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a marauder bomb. Basically an automated mini sub. You got the set online?”
    â€œSure. Just mask up. Weapons systems on the right arm.”
    I slid the elasticized gunner’s eyemask down over my face and and touched the activate pads at the temples. A seascape in bright primaries wrapped around my field of vision, pale blue shaded deeper gray with the landscape of the seabed beneath. Hardware came through in shades of red, depending on how much it corresponded to the parameters I’d programmed in earlier. Most of it was light pink in color, inanimate alloy wreckage devoid of electronic activity. I let myself slide forward into the virtual representation of what the shuttle’s sensors were seeing, forced myself to stop actively looking for anything, and relaxed the last mental millimeters into the Zen state.
    Minesweeping was not something the Envoy Corps taught as such, but the total poise that only comes, paradoxically, with an utter lack of expectation was vital to the core training. A Protectorate Envoy, deployed as digitized human freight via hyperspatial needlecast, could expect to wake up to literally anything. At the very least, you habitually find yourself in unfamiliar bodies on unfamiliar worlds where people are shooting at you. Even on a good day, no amount of briefing can prepare you for a total change of environment like that, and in the invariably unstable-to-lethally-dangerous sets of circumstances the Envoys have been created to deal with, there just isn’t any point.
    Virginia Vidaura, Corps trainer, hands in the pockets of her coveralls, looking us over with calm speculation. Day one induction.
    Since it is logistically impossible to expect everything,
she told us evenly,
we will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.
    I didn’t even consciously see the first smart mine. There was a red flare in the corner of one eye, and my hands had already matched coordinates and loosed the shuttle’s hunter-killer micros. The little missiles ran green traces across the virtual seascape, plunged beneath the surface like sharp knives in flesh, and pricked the squatting mine before it could either move or respond. Flash blast of detonation and the surface of the sea heaved upward like a body on an interrogation table.
    Once upon a time men had to run their weapons systems all by themselves. They went up in the air in fliers not much bigger or better equipped than bathtubs with wings and fired off whatever clumsy hardware they could squeeze into the cockpit with them. Later, they designed machines that could do the job faster and more accurately than humanly possible, and for a while it was a machine’s world up there. Then the emerging biosciences began to catch up and suddenly the same speed and precision capacity was available as a human option again. Since then it’s been a race of sorts between technologies to see which can be upgraded faster, the external machines or the human factor. In that particular race, Envoy psychodynamics were a sharp surprise sprint up the inside lane.
    There are war machines that are faster than me, but we weren’t lucky enough to have one aboard. The shuttle was a hospital auxiliary, and its strictly defensive weaponry ran to the micro turret in the nose and a decoy-and-evade package that I wouldn’t have trusted to fly a kite. We were going to have to do this ourselves.
    â€œOne down. The rest of the pack won’t be far away. Kill your speed. Get us down on the deck and arm the tinsel.”
    They came from the west, scuttling across the seabed like fat-bodied cylindrical spiders, drawn to the violent death of their brother. I felt the shuttle tip forward as Schneider brought us down to barely ten meters in altitude and the solid thump as the tinsel bomb racks deployed. My eyes flickered across the mines. Seven of them, converging. They usually ran five to a pack, so this had to be the remnants of two groups,