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“We’re screwed,” Zero muttered.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Geoffrey said. “We’re on a floating television studio!”

Cynthea looked tortured as she shook her head. “The Navy took away all our satellite transmission equipment after we lost Dante—”

“I still have a videophone,” Peach interrupted.

“Peach!” Cynthea gripped his shoulders.

Peach handed her a spare wireless headset from around his neck.

“You’re my hero!” Cynthea yelled.

“I know, boss.”

“Go get it, go set it up!” Cynthea shouted after him as Peach and Zero ran out the hatchway down the stairs.

Cynthea put on the headset and adjusted the mike.

“Set it up on the bow, Peach! Make sure to get the battleships in the frame,” she commanded through the headset. “We’ll make a human shield!”

She grabbed the satellite phone in the bridge and punched in a number. She winked at Nell as she said, “Hi, Judy, this is Cynthea Leeds. Put me through to Barry, sweetie!”

Captain Sol grimaced as the Navy ships grew rapidly on the horizon in the wide window of the bridge.

Peach and Zero tore down the passageway. Zero opened the hatch of the control room—only to see five Henders rats leaping straight at him.

Zero’s reflexes were barely fast enough to slam the hatch in time. A cold sweat washed over him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He looked at Peach with wide eyes.

Hender popped out of a hatch farther down the companion-way and Copepod jumped out behind him. Hender yawned, scratching his head and belly with four hands, and saw the two humans. Suddenly, he heard or smelled something that made him leap down the passageway on four legs toward them. Copepod stayed at his heel, snarling.

“Ooooooh,”
Hender said, and he made a staccato call like a rising clarinet scale.

The other hendropods burst from their rooms and ran down the hall to join him, shooing the humans away.

The five hendros huddled around the hatch to the control room and then they rushed in one after another, banging the hatch closed behind them.

“Come on, Peach,”
Cynthea urged over Peach’s headset.

“Um, there’s a delay, boss,” Peach said.

“There’s no time for delays!”
she snarled.

Zero shook his head at Peach.

Peach winced. Then, ignoring Zero’s objections, he opened the control room hatch and ran in, slamming it shut behind him.

He grabbed the videophone, camera, laptop, and microphones while the hendropods, appearing and disappearing around him, fought off the rats launching viciously at him. One scratched Peach’s forehead with a raking claw arm but another hendro shot the rat through its arching center with a whirring obsidian disk. A few severed locks of hair revealed Peach’s brow, where a thin cut
started bleeding. But Peach didn’t shout. He focused instead on the equipment he needed.

Peach lurched out the hatch with gear under his arms. Still inside, the hendropods slammed the hatch behind him, the bottom of his pant leg caught with two rat arms pierced through the jeans. He yelled and jerked his foot to rip free and the hatch opened for an instant as the rat was pulled back in before the hendros slammed the hatch shut again, freeing his leg.

“Come on!” Zero yelled.

“What about them?” Peach gestured at the hatch.

Copepod barked at the hatch, his body rigid as he jumped and clawed frantically at the door.

Andy came running in. “Where’s Hender?”

“In there,” Zero answered.

Andy reached for the hatch. But Zero stopped him.

“No,” he shouted, then turned and ran after Peach. “Get the hendros up here as fast as you can but don’t open that goddamned door, Andy!”

Thatcher munched trail-mix as he watched artillery shells prick white plumes off the
Trident’s
bow.

The Zodiac drifted into the wide foamy plain of the
Nicholas’s
wake. The salt was thick in the air as the billions of bubbles churned by the frigate’s propellers fizzed on the surface of the sea around him.

He squinted with grim satisfaction at each delayed concussion that rolled over the waves. He was betting that after the chaos subsided, anyone on the
Trident
would be lucky to be alive. Certainly none of them would be able to exonerate themselves even if they were. It was also extremely likely that the hendropods would be killed along with the rats when the ship was finally boarded by the Navy and they were discovered.

Thatcher knew his story was rock solid, that his reputation would win the battle of credibility, and that history would forever
cast the others in shades of doubt, no matter the outcome. The odds were that he would gain even more stature before all was said and done simply by opposing them, even if by some miracle they did survive. He had, after all, witnessed them smuggling live, extremely dangerous specimens off Henders Island, in direct violation of a Presidential order, a crime tantamount to global terrorism. And the scene of the crime was about to be vaporized forever by a nuclear weapon.

He had been hoping that he would not have to call any attention to the
Trident
—the long shot he had pictured was the voracious rats taking over the ship, which would have eventually run aground or been boarded so that the rats would then start spreading at some port of call or random landing point. And the seeds of mankind’s destruction would have been planted, though too slowly to ever reach him in Costa Rica. What a show it would be to watch the Earth’s man-centric ecosystem collapsing across whole continents during the last twenty years of his life.

But he could settle for the crew and passengers of the
Trident
discredited as terrorists and quite possibly killed in a confrontation with the Navy; there was really no downside.

“Free will, Dr. Binswanger,” Thatcher goaded the younger scientist from afar, reciting the Redmond Principle, “can and will do
anything.”
He bit his lower lip as he realized that he wasn’t a fraud, after all, and the notion seized him with a paroxysm of laughter. After doing away with his own son, and now possibly an entire intelligent species, if not his own, he had categorically proven the Redmond Principle,
all by himself.

The Navy ships continued to close on the
Trident
as another warning shot erupted off her starboard side.

“Hurry it up, Cynthea,” Captain Sol urged. Then, on the radio, he said, “We are complying! We are complying!”

“All hands on deck now, Captain!”
came the response.

Cynthea still clung to the phone. “Barry, this is television history! No—it’s BIGGER THAN TELEVISION, sweetie! Come on! Say yes!”

As the crew gathered at the prow of the
Trident
, Zero and Peach set up the videophone equipment, looking over their shoulders at the two huge Navy ships bearing down port and starboard.

“Hender,” Andy shouted through the door of the control room. “We have to go!”

The Zodiac rolled over a series of high swells, as Thatcher watched the Navy ships closing in on the
Trident.

He recognized the bottom of a jar of Planters cashews buried under some rubber fins and scuba gear. He dug it out and was disappointed when he twisted off the lid to see that there were only three left.

Cynthea furiously negotiated with the
SeaLife
producers on the phone and finally played her trump card: “We could all get KILLED, Barry—on LIVE television!”

Cynthea ran down the stairs from the bridge toward the bow, screaming, “OK, set it up! Set it up! We’re going live right now! Don’t ask! Where are they?”

The crew of the
Trident
was clustered on the prow, with the two ships looming in the background, perfectly framed. But no hendropods.

Running to the prow at full tilt, Cynthea stepped in front of the camera and played reporter. “What remains of the crew of the
Trident
is now being threatened by the United States Navy. Abandon ship or go down with the ship is their order. Why?” She looked in vain toward the companionway but saw no sign of the hendros as she vamped. “Because today we have saved a
remarkable
species from
total
destruction!”

Another shot exploded directly off the bow.

“We have to exit, Hender,” Andy shouted. “Go now! Now, now,
now!”

Andy reached for the door handle and the hatch opened inward.

Hender looked out. “OK,” Hender said. “Hi Andy!”

Copepod barked in response.

Cynthea saw Andy run out on the foredeck. The five hendropods glided behind him.

The nearest Navy ship was now on top of them, slicing past their port side, its loudspeakers blaring out over the decks.

“YOU ARE ORDERED BY THE UNITED STATES NAVY TO ABANDON SHIP NOW. CARRY NOTHING WITH YOU OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON.”

When the hendropods saw an arcing waterspout fired from a water canon on the deck of the destroyer, they whirled and ran in the other direction.

Andy caught Hender. “No, it’s OK, Hender! Come on!”

The hendropods turned around slowly at Hender’s humming
and clicking calls. Then, reluctantly, they continued behind him and Andy toward the bow.

Behind them, one last Henders rat crouched in the hatchway through which they had come, rubbing its spikes together as it chose a target.

It bolted across the deck toward the hendropods just as they entered the frame of the videophone.

As the rat launched itself through the air, Copepod growled inches from Hender’s ankle.

Hender glanced at the ocean with one eye before casually batting the rat overboard with a deft block by its rear foot.

The rat thrashed in the water before sinking into the sea.

Nell, Geoffrey, Andy, Captain Sol, Warburton, Cynthea, Samir, Marcello, and the rest of the
Trident’s
crew gathered the hendro pods between them on the foredeck, creating a human shield as Cynthea had commanded.

With the combined stress of the moment and the sight of the gigantic ships moving through the sea around them, all of the hendros vanished.

All the major networks and cable news channels displayed on plasma screens in the White House Situation Room were muted.

The President and his advisors stared in astonishment at only one screen—the one that carried the live feed from the guided missile destroyer, U.S.S.
Stout.

“Captain Bobrow, can you hear me?” the President asked the captain of the
Stout.

“Yes, sir.”

“Get me a closer view of the folks on deck, if you can, Captain.”

“Yes, sir. We’re getting you a closer view now.”

The image zoomed in as a camera on the decks of the
Stout
showed the
Trident’s
crew clustered at the bow.

“Isn’t that Nell?” the President said. “That’s Nell Duckworth, I
believe, isn’t it, Trudy? I was told she died in an accident on the island. And there’s Dr. Binswanger.”

The others were impressed once more by the President’s Rolodex memory for names and faces.

“What’s going on here, Wallace? Lay off the shells, Captain Bobrow, damn it. I want you to stop firing, is that understood?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President, those are from the other guys.”

“Well, hey, you other guys, stop firing,” said the President.

“Yes, sir!”

“What is that…some kind of distortion?” the Defense Secretary asked.

“We need a closer look there, Captain Bobrow.”

“Yes, sir. We’re coming around.”

The Press Secretary suddenly cracked the door of the Situation Room and stuck his head in. “Mr. President! Turn to the Discovery Channel, sir!”

“What?”

The bullhorns sounded again from the nearest ship:

“ABANDON SHIP TRIDENT! CARRY NOTHING WITH YOU OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON!”

“These are the amazing people of Henders Island,” Cynthea declaimed triumphantly into Peach’s microphone.

Marcello kissed his St. Christopher’s medal.

Cynthea gestured at the hendropods, but stopped, bewildered. They were gone. “What happened? Where are they?”

Sixty million people worldwide were watching TV when the live-feed from the
Trident
cut into their regularly scheduled programming.

Within two minutes, that number had leaped to over 200
million. The number continued to rise as the media feeding-frenzy accelerated through the swarm of satellites encircling the Earth in real-time.

The President listened to Cynthea Leeds speaking from the bow of the ship on the television. Whatever species of Henders organism the TV producer was referring to was nowhere to be seen.

“The President of the United States and the Navy are about to destroy not only us, but a new and intelligent species of people who have as much right to exist on this planet as we do! More, even!”

The loudspeakers of the
Stout
echoed over the deck in the background, “TRIDENT, YOU ARE IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF UNITED STATES NAVY DIRECTIVES. BEGIN ABANDONING SHIP IN THIRTY SECONDS, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON.”

“I don’t like it, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense insisted. “Why are they not complying? Are they crazy?”

The Navy ship’s bullhorn rang out in the background.

“ABANDON SHIP NOW! COMPLY NOW!”

“And so the United States Navy continues its countdown to its sentence of execution,” Cynthea narrated.

There was an unbearable silence. The
Trident
crew looked at their watches and winced as the seconds ticked down. The Navy had stopped firing warning shots, but no one was sure if this was a good or bad thing.