by Peter Watts
“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 and—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.
They don’t even know they’re dead, she thought. The torpedoes haven’t reached Atlantis yet. They’re living the last few minutes of their lives and they don’t even know it.
They’ll live longer than me...
A hand around her ankle; friction against the floor.
Bye, Jelaine. Bye Avril. Bye Dale and Abra and Hannuk...
A great gulping wheeze, very close. The sensation of distant flesh expanding.
Bye Kevin. Bye Grace. Sorry we could never work it out...
A pulse. She had a pulse.
Bye Jerry. Bye Pat. Bye again...
There were voices. There was light, somewhere. Everywhere.
Bye, Alyx. Oh God, I’m so sorry. Alyx.
“...bye, world.”
But that voice had come from outside her head.
She opened her eyes.
“You know I’m serious,” Desjardins was saying.
Somehow Ken Lubin was still on his feet, listing to port. He stood just beyond the pool of light. Achilles Desjardins stood within it. They confronted each other from opposite sides of a waist-high workstation.
Lubin must have pulled her out of the neuroinduction field. He’d saved her life again. Not bad for a blind psychopath. Now he stood staring sightlessly into the face of his enemy, his hand extended. Probably feeling out the edge of the field.
“Dedicated little bitch, I have to admit,” Desjardins said. “Willing to sacrifice a handful of people she actually knows for a planetful of people she doesn’t. I thought she was way too human to be so rational.” He shook his head. “But the whole point is kind of lost if the world blows up anyway, no? I mean, all those runaways on the Ridge are about to die in—oh, sorry, who’ve just died—and for what? The only thing that’ll give their deaths any meaning at all is if you turn around and walk away.”
They’re gone, Clarke thought. I killed them all...
“You know how many battellites are still wobbling around up there, Ken. And you know I’m good enough to have got into at least a few of ’em. Not to mention all the repositories of chemical and biological weapons kicking around groundside after a hundred years of R&D. All those tripwires run right through my left ventricle, buddy. Lenie should thank the spirit of motherfucking entropy that she didn’t kill me, or the heavens would be raining fire and brimstone by now.”
Clarke tried to move. Her muscles buzzed, hung over. She could barely lift her arm. Not the usual med-cubby field by a long shot. This one had been cranked to quell riots. This one was industrial.
Still Lubin didn’t speak. He managed a controlled stagger to the left, his arm still extended.
“Channels seven through nineteen,” Desjardins told him. “Look for yourself. See the kill switches? See where they lead? I’ve had five years to set this up, Ken. You kill me, you kill billions.”
“I— expect you’ll find a number of those tripwires are no longer connected.” Lubin’s voice was thin and strained.
“What, your pack-hunting Lenies? They can’t get into the lines until the lines open. And even then, so what? They’re her, Ken. They’re concentrated essence of Lenie Clarke at the absolute peak of her game. They get their teeth into a tripwire, you think for a second they won’t pull it themselves?”
Lubin cocked his head slightly, as if taking note of some interesting sound.
“It’s still a good deal, Ken. Take it. You’d have a hard time killing me anyway. I mean, I know what a tough hombre you are, but your motor nerves short out just the same as anyone else’s. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re blind.”
Realization stabbed Clarke like an icicle: Achilles, you idiot, don’t you know what you’re doing? Haven’t you read his file?
Lubin was speaking: “So why deal in the first place?”
“Because you are a tough hombre. You could probably hunt me down by smell if it came to that, and even though you’re having a really off day I’d just as soon not take the chance.”
You’re talking to Ken Lubin, she raged silently, trapped in her own dead flesh. Do you actually think you’re threatening him?
“So we disappear, you disappear, the world relaxes.” Lubin wavered in and out of focus. “Until someone else kills you.”
Clarke tried to speak. All she could force out was a moan, barely audible even to herself.
It’s not a threat at all—
“You disappear,” Desjardins said. “Lenie’s mine. Saved her special.”
It’s an inducement...
“You’re proceeding from a false premise,” Lubin pointed out.
“Yeah? What premise is that?”
“That I give a shit.”
Clarke caught a glimpse of muscles bunching in Lubin’s left leg,
of a sudden sodden pulse of fresh blood coursing down his right. Suddenly he was airborne, hurtling through the field and overtop the barrier from an impossible standing start. He rammed into Desjardins like an avalanche, pure inertia; they toppled out of sight behind the console, to the sound of bodies and plastic in collision.
A moment’s silence.
She lay there, tingling and paralyzed, and wondered who to root for. If Lubin’s momentum hadn’t carried him completely through the field he’d be dying now, with no one to pull him to safety. Even if he’d made it across, he’d still be helpless for a while. Desjardins might have a chance, if the collision hadn’t stunned him.
Achilles, you murderer. You psychopath, you genocidal maniac. You foul vicious monster. You’re worse than I am. There’s no hell deep enough for you.
Get out of there. Please. Before he kills you.
Something gurgled. Clarke heard the faint scratching of fingernails on plastic or metal. A meaty thud, like someone slinging a dead fish against the deck—or the flopping of a limb, stunned in transit, struggling back to life. A brief scuffling sound.
Ken. Don’t do it.
She gathered all her strength into a single, desperate cry: “No.” It came out barely whispered.
On the far side of the barricade, a wet snapping pop. Then nothing at all.
Oh God, Ken. Don’t you know what you’ve done?
Of course you know. You’ve always known. We could’ve saved it, we could have made things right, but they were right about you. Pat was right. Alyx was right. You monster. You monster. You wasted it all.
God damn you.
She stared up at the ceiling, tears leaking around her eyecaps, and waited for the world to end.
She could almost move again, if only she could think of a reason to. She rolled onto her side. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, his bloody face impenetrable. He looked like some carved and primitive idol, awash in human sacrifice.
“How long?” she rasped.
“Long?”
“Or has it started already? Are the claves on fire? Are the bombs falling? Is it enough for you, are you fucking hard yet?”
“Oh. That.” Lubin shrugged. “He was bluffing.”