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insufferable. But once he'd had an hour at a couple gigahertz to think about it, he'd come around. The reef would, too.
"In you go," he said gently to the human-shells. "Have a great dive."
He tracked them on sonar as they descended slowly. The woman -- he called her Janet -- needed to equalize more often than the man, pinching her nose and blowing. Robbie liked to watch the low-rez feed off of their cameras as they hit the reef. It was coming up sunset, and the sky was bloody, the fish stained red with its light.
"We warned you," the reef said. Something in its tone -- just modulated pressure waves through the water, a simple enough trick, especially with the kind of hardware that had been raining down on the ocean that spring. But the tone held an unmistakable air of menace.
Something deep underwater went *whoomph* and Robbie grew alarmed. "Asimov!" he cursed, and trained his sonar on the reef wall frantically. The human-shells had disappeared in a cloud of rising biomass, which he was able to resolve eventually as a group of parrotfish, surfacing quickly.
A moment later, they were floating on the surface. Lifeless, brightly colored, their beaks in a perpetual idiot's grin. Their eyes stared into the bloody sunset.
Among them were the human-shells, surfaced and floating with their BCDs inflated to keep them there, following perfect dive-procedure. A chop had kicked up and the waves were sending the fishes -- each a meter to a meter and a half in length -- into the divers, pounding them remorselessly, knocking them under. The human-shells were taking it with equanimity -- you couldn't panic when you were mere uninhabited meat -- but they couldn't take it forever. Robbie dropped his oars and rowed hard for them, swinging around so they came up alongside his gunwales.
The man -- Robbie called him Isaac, of course -- caught the edge of the boat and kicked hard, hauling himself into the boat with his strong brown arms. Robbie was already rowing for Janet, who was swim