The salt spray tasted like rust and cold iron. It lashed across the deck of the trawler, a boat named the St. Elsbeth that smelled of diesel and dead fish. Sineus stood near the stern, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, the collar of his coat turned up against a wind that had teeth. The black water of the Baltic churned below, a restless, angry gut. They had left the lights of Rostock, a port in East Germany, hours behind them, trading the paranoia of the land for the vast, empty dread of the sea.
Anja Petrova, the KGB physicist who had built the weapon they now ran from, huddled near the wheelhouse, the heavy case containing the Aegis Conduit clutched like a prayer book. Her face was pale in the dim glow of the running lights, her expression a mask of exhaustion and grim resolve. The escape from Zurich had cost them their cover, their resources, their last vestiges of belonging to any side. Now they were just cargo on a smuggler’s boat, running north.
Sineus watched the water. It wasn’t clean. In the boat’s wake, under the churning foam, he saw it. Faint, shimmering patterns that crawled over the surface of the waves, like oil on a puddle but without the color. It was the visual signature of psychic noise, the world’s memory fraying at the edges. Static. It was everywhere now, a sickness spreading through the very fabric of things. A sign that the Echo Protocol, or something worse, was still singing its song of ruin somewhere out in the world.
The Port Captain, a grizzled Dane named Lars with a face like a worn sea-chart, stepped out of the wheelhouse. He held two steaming mugs of what passed for coffee. It was black, bitter, and hot. A perfect drink for the end of the world. He handed one to Sineus.
— Nothing on the radio, — Lars said, his voice a low rumble like stones grinding together. — Not even the weather. Just noise.
— The noise is the weather now, — Sineus replied, taking a sip. The heat was a small, temporary victory against the cold that seeped into his bones.
— She sleeps? — Lars asked, nodding toward Petrova.
— She tries.
— Good. Let her. The sea is no place for bad dreams. It has enough of its own.
Lars stared out at the black horizon, his eyes narrowed. He was a man who believed in currents, tides, and the integrity of his hull. He was an idealist masquerading as a cynic, smuggling refugees and defectors not for the money, but because he believed some people deserved a shore to stand on. It made him reliable. It also made him a target.
Petrova came to the railing, her gaze fixed on the unnatural shimmer in their wake. — It’s getting stronger. The resonance. Whatever Kestrel is doing, he’s scaling it up.
— He’s not just using it, — Sineus said, his voice low. — He’s tuning the world with it.
Before she could answer, a light bloomed on the horizon. It was sharp and white, a pinprick that grew with unnatural speed into a blinding spear. A searchlight. It swept across the waves, a cold, methodical finger searching for them in the dark.
Lars swore, a single, sharp curse that the wind snatched away. He lunged back into the wheelhouse. The trawler’s engine groaned, the pitch changing as he pushed it for more speed. The old boat shuddered, a protest running through its rusted frame.
— Soviet patrol boat, — Lars yelled over the engine’s roar. — Fast. Faster than us.
The searchlight found them, pinning the St. Elsbeth in a circle of merciless white. It bleached the color from the deck, turning the rust to a flat gray and their faces to bone. They were caught. The price of their escape from the continent was being called due in the middle of the empty sea.
A second light flared from the patrol boat, a brief, angry orange blossom. A heartbeat later, the air was torn apart by the sound of a heavy machine gun. A line of tracers, glowing green like angry hornets, stitched across the water just off their port side. The sound was a physical blow, a brutal declaration that the game of shadows was over.
— They’re not trying to board us! — Petrova shouted, her voice tight with a new kind of fear. — They’re trying to sink us!
Another burst of fire, closer this time. Wood splintered from the trawler’s railing. The patrol boat was closing the distance, a sleek, gray shark cutting through the waves, its silhouette sharp and predatory against the night sky. They had maybe five minutes before those guns found the engine or the hull below the waterline.
Lars was fighting the wheel, trying to present the narrowest possible target, but the trawler was a pig, slow and clumsy. The patrol boat ran circles around them. Sineus gripped the cold metal of the railing, the wind tearing at him. His pistol was useless at this range. Their only weapon was the one inside his head, and it was a weapon made for surgery, not for naval combat.
— Can you do anything? — Petrova yelled, her hands white-knuckled on the case.
— At this distance? It’s not a gun, — he said, but he was already reaching out, his mind casting a line into the storm of noise and motion.
He pushed past the roar of the engines, the crash of the waves, the shriek of the wind. He found the patrol boat, a node of focused, hostile intent on the black water. He felt the minds of the crew, a dozen or so of them, a disciplined, angry hum. He needed a target. Not the captain. Not the helmsman. The gunner.
He found him. A young man, focused, his mind a narrow, clean channel of concentration. Calculate the lead, adjust for the roll, squeeze the trigger. A simple, deadly loop. Sineus couldn’t cut it. A full psychic severance at this range, against a moving target, through the psychic static of the open sea? Impossible. It would take too much energy, too much focus. It would leave him a drooling wreck.
But he didn’t need to cut. He just needed to smudge.
Sineus closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the cold, wet railing. He focused his will, not into a blade, but into a clumsy, greasy thumb. He pushed it into the gunner’s mind, into that clean, efficient loop of memory. He didn’t erase the knowledge of how to lead a target. He just smeared it, made it sticky and uncertain. He wrapped the man’s muscle memory in a thin film of doubt.
The effort was immense. A sharp, cold pain lanced through his skull, and he tasted blood at the back of his throat. The psychic static of the world screamed in his ears, a wall of white noise trying to push him out. For a moment, he felt the gunner’s confusion, a flicker of "wait, how…?" that was not his own.
The machine gun fired again. The stream of tracers went wide, arcing harmlessly into the night sky. The gunner had overcompensated, his instincts betrayed by a sudden, inexplicable clumsiness.
It was enough.
Lars saw the opening. He didn’t hesitate. With a roar that was more animal than human, he spun the trawler’s wheel hard over. The old boat groaned in protest, its hull screaming as it turned sharply, not away from the patrol boat, but toward it. It was a madman’s move, a choice to trade the certainty of being sunk for the possibility of mutual destruction.
— Hold on! — Lars bellowed.
The trawler, heavy and implacable, plowed through the waves. The patrol boat, caught off guard by the suicidal maneuver, tried to turn away, but it was too late. The trawler’s reinforced bow, built for breaking ice, struck the smaller vessel amidships with a sickening crunch of tearing metal. The impact threw Sineus against the wheelhouse, the world a blur of motion and a single, deafening sound.
For a moment, the two boats were locked together, grinding against each other. Then the trawler pulled away, its engine screaming. The patrol boat was crippled, listing heavily to one side, its searchlight now pointing uselessly at the dark clouds above. A plume of black smoke began to pour from its engine compartment. No more shots came from its deck.
The chase was over.
The deck of the St. Elsbeth was a wreck of splintered wood and twisted metal. The bow was crumpled, but the hull was intact. They were alive.
Lars stumbled out of the wheelhouse, his face bleeding from a cut on his forehead. He looked back at the dying patrol boat, then at Sineus. A slow, grim smile spread across his face.
— You have a strange kind of luck, friend, — he said, wiping blood from his eye with the back of his hand.
Sineus pushed himself upright, his head throbbing. The cold behind his eyes was a familiar, unwelcome guest. He had bought them their escape, but the price was a piece of his own mind, a smudge of psychic grease that would take days to clean.
The air was still. The only sound was the groaning of their own damaged engine.
He looked out at the water, where the crippled Soviet boat was slowly sinking.
They had escaped the chase, but now they had to make landfall in Finland, deep in hostile territory.
