by Peter Watts
"Lenie. Do you read?"
She floats dumbly overhead, out of reach, watching them stab black bodies. Occasional bubbles erupt from the needle tips, race into the sky like clusters of shuddering silvery mushrooms.
Compressed air, injected into flesh. You can make a weapon out of almost anything.
"Lenie?"
"She could be dead, Ken. I can't find Dale or Abra either."
Other voices, too fuzzy to distinguish. Most of the white noise generators are still online, after all.
She tunes in the crabs. She wonders what they must be feeling now. She wonders what she's feeling, too, but she can't really tell. Maybe she feels like a head cheese.
The corpses, though, down there in their armor, mopping up. No shortage of feelings there. Determination. A surprising amount of fear. Anger, but distant; it isn't driving them.
Not as much hate as she would have expected.
She rises. The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis lights the water, deceptively serene. She can barely hear buzzing rifter voices; she can't make out any words. She can't tune any of them in. She's all alone at the bottom of the sea.
Suddenly she rises past some invisible line-of-sight, and her jawbone fills with chatter.
"—the bodies," Lubin's saying. "Bring terminals at personal discretion. Garcia's waiting under Med for triage."
"Med won't hold half of us," someone—oh, it's Kevin!—buzzes faintly in the distance. "Way too many injured."
"Anyone from F-3 not injured and not carrying injured, meet at the cache. Hopkinson?"
"Here."
"Anything?"
"Think so, maybe. We're getting a whole lot of brains in Res-E. Can't tell who, but—"
"Yeager and Ng, bring your people straight up forty meters. Don't change your lats and longs, but I want everybody well away from the hull. Hopkinson, get your people back to the Med Hab."
"We're okay—"
"Do it. We need donors."
"Jesus," someone says faintly, "We're fucked…"
"No. They are."
Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through the mutilating filter of her vocoder.
"Grace, they just—"
"Just what?" she buzzes. "Do you think they're winning? What are they gonna do for an encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We've got enough charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we're gonna use them."
"Ken?"
A brief silence.
"Look, Ken," Nolan buzzes, "I can be at the cache in—"
"Not necessary," Lubin tells her. "Someone's already en route."
"Who's—"
"Welcome back, by the way," Lubin says to the anonymous soldier. "You know the target?"
"Yes." A faint voice, too soft and distorted to pin down.
"The charge has to be locked down within a meter of the mark. Set it and back away fast. Don't spend any more time than absolutely necessary in proximity to the hull, do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Acoustic trigger. I'll detonate from here. Blackout lifting in ten."
My God, Clarke thinks, It's you…
"Everyone at safe-distance," Lubin reminds the troops. "Blackout lifting now."
She's well out of the white noise; there's no obvious change in ambience. But the next vocoder she hears, still soft, is clearly recognizable.
"It's down," Julia Friedman buzzes.
"Back off," Lubin says. "Forty meters. Stay away from the bottom."
"Hey Avril," Friedman says.
"Right here," Hopkinson answers.
"When you tuned that wing, were there children?"
"Yeah. Yeah, there were."
"Good," buzzes Friedman. "Gene always hated kids."
The channel goes dead.
At first, she thinks the retribution's gone exactly as expected. The world pulses around her—a dull, almost subsonic drumbeat through brine and flesh and bone—and for all she knows, a hundred or more of the enemy are reduced to bloody paste. She doesn't know how many rifters died in the first exchange, but surely this restores the lead.
She's in an old, familiar place where it doesn't seem to matter much either way.
Even the second explosion—same muffled thump, but softer somehow, more distant—even that doesn't tip her off immediately. Secondary explosions would almost be inevitable, she imagines—pipes and powerlines suddenly ruptured, a cascade of high-pressure tanks with their feeds compromised—all kinds of consequences could daisy-chain from that initial burst. Bonus points for the home team, probably. Nothing more.
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 med hab." 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. Even 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 II. You are all infected. Mark II 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 tripwired 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: 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 h
ad 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 at a t-junction, step across the yellowjacket 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 the 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 dropgates.
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 dropgates 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 limpetphone 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 towards 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 icewater 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.