Ethan Carter sucked in dry, recycled air. No matter how many dives he completed, he still couldn’t get used to the metallic undertones that permeated submarine interiors. The Gray Lady was no different. Designed to carry up to seven men to the deepest ocean depths, her atmosphere was rarefied and chilled in his nostrils. His throat was dry and his eyes gritty from lack of sleep and too much bad coffee.

A coral-pink squid coasted against the Lady’s front viewport. Silver stripes pulsed across its length as it flattened slightly under the forward pressure of the descending sub before it slipped to the side, vanishing into the inky darkness.

“Fish are getting lazy. Not even bothering to dodge Lady anymore,” Finn Jones commented from the cockpit. Finn’s substantial torso was wedged into the captain’s seat, tattoos flexing on his bare forearms. Like most of the assembled team, Finn had been military in his previous life, the one lived before he found himself working as an unofficial mercenary for Triton Core, the biggest ocean-based multinational on the entire planet.

Sitting next to Finn, Nikolai Borostovlo chuckled. “They’re driven to commit suicide when they see your pretty face.”

Nik was Ethan’s oldest friend. Wiry and lean, he was lethal with any weapon, which was good in a fight and bad because he had a short temper and sometimes the knife came out too readily. His face was aristocratic, angular and refined, regularly drawing the ladies like flies to honey. The two of them had worked together on many covert missions where Nik’s evident Russian ancestry had proven to be an advantage.

Two years ago, it had been Nik who’d persuaded Ethan to leave the Special Boat Services for the more lucrative private waters of the Ocean Wolves when a military psychiatrist had deemed Ethan unfit for duty. SBS’s loss had turned out to be Triton Core’s gain. Ethan needed to work. It was the only thing that kept him sane. The psychiatrist just hadn’t been smart enough to see that.

Nik turned to the small unit of mercenaries seated behind him along the metal walls of the Lady and dipped his head in the direction of Chief Hayne. “Ceto Habitat in twenty minutes, Chief.”

Chief was the oldest of the team, somewhere in his fifties. His hair grew wild and shaggy, matching the beard that covered most of his face. Ethan had a deep respect for the man. Chief had served in the Navy, a submariner all his life until he was relieved of duty after being found DUI-ing his nuclear submarine. Losing your wife of thirty years to a slow, methodical battle with breast cancer could do that to a man. Chief had left the Navy for the Ocean Wolves without a backward glance. The flexible rules of mercenary life suited his broken heart.

There was no official ranking within the Wolves apart from Chief’s seniority as commanding officer. Each man brought his own special talents to the team, but Chief’s talent was keeping them all in hand and making sure they didn’t kill each other before they’d completed their assigned mission.

Chief grunted. His head rested on the sub’s unadorned metal interior. His eyes were closed and his skull lolled with the thrust of the engines. “I would kill for a Big Mac,” he muttered. “What are the chances they have proper food in this place?”

“Ever think about anything other than food, Chief?”

The deep voice came from the rear of the Lady where Brent Luca sprawled with his legs splayed wide. One leg bounced in an unceasing nervous jitter, bumping the large pulse rifle that lay sleek and deadly across his lap.

Chief flipped him the bird without even opening his eyes.

Luca grinned, revealing too many tombstone-shaped teeth and shook his head.

Luca was the newest addition. Fair-haired and heavily scarred across his face and body, he’d served his time acting as an undercover contact for the British army in every area of conflict around the globe. His background of lying and deception made him highly skilled and dangerous as hell, but Ethan suspected it had stained his soul.

Luca focused his attention on Cade. “Hey, kid. You wet your pants yet?”

“Knock it off, Luca,” Ethan growled.

Luca fired him a steely glare and his agitated leg jittered at a faster pace.

Ethan smiled to himself. Cade Jackson’s calm expression was unaffected by Luca’s jibes. His youthful face belied a razor-sharp mind, with the ability to hack into any computer system using the random contents of a kitchen cutlery drawer and a paper clip.

Luca tapped his thigh in a quick staccato, the noise drilling into Ethan’s skull. He clenched his jaw against the irritation.

“This better be good, Chief,” Luca said. “I had a redhead wrapped around me at the bar last night. Had to say goodbye before she even gave me her name.”

Cade lifted his face from the data stream that painted his features with an eerie light. “That was on purpose, Luca. She didn’t want to give you her name.”

Luca’s leg stalled for a second then resumed its jitter. He cocked a finger at Cade and made a kapow sound. “Fuck you, Bambi.”

Cade shook his head, grinning, Luca’s heckling running off his back like water.

“Luca. Put a sock in it,” Ethan interrupted.

Luca hoisted a mock salute. “Yes, sir.” He curled his lip at Ethan. “Who put in charge of the picnic anyway?”

“Luca.” Irritation edged Chief’s voice.

Cade returned his attention to the small tablet on his lap. His fingers were long and moved so fast on the flexible keyboard that Ethan struggled to follow them. Not the hands of a soldier, the hands of a tech wizard.

Not like his own. His palms were calloused and rough from the gym work that consumed his spare time to stop his brain from going into meltdown. Scars littered the back of his hands. Shrapnel, knives, even a dog once. They were a mess. Just like him. Ethan stuffed them deep into his pants pockets where he could no longer see them.

Memories shifted in his mind, the restraints loosened by the long, monotonous underwater descent.

“One thousand feet and closing,” Finn called from the pilot seat, switching on the comms. “Gray Lady to Ceto. Gray Lady to Ceto. Respond, please.” Finn rapped his knuckles on the plastic arm of his seat while he waited. “Nothing. Shit. One of these days I’d like them to send us on a mission involving a welcoming committee with bunches of flowers.”

“That would be boring.” Nik’s face was illuminated by the med screen he held in his hands. Setting up and calibrating the team’s biometric monitoring systems, he glanced up at Ethan, a frown creasing his forehead.

Ethan met his gaze. “Think I ate too much chili before we came down,” he joked, aware that the biometric wires woven through his clothes would be showing his accelerating heart rate in all its glory.

“Maybe you should be getting some more R and R?”

Ethan threw Nik a wry grin. “Speak to Chief about that. Had my Hawaiian shirt already packed.” What he didn’t add was that he’d been glad when the call had come through. That he was exhausted, but two weeks leave had felt like balancing on the edge of a cliff. He welcomed work and the distraction it brought, even if he was bone tired.

A shudder thrummed through the Lady’s hull. The metal vibrating under his feet triggered a familiar acid twist of emotion in Ethan’s belly. For a second, he was back in the car wreckage—the floor humming from the still spinning wheels, the scent of fuel burning his nose, Becca screaming next to him, her bloody hands raised in the flickering rain that streamed through the broken windshield.

Chief’s deep voice snapped him out of his nightmare. “Don’t blame me for your lack of social life, Carter.”

“No, Chief.” Ethan stared at the ceiling, mentally cursing, forcing his mind to remain in the here and now. His dreams were increasingly slipping over into his waking hours, and he was helpless to stop it. He refused to go and see another shrink. Every damn one of them had thrown a bottle of tablets at him as if that was some kind of cure for losing your family. Medication only numbed his mind and made it impossible for him to function. Or live. So he remained stuck in this halfway ground where he was off the meds but still plagued by the torment of a car crash that had killed his child and taken his wife from him. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could live in this no-man’s-land without a compass to guide him to safety.

He closed his eyes and took another deep breath of tinned air. After this mission, he was going to take some proper time off. Maybe take Nik up on the offer of his house in the Ukraine. He imagined cool trees above his head, sun dappling through them with the promise of a clear mind and peace.

The Lady juddered, and Ethan’s eyes snapped back open to the rarefied confines of steel, glass, and rubber. He exhaled and risked a glance at Nik. Something flickered over his friend’s face, but before Ethan could make sense of it, Finn interrupted.

“Ceto’s still not responding, Chief.”

Luca’s leg bounced.

Chief straightened and opened his eyes. “Cade?”

“Ceto comms are down. Mainframe included,” Cade confirmed.

Luca shook his head. “Nasty. What are the chances of that? We get sent down and before we arrive everything goes dead. This is bad.”

“That’s why they pay you the danger money, Luca,” Finn reminded him from the front cockpit.

Luca shook his head, lifted the crucifix he wore around his neck, and kissed the metal. “It doesn’t matter.”

Cade frowned. “How?”

“No matter what the hell is going on down there, we collect the research Triton wants and get the hell out.”

“That’s cold.”

Luca nodded. “This job does that to you, Bambi.”

Cade glanced at Luca and then Ethan. Ethan made a tiny negative movement of his head for Cade to let it drop. Luca was a pain in the ass. Cade would be better saving his energy for bigger battles with Luca than name-calling.

Cade rolled his shoulders and breathed out noisily before returning his attention to his tablet. “No joy. I’ve tried to access every back door I can think of, but the place is shut down cold. Aimee runs the base. Even she’s not responding to contact.”

Ethan peered at Cade’s screen, his curiosity piqued. “Aimee?”

Cade grinned. “Don’t get your hopes up. Artificial Intelligence MarinE Environment. All bells and whistles. She’s state of the art tech, running the whole damn base with a rod of iron.” He winked. “As you would expect from any shit-hot woman with a planetary IQ.”

Luca snorted. “Just what we need. Some hormonal female computer running the joint.”

An explosion of large fish hit the central viewport, their silvered bellies a bright spark in the dark.

Ethan dragged his gaze from Finn’s tablet. “What on earth?”

More fish collided with the Gray Lady’s bow, scattering across the main viewport in jeweled streaks of silver and cyan blue as the sub plowed into the thick of a school. Fish battered the glass from all directions, their meaty bodies creating muffled thumps through the inches of Plexiglas.

“Shit,” Finn swore, carving the sub to port. The engine whined and soared, protesting at the sudden maneuvers. Ethan leaned forward, expecting to see the outer limits of the shoal on the radar.

But the radar was alive.

The screen was a mass of bright blue blips that surrounded them in every direction. There was no shape to the school because it swamped them.

Clipped tones burst from the comms unit. “Gray Lady, this is Triton One. Standby for report. Over.”

Finn flicked the speak button. “Triton One, this is Gray Lady. Standby to copy. Over.”

“Roger, Gray Lady. We’re picking up unusual formations of biological life forms heading in your direction.”

“Copy that, Triton One. Biological life forms headed our way.” Finn clicked off the speak button. “Fucking fish in the ocean. Good to know. Bloody topside desk jockeys trying to tell me how to do my job.”

“How big is the shoal?” Luca asked, his leg momentarily stilled.

Finn threw his hands up in the air in disgust. “You tell me. Can’t see nothing but dots for miles in any direction.”

Pale squid now streaked across the glass, their tentacles pulsing in a bioluminescent frenzy as they pumped black ink behind them in a cloudy trail. Thuds echoed through the hull as meat and suckers pounded the sub.

The Gray Lady bucked, and warning lights flared across Finn’s control panel. “Shit, they’re jamming the coolant intake valves.” His hand flew over the controls.

Ethan’s focus narrowed on the front viewport, his pulse accelerating as Finn fought to maintain control of the Lady. “How can that happen?”

“It shouldn’t,” Finn replied without taking his eyes off the controls. The engine stuttered, grinding resonating through the hull. “But they’re actually forcing their way into the intake. Bloody hara-kiri squid. Coolant system is shorting out, and I’ve lost port balance controls.”

The viewport cleared in a rush. One or two stragglers pinged off the hull, then everything was dark again, but the engine noise of the Lady had shifted from a fluid hum to a labored drone.

Finn swore under his breath and wrenched hard on the steering controls. “Just as well we’re nearly there,” he called out through gritted teeth.

The Lady pitched hard to port, sending Cade’s tablet skittering across the polished metal floor. “Anyone breathalyze you before letting you drive this thing?” Luca shouted.

The Lady jolted, and this time Ethan grabbed a strap above his head. Shit, I’m getting too old for this crap.

“Fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls,” Finn called over his shoulder. “We have arrived at our destination and just in fucking time.”