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End Game
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Night Shift
She was a screamer. He'd programmed her that way. Not to say she didn't like it, of course; he'd programmed that too. Joel had one hand wrapped around a fistful of her zebra cut— the program had a nifty little customizing feature, and tonight he was honoring SS Preteela— and the other hand was down between her thighs doing preliminary recon. He was actually halfway through his final run when his fucking watch started ringing, and his first reaction was to just keep on plugging, and to kick himself later for not shutting the bloody thing off.
His second reaction was to remember that he had shut it off. Only emergency priorities could set it ringing.
"Shit."
He clapped his hands, twice; fake Preteela froze in mid-scream. "Answer."
A brief squirt of noise as machines exchanged recognition codes. "Grid Authority here. We urgently need of a 'scaphe pilot for the Channer run tonight, liftoff twenty-three hundred from the Astoria platform. Are you available?"
"Twenty-three? Middle of the night?"
A barely audible hiss on the line. Nothing else.
"Hello?" Joel said.
"Are you available?" the voice asked again.
"Who is this?"
"This is the scheduling subroutine, DI43, Hongcouver office."
Joel eyed the petrified tableau waiting in his 'phones. "That's pretty late. What's the payscale?"
"Eight point five times base," Hongcouver said. "At your rate salary that would—"
Joel gulped. "I'm available."
"Goodbye."
"Wait! What's the run?"
"Astoria to Channer Vent return." Subroutines were pretty literal-minded.
"I mean, what's the cargo?"
"Passengers," said the voice. "Goodbye."
Joel stood there a moment, feeling his erection deflate. "Time." A luminous readout appeared in the air above Preteela's right shoulder: thirteen ten. He'd have to be on site a half-hour before liftoff, and Astoria was only a couple of hours away...
"Lots of time," he said to no one in particular.
But he wasn't really in the mood any more. Work had a way of doing that to him lately. Not the drudgery, or the long hours, or any of the things most people would complain about. Joel liked boredom. You didn't have to think much.
But work had gotten really weird lately.
He pulled the eyephones off his head and looked down at himself. Feedback gloves on his hands, his feet, hanging off his flaccid dick. Take away the headset and it really was a rinky-dink system. At least until he could afford the full suit.
Still, beats real life. No bullshit, no bugs, no worries.
On impulse, he rang up a friend in SeaTac— "Jess, catch this code for me, will you?" — and squirted the recognition sequence Hongcouver had just sent.
"Got it," Jess said.
"It's valid, right?"
"Checks out. Why?"
"Just got called up for a midocean run that's going to peak around three in the morning. Octuple pay. I just wondered if it was some kind of cruel hoax."
"Well, if it is, the Router's developed a sense of humor. Hey, maybe they've put in a head cheese up there."
"Yeah." Ray Stericker's face flashed through his mind.
"So what's the job?" Jess asked.
"Don't know. Ferrying something, I guess, but why I have to do it in the middle of the night is beyond me."
"Strange days."
"Yeah. Thanks, Jess."
"Any time."
Strange days indeed. H-bombs going off all over the abyssal plain, all this traffic going to places nobody ever went to before, no traffic at all in places that used to be just humming. Flash fires and barbecued refugees and slagged shipyards. Chipheads with rotenone cocktails and giant fish. A couple of weeks back Joel had shown up for a run to Mendocino and found some guy sandblasting a radiation hazard logo off the cargo casing.
The whole bloody coast is getting too dangerous. N'AmPac's gonna burn down way before it ever floods.
But that was the beauty of being a freelancer. He could pick up and move. He would pick up and move, leave the bloody coast behind— shit, maybe even leave N'Am behind. There was always South Am. Or Antarctica, for that matter. He would definitely look into it.
Right after this run.
Scatter
She finds him on the abyssal plain, searching. He's been out here for hours; sonar showed him tracking back and forth, back and forth, all the way to the carousel, out to the whale, back again, in and around the labyrinthine geography of the Throat itself.
Alone. All alone.
She can feel his desperation fifty meters away. The facets of that pain glimmer in her mind as the squid pulls her closer. Guilt. Fear.
Growing with her approach, anger.
Her headlight sweeps across a small contrail on the bottom, a wake of mud kicked back into suspension after a million-year sleep. Clarke changes course to follow and kills the beam. Darkness clamps around her. This far out, photons evade even rifter eyes.
She feels him seething directly ahead. When she pulls up beside him the water swirls with unseen turbulence. Her squid shudders from the impact of Brander's fists.
"Keep that fucking thing out of here! You know he doesn't like it!"
She draws down the throttle. The soft hydraulic whine fades.
"Sorry," she says. "I just thought—"
"Fuck, Len, you of all people! You trying to drive him off? You want him blasted into the fucking stratosphere when that thing goes off?"
"I'm sorry." When he doesn't respond, she adds, "I don't think he's out here. Sonar—"
"Sonar's not worth shit if he's on the bottom."
"Mike, you're not going find him rooting around here in the dark. We're blind this far out."
A wave of pistol clicks sweeps across her face. "I've got this for close range," says the machinery in Brander's throat.
"I don't think he's out here," Clarke says again. "And even if he is, I don't know if he'd let you get close after—"
"That was a long time ago," the darkness buzzes back. "Just because you're still nursing grudges from the second grade..."
"That's not what I meant," she says. She tries to speak gently, but the vocoder strips her voice down to a soft rasp. "I only meant, it's been so long. He's gone so far, we barely even see him on sonar any more. I don't know if he'd let any of us near him."
"We've got to try. We can't just leave him here. If I can just get close enough to tune him in..."
"He couldn't tune back," Clarke reminds him. "He went over before we changed, Mike. You know that."
"Fuck off! That's not the point!"
But it is, and they both know it. And Lenie Clarke suddenly knows something else, too. She knows that part of her is enjoying Brander's pain. She fights it, tries to ignore the realization of her own realization, because the only way to keep it from leaking into Brander's head is to keep it out of her own. She can't. No: she doesn't want to. Mike Brander, know-it-all, destroyer of perverts, self-righteous self-appointed self-avenger, is finally getting some small payback for what he did to Gerry Fischer.
Give it up, she wants to shout at him. Gerry's gone. Didn't you tune him in when that prick Scanlon held him hostage? Didn't you feel how empty he was? Or was all that too much for you, did you just look the other way instead? Well here's the abstract, Mikey: he's nowhere near human enough to grasp your half-assed gestures of atonement.
No absolution this time, Mike. You get to take this to your grave. Ain't justice a bitch?
She waits for him to tune her in, to feel her contempt diluting that frantic morass of guilt and self-pity. It doesn't happen. She waits and waits. Mike Brander, awash in his own symphony, just doesn't notice.
"Shit," hisses Lenie Clarke, softly.
"Come in," calls Alice Nakata, from very far away. "Everybody, come in."
Clarke boosts her gain. "Alice? Lenie."
"Mike," Brander says a long moment later. "I'm listening."
"You should get back here," Nakata tells them. "They called."
"Who? The GA?"
"They say they want to evacuate us. They say twelve hours."
* * *
"This is bullshit," says Brander.
"Who was it?" Lubin wants to know.
"I don't know," Nakata says. "I think, no one that we've spoken to before."
"And that was all he said? Evac in twelve?"
"And we are supposed to remain inside Beebe until then."
"No explanation? No reason given?"
"He hung up as soon as I acknowledged the order." Nakata looks vaguely apologetic. "I did not get the chance to ask, and nobody answered when I called back."
Brander stands up and heads for Comm.
"I've already set retry," Clarke says. "It'll beep when it gets through."
Brander stops, stares at the nearest bulkhead. Punches it.
"This is bullshit!"
Lubin just watches.
"Maybe not," Nakata says. "Maybe it's good news. If they were going to leave us here when they detonated, why would they lie about extraction? Why talk to us at all?"
"To keep us nice and close to ground zero," Brander spits. "Now here's a question for you, Alice: if they're really planning on evacuating us, why not tell us the reason?"
Nakata shrugs helplessly. "I do not know. The GA does not often tell us what is going on."
Maybe they're trying to psyche us out, Clarke muses. Maybe they want us to make a break, for some reason.
"Well," she says aloud, "how far could we get in twelve hours anyway? Even with squids? What are the chances we'd reach safe distance?"
"Depends on how big the bomb is," Brander says.
"Actually," Lubin remarks, "assuming that they want to keep us here for twelve hours because that would be enough time to get away, we might be able to work out the range."
"If they didn't just pull that number out of a hat," Brander says.
"It still makes no sense," Nakata insists. "Why cut off our communications? That is guaranteed to make us suspicious."
"They took Judy," Lubin says.
Clarke takes a deep breath. "One thing's true, anyway."
The others turn.
"They want to keep us here," she finishes.
Brander smacks fist into palm. "And that's the best single reason for getting the fuck out, you ask me. Soon as we can."
"I agree," Lubin says.
Brander stares at him.
* * *
"I'll find him," she says. "I'll do my best, anyway."
Brander shakes his head. "I should stay. We should all stay. The chances of finding him—"
"The chances of finding him are best if I go out alone," Clarke reminds him. "He still comes out, sometimes, when I'm there. You wouldn't even get close."
He knows that, of course. He's just making token protests; if he can't get absolution from Fischer, at least he can try and look like a saint to everyone else.
Still, Clarke remembers, it's not entirely his fault. He's got baggage like the rest of us.
Even if he did mean harm...
"Well, the others are waiting. I guess we're off."
Clarke nods.
"You coming outside?"
She shakes her head. "I'll do a sonar sweep first. You never know, I might get lucky."
"Well, don't take too long. Only eight hours to go."
"I know."
"And if you can't find him after an hour—"
"I know. I'll be right behind you."
"We'll be—"
"Out to the dead whale, then steady bearing eighty-five degrees," she says. "I know."
"Look, you sure about this? We can wait in here for you. One hour's probably not going to make much difference."
She shakes her head. "I'm sure."
"Okay." He stands there, looking uncomfortable. One hand starts to rise, wavers, falls back.
He climbs down the ladder.
"Mike," she calls down after him.
He looks up.
"Do you really think they're going to blow that thing up?"
He shrugs. "I dunno. Maybe not. But you're right: they want us here for some reason. Whatever it is, I bet we wouldn't like it."
Clarke considers that.
"See you soon," Brander says, stepping into the 'lock.
"'Bye," she whispers.
* * *
When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can't hear much of anything these days.
Lenie Clarke sits in the darkness, listening. When was the last time these walls complained about the pressure? She can't remember. When she first came down here the station groaned incessantly, filled every waking moment with creaking reminders of the weight on its shoulders. But sometime since then it must have made peace with the ocean; the water pushing down and the armor pushing back have finally settled to equilibrium.
Of course, there are other kinds of pressure on the Juan de Fuca Rift.
She almost revels in the silence now. No clanging footfalls disturb her, no sudden outbursts of random violence. The only pulse she hears is her own. The only breath comes from the air conditioners.
She flexes her fingers, lets them dig into the fabric of the chair. She can see into the communications cubby from her position in the lounge. Occasional telltales flicker through the hatchway, the only available light. For Clarke, it's enough; her eyecaps grab those meager photons and show her a room in twilight. She hasn't gone into Comm since the rest of them left. She didn't watch their icons crawl off the edge of the screen, and she hasn't swept the rift for signs of Gerry Fischer.
She doesn't intend to now. She doesn't know if she ever did.
Far away, Lubin's lonely windchimes serenade her.
Clank.
From below.
No. Stay away. Leave me alone.
She hears the airlock draining, hears it open. Three soft footsteps. Movement on the ladder.
Ken Lubin rises into the lounge like a shadow.
"Mike and Alice?" she says, afraid to let him begin.
"Heading out. I told them I'd catch up."
"We're spreading ourselves pretty thin," she remarks.
"I think Brander was just as happy to be rid of me for a while."
She smiles faintly.
"You're not coming," he says.
Clarke shakes her head. "Don't try—"
"I won't."
He folds himself down into a convenient chair. She watches him move. There's a careful grace about him, there always has been. He moves as though always afraid of damaging something.
"I thought you might do this," he says after a while.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know myself until, well..."
He waits for her to continue.
"I want to know what's going on," she says at last. "Maybe they really are playing straight with us this time. It's not that unlikely. Maybe things aren't as bad as we thought..."
Lubin seems to consider that. "What about Fischer? Do you want me to—"
She barks a short laugh. "Fischer? You really want to drag him through the muck for days on end, and then haul him onto some fucking beach where he can't even stand up without breaking both his legs? Maybe it'd make Mike feel a bit better. Not much of an act of charity for Gerry, though."
And not, she knows now, for Lenie Clarke either. She's been deluding herself all this time. She felt herself getting stronger and she thought she could just walk away with that gift, take it anywhere. She thought she could pack all of Channer inside of her like some new prosthetic.
But now. Now the mere thought of leaving brings all her old weakness rushing back. The future opens before her and she feels herself devolving, curling up into some soft prehuman tadpole, cursed now with the memory of how it once felt to be made of steel.
It's not me. It never was. It was just the rift, using me...
"I guess," she says at last, "I just didn't change that much after all..."
Lubin looks as though he's almost smiling.
His expression awakens some vague, impatient anger in her. "Why did you come back here anyway?" she demands. "You never gave a shit about what any of us did, or why. All you ever cared about was your own agenda, whatever that…"
Something clicks. Lubin's virtual smile disappears.
"You know." Clarke says. "You know what this is all about."
"No."
"Bullshit, Ken. Mike was right, you know way too much. You knew exactly what question to ask the Drybacks about the CPU on that bomb, you knew all about megatons and bubble diameters. So what's going on?"
"I don't know. Really." Lubin shakes his head. "I do have—expertise, in certain kinds of operations. Why should that surprise you? Did you really think domestic violence was the only kind that would qualify someone for this job?"
There's a silence. "I don't believe you," Clarke says at last.
"That's your prerogative," Lubin says, almost sadly.
"And why," she asks, "did you come back?"
"Just now?" Lubin shrugs. "I wanted— I wanted to say I'm sorry. About Karl."
"Karl? Yeah. Me too. But that's over and done with."
"He really cared about you, Lenie. He would have come back eventually. I know that."
She looks at him curiously. "What do you—"
"But I'm conditioned for tight security, you see, and Acton could see right inside. All the things I did…before. He could see it, there wasn't—"
Acton could see— "Ken. We've never been able to tune you in. You know that."
He nods, rubbing his hands together. In the dim blue light Clarke can see sweat beading on his forehead.
"We get this training," he says, his voice barely a whisper. "Ganzfeld interrogation's a standard tool in corporate and national arsenals, you've got to be able to— to block the signals. I could, mostly, with you people. Or I'd just stay away so it wouldn't be a problem."
What is he saying, Lenie Clarke asks herself, already knowing. What is he saying?
"But Karl, he just— he dropped his inhibitors way too— I couldn't keep him out."
He rubs his face. Clarke has never seen him so fidgety.
"You know that feeling you get," Lubin says, "when you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar? Or in bed with someone else's lover? There's a formula for it. Some special combination of neurotransmitters. When you feel, you know, you've been--found out."
Oh my God.
"I've got a— sort of a conditioned reflex," he tells her. "It kicks in whenever those chemicals build up. I don't really have control over it. And when I feel, down in my gut, that I've been discovered, I just..."
Five percent, Acton told her, long ago. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll be okay.
"I don't really have a choice..." Lubin says.
Five or ten percent. No more.
"I thought— I thought he was just worried about calcium depletion," Clarke whispers.
"I'm sorry." Lubin doesn't move at all, now. "I thought, coming down here—I thought it'd be safest for everyone, you know? It would have been, if Karl hadn't…"
She looks at him, numbed and distant. "How can you tell me this, Ken? Doesn't this, this confession of yours constitute a security breach?"
He stands up, suddenly. For a moment she thinks he's going to kill her.
"No," he says.
"Because your gut tells you I'm as good as dead anyway," she says. "Whatever happens. So no harm done."
He turns away. "I'm sorry," he says again, starting down the ladder.
Her own body seems very far away. But a small, hot coal is growing in all that dead space.
"What if I changed my mind, Ken?" she calls after him, rising. "What if I decided to leave with the rest of you? That'd get the old killer reflex going, wouldn't it?"
He stops on the ladder. "Yes," he says at last. "But you won't."
She stands completely still, watching him. He doesn't even look back.
* * *
She's outside. This isn't part of the plan. The plan is to stay inside, like they told her to. The plan is to sit there, just asking for it.
But here she is at the Throat, swimming along Main Street. The generators loom over her like sheltering giants. She bathes in their warm sodium glow, passes through clouds of flickering microbes, barely noticed. Beneath her, monstrous benthos filter life from the water, as oblivious to her as she is to them. Once she passes a multicolored starfish, beautifully twisted, stitched together from leftovers. It lies folded back against itself, two arms facing upward; a few remaining tube feet wave feebly in the current. Cottony fungus thrives in a jagged patchwork of seams.
At the edge of the smoker her thermistor reads 54°C.
It tells her nothing. The smoker could sleep for a hundred years or go off in the next second. She tries to tune in to the bottom-dwellers, glean whatever instinctive insights Acton could steal, but she's never been sensitive to invertebrate minds. Perhaps that skill comes only to those who've crossed the ten-percent threshold.
She's never risked going down this one before.
It's a tight fit. The inside of the chimney grabs her before she gets three meters. She twists and squirms; soft chunks of sulfur and calcium break free from the walls. She inches down, headfirst. Her arms are pinned over her head like black jointed antenna. There's no room to keep them at her sides.
She's plugging the vent so tightly that no light can filter in from Main Street. She trips her headlight on. A flocculent snowstorm swirls in the beam.
A meter further down, the tunnel zigs right. She doesn't think she'll be able to navigate the turn. Even if she can, she knows the passage is blocked. She knows, because a lime-encrusted skeletal foot protrudes around the corner.
She wriggles forward. There's a sudden roaring, and for one paralyzed moment she thinks the smoker is starting to blow. But the roar is in her head; something's plugging her electrolyser intake, depriving her of oxygen. It's only Lenie Clarke, passing out.
She shakes back and forth, a spasm centimeters in amplitude. It's enough; her intake is clear again. And as an added bonus, she's gotten far enough to see around the corner.
Acton's boiled skeleton clogs the passageway, crusty with mineral deposits. Blobs of melted copolymer stick to the remains like old candle wax. Somewhere in there, at least one piece of human technology is still working, screaming back to Beebe's deafened sensors.
She can't reach him. She can barely even touch him. But somehow, even through the encrustations, she can see that his neck has been neatly snapped.
Reptile
It has forgotten what it was.
Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there's nothing around to use it? This one doesn't remember where it comes from. It doesn't remember the ones that drove it out so long ago. It doesn't remember the overlord that once sat atop its spinal cord, that gelatinous veneer of language and culture and denied origins. It doesn't even remember the slow deterioration of that oppressor, its final dissolution into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now even those have fallen silent.
Not much comes down from the cortex any more. Low-level impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca's area mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by a black ocean hot and mercurial as live steam, cold and sluggish as antifreeze. All that's left now is pure reptile.
It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find, somehow knowing what to avoid and what to consume. Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted residues; newer skin, laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean with aliquots of distilled sea water.
It's dying, of course, but slowly. It wouldn't care much about that, even if it knew.
* * *
Like all living things, it has a purpose. It is a guardian. It forgets, sometimes, exactly what it is supposed to be protecting. No matter. It knows it when it sees it.
It sees her now, crawling from a hole in the bottom of the world. She looks much like the others, but it has always been able to tell the difference. Why protect her, and not the others? It doesn't care. Reptiles never question motives. They only act on them.
She doesn't seem to know that it is here, watching.
The reptile is privy to certain insights that should, by rights, be denied it. It was exiled before the others tweaked their neurochemistry into more sensitive modes. And yet all that those changes did, in the end, was to make certain weak signals more easily discernible against a loud and chaotic background. Since the reptile's cortex shut down, background noise has been all but silenced. The signals are as weak as ever, but the static has disappeared. And so the reptile has, without realizing it, absorbed a certain muddy awareness of distant attitudes.
It feels, somehow, that this place has become dangerous, although it doesn't know how. It feels that the other creatures have disappeared. And yet, the one it protects is still here. With far less comprehension than a mother cat relocating her endangered kittens, the reptile tries to take its charge to safety.
It's easier when she stops struggling. Eventually she even allows it to pull her away from the bright lights, back towards the place she belongs. She makes sounds, strange and familiar; the reptile listens at first, but they make its head hurt. After a while she stops. Silently, the reptile draws her through sightless nightscapes.
Dim light dawns ahead. And sound; faint at first, but growing. A soft whine. Gurgles. And something else, a pinging noise— metallic, Broca murmurs, although it doesn't know what that means.
A copper beacon glares out from the darkness ahead — too coarse, too steady, far brighter than the bioluminescent embers that usually light the way. It turns the rest of the world stark black. The reptile usually avoids this place. But this is where she comes from. This is safety for her, even though to the reptile, it represents something completely—
From the cortex, a shiver of remembrance.
The beacon shines down from several meters above the sea bed. At closer range it resolves into a string of smaller lights stretched in an arc, like photophores on the flank of some enormous fish.
Broca sends down more noise: Sodium floods.
Something huge looms behind those lights, bloating gray against black. It hangs above the sea bed like a great smooth boulder, impossibly buoyant, encircled by lights at its equator. Striated filaments connect it to the bottom.
And something else, smaller but even more painfully bright, is coming down out of the sky.
"ThisisCSSForcipigeroutofAstoriaAnybodyhome?"
The reptile shoots back into the darkness, mud billowing behind it. It retreats a good twenty meters before a dim realization sinks in.
Broca's area knows those sounds. It doesn't understand them — Broca's never much good at anything but mimicry — but it's heard something like them before. The reptile feels an unaccustomed twitch. It's been a long time since curiosity was any use.
It turns and faces back from whence it fled. Distance has smeared the lights into a diffuse, dull glow. She's back there somewhere, unprotected.
It edges back towards the beacon. One light divides again into many; that dim, ominous outline still lurks behind them. And the thing from the sky is settling down on top of it, making noises at once frightening and familiar.
She floats in the light, waiting. Dedicated, afraid, the reptile comes to her.
"Heylook." The reptile flinches, but holds its ground this time. "Ididn'tmeentoostartlyou, butnobodysanseringinside. Imsupposdtopickyouguysup."
She glides up towards the thing from the sky, comes to rest in front of the shiny round part on its front. The reptile can't see what she's doing there. Hesitantly, its eyes aching with the unaccustomed brightness, it starts after her.
But she turns and meets it, coming back. She reaches out, guides it down along the bulging surface, past the lights that ring its middle (too bright, too bright), down towards—
Broca's Area is gibbering nonstop, eeeebbeeebeebebeebe beebe, and now there's something else, too, something inside the reptile, stirring. Instinct. Feeling. Not so much memory as reflex—
It pulls back, suddenly frightened.
She tugs at it. She makes strange noises: togetinsydjerrycumminsiditsallrite— The reptile resists, uncertainly at first, then vigorously. It slides along the gray wall, now a cliff, now an overhang; it scrabbles for purchase, catches hold of some protuberance, clings against this strange hard surface. Its head darts back and forth, back and forth, between light and shadow.
"—onGerryyouvgaw toocome inside—"
The reptile freezes. Inside. It knows that word. It even understands it, somehow. Broca's not alone any more, something else is reaching out from the temporal lobe and tapping in. Something up there actually knows what Broca is talking about.
What she's talking about.
"Gerry—"
It knows that sound too.
"—please—"
That sound comes from a long time ago.
"—trust me— is there any of you left in there? Anything at all?"
Back when the reptile was part of something larger, not an it at all, then, but—
—he.
Clusters of neurons, long dormant, sparkle in the darkness. Old, forgotten subsystems stutter and reboot.
I—
"Gerry?"
My name. That's my name. He can barely think over the sudden murmuring in his head. There are parts of him still asleep, parts that won't talk, still other parts completely washed away. He shakes his head, trying to clear it. The new parts — no, the old parts, the very old parts that went away and now they've come back and won't shut the fuck up — are all clamoring for attention.
Everywhere is so bright. Everywhere hurts. Everywhere...
Words scroll through his mind: The lights are on. Nobody's home.
The lights come on, flickering.
He can catch glimpses of sick, rotten things squirming in his head. Old memories grind screeching against thick layers of corrosion. Something lurches into sudden focus: a fist. The feel of bones, breaking in his face. The ocean in his mouth, warm and somehow brackish. A boy with a shockprod. A girl covered in bruises.
Other boys.
Other girls.
Other fists.
Everything hurts, everywhere.
Something's trying to pry his fingers free. Something's trying to drag him inside. Something wants to bring all this back. Something wants to take him home.
Words come to him, and he lets them out: "don't you fucking TOUCH ME!"
He pushes his tormentor away, makes a desperate grab for empty water. The darkness is too far away; he can see his shadow stretching along the bottom, black and solid and squirming against the light. He kicks as hard as he can. Nothing grabs him. After a while the light fades away.
But the voices shout as loud as ever.
Skyhop
Beebe yawns like a black pit between his feet. Something rustles down there; he catches hints of movement, darkness shifting against darkness. Suddenly something glints up at him; two ivory smudges of reflected light, all but lost against that black background. They hover there a moment, then begin to rise. A pale face resolves around them.
She climbs out of Beebe, dripping, and seems to bring some of the darkness with her. It follows her to the corner of the passenger compartment and hangs around her like a blanket. She doesn't say anything.
Joel glances into the pit, back at the rifter. "Is anyone else, er..."
She shakes her head, a gesture so subtle he nearly misses it.
"There was— I mean, the other one..." This has to be the rifter who was hanging off his viewport a few minutes ago: Clarke, her shoulder patch says. But the other one, the one that shot off like a refugee on the wrong side of the fence— that one's still close by, according to sonar. Hugging the bottom, thirty meters beyond the light. Just sitting there.
"There's no one else coming," she says. Her voice sounds small and dead.
"No one?" Two accounted for, out of a max complement of six? He cranks up the range on his display; nobody further out, either. Unless they're all hiding behind rocks or something.
He looks back down Beebe's throat. Or they could all be hiding right down there, like trolls, waiting...
He abruptly drops the hatch, spins it tight. "Clarke, right? What's going on down here?"
She blinks at him. "You think I know?" She seems almost surprised. "I thought you'd be able to tell me."
"All I know is, the GA's paying me a shitload to do graveyard on short notice." Joel climbs forward, drops into the pilot's couch. Checks sonar. That weird fucker is still out there.
"I don't think I'm supposed to leave anyone behind," he says.
"You won't be," Clarke says.
"Will too. Got him right there in my sights."
She doesn't answer. He turns around and looks at her.
"Fine," she says at last. "You go out and get him."
Joel stares at her for a few seconds. I don't really want to know, he decides at last.
He turns without another word and blows the tanks. The 'scaphe, suddenly buoyant, strains against the docking clamps. Joel frees it with a tap on his panel. The 'scaphe leaps away from Beebe like something living, wobbles against viscous resistance, and begins climbing.
"You..." From behind him.
Joel turns.
"You really don't know what's going on?" Clarke asks.
"They called me about twelve hours ago. Midnight run to Beebe, they said. When I got to Astoria they told me to evacuate everyone. They said you'd all be ready and waiting."
Her lips curve up a bit. Not exactly a smile, but probably as close as these psychos ever come. It looks good on her, in a cold distant sort of way. Get rid of the eyecaps and he could easily see himself putting her into his VR program.
"What happened to everyone else?" he risks.
"Nothing," she said. "We just got— a bit paranoid."
Joel grunts. "Don't blame you. Put me down there for a year, paranoia'd be the least of my problems."
That brief, ghostly smile again.
"But really," he says, pushing it. "Why's everyone staying behind? This some kind of a labor action? One of those—" —what did they used to call them— "strike thingies?"
"Something like that." Clarke looks up at the overhead bulkhead. "How long to the surface?"
"A good twenty minutes, I'm afraid. These GA 'scaphes are fucking dirigibles. Everyone else is out there racing with dolphins, and the most I can manage with this thing is a fast wallow. Still—" he tries a disarming grin— "there's an up side. They're paying me by the hour."
"Hooray for you," she says.
Floodlight
It's almost silent again.
Little by little, the voices have stopped screaming. Now they converse among themselves in whispers, discussing things that mean nothing to him. It's okay, though. He's used to being ignored. He's glad to be ignored.
You're safe, Gerry. They can't hurt you.
What— who—
They've all gone. It's just us now.
You—
It's me, Gerry. Shadow. I was wondering when you'd come back.
He shakes his head. The faintest light still leaks over his shoulder. He turns, not so much toward light as toward a subtle lessening of darkness.
She was trying to help you, Gerry. She was only trying to help.
She—
Lenie. You're her guardian angel. Remember?
I'm not sure. I think—
But you left her back there. You ran away.
She wanted— I— not inside...
He feels his legs moving. Water pushes against his face. He moves forward. A soft hole open in the darkness ahead. He can see shapes inside it.
That's where she lives, Shadow says. Remember?
He creeps back into the light. There were noises before, loud and painful. There was something big and dark, that moved. Now there is only this great ball hanging overhead, like, like,
—like a fist—
He stops, frightened. But everything's quiet, so quiet he can hear faint cries drifting across the seabed. He remembers: there's a hole in the ocean, a little ways from here, that talks to him sometimes. He's never understood what it says.
Go on, Shadow urges. She went inside.
She's gone—
You can't tell from out here. You have to get in close.
The underside of the sphere is a cool shadowy refuge; the equatorial lights can't reach all the way around its convex surface. In the overlapping shadows on the south pole, something shimmers enticingly.
Go on.
He pushes off the bottom, glides into the cone of shadow beneath the object. A bright shiny disk a meter across, facing down, wriggles inside a circular rim. He looks up into it.
Something looks back.
Startled, he twists down and away. The disk writhes in the sudden turbulence. He stops, turns back.
A bubble. That's all it is. A pocket of gas, trapped underneath the
—the airlock.
That's nothing to be scared of, Shadow tells him. That's how you get in.
Still nervous, he swims back underneath the sphere. The air pocket shines silver in the reflected light. A black wraith moves into view within it, almost featureless except for two empty white spaces where eyes should be. It reaches out to meet his outstretched hand. Two sets of fingertips touch, fuse, disappear. One arm is grafted onto its own reflection at the wrist. Fingers, on the other side of the looking glass, touch metal.
He pulls back his hand, fascinated. The wraith floats overhead, empty and untroubled.
He draws one hand to his face, runs an index finger from one ear to the tip of the jaw. A very long molecule, folded against itself, unzips.
The wraith's smooth black face splits open a few centimeters; what's underneath shows pale gray in the filtered light. He feels the familiar dimpling of his cheek in sudden cold.
He continues the motion, slashing his face from ear to ear. A great smiling gash opens below the wraith's eyespots. Unzipped, a flap of black membrane floats under its chin, anchored at the throat.
There's a pucker in the center of the skinned area. He moves his jaw; the pucker opens.
By now most of his teeth are gone. He's swallowed some, spat others out if they came loose when his face was unsealed. No matter. Most of the things he eats these days are even softer than he is. When the occasional mollusk or echinoderm proves too tough or too large to swallow whole, there are always hands. Thumbs still oppose.
But this is the first time he's actually seen that gaping, toothless ruin where a mouth used to be. He knows this isn't right, somehow.
What happened to me? What am I?
You're Gerry, Shadow says. You're my best friend. You killed me. Remember?
She's gone, Gerry realizes.
It's okay.
I know it is. I know.
You helped her, Gerry. She's safe now. You saved her.
I know. And he remembers something, small and vital, it that last instant before everything turns white as the sun:
—This is what you do when you really—
Sunrise
The lifter was still reeling CSS Forcipiger up into its belly when the news appeared on the main display. Joel checked it over, frowning, then deliberately looked outside. Gray predawn light was starting to wash out the eastern horizon.
When he looked back again, the information hadn't changed. "Shit. This doesn't make any sense at all."
"What?" Clarke said.
"We're not going back to Astoria. Or I am, but you're getting dropped off over the conshelf somewhere."
"What?" Clarke came forward, stopped just short of the cockpit.
"Says right here. We follow the usual course, but we dip down to zero altitude fifteen klicks offshore. You debark. Then I go on to Astoria."
"What's offshore?"
He checked. "Nothing. Water."
"Maybe a boat? A submarine?" Her voice went oddly dull on the last word.
"Maybe. No mention of it here, though." He grunted. "Maybe you're supposed to swim the rest of the way."
The lifter locked them tight. Tame thunderbolts exploded aft, superheating bladders of gas. The ocean began to fall away.
"So you're just going to dump me in the middle of the ocean," Clarke said coldly.
"It's not my decision."
"Of course not. You're just following orders."
Joel turned around. Her eyes stared back at him like twin snowscapes.
"You don't understand," he told her. "These aren't orders. I don't fly the lifter."
"Then what—"
"The pilot's a gel. It's not telling me to do anything. It's just bringing us up to speed on what it's doing, all on its own."
She didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "Is that the way it's done now? We take orders from machines?"
"Someone must have given the original order. The gel's following it. They haven't taken over yet. And besides," he added, "they're not exactly machines."
"Oh," she said softly. "I feel much better now."
Uncomfortably, Joel turned back to the console. "It is kind of odd, though."
"Really." Clarke didn't seem especially interested.
"Getting this from the gel, I mean. We've got a radio link. Why didn't someone just tell us?"
"Because your radio's out," Clarke said distantly.
Surprised, he checked the diagnostics. "No, it's working fine. In fact, I think I'll call in right now and ask what the fuck this is all about..."
Thirty seconds later he turned back to her. "How did you know?"
"Lucky guess." She didn't smile.
"Well the board's green, but I can't raise anyone. We're flying deaf." A doubt tickled the back of his mind. "Unless the gel's got access we don't, for some reason." He linked into the lifter's interface and called up that vehicle's afferent array. "Huh. What was that you said about machines giving the orders?"
That got her attention. "What is it?"
"The lifter got its orders through the Net."
"Isn't that risky? Why doesn't the GA just talk to it direct?"
"Dunno. It's as cut off as we are right now, but the last message came from this node here. Shit; that's another gel."
Clarke leaned forward, managing somehow not to touch him in the crowded space. "How can you tell?"
"The node address. BCC stands for biochemical cognition."
The display beeped twice, loudly.
"What's that?" Clarke said.
Sunlight flooded up from the ocean. It shone deep and violent blue.
"What the fuck—"
The cabin filled with computer screams. The altimeter readout flashed crimson and plummeted. We're falling, Joel thought, and then, no, we can't be. No acceleration.
The ocean's rising...
The display was a blizzard of data, swirling by too fast for human eyes. Somewhere overhead the gel was furiously processing options that might keep them alive. A sudden lurch: Joel grabbed useless submarine controls and hung on for dear life. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clarke flying back towards the rear bulkhead.
The lifter clawed itself into the sky, lightning crackling along its length. The ocean raced after it, an enormous glowing bulge swelling towards the ventral port. Its murky light brightened as Joel watched; blue intensifying to green, to yellow.
To white.
A hole opened in the Pacific. The sun rose in its center. Joel flung his hands in front of his eyes, saw the bones there silhouetted in orange flesh. The lifter spun like a kicked toy, rammed deep into the sky on a pillar of steam. Outside, the air screamed. The lifter screamed back, skidding.
But it didn't break.
Somehow, after endless seconds, the keel steadied. The readouts were still online; atmospheric disturbance, they said, almost eight kilometers away now, bearing one-twenty. Joel looked out the starboard port. Off in the distance, the glowing ocean was ponderously collapsing upon itself. Ring-shaped waves expanded past beneath his feet, racing to the horizon.
Back where they had started, cumulus grew into the sky like a soft gray beanstalk. From here, against the darkness, it looked almost peaceful.
"Clarke," he said, "we made it."
He turned in his chair. The rifter was curled into a fetal position against the bulkhead. She didn't move.
"Clarke?"
But it wasn't Clarke that answered him. The lifter's interface was bleating again.
Unregistered contact, it complained.
Bearing 125x87 V1440 6V5.8m1sec-2 range 13000m
Collision imminent 12000m
11000m
10000m
Barely visible through the main viewport, a white cloudy dot caught a high-altitude shaft of morning sunlight. It looked like a contrail, seen head-on.
"Ah, shit," Joel said.
Jericho
One whole wall was window. The city spread out beyond like a galactic arm. Patricia Rowan locked the door behind her, sagged against it with sudden fatigue.
Not yet. Not yet. Soon.
She went through her office and turned out all the lights. City glow spilled in through the window, denied her any refuge in darkness.
Patricia Rowan stared back. A tangled grid of metropolitan nerves stretched to the horizon, every synapse incandescent. Her eyes wandered southwest, selected a bearing. She stared until her eyes watered, almost afraid even to blink for fear of missing something.
That was where it would come from.
Oh God. If only there was another way.
It could have worked. The modellers had put even money on pulling this off without so much as a broken window. All those faults and fractures between here and there would work in their favor, firebreaks to keep the tremor from getting this far. Just wait for the right moment; a week, a month. Timing. That's all it would've taken.
Timing, and a calculating slab of meat that followed human rules instead of making up its own.
But she couldn't blame the gel. It simply didn't know any better, according to the systems people; it was just doing what it thought it was supposed to. And by the time anybody knew differently— after Scanlon's cryptic interview with that fucking thing had looped in her head for the hundredth time, after she'd taken the recording down to CC, after their faces had gone puzzled and confused and then, suddenly, pale and panicky— by then it had been too late. The window was closed. The machine was engaged. And a lone GA shuttle, officially docked securely at Astoria, was somehow showing up on satcams hovering over the Juan de Fuca Rift.
She couldn't blame the gel, so she tried to blame CC. "After all that programming, how could this thing be working for ßehemoth? Why didn't you catch it? Even Scanlon figured it out, for Christ's sake!" But they'd been too scared for intimidation. You gave us the job, they'd said. You didn't tell us what was at stake. You didn't even really tell us what we were doing. Scanlon came at this from a whole different angle, who knew the head cheese had a thing for simple systems? We never taught it that...
Her watch chimed softly. "You asked to be informed, Ms. Rowan. Your family got off okay."
"Thank you," she said, and killed the connection.
A part of her felt guilty for saving them. It hardly seemed fair that the only ones to escape the holocaust would be the beloved of one of its architects. But she was only doing what any mother would. Probably more: she was staying behind.
That wasn't much. It probably wouldn't even kill her. The GA's buildings were built with the Big One in mind. Most of the buildings in this district would probably still be standing this time tomorrow. Of course, the same couldn't be said for much of Hongcouver or SeaTac or Victoria.
Tomorrow, she would help pick up the pieces as best she could.
Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe the quake won't be so bad. Who knows, that gel down there might even have chosen tonight anyway...
Please...
Patricia Rowan had seen earthquakes before. A strike-slip fault off Peru had rebounded the time she'd been in Lima on the Upwell project; the moment magnitude of that quake had been close to nine. Every window in the city had exploded.
She actually hadn't had a chance to see much of the damage then. She'd been trapped in her hotel when forty-six stories of glass collapsed onto the streets outside. It was a good hotel, five stars all the way; the ground-level windows, at least, had held. Rowan remembered looking out from the lobby into a murky green glacier of broken glass, seven meters deep, packed tight with blood and wreckage and butchered body parts jammed between piecemeal panes. One brown arm was embedded right next to the lobby window, waving, three meters off the ground. It was missing three fingers and a body. She'd spied the fingers a meter away, pressed floating sausages, but she hadn't been able to tell which of the bodies, if any, would have connected to that shoulder.
She remembered wondering how that arm had got so high off the ground. She remembered vomiting into a wastebasket.
It couldn't happen here, of course. This was N'AmPac; there were standards. Every building in the lower mainland had windows designed to break inwards in the event of a quake. It wasn't an ideal solution— especially to those who happened to be inside at the time— but it was the best compromise available. Glass can't get up nearly as much speed in a single room as it can racing down the side of a skyscraper.
Small blessings.
If only there was some other way to sterilize the necessary volume. If only ßehemoth didn't, by it's very nature, live in unstable areas. If only N'AmPac corpses weren't authorized to use nukes.
If only the vote hadn't been unanimous.
Priorities. Billions of people. Life as we know it.
It was hard, though. The decisions were obvious and correct, tactically, but it had been hard to keep Beebe's crew quarantined down there. It had been hard to decide to sacrifice them. And now that they somehow seemed to be getting out anyway, it was—
Hard? Hard to bring at 9.5 moment-magitude quake down on the heads of ten million people? Just hard?
There was no word for it.
But she had done it, somehow. The only moral alternative. It was still just murder in small doses, compared to what might be necessary down the—
No. This is being done so nothing will be necessary down the road.
Maybe that was why she could bring herself to do it. Or maybe, somehow, reality had finally trickled down from her brain to her gut, inspired it to take the necessary steps. Certainly, something had hit her down there.
I wonder what Scanlon would say. It was too late to ask him now. She'd never told him, of course. She was never even tempted. To tell him that they knew, that his secret was out, that once again he just didn't matter that much— somehow, that would have been worse than killing him. She'd had no desire to hurt the poor man.
Her watch chimed again. "Override," it said.
Oh God. Oh God.
It had started, out there beyond the lights, under three black kilometers of seawater. That crazy kamikaze gel, interrupted in the midst of one of its endless imaginary games: forget that shit. Time to blow.
And perhaps, confused, it was saying Not now, it's the wrong time, the damage. But it didn't matter any more. Another computer— a stupid one this time, inorganic and programmable and completely trustworthy— would send the requisite sequence of numbers and the gel would be right out of the loop, no matter what it thought.
Or maybe it just saluted and stood aside. Maybe it didn't care. Who knew what those monsters thought any more?
"Detonation," said the watch.
The city went dark.
The abyss rushed in, black and hungry. One isolated cluster sparkled defiantly in the sudden void; a hospital perhaps, running on batteries. A few private vehicles, self-powered antiques, staggered like fireflies along streets gone suddenly blind. The rapitrans grid was still glowing too, more faintly than usual.
Rowan checked her watch; only an hour since the decision. Only an hour since their hand had been forced. Somehow, it seemed a lot longer.
"Tactical feed from seismic 31," she said. "Descramble."
Her eyes filled with information. A false-color map snapped into focus in the air before her, a scarred ocean floor laid bare and stretched vertically. One of those scars was shuddering.
Beyond the virtual display, beyond the window, a section of cityscape flickered weakly alight. Further north, another sector began to shine. Rowan's minions were frantically rerouting power from Gorda and Mendocino, from equatorial sunfarms, from a thousand small dams scattered throughout the Cordillera. It would take time, though. More than they had.
Perhaps we should have warned them. Even an hour's advance notice would have been something. Not enough time for evac, of course, but maybe enough time to take the china off the shelves. Enough time to line up some extra backups, for all the good they'd do. Lots of time for the entire coast to panic if the word got out. Which was why not even her own family had any idea of the reason behind their sudden surprise trip to the east coast.
The sea floor rippled in Rowan's eyes, as though made of rubber. Floating just above it, a translucent plane representing the ocean's surface was shedding rings. The two shockwaves raced each other across the display, the seabed tremor in the lead. It bore down on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, crashed into it, sent weaker tremors shivering off along the fault at right angles. It seemed to hesitate there for a moment, and Rowan almost dared to hope that the Zone had firewalled it.
But now the Zone itself began to slide, slow, ponderous, almost indiscernible at first. Way down in the moho, five hundred-year-old fingernails began tearing painfully free. Five centuries of pent-up tension, slumping.
Next stop, Vancouver Island.
Something unthinkable was rebounding along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Kelp harvesters and supertankers would be sensing impossible changes in the depth of the water column below them. If there were humans on board, they'd have a few moments to reflect on how utterly useless a ninety second warning can be.
It was more than the Strip got.
The tactical display didn't show any of the details, of course. It showed a brown ripple sweeping across coastal bedrock and moving inland. It showed a white arc gliding in behind, at sea level. It didn't show the ocean rearing up offshore like a range of foothills. It didn't show sea level turning on edge. It didn't show a thirty-meter wall of ocean smashing five million refugees into jelly.
Rowan saw it all anyway.
She blinked three times, eyes stinging: the display vanished. In the distance the red pinpoints of ambulance and police lights were flashing here and there across the comatose grid; whether in response to alarms already sounded or merely pending, she didn't know. Distance and soundproofing blocked any siren song.
Very gently, the floor began to rock.
It was almost a lullaby at first, back and forth, building gradually to a swaying crescendo that nearly threw her off her feet. The structure complained on all sides, concrete growling against girder, more felt that heard. She spread her arms, balancing, embracing space. She couldn't bring herself to cry.
The great window burst outward in a million tinkling fragments and showered itself into the night. The air filled with glass spores and the sound of windchimes.
There was no glass on the carpet.
Oh Christ, she realized dully. The contractors fucked up. All that money spent on imploding anti-earthquake glass, and they put it in backwards…
Off to the southwest, a small orange sun was rising. Patricia Rowan sagged to her knees on the pristine carpet. Suddenly, at last, her eyes were stinging. She let the tears come, profoundly grateful; still human, she told herself. I'm still human.
The wind washed over her. It carried the faint sounds of people and machinery, screaming.
Detritus
The ocean is green. Lenie Clarke doesn't know how long she's been unconscious, but they can't have sunk more than a hundred meters. The ocean is still green.
Forcipiger falls slowly through the water, nose-down, its atmosphere bleeding away through a dozen small wounds. A crack the shape of a lightning bolt runs across the forward viewport; Clarke can barely see it through the water rising in the cockpit. The forward end of the 'scaphe has become the bottom of a well. Clarke braces her feet against the back of a passenger seat and leans against a vertical deck. The ceiling lightstrip flickers in front of her. She's managed to get the pilot up out of the water and strapped into another seat. At least one of his legs is definitely broken. He hangs there like a soaked marionette, still unconscious. He continues to breathe. She doesn't know whether he'll actually wake up again.
Maybe better if he doesn't, she reflects, and giggles.
That wasn't very funny, she tells herself, and giggles again.
Oh shit. I'm looped.
She tries to concentrate. She can focus on isolated things: a single rivet in front of her. The sound of metal, creaking. But they take up all her attention, somehow. Whatever she happens to be looking at swells up and fills her world. She can barely think of anything else.
Hundred meters, she manages at last. Hull breach. Pressure— up—
Nitrogen—
—narcosis—
She bends down to check the atmosphere controls on the wall. They're sideways. She finds this vaguely amusing, but she doesn't know why. Anyhow, they don't seem to work.
She bends down to an access panel, slips, bounces painfully down into the cockpit with a splash. Occasional readouts twinkle on the submerged panels. They're pretty, but the longer she looks at them the more her chest hurts. Eventually she makes the connection, pulls her head back up into atmosphere.
The access panel is right in front of her. She fumbles at it a couple of times, gets it open. Hydrox tanks lie side-by-side in military formation, linked together into some sort of cascade system. There's a big yellow handle at one end. She pulls at it. It gives, unexpectedly. Clarke loses her balance and slides back underwater.
There's a ventilator duct right in front of her face. She's not sure, but she thinks the last time she was down here it didn't have all these bubbles coming out of it. She thinks that's a good sign. She decides to stay here for a while, and watch the bubbles. Something's bothering her, though. Something in her chest.
Oh, that's right. She keeps forgetting. She can't breathe.
Somehow she gets her face seal zipped up. The last thing she remembers is her lung shriveling away, and water rushing through her chest.
* * *
The next time she comes up, two thirds of the cockpit is flooded. She rises into the aft compartment, peels the 'skin off her face. Water drains from the left side of her chest; atmosphere fills the right.
Overhead, the pilot is moaning.
She climbs up to him, swings his seat around so that he's lying on his back, facing the rear bulkhead. She locks it into position, tries to keep his broken leg reasonably straight.
"Ow," he cries.
"Sorry. Try not to move. Your leg's broken."
"No shit. Oww." He shivers. "Christ I'm cold." Clarke sees it sink in. "Oh Christ. We're breached." He tries to move, manages to twist his head around before some other injury twists back. He relaxes, wincing.
"The cockpit's flooding," she tells him. "Slowly, so far. Hang on a second." She climbs back down and pulls at the edge of the cockpit hatch. It sticks. Clarke keeps pulling. The hatch comes loose, starts to swing down.
"Wait a second," the pilot says.
Clarke pushes the hatch back against the bulkhead.
"You know those controls?" the pilot asks.
"I know the standard layout."
"Anything still working down there? Comm? Propulsion?"
She kneels down and ducks her head underwater. A couple of readouts that were alive before have gone out. She scans what's left.
"Waldos. Exterior floods. Sonobuoy," she reports when she comes back up. "Everything else is dead."
"Shit." His voice is shaking. "Well, we can send up the buoy, anyway. Not that they're about to launch a rescue."
She reaches through the rising water and trips the control. Something thuds softly on the outside of the hull. "Why wouldn't they? They sent you to pick us up. If we'd just gotten away before the thing went off..."
"We did," the pilot says.
Clarke looks around the compartment. "Uh—"
The pilot snorts. "Look, I don't know what the fuck you guys were doing with a nuke down there, or why you couldn't wait a bit longer to set it off, but we got away from it okay. Something shot us down afterwards."
Clarke straightens. "Shot us?"
"A missile. Air-to-air. Came right out of the stratosphere." His voice is shaking with the cold. "I don't think it actually hit the 'scaphe. Blew the shit out of the lifter, though. I barely managed to get us down to a safe level before—"
"But that doesn't— why rescue us, then shoot us down?"
He doesn't say anything. His breathing is fast and loud.
Clarke pulls again at the cockpit hatch. It swings down against the opening with a slight creak.
"That doesn't sound good," the pilot remarks.
"Hang on a sec." Clarke spins the wheel; the hatch sinks down against the mimetic seal with a sigh. "I think I've got it." She climbs back up to the rear bulkhead.
"Christ I'm cold." The pilot says. He looks at her. "Oh, shit. How far down are we?"
Clarke looks through one of the compartment's tiny portholes. Green is fading. Blue is in ascension.
"Hundred fifty meters. Maybe two."
"I should be narked."
"I switched the mix. We're on hydrox."
The pilot shudders, violently. "Look, Clarke, I'm freezing. One of those lockers has got survival suits."
She finds them, unrolls one. The pilot is trying to unhook himself from the seat, without success. She tries to help.
"Ow!"
"Your other leg's injured too. Maybe just a sprain."
"Shit! I'm coming apart and you just stuffed me up here? Didn't the GA even get you medtech training, for Christ's sake?"
She backs away: one awkward step to the back of the next passenger seat. It doesn't seem like a good time to admit that she was narked when she put him there.
"Look, I'm sorry," he says after a moment. "It's just— this is not a great situation, you know? Could you just unzip that suit, and spread it over me?"
She does.
"That's better." He's still shivering, though. "I'm Joel."
"I'm Cl— Lenie," she replies.
"So, Lenie. We're on our own, our systems are all out, and we're headed for the bottom. Any suggestions?"
She can't think of any.
"Okay. Okay." Joel takes a few deep breaths. "How much hydrox do we have?"
She climbs down and checks the gauge on the cascade. "Sixteen thousand. What's our volume?"
"Not much." He frowns, acting as though he's only trying to concentrate. "You said two hundred meters, that puts us at, lessee, twenty atmospheres when you sealed the hatch. Should keep us going for a hundred minutes or so." He tries a laugh; it doesn't come off. "If they are sending a rescue, they'd better do it pretty fucking fast."
She plays along. "It could be worse. How long would it last if we hadn't sealed the hatch until, say, a thousand meters?"
Shaking. "Ooh. Twenty minutes. And the bottom's close to four thousand around here, and that far down it'd last, say it'd last, five minutes, tops." He gulps air. "Hundred and eight minutes isn't so bad. A lot can happen in a hundred and eight minutes..."
"I wonder if they got away," Clarke whispers.
"What did you say?"
"There were others. My—friends." She shakes her head. "They were going to swim back."
"To the mainland? That's insane!"
"No. It could work, if only they got far enough before—"
"When did they leave?" Joel asks.
"About eight hours before you came."
Joel says nothing.
"They could have made it," Lenie insists, hating him for his silence.
"Lenie, at that range—I don't think so."
"It's possible. You can't just—oh, no…"
"What?" Joel twists in his harness, tries to see what she's looking at. "What?"
A meter and a half below Lenie Clarke's feet, a needle of seawater shoots up from the edge of the cockpit hatch. Two more erupt as she watches.
Beyond the porthole, the sea has turned deep blue.
* * *
The ocean squeezes into Forcipiger, bullies the atmosphere into tighter and tighter corners. It never lets up.
Blue is fading. Soon, black will be all that's left.
Lenie Clarke can see Joel's eye on the hatch. Not the leaky traitor that let the enemy in past the cockpit; that's under almost two meters of icewater now. No, Joel's watching the ventral docking hatch that once opened and closed on Beebe Station. It sits embedded in the deck-turned-wall, integrity uncompromised, the water just beginning to lap at its lower edge. And Lenie Clarke knows exactly what Joel is thinking, because she's thinking it too.
"Lenie," he says.
"Right here."
"You ever try to kill yourself?"
She smiles. "Sure. Hasn't everyone?"
"Didn't work, though."
"Apparently not," Clarke concurs.
"What happened?" Joel asks. He's shivering again, the water's almost up to him, but other than that his voice seems calm.
"Not much. I was eleven. Plastered a bunch of derms all over my body. Passed out. Woke up in an MA ward."
"Shit. One step up from refmed."
"Yeah, well, we can't all be rich. Besides, it wasn't that bad. They even had counsellors on staff. I saw one myself."
"Yeah?" His voice is starting to shake again. "What'd she say?"
"He. He told me the world was full of people who needed him a lot more than I did, and next time I wanted attention maybe I could do it in some way that didn't cost the taxpayer."
"S-shit. What an as—asshole." Joel's got the shakes again.
"Not really. He was right. And I never tried it again, so it must've worked." Clarke slips into the water. "I'm going to change the mix. You look like you're starting to spazz again."
"Len—"
But she's gone before he can finish.
She slips down to the bottom of the compartment, tweaks the valves she finds there. High pressure turns oxygen to poison; the deeper they go, the less of it that air-breathers can tolerate without going into convulsions. This is the second time she's had to lean out the mixture. By now, she and Joel are only breathing one percent O2.
If he lives long enough, though, there'll be other things she can't control. Joel isn't equipped with rifter neuroinhibitors.
She has to go up and face him again. She's holding her breath, there's no point in switching on her electrolyser for a measly twenty or thirty seconds. She's tempted to do it anyway, tempted to just stay down here. He can't ask her as long as she stays down here. She's safe.
But of all the things she's been in her life, she's never had to admit to being a coward.
She surfaces. Joel's still staring at the hatch. He opens his mouth to speak.
"Hey, Joel," she says quickly, "you sure you don't want me to switch over? It really doesn't make sense for me to use your air when I don't have to."
He shakes his head. "I don't want to spend my last few minutes alive listening to a machine voice, Lenie. Please. Just— stay with me."
She looks away from him, and nods.
"Fuck, Lenie," he says. "I'm so scared."
"I know," she says softly.
"This waiting, it's just— God, Lenie, you wouldn't put a dog through this. Please."
She closes her eyes, waiting.
"Pop the hatch, Lenie."
She shakes her head. "Joe, I couldn't even kill myself. Not when I was eleven. Not— not even last night. How can I—"
"My legs are wrecked, Len. I can't feel anything else any more. I c-can barely even talk. Please."
"Why did they do this to us, Joel? What's going on?"
He doesn't answer.
"What has them so scared? Why are they so—"
He moves.
He lurches up, falls sideways. His arms reach out; one hand catches the edge of the hatch. The other catches the wheel in its center.
His legs twist grotesquely underneath him. He doesn't seem to notice.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I couldn't—"
He fumbles, get both hands on the wheel. "No problem."
"Oh God. Joel—"
He stares at the hatch. His fingers clench the wheel.
"You know something, Lenie Clarke?" There's cold in his voice, and fear, but there's a sudden hard determination there too.
She shakes her head. I don't know anything.
"I would have really liked to fuck you," he says.
She doesn't know what to say to that.
He spins the hatch. Pulls the lever.
The hatch falls into Forcipiger. The ocean falls after it. Somehow, Lenie Clarke's body has prepared itself when she wasn't looking.
His body jams back into hers. He might be struggling. Or it could just be the rush of the Pacific, playing with him. She doesn't know if he's alive or dead. But she holds onto him, blindly, the ocean spinning them around, until there isn't any doubt.
Its atmosphere gone, Forcipiger is accelerating. Lenie Clarke takes Joel's body by the hands, and draws it out through the hatch. It follows her into viscous space. The 'scaphe spins away below them, fading in moments.
With a gentle push, she sets the body free. It begins to drift slowly towards the surface. She watches it go.
Something touches her from behind. She can barely feel it through her 'skin.
She turns.
A slender, translucent tentacle wraps softly around her wrist. It fades away into a distance utterly black to most, slate gray to Lenie Clarke. She brings it to her. Its swollen tip fires sticky threads at her fingers.
She brushes it aside, follows the tentacle back through the water. She encounters other tentacles on the way, feeble, attenuate things, barely twitching against the currents. They all lead back to something long, and thick, and shadowy. She circles in.
A great column of writhing, wormlike stomachs, pulsing with faint bioluminescence.
Revolted, she smashes at it with one clenched fist. It reacts immediately, sheds squirming pieces of itself that flare and burn like fat fireflies. The central column goes instantly dark, pulling into itself. It pulses, descends in spurts, slinking away under cover of its own discarded flesh. Clarke ignores the sacrificial tidbits and pursues the main body. She hits it again. Again. The water fills with pulsing dismembered decoys. She ignores them all, keeps tearing at the central column. She doesn't stop until there's nothing left but swirling fragments.
Joel. Joel Kita. She realizes that she liked him. She barely knew him, but she liked him just the same.
And they just killed him.
They killed all of us, she thinks. Deliberately. They meant to. They didn't even tell us why.
It's all their fault. All of it.
Something ignites in Lenie Clarke. Everyone who's ever hit her, or raped her, or patted her on the head and said don't worry, everything will be fine comes to her in that moment. Everyone who ever pretended to be her friend. Everyone who pretended to be her lover. Everyone who ever used her, and stood on her back, and told each other they were so much better than she was. Everyone, feeding off her every time they so much as turned on the fucking lights.
They're all waiting, back on shore. They're just asking for it.
It was a little bit like this back when she beat the shit out of Jeanette Ballard. But that was nothing, that was just a taste of coming attractions. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.
Karl Acton's fear has come to pass. Lenie Clarke has been activated.
She doesn't know why the GA is so terrified of her. She only knows that they've stopped at nothing to keep her from getting back to the mainland. With any luck, they think they've succeeded. With any luck, they're not worried any more.
That'll change. Lenie Clarke swims down and east, towards her own resurrection.
