by Peter Watts
“No,” Clarke says. “Nothing.”
“Right. So, five years ago this whole area was clean. The whole abyssal Atlantic was clean, as far as we know. And how long can βehemoth survive in cold seawater before it shrivels up like a prune and dies?”
“A week or two,” Seger recites. “A month max.”
“And how long would it take to get here via deep circulation?”
“Decades. Centuries.” Seger sighs. “We know all this, Pat. Obviously, something’s changed.”
“Thanks for that insight, Jerry. What might that something be?”
“Christ, what do you want from me? I’m not an oceanographer.” Seger waves an exasperated hand at the modelers. “Ask them. Jason’s been running that model for—”
“Semen-sucking-motherfucking stumpfucker!” Jason snarls at the screen. The screen snarls back:
FAILURE TO CONVERGE. CONFIDENCE LIMITS EXCEEDED.
FURTHER PREDICTIONS UNRELIABLE.
Rowan closes her eyes and starts again. “Would it be able to survive in the euphotic zone, at least? It’s warmer up there, even in winter. Could our recon parties have picked it up and brought it back?”
“Then it would be showing up here, not way over at Impossible Lake.”
“But it shouldn’t be showing anywh—”
“What about fish?” Lubin says suddenly.
Rowan looks at him. “What?”
“βehemoth can survive indefinitely inside a host, correct? Less osmotic stress. That’s why they infect fish in the first place. Perhaps they hitched a ride.”
“Abyssal fish don’t disperse,” Seger says. “They just hang around the vents.”
“Are the larvae planktonic?”
“Still wouldn’t work. Not over these kinds of distances, anyway.”
“With all due respect,” Lubin remarks, “you’re a medical doctor. Maybe we should ask someone with relevant expertise.”
It’s a jab, of course. When the corpses were assigning professional berths on the ark, ichthyologists didn’t even make the long list. But Seger only shakes her head impatiently. “They’d tell you the same thing.”
“How do you know?” There’s an odd curiosity in Rowan’s voice.
“Because βehemoth was trapped in a few hot vents for most of Earth’s history. If it had been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.”
Something changes in Patricia Rowan. Clarke can’t quite put her finger on it. Maybe it’s some subtle shift in the other woman’s posture. Or perhaps Rowan’s ConTacts have brightened, as if the intel twinkling across her eyes has slipped into fast-forward.
“Pat?” Clarke asks.
But suddenly Seger’s coming out of her chair like it was on fire, spurred by a signal coming over her earbud. She taps her watch to bring it online: “I’m on my way. Stall them.”
She turns to Lubin and Clarke. “If you really want to help, come with me.”
“What’s the problem?” Lubin asks.
Seger’s already halfway across the cave. “More slow learners. They’re about to kill your friend.”
CAVALRY
THERE are lines drawn everywhere in Atlantis, four-centimeter gaps that circumscribe whole corridors as if someone had chainsawed through the bulkheads at regular intervals. The gaps are flagged by cautionary bands of diagonal striping to either side, and if you stand astride one of them and look up to where it passes overhead, you’ll see why: each contains a dropgate, poised to guillotine down in the event of a hull breach. They’re such convenient and ubiquitous boundaries that parties in opposition have always tended to use them as lines in the sand.
Parties like the half-dozen corpses hanging back at the junction, too scared or too smart to get involved. Parties like Hannuk Yeager, dancing restlessly on the far side of the striped line, keeping them all at bay fifteen meters upwind of the infirmary.
Lubin shoulders through the chickenshit corpses, Clarke hobbling in his wake. Yeager bares his teeth in greeting: “Party’s four doors down on the left!” His capped eyes narrow at their corpse escorts.
Clarke and Lubin pass. Seger tries to follow; Yeager catches her around the throat and holds her there, squirming. “Invitation only.”
“You don’t—” Yeager clenches; Seger’s voice chokes down to a whisper. “You want … Gene to die…?”
“Sounds like a threat,” Yeager growls.
“I’m his doctor!”
“Let her go,” Clarke tells him. “We might need her.”
Yeager doesn’t budge.
Oh shit, Clarke thinks. Is he primed?
Yeager’s got a mutation: too much monoamine oxidase in his blood. It breaks down the brain chemicals that keep people on an even keel. The authorities tweaked him to compensate, back in the days when they could get away with such things, but he learned to get around it somehow. Sometimes he deliberately strings himself so tight that a sideways glance can send him off the deep end. It gets him off. When that happens, it doesn’t matter all that much whether you’re friend or foe. Times like that, even Lubin takes him seriously.
Lubin’s taking him seriously now. “Let her past, Han.” His voice is calm and even, his posture relaxed.
From down the corridor, a groan. The sound of something breaking.
Yeager snorts and tosses Seger aside. The woman staggers coughing against the wall.
“You too,” Lubin says to Rowan, who’s still discreetly behind the striped line. To Yeager: “If it’s okay with you, of course.”
“Shit, I don’t give a fuck.” Yeager’s fingers clench and unclench as if electrified.
Lubin nods. “You go on,” he says casually to Clarke. “I’ll help Han hold the fort.”
It’s Nolan, of course. Clarke can hear her snarling as she nears the medbay: “Ah, the little fuckhead’s gone and shit himself…”
She squeezes through the hatch. The sour stench of fear and feces hits her in the face. Nolan, yes. And she’s got Creasy backing her up. Klein’s been thrown into the corner, broken and bleeding. Maybe he tried to get in the way. Maybe Nolan just wanted him to.
Gene Erickson’s awake at last, crouching on the table like a caged animal. His splayed fingers push against the isolation membrane and it just stretches, like impossibly thin latex. The farther he pushes, the harder it pulls; his arm isn’t quite extended but the membrane’s tight as it’s going to go, a mass of oily indestructible rainbows swirling along lines of resistable force.
“Fuck,” he growls, sinking back.
Nolan squats down and cocks her head, birdlike, a few centimeters from Klein’s bloody face. “Let him out, sweetie.”
Klein drools blood and spit. “I told you, he’s—”
“Get away from him!” Seger pushes into the compartment as though the past five years—as though the past five minutes—never happened. She barely gets her hand on Nolan’s shoulder before Creasy slams her into a bulkhead.
Nolan brushes imaginary contaminants from the place where Seger touched her. “Don’t damage the head,” she tells Creasy. “Could be a password in there.”
“Everybody.” Rowan, at least, is smart enough to stay in the corridor. “Just. Calm. Down.”
Nolan snorts, shaking her head. “Or what, stumpfuck? Are you going to call security? Are you going to have us ejected from the premises?”
Creasy’s white eyes regard Seger from mere centimeters away, a promise of empty and mindless violence set above a grinning bulldozer jaw. Creasy, it is said, has a way with women. Not that he’s ever fucked with Clarke. Not that anyone does, as a rule.
Rowan looks through the open hatch, her expression calm and self-assured. Clarke sees the plea hidden behind the confident facade. For a moment, she considers ignoring it. Her leg tingles maddeningly. At her elbow Creasy makes kissy-kissy noises at Seger, his hand vised around the doctor’s jaw.
Clarke ignores him. “What’s the deal, Grace?”
/>
Nolan smiles harshly. “We managed to wake him up, but Normy here”—an absent punch at Klein’s head—“put some kind of password on the table. We can’t dial down the membrane.”
Clarke turns to Erickson. “How you feeling?”
“They did something to me.” He coughs. “When I was in coma.”
“Yes we did. We saved his—” Creasy bumps Seger’s head against the bulkhead. Seger shuts up.
Clarke keeps her eyes on Erickson. “Can you move without spilling your intestines all over?”
He twists clumsily around to show off his abdomen; the membrane stretches against his head and shoulder like an amniotic sac. “Miracles of modern medicine,” he tells her, flopping onto his back. Sure enough, his insides have all been packed back where they belong. Fresh pink scars along his abs complement the older ones on his thorax.
Jerenice Seger looks very much as if she wants to say something. Dale Creasy looks very much as if he wants her to try.
“Let her talk,” Clarke tells him. He loosens his grip just slightly; Seger looks at Clarke and keeps her mouth shut.
“So what’s the story?” Clarke prompts. “Looks like you glued him back together okay. It’s been almost three days.”
“Three days,” Seger repeats. Her voice is squeezed thin and reedy under Creasy’s grip. “He was almost disemboweled, and you think three days is enough time to recover.”
In fact, Clarke’s sure of it. She’s seen torn and broken bodies before; she’s seen multiarmed robots reassemble them, lay fine electrical webbing into their wounds to crank healing up to a rate that would be miraculous if it weren’t so routine. Three days is more than enough time to drag yourself back outside, seams still oozing maybe but strong enough, strong enough; and once you’re weightless again, and sheltered by the endless black womb of the abyss, you’ve got all the time in the world to recover.
It’s something the drybacks have never been able to grasp: what keeps you weak is the gravity.
“Does he need more surgery?” she asks.
“He will, if he isn’t careful.”
“Answer the fucking question,” Nolan snarls.
Seger glances at Clarke, evidently finds no comfort there. “What he needs is time to recover, and coma will cut that by two thirds. If he wants to get out of here quickly, that’s his best option.”
“You’re keeping him here against his will,” Nolan says.
“Why—” Rowan begins from the corridor.
Nolan wheels on her. “You shut the fuck up right now.”
Rowan calmly pushes her luck. “Why would we want to keep him here if it weren’t medically necessary?”
“He could rest up in his own hab,” Clarke says. “Outside, even.”
Seger shakes her head. “He’s running a significant fever—Lenie, just look at him!”
She’s got a point. Erickson’s flat on his back, apparently exhausted. A sheen of perspiration slicks his skin, almost lost behind the more conspicuous glistening of the membrane.
“A fever,” Clarke repeats. “Not from the operation?”
“No. Some kind of opportunistic infection.”
“From what?”
“He was mauled by a wild animal,” Seger points out, exasperated. “There’s no end to the kind of things you can pick up from something as simple as a bite, and he was nearly eviscerated. It would be almost inconceivable if there weren’t complications.”
“Hear that, Gene?” Clarke says. “You’ve got fish rabies or something.”
“Fuckin’ A,” he says, staring at the ceiling.
“So it’s your call. Want to stay here, let ’em fix you? Or trust to drugs and take your chances?”
“Get me out of here,” Erickson says weakly.
She turns back to Seger. “You heard him.”
Seger draws herself up, impossibly, perpetually, insanely defiant. “Lenie, I asked you to come along to help. This is the furthest thing from—”
Creasy’s fist hits her in the stomach like a wrecking ball. Seger oofs and topples to the side. Her head hits the bulkhead on the way down. She lies there, gulping breathlessly.
Out of the corner of her eye Clarke sees Rowan step forward, then think better of it.
She stares evenly at Creasy. “Not necessary, Dale.”
“High and mighty cunt was just asking for it,” Creasy grumbles.
“And how’s she going to let Gene out of jail if she can’t even breathe, you idiot?”
“Really, Len. What’s the big deal?”
Nolan. Clarke turns to face her.
“You know what they did to us,” Nolan continues, rising at Creasy’s side. “You know how many of us these pimps fucked over. Killed, even.”
Fewer than I did, Clarke doesn’t say.
“I say if Dale wants to go to town on this stumpfuck, let him.” Nolan puts a comradely hand on Creasy’s shoulder. “Might go a tiny way to balancing the books, y’know?”
“You say,” Clarke says quietly. “I say different.”
“Now there’s a surprise.” The trace of a smile ghosts across Nolan’s face.
They stare at each other through their corneal shields. Across the compartment, Klein whimpers; Jerenice Seger seems to be breathing again at their feet. Creasy looms close at Clarke’s shoulder, an ominous presence just short of overt threat.
She keeps her breathing slow and even. She lowers herself into a squat—carefully, carefully, her bad leg nearly buckling again—and helps Seger into a sitting position.
“Let him out,” she says.
Seger mutters into her wristwatch. A keyboard jammed with strange alphanumerics lights up the skin of her forearm; she taps a sequence with her other hand.
The isolation tent pops softly. Erickson pushes a tentative finger through the membrane, finds it unlocked, and lurches off the table as if passing through a soap bubble. His feet hit the deck with a fleshy slap. Nolan holds out a diveskin she’s produced from somewhere: “Welcome back, buddy. Told you we’d get you out.”
They leave Clarke with the corpses. Seger hauls herself to her feet, ignoring Clarke’s offered hand and bracing herself against the bulkhead. One hand still clutches protectively at her stomach. She lurches over to Klein.
“Norm? Norm?” She squats next to her subordinate, stiff-limbed, and pushes back one of his eyelids. “Stay with me…” Droplets of blood dribble from her scalp and splatter onto the medic’s pummeled face, making no difference at all. Seger curses and wipes the back of her hand across her injury.
Clarke steps forward to help. Her foot comes down on something small and hard, like a small stone. She lifts her foot. A tooth, sticky with coagulating fluids, clatters softly onto the deck.
“I—” Clarke begins.
Seger turns. Rage simmers on her face. “Just get out of here.”
Clarke stares at her for a moment. Then she turns on her heel and leaves.
* * *
Rowan’s waiting in the corridor. “This can’t happen again.”
Clarke leans against the bulkhead to take some weight off her injured leg. “You know Grace. She and Gene are—”
“It’s not just Grace. At least, it won’t be for long. I said something like this might happen.”
She feels very tired. “You said you wanted space between the two sides. So why was Jerry keeping Gene here when he wanted to leave?”
“Do you think she wanted that man around? She was looking out for the welfare of her patient. That’s her job.”
“Our welfare is our own concern.”
“You people simply aren’t qualified—”
Clarke raises one preemptive hand. “Heard it, Pat. The little people can’t see the Big Picture. Joe Citizen can’t handle the truth. The peasants are too eeegnorant to vote.” She shakes her head, disgusted. “It’s been five years and you’re still patting us on the head.”
“Are you saying that Gene Erickson is a more qualified diagnostician than our chief of medicine?”
“I’m saying he has the right to be wrong.” Clarke waves an arm down the corridor. “Look, maybe you’re right. Maybe he’ll come down with gangrene and come crawling back to Jerry inside a week. Or maybe he’d rather die. But it’s his decision.”
“This isn’t about gangrene,” Rowan says softly. “And it isn’t about some common low-grade infection. And you know it.”
“And I still don’t see what difference it makes.”
“I told you.”
“You told me about a bunch of frightened children who can’t believe that their own defenses will hold. Well, Pat, the defenses will hold. I’m living proof. We could be drinking βehemoth in pure culture and it wouldn’t hurt us.”
“We’ve lost—”
“You’ve lost one more layer of denial. That’s all. βehemoth’s here, Pat. I don’t know how, but there’s nothing you can do about it and why should you even bother? It’s not going to do anything except rub your noses in something you’d rather not think about, and you’ll adapt to that soon enough. You’ve done it before. A month from now you’ll have forgotten about it all over again.”
“Then please—” Rowan begins, and stops herself.
Clarke waits while the other woman braces herself, yet again, for the subordinate role.
“Give us that month,” Rowan whispers at last.
NEMESIS
CLARKE doesn’t often go into the residential quarter. She doesn’t remember ever having been in this particular section. The corridor here is sheathed in lattice paint and wired up to a mural generator. A forest of antlered coral crowds the port bulkhead; surgeonfish school and swirl to starboard, like the nodes of some abstract and diffuse neural net. A mesh of fractured sunlight dances across everything. Clarke can’t tell whether the illusion is purely synthetic, or powered by archived footage of a real coral reef. She wouldn’t even know how to tell the difference; of all the sea creatures that have made her acquaintance over the years, none have lived in sunlight.