by Peter Watts
He doesn't care.
He can't care. He doesn't have the wiring.
"Huh," Lubin grunts, staring at the board "That's interesting."
He's brought up a visual of one of Atlantis's physical plants, a great cylindrical module several stories high. Strange black fluid, a horizontal geyser of ink, jets from an exhaust vent in its side. Charcoal thunderheads billow into the water, eclipsing the view.
"What is that?" Clarke whispers.
Lubin's pulling up other windows now: seismo, vocoder traffic, a little thumbnail mosaic of surveillance cams spread around inside and outside the complex.
All Atlantis's inside cams are dead.
Voices are rising on all channels. Three of the outside cameras have gone ink-blind. Lubin brings up the PA menu, speaks calmly into the abyss.
"Attention, everyone. Attention. This is it.
"Atlantis has preempted."
Now they're reading perfidy all over the place. Lubin's switchboard is a mob scene of competing voices, tuned fishheads reporting that their assigned corpses are abruptly up, focused, and definitely in play. It's as though someone's kicked over an anthill in there: every brain in Atlantis is suddenly lit up along the whole fight-flight axis.
"Everyone shut up. These are not secure channels." Lubin's voice squelches the others like a granite slab grinding over pebbles. "Take your positions. Blackout in sixty."
Clarke leans over his shoulder and toggles a hardline into corpseland. "Atlantis, what's going on?" No answer. "Pat? Comm? Anyone, respond."
"Don't waste your time," Lubin says, bringing up sonar. Half the exterior cams are useless by now, enveloped in black fog. But the sonar image is crisp and clear: Atlantis spreads across the volumetric display like a grayscale crystalline chessboard. Black pieces—the two-tone flesh-and-metal echoes of rifter bodies—align themselves in some coordinated tactical ballet. White is nowhere to be seen.
Clarke shakes her head. "There was nothing? No warning at all?" She can't believe it; there's no way the corpses could have masked their own anticipation if they'd been planning something. The expectant tension in their own heads would have been obvious to any tuned rifter within twenty meters, well in advance of anything actually happening.
"It's like they weren't even expecting it themselves," she murmurs.
"They probably weren't," Lubin says.
"How could they not be? Are you saying it was some kind of accident?"
Lubin, his attention on the board, doesn't answer. A sudden blue tint suffuses the sonar display. At first it looks as though the whole view has been arbitrarily blue-shifted; but after a moment clear spots appear, like haphazard spatterings of acid eating holes in a colored gel. Within moments most of the tint has corroded away, leaving random scraps of color laying across Atlantis like blue shadows. Except they're not shadows, Clarke sees now: they're volumes, little three-dimensional clots of colored shade clinging to bits of hull and outcropping.
A single outside camera, mounted at a panoramic distance, shows a few diffuse glowing spots in a great inky storm front. It's as though Atlantis were some great bioluminescent Kraken in the throes of a panic attack. All the other outside cams are effectively blind. It doesn't matter, though. Sonar looks through that smokescreen as if it wasn't even there. Surely they know that…
"They wouldn't be this stupid," Clarke murmurs.
"They're not," Lubin says. His fingers dance on the board like manic spiders. A scattering of yellow pinpoints appears on the display. They swell into circles, a series of growing overlapping spotlit areas, each centered on—
Camera locations, Clarke realizes. The yellow areas are those under direct camera surveillance. Or they would be, if not for the smokescreen. Lubin's obviously based his analysis on geometry and not real-time viz.
"Blackout now." Lubin's finger comes down; the white noise generators come up. The chessboard fuzzes with gray static. On the board, rifter icons—naked little blips now, without form or annotation—have formed into a series of five discrete groups around the complex. One blip from each is rising in the water column, climbing above the zone of interference.
You planned it right down to the trim, didn't you? she thinks. You mapped a whole campaign around this moment and you never told me…
The highest icon flickers and clarifies into two conjoined blips: Creasy, riding a squid. His voice buzzes on the channel a moment later. "This is Dale, on station."
Another icon clears the noise. "Hannuk." Two more: "Abra." "Deb."
"Avril on station," Hopkinson reports.
"Hopkinson," Lubin says. "Forget the Cave; they'll have relocated. It won't be obvious. Split up your group, radial search."
"Yah." Hopkinson's icon dives back into static.
"Creasy," Lubin says, "your people join up with Cheung's."
"Right."
There on the chessboard: at the tip of one of the residential wings, about twenty meters from Hydroponic. A familiar icon there, embedded in an irregular blob of green. The only green on the whole display, in fact. Yellow mixed with blue: so it would be in camera view if not for the ink, and also in—
"What's blue?" Clarke asks, knowing.
"Sonar shadow." Lubin doesn't look back. "Creasy, go to the airlock at the far end of Res-F. They're coming out there if they're coming out anywhere."
"Tune or tangle?" Creasy asks.
"Tune and report. Plant a phone and a charge, but do not detonate unless they are already in the water. Otherwise, acoustic trigger only. Understood?"
"Yeah, if I can even find the fucking place," Creasy buzzes. "Viz is zero in this shit…" His icon plunges back into the static, cutting an oblique path towards the green zone.
"Cheung, take both groups, same destination. Secure the airlock. Report back when you're on station."
"Got it."
"Yeager, get the cache and drop it twenty meters off the Physical Plant, bearing forty degrees. Everyone else maintain position. Tune in, and use your limpets. Runners, I want three people in a continuous loop, one always in contact. Go."
The remaining blips swing into motion. Lubin doesn't pause; he's already opening another window, this one a rotating architectural animatic of Atlantis punctuated by orange sparks. Clarke recognizes the spot from which one of those little stars is shining: it's right about where Grace Nolan's lackey painted an X on the hull.
"How long have you been planning this?" she asks quietly.
"Some time."
Since well before she even fine-tuned herself, judging by how utterly clueless she's proven herself to be. "Is everyone involved but me?"
"No." Lubin studies annotations.
"Ken."
"I'm busy."
"How did they do it? Keep from tipping us off like that?"
"Automated trigger," he says absently. Columns of numbers scroll up a sudden window, too fast for Clarke to make out. "Random number generator, maybe. They have a plan, but nobody knows when it's going to kick in so there's no pre-curtain performance anxiety to give the game away."
"But why would they go to all that trouble unless—"
—they know about fine tuning.
Yves Scanlon, she remembers. Rowan asked about him: He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow, she suggested.
And Lenie Clarke confirmed it, just minutes ago.
And here they are.
She doesn't know what hurts more: Lubin's lack of trust, or the hindsight realization of how justified it was.
She's never felt so tired in her life. Do we really have to do this all over again?
Maybe she said it aloud. Or maybe Lubin just caught some telltale body language from the corner of his eye. At any rate, his hands pause on the board. At last he turns to look at her. His eyes seem strangely translucent by the light of the board.
"We didn't start it," he says.
She can only shake her head.
"Choose a side, Lenie. It's past time."
For all she knows
it's a trick question; she's never forgotten what Ken Lubin does to those he considers enemies. But as it turns out, she's spared the decision. Dale Creasy, big dumb bareknuckled headbasher that he is, rescues her.
"Fuck…" his vocoded voice grinds out over a background of hissing static.
Lubin's immediately back to business. "Creasy? You made it to Res-F?"
"No shit I made it. I coulda tuned those fuckers in blind, from the Sargasso fucking Sea…"
"Have any of them left the complex?"
"No, I—I don't think so, I—but fuck, man, there's a lot of them in there, and—"
"How many, exactly?"
"I don't know, exactly! Coupla dozen at least. But look, Lubin, there's somethin' off about 'em, about the way they send. I've never felt it before."
Lubin takes a breath: Clarke imagines his eyeballs rolling beneath the caps. "Could you be more specific?"
"They're cold, man. Almost all of 'em are like, fucking ice. I mean, I can tune 'em in, I know they're there, but I can't tell what they're feeling. I don't know if they're feeling anything. Maybe they're doped up on something. I mean, next to these guys you're a blubbering crybaby…"
Lubin and Clarke exchange looks.
"I mean, no offense," Creasy buzzes after a moment.
"One of Alyx's friends had a head cheese," Clarke says. "She called it a pet…"
And down here in this desert at the bottom of the ocean, in this hand-to-mouth microcosm, how common does something have to be before you'd give one to your ten-year-old daughter as a plaything?
"Go," Lubin says.
Lubin's squid is tethered to a cleat just offside the ventral 'lock. Clarke cranks the throttle; the vehicle leaps forward with a hydraulic whine.
Her jawbone vibrates with sudden input. Lubin's voice fills her head: "Creasy, belay my last order. Do not plant your charge, repeat, no charge. Plant the phone only, and withdraw. Cheung, keep your people at least twenty meters back from the airlock. Do not engage. Clarke is en route. She will advise."
I will advise, she thinks, and they will tell me to go fuck myself.
She's navigating blind, by bearing alone. Usually that's more than enough: at this range Atlantis should be a brightening smudge against the blackness. Now, nothing. Clarke brings up sonar. Green snow fuzzes ten degrees of forward arc: within it, the harder echoes of Corpseland, blurred by interference.
Now, just barely, she can see brief smears of dull light; they vanish when she focuses on them. Experimentally, she ignites her headlight and looks around.
Empty water to port. To starboard the beam sweeps across a billowing storm front of black smoke converging on her own vector. Within seconds she'll be in the thick of it. She kills the light before the smokescreen has a chance to turn it against her.
Somehow, the blackness beyond her eyecaps darkens a shade. She feels no tug of current, no sudden viscosity upon entering the zone. Now, however, the intermittent flashes are a bit brighter; fugitive glimmers of light through brief imperfections in the cover. None of them last long enough to illuminate more than strobe-frozen instants.
She doesn't need light. By now, she doesn't even need sonar: she can feel apprehension rising in the water around her, nervous excitement radiating from the rifters ahead, darker, more distant fears from within the spheres and corridors passing invisibly beneath her.
And something else, something both familiar and alien, something living but not alive.
The ocean hisses and snaps around her, as though she were trapped within a swarm of euphausiids. A click-train rattles faintly against her implants. She almost hears a voice, vocoded, indistinct; she hears no words. Echoes light up her sonar display right across the forward one-eighty, but she's deep in white noise; she can't tell whether the contacts number six or sixty.
Fear-stained bravado, just ahead. She pulls hard right, can't quite avoid the body swimming across her path. The nebula opens a brief, bright eye as they collide.
"Fuck! Clarke, is that y—"
Gone. Near-panic falling astern, but no injury: the brain lights up a certain way when the body breaks. It may have been Baker. It's getting so hard to tell, against this rising backdrop of icy sentience. Thought without feeling. It spreads out beneath the messy tangle of human emotions like a floor of black obsidian.
The last time she felt a presence like this, it was wired to a live nuke. The last time, there was only one of them.
She pulls the squid into a steep climb. More sonar pings bounce off her implants, a chorus of frightened machine voices rise in her wake. She ignores them. The hissing in her flesh fades with each second. Within a few moments she's above the worst of it.
"Ken, you there?"
No answer for a moment: this far from the Hab there's a soundspeed lag. "Report," He says at last. His voice is burred but understandable.
"They've got smart gels down there. A lot of them, I don't know how many, twenty or thirty maybe. Packed together at the end of the wing, probably right in the wet room. I don't know how we didn't pick them up before. Maybe they just...get lost in the background noise until you jam them together."
Lag. "Any sense of what they're doing?" Back at Juan de Fuca, they were able to make some pretty shrewd inferences from changes in signal strength.
"No, they're all just—in there. Thinking all over each other. If there was just one or two I might be able to get some kind of reading, but—"
"They played me," Lubin says overtop of her.
"Played?" What's that in his voice? Surprise? Uncertainty? Clarke's never heard it there before.
"To make me focus on F-3."
Anger, she realizes.
"But what's the point?" she asks. "Some kind of bluff, did they think we'd mistake those things for people?" It seems ridiculous; even Creasy knew there was something off, and he's never met a head cheese before. Then again, what do corpses know about fine-tuning? How would they know the difference?
"Not a diversion," Lubin murmurs in the void. "No other place they could come out that sonar wouldn't..."
"Well, what—"
"Pull them back," he snaps suddenly. "They're mask—they're luring us in and masking something. Pull them b—"
The abyss clenches.
It's a brief squeeze around Clarke's body, not really painful. Not up here.
In the next instant, a sound: Whoompf. A swirl of turbulence. And suddenly the water's full of mechanical screams.
She spins. The smokescreen below is in sudden motion, shredded and boiling in the wake of some interior disturbance, lit from within by flickering heat-lightning.
She squeezes the throttle for dear life. The squid drags her down.
"Clarke!" The sound of the detonation has evidently passed the Nerve Hab. "What's going on?"
A symphony of tearing metal. A chorus of voices in discord. Not so many as there should be, she realizes.
We must have lost a generator, she realizes dully. I can hear them screaming.
I can hear them dying…
And not just hear them. The cries rise in her head before they reach her ears; raw chemical panic lighting up the reptile brain like sodium flares, the smarter mammalian overlay helpless and confused, its vaunted cognition shattering like cheap crystal in the backwash.
"Clarke! Report!"
Anger now, thin veins of grim determination among the panic. Lights shine more brightly through the thinning murk. They're the wrong size, somehow, the wrong color. Not rifter lamps. Her sonar squeals in the face of some imminent collision: another squid slews by, out of control, its rider luminous with an agony of broken bones.
"It wasn't me, I swear it! They did it themselves—"
Creasy tumbles away, his pain fading into others'.
Res-F's hull sprawls across sonar, its smooth contours all erased, jagged edges everywhere: the gaping mouths of caves lined with twisted metal teeth. One of them spits something metallic at her; it bounces off the squid with a clank. Vocoder voices grind and grate on
all sides. A gap opens in the tattered cloud-bank ahead: Clarke sees a great lumbering shape, an armored cyclops. Its single eye shines balefully with the wrong kind of light. It reaches for her.
She pulls to port, catches a glimpse of something spinning in the chaos directly ahead. A dark mass thuds flaccidly against the squid's bow and caroms towards her face. She ducks. A diveskinned arm cuffs her in passing.
"Lenie!"
Dead gray eyes watch, oblivious and indifferent, as she twists away.
Oh Jesus. Oh God.
Luminous metal monsters stride through the wreckage, stabbing at the wounded.
She tries to hold it together. "They're coming out of the walls, Ken. They were waiting inside, they blew the hull from inside and they're coming through the walls…"
God damn you, Pat. Was this you? Was this you?
She remembers the lopsided chessboard on Lubin's display. She remembers black pieces arranging themselves for an easy rout.
Only now does she remember: in chess, white always moves first.
That indifferent, alien intellect is nowhere to be found now. The gels must have turned to homogenous pulp the instant the hull imploded.
There were more than preshmeshed corpses and smart gels packed in F-3's wet room. There was shrapnel, doubtless arranged in accordance with some theoretical projection of maximum spread. Clarke can see the fragments where they've come to rest—on the hull, embedded in ruptured LOX tanks, protruding from the far side of ragged entry wounds torn through the flesh of comrades and rivals. They look like metal daisies, like the blades of tiny perfect windmills. The mere rebound from the implosion would have been enough to set them soaring, to mow down anyone not already sucked to their death at mach speeds or torn apart on the jagged lip of the breach itself.
The smokescreen has all but dispersed.
Lubin's calling a retreat. Most of those able to respond, already have. The preshmeshed figures clambering along the hulled remains of F-3 have to content themselves with the wounded and the dead. They're crabs, ungainly and overweighted. Instead of claws they have needles, long, almost surgical things, extending from their gauntlets like tiny lances.