“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 toward 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.”
“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 bare-knuckled head-basher 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 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 o
f 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 patterns 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 toward 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 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.
“Lenie. Do you read?”
She floats dumbly overhead, out of reach, watching them stab black bodies. Occasional bubbles erupt from the needle tips, race into the sky like clusters of shuddering silvery mushrooms.
Compressed air, injected into flesh. Instant embolism. You can make a weapon out of almost anything.
“Lenie?”
“She could be dead, Ken. I can’t find Dale or Abra either.”
Other voices, too fuzzy to distinguish. Most of the white noise generators are still online, after all.
She tunes in the crabs. She wonders what they must be feeling now. She wonders what she’s feeling, too, but she can’t really tell. Maybe she feels like a head cheese.
The corpses, though, down there in their armor, mopping up. No shortage of feelings there. Determination. A surprising amount of fear. Anger, but distant; it isn’t driving them.
Not as much hate as she would have expected.
She rises. The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis lights the water, deceptively serene. She can barely hear buzzing rifter voices; she can’t make out any words. She can’t tune any of them in. She’s all alone at the bottom of the sea.
Suddenly she rises past some invisible line-of-sight, and her jawbone fills with chatter.
“—the bodies,” Lubin’s saying. “Bring terminals at personal discretion. Garcia’s waiting under Med for triage.”
“Med won’t hold half of us,” someone—oh, it’s Kevin!—buzzes faintly in the distance. “Way too many injured.”
“Anyone from F-3 not injured and not carrying injured, meet at the cache. Hopkinson?”
“Here.”
“Anything?”
“Think so, maybe. We’re getting a whole lot of brains in Res-E. Can’t tell who, but—”
“Yeager and Ng, bring your people straight up forty meters. Don’t change your lats and longs, but I want everybody well away from the hull. Hopkinson, get your people back to the Med Hab.”
“We’re okay—”
“Do it. We need donors.”
“Jesus,” someone says faintly. “We’re fucked…”
“No. They are.”
Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through the mutilating filter of her vocoder.
“Grace, they just—”
“Just what?” she buzzes. “Do you think they’re winning? What are they gonna do for an encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We’ve got enough charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we’re gonna use them.”
“Ken?”
A brief silence.
“Look, Ken,” Nolan buzzes, “I can be at the cache in—”
“Not necessary,” Lubin tells her. “Someone’s already en route.”
“Who’s—”
“Welcome back, by the way,” Lubin says to the anonymous soldier. “You know the target?”
“Yes.” A faint voice, too soft and distorted to pin down.
“The charge has to be locked down within a meter of the mark. Set it and back away fast. Don’t spend any more time than absolutely necessary in proximity to the hull, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Acoustic trigger. I’ll detonate from here. Blackout lifting in ten.”
My God, Clarke thinks, It’s you …
“Everyone at safe distance,” Lubin reminds the troops. “Blackout lifting now.”
She’s well out of the white noise; there’s no obvious change in ambience. But the next vocoder she hears, still soft, is clearly recognizable.
“It’s down,” Julia Friedman buzzes.
“Back off,” Lubin says. “Forty meters. Stay away from the bottom.”
“Hey Avril,” Friedman says.
“Right here,” Hopkinson answers.
“When you tuned that wing, were there children?”
“Yeah. Yeah, there were.”
“Good,” buzzes Friedman. “Gene always hated kids.”
The channel goes dead.
* * *
At first, she thinks the retribution’s gone exactly as expected. The world pulses around her—a dull, almost subsonic drumbeat through brine and flesh and bone—and for all she knows, a hundred or more of the enemy are reduced to bloody paste. She doesn’t know how many rifters died in the first exchange, but surely this restores the lead.
She’s in an old, familiar place where it doesn’t seem to matter much either way.
Even the second explosion—same muffled thump, but softer somehow, more distant—even that doesn’t tip her off immediately. Secondary explosions would almost be inevitable, she imagines—pipes and power lines suddenly ruptured, a cascade of high-pressure tanks with their feeds compromised—all kinds of consequences could daisy-chain from that initial burst. Bonus points for the home team, probably. Nothing more.