Page 39 of Oleander

“That a yes?” Eric called.

“It’s Alvin,” Luke said. “It’s either a yes or a deeply personal critique of landscaping.”

Alvin released the flamingo and moved toward open water. Luke followed him with his attention, reaching farther, into the warm layered dark of the Gulf. Sound traveled there with astonishing fidelity.

Propellers, pumps, snapping shrimp, distant engines, the metallic complaints of platforms, all became signatures. Alvin knew the shallows and channels, but the deep belonged to faster friends.

Luke sent another image: sleek bodies moving through pressure and echo. Dolphins. Alvin rolled once beneath the surface, a slow muscular turn that splashed Cam’s boots.

“He likes you,” Luke said.

Cam looked at the water dripping from his jeans.

“I’d hate to see intimacy.”

Within twenty minutes, Alvin reached a pod feeding along a current edge. Luke felt the contact as a burst of bright overlapping awareness: clicks, speed, silver fish turning, a calf tucked between adults, the distant pulse of a large ship.

He offered the Imperium’s acoustic profile, harvested earlier by one of Hex’s hydrophones. The dolphins answered by scattering south and east, not commanded but curious, delighted by the problem and by the prospect of racing something enormous and slow.

Hex authorized two drones. They launched from the dock with predatory whines, climbed through low cloud, and turned Gulfward. One carried a long-lens camera and thermal sensor. The other carried an acoustic package capable of hovering low enough to sample engine noise and encrypted radio spill without advertising itself to every radar operator between Texas and Cuba.

“Birds upstairs, dolphins downstairs, alligator in middle management,” Eric said. “This operation has a better org chart than Burton Drilling.”

“Lower turnover, too,” said Hex.

The first drone found the Imperium at dusk. Its thermal image painted the yacht in ghostly white: generators hot, galley active, engine room blooming brighter by the minute.

Crew streamed between decks. Cases arrived from a tender and disappeared through a service door. A man on the upper deck paced beside the rail, stopping every few seconds to stare behind him.

“There’s our prince of petroleum,” Cam said. “Walking like his colon just received a subpoena.”

Luke ignored him and enlarged the service door.

“Three hard cases. One fireproof document bin. Two armed men.”

Eric tagged each item on the recording. The dolphins supplied what the camera could not. Through Luke, their reports arrived as patterns: the propellers turning briefly, stopping, turning again; a tender circling to the port quarter; a smaller motor approaching from the east; metallic impacts from below deck.

Alvin held nearer the coast, relaying through familiar channels of sound and instinct. The system was imprecise in words and exact in motion.

On the television, another disclosure landed. Dorothy had preserved a recording of a closed executive meeting held six weeks before Platform Nine failed.

In it, a vice president warned Hollis that emergency shutdown components had exceeded their service life. A second voice asked whether production should pause. Hollis answered that steel did not become dangerous because an engineer put a birthday on it.

The anchor read a statement from the EPA announcing a criminal investigation into concealed environmental releases associated with Platform Nine and three other Burton facilities.

Minutes later, the FBI confirmed execution of multiple search warrants. The network displayed aerial footage of agents entering a records warehouse while reporters shouted questions from behind barricades.

Burton Drilling stock dropped below the value of the company’s scrap inventory. Trading halted again. A market analyst tried to explain debt covenants, but the rolling scroll beneath him changed so often that he appeared to be delivering financial commentary during an earthquake.

“How many ships?” Luke asked.

Eric pulled up marine traffic.

“Coast Guard cutter west of him, officially on patrol. FBI aircraft filed out of Houston. EPA has people headed to the port. Local law enforcement is tying itself into a decorative knot over jurisdiction.”

“And the small motor east of the yacht?”

Hex checked the thermal feed.