Chapter 14: Thresh's Tremor Gets Worse

The ferry from Tessaly made Sunder in nine hours. Karev spent six of them below deck in the freight compartment, sitting on a secured equipment crate with his back against the hull and his secondary communications unit balanced on his knee, not reading the messages queued on it. The hull transmitted the engine's vibration in a low continuous pulse that his modified inner ear registered as information and then set aside when the information turned out to be nothing: deep water, open passage, no contact.

He read the messages on the seventh hour. Pip had sent three, each shorter than the last. The first was a detailed summary of her archive session with Casca, the NovaBiochem documents, the Serrath signatory connection, the disposal coordinates mapped against current threat zones. She had phrased it in the neutral register she used when she was frightened and working hard not to be. The second message was: *six locations. all six. karev.* The third was a timestamp from forty minutes later and no text.

He wrote back: *Understood. Hold the files. Don't transmit anything until I get to Sunder.* Then he put the unit away and looked at the freight compartment's corrugated ceiling and let the engine's pulse count the remaining two hours.