It started as a low flat beach of fine wet sand, then suddenly got steeper and coarser, with a vaguely scalloped shape that probably showed where a grab dredger had opened its clam shell bucket to dump huge gobs of muck. This was new work that hadn’t yet settled to its natural angle of repose. Saskia helped that process along in a small way by wading and staggering up over knee-high mini-cliffs and touching off small avalanches. The levee was higher than it looked from a distance, which on a day like this was reassuring. Eventually she got to the point where she could see over the top, though. And what she could see—"The enemy forces"—was a whole lot of nothing. Visibility was cut off by mist at a distance of maybe a kilometer. The gray sea was churning and heaving, but there weren’t a lot of breakers coming in against this steep artificial shore. Those that did attack it were flicked away by the dike’s outer armor. For, soft as it was on its inner slope, the side facing the sea was another matter. The smallest and lightest objects that met the eye there were reinforced concrete cubes two and a half meters on a side. And, as had been explained to her at a level of detail that would have rendered most royals catatonic, this was only the uppermost layer of an engineered system that reached deep below the water.