Chapter 3: The Sunder Depot

The transit skiff from Meridian ran northeast for eleven hours through chop that wasn't quite rough enough to justify the way it felt, and Karev spent most of it on the open rear deck watching the water.

Not for anything. Or not for anything he would have named to another person. The habit had calcified over fifteen years of contract work until it was less vigilance than a kind of metabolic baseline — his modified inner ear parsing the sea's motion the way other people parsed birdsong, the way Pip parsed silence in a recording, looking for the thing that didn't fit the ambient signature. He watched the water and the water offered nothing unusual, which was its own information.

Ark Sunder resolved out of the northern haze around mid-morning: a low, rust-stained platform structure bracketed by salvage rigs and the skeletal remains of three pre-Inundation industrial vessels that had been incorporated into the Ark's expansion scaffolding so completely they were now load-bearing walls. It was not the kind of place that inspired confidence in the structural decisions of its builders. It was exactly the kind of place that inspiredconfidence in the practical intelligence of its inhabitants, who had been making precisely calibrated decisions about what would fall down and what would not for forty years, and were, by definition, still here.