by Peter Watts
"Oh, right," Desjardins remarked. "Security will cut you into little cubes if you try to sneak anything past." A curved panel beneath the display slid back at their approach. "Just throw everything in there."
Lubin felt out the chamber, set his pistol and belt down inside it. Clarke followed suit with her own weapon while Lubin struggled to remove his pack. He shrugged off Clarke's attempted assistance; the pack clanked on top of the pile. The panel slid shut.
The wraparound display bloomed into a riot of images and acronyms. Clarke recognized some of them from Lubin's tutorial on the way up: taser and microwave gun; mechanical springlift; aerosol flypaper. Other things she'd never seen before. For all she knew Lubin had brought them from his stash at the bottom of the Atlantic.
"Is that an electron stripper?" Desjardins asked. "And a pulse bomb! You brought your own tiny pulse bomb! Isn't that cute!"
Lubin, his jaw set, said nothing.
"That's everything, then? No nasty biosols or hidden freakwire? Because I'm telling you, those gates are very unforgiving. You walk through with any—"
"Our implants," Clarke said.
"Those will pass."
Lubin felt his way between the gateposts. No klaxons sounded, no lasers lanced down from overhead. Clarke stepped after him.
"The elevators are just around the corner," Desjardins said.
Completely disarmed, they stepped into Desjardins's parlor. Clarke led Lubin with soft words and an occasional touch. She didn't dare speak her mind, even in a whisper. But she gave his arm the slightest squeeze, and knew after all their long years together that he'd know what she meant: He didn't buy it for a second.
Lubin replied with a blind glance and the twitch of a bloody lip: Of course he didn't.
All according to plan. Such as it was.
She had to take the physics on faith.
She could buy everything else that Lubin had laid out on the way up. It didn't matter whether Desjardins believed their story, so long as he thought they might be useful. He wouldn't try to kill them outright until convinced otherwise.
Which didn't mean that he wouldn't still try to disable them. He wasn't about to let anyone into his secret lair without taking precautions—disarming them, confining them, cutting their strings.
Nothing lethal, Lubin had predicted, and nothing that will damage the structure. That limits his options. We can handle it.
Fine, as far as it went. It was how they were going to handle it that she couldn't quite get behind.
A good half-liter of water sloshed through the plumbing in Clarke's chest, unable to drain because of the tape on her electrolysis intake. Five hundred milliliters didn't sound like much. When she swam through the deeps a steady current of seawater flowed through her implants, endlessly replenished. It hardly seemed possible that the stagnant dregs trapped there now would last more than a moment.
Four hundred fifty grams of molecular oxygen, Lubin had said. That's almost what you'd get in two thousand liters of air.
Her head couldn't argue with the numbers. But her gut was no mathematician.
A rank of elevators stood before them. One set of doors was open; soft light spilled from the compartment behind.
He'll confine us first.
They entered. The doors slid shut. The cage began to move.
Down.
This is insane, she thought. This can't work. But already, she imagined she could hear the soft hiss of gas from hidden nozzles...
She coughed and tripped her implants, praying to some indeterminate deity that Lubin hadn't fucked up his calculations.
He hadn't. A familiar, subtle vibration started somewhere in her chest. Her guts writhed and flooded with their own private stock of isotonic saline. The liquid rose in her throat and filled her mouth. Brief nausea accompanied the flooding of her middle ears. A salty trickle ran down her chin before she remembered to clamp her lips together. The world muted, all sounds suddenly faint and distant except for the beating of her own heart.
Just like that, she lost the urge to breathe.
The descent continued. Lubin leaned against the wall of the elevator, his face a bloody cyclops mask. Clarke felt warm wetness on her upper lip: her nose was running. She reached up and gave it a scratch, inconspicuously jamming the plug in her left nostril tight against the leak.
Suddenly her body thrummed, deep inside, an almost subsonic quaking that vibrated her bones as though they were the parts of some great bass instrument. Faint nausea struck her in the throat. Her bowels quavered.
The two most likely options, Lubin had mused, are gas and infrasound.
She didn't know if gas was in Desjardins's arsenal—for all she knew the air around them was already saturated. But this was obviously some kind of squawkbox. The sound dish must stretch across the whole ceiling of the elevator, or maybe beneath the floor. The walls focused its vibrations, built resonances within the cage. The sound would be tuned to build intolerable harmonics in the lungs and middle ears, in the sinuses and trachea.
It made her sick even with her airways and hard cavities flooded; she could scarcely imagine the impact on unbuttressed flesh. The implants didn't deal with gastrointestinal gases—deep-sea pressure collapsed those soft pockets down with no ill effect—and acoustic attacks were generally tuned to harder, more predictable air spaces anyway. Desjardins's squawkbox was doing something down there, though. It was all she could do to keep from vomiting saline all over the compartment, from shitting in her diveskin. Any dryback would be on the floor by now, soiled and retching or unconscious. Clarke clenched at both ends and hung on.
The elevator stopped. The lights went out.
He knows, she thought. He figured it out, of course he figured it out. How could we think he wouldn't? How could he not notice?
Any second the elevator would lurched back into motion, drag them up through this ruined, booby-trapped derelict where sixty-five floors of countermeasures would turn them into—
Her head cleared. Her bones stopped tingling. Her bowels returned to the fold.
"Okay, guys." Desjardins's voice was tinny and distant in Clarke's flooded ears. "End of the line."
The doors slid open.
An oasis of bright machinery on a vast dark plain. That's what naked eyes would have seen: the Second Coming perhaps, a Christ-figure bathed in light and technology while all around was an infinite void.
To Lenie Clarke there was no darkness. The void was a converted parking garage, an empty gray cavern stretching half a city block on a side. Evenly-spaced rows of support pylons held the ceiling from the floor. Plumbing and fiberop emerged from the walls, crawled along their surfaces like a webbing of sparse vines. Cables converged into a loosely-bound trunk, winding along the floor to a horseshoe of workstations lit by chemical lightstrips.
Christ was someone Lenie Clarke had met before. She'd first encountered him in darkness much deeper than this, a prisoner of Ken Lubin. Back then, Achilles Desjardins had been a man convinced he was about to die.
It had been so much easier to read him, then.
Clotting blood cracked around Lubin's lips. His chest rose. Clarke shut down her own implants, yanking the plugs from her nose before the tide had fully receded within her. In the center of the room, in the heart of a high-tech horseshoe, Desjardins watched them approach.
"I thought I could make up for it," he said.
In some strange, twisted way it was actually good to see him again.
"For being a monster," he explained, as if someone had asked. "Why I joined the Patrol, you know? I couldn't change what I was, but I thought—you know, if I helped save the world, maybe that could make up for it somehow." His mouth spread in a rueful smile. "Pretty stupid, right? Look where it got me."
"Look where it got everyone," Lubin said.
Desjardins's smile vanished. There was no shielding on his eyes, and yet somehow he was suddenly as opaque as any rifter.
Please, Clarke thought. Let this all be some monstrous,
stupid mistake. Tell us we've misread everything. Please. Prove us wrong.
"I know why you're here," he said, looking at Lubin.
"You let us in anyway," Lubin observed.
"Well, I'd hoped to be at a bit more of an advantage by now, but whatever. Nice trick with the implants, by the way. I didn't even realise they'd work without your diveskins sealed up. Pretty stupid mistake for Achilles the Master Pattern-Matcher, eh?" He shrugged. "I've had a lot on my mind lately."
"You let us in," Lubin repeated.
Desjardins nodded. "Yeah. That's far enough, by the way."
They were four meters from his fort. Lubin stopped. Clarke followed suit.
"You want us to kill you?" she asked. "Is that it?"
"Suicide By Rifter, huh?" He snorted a soft laugh. "There'd be a certain poetry to that, I guess. But no."
"What, then?"
He cocked his head; the gesture made him look about eight years old. "You were the ones who pulled that kin-selection trick with my Lenies, weren't you?"
Clarke nodded, swallowing on the realization: So he's behind those too.
He's guilty after all....
"I figured," Desjardins admitted. "It's the kind of thing that would only occur to someone who knew where they came from. Not many of those left up here. And the thing of it is, it's easy enough to do but it's not so simple to undo." He looked hopefully at Lubin. "But you said you knew how to—?"
Lubin bared his teeth in a bloody rictus. "I lied."
"Yeah. I kind of figured that too." Desjardins shrugged. "So I guess there's only one thing left to talk about, isn't there?"
Clarke shook her head. "What are you—"
Lubin tensed beside her. Desjardins's eyes flickered to the side for the merest instant; cued, the surface of a nearby wall sparkled and brightened before them. The image that resolved on the smart paint was hazy but instantly recognizable: a sonar composite.
"It's Atlantis," Clarke said, suddenly uncertain.
"I see it," Lubin said.
"Not real-time, of course," the 'lawbreaker explained. "The baud rate's a fucking trickle, and with all the range and cover issues I can only sneak in and grab a shot like this once in a while. But you get the idea."
Lubin stood motionless. "You're lying."
"Word of advice, Ken. You know how some of your people kind of just go off the deep end and wander into the black? You really shouldn't let them take squids when they go. You never know where their security transponders might end up."
"No." Clarke shook her head. "You? It was you down there?" Not Grace. Not Seger. Not the corpses or the rifters or the M&Ms or even two lousy guys on a boat.
You. All along.
"I can't take all the credit," Desjardins admitted. "Alice helped me tweak ßehemoth."
"Reluctantly, I'd guess," Lubin said.
Oh, Achilles. One chance to fix the mess I made and you fucked it up. One chance to make peace and you threaten everyone I ever knew. One lousy, faint hope, and you—
How dare you. How dare you.
A thin, final straw vanished in her hand.
She stepped forward. Lubin reached out with one mutilated hand, and held her back.
Desjardins ignored her. "I'm not an idiot, Ken. You're not the main attack force, you're just all you could scrape together on short notice. But you're not an idiot either, so there are reinforcements on the way." He held up his hand to preempt any protest. "That's okay, Ken, really. I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, and I took all the necessary precautions. Although thanks to you, I do seem to have lost a certain finesse when it comes to my big guns..."
His eyes jiggled slightly in their sockets. His fingers twitched. Clarke remembered Ricketts, sweet-talking his way into Phocoena with a wink and a glance.
The image on the wall dissolved. Numbers appeared in its place.
"Now I am in real-time contact with these guys. Can you see them, Ken? Channel 6?"
Lubin nodded.
"Then you know what they are."
Clarke knew too. Four sets of lats and longs. Depth readings, zeroed. Targeting ranges. A row of little flashing icons that said holding.
"I don't want to do this," Desjardins said. "It was going to be my retirement home, after all. I never wanted to blow it up, just—hobble parts of it. Smooth the transition, so to speak. But if I'm gonna be dead anyway—"
She twisted in Lubin's grip. But even mutilated, Lubin was immovable. His hand shackled her arm like a granite claw, oily with coagulating fluids. She could only slip in his grasp; she could not break free.
"I do have other options," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Contingency villas, you might say. I can go to one of those instead." He lifted a hand to the telemetry. "You've got a lot more riding on this than me."
He planned it for years, she realized. Even when we thought he was helping us. And ever since we've been cowering in the dark like good little rabbits while our lines went dark and our contacts dried up and it was him all along, cutting us off, fumigating the place so there wouldn't be any uncooperative tenants around when his luck ran out and he needed a place to hide...
"You asshole," she whispered, straining.
He didn't look at her. "So when are the cavalry coming, Ken? How did you call them in? How much do they know?"
"I tell you," Lubin said, "and you call off the attack."
"No, Ken, you call off your attack. Use whatever clever code words you set in place to shut down your sub's autopilot, or to convince Helsinki that you were mistaken, or whatever it takes."
"And you blow up Atlantis anyway."
"What for? I have other options, as I said. Why waste all those perfectly good hostages for no payoff? They're worth way more to me alive."
"For now."
"Now is all we've got, buddy."
Clarke glared: from the man who had tried to kill her, to the man who'd risked his life to stop him. Every hour you're in this place, you kill more people than ever lived in Atlantis, she thought.
Every hour I kill more people, by leaving you here.
And Ken Lubin was about to cut a deal.
She could see it in his stance, in that ruined blind face that had been at her side and behind her back all these years. He wasn't entirely inscrutable. Not to her. Not even now.
"I know you, Ken," Desjardins was saying. "We go way back, you and I. We're soul mates. We make our own rules, and by God we live by them. People don't matter. Populations don't matter. What matters is the rules, am I right, Ken? What matters is the mission.
"If you don't deal, the mission fails."
"Ken," she whispered.
"But you can save them," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Isn't that why you came back in the first place? Just give me your stats and the mission succeeds. You walk away, I abort the strike, and before I disappear I'll even send you a fix for that nasty new strain of ßehemoth your buddies have been wrestling with. I gather by now a fair number of them are seriously under the weather back there."
She remembered a floating machine that had used his voice: If killing ten saves a thousand, it's a deal. She remembered Patricia Rowan, torn apart on the inside, the face she presented to the world cold and unflinching: I tried to serve the greater good.
"Or," Desjardins said, "you can try and take me out, and kill everyone you came up here to save." His eyes were locked on Lubin's. It was as though the two of them shared their own pocket universe, as though Clarke didn't even exist. "Your choice. But you really shouldn't take too long making up your mind—your tweaks are fucking things up all over the place. I don't know even how long I can keep control of these circuits."
She thought of what Patricia Rowan would have done, faced with this choice. She thought of the millions dead who would not have died, if only she had.
She remembered Ken Lubin himself, a million years ago: Is there anything you wouldn't do, for the chance to take it back?
"No," she said softly.
Desjardins raised an eyebrow an
d—finally— deigned to look at her. "I wasn't talking to you. But if I were Lenie Clarke—" He smiled. "—I wouldn't be shameless enough to pretend I gave a flying fuck about the rest of the world."
She twisted in Lubin's grasp and kicked, as hard as she could. Her boot plunged deep into the gash in his thigh. Lubin staggered and cried out.
And Clarke was free, and springing forward.
She launched herself directly at Desjardins. He won't risk it, she told herself. It's his only leverage, he's dead if he hits the button, he must know he's—
Desjardins's eyes flickered left. His fingers twitched. And a tiny thread of doubt blossomed into full-blown horror as the numbers on the wall began to move...
Holding transmuted into a whole new word, again and again and again along the bottom of the board. Clarke tried desperately not to read it, drove forward on the wings of some frantic infantile hope maybe if I don't see it it won't happen, maybe there's still time, but she did see it, she couldn't help seeing it, spelled out in quadruplicate full-stop before the whole board went dark:
Commit.
With the next step she toppled.
Something hummed deep in her head. Her bones sang with subtle electricity. Her legs collapsed beneath her, her arms were dead weights at her sides. Her skull cracked painfully against the back of a workstation, cracked again against the floor. Her lung deflated with a tired sigh—she tried to hold her breath but suddenly she was slack-jawed and drooling. Her bladder voided. Implants clicked and stuttered in her chest.
"You gotta love the symmetry," a voice remarked from somewhere on the other side of the universe. "The ultimate victim, you know? The ultimate victim, and the most powerful woman in the world all rolled into one tight little bod. And I, well, I'm the last word in one or two things myself..."
She couldn't feel a heartbeat. Darkness roared up from somewhere deep in her skull, swept swirling across her eyes.
"It's fucking mythic is what it is," the voice continued, distant and barely audible. "We just had to get together..."
She didn't know what he was talking about. She didn't care. There was nothing in her world but noise and chaos, nothing in her head but commit commit commit commit.