Behemoth: B-Max

by Peter Watts

  But something in the back of her mind says the second blast just felt wrong—the wrong resonance, perhaps, as if one were to ring a great antique church bell and hear a silvery tinkle. And the voices, when they come back online, are not cheering their latest victory over the rampaging Corpse Hordes, but so full of doubt and uncertainty that not even the vocoders can mask it.

  “What the fuck was that—”

  “Avril? Did you feel that out your way?”

  “Avril? Anybody catching—anyone…”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Gardiner? David? Stan? Anyone—”

  “Garcia, are you—I’m not getting—”

  “It’s gone. I’m right here, it’s just fucking gone…”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The whole bottom of the hab, it’s just—it must’ve set them both—”

  “Both what? She only set one charge, and that was on—”

  “Ken? Ken? Lubin, where the fuck are you?”

  “This is Lubin.”

  Silence in the water.

  “We’ve lost the medhab.” His voice is like rusty iron.

  “What—”

  “How did—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Lubin snarls across the nightscape.

  There’s silence again, almost. A few, on open channels, continue to emit metal groans.

  “Evidently an unpacked charge was attached to the hab,” Lubin continues. “It must have been set off by the same signal we used on Atlantis. From this point on, no omnidirectional triggers. There may be other charges set to detonate on multiple pings. Everyone—”

  “This is Atlantis speaking.”

  The words boom across the seabed like the Voice of God, unsullied by any interference. Ken forgot to black back out, Clarke realizes. Ken’s started shouting at the troops.

  Ken’s losing it …

  “You may think you are in a position of strength,” the voice continues. “You are not. If you destroy this facility, your own deaths are assured.”

  She doesn’t recognize the voice. Odd. It speaks with such authority.

  “You are infected with Mark Two. You are all infected. Mark Two is highly contagious during an asymptomatic incubation period of several weeks. Without intervention you will all be dead within two months.

  “We have a cure.”

  Dead silence. Not even Grace Nolan says I told you so.

  “We’ve trip-wired all relevant files and cultures to prevent unauthorized access. Kill us and you kill yourselves.”

  “Prove it,” Lubin replies.

  “Certainly. Just wait a while. Or if you’re feeling impatient, do that mind-reading trick of yours. What do you call it? Tuning in? I’m told it separates the trustworthy from the liars, most of the time.”

  Nobody corrects him.

  “State your terms,” Lubin says.

  “Not to you. We will only negotiate with Lenie Clarke.”

  “Lenie Clarke may be dead,” Lubin says. “We haven’t been able to contact her since you blew the res.” He must know better by now: she’s high in the water, her insides resonating to the faint tapping of click trains. She keeps quiet. Let him play out the game in his own way. It might be his last.

  “That would be very bad news for all of us,” Atlantis replies calmly. “Because this offer expires if she’s not at Airlock Six within a half hour. That is all.”

  Silence.

  “It’s a trick,” Nolan says.

  “Hey, you said they had a cure,” someone else buzzes—Clarke can’t tell who, the channels are fuzzing up again. The white noise generators must be back online.

  “So what if they do?” Nolan buzzes. “I don’t trust them to share it with us, and I sure as shit don’t trust Lenie fucking Clarke to be my ambassador. How do you think those fuckers found out about fine-tuning in the first place? Every one of our dead is thanks to her.”

  Clarke smiles to herself. Such small numbers she concerns herself with. Such a tiny handful of lives. She feels her fingers clenching on the towbar. The squid gently pulls her forward; the water gently tugs her back.

  “We can do what they say. We can tune them in, check out the story.” She thinks that’s Gomez, but the interference is rising around her as she travels. She’s lost even the crude intonations of vocoded speech.

  A buzz in her jaw: a beep just behind her ear. Someone tagging her on a private channel. Probably Lubin. He’s King Tactical, after all. He’s the one who knows where she is. Nobody else can see beyond the stumps of their own shattered limbs.

  “And it proves what? That they’re gonna…”—static—“it to us? Shit, even if they don’t have a cure they’ve probably convinced a bunch of their buddies that they do, just so we won’t be…” Nolan’s voice fades out.

  Lubin says something on open channel. Clarke can’t make out the words. The beeping in her head seems more urgent now, although she knows that’s impossible; the ambient hiss is drowning that signal along with all the others.

  Nolan again: “Fuck off, Ken. Why we ever liste … you … can’t even outsmart … ing corp…”

  Static, pure and random. Light, rising below. Airlock Six is dead ahead, and all the static in the world can’t drown out the single presence waiting behind it.

  Clarke can tell by the guilt. There’s only one other person down here with so twisted a footprint.

  BAPTISM

  ROWAN pulls open the airlock before it’s even finished draining. Seawater cascades around Clarke’s ankles into the wet room.

  Clarke strips off her fins and steps clear of the lock. She leaves the rest of her uniform in place, presents the usual shadow-self; only her face flap is unsealed. Rowan stands aside to let her pass. Clarke slings the fins securely across her back and pans the spartan compartment. There’s not a link of preshmesh to be seen. Normally, one whole bulkhead would be lined with diving armor.

  “How many have you lost?” she asks softly.

  “We don’t know yet. More than these.”

  Small potatoes, Clarke reflects. For both of us.

  But the war is still young …

  “I honestly didn’t know,” Rowan says.

  There’s no second sight, here in the near-vacuum of a sea-level atmosphere. Clarke says nothing.

  “They didn’t trust me. They still don’t.” Rowan’s eyes flicker to a fleck of brightness up where the bulkhead meets the ceiling: a pinhead lens. Just a few days ago, before the corpses spined up again, rifters would have watched events unfold through that circuit. Now, Rowan’s own kind will be keeping tabs.

  She stares at the rifter with a strange, curious intensity that Clarke has never seen before. It takes Clarke a moment to recognize what’s changed; for the first time in Clarke’s memory, Rowan’s eyes have gone dark. The feeds to her ConTacs have been shut off, her gaze stripped of commentary or distraction. There’s nothing in there now but her.

  A leash and collar could hardly convey a clearer message.

  “Come on,” Rowan says. “They’re in one of the labs.”

  Clarke follows her out of the wet room. They turn right down a corridor suffused in bright pink light. Emergency lighting, she realizes; her eyecaps boost it to idiotic nursery ambience. Rowan’s eyes will be serving up the dim insides of a tube, blood-red like the perfused viscera of some man-eating monster.

  They turn left a T-junction, step across the yellow-jacket striping of a dropgate.

  “So what’s the catch?” she asks. The corpses aren’t going to just hand over their only leverage with no strings attached.

  Rowan doesn’t look back. “They didn’t tell me.”

  Another corner. They pass an emergency docking hatch set into the outer bulkhead; a smattering of valves and readouts disfigure the wall to one side. For a moment Clarke wonders if Harpodon is affixed to the other side, but no. Wrong section.

  Suddenly, Rowan stops and turns.

  “Lenie, if anything should—”

  Something kicks Atlantis in t
he side. Somewhere behind them, metal masses collide with a crash.

  The pink lights flicker.

  “Wha—”

  Another kick, harder this time. The deck jumps: Clarke stumbles to the same sound of metal on metal, and this time recognizes it: the drop-gates.

  The lights go out.

  “Pat, what the fuck are your peo—”

  “Not mine.” Rowan’s voice trembles in the darkness.

  She hovers a meter away, an indistinct silhouette, dark gray on black.

  No commotion, Clarke notes. No shouting, nobody running down the halls, no intercom …

  It’s so quiet it’s almost peaceful.

  “They’ve cut us off,” Rowan says. Her edges have resolved, still not much detail but the corpse’s shape is clearer now at least. Hints and glints of the bulkheads are coming into view as well. Clarke looks around for the light source and spies a constellation of pale winking pinpoints a few meters behind them. The docking hatch.

  “Did you hear me? Lenie?” Rowan’s voice is leaving worried and approaching frantic. “Are you there?”

  “Right here.” Clarke reaches out and touches the corpse lightly on the arm. Rowan’s ghostly shape startles briefly at the contact.

  “Do you—are you—”

  “I don’t know, Pat. I wasn’t expecting this either.”

  “They’ve cut us off. You hear the drop-gates fall? They hulled us. The bastards hulled us. Ahead and behind. We’re flooded on both sides. We’re trapped.”

  “They didn’t hull this segment, though,” Clarke points out. “They’re trying to contain us, not kill us.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” says one of the bulkheads.

  Blind Rowan jumps in the darkness.

  “As a matter of fact,” the bulkhead continues, “we are going to kill the corpse.” It speaks in a tinny vibrato, thick with distortion: a voice mutilated twice in succession, once by vocoder, once by limpet phone stuck to the outside of the hull. Inanely, Clarke wonders if she sounded this bad to Alyx.

  She can’t tell who it is. She thinks the voice is female. “Grace?”

  “They weren’t going to give you shit, Lenie. They don’t have shit to give you. They were fishing for hostages and you went ambling innocently into their trap. But we look after our own. Even you, we look after.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? How do you know?”

  “How do we know?” The bulkhead vibrates like a great Jew’s harp. “You’re the one that showed us how to tune in! And it works, sweetie, it works like sex and we’re reading a whole bunch of those stumpfucks down in the medlab and believe me the guilt is just oozing across that hull. By the way, if I were you I’d seal up my diveskin. You’re about to be rescued.”

  “Grace, wait! Hang on a second!” Clarke turns to the corpse. “Pat?”

  Rowan isn’t shaking her head. Rowan isn’t speaking up in angry denial. Rowan isn’t doing any of the things that an innocent person—or even a guilty one, for that matter—should be doing when threatened with death.

  “Pat, you—fuck no, don’t tell me you—”

  “Of course I didn’t, Lenie. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? They tricked us both…”

  Something clanks against the hull.

  “Wait!” Clarke stares at the ceiling, at the walls, but her adversary is invisible and untouchable. “Pat’s not part of this!”

  “Right. I heard.” A gargling, metal-shredding sound that might be laughter. “She’s the head of the fucking board of directors and she didn’t know anything. I believe that.”

  “Tune her in, then! See for yourself!”

  “The thing is, Len, us novices aren’t that good at tuning in singles. Signal’s too weak. So it wouldn’t prove much. Say bye-bye, Pattie.”

  “Bye,” Rowan whispers. Something on the other side of the bulkhead begins whining.

  “Fuck you Nolan, you back off right now or I swear I’ll kill you myself! Do you hear me? Pat didn’t know! She’s no more in control than—”

  —than I am, she almost says, but suddenly there’s a new light source here in the corridor, a single crimson point. It flares, blindingly intense even to Lenie Clarke’s bleached vision, and dies in the next instant.

  The world explodes with the sound of pounding metal.

  Rowan’s silhouette has folded down into a cringing shape in the corner. Something’s slicing across Clarke’s darkened field of view like a roaring white laser. Water, she realizes after a moment. Water forced through a little hole in the ceiling by the weight of an ocean. If she were to pass her arm through that pencil-thin stream, it would shear right off.

  In seconds the water’s up to her ankles.

  She starts toward Rowan, desperate to do something, knowing there’s nothing left to do. The compartment glows sudden, sullen red: another eye winks on the outer wall. It opens, and goes dark, and a second thread of killing sea drills the air. Ricochets spray back from the inner wall like liquid shrapnel: needle-sharp pain explodes in Clarke’s shoulder. Suddenly she’s on her back, water closing over her face, her skull ringing from its impact with the deck.

  She rolls onto her stomach, pushes herself up onto all fours. The water rises past her elbows as she watches. She stays low, crawls across the corridor to Rowan’s huddled form. A hundred lethal vectors of incidence and reflection crisscross overhead. Rowan’s slumped against the inner wall, immersed in ice water to her chest. Her head hangs forward, her hair covering her face. Clarke lifts her chin; there’s a dark streak across one cheek, black and featureless in the impoverished light. It flows: shrapnel hit.

  Rowan’s face is opaque. Her naked eyes are wide but unseeing: the few stray photons from down the tunnel don’t come close to the threshold for unassisted sight. There’s nothing in Rowan’s face but sound and pain and freezing cold.

  “Pat!” Clarke can hardly hear her own voice over the roar.

  The water rises past Rowan’s lips. Clarke grabs the other woman under the arms, heaves her into a semi-erect lean against the bulkhead. A ricochet shatters a few centimeters to the left. Clarke puts herself between Rowan and the worst of the backshatter.

  “Pat!” She doesn’t know what she expects the corpse to say in response. Patricia Rowan is already dead; all that’s left is for Lenie Clarke to stand and watch while she goes through the motions. But Rowan is saying something; Clarke can’t hear a thing over the ambient roar, but she can see Rowan’s lips move, she can almost make out—

  A sudden stabbing pain, a kick in the back. Clarke keeps her balance this time; the water, pooled over halfway to the ceiling now, is catching the worst of the ricochets.

  Rowan’s mouth is still in motion. She’s not speaking, Clarke sees: She’s mouthing syllables, slow careful exaggerations meant to be seen and not heard:

  Alyx … Take care of Alyx …

  The water’s caught up to her chin again.

  Clarke’s hands find Rowan’s, guide them up. With Rowan’s hands on her face, Clarke nods.

  In her personal, endless darkness, Patricia Rowan nods back.

  Ken could help you now. He could keep it from hurting maybe, he could kill you instantly. I can’t. I don’t know how …

  I’m sorry.

  The water’s too deep to stand in, now—Rowan is feebly treading water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It’s a pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds, brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.

  She may escape drowning, though, even if she can’t escape death. The rising water compresses the atmosphere around them, squeezes it so hard that oxygen itself turns toxic. The convulsions, Clarke’s heard, are not necessarily painful …

  It’s a fate that will strike Clarke as quickly as Rowan, if she waits too long. It seems wrong to save herself while Rowan gasps for breath. But Clarke has her own brainstem, and it won’t let sick, irrational guilt
stand in the way of its own preservation. She watches as her hands move of their own accord, sealing her face flap, starting up the machinery in her flesh. She abandons Rowan to face her fate alone. Her body floods like the corridor, but to opposite effect. The ocean slides through her chest, sustaining life instead of stealing it. She becomes the mermaid again, while her friend dies before her eyes.

  But Rowan’s not giving up, not yet, not yet. The body isn’t resigned no matter what the mind may have accepted. There’s just a small pocket of air up near the ceiling but the corpse’s stiff, clumsy legs are still kicking, hands still clawing against the pipes and why doesn’t she just fucking give up?

  Ambient pressure kicks past some critical threshold. Unleashed neurotransmitters sing through the wiring in her head. Suddenly, Lenie Clarke is in Patricia Rowan’s mind. Lenie Clarke is learning how it feels to die.

  Goddamn you Pat, why can’t you just give up? How can you do this to me?

  She sinks to the bottom of the compartment. She stares resolutely at the deck, her eyelids pinned open, while the swirling turbulence fades by degrees and the roar of inrushing water dies back and all that’s left is that soft, erratic scratching, that pathetic feeble clawing of frozen flesh against biosteel …

  Eventually the sound of struggling stops. The vicarious anguish, the sadness and regret go on a little longer. Lenie Clarke waits until the last little bit of Patricia Rowan dies in her head. She lets the silence stretch before tripping her vocoder.

  “Grace. Can you hear me?”

  Her mechanical voice is passionless and dead level.

  “Course you can. I’m going to fucking kill you, Grace.”

  Her fins float off to one side, still loosely tethered to her diveskin. Clarke retrieves them, pulls them over her feet.

  “There’s a docking hatch right in front of me, Grace. I’m going to open it, and I’m going to come out there and I’m going to gut you like a fish. If I were you I’d start swimming.”