” Kamal said. “I’ve got a ghost on the far side, a Sable Compact sub-skimmer rising, small, fast. Handoff platform is an old refinery, Orvi Prime, scrapped and listing.”

Captain Feloski saw it on the distant edge of water, a carcass of a structure half-sunk, a lattice of pipes and decks, a rust spine with gulls wheeling. The kind of place deals happened.

“Time to intercept?” he said.

“Six minutes if we cut the waves,” Lysa said. “Four if I ignore everything Mira loves.”

Mira didn’t look up. “Break the field and the sea breaks back.”

Delamon checked straps. “I brought extra straps.”

“Four minutes,” Feloski said.

Slipstream sang. Tidebreaker growled. Waveknife bullied water out of its way. They rode the wind’s shoulder, skipping troughs, throwing sheets of spray high as flags. Thunder came down their backs like someone slamming a door.

Halfway through the Straits, everything went sideways. The sea jumped a foot in a heartbeat, the kind of freak rise that made ships fall into holes that weren’t there a second before. Slipstream lifted clean; Waveknife took it on the chin. Tidebreaker’s laminar field groaned, dropped, caught. Feloski felt the deck skate under him and kept his hands easy. Panic tightened controls, then the sea took them.

They gained the lee of Orvi Prime bleeding and breathless.

Through the rust lattice, the black hull waited, calm as a knife on a table. On the refinery’s lowest deck stood three figures in rain capes. One of them was Kellan Dray, hair plastered to his head, face very open and reasonable as he spoke to a man Feloski didn’t know, a Sable Compact envoy in a low visibility suit.

The third was Sorel Vex, damp and amused, the way a fox might be when the henhouse got wise too late.

Feloski brought Tidebreaker to a hover thirty meters off, close enough for wind to shove stinging rain in his eyes, far enough to keep space.

He opened comms to speakers. “This is over. Kellan, step away from the core.”

Kellan’s voice carried thinly across water. “It’s not what you think, Captain. Cordiscan’s security is… unready. The Federation treats us like a child tied behind its ships. The Compact offers parity.”

“You sold your world for a promise,” RafeFeloski said, “to people who wouldn’t spit on your fire to put it out.”

Kellan’s jaw clenched. “I offered leverage to be treated as an equal.”

Sorel Vex lifted a hand, making a patting motion to the air. “Children, children. Captain, you have a sea full of eels at your back and an old refinery groaning under your feet. Are you sure this is the hill you want to die on?”

Delamon’s voice was low in Feloski’s ear. “Say the word.”

Not yet, Feloski thought. Not with a storm over our heads and teeth under our feet.

Mira whispered, “They have lure buoys under the decks. Same frequency package as before. If they pulse, this place will be a feast.”

The Captain needed control. He needed the sea to eat someone else’s mistake.

“Kamal,” he said softly, “can you copy their bait song?”

Kamal blinked rain out of his lashes. “I think so. I’d need to shift the base chord by a half step and invert the pulsed interval so it says, ‘Food—over there.’”

“Do it. Quiet. We don’t want Sorel hearing it until the eels do.”

Kamal’s fingers danced. Electricity licked the sky. Mira fed him power crumbs out of systems that weren’t allowed to have crumbs. Lysa drifted Slipstream right to draw eyes. Delamon edged Waveknife left to be a wall.

On the deck, the Compact envoy held out his hand. Kellan lifted the data core out of a waterproof bag. It was the size of a fist, faceted, opalescent, humming at a frequency that made Feloski’s molars ache. Old tech, beautiful, terrible.

“Now,” The Captain said.

Kamal thumbed the final key. Somewhere beneath the refinery, a sound that wasn’t a sound hit the water, bent around iron and stone, and became a command: Eat here.

 

7 — The Lure

It was not immediate. Divaracoss didn’t teleport. They moved like old kings, slow until they didn’t.

The refinery shifted. A wave that didn’t belong to any wind rose, ran under Tidebreaker, and punched the pilings. Screws screamed in their housings. Gulls scattered screaming.

Sorel Vex’s eyes narrowed. He felt the sea change without knowing why. “Captain,” he called, “what did you do?”

“Asked for help,” Feloski said.

Kellan looked down at the water, something like fear finally showing. The Compact envoy reached, impatient now. “Give it.”

Lysa chose that moment to act. She kicked Slipstream into a blossom of spray, cutting the angle, throwing water over the deck in a white wall. Delamon fired one shock-net, one, hissing it across the envoy’s feet. The man went down cursing, tangled. Sorel Vex moved like water, slipping aside, and Kellan, Kellan panicked.

He clutched the core to his chest and ran.

“Don’t!” Feloski shouted, but the storm doesn’t hear, it just answers itself. Kellan hit a slick patch, slid toward the deck’s lip. At the same time, the sea below opened as something large rose to meet the new song.

Feloski didn’t think. He jumped.

Tidebreaker dropped half a meter as his weight left it; he hit Orvi Prime’s deck on knees and palms and ran with the kind of speed you only get when you don’t consider consequences. He reached Kellan at the lip, grabbed the back of his coat, and hauled him backward as the first Divaracoss broke the surface through rain.

For a heartbeat, Feloski saw it close, a moving canyon of dark plates, a mouth like a falling door. It rose, took the empty space where Kellan would have been, and slammed back down, flooding the deck with a tide that nearly swept them both over.

The core skittered, bounced. Sorel Vex lunged. Feloski kicked it sideways like a footballer, felt something in his ankle give, and suppressed the pain. The core hit a rust lip, spun, and lodged behind a pipe flange. Everyone saw it at once.

“Mine,” Sorel said, half a laugh on the word.

“Not today,” Feloski said.

Delamon landed like an avalanche, grabbed Sorel by the back of his tac-vest, and used his own momentum to turn the pirate into a lever. Sorel went up, then down, hard, breath gone. Delamon’s fist followed, short and mean.

The Compact envoy cut himself free of the net with a wrist-knife and came in low. Mira, Mira was suddenly there, small and fierce, catching his wrist with both hands, using his weight and the slick deck to send him sliding into a nest of broken pipe.

Another wave hit, bigger. The deck bucked. The refinery groaned as if remembering it was hollow. Divaracoss weren’t queuing politely anymore, they were arriving in force, called by a song that bounced off the refinery’s bones and said feast.

Feloski grabbed the core with one hand and Kellan’s collar with the other. “You’re done,” he said to the traitor. “If we live, you answer for this. If we don’t, the sea answers for you.”

Kellan’s breath came in sobs that were not apologies. “I... I..”

“Not now,” Feloski said, and dragged him toward the gap where Tidebreaker nosed the deck.

Sorel Vex coughed, spit rusty water, and laughed hoarsely. “You can’t run with all the mouths in this sea, Captain.”

Feloski didn’t look back. “I never ran. I just pick where I fight.”

 

8 — Teeth and Lightning

They didn’t get a clean exit. Lightning finally found something it liked in the refinery’s forest of rods and slammed it. Electricity walked down the structure, blew fuses that had rusted in place, and set little blue fires like stars under the rain.

Kamal yelped. “Their lure buoys just overloaded, spiking wide-band. We’re, ah, we’re ringing the whole trench.”

“Translate,” Delamon grunted, hauling Sorel by his collar in the other direction because leaving a pirate on the deck to get eaten offended his sense of fair fights.

“It means we called all their grandmothers,” Kamal said.

“Then we leave now,” Feloski said. “Lysa, make me a lane.”

Slipstream leapt off her moor, half-insulted by what the Straits had done to her earlier. She darted across the water ahead of Tidebreaker, laying down a path of low power counter songs Mira threw together on the fly, discords that said: Not here. Not food. Not now. Waveknife lurked flanking, shock-nets live, not for killing but for pushing. Even on a night like this, they weren’t making enemies out of a species that called Cordiscan home before anyone stood upright here.

They ran.

Behind them, Orvi Prime bucked as three eels slammed the pilings in a row and then one took the deck they had stood on moments ago. Steel folded like paper. The Compact envoy raised his hands to a sky that did not care and went off the edge without a sound. Kellan watched him go with the look of a man understanding his place in a story too late.

Sorel Vex struggled in Delamon’s grip and got an elbow into ribs hard enough to make the big man grunt. Feloski pivoted and put his own shoulder into Sorel’s chest. The pirate oofed and subsided, smarter than his reputation sometimes.

Tidebreaker hit the Straits chop at speed. Laminar field held. Every trough could have been a grave but wasn’t. Meters stretched and snapped. Behind them, thunder stitched the horizon together.

“Something’s following,” Lysa said after a minute that felt like an hour. “Big. Fast.”

“Of course it is,” Kamal said weakly.

Mira frowned at her board. “That’s not an eel. That’s… smooth. That’s a hull.”

Even in the rain, they saw the Sable Compact sub-skimmer rise, smooth black like their thief’s but wider, a manta profile with a dorsal sensor ridge. It had stayed down when the eels came, then come up when the path cleared. Patient. Professional.

It cut across their triangle, accelerated with a tone like knives on glass, and spoke on a wideband with a neutral voice. “Federation craft. You have something that belongs to us.”

“Not yours,” Feloski said. “Not anyone’s but the Embassy’s.”

“Then let’s negotiate,” the voice said. “Stop. Heave to. Or we hull you.”

Delamon’s hands tightened. “We could kill their engines.”

“Not without killing ourselves,” Mira said. “Any discharge in this water’s a rave invitation.”

Lysa hummed under her breath, her thinking hum. “We could use them.”

“Explain,” Feloski said.

“They want us alive because of the core,” she said. “They’ll come in close to board. If they come in close… and if Kamal keeps singing that wrong dinner bell just a little to our starboard..”

Mira’s eyes lit. “You want to feed our friends the bigger ship.”

“Not feed,” Lysa said, suddenly very Cordiscan in her precision. “Redirect.”

Captain Feloski weighed it in a breath. He did not like using the Divaracoss as a weapon. He liked less the future where the core left Cordiscan.

“Do it,” he said.

Kamal shifted the lure by ten meters and two degrees of pitch. The Sable skimmer slid in, confident, hull broad and sure on the water. For a control craft, it was surprisingly… edible.

The first eel hit its stern. Not a full breach, more like a bite to test, but it sheared a steering vane clean and the craft slewed. The second eel learned the lesson of the first and came up under the bow with a strike that made the sub-skimmer ring like a bell. The third decided bells were food.

The Sable pilot made exactly the sound a professional makes when everything he relies on lies to him, then did the right thing: he dumped power, killed noise, and tried to become the sea. For a heartbeat, it worked.

Then the lure buoy under Orvi Prime chose that moment to fail in a way it had never been designed to fail, and screamed its last word across half the trench. The eels answered with four bodies at once, and the Sable went down sideways in a flail of foam.

Feloski didn’t watch it sink. He watched the sea around his craft. “We’re done here,” he said, to the storm, to the eels, to the men and women who still had work to do.

 

9 — Return

They limped back in a gray that bled into daylight. The Straits spat them into softer water. The Churn became a bad memory in the hiss of foam on foils.

Fort Issel sent escorts, Issari outriders on low hulls that made almost no wake at all, riding like secrets. The Matriarch met them again at the pier, eyes taking everything in at once.

Feloski handed the data core to Mira, who handed it to an Issari acolyte, who slid it into a vault cradle that clamped shut with the sound of respect.

Kellan Dray stood with his hands bonded, hair matted to his head, the set of a man who’d run out of words. He tried to meet Feloski’s eyes and failed; when he looked back the second time, Feloski let him.

“You thought you were buying parity,” Feloski said. “You were selling your ocean.”

Kellan swallowed, voice hoarse. “They promised”

“They always do,” Feloski said. “The only promise that counts is the one you keep to the people in the water with you.”

Sorel Vex, beside him under Delamon’s gentle iron hand, managed a bruised smile. “Captain, as pirates go, am I at least memorable?”

“You’re wet,” Delamon said. “That’s all I’ll remember.”

The Matriarch regarded Sorel for a long moment. “Throw him in a cell that leaks,” she said.

Sorel laughed once, then coughed salt.

Kamal sagged onto a coil of line, eyes wide, everything he’d done catching up to him now that no one needed him to be clever. Mira sat beside him and bumped his shoulder. “Good song,” she said.

“I kept thinking we were going to die,” he said.

“We are,” she said. “Just not today.”

Lysa leaned against Slipstream’s scarred hull, patting the grafted foil. “You were a good girl,” she told the craft. “Even with one leg bitten.”

Captain Feloski walked to the end of the pier where the water lapped against ironwood pilings, green, black and impenetrable. He let the wind lick the salt from his face and listened for a long moment to a world that had tried like hell to kill him and his team and had failed for now. He did not mistake that for mercy. Cordiscan did not have mercy carved into it. It had memory.

Footsteps approached, the Matriarch, slow and deliberate. She stood beside him, not speaking until the silence had said everything it wanted to say.

“You brought back what matters,” she said.

“We brought back a core,” Feloski said. “The rest will be harder.”

The Matriarch inclined her head. “Politics is a different sea. It has predators too.”

Feloski looked out where the Shale Spires knifed the horizon and the Divacross water lay flat enough to lie about itself. “We’ll learn its songs,” he said.

“Learn quickly,” she said. “The Sable Compact will sing louder next time.”

He nodded. “They always do.”

Behind them, Delamon herded Sorel away. Kamal and Mira argued fondly about whether the lure had been A-sharp or something uglier. Lysa hummed quietly, already teaching herself a new trick to cheat a storm she hadn’t met yet.

Feloski let himself breathe. The core was safe. The thieves were broken. The world, for one sliver, had held.

He turned away from the water. “We debrief at the Embassy,” he said. “Then we sleep. Then we see where the next wave comes from.”

As they walked, the Issari outriders slipped back onto the sea without a ripple, becoming part of a world that accepted them without question. Above, the five sigils on the Embassy pennant snapped in the wind, braided kelp dark against the sky.

Cordiscan would make its own place in the Federation. Not by selling what it was. By surviving what it had always survived, storms, fangs, and the appetites of those who thought they could cage an ocean.

Marion Feloski looked at his team, scarred skimmers, tired eyes, jokes where fear would have been in other crews, and felt the simple certainty settle in: they would answer the next call.

The sea breathed. The city woke. Somewhere out beyond the Shale Spires, something old rolled in its trench and waited for the song it had known since the first tide.

Not today, Feloski thought. Not ours.

He kept walking.