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“Agent Otto is in the other zodiac,” he said. “He’s okay.”

She felt a burst of relief, albeit a brief one — she had her hands full trying to save a life.

Tim adjusted his grip on the wounded soldier. “He’s still breathing, he’s moving his legs, and I think the major vessels are intact. He can survive this if we can control the bleeding.”

“Cease fire,” another voice called out. “Cease fire!”

The gunfire stopped, leaving only the driving snow and the howling of the wind.

Klimas stood. “Recovery complete,” he said. “We’re clear.”

From high above, she heard the loudest sound yet. She looked up in time to see a flicker of flame heading behind them, toward the Pinckney and the Brashear.

A missile.

She looked away just before it hit and became a deafening, temporary sun that lit up the surface of Lake Michigan.

The task force was done for. Captain Yasaka, Cantrell, Austin, Chappas, Edmund, all the crew from both s.h.i.+ps and the Truxtun as well — all gone.

So, too, were the last of the hydras.

A black-gloved hand dropped a black canvas pouch in front of her. It was about twice the size of a paperback. She looked up, saw the black-faced Klimas looking down.

“Trauma kit,” he said. “Save him.”

She nodded.

Thoughts of Clarence, the battle, the dead, the hydras, even the awareness of her s.h.i.+vering body and her own wound faded away as she and Tim Feely went to work.

THE SELECTION PROCESS

In the deepest points of Lake Michigan, the water temperature remains steady at just a few degrees above the freezing point.

The intense cold hadn’t stopped the apoptosis chain reaction from affecting the Los Angeles’s dead crew, but it had slowed the process enough so that plenty of rotting meat remained on their bones. Meat, for example, that was on the severed leg of one Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.

When the Platypus ground its way past that leg, slimy flesh sloughed off onto the machine’s acoustic foam covering. This coating of partially rotted tissue contained thousands of cyst-encased neutrophils.