by Peter Watts
"He died," she says softly.
"Just... faded away? Like the rest of us?"
"No."
"How, then?"
She thinks of a word with customized resonance.
"Boom," she says.
Frontier
Come away, they said after Rio. Come away, now that you've saved our asses yet again.
That wasn't entirely true. He hadn't saved Buffalo. He hadn't saved Houston. Salt Lake and Boise and Sacramento were gone, fallen to improvised assaults ranging from kamikaze airliners to orbital nukes. Half a dozen other franchises were barely alive. Very few of those asses had been saved.
But to the rest of the Entropy Patrol, Achilles Desjardins was a hero ten times over. It had been obvious almost immediately that fifty CSIRA franchises were under directed and simultaneous attack across the western hemisphere, but it had been Desjardins and Desjardins alone who'd put the pieces together, under fire and on the fly. It had been he who'd drawn the impossible conclusion that the attacks were being orchestrated by one of their own. The rest of the Patrol had taken up the call and flattened Rio as soon as they had the scoop, but it had been Desjardins who'd told them where to aim. Without his grace under pressure, every CSIRA stronghold in the hemisphere could have ended up in flames.
Come away, said his grateful masters. This place is a writeoff.
Sudbury CSIRA had taken a direct hit amidships. A suborbital puddle-jumper en route from London to Toromilton, subverted by the enemy and lethally off-course, had left an impact crater ten stories high in the building's northern face. Its fuel tanks all but empty, the fires hadn't burned hot enough to take down the structure. They had merely incinerated, poisoned, or suffocated most of those between the eighteenth and twenty-fifth floors.
Sudbury's senior 'lawbreakers had worked between floors twenty and twenty-four. It had been lucky that Desjardins had managed to raise the alarm before they'd been hit. It had been an outright motherfucking miracle that he hadn't been killed when they were.
Come away.
And Achilles Desjardins looked around at the smoke and the flames, the piled body bags and those few stunned coworkers still sufficiently intact to escape mandatory euthenasia, and replied: You need me here.
There is no here.
But there was more left of here than there was of Salt Lake or Buffalo. The attacks had reduced redundancy across N'Am's fast-response network by over thirty percent. Sudbury was hanging by a thread, but that thread still connected sixteen hemispheric links and forty-seven regional ones. Abandoning it completely would cut system redundancy by another five percent and leave a half-million square kilometers without any rapid-response capacity whatsoever. ßehemoth already ran rampant across half the continent; civilization was imploding throughout its domain. CSIRA could not afford the luxury of further losses.
But there were counterpoints. Half the floors of the Sudbury franchise were uninhabitable. There was barely enough surviving bandwidth for a handful of operatives, and under the current budget it would be almost impossible to keep even that much open. All the models agreed: the best solution was to abandon Sudbury and upgrade Toromilton and Montreal to take up the slack.
And how long, Desjardins wondered, before those upgrades came onstream?
Six months. Maybe a year.
Then they needed a stopgap. They needed to keep the pilot light burning for just a little longer. They needed someone on-site for those unforeseeable crisis points when machinery wasn't up to the job.
But you're our best 'lawbreaker, they protested.
And the task will be almost impossible. Where else should I be?
His bosses said, Welllllllll....
Only six months, he reminded them. Maybe a year.
Of course, it wouldn't turn out that way. Murphy's malign hand would stir the pot and maybe-a-year would morph into three, then four. The Toromilton upgrades would falter and stall; far-sighted master plans would collapse, as they always had, beneath the weight of countless daily emergencies. Making do, the Entropy Patrol would throw crumbs enough at Sudbury to keep the lights on and the clearance codes active, ever-grateful for their uncomplaining minion and the thousand fingers he kept jammed in the dike
But that was now and this was then, and Desjardins was saying, I'll be your lighthouse keeper. I'll be your sentinel on the lonely frontier, I'll fight the brush fires and hold the line until the cavalry comes online. I can do this. You know I can.
And they did know, because Achille Desjardins was a hero. More to the point, he was a 'lawbreaker; he wouldn't have been able to lie to them even if he'd wanted to.
What a guy, they said, shaking their heads in admiration. What a guy.
Groundwork
Kevin Walsh is a good kid. He knows relationships take work, he's willing to do what it takes to keep the spark—such as it is—alive. Or at least, to stretch its death out over the longest possible period.
He attached himself to her arm after Lubin handed out the first fine-tuning assignments, and wouldn't take Later, maybe for an answer. Finally Clarke relented. They found an unoccupied hab and threw down a couple of sleeping pallets, and he uncomplainingly worked his tongue and thumb and forefinger down to jelly until she didn't have the heart to let him continue. She stroked his head and said it was nice but it really wasn't working, and she offered herself in turn for his efforts, but he didn't take her up on it—whether out of chivalrous penance for his own inadequacy or simply because he was sulking, she couldn't tell.
Now they lie side by side, hands lightly interlocked at arm's length. Walsh is asleep, which is surprising: he's no more fond of sleeping in gravity than any other rifter. Maybe it's another chivalrous affectation. Maybe he's faking it.
Clarke can't bring herself to do even that. She lies on her back and stares up at the condensation beading on the bulkhead. After a while she disentangles her hand from Walsh's—gently, so as not to interrupt the performance—and wanders over to the local Comm board.
The main display frames a murky, cryptic obelisk looming up out of the seabed. Atlantis's primary generator. Part of it, anyway—the bulk of the structure plunges deep into bedrock, into the heart of a vent from which it feeds like a mosquito sucking hot blood. Only the apex rises above the substrate like some lumpy windowless skyscraper, facades pocked and wormy with pipes and vents and valves. A sparse dotted line of floodlights girdles the structure about eight meters up, casting a bright coarse halo that stains everything copper. The abyss presses down against that light like a black hand; the top of the generator extends into darkness.
A conduit the size of a sewer pipe emerges at ground level and snakes into the darkness. Clarke absently tags the next cam in line, following the line along the seabed.
"Hey, what are you…"
He doesn't sound sleepy at all.
She turns. Walsh is crouched half-kneeling on the pallet, as though caught in the act of rising. He doesn't move, though.
"Hey, get back here. I wanna try again." He's going for a boyish grin. He's wearing the Disarmingly Cute Face of Seduction. It's a jarring contrast with his posture, which evokes the image of an eleven-year-old caught masturbating on the good linen.
She eyes him curiously. "What's up, Kev?"
He laughs; it sounds like a hiccough. "Nothing's up… we just didn't, you know, finish…"
A dull gray lump of realization congeals in her throat. Experimentally, she turns back to the board and trips the next surveillance cam in the chain. The seabed conduit winds on towards a distant hazy geometry of backlit shadows.
Walsh tugs at her shoulder, nuzzles from behind. "Ladies' choice. Limited time offer, expires soon…"
Next cam.
"Come on, Len—"
Atlantis. A small knot of rifters has accreted at the junction of two wings, nowhere near any of the assigned surveillance stations. They appear to be taking measurements of some kind. Some of them are laden with strange cargo.
Walsh has fallen silent. Th
e lump in Clarke's throat metastasizes.
She turns. Kevin Walsh has backed away, a mixture of guilt and defiance on his face.
"You gotta give her a chance, Len," he says. "I mean, you gotta be more objective about this…"
She regards him calmly. "You asshole."
"Oh right," he flares. "Like anything I ever did mattered to you."
She grabs the disconnected pieces of her diveskin. They slide around her body like living things, fusing one to another, sealing her in, sealing him out, welcome liquid armor that reinforces the boundary between us and them.
Only there is no us, she realizes. There never was. And what really pisses her off is that she'd forgotten that, that she never even saw this coming; even privy to her lover's brainstem, even cognizant of all the guilt and pain and stupid masochistic yearning in there, she hadn't picked up on this imminent betrayal. She'd sensed his resentment, of course, and his hurt, but that was nothing new. When it came right down to it, outright treachery just didn't make enough of a difference in this relationship to register.
She doesn't look at him as she descends to the airlock.
Kevin Walsh is one fucked-up little boy. It's just as well she never got too attached.
Their words buzz back and forth among the shadows of the great structure: numbers, times, shear stress indices. A couple of rifters carry handpads; others fire click-trains of high-frequency sounds through acoustic rangefinders. One of them draws a big black X at some vital weak spot.
How did Ken put it? For concealment, not effect. Obviously they aren't going to make that mistake again.
They're expecting her, of course. Walsh didn't warn them—not on the usual channels, anyway— but you can't sneak up on the fine-tuned.
Clarke pans the company. Nolan, three meters overhead, looks down at her. Cramer, Cheung, and Gomez accrete loosely around them. Creasy and Yeager—too distant for visual ID, but clear enough on the mindline—are otherwise occupied some ways down the hull.
Nolan's vibe overwhelms all the others: where once was resentment, now there's triumph. But the anger—the sense of scores yet to be settled— hasn't changed at all.
"Don't blame Kev," Clarke buzzes. "He did his best." She wonders offhand how far Nolan went to secure that loyalty.
Nolan nods deliberately. "Kev's a good kid. He'd do anything to help the group." The slightest emphasis on anything slips through the machinery, but Clarke's already seen it in the meat behind.
That far.
She forces herself to look deeper, to dig around for guilt or duplicity, but of course it's pointless. If Nolan ever kept such secrets, she's way past it now. Now she wears her intentions like a badge of honor.
"So what's going on?" Clarke asks.
"Just planning for the worst," Nolan says.
"Uh huh." She nods at the X on the hull. "Planning for it, or provoking it?"
Nobody speaks.
"You do realize we control the generators. We can shut them down any time we want. Blowing the hull would be major overkill."
"Oh, we'd never do for excessive force." That's Cramer, off to the left. "Especially since they always be so gentle."
"We just think it would be wise to have other options," Chen buzzes, apologetic but unswayable. "Just in case something compromises Plan A."
"Such as?"
"Such as the way certain hands pump the cocks of the mouths that bite them," Gomez says.
Clarke spins casually to face him. "Articulate as always, Gomer. I can see why you don't talk much."
"If I were you—" Nolan begins.
"Shut the fuck up."
Clarke turns slowly in their midst, her guts convecting in a slow freezing boil. "Anything they did to you, they did to me first. Any shit they threw at you, they threw way more at me. Way more."
"Which ended up landing on everyone but you," Nolan points out.
"You think I'm gonna stick my tongue up their ass just because they missed when they tried to kill me?"
"Are you?"
She coasts up until her face is scant centimeters from Nolan's. "Don't you fucking dare question my loyalty again, Grace. I was down here before any of you miserable haploids. While you were all back on shore pissing and moaning about job security, I broke into their fucking castle and personally kicked Rowan and her buddies off the pot."
"Sure you did. Then you joined her sorority two days later. You play VR games with her daughter, for Chrissake!"
"Yeah? And what exactly did her daughter do to deserve you dropping the whole Atlantic Ocean onto her head? Even if you're right—even if you're right—did their kids fuck you over? What did their families and their servants and their toilet-scrubbers ever do to you?"
The words vibrate off into the distance. The deep, almost subsonic hum of some nearby piece of life-support sounds especially loud in their wake.
Maybe the tiniest bit of uncertainty in the collective vibe, now. Maybe even a tiny bit in Nolan's.
But she's not giving a micron. "You want to know what they did, Len? They chose sides. The wives and the husbands and the medics and even any pet toilet-scrubbers those stumpfucks may have kept around for old time's sake. They all chose sides. Which is more than I can say for you."
"This is not a good idea," Clarke buzzes.
"Thanks for your opinion, Len. We'll let you know if we need you for anything. In the meantime, stay out of my way. The sight of you makes me want to puke."
Clarke plays her final card. "It's not me you have to worry about."
"What made you think we were ever worried about you?" The contempt comes off of Nolan in waves.
"Ken gets very unhappy when he's caught in the middle of some half-assed fiasco like this. I've seen it happen. He's the kind of guy who finds it much easier to shut something down than clean up after it. You can deal with him."
"We already have," Nolan buzzes. "He knows all about it."
"Even gave us a few pointers," Gomez adds.
"Sorry, sweetie." Nolan leans in close to Clarke; their hoods slip frictionlessly past each other, a mannequin nuzzle. "But you really should have seen that coming."
Without another word the group goes back to work, as if cued by some stimulus to which Lenie Clarke is blind and deaf. She hangs there in the water, stunned, betrayed. Bits and pieces of some best-laid plan assemble themselves in the water around her.
She turns and swims away.
Harpodon
Once upon a time, back during the uprising, a couple of corpses commandeered a multisub named Harpodon III. To this day Patricia Rowan has no idea what they were trying to accomplish; Harpodon's spinal bays were empty of any construction or demolition modules that might have served as weapons. The sub was as stripped as a fish skeleton, and about as useful: cockpit up front, impellors in back, and a whole lot of nothing hanging off the segmented spine between.
Maybe they'd just been running for it.
But the rifters didn't bother asking, once they'd caught on and caught up. They hadn't come unequipped: they had torches and rivet guns, not quite enough to cut Harpodon in half but certainly enough to paralyze it from the neck down. They punched out the electrolysis assembly and the Lox tanks; the fugitives got to watch their supply of breathable atmosphere drop from infinite down to the little bubble of nitrox already turning stale in the cockpit.
Normally the rifters would just have holed the viewport and let the ocean finish the job. This time, though, they hauled Harpodon back to one of Atlantis's viewports as a kind of object lesson: the runaways suffocated within perspexed view of all the corpses they'd left behind. There'd already been some rifter casualties, as it turned out, and Grace Nolan had been leading the team that shift.
But back then, not even Nolan was entirely without pity. Once the runaways were well and truly dead, once the moral of the story had properly sunk in, the rifters mated the wounded sub to the nearest docking hatch and let the corpses reclaim the bodies. Harpodon hasn't moved in all the years since. It's still g
rafted onto the service lock, protruding from the body of Atlantis like a parasitic male anglerfish fused to the flank of his gigantic mate. It's not a place that anybody goes.
Which makes it the perfect spot for Patricia Rowan to consort with the enemy.
The diver 'lock is an elongate blister distending the deck of the cockpit, just aft of the copilot's seat where Rowan sits staring at rows of dark instruments. It gurgles behind her; she hears a tired pneumatic sigh as its coffin lid swings open, hears the soft slap of wet feet against the plates.
She's left the lights off, of course—it wouldn't do for anyone to know of her presence here—but some flashing beacon, way along the curve of Atlantis's hull, sends pulses of dim brightness through the viewports. The cockpit interior blinks lazily in and out of existence, a jumbled topography of metal viscera keeping the abyss at bay.
Lenie Clarke climbs into the pilot's seat beside her.
"Anyone see you?" Rowan asks, not turning her head.
"If they had," the rifter says, "they'd probably be finishing the job right now." Refering, no doubt, to the injuries sustained by Harpodon in days gone by. "Any progress?"
"Eight of the samples tested positive. No fix yet." Rowan takes a deep breath. "How goes the battle on your end?"
"Maybe you could pick a different expression. Something a bit less literal."
"Is it that bad?"
"I don't think I can hold them back, Pat."
"Surely you can," Rowan says. "You're the Meltdown Madonna, remember? The Alpha Femme."
"Not any more."
Rowan turns to look at the other woman.
"Grace is—some of them are taking steps." Lenie's face switches on and off in the pulsating gloom. "They're mine-laying again. Right out in the open this time."
Rowan considers. "What does Ken think about that?"
"Actually, I think he's okay with it."
Lenie sounds as though she'd been surprised by that. Rowan isn't. "Mine-laying again?" she repeats. "So you know who set them the first time?"
"Not really. Not yet. Not that it matters." Lenie sighs. "Hell, some people still think you planted the first round yourselves."