by Peter Watts
"The consensus is that you should stay in the airlock for the time being," Rowan says.
Clarke glances at Lubin. He's watching the welcoming committee with blank, impassive eyes.
"Who was it?" Clarke asks calmly.
"I don't think that's really important," Rowan says.
"Lisbeth might think otherwise. Her nose is broken."
"Our man says he was defending himself."
"A man in 300-bar preshmesh armor defending himself against an unarmed woman in a diveskin."
"A corpse defending himself from a fishhead," someone says from within the committee. "Whole other thing."
Rowan ignores the intrusion. "Our man resorted to fists," she says, "because that was the only approach that had any real hope of succeeding. You know as well as we do what we're defending ourselves from."
"What I know is that none of you are supposed to leave Atlantis without prior authorization. Those were the rules, even before the quarantine. You agreed to them."
"We weren't allowed much of a choice," Rowan remarks mildly.
"Still."
"Fuck the rules," says another corpse. "They're trying to kill us. Why are we arguing protocol?"
Clarke blinks. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know damn well what it—"
Rowan holds up a hand. The dissident falls silent.
"We found a mine," Rowan says, in the same voice she might use to report that the head was out of toilet paper.
"What?"
"Nothing special. Standard demolition charge. Might have even been one of the same ones Ken wired up before we—" She hesitates, choosing her words— "came to terms a few years back. I'm told it would have isolated us from primary life-support and flooded a good chunk of Res-C. Somewhere between thirty to a hundred killed from the implosion alone."
Clarke stares at Lubin, notes the slightest shake of the head.
"I didn't know," Clarke says softly.
Rowan smiles faintly. "You'll understand there might be some skepticism on that point."
"I'd like to see it," Lubin says.
"I'd like to see my daughter in the sunlight," Rowan tells him. "It's not going to happen."
Clarke shakes her head. "Pat, listen. I don't know where it came from. I—"
"I do," Rowan says mildly. "There are piles of them stashed at the construction caches. A hundred or more at Impossible Lake alone."
"We'll find out who planted it. But you can't keep it. You're not allowed weapons."
"Do you seriously expect us to simply hand it back to the people who planted it in the first place?"
"Pat, you know me."
"I know all of you," Rowan says. "The answer is no."
"How did you find it?" Lubin asks from out of left field.
"By accident. We lost our passive acoustics and sent someone out to check the antennae."
"Without informing us beforehand."
"It seemed fairly likely that you people were causing the interference. Informing you would not have been a wise idea even if you hadn't been mining our hulls."
"Hulls," Lubin remarks. "So you found more than one."
No one speaks.
Of course not, Clarke realizes. They're not going to tell us anything. They're gearing up for war.
And they're going to get slaughtered…
"I wonder if you've found them all," Lubin muses.
They stand without speaking, gagged by the synthetic black skin across their faces. Behind their backs, behind the impenetrable mass of the inner hatch, the corpses return to whatever plots and counterplans they're drawing. Ahead, past the outer hatch, a gathering crowd of rifters waits for answers. Around them and within them, machinery pumps and sparks and readies them for the abyss. By the time the water rises over their heads they are incompressible.
Lubin reaches for the outer hatch. Clarke stops him.
"Grace," she buzzes.
"Could be anyone." He rises, weightless in the flooded compartment. One hand reaches up to keep the ceiling at bay. It's an odd image, this humanoid silhouette floating against the bluish-white walls of the airlock. His eyecaps almost look like holes cut from black paper, letting the light shine through from behind.
"In fact," he continues, "I'm not entirely convinced they're telling the truth."
"The corpses? Why would they lie? How would it serve them?"
"Sow dissension among the enemy. Divide and conquer."
"Come on, Ken. It's not as though there's a pro-corpse faction ready to rise up on their behalf and..."
He just looks at her.
"You don't know," she buzzes, so softly she can barely feel the vibration in her own jaw. "It's all just guesses and suspicions. Rama hasn't had a chance to—you can't be sure."
"I'm not."
"We don't really know anything." She hesitates, then edits herself: "I don't know anything. You do."
"Not enough to matter. Not yet."
"I saw you, tracking them along the corridors."
He doesn't nod. He doesn't have to.
"Who?"
"Rowan, mainly."
"And what's it like in there?"
"A lot like it is in there," he says, pointing at her.
Stay out of my head, you fucker. But she knows, at this range, it's not a matter of choice. You can't just choose to not feel something. Whether those feelings are yours or someone else's is really beside the point.
So she only says, "Think you could be a little less vague?"
"She feels very guilty about something. I don't know what. There's no shortage of possibilities."
"Told you."
"Our own people, though," he continues. "Are not quite so conflicted, and much more easily distracted. And I can't be everywhere. And we're running out of time."
You bastard, she thinks. You asshole. You stumpfucker.
He floats above her, waiting.
"Okay," she says at last. "I'll do it."
Lubin pulls the latch. The outer hatch slides back, opening a rectangle of murky darkness in a stark white frame. They rise into a nightscape stippled with waiting eyes.
Lenie Clarke is a little bit twisted, even by Rifter standards.
Rifters don't worry much about privacy, for one thing. Not as much as you might expect from a population of rejects and throwaways. You might think the only ones who could ever regard this place as an improvement would be those with the most seriously fucked-up baselines for comparison, and you'd be right. You might also think that such damaged creatures would retreat into their shells like hermit crabs with half their limbs ripped away, cringing at the slightest shadow, or lashing out furiously at any hint of intrusion. It does happen, occasionally. But down here, the endless heavy night anesthetizes even if it doesn't heal. The abyss lays dark hands on the wounded and the raging, and somehow calms them. There are, after all, three hundred sixty degrees of escape from any conflict. There are no limiting resources to fight over; these days, half the habs are empty anyway. There is little need for territoriality, because there is so much territory.
So most of the habs are unguarded and unclaimed. Occupants come and go, rise into any convenient bubble to fuck or feed or—more rarely—socialize, before returning to their natural environment. Any place is as good as any other. There's little need to stand jealous guard over anything so ubiquitous as a Calvin Cycler or a repair bench, and there's hardly more that rifters need beyond these basics. Privacy is everywhere; swim two minutes in any direction and you can be lost forever. Why erect walls around recycled air?
Lenie Clarke has her reasons.
She's not entirely alone in this. A few other rifters have laid exclusive claims, pissed territorially on this cubby or that deck or—in very rare cases—an entire hab. They've nested refuge within refuge, the ocean against the world at large, an extra bubble of alloy and atmosphere against their own kind. There are locks on the doors in such places. Habs do not come with locks—their dryback designers had safety issues—but
the private and the paranoid have made do, welding or growing their own fortifications onto the baseline structure.
Clarke isn't greedy. Her claim is a small one, a cubby on the upper deck of a hab anchored sixty meters northeast of Atlantis. It's scarcely larger than her long-lost quarters on Beebe Station; she thinks that may have been why she chose it. It doesn't even have a porthole.
She doesn't spend much time here. In fact, she hasn't been here since she and Walsh started fucking. But it doesn't matter how much time she actually spends in this cramped, spartan closet; what matters is the comforting knowledge that it's hers, that it's here, that no one can ever come in unless she lets them. And that it's available when she needs it.
She needs it now.
She sits naked on the cubby's pallet, bathed in light cranked almost dryback-bright; the readouts she'll be watching are color-coded, and she doesn't want to lose that information. A handpad lies on the neoprene beside her, tuned to her insides. Mosaics of green and blue glow on its face: tiny histograms, winking stars, block-cap letters forming cryptic acronyms. There's a mirror on the opposite bulkhead; she ignores it as best she can, but her empty white eyes keep catching their own reflection.
One hand absently fingers her left nipple; the other holds a depolarizing scalpel against the seam in her chest. Her skin invaginates smoothly along that seam, forms a wrinkle, a puckered geometric groove in her thorax: three sides of a rectangle, a block-C, pressed as if by a cookie-cutter into the flesh between left breast and diaphragm and midline.
Clarke opens herself at the sternum.
She unlatches her ribs at the costochondrals and pulls them back; there's a slight resistance and a faint, disquieting sucking sound as the monolayer lining splits along the seam. A dull ache as air rushes into her thorax—it's a chill, really, but deep-body nerves aren't built to distinguish temperature from pain. The mechanics who transformed her hinged four of her ribs on the left side. Clarke hooks her fingers under the fleshy panel and folds it back, exposing the machinery beneath. Sharper, stronger pain stabs forth from intercostals never designed for such flexibility. There are bruises in their future.
She takes a tool from a nearby tray and starts playing with herself.
The flexible tip of the tool, deep within her thorax, slips neatly over a needle-thin valve and locks tight. She's still impressed at how easily she can feel her way around in there. The tool's handle contains a thumbwheel set to some astronomical gear ratio. She moves it a quarter turn; the tip rotates a fraction of a degree.
The handpad at her side bleeps in protest: NTR and GABA flicker from green to yellow on its face. One of the histogram bars lengthens a smidge; two others contract.
Another quarter turn. More complaints from the pad.
It's such a laughably crude invasion, more rape than seduction. Was there any real need for these fleshy hinges, for the surgical butchery that carved this trap door into her chest? The pad taps wirelessly into the telemetry from her implants; that channel flows both ways, sends commands into the body as well as taking information out of it. Minor adjustments, little tweaks around approved optima, are as simple as tapping on a touchpad and feeling the machinery respond from inside.
Of course, the tweaks Lenie Clarke is about to indulge in are way beyond "minor".
The Grid Authority never claimed to own the bodies of their employees, not officially at least. They owned everything they put inside, though. Clarke smiles to herself. They could probably charge me with vandalism.
If they'd really wanted to keep her from putting her grubby paws all over company property then they shouldn't have left this service panel in her chest. But they were on such a steep curve, back then. The brownouts weren't waiting; Hydro-Q wasn't waiting; the GA couldn't wait either. The whole geothermal program was fast-tracked, rearguard, and on the fly; the rifters themselves were a short term stopgap even on that breakneck schedule. Lenie Clarke and her buddies were prototypes, field tests, and final product all rolled into one. How could any accountant justify sealing up the implants on Monday when you'd only have to cut your way back in on Wednesday to fix a faulty myocell, or install some vital component that the advance sims had overlooked?
Even the deadman alarms were an afterthought, Clarke remembers. Karl Acton brought them down to Beebe at the start of his tour, handed them out like throat lozenges, told everyone to pop themselves open and slide 'em in right next to the seawater intake.
Karl was the one who discovered how to do what Lenie Clarke is doing right now. Ken Lubin killed him for it.
Times change, Clarke reflects, and tweaks another setting.
Finally she's finished. She lets the fleshy flap fall back into her chest, feels the phospholipids rebind along the seam. Molecular tails embrace in an orgy of hydrophobia. Another ache throbs diffusely inside now, subtly different from those that have gone before: disinfectants and synthetic antibodies, spraying down the implant cavity in the unlikely event that its lining should fail.
The outraged handpad has given up; half of its readouts are yellow and orange.
Inside Clarke's head, things are beginning to change. The permeability of critical membranes is edging up a few percent. The production of certain chemicals, designed not to carry signals but to blockade them, is subtly being scaled back. Windows are not yet opening, but they are being unlocked.
She can feel none of this directly, of course. The changes, by themselves, are necessary but not sufficient—they don't matter here where lungs are used, where pressure is a mere single atmosphere. They only matter when catalyzed by the weight of an ocean.
But now, when Lenie Clarke goes outside—when she steps into the airlock and the pressure accretes around her like a liquid mountain; when three hundred atmospheres squeeze her head so hard that her very synapses start short-circuiting—then, Lenie Clarke will be able to look into men's souls. Not the bright parts, of course. No philosophy or music, no altruism, no intellectual musings about right and wrong. Nothing neocortical at all. What Lenie Clarke will feel predates all of that by a hundred million years. The hypothalamus, the reticular formation, the amygdala. The reptile brain, the midbrain. Jealousies, appetites, fears and inarticulate hatreds. She'll feel them all, to a range of fifteen meters or more.
She remembers what it was like. Too well. Six years gone and it seems like yesterday.
All she has to do is step outside.
She sits in her cubby, and doesn't move.
Gravediggers
Find the damn mines.
They spread out across the territory like black dogs, sniffing through light and shadow with sonar pistols and flux detectors. Some of them may question the exercise—and some of them almost certainly root for its failure—but nobody still alive after five years down here is going to be dumb enough to go all insubordinate on Ken Lubin.
Find the damn mines.
Clarke glides among them, just another nose on the trail as far as anyone can tell. Hers is not so focused, though. The others follow invisible lines, the threads of a systematic grid laid down across the search area; but Clarke zigzags, coasts down to accompany this compatriot or that, exchanging insignificant bits of conversation and intel before diverging courses in search of new company. Clarke has a different mission.
Find the damn mine-layer.
Hectares of biosteel. Intermittent punctuations of light and shadow. Flashing staccatos at each extremity, little blinking beacons that announce the tips of scaffolds, antennae, danger zones where hot fluids might vent without warning. The baleful, unwavering glare of floodlights around airlocks and docking hatches and loading bays, reignited for today's exercise. Pale auras of wasted light from a hundred parabolic viewports. Twilit expanses of hull where every protuberance casts three or four shadows, dimly lit by lamps installed in more distant and glamorous neighborhoods.
Everywhere else, darkness. Elongated grids of shadow laid out by naked support struts. Impenetrable inky pools filling the spaces between keel and substrat
e, as though Atlantis were some great bed with its own scary place for monsters lying beneath. Fuzzy darkness where the light simply attenuates and fades; or razor-sharp where some tank or conduit extends into bright sodium sunlight, laying inky shadows over whatever lies beneath.
More than enough topography to hide an explosive device barely twice the size of a man's hand. More than enough to hide a thousand.
It would be a big enough job for fifty-eight. It's a lot bigger for the two dozen that Lubin is willing to conscript to the task; rifters who haven't gone native, who don't overtly hate the corpses enough to leave suspicious-looking objects "unnoticed" in their sweep—rifters who aren't among the most likely to have planted such devices in the first place. It's nowhere near a sure thing, of course; few of these people have been cleared as suspects. Not even the intel stolen directly from their brainpans is incontrovertible. They didn't hand out the eyes and the 'skin to anyone who didn't have a certain history, twisted wiring is what suits a body to the rift in the first place. Everyone's haunted here. Everyone carries their own baggage: their own tormentors, their own victims, the addictions, the beatings and the anal rapes and the paternal fondling at the hands of kindly Men In Black. Hatred of the corpses, so recently abated, is once again a given. ß-max has brought all the old conflicts back to the surface, reignited hostilities that five years of grudging, gradual coexistence had begun to quench. A month or two past, rifters and corpses were almost allies, bitter holdouts like Erickson and Nolan notwithstanding. Now, few would shed many tears if the ocean crashed in on the whole lot of them.
Still. There's a difference between dancing on someone's grave and digging it. There's an element of, of calculation on top of the hatred. Of planning. It's a subtle difference; Clarke doesn't know if she or Lubin would be able to pick it up under these circumstances. It might not even manifest itself in someone until the very moment they came upon the incriminating object, saw the mine stuck to the hull like some apocalyptic limpet, tripped their vocoder with every intention of raising the alarm and then—
Maybe the bastards deserve it after all they've done to us, after all they've done to the whole world, and it's not like I set the damn thing, it's not like I had anything to do with it except I maybe just didn't notice it there under the strut, perfectly understandable in the murk and all…