Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Edmond Kingston surveyed the morning scene: gray skies meeting navy water with white spray peaks. Waves hit the outer kelp wall, splashed, and died quickly. The wind moved the rain in streaks across the window. A typical morning on the North Pacific Seastead.

He continued to admire the city he had built and kept afloat. The thick kelp breakwater was barely visible above the roiling water, the port and container storage, the residences, and the heliport. The old drilling platform was ugly—gray and rust were the primary colors—but he didn’t care. This was his life’s work: a city on the sea. The streaks of seagull excrement dotted the corners where rain or maintenance didn't reach.

My life's work, he thought and ran his hands through his thinning red hair. Barely fifteen years old, but still afloat. Well, their life's work technically. And now she, Keight, was coming back to take half of it. It was today, wasn’t it? He visualized her ship sinking—too dark and too unlikely—how about delayed, but he knew he wouldn’t be so lucky.

He watched the port. The gantry cranes unloaded shuffled containers on and around ships. The dock's status as a useful entrepôt was always dubious. Useful was a generous term. Profitable? Even more generous. She could have the port; he wouldn’t care. The moneymaker was below the waterline. It was the ocean-chilled finance data center they rented for high-frequency traders. Their seastead had tapped into the VSNL Transpacific fiber optic line, which sat uniquely between the data of billions. It was the one spot on Earth with the lowest latency between Tokyo and Seattle, enabling the traders to act milliseconds before other financial intellects.

His real treasure, the research data center, wasn't on the books (nor was it profitable). Hidden did not help with Keight; she helped build it.

The coffee maker beeped and pulled him away from the west-facing window.

He poured a cup from his micro kitchenette and now looked out a small window to the south. There, some freeloaders had tethered up to the kelp forest and constructed their own gangways, which radiated out from the North Pacific Seastead. They were as welcome as seagulls.

He sipped and watched as the wafts of hot coffee hit his nose.

Then noticed an orange flicker of light through the windows of one of the unmanaged gangway nodes. The seastead city had aggregated by itself and grown without management. An organism grown past what he could control.

What are they doing over there? he thought.

You don't want to know Ed.

The bright orange flash now glowed a low red, and finally, black smoke billowed up.

Fire!

Edmond grabbed his radio. “Central. Central. Fire in the southeast gangways. I repeat: Fire, fire, fire!”

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