by Peter Watts
"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's 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."
Maybe she already has. At any rate, there's no answer.
Clarke kicks down the corridor, gaze fixed immovably on the docking hatch. Its sparkling mosaic of readouts, unquenchable even by the Atlantic itself, lights her way.
"Got your head start, Grace? Won't do you any good."
Something soft bumps into her from behind. Clarke flinches, wills herself not to look.
"Ready or not, here I come."
She undogs the hatch.
Tag
There's nobody out there.
They've left evidence behind—a couple of point-welders still squatting against the hull on tripod legs, the limpet transceiver stuck to the alloy a few meters away—but of Nolan and any other perpetrators, there's no sign. Clarke smiles grimly to herself.
Let them run.
But she can't find anyone else, either. None of Lubin's sentries at their assigned posts. Nobody monitoring the surveillance limpets festooning Atlantis in the wake of the Corpses' exercise in channel-switching. She flies over the very medlab on which, she's been assured, any number of rifter troops are fine-tuning the would-be hostage-takers lurking within. Nothing. Gantries and habslabs and shadows. Blinking lights in some places, recent darkness in others where the beacons or the portholes have been smashed or blacked out. Epochal darkness everywhere else.
No other rifters, anywhere.
Maybe the corpses had some weapon, something even Ken didn't suspect. Maybe they touched a button and everyone just vanished…
But no. She can feel the corpses inside, their fear and apprehension and blind pants-pissing desperation radiating a good ten meters into the water. Not the kind of feelings you'd expect in the wake of overwhelming victory. If the corpses even know what's going on, it's not making them feel any better.
She kicks off into the abyss, heading for Lubin's nerve hab. Now, finally, she can tune in faint stirrings from the water ahead. But no: it's just more of the same. More fear, more uncertainty. How can she still be reading Atlantis from this range? How can these sensations be getting stronger as the corpses recede behind her?
It's not much of a mystery. Pretending otherwise barely brings enough comfort to justify the effort.
Faint LFAM chatter rises in the water around her. Not much, considering; by now she can feel dozens of rifters, all subdued, all afraid. Hardly any of them speak aloud. A constellation of dim stars pulses faintly ahead. Someone crosses Clarke's path, ten or fifteen meters ahead, invisible but for a brief eclipse of running lights. His mind quails, washing over hers.
So many of them have collected around the hab. They mill about like stunned fish or merely hang motionless in the water, waiting. Maybe this is all there is, maybe these are all the rifters left in the world. Apprehension hangs about them like a cloud.
Perhaps Grace Nolan is here. Clarke feels cold, cleansing anger at the prospect. A dozen rifters turn at her thoughts and stare with dead white eyes.
"What's going on?" Clarke buzzes. "Where is she?"
"Fuck off, Len. We've got bigger problems right now." She doesn't recognize the speaker.
Clarke swims toward the hab; most of the rifters part for her. Half a dozen block her way. Gomez. Cramer. Others in back, too black and distant to recognize in the brainstem ambience.
"Is she in there?" Clarke says.
"You back off," Cramer tells her. "You not be giving no orders here."
"Oh, I'm not ordering anybody. It's completely up to you. You can either get out of my way, or try and stop me."
"Is that Lenie?" Lubin's voice, air-normal channel.
"Yeah," Cramer buzzes after a moment. "She be pretty—"
"Let her in," Lubin says.
It's a private party, by invitation only. Ken Lubin. Jelaine Chen and Dimitri Alexander. Avril Hopkinson.
Grace Nolan.
Lubin doesn't even look around as Clarke climbs up from the wet room. "Deal with it later. We need you in on this, Len, but we need Grace too. Either of you lays a hand on the other, I'll take my own measures."
"Understood," Nolan says evenly.
Clarke looks at her, and says nothing.
"So." Lubin returns his attention to the monitor. "Where were we?"
"I'm pretty sure it didn't see us," Chen says.
"It was too preoccupied with the site itself, and that model doesn't have wraparound vision." She taps the screen twice in quick succession; the image at its center freezes and zooms.
It looks like your garden-variety squid, but with a couple of manipulator arms at the front end and no towbar at the back. An AUV of some kind. It's obviously not from around here.
Hopkinson sucks breath through clenched teeth. "That's it, then. They found us."
"Maybe not," Chen says. "You can't teleop something that deep, not in that kind of terrain. It had to be running on its own. Whoever sent it wouldn't know what it found until it got back to the surface."
"Or until it doesn't report back on schedule."
Chen shrugs. "It's a big, dangerous ocean. It doesn't come back, they chalk it up to a mudslide or a faulty nav chip. No reason to suspect we had anything to do with it."
Hopkinson shakes her head. "No reason? What's an AUV even doing down here if not looking for us?"
"It would be a pretty amazing coincidence," Alexander agrees.
Lubin reaches forward and taps the screen. The image de-zooms and continues playing where it left off. Acronyms and numbers cluster along the bottom edge of the screen, shifting and shuffling as the telemetry changes.
The AUV's floating a few meters from the shore of Impossible Lake, just above the surface. One arm extends, dips a finger across the halocline, pulls back as if startled.
"Look at that," Nolan says. "It's scared of hypersaline."
The little robot moves a few meters into the hazy distance, and tries again.
"And it wasn't aware of you any of this time?" Lubin asks.
Alexander shakes his head. "Not until later. Like Laney said, it was too busy checking out the site."
"You got footage of that?" Nolan again, like she doesn't have a care in the world. Like she isn't living on borrowed time.
"Just a few seconds, back at the start. Real muddy, it doesn't show much. We didn't want to get too close, for obvious reasons."
"Yet you sonared it repeatedly," Lubin remarks.
Chen shrugs. "Seemed like the lesser of two evils. We had to get some track on what it was doing. Better than letting it see us."
"And if it triangulated on your pings?"
"We kept moving. Gapped the pings nice and wide. The most it could've known was that something was scanning the water column, and we've got a couple of things out there that do that anyway." Chen gestures at the screen, a little defensively. "It's all there in the track."
Lubin grunts.
"Okay, here's where it happens," Alexander says. "About thirty seconds from now."
The AUV is fading in the haze, apparently heading towards one of the few streetlights that actually pokes above the surface of Impossible Lake. Just before it disappears entirely, a black mass eclipses the view; some ragged outcrop intruding from the left. No circles of light play across that surface, even though the sub is obviously mere meters away; Chen and Alexander are running dark, hiding behind the local topography. The view on the screen tilts and bobs as their sub maneuvers around the rocks: dark shadows on darker ones, barely visible in the dim light backscattered around corners.
Alexander leans forward. "Here it comes…"
Light ahead and to the right; the far end of the outcropping cuts the edges of that brightening haze like a jumble of black shattered glass. The sub throttles back, moves forward more cautiously now, edges into the light—
—and nearly collides with the AUV coming the other way.
Two of the telemetry acronyms turn bright red and start flashing. There's no sound in the playback, but Clarke can imagine sirens in the sub's cockpit. For an instant, the AUV just sits there; Clarke swears she sees its stereocam irises go wide. Then it spins away—to continue its survey or to run like hell, depending on how smart it is.
They'll never know. Because that's when something shoots into view from below camera range, an elongate streak like a jet of gray ink. It hits the AUV in mid-spin, splashes out and wraps around it, shrinks down around its prey like an elastic spiderweb. The AUV pulls against the restraints but the trailing ends of the mesh are still connected to the sub by a springy, filamentous tether.
Clarke has never seen a cannon net in operation before. It's pretty cool.
"So that's it," Alexander says as the image freezes. "We're just lucky we ran into it before we'd used up the net on one of your monster fish."
"We're lucky I thought to use the net, too," Chen adds. "Who'da thunk it would come in so handy?" She frowns, and adds, "wish I knew what tipped the little beast off, though."
"You were moving," Lubin tells her.
"Yeah, of course. To keep it from getting a fix on our sonar signals, like you said."
"It followed your engine noise."
A little of the cockiness drains from Chen's posture.
"So we've got it," Clarke says. "Right now."
"Debbie's taking it apart now," Lubin says. "It wasn't booby-trapped, at least. She says we can probably get into its memory if there isn't any serious crypto."
Hopkinson looks a bit more cheerful. "Seriously? We can just give it amnesia and send it on its way?"
It sounds too good to be true. Lubin's look confirms it.
"What?" Hopkinson says. "We fake the data stream, it goes back home and tells its mom there's nothing down here but mud and starfishies. What's the problem?"
"How often do we go out there?" Lubin asks her.
"What, to the Lake? Maybe once or twice a week, not counting all the times we went out to set the place up."
"That's a very sparse schedule."
"It's all we need, until the seismic data's in."
The dread in Clarke's stomach—belayed a few moments ago, when the conversation turned to the hope of false memory—comes back like a tide, twice as cold as before. "Shit," she whispers. "You're talking about the odds."
Lubin nods. "There's virtually no chance we'd just happen to be in the area the very first time that thing came calling."
"So this isn't the first time. It's been down there before," Clarke says.
"Several times at least, I'd guess. It may have been to Impossible Lake more often than we have." Lubin looks around at the others. "Someone's already on to us. If we send this thing back with no record of the site, we'll simply be telling them that we know that."
"Fuck," Nolan says in a shaky voice. "We're sockeye. Five years. We're complete sockeye."
For once, Clarke's inclined to agree with her.
"Not necessarily," Lubin says. "I don't think they've found us yet."
"Gullshit. You said yourself, months ago, years even—"
"They haven't found us." Lubin speaks with that level, overly-controlled voice that speaks of thinning patience. Nolan immediately shuts up.
"What they have found," Lubin continues after a moment, "is a grid of lights, seismic recorders, and survey sticks. For all they know it's the remains of some aborted mining operation." Chen opens her mouth: Lubin raises a palm, pre-empting her. "Personally I don't believe that. If they've got reason to look for us in this vicinity, they'll most likely assume that we're behind anything they discover.
"But at most, the Lake only tells them that they're somewhere in the ballpark." Lubin smiles faintly. "That they are; we're only twenty kilometers away. Twenty pitch-black kilometers through the most extreme topography on the planet. If that's all they have to go on, they'll never find us."
"Until they send something down to just sit quiet and wait for us," Hopkinson says, unconvinced. "Then follow us back."
"Maybe they already have," Clarke suggests.
"No alarms," Chen reminds her.
Clarke remembers: there are transponders in every hab, every drone and vehicle down here. They talk nicely enough to each other, but they'll scream to wake the dead should sonar touch anything that doesn't know the local dialect. Clarke hasn't thought about them for years; they hail from the early days of exile, when fear of discovery lay like a l
eaden hand on everyone's mind. But in all this time the only enemies they've found have been each other.
"Strange they haven't tried, though," Clarke says. It seems like an obvious thing to do.
"Maybe they tried and lost us," Hopkinson suggests. "If they got too close we'd see them, and there's spots along that route where sonar barely gives you sixty meters line-of-sight."
"Maybe they don't have the resources," Alexander says hopefully. "Maybe it's just a couple of guys on a boat with a treasure map."
Nolan: "Maybe they just haven't got around to it yet."
"Or maybe they don't have to," Lubin says.
"What, you mean..." Something dawns on Hopkinson's face. "Pest control?"
Lubin nods.
Silence falls around the implications. Why spend valuable resources acquiring and following your target through territory which might be saturated with tripwires? Why risk giving yourself away when it's cheaper and simpler to trick your enemies into poisoning their own well?
"Shit," Hopkinson breathes. "Like leaving poisoned food out for the ants, so they bring it back to the queen…"
Alexander's nodding. "And that's where it came from…ßehemoth was never supposed to show up anywhere around here, and all of a sudden, just like magic…"
"ß-max came from goddamned Atlantis," Nolan snaps. "For all we know the strain out at the Lake's just baseline. We've only got the corpses' say-so that it isn't."
"Yeah, but even the baseline strain wasn't supposed to show up out there—"
"Am I the only one who remembers the corpses built the baseline in the first place?" Nolan glares around the room, white eyes blazing. "Rowan admitted it, for Chrissakes!"
Her gaze settles on Clarke, pure antimatter. Clarke feels her hands bunching into fists at her side, feels the corner of her mouth pull back in a small sneer. None of her body language, she realizes, is intended to defuse the situation.
Fuck it, she decides, and takes one provocative step forward.
"Oh, right," Nolan says, and charges.
Lubin moves. It seems so effortless. One instant he's sitting at the console; the next, Nolan's crumpling to the deck like a broken doll. In the barely-perceptible time between Clarke thinks she saw Lubin rising from his chair, thinks she glimpsed his elbow in Nolan's diaphragm and his knee in her back. She may have even heard something, like the snapping of a tree branch across someone's leg. Now her rival lies flat on her back, motionless but for a sudden, manic fluttering of fingers and eyelids.
