阅读 ‧ 电子书库

Atlantis is in the grip of a patchwork blight. Parts of its colossal structure continue to shine as they always have; apical beacons, vents, conduit markers glaring into the darkness. But there are other places where the lights have dimmed, dark holes and gaps where lamps that once shone yellow-green have all shifted down to a faint, spectral blue so deep it borders on black. Out of order, that blue-shift says. Or more precisely, No Fish-heads.

The airlocks. The hanger bay doors. Nobody's playing just a precaution these days…

She pans and tilts, aiming the camera. She zooms: distant murk magnifies, turns fuzzy distance into fuzzy foreground. Viz is low today; either smokers are blowing nearby or Atlantis is flushing particulates. All she can see is a fuzzy black outline against a green background, a silhouette so familiar she can't even remember how she recognizes it.

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

It's Lubin.

He's floating just centimeters off the hull, sculling one way, sculling back. Station-keeping against a tricky interplay of currents, perhaps—except there's nothing for him to station-keep over. There's no viewport in his vicinity, no way to look inside, no obvious reason to hold his position along that particular stretch of corridor.

After a few moments he begins to move away along the hull, far too slowly for comfort. His fins usually scissor the water in smooth, easy strokes, but he's barely flicking them now. He's moving no faster than a dryback might walk.

Someone climaxes behind her. Ng grumbles about my turn. Lenie Clarke barely hears them.

You bastard, she thinks as Lubin fades in the distance. You bastard.

You went ahead and did it.

Conscript

Alyx doesn't get the whole native thing. Probably none of the corpses do, truth be told, but none of the others lose any sleep over it either; the more fish-heads out of the way the better, they figure, and screw the fine print. Alyx, bless her soul, reacted with nothing short of outrage. As far as she's concerned it's no different than leaving your crippled grandmother out to die on an ice floe.

"Lex, it's their own choice," Clarke explained once.

"What, they choose to go crazy? They choose to have their bones go so punky they can't even stand up when you bring them inside?"

"They choose," she said gently, "to stay out on the rift, and they think it's worth the price."

"Why? What's so great about it? What do they do out there?"

She didn't mention the hallucinations. "There's a kind of—freedom, I guess. You feel connected to things. It's hard to explain."

Alyx snorted. "You don't even know."

It's partly true. Certainly Clarke feels the pull of the deep sea. Maybe it's an escape, maybe the abyss is just the ultimate place to hide from the living hell that was life among the drybacks. Or maybe it's even simpler. Maybe it's just a dark, weightless evocation of the womb, a long-forgotten sense of being nourished and protected and secure, back before the contractions started and everything turned to shit.

Every rifter feels as much. Not every rifter goes native, though, at least not yet. Some just have a kind of—special vulnerability, really. The addictive rifters, as opposed to the merely social ones. Maybe the natives have too much serotonin in their temporal lobes or something. It usually comes down to something like that.

None of which would really fly with Alyx, of course.

"You should take down their feeding stations," Alyx said. "Then they'd have to come inside to eat at least."

"They'd either starve, or make do with clams and worms." Which was basically starvation on the installment plan, if it didn't poison them outright. "And why force them to come inside if they don't want to?"

"Because it's suicide, that's why!" Alyx cried. "Jeez, I can't believe I have to explain it to you! Wouldn't you stop me from trying to kill myself?"

"That depends."

"Depends?"

"On if you really wanted to, or you were just trying to win an argument."

"I'm serious."

"Yeah. I can see that." Clarke sighed. "If you really wanted to kill yourself, I'd be sad and pissed off and I'd miss you like hell. But I wouldn't stop you."

Alyx was appalled. "Why not?"

"Because it's your life. Not mine."

Alyx didn't seem to have been expecting that. She glared back, obviously unconvinced, obviously unequipped to respond.

"Have you ever wanted to die?" Clarke asked her. "Seriously?"

"No, but—"

"I have."

Alyx fell silent.

"And believe me," Clarke continued, "it's no fun listening to a bunch of professional head lice telling you how much there is to live for and how things aren't really so bad and how five years from now you'll look back and wonder how you ever could have even imagined offing yourself. I mean, they don't know shit about my life. If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And as far as I'm concerned it's the height of fucking arrogance to tell another human being whether their life is worth living."

"But you don't have to feel that way," Alyx said unhappily. "Nobody does! You just slap a derm on your arm and—"

"It's not about feeling happy, Lex. It's about having cause to feel happy." Clarke put her palm against the girl's cheek. "And you say I don't care enough to stop you from killing yourself, but I say I care about you so goddamned much I'd even help you do it, if that was you really wanted."

Alyx stared at the deck for a long time. When she looked up again her eyes shone.

"But you didn't die," she said softly. "You wanted to, but you didn't, and that's why you're alive right now."

And that's why a lot of other people aren't... But Clarke kept the thought to herself.

And now she's about to repudiate it all. She's about to hunt down someone who's chosen to retire, and she's going to ignore that choice, and inflict her own in its place. She'd like to think that maybe Alyx would find the irony amusing, but she knows better. There's nothing funny about any of this. It's all getting way too scary.

She's foregone the use of a squid this time out; natives tend to shy away from the sound of machinery. For what seems like forever she's been traversing a plain of bone-gray mud, a bottomless ooze of dead plankton ten million years in the making. Someone has preceded her here; a sudden contrail crosses her path, a fog of tiny bodies still swirling in the wake of some recent turbulence. She follows it. Scattered chunks of pumice and obsidian rise from the substrate like fractured sundials. Their shadows sweep across the bright scrolling footprint of Clarke's headlamp, stretching and dwindling and merging again with the million-year darkness. Eventually they come to dominate the substrate, no longer isolated protrusions in mud but a fractured tumbledown landscape in their own right.

A jumbled talus of cracked volcanic glass rises in Clarke's path. She brightens her headlamp: the beam puddles on a sheer rock wall a few meters further on, its surface lacerated with deep vertical fissures.

"Hello? Rama?"

Nothing.

"It's Lenie."

A white-eyed shadow slips like an eel between two boulders. "...bright..."

She dials down the light. "Better?"

"Ah...Len..." It's a mechanical whisper, two syllables spaced seconds apart by the effort it takes to get them out. "Hi..."

"We need your help, Rama."

Bhanderi buzzes something incomprehensible from his hiding place.

"Rama?"

"Don't...help?"

"There's a disease. It's like ßehemoth, but our tweaks don't work against it. We need to know what it is, we need someone who knows genetics."

Nothing moves among the rocks.

"It's serious. Please. Can you help?"

"...teomics," Bhanderi clicks

"What? I didn't hear you."

"...Proteomics. Only...minored in gen...genetics."

He's almost managed a complete sentence. Who better to trust with hundreds of lives?

"...had a dream about you," Bhanderi sighs. It sounds like someone strumming a metal comb.

"It wasn't a dream. This isn't either. We really need your help, Rama. Please."

"That's wrong," he buzzes. "That doesn't make sense."

"What doesn't?" Clarke asks, encouraged by the sudden coherence.

"The corps...ask the corpses."

"The corpses may have made the bug. Tweaked it, anyway. We can't trust them."

"...poor you..."

"Can you just—"

"More histamine," Bhanderi buzzes absently, lost again. Then: "Bye..."

"No! Rama!"

She brightens her beam in time to see a pair of fins disappear into a crevice a few meters up the cliff. She kicks up after him, plunges into the fissure like a high-diver, arms above her head. The crevice splits the rock high and deep, but not wide; two meters in she has to turn sideways. Her light floods the narrow gash, bright as a topside day; somewhere nearby a vocoder makes distressed ratcheting sounds.

Four meters overhead, Bhanderi scrambles froglike up the gap. It narrows up there—he seems in imminent danger of wedging himself inextricably between the rock faces. Clarke starts after him.

"Too bright!" he buzzes.

Tough, she thinks back at him.

Bhanderi's a skinny little bastard after two months of chronic wasting. Even if he gets stuck in here, he might get wedged too far back for Clarke to reach him. Maybe his panicked devolving little brain is juggling those variables right now—Bhanderi zig-zags, as if torn between the prospects of open water and protective confinement. Finally he opts for the water, but his indecision has cost him; Clarke has him around the ankle.

He thrashes in a single plane, constrained by faces of stone. "Fucking bitch. Let go!"

"Vocabulary coming back, I see."

"Let...go!"

She works her way towards the mouth of the crevice, dragging Bhanderi by the leg. He scrabbles against the walls, resisting—then, pulled free of the tightest depths, he twists around and comes at her with his fists. She fends him off. She has to remind herself how easily his bones might break.

Finally he's subdued, Clarke's arms hooked around his shoulders, her hands interlocked behind his neck in a full nelson. They're still inside the mouth of the crevice, barely; Bhanderi's struggles jam her spine against cracked slabs of basalt.

"Bright," he clicks.

"Listen, Rama. There's way too much riding on this for me to let you piss away whatever's left in that head of yours. Do you understand?"

He squirms.

"I'll turn off the light if you stop fighting and just listen to me, okay?"

"...I...you..."

She kills the beam. Bhanderi stiffens, then goes limp in her arms.

"Okay. Better. You've got to come back, Bhanderi. Just for a little while. We need you."

"...need... bad zero—"

"Will you just stop that shit? You're not that far gone, you can't be. You've only been out here for—" It's been around two months, hasn't it? More than two, now. Is that enough time for a brain to turn to mush? Is this whole exercise a waste of time?

She starts again. "There's a lot riding on this. A lot of people could die. You could die. This—disease, or whatever it is, it could get into you as easily as any of us. Maybe it already has. Do you understand?"

"...understand..."

She hopes that's an answer and not an echo. "It's not just the sickness, either. Everyone's looking for someone to blame. It's only a matter of time before—"

Boom, she remembers. Blew it up. Way too bright.

"Rama," she says slowly. "If things get out of hand, everything blows up. Do you understand? Boom. Just like at the woodpile. Boom, all the time. Unless you help me. Unless you help us. Understand?"

He hangs against her in the darkness like a boneless cadaver.

"Yeah. Well," he buzzes at last. "Why didn't you just say so?"

The struggle has hobbled him. Bhanderi favors his left leg when he swims; he veers to port with each stroke. Clarke hooks her hand under his armpit to share thrust but he startles and flinches from her touch. She settles for swimming at his side, nudging him back on course when necessary.

Three times he breaks away in a crippled lunge for oblivion. Three times she brings him back to heel, flailing and gibbering. The episodes don't last, though. Once subdued, he calms; once calm, he cooperates. For a while.

She comes to understand that it isn't really his fault.

"Hey," she buzzes, ten minutes out from Atlantis.

"Yeah."

"You with me?"

"Yeah. It comes and goes." An indecipherable ticking. "I come and go."

"Do you remember what I said?"

"You drafted me."

"Do you remember what for?"

"Some kind of disease?"

"Some kind."

"And you...you think the corpses did..."

"I don't know."

"...leg hurts..."

"Sorry..."

And his brainstem rises up and snatches him away again. She grapples and holds on until it lets go. Until he fights his way back from wherever he goes at times like this.

"...still here, I see.."

"Still here," Clarke repeats.

"God, Len. Please don't do this."

"I'm sorry," she tells him. "I'm sorry..."

"I'm not worth shit to you," Bhanderi grates. "I can't remember anything..."

"It'll come back." It has to.

"You don't know. You don't know any...thing about us."

"I know a little."

"No."

"I knew someone. Like you. He came back." Which is almost a lie.

"Let me go. Please."

"After. I promise."

She rationalizes in transit, not convincing herself for an instant. She's helping him as well as herself, she's doing him a favor. She's saving him from the ultimate lethality of his own lifestyle. Hyperosmosis; Slimy Implant Syndrome; mechanical breakdown. Rifters are miracles of bioengineering—thanks to the superlative design of their diveskins, they can even shit in the woods—but they were never designed to unseal outside of an atmosphere. Natives unmask all the time out here, let raw ocean into their mouths to corrupt and corrode and contaminate the brackish internal saline that braces them against the pressure. Do that often enough and something's bound to seize up eventually.

I'm saving your life, she thinks, unwilling to say the words aloud.

Whether he likes it or not, Alyx replies from the back of her mind.

"The light..." Bhanderi croaks.

Glimmers smear the darkness ahead, disfiguring the perfect void like faint glowing sores. Bhanderi stiffens at Clarke's side, but doesn't bolt. She knows he can handle it; it can't have been more than a couple of weeks since she found him inside the nerve hab, and he had to pass through brighter skies than these to get there. Surely he can't have slipped so far in such a short time?

Or is it something else, not so much a slip as a sudden jolt? Maybe it's not the light that bothers him at all. Maybe it's what the light reminds him of, now.

Boom. Blew it up.

Spectral fingers tap lightly against Clarke's implants: once, twice. Someone ahead, taking a sonar bearing. She takes Bhanderi's arm, holds it gently but firmly. "Rama, someone's—"

"Charley," Bhanderi buzzes.

Garcia rises ahead of them, ambient backlight framing him like a visitation. "Holy shit. You got him. Rama, you in there?"

"Client..."

"He remembers me! fuck it's good to see you, man. I thought you'd pretty much shuffled off the mortal coil."

"Tried. She won't let me."

"Yeah, we're all sorry about that but we really need your help. Don't sweat it though, buddy. We'll make it work." Garcia turns to Clarke. "What do we need?"

"Medhab ready?"

"Sealed off one sphere. Left the other in case someone breaks an arm."

"Okay. We'll need the lights off, to start with anyway. Even the externals."

"No problem."

"...Charley..." Bhanderi clicks.

"Right here, man."

"...you my techie...?"

"Dunno. Could be, I guess. Sure. You need one?"

Bhanderi's masked face turns to Clarke. Suddenly there's something different in the way he holds himself. "Let me go."

This time, she does.

"How long since I was inside?" he asks.

"I think maybe two weeks. Three at the outside." By rifter standards, the estimate is almost surgically precise.

"I may have...problems," he tells them. "Readjusting. I don't know if I can—I don't know how much I can get back."

"We understand," Clarke buzzes. "Just—"

"Shut up. Listen." Bhanderi's head darts from side to side, a disquieting reptilian gesture that Clarke has seen before. "I'll need to...to kickstart. I'll need help. Acetylcholine. Uh, tyrosine hydroxylase. Picrotoxin. If I fall apart...if I fall apart in there you'll need to get those into me. Understand?"

She runs them back. "Acetylcholine. Picrotoxin. Tyro, uh—"

"Tyrosine hydroxylase. Remember."

"What dose?" Garcia wonders. "What delivery?"

"I don't—shit. Can't remember. Check MedBase. Maximum recommended dosage for...for everything except the hydroxy...lase. Double for that, maybe. I think."

Garcia nods. "Anything else?"

"Hell yes," Bhanderi buzzes. "Just hope I can remember what..."

Portrait of the Sadist as a Team Player

Alice Jovellanos's definition of apology was a little unconventional.

Achilles, she had begun, you can be such a raging idiot sometimes I just don't believe it.

He'd never made a hard copy. He hadn't needed to. He was a 'lawbreaker, occipital cortex stuck in permanent overdrive, pattern-matching and correlative skills verging on the autistic. He had scrolled her letter once down his inlays, watched it vanish, and reread it a hundred times since, every pixel crisp and immutable in perfect recollection.

Now he sat still as stone, waiting for her. Sudbury's ever-dimming nightscape splashed haphazard patches of light across the walls of his apartment. There were too many lines-of-sight to nearby buildings, he noted. He would have to blank the windows before she arrived.

You know what I was risking coming clean with you yesterday, Alice had dictated. You know what I'm risking sending this to you now—it'll autowipe, but there's nothing these assholes can't scan if they feel like it. That's part of the problem, that's why I'm taking this huge risk in the first place...

I heard what you said about trust and betrayal, and maybe some of it rings a bit more true than I'd like. But don't you see there was no point in asking you beforehand? As long as Guilt Trip was running the show, you were incapable of making your own decision. You keep insisting that's wrong, you go on about all the life-and-death decisions you make and the thousands of variables you juggle but Achilles my dear, whoever told you that free will was just some complicated algorithm for you to follow?

I know you don't want to be corrupted. But maybe a decent, honest human being is his own safeguard, did you ever think of that? Maybe you don't have to let them turn you into one big conditioned reflex. Maybe you just want them to, because then it's not really your responsibility, is it? It's so easy to never have to make your own decisions. Addictive, even. Maybe you even got hooked on it, and you're going through a little bit of withdrawal now.

She'd had such faith in him. She still did; she was on her way here right now, not suspecting a thing. Surveillance-free accomodation wasn't cheap, but any senior 'lawbreaker could afford the Privacy Plus brand name and then some. The security in his building was airtight, ruthless, and utterly devoid of long-term memory. Once a visitor cleared, there would be no record of their comings and goings.

Anyhow, what they stole, we gave back. And I'm going to tell you exactly how we did that, on the premise, you know, ignorance breeds fear and all that. You know about the Minsky receptors in your frontal lobes, and how all those nasty little guilt transmitters bind to them, and how you perceive that as conscience. They made Guilt Trip by tweaking a bunch of behavior-modification genes snipped from parasites; the guiltier you feel, the more Trip gets pumped into your brain. It binds to the transmitters, which changes their shape and basically clogs your motor pathways so you can't move.

Anyway, Spartacus is basically a guilt analog. It's got the same active sites, so it binds to the Trip, but the overall conformation is slightly different so it doesn't actually do anything except clog up the Minsky receptors. Also it takes longer to break down than regular guilt, so it reaches higher concentrations in the brain. Eventually it overwhelms the active sites through sheer numbers.

He remembered splinters from an antique hardwood floor, tearing his face. He remembered lying in the dark, the chair he was tied to toppled on its side, while Ken Lubin's voice wondered from somewhere nearby: "What about side effects? Baseline guilt, for example?"

And in that instant, bound and bleeding, Achilles Desjardins had seen his destiny.

Spartacus wasn't content to simply unlock the chains that the Trip had forged. If it had been, there might have been hope. He would have had to fall back on good old-fashioned shame to control his inclinations, certainly. He would have stayed depraved at heart, as he'd always been. But Achilles Desjardins had never been one to let his heart out unsupervised anyway. He could have coped, even out of a job, even up on charges. He could have coped.

But Spartacus didn't know when to quit. Conscience was a molecule like any other—and with no free receptor sites to bind onto, it might as well be neutral saline for all the effect it had. Desjardins was headed for a whole new destination, a place he'd never been before. A place without guilt or shame or remorse, a place without conscience in any form.

Alice hadn't mentioned any of that when she'd spilled her pixellated heart across his in-box. She'd only assured him how safe it all was. That's the real beauty of it, Killjoy; both your natural transmitters and the Trip itself are still being produced normally, so a test that keys on either of 'em comes up clean. Even a test looking for the complexed form will pass muster, since the baseline complex is still floating around—it just can't find any free receptor sites to latch onto. So you're safe. Honestly. The bloodhounds won't be a problem.

Safe. She'd had no idea what kind of thing looked out from behind his eyes. She should have known better. Even children know the simple truth: monsters live everywhere, even inside. Especially inside.

I wouldn't put you at risk, Achilles, believe me. You mean too—you're too much of a friend for me to fuck around like that.

She loved him, of course. He had never really admitted it before—some pipsqueak inner voice might have whispered I think she kind of, maybe before three decades of self-loathing squashed it flat: What a fucking egotist. As if anyone would want anything to do with an enculé like you...

She'd never explicitly propositioned him—in her own way she was as insecure as he was, for all her bluster—but the signs were there in hindsight: her good-natured interference every time a woman appeared in his life, her endless social overtures, the nickname Killjoy—ostensibly because of his reticence to go out, but more likely because of his reticence to put out. It was all so obvious now. Freed from guilt, freed from shame, his vision had sharpened to crystal perfection.

Anyway, there you go. I've stuck my neck out for you, and what happens now is pretty much up to you. If you turn me in, though, know this: you're the one making that decision. However you rationalize it, you won't be able to blame some stupid longchain molecule. It'll be you all the way, your own free will.

He hadn't turned her in. It must have been some fortuitous balance of conflicting molecules: those that would have compelled betrayal weakening in his head, those that spoke to loyalty among friends not yet snuffed out. In hindsight, it had been a very lucky break..

So use it, and think about all the things you've done and why, and ask yourself if you're really so morally rudderless that you couldn't have made all those tough decisions without enslaving yourself to a bunch of despots. I think you could have, Achilles. You never needed their ball and chain to be a decent human being. I really believe that. I'm gambling everything on it.

He checked his watch.

You know where I am. You know what your options are. Join me or stab me. Your choice.

He stood, and crossed to the windows. He blanked the panes.

Love, Alice.

The doorbell chimed.

Every part of her was vulnerable. She looked up at him, her face hopeful, her almond eyes cautious. One corner of her mouth pulled back in a tentative, slightly rueful grin.

Desjardins stood aside, took a deep, quiet breath as she passed. Her scent was innocent and floral, but there were molecules in that mix working below the threshold of conscious awareness. She wasn't stupid; she knew he wasn't either. She must realise he'd peg his incipient arousal on pheromones she hadn't worn in his presence for years.

Her hopes must be up.

He'd done his best to raise them, without being too obvious. He'd affected a gradual thawing in his demeaner over the previous few days, a growing, almost reluctant warmth. He'd stood at her side as Clarke and Lubin disappeared into traffic, en route to their own private revolution; Desjardins had let his arm bump against Alice's, and linger. After a few moments of that casual contact she'd looked up at him, a bit hesitantly, and he'd rewarded her with a shrug and a smile.

She'd always had his friendship, until she'd betrayed him. She'd always longed for more. It was an incapacitating mix. Desjardins had been able to disarm her with the merest chance of reconciliation.

Now she brushed past, closer than strictly necessary, her ponytail swishing gently against her nape. Mandelbrot appeared in the hall and slithered around her ankles like a furry boa. Alice reached down to scritch the cat's ears. Mandelbrot hesitated, perhaps wondering whether to play hard to get, then evidently figured fuck it and let out a purr.

Desjardins directed Alice to the bowl of goofballs on the coffee table. Alice pursed her lips. "These are safe?" Some of the chemicals that senior 'lawbreakers kept in their systems could provoke nasty interactions with the most innocuous recreationals, and Jovellanos had only just gotten her shots.

"I doubt they're any worse than the ways you've already fucked with the palette," Desjardins said.

Her face fell. A twinge of remorse flickered in Desjardins's throat. He swallowed, absurdly grateful for the feeling. "Just don't mix them with axotropes," he added, more gently.

"Thanks." She took the olive branch with the drug, popped a cherry-red marble into her mouth. Desjardins could see her bracing herself.

"I was afraid you were never going to talk to me again," she said softly.

If her hair had been any finer it would be synthetic.

"It would have served you right." He let the words hang between them. He imagined knotting that jet-black ponytail around his fist. He imagined suspending her by it, letting her feet kick just off the floor...

No. Stop it.

"But I think I understand why you did it," he said at last, letting her off the hook.

"Really?"

"I think so. You had a lot of nerve." He took a breath. "But you had a lot of faith in me, too. You wouldn't have done it otherwise. I guess that counts for something."

It was as though she'd been holding her breath since she arrived, and only let it out now that her sentence had been read aloud: Conditional discharge. She bought it, Desjardins thought. She thinks there's hope—

—while another part of him, diminished but defiant, insisted Why does she have to be wrong?

He brushed her cheek with his palm, could just barely hear the the soft, quick intake of breath his touch provoked. He blinked against the fleeting image of a backhanded blow across that sweet, unsuspecting face. "You have a lot more faith in me than I do, Alice. I don't know how warranted it is."

"They stole your freedom to choose. I only gave it back to you."

"You stole my conscience. How am I supposed to choose?"

"With your mind, Killjoy. With that brilliant, beautiful mind. Not some gut-instinct emotion that's done more harm than good for the past couple million years."

He sank onto the sofa, a small, sudden pit opening in his stomach. "I'd hoped it was a side-effect," he said softly.

She sat beside him. "What do you mean?"

"You know." Desjardins shook his head. "People never think things through. I kind of hoped you and your buddies just—hadn't worked out the ramifications, you know? You were just trying to subvert the Trip, and the whole conscience thing was a—a misstep. Unforeseen. But I guess not."

She put her hand on his knee. "Why would you hope that?"

"I'm not really sure." He barked a soft laugh. "I guess I thought, if you didn't know you were—I mean, if you do something by accident that's one thing, but if you deliberately set out to make a bunch of psychopaths—"

"We're not making psychopaths, Achilles. We're freeing people from conscience."

"What's the difference?"

"You can still feel. Your amygdala still works. Your dopamine and serotonin levels are normal. You're capable of long-term planning, you're not a slave to your impulses. Spartacus doesn't change any of that."

"Is that what you think."

"You really think all the assholes in the world are clinical?"

"Maybe not. But I bet all the clinicals in the world are assholes."

"You're not," she said.

She stared at him with serious, dark eyes. He couldn't stop smelling her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to gut her like a fish and put her head on a stick.

He gritted his teeth and kept silent.

"Ever hear of the trolly paradox?" Alice said after a moment.

Desjardins shook his head.

"Six people on a runaway train, headed off a cliff. The only way to save them is switch the train to another track. Except there's someone else standing on that track, and he won't be able to get out of the way before the train squashes him. Do you reroute?"

"Of course." It was the greater good at its most simplistic.

"Now say you can't reroute the train, but you can stop it by pushing someone into its path. Do you?"

"Sure," he said immediately.

"I did that for you," Alice pronounced.

"Did what?"

"Most people don't accept the equivalence. They think it's right to reroute the train, but wrong to push someone in front of it. Even though it's exactly the same death, for exactly the same number of lives saved."

He grunted.

"Conscience isn't rational, Achilles. You know what parts of your brain light up when you make a moral decision? I'll tell you: the medial frontal gyrus. The posterior cingulate gyrus. The angular gyrus. All—"

"Emotional centers," Desjardins cut in.

"Damn right. The frontal lobes don't spark at all. And even people who recognise the logical equivalence of those scenarios have to really work at it. It just feels wrong to push someone to their death, even for the same net gain of lives. The brain has to wrestle with all this stupid, unfounded guilt. It takes longer to act, longer to reach critical decisions, and when all's said and done it's less likely to make the right decion. That's what conscience is, Killjoy. It's like rape or greed or kin selection—it served its purpose a few million years ago, but it's been bad news ever since we stopped merely surviving our environment and started dominating it instead."

You rehearsed that, Desjardins thought.

He allowed himself a small smile. "There's a bit more to people than guilt and intellect, my dear. Maybe guilt doesn't just hobble the mind, did you ever think of that? Maybe it hobbles other things as well."

"Like what?"

"Well, just for example—" he paused, pretending to cast around for inspiration— "how do you know I'm not some kind of crazed serial killer? How do you know I'm not psychotic, or suicidal, or, or into torture, say?"

"I'd know," Alice said simply.

"You think sex killers walk around with signs on their foreheads?"

She squeezed his thigh. "I think that I've known you for a whole long time, and I think there's no such thing as a perfect act. If someone was that full of hate, they'd slip up eventually. But you—well, I've never heard of a monster who respected women so much he refused to even fuck them. And by the way, you might want to reconsider that particular position. Just a thought."

Desjardins shook his head. "You've got it all worked out, haven't you?"

"Completely. And I've got oodles of patience."

"Good. Now you can use some of it." He stood and smiled down at her. "I've gotta go to the bathroom for a minute. Make yourself at home."

She smiled back. "I will indeed. Take your time."

He locked the door, leaned across the sink and stared hard into the mirror. His reflection stared back, furious.

She betrayed you. She turned you into this.

He liked her. He loved her. Alice Jovellanos had been his loyal friend for years. Desjardins hung onto that as best he could.

She did it on purpose.

No. They had done in on purpose.

Because Alice hadn't acted alone. She was damn smart, but she hadn't come up with Spartacus all by herself. She had friends, she'd admitted as much: We're kinda political, in a ragtag kind of way, she'd said when she first broke the news of his—his emancipation.

He could feel the chains in his head crumbling to rust. He could feel his own depravity tugging on those corroded links, and grinning. He searched himself for some hint of the regret he'd felt just a few minutes ago—he'd hurt Alice's feelings, and he'd felt bad about it. He could still do that. He could still feel remorse, or something like it, if he only tried.

You're not a slave to your impulses, she'd said.

That was true, as far as it went. He could restrain himself if he wanted to. But that was the nature of his predicament: he was starting to realise that he didn't want to.

"Hey, Killjoy?" Alice called from down the hall.

Shut up! SHUT UP! "Yeah?"

"Mandelbrot's demanding dinner and his feeder's empty. Didn't you keep the kibble under the sink?"

"Not any more. She figured out how to break into the cupboards."

"Then wh—"

"Bedroom closet."

Her footsteps passed on the other side of the door, Mandelbrot vocally urging them on.

On purpose.

Alice had infected him ahead of schedule, to clear his mind for the fight against ßehemoth—and perhaps for more personal reasons, conscious or otherwise. But her friends had set their sights a lot higher than Achilles Desjardins; they were out to liberate every 'lawbreaker on the planet. Lubin had summed it up, there in the darkness two weeks ago: "Only a few thousand people with their hands on all the world's kill switches and you've turned them all into clinical sociopaths..."

Desjardins wondered if Alice would have tried her semantic arguments with Lubin. If she had been tied to that chair, blind, pissing her pants in fear for her life while that murderous cipher paced around her in the darkness, would she have presumed to lecture him on serotonin levels and the cingulate gyrus?

She might have, at that. After all, she and her friends were political—in a ragtag kinda way—and politics made you stupid. It made you think that Human decency was some kind of Platonic ideal, a moral calculus you could derive from first principals. Don't waste your time with basic biology. Don't worry about the fate of altruists in Darwin's Universe. People are different, people are special, people are moral agents. That's what you got when you spent too much time writing manifestos, and not enough time looking in the mirror.

Achilles Desjardins was only the first of a new breed. Before long there would be others, as powerful as he and as unconstrained. Maybe there already were. Alice hadn't told him any details. He didn't know how far the ambitions of the Spartacus Society had progressed. He didn't know what other franchises were being seeded, or what the incubation period was. He only knew that sooner or later, he would have competition.

Unless he acted now, while he still had the advantage.

Mandelbrot was still yowling in the bedroom, evidently dissatisfied with the quality of the hired help. Desjardins couldn't blame her; Alice had had more than enough time to retrieve the kibble, bring it back to the kitchen, and—

—in the bedroom, he realised.

Well, he thought after a moment. I guess that settles it.

Suddenly, the face in the mirror was very calm. It did not move, but it seemed to be speaking to him all the same. You're not political, it told him. You're mechanical. Nature programmed you one way, CSIRA programmed you another, Alice came along and rewired you for something else. None of it is you, and all of it is you. And none of it was your choice. None of it was your responsibility.

She did this to you. That cunt. That stumpfuck. Whatever happens now is not your fault.

It's hers.

He unlocked the door and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Live telltales twinkled across the sensorium on his pillow. His feedback suit lay across the bed like a shed skin. Alice Jovellanos stood shaking at the foot of the bed, lifting the headset from her skull. Her face was beautiful and bloodless.

She would not have been able to mistake the victim in that virtual dungeon for anyone else. Desjardins had tuned the specs to three decimal places.

Mandelbrot immediately gave up on Alice and began head-butting Desjardins, purring loudly. Desjardins ignored her.

"I need some technical info," he said, almost apologetically. "And some details on your friends. I was actually hoping to sweet-talk it out of you, though." He gestured at the sensorium, savoring the horror on her face. "Guess I forgot to put that stuff away."

She shook her head, a spasm, a panicky twitch. "I—I d-don't think you did..." she managed after a moment.

"Maybe not." Achilles shrugged. "But hey, look on the bright side. That's the first time you've actually been right about me."

It made sense, at last: the impulse purchases routed almost unconsciously through anonymous credit lines, the plastic sheeting and portable incinerator, the dynamic-inversion sound damper. The casual snoop into Alice's master calendar and contact list. That was the great thing about being a 'lawbreaker on the Trip; when everybody knew you were chained to the post, nobody bothered putting up fences around the yard.

"Please," Alice quavered, her lip trembling, her eyes bright and terrified. "Achilles..."

Somewhere in the basement of Desjardins's mind, a last rusty link crumbled to powder.

"Call me Killjoy," he said.

Automechanica

The first round goes to the corpses.

A rifter by the name of Lisbeth Mak—kind of a wallflower, Clarke barely even remembers the name— came upon a corpse crawling like an armored cockroach around the outside of the primary physical plant. It didn't matter whether he had a good reason to be there. It didn't matter whether or not this constituted a violation of quarantine. Mak did what a lot of fish-heads might have done regardless; she got cocky. Decided to teach this stumpfucking dryback a lesson, but decided to warm him up first. So she swam easy circles around her helpless and lumbering prey, made the usual derisive comments about diving bells with feet, called loudly and conspicuously for someone to bring her one of those pneumatic drills from the tool shed: she had herself a crab to shell.

She forgot entirely about the headlamp on the corpse's helmet. It hadn't been shining when she caught the poor fucker—obviously he'd been trying to avoid detection, and there was enough ambient light around that part of the structure even for dryback eyes. When he flashed that peeper at her, her eyecaps turned dead flat white in their haste to compensate.

She was only blind for a second or two, but it was more than enough for the corpse to get his licks in. Preshmesh vs. copolymer is no contest at all. By the time Mak, bruised and bloodied, called for backup, the corpse was already heading back inside.

Now Clarke and Lubin stand in Airlock Five while the ocean drains away around them. Clarke splits her face seal, feels herself reinflate like a fleshy balloon. The inner hatch hisses and swings open. Bright light, painfully intense, spills in from the space beyond. Clarke steps back as her eyecaps adjust, raising her hands against possible attack. None comes. A gang of corpses jam the wet room, but only one stands in the front rank: Patricia Rowan.

Between Rowan and rifters, an isolation membrane swirls with oily iridescence.

"The consensus is that you should stay in the airlock for the time being," Rowan says.

Clarke glances at Lubin. He's watching the welcoming committee with blank, impassive eyes.

"Who was it?" Clarke asks calmly.

"I don't think that's really important," Rowan says.

"Lisbeth might think otherwise. Her nose is broken."

"Our man says he was defending himself."

"A man in 300-bar preshmesh armor defending himself against an unarmed woman in a diveskin."

"A corpse defending himself from a fishhead," someone says from within the committee. "Whole other thing."

Rowan ignores the intrusion. "Our man resorted to fists," she says, "because that was the only approach that had any real hope of succeeding. You know as well as we do what we're defending ourselves from."

"What I know is that none of you are supposed to leave Atlantis without prior authorization. Those were the rules, even before the quarantine. You agreed to them."

"We weren't allowed much of a choice," Rowan remarks mildly.

"Still."

"Fuck the rules," says another corpse. "They're trying to kill us. Why are we arguing protocol?"

Clarke blinks. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know damn well what it—"

Rowan holds up a hand. The dissident falls silent.

"We found a mine," Rowan says, in the same voice she might use to report that the head was out of toilet paper.

"What?"

"Nothing special. Standard demolition charge. Might have even been one of the same ones Ken wired up before we—" She hesitates, choosing her words— "came to terms a few years back. I'm told it would have isolated us from primary life-support and flooded a good chunk of Res-C. Somewhere between thirty to a hundred killed from the implosion alone."

Clarke stares at Lubin, notes the slightest shake of the head.

"I didn't know," Clarke says softly.

Rowan smiles faintly. "You'll understand there might be some skepticism on that point."

"I'd like to see it," Lubin says.

"I'd like to see my daughter in the sunlight," Rowan tells him. "It's not going to happen."

Clarke shakes her head. "Pat, listen. I don't know where it came from. I—"

"I do," Rowan says mildly. "There are piles of them stashed at the construction caches. A hundred or more at Impossible Lake alone."

"We'll find out who planted it. But you can't keep it. You're not allowed weapons."

"Do you seriously expect us to simply hand it back to the people who planted it in the first place?"

"Pat, you know me."

"I know all of you," Rowan says. "The answer is no."

"How did you find it?" Lubin asks from out of left field.

"By accident. We lost our passive acoustics and sent someone out to check the antennae."

"Without informing us beforehand."

"It seemed fairly likely that you people were causing the interference. Informing you would not have been a wise idea even if you hadn't been mining our hulls."

"Hulls," Lubin remarks. "So you found more than one."

No one speaks.

Of course not, Clarke realizes. They're not going to tell us anything. They're gearing up for war.

And they're going to get slaughtered…

"I wonder if you've found them all," Lubin muses.

They stand without speaking, gagged by the synthetic black skin across their faces. Behind their backs, behind the impenetrable mass of the inner hatch, the corpses return to whatever plots and counterplans they're drawing. Ahead, past the outer hatch, a gathering crowd of rifters waits for answers. Around them and within them, machinery pumps and sparks and readies them for the abyss. By the time the water rises over their heads they are incompressible.

Lubin reaches for the outer hatch. Clarke stops him.

"Grace," she buzzes.

"Could be anyone." He rises, weightless in the flooded compartment. One hand reaches up to keep the ceiling at bay. It's an odd image, this humanoid silhouette floating against the bluish-white walls of the airlock. His eyecaps almost look like holes cut from black paper, letting the light shine through from behind.

"In fact," he continues, "I'm not entirely convinced they're telling the truth."

"The corpses? Why would they lie? How would it serve them?"

"Sow dissension among the enemy. Divide and conquer."

"Come on, Ken. It's not as though there's a pro-corpse faction ready to rise up on their behalf and..."

He just looks at her.

"You don't know," she buzzes, so softly she can barely feel the vibration in her own jaw. "It's all just guesses and suspicions. Rama hasn't had a chance to—you can't be sure."

"I'm not."

"We don't really know anything." She hesitates, then edits herself: "I don't know anything. You do."

"Not enough to matter. Not yet."

"I saw you, tracking them along the corridors."

He doesn't nod. He doesn't have to.

"Who?"

"Rowan, mainly."

"And what's it like in there?"

"A lot like it is in there," he says, pointing at her.

Stay out of my head, you fucker. But she knows, at this range, it's not a matter of choice. You can't just choose to not feel something. Whether those feelings are yours or someone else's is really beside the point.

So she only says, "Think you could be a little less vague?"

"She feels very guilty about something. I don't know what. There's no shortage of possibilities."

"Told you."

"Our own people, though," he continues. "Are not quite so conflicted, and much more easily distracted. And I can't be everywhere. And we're running out of time."

You bastard, she thinks. You asshole. You stumpfucker.

He floats above her, waiting.

"Okay," she says at last. "I'll do it."

Lubin pulls the latch. The outer hatch slides back, opening a rectangle of murky darkness in a stark white frame. They rise into a nightscape stippled with waiting eyes.

Lenie Clarke is a little bit twisted, even by Rifter standards.

Rifters don't worry much about privacy, for one thing. Not as much as you might expect from a population of rejects and throwaways. You might think the only ones who could ever regard this place as an improvement would be those with the most seriously fucked-up baselines for comparison, and you'd be right. You might also think that such damaged creatures would retreat into their shells like hermit crabs with half their limbs ripped away, cringing at the slightest shadow, or lashing out furiously at any hint of intrusion. It does happen, occasionally. But down here, the endless heavy night anesthetizes even if it doesn't heal. The abyss lays dark hands on the wounded and the raging, and somehow calms them. There are, after all, three hundred sixty degrees of escape from any conflict. There are no limiting resources to fight over; these days, half the habs are empty anyway. There is little need for territoriality, because there is so much territory.

So most of the habs are unguarded and unclaimed. Occupants come and go, rise into any convenient bubble to fuck or feed or—more rarely—socialize, before returning to their natural environment. Any place is as good as any other. There's little need to stand jealous guard over anything so ubiquitous as a Calvin Cycler or a repair bench, and there's hardly more that rifters need beyond these basics. Privacy is everywhere; swim two minutes in any direction and you can be lost forever. Why erect walls around recycled air?

Lenie Clarke has her reasons.

She's not entirely alone in this. A few other rifters have laid exclusive claims, pissed territorially on this cubby or that deck or—in very rare cases—an entire hab. They've nested refuge within refuge, the ocean against the world at large, an extra bubble of alloy and atmosphere against their own kind. There are locks on the doors in such places. Habs do not come with locks—their dryback designers had safety issues—but the private and the paranoid have made do, welding or growing their own fortifications onto the baseline structure.

Clarke isn't greedy. Her claim is a small one, a cubby on the upper deck of a hab anchored sixty meters northeast of Atlantis. It's scarcely larger than her long-lost quarters on Beebe Station; she thinks that may have been why she chose it. It doesn't even have a porthole.

She doesn't spend much time here. In fact, she hasn't been here since she and Walsh started fucking. But it doesn't matter how much time she actually spends in this cramped, spartan closet; what matters is the comforting knowledge that it's hers, that it's here, that no one can ever come in unless she lets them. And that it's available when she needs it.

She needs it now.

She sits naked on the cubby's pallet, bathed in light cranked almost dryback-bright; the readouts she'll be watching are color-coded, and she doesn't want to lose that information. A handpad lies on the neoprene beside her, tuned to her insides. Mosaics of green and blue glow on its face: tiny histograms, winking stars, block-cap letters forming cryptic acronyms. There's a mirror on the opposite bulkhead; she ignores it as best she can, but her empty white eyes keep catching their own reflection.

One hand absently fingers her left nipple; the other holds a depolarizing scalpel against the seam in her chest. Her skin invaginates smoothly along that seam, forms a wrinkle, a puckered geometric groove in her thorax: three sides of a rectangle, a block-C, pressed as if by a cookie-cutter into the flesh between left breast and diaphragm and midline.

Clarke opens herself at the sternum.

She unlatches her ribs at the costochondrals and pulls them back; there's a slight resistance and a faint, disquieting sucking sound as the monolayer lining splits along the seam. A dull ache as air rushes into her thorax—it's a chill, really, but deep-body nerves aren't built to distinguish temperature from pain. The mechanics who transformed her hinged four of her ribs on the left side. Clarke hooks her fingers under the fleshy panel and folds it back, exposing the machinery beneath. Sharper, stronger pain stabs forth from intercostals never designed for such flexibility. There are bruises in their future.

She takes a tool from a nearby tray and starts playing with herself.

The flexible tip of the tool, deep within her thorax, slips neatly over a needle-thin valve and locks tight. She's still impressed at how easily she can feel her way around in there. The tool's handle contains a thumbwheel set to some astronomical gear ratio. She moves it a quarter turn; the tip rotates a fraction of a degree.

The handpad at her side bleeps in protest: NTR and GABA flicker from green to yellow on its face. One of the histogram bars lengthens a smidge; two others contract.

Another quarter turn. More complaints from the pad.

It's such a laughably crude invasion, more rape than seduction. Was there any real need for these fleshy hinges, for the surgical butchery that carved this trap door into her chest? The pad taps wirelessly into the telemetry from her implants; that channel flows both ways, sends commands into the body as well as taking information out of it. Minor adjustments, little tweaks around approved optima, are as simple as tapping on a touchpad and feeling the machinery respond from inside.

Of course, the tweaks Lenie Clarke is about to indulge in are way beyond "minor".

The Grid Authority never claimed to own the bodies of their employees, not officially at least. They owned everything they put inside, though. Clarke smiles to herself. They could probably charge me with vandalism.

If they'd really wanted to keep her from putting her grubby paws all over company property then they shouldn't have left this service panel in her chest. But they were on such a steep curve, back then. The brownouts weren't waiting; Hydro-Q wasn't waiting; the GA couldn't wait either. The whole geothermal program was fast-tracked, rearguard, and on the fly; the rifters themselves were a short term stopgap even on that breakneck schedule. Lenie Clarke and her buddies were prototypes, field tests, and final product all rolled into one. How could any accountant justify sealing up the implants on Monday when you'd only have to cut your way back in on Wednesday to fix a faulty myocell, or install some vital component that the advance sims had overlooked?

Even the deadman alarms were an afterthought, Clarke remembers. Karl Acton brought them down to Beebe at the start of his tour, handed them out like throat lozenges, told everyone to pop themselves open and slide 'em in right next to the seawater intake.

Karl was the one who discovered how to do what Lenie Clarke is doing right now. Ken Lubin killed him for it.

Times change, Clarke reflects, and tweaks another setting.

Finally she's finished. She lets the fleshy flap fall back into her chest, feels the phospholipids rebind along the seam. Molecular tails embrace in an orgy of hydrophobia. Another ache throbs diffusely inside now, subtly different from those that have gone before: disinfectants and synthetic antibodies, spraying down the implant cavity in the unlikely event that its lining should fail.

The outraged handpad has given up; half of its readouts are yellow and orange.

Inside Clarke's head, things are beginning to change. The permeability of critical membranes is edging up a few percent. The production of certain chemicals, designed not to carry signals but to blockade them, is subtly being scaled back. Windows are not yet opening, but they are being unlocked.

She can feel none of this directly, of course. The changes, by themselves, are necessary but not sufficient—they don't matter here where lungs are used, where pressure is a mere single atmosphere. They only matter when catalyzed by the weight of an ocean.

But now, when Lenie Clarke goes outside—when she steps into the airlock and the pressure accretes around her like a liquid mountain; when three hundred atmospheres squeeze her head so hard that her very synapses start short-circuiting—then, Lenie Clarke will be able to look into men's souls. Not the bright parts, of course. No philosophy or music, no altruism, no intellectual musings about right and wrong. Nothing neocortical at all. What Lenie Clarke will feel predates all of that by a hundred million years. The hypothalamus, the reticular formation, the amygdala. The reptile brain, the midbrain. Jealousies, appetites, fears and inarticulate hatreds. She'll feel them all, to a range of fifteen meters or more.

She remembers what it was like. Too well. Six years gone and it seems like yesterday.

All she has to do is step outside.

She sits in her cubby, and doesn't move.

Gravediggers

Find the damn mines.

They spread out across the territory like black dogs, sniffing through light and shadow with sonar pistols and flux detectors. Some of them may question the exercise—and some of them almost certainly root for its failure—but nobody still alive after five years down here is going to be dumb enough to go all insubordinate on Ken Lubin.

Find the damn mines.

Clarke glides among them, just another nose on the trail as far as anyone can tell. Hers is not so focused, though. The others follow invisible lines, the threads of a systematic grid laid down across the search area; but Clarke zigzags, coasts down to accompany this compatriot or that, exchanging insignificant bits of conversation and intel before diverging courses in search of new company. Clarke has a different mission.

Find the damn mine-layer.

Hectares of biosteel. Intermittent punctuations of light and shadow. Flashing staccatos at each extremity, little blinking beacons that announce the tips of scaffolds, antennae, danger zones where hot fluids might vent without warning. The baleful, unwavering glare of floodlights around airlocks and docking hatches and loading bays, reignited for today's exercise. Pale auras of wasted light from a hundred parabolic viewports. Twilit expanses of hull where every protuberance casts three or four shadows, dimly lit by lamps installed in more distant and glamorous neighborhoods.

Everywhere else, darkness. Elongated grids of shadow laid out by naked support struts. Impenetrable inky pools filling the spaces between keel and substrate, as though Atlantis were some great bed with its own scary place for monsters lying beneath. Fuzzy darkness where the light simply attenuates and fades; or razor-sharp where some tank or conduit extends into bright sodium sunlight, laying inky shadows over whatever lies beneath.

More than enough topography to hide an explosive device barely twice the size of a man's hand. More than enough to hide a thousand.

It would be a big enough job for fifty-eight. It's a lot bigger for the two dozen that Lubin is willing to conscript to the task; rifters who haven't gone native, who don't overtly hate the corpses enough to leave suspicious-looking objects "unnoticed" in their sweep—rifters who aren't among the most likely to have planted such devices in the first place. It's nowhere near a sure thing, of course; few of these people have been cleared as suspects. Not even the intel stolen directly from their brainpans is incontrovertible. They didn't hand out the eyes and the 'skin to anyone who didn't have a certain history, twisted wiring is what suits a body to the rift in the first place. Everyone's haunted here. Everyone carries their own baggage: their own tormentors, their own victims, the addictions, the beatings and the anal rapes and the paternal fondling at the hands of kindly Men In Black. Hatred of the corpses, so recently abated, is once again a given. ß-max has brought all the old conflicts back to the surface, reignited hostilities that five years of grudging, gradual coexistence had begun to quench. A month or two past, rifters and corpses were almost allies, bitter holdouts like Erickson and Nolan notwithstanding. Now, few would shed many tears if the ocean crashed in on the whole lot of them.

Still. There's a difference between dancing on someone's grave and digging it. There's an element of, of calculation on top of the hatred. Of planning. It's a subtle difference; Clarke doesn't know if she or Lubin would be able to pick it up under these circumstances. It might not even manifest itself in someone until the very moment they came upon the incriminating object, saw the mine stuck to the hull like some apocalyptic limpet, tripped their vocoder with every intention of raising the alarm and then—

Maybe the bastards deserve it after all they've done to us, after all they've done to the whole world, and it's not like I set the damn thing, it's not like I had anything to do with it except I maybe just didn't notice it there under the strut, perfectly understandable in the murk and all…

Any number of minds could seem perfectly innocent—even to themselves— right up to the point at which that last-wire stimulus came into view and catalyzed a simple chain of thought that ends in just looking the other way. Even then, who knows whether fine-tuning might pick it up?

Not Lenie Clarke. She searches anyway, gliding between the hulls and the storage tanks, flying over her fellows searching the lights and the shadows, only ostensible in her hunt for ordinance.

What she's really hunting is guilt.

Not honest guilt, of course. She's trolling for fear of discovery, she's on the prowl for righteous anger. Newly reawakened, she swims through a faint cauldron of secondhand emotions. The water's tainted with a dozen kinds of fear, of anger, with the loathing of self and others. A darker center roils beneath the surface of each dark body. There's also excitement of a sort, the initial thrill of the chase decaying exponentially down to rote boredom. Sexual stirrings. Other, fainter feelings she can't identify.

She's never forgotten why she resisted fine-tuning back at Channer, even after all the others had gone over. Now, though, she remembers why she found it so seductive when she finally gave in: in that endless welter of feelings, you always lost track of which ones were yours...

It's not quite the same here on the Ridge, unfortunately. Not that the physics or the neurology have changed. Not that anyone else has. It's Lenie Clarke that's different now. Victim and vendetta have faded over the years, black and white have bled together into a million indistinguishable shades of gray. Her psyche has diverged from the rifter norm, it no longer blends safely into that background. The guilt alone is so strong that she can't imagine it arising from anyone but her.

She stays the course, though. She keeps hunting, though her senses are dulled. Somewhere off in the diffracted distance, Ken Lubin is doing the same. He's probably a lot better at it than she is. He's had training in this kind of thing. He's had years of experience.

Something tickles the side of her mind. Some distant voice shouts through the clouds in her head. She realizes that she's been sensing it for some time, but its volume has crept up so gradually that it hasn't registered until now. Now it's unmistakable: threat and exclamation and excitement, at the very limit of her range. Two rifters cross her path, heading south, legs pumping. Clarke's jaw is buzzing with vocoded voices; in her reverie, she's missed those too.

"Almost missed it completely," one of them says. "It was tucked in under—"

"Got another one," A second voice breaks in. "Res-A."

One look and Clarke knows she would have missed it.

It's a standard demolition charge, planted in the shadow of an overhanging ledge. Clarke floats upside down and lays her head against the hull to look along the space beneath; she sees a hemispherical silhouette, shaded by the ledge, backlit by the diffuse murky glow of the water behind.

"Jesus," she buzzes, "How did you find the damn thing?"

"Sonar caught it."

With typical rifter discipline, the searchers have abandoned their transects and accreted around the find. Lubin hasn't sent them back; there's an obvious reason why he'd want them all here with the murder weapon. Clarke tunes and concentrates:

Excitement. Reawakened interest, after an hour of monotonous back-and-forth. Concern and threads of growing fear: this is a bomb after all, not an Easter egg. A few of the more skittish are already backing away, caution superceding curiosity. Clarke wonders idly about effective blast radius. Forty or fifty meters is the standard safe-distance during routine construction, but those guidelines are always padded.

She focuses. Everyone's a suspect, after all. But although the ubiquitous undercurrent of rage simmers as always, none of it has risen to the surface. There is no obvious anger at being thwarted, no obvious fear of imminent discovery. This explosive development is more puzzle than provocation to these people, a game of Russian Roulette nested inside a scavenger hunt.

"So what do we do now?" Cheung asks.

Lubin floats above them all like Lucifer. "Everybody note the sonar profile. That's how you'll acquire the others; they'll be too well-hidden for a visual sweep."

A dozen pistols fire converging click-trains on the offending object.

"So do we leave it there, or what?"

"What if it's booby-trapped?"

"What if it goes off?"

"Then we've got fewer corpses to worry about," Gomez buzzes from what he might think of as a safe distance. "No skin off my fore."

Lubin descends through the conjecture and reaches under the ledge.

Ng sculls away: "Hey, is that a good—"

Lubin grabs the device and yanks it free. Nothing explodes. He turns and surveys the assembled rifters. "When you find the others, don't touch them. I'll remove them myself."

"Why bother," Gomez buzzes softly.

It's a rhetorical grumble, not even a serious challenge, but Lubin turns to face him anyway. "This was badly positioned," he says. "Placed for concealment, not effect. We can do much better."

Minds light up, encouraged, on all sides. But to Clarke, it's as though Lubin's words have opened a tiny gash in her diveskin; she feels the frigid Atlantic seeping up her spine.

What are you doing, Ken? What the fuck are you doing?

She tells himself he's just playing to the gallery, saying whatever it takes to keep people motivated. He's looking at her now, his head cocked just slightly to one side, as if in response to some unvoiced question. Belatedly, Clarke realizes what she's doing: she's trying to look into his head. She's trying to tune him in.

It's a futile effort, of course. Dangerous, even. Lubin hasn't just been trained to block prying minds; he's been conditioned, rewired, outfitted with subconscious defenses that can't be lowered by any act of mere volition. Nobody's ever been able to tunnel into Lubin's head except Karl Acton, and whatever he saw in there, he took to his grave.

Now Lubin watches her, dark inside and out for all her unconscious efforts.

She remembers Acton, and stops trying.

Striptease

The final score is nine mines and no suspects. Either might be subject to change.

Atlantis itself is an exercise in scale-invariant complexity, repairs to retrofits to additions to a sprawling baseline structure that extends over hectares. There's no chance that every nook and cranny has been explored. Then again, what chance is there that the culprits—constrained by time and surveillance and please God, small numbers—had any greater opportunity to plant explosives than the sweepers have had to find them? Neither side is omnipotent. Perhaps, on balance, that is enough.

As for who those culprits are, Clarke has tuned in three dozen of her fellows so far. She has run her fingers through the viscous darkness in all those heads and come up with nothing. Not even Gomez, or Yeager. Not even Creasy. Grave-dancers, for sure, all of them. But no diggers.

She hasn't run into Grace Nolan lately, though.

Nolan's the Big Red Button right now. She's holding back for the moment; any alleged corpse treachery looks a little less asymmetrical in light of recent events. But the way things are going, Nolan's got nothing to lose by letting this play out. There's already more than enough sympathy out there for the Mad Bomber; if it turns out to be Nolan, the very act of unmasking her could boost her status more than harm it.

The leash is tenuous enough already. If it snaps there's going to be ten kinds of shit in the cycler.

And that's granting the charitable assumption that they even find the culprits. What do you look for, in the unlit basements of so many minds? Here, even the innocent are consumed with guilt; even the guilty wallow in self-righteousness. Every mind is aglow with the black light of PsychoHazard icons: which ones are powered by old wounds, which by recent acts of sabotage? You can figure it out, sometimes, if you can stand sticking your head into someone else's tar pit, but context is everything. Hoping for a lucky break is playing the lottery; doing it right takes time, and leaves Clarke soiled.

Not doing it delivers the future into Grace Nolan's hands.

There's no time. I can't be everywhere. Ken can't be everywhere.

There's an alternative, of course. Lubin suggested it, just after the bomb sweep. He was sweet about it, too, he made it sound as if she had a choice. As if he wouldn't just go ahead and do it himself if she wasn't up for it.

She knows why he gave her the option. Whoever shares this secret is going to get a bit of a boost in the local community. Lubin doesn't need the cred; no rifter would be crazy enough to cross him.

She remembers a time, not so long ago, when she could make the same claim about herself.

She takes a breath, and opens a channel to whom it may concern. The next step, she knows, could kill her. She wonders—hardly for the first time— if that would really be such a bad thing.

Her audience numbers fewer than a dozen. There's room for more; the medhab—even the lone sphere that hasn't been commandeered as Bhanderi habitat—is bigger than most. Not present are even more that can be trusted, judging by the notes Clarke and Lubin have recently compared. But she wants to start small. Maybe ease into it a little. The ripple effect will kick in soon enough.

"I'm only going to do this once," she says. "So pay attention."

Naked to the waist, she splits herself open again.

"Don't change anything except your neuroinhibitors. It probably throws out some overall balance with the other chemicals, but it all seems to come out in the wash eventually. Just don't go outside for a while after you make the changes. Give everything a chance to settle."

"How long?" Alexander asks.

Clarke has no idea. "Six hours, maybe. After that, you should be good to go. Ken will assign you to stations around the hubs."

Her audience rustles, unhappy at the prospect of such prolonged confinement.

"So how do we tweak the inhibitors?" Mak's broken nose is laced with fine beaded wires, a miniscule microelectric grid designed to amp up the healing process. It looks like an absurdly shrunken veil of mourning.

Clarke smiles despite herself. "You reduce them."

"You're kidding."

"No fucking chance."

"What about André?"

André died three years ago, the life spasming out of him on the seabed in a seizure that nearly tore him limb from limb. Seger laid the blame on a faulty neuroinhibitor pump. Human nerves aren't designed for the abyss; the pressure sets them firing at the slightest provocation. You turn into a fleshy switchboard with no circuit-breakers and no insulation. Eventually, after a few minutes of quivering tetanus, the body runs out of neurotransmitters and just stops.

Which is why rifter implants flood the body with neuroinhibitors whenever ambient pressure rises above some critical threshold. Without them, stepping outside at these depths would be tantamount to electrocution.

"I said reduce," Clarke repeats. "Not eliminate. Five percent. Seven percent tops."

"And that does what, exactly?"

"Reduces synaptic firing thresholds. Your nerves get just a bit more…more sensitive, I guess. To smaller stimuli, when you go outside. You become aware of things you never noticed before."

"Like what?" says Garcia.

"Like—" Clarke begins, and stops.

Suddenly she just wants to seal herself up and deny it all. Never mind, she wants to say. Bad idea. Bad joke. Forget I said anything. Or maybe even admit it all: You don't know what you're risking. You don't know how easy it is to go over the edge. My lover couldn't even fit inside a hab without going into withdrawal, couldn't even breathe without needing to smash anything that stood between him and the abyss. My friend committed murder for privacy in a place where you couldn't swim next to someone without being force-fed their sickness and want. And he's your friend too, he's one of us here, and he's the only other person left alive in the whole sick twisted planet who knows what this does to you…

She glances around, suddenly panicky, but Ken Lubin is not in the audience. Probably off drawing up duty rosters for the finely tuned.

Then again, she remembers, you get used to it.

She takes a breath and answers Garcia's question. "You can tell if someone's jerking you around, for one thing."

"Hot damn," Garcia exults. "I'm gonna be a walking bullshit detector."

"That you are," Clarke says, managing a smile.

Hope you're up for it.

Her acolytes depart for their own little bubbles to play with themselves. Clarke closes herself back up as the med hab empties. By the time she's back in black there's just her, a crowd of wet footprints, and the massive hatch—always left open until just recently—that opens into the next sphere. Garcia's grafted a combination lock across its wheel in uncaring defiance of dryback safety protocols.

How long do I have, she wonders, before everyone can muck around in my head?

Six hours at least, if the acolytes take her guess seriously. Then they'll start playing, trying out the new sensory mode, perhaps even reveling in it if they don't recoil at the things they find.

They'll start spreading the word.

Clarke's selling it as psychic surveillance, a new way to track down any guilty secrets the corpses may be hiding. Its effects are bound to spread way beyond Atlantis, though. It'll be that much harder for anyone to conspire in the dark, when every passing soul comes equipped with a searchlight.

She finds herself standing at the entrance to Bhanderi's lair, her hand on the retrofitted keypad near its center. She keys in the combination and undogs the hatch.

Suddenly she's seeing in color. The mimetic seal rimming the hatch is a deep, steely blue. A pair of colorcoded pipes wind overhead like coral snakes. A cylinder of some compressed gas, spied through the open portal, reflects turquoise: the decals on its side are yellow and—incomprehensibly—hot pink.

It's as bright as Atlantis in there.

She steps into the light: Calvin cycler, sleeping pallet, blood bank ooze pigment into the air. "Rama?"

"Close the door."

Something sits hunched at the main workstation, running a sequence of rainbow nucleotides. It can't be a rifter. It doesn't have the affect, it doesn't have the black shiny skin. It looks more like a hunched skeleton in shirtsleeves. It turns, and Clarke flinches inwardly: it doesn't even have the eyes. The pupils twitching in Bhanderi's face are dark yawning holes, dilated so widely that the irises around them are barely visible.

Not so bright, then. Still dark enough for uncapped eyes to strain to their limits. Such subtle differences get lost behind membranes that render the world at optimum apparent lumens.

Something must show on her face. "I took out the caps," Bhanderi says. "The eyes— overstimulate, with all the enhancers." His voice is still hoarse, the cords still not reacclimated to airborne speech.

"How's it going?" Clarke asks.

A bony shrug. She can count the ribs even through his t-shirt.

"Anything yet? Diagnostic test, or—"

"Won't be able to tell the difference until I know if there is a difference. So far it looks like ßehemoth with a couple of new stitches. Maybe mutations, maybe refits. I don't know yet."

"Would a baseline sample help?"

"Baseline?"

"Something that didn't come through Atlantis. Maybe if you had a sample from Impossible Lake, you could compare. See if they're different."

He shakes his head: a twitch, a tic. "There are ways to tell tweaks. Satellite markers, junk sequences. Just takes time."

"But you can do it. The—enhancers worked. It came back to you."

He nods like a striking snake. He calls up another sequence.

"Thank you," Clarke says softly.

He stops.

"Thank you? What choice do I have? There's a lock on the hatch."

"I know." She lowers her eyes. "I'm sorry."

"Did you think I'd just leave? That I'd just swim off and let this thing kill us all? Kill me, maybe?"

She shakes her head. "No. Not you."

"Then why?"

Even motionless, his face looks like a stifled scream. It's the eyes. Through all the calm, rapid-fire words, Bhanderi's eyes seem frozen in a stare of absolute horror. It's as if there's something else in there, something ancient and unthinking and only recently awakened. It looks out across a hundred million years into an incomprehensible world of right angles and blinking lights, and finds itself utterly unable to cope.

"Because it comes and goes," Clarke says. "You said it yourself."

He extends one stick-like forearm, covered in derms; a chemical pump just below his elbow taps directly into the vein beneath. He's been dosing himself ever since he climbed back into atmosphere, using miracles of modern chemistry to rape sanity back into his head, to force submerged memories and skills back to the surface for a while. So far, she has to admit, it's working.

But whenever she looks at him, she sees the reptile looking back. "We can't risk it, Rama. I'm sorry."

He lowers his arm. His jaw clicks like some kind of insect.

"You said—" he begins, and falls silent.

He tries again. "When you were bringing me in. Did you say you knew a—"

"Yes."

"I didn't know any—I mean, who?"

"Not here," she tells him. "Not even this ocean. Way back at the very beginning of the rifter program. He went over in front of my eyes." A beat, then: "His name was Gerry."

"But you said he came back."

She honestly doesn't know. Gerry Fischer just appeared out of the darkness, after everyone else had given up and gone. He dragged her to safety, to an evacuation 'scaphe hovering uncertainly over a station already emptied of personnel. But he never spoke a word, and he kicked and fought like an animal when she tried to rescue him in turn.

"Maybe he didn't so much come back as come through," she admits now, to this creature who must in his own way know Gerry Fischer far better than she ever did.

Bhanderi nods. "What happened to him?"

"He died," she says softly.

"Just... faded away? Like the rest of us?"

"No."

"How, then?"

She thinks of a word with customized resonance.

"Boom," she says.

Frontier

Come away, they said after Rio. Come away, now that you've saved our asses yet again.

That wasn't entirely true. He hadn't saved Buffalo. He hadn't saved Houston. Salt Lake and Boise and Sacramento were gone, fallen to improvised assaults ranging from kamikaze airliners to orbital nukes. Half a dozen other franchises were barely alive. Very few of those asses had been saved.

But to the rest of the Entropy Patrol, Achilles Desjardins was a hero ten times over. It had been obvious almost immediately that fifty CSIRA franchises were under directed and simultaneous attack across the western hemisphere, but it had been Desjardins and Desjardins alone who'd put the pieces together, under fire and on the fly. It had been he who'd drawn the impossible conclusion that the attacks were being orchestrated by one of their own. The rest of the Patrol had taken up the call and flattened Rio as soon as they had the scoop, but it had been Desjardins who'd told them where to aim. Without his grace under pressure, every CSIRA stronghold in the hemisphere could have ended up in flames.

Come away, said his grateful masters. This place is a writeoff.

Sudbury CSIRA had taken a direct hit amidships. A suborbital puddle-jumper en route from London to Toromilton, subverted by the enemy and lethally off-course, had left an impact crater ten stories high in the building's northern face. Its fuel tanks all but empty, the fires hadn't burned hot enough to take down the structure. They had merely incinerated, poisoned, or suffocated most of those between the eighteenth and twenty-fifth floors.

Sudbury's senior 'lawbreakers had worked between floors twenty and twenty-four. It had been lucky that Desjardins had managed to raise the alarm before they'd been hit. It had been an outright motherfucking miracle that he hadn't been killed when they were.

Come away.

And Achilles Desjardins looked around at the smoke and the flames, the piled body bags and those few stunned coworkers still sufficiently intact to escape mandatory euthenasia, and replied: You need me here.

There is no here.

But there was more left of here than there was of Salt Lake or Buffalo. The attacks had reduced redundancy across N'Am's fast-response network by over thirty percent. Sudbury was hanging by a thread, but that thread still connected sixteen hemispheric links and forty-seven regional ones. Abandoning it completely would cut system redundancy by another five percent and leave a half-million square kilometers without any rapid-response capacity whatsoever. ßehemoth already ran rampant across half the continent; civilization was imploding throughout its domain. CSIRA could not afford the luxury of further losses.

But there were counterpoints. Half the floors of the Sudbury franchise were uninhabitable. There was barely enough surviving bandwidth for a handful of operatives, and under the current budget it would be almost impossible to keep even that much open. All the models agreed: the best solution was to abandon Sudbury and upgrade Toromilton and Montreal to take up the slack.

And how long, Desjardins wondered, before those upgrades came onstream?

Six months. Maybe a year.

Then they needed a stopgap. They needed to keep the pilot light burning for just a little longer. They needed someone on-site for those unforeseeable crisis points when machinery wasn't up to the job.

But you're our best 'lawbreaker, they protested.

And the task will be almost impossible. Where else should I be?

His bosses said, Welllllllll....

Only six months, he reminded them. Maybe a year.

Of course, it wouldn't turn out that way. Murphy's malign hand would stir the pot and maybe-a-year would morph into three, then four. The Toromilton upgrades would falter and stall; far-sighted master plans would collapse, as they always had, beneath the weight of countless daily emergencies. Making do, the Entropy Patrol would throw crumbs enough at Sudbury to keep the lights on and the clearance codes active, ever-grateful for their uncomplaining minion and the thousand fingers he kept jammed in the dike

But that was now and this was then, and Desjardins was saying, I'll be your lighthouse keeper. I'll be your sentinel on the lonely frontier, I'll fight the brush fires and hold the line until the cavalry comes online. I can do this. You know I can.

And they did know, because Achille Desjardins was a hero. More to the point, he was a 'lawbreaker; he wouldn't have been able to lie to them even if he'd wanted to.

What a guy, they said, shaking their heads in admiration. What a guy.

Groundwork

Kevin Walsh is a good kid. He knows relationships take work, he's willing to do what it takes to keep the spark—such as it is—alive. Or at least, to stretch its death out over the longest possible period.

He attached himself to her arm after Lubin handed out the first fine-tuning assignments, and wouldn't take Later, maybe for an answer. Finally Clarke relented. They found an unoccupied hab and threw down a couple of sleeping pallets, and he uncomplainingly worked his tongue and thumb and forefinger down to jelly until she didn't have the heart to let him continue. She stroked his head and said it was nice but it really wasn't working, and she offered herself in turn for his efforts, but he didn't take her up on it—whether out of chivalrous penance for his own inadequacy or simply because he was sulking, she couldn't tell.

Now they lie side by side, hands lightly interlocked at arm's length. Walsh is asleep, which is surprising: he's no more fond of sleeping in gravity than any other rifter. Maybe it's another chivalrous affectation. Maybe he's faking it.

Clarke can't bring herself to do even that. She lies on her back and stares up at the condensation beading on the bulkhead. After a while she disentangles her hand from Walsh's—gently, so as not to interrupt the performance—and wanders over to the local Comm board.

The main display frames a murky, cryptic obelisk looming up out of the seabed. Atlantis's primary generator. Part of it, anyway—the bulk of the structure plunges deep into bedrock, into the heart of a vent from which it feeds like a mosquito sucking hot blood. Only the apex rises above the substrate like some lumpy windowless skyscraper, facades pocked and wormy with pipes and vents and valves. A sparse dotted line of floodlights girdles the structure about eight meters up, casting a bright coarse halo that stains everything copper. The abyss presses down against that light like a black hand; the top of the generator extends into darkness.

A conduit the size of a sewer pipe emerges at ground level and snakes into the darkness. Clarke absently tags the next cam in line, following the line along the seabed.

"Hey, what are you…"

He doesn't sound sleepy at all.

She turns. Walsh is crouched half-kneeling on the pallet, as though caught in the act of rising. He doesn't move, though.

"Hey, get back here. I wanna try again." He's going for a boyish grin. He's wearing the Disarmingly Cute Face of Seduction. It's a jarring contrast with his posture, which evokes the image of an eleven-year-old caught masturbating on the good linen.

She eyes him curiously. "What's up, Kev?"

He laughs; it sounds like a hiccough. "Nothing's up… we just didn't, you know, finish…"

A dull gray lump of realization congeals in her throat. Experimentally, she turns back to the board and trips the next surveillance cam in the chain. The seabed conduit winds on towards a distant hazy geometry of backlit shadows.

Walsh tugs at her shoulder, nuzzles from behind. "Ladies' choice. Limited time offer, expires soon…"

Next cam.

"Come on, Len—"

Atlantis. A small knot of rifters has accreted at the junction of two wings, nowhere near any of the assigned surveillance stations. They appear to be taking measurements of some kind. Some of them are laden with strange cargo.

Walsh has fallen silent. The lump in Clarke's throat metastasizes.

She turns. Kevin Walsh has backed away, a mixture of guilt and defiance on his face.

"You gotta give her a chance, Len," he says. "I mean, you gotta be more objective about this…"

She regards him calmly. "You asshole."

"Oh right," he flares. "Like anything I ever did mattered to you."

She grabs the disconnected pieces of her diveskin. They slide around her body like living things, fusing one to another, sealing her in, sealing him out, welcome liquid armor that reinforces the boundary between us and them.

Only there is no us, she realizes. There never was. And what really pisses her off is that she'd forgotten that, that she never even saw this coming; even privy to her lover's brainstem, even cognizant of all the guilt and pain and stupid masochistic yearning in there, she hadn't picked up on this imminent betrayal. She'd sensed his resentment, of course, and his hurt, but that was nothing new. When it came right down to it, outright treachery just didn't make enough of a difference in this relationship to register.

She doesn't look at him as she descends to the airlock.

Kevin Walsh is one fucked-up little boy. It's just as well she never got too attached.

Their words buzz back and forth among the shadows of the great structure: numbers, times, shear stress indices. A couple of rifters carry handpads; others fire click-trains of high-frequency sounds through acoustic rangefinders. One of them draws a big black X at some vital weak spot.

How did Ken put it? For concealment, not effect. Obviously they aren't going to make that mistake again.

They're expecting her, of course. Walsh didn't warn them—not on the usual channels, anyway— but you can't sneak up on the fine-tuned.

Clarke pans the company. Nolan, three meters overhead, looks down at her. Cramer, Cheung, and Gomez accrete loosely around them. Creasy and Yeager—too distant for visual ID, but clear enough on the mindline—are otherwise occupied some ways down the hull.

Nolan's vibe overwhelms all the others: where once was resentment, now there's triumph. But the anger—the sense of scores yet to be settled— hasn't changed at all.

"Don't blame Kev," Clarke buzzes. "He did his best." She wonders offhand how far Nolan went to secure that loyalty.

Nolan nods deliberately. "Kev's a good kid. He'd do anything to help the group." The slightest emphasis on anything slips through the machinery, but Clarke's already seen it in the meat behind.

That far.

She forces herself to look deeper, to dig around for guilt or duplicity, but of course it's pointless. If Nolan ever kept such secrets, she's way past it now. Now she wears her intentions like a badge of honor.

"So what's going on?" Clarke asks.

"Just planning for the worst," Nolan says.

"Uh huh." She nods at the X on the hull. "Planning for it, or provoking it?"

Nobody speaks.

"You do realize we control the generators. We can shut them down any time we want. Blowing the hull would be major overkill."

"Oh, we'd never do for excessive force." That's Cramer, off to the left. "Especially since they always be so gentle."

"We just think it would be wise to have other options," Chen buzzes, apologetic but unswayable. "Just in case something compromises Plan A."

"Such as?"

"Such as the way certain hands pump the cocks of the mouths that bite them," Gomez says.

Clarke spins casually to face him. "Articulate as always, Gomer. I can see why you don't talk much."

"If I were you—" Nolan begins.

"Shut the fuck up."

Clarke turns slowly in their midst, her guts convecting in a slow freezing boil. "Anything they did to you, they did to me first. Any shit they threw at you, they threw way more at me. Way more."

"Which ended up landing on everyone but you," Nolan points out.

"You think I'm gonna stick my tongue up their ass just because they missed when they tried to kill me?"

"Are you?"

She coasts up until her face is scant centimeters from Nolan's. "Don't you fucking dare question my loyalty again, Grace. I was down here before any of you miserable haploids. While you were all back on shore pissing and moaning about job security, I broke into their fucking castle and personally kicked Rowan and her buddies off the pot."

"Sure you did. Then you joined her sorority two days later. You play VR games with her daughter, for Chrissake!"

"Yeah? And what exactly did her daughter do to deserve you dropping the whole Atlantic Ocean onto her head? Even if you're right—even if you're right—did their kids fuck you over? What did their families and their servants and their toilet-scrubbers ever do to you?"

The words vibrate off into the distance. The deep, almost subsonic hum of some nearby piece of life-support sounds especially loud in their wake.

Maybe the tiniest bit of uncertainty in the collective vibe, now. Maybe even a tiny bit in Nolan's.

But she's not giving a micron. "You want to know what they did, Len? They chose sides. The wives and the husbands and the medics and even any pet toilet-scrubbers those stumpfucks may have kept around for old time's sake. They all chose sides. Which is more than I can say for you."

"This is not a good idea," Clarke buzzes.

"Thanks for your opinion, Len. We'll let you know if we need you for anything. In the meantime, stay out of my way. The sight of you makes me want to puke."

Clarke plays her final card. "It's not me you have to worry about."

"What made you think we were ever worried about you?" The contempt comes off of Nolan in waves.

"Ken gets very unhappy when he's caught in the middle of some half-assed fiasco like this. I've seen it happen. He's the kind of guy who finds it much easier to shut something down than clean up after it. You can deal with him."

"We already have," Nolan buzzes. "He knows all about it."

"Even gave us a few pointers," Gomez adds.

"Sorry, sweetie." Nolan leans in close to Clarke; their hoods slip frictionlessly past each other, a mannequin nuzzle. "But you really should have seen that coming."

Without another word the group goes back to work, as if cued by some stimulus to which Lenie Clarke is blind and deaf. She hangs there in the water, stunned, betrayed. Bits and pieces of some best-laid plan assemble themselves in the water around her.

She turns and swims away.

Harpodon

Once upon a time, back during the uprising, a couple of corpses commandeered a multisub named Harpodon III. To this day Patricia Rowan has no idea what they were trying to accomplish; Harpodon's spinal bays were empty of any construction or demolition modules that might have served as weapons. The sub was as stripped as a fish skeleton, and about as useful: cockpit up front, impellors in back, and a whole lot of nothing hanging off the segmented spine between.

Maybe they'd just been running for it.

But the rifters didn't bother asking, once they'd caught on and caught up. They hadn't come unequipped: they had torches and rivet guns, not quite enough to cut Harpodon in half but certainly enough to paralyze it from the neck down. They punched out the electrolysis assembly and the Lox tanks; the fugitives got to watch their supply of breathable atmosphere drop from infinite down to the little bubble of nitrox already turning stale in the cockpit.

Normally the rifters would just have holed the viewport and let the ocean finish the job. This time, though, they hauled Harpodon back to one of Atlantis's viewports as a kind of object lesson: the runaways suffocated within perspexed view of all the corpses they'd left behind. There'd already been some rifter casualties, as it turned out, and Grace Nolan had been leading the team that shift.

But back then, not even Nolan was entirely without pity. Once the runaways were well and truly dead, once the moral of the story had properly sunk in, the rifters mated the wounded sub to the nearest docking hatch and let the corpses reclaim the bodies. Harpodon hasn't moved in all the years since. It's still grafted onto the service lock, protruding from the body of Atlantis like a parasitic male anglerfish fused to the flank of his gigantic mate. It's not a place that anybody goes.

Which makes it the perfect spot for Patricia Rowan to consort with the enemy.

The diver 'lock is an elongate blister distending the deck of the cockpit, just aft of the copilot's seat where Rowan sits staring at rows of dark instruments. It gurgles behind her; she hears a tired pneumatic sigh as its coffin lid swings open, hears the soft slap of wet feet against the plates.

She's left the lights off, of course—it wouldn't do for anyone to know of her presence here—but some flashing beacon, way along the curve of Atlantis's hull, sends pulses of dim brightness through the viewports. The cockpit interior blinks lazily in and out of existence, a jumbled topography of metal viscera keeping the abyss at bay.

Lenie Clarke climbs into the pilot's seat beside her.

"Anyone see you?" Rowan asks, not turning her head.

"If they had," the rifter says, "they'd probably be finishing the job right now." Refering, no doubt, to the injuries sustained by Harpodon in days gone by. "Any progress?"

"Eight of the samples tested positive. No fix yet." Rowan takes a deep breath. "How goes the battle on your end?"

"Maybe you could pick a different expression. Something a bit less literal."

"Is it that bad?"

"I don't think I can hold them back, Pat."

"Surely you can," Rowan says. "You're the Meltdown Madonna, remember? The Alpha Femme."

"Not any more."

Rowan turns to look at the other woman.

"Grace is—some of them are taking steps." Lenie's face switches on and off in the pulsating gloom. "They're mine-laying again. Right out in the open this time."

Rowan considers. "What does Ken think about that?"

"Actually, I think he's okay with it."

Lenie sounds as though she'd been surprised by that. Rowan isn't. "Mine-laying again?" she repeats. "So you know who set them the first time?"

"Not really. Not yet. Not that it matters." Lenie sighs. "Hell, some people still think you planted the first round yourselves."

"That's absurd, Lenie. Why would we?"

"To give you an—excuse, I guess. Or as some kind of last-ditch self-destruct, to take us out with you. I don't know." Lenie shrugs. "I'm not saying they're making sense. I'm just telling you where they're at."

"And how are we supposed to be putting together all this ordinance, when you people control our fabrication facilities?"

"Ken says you can get a standard Calvin cycler to make explosives if you tweak the wiring the right way."

Ken again.

Rowan still isn't sure how to broach the subject. There's a bond between Lenie and Ken, a connection both absurd and inevitable between two people for whom the term friendship should be as alien as a Europan microbe. It's nothing sexual—the way Ken swings it hardly could be, although Rowan suspects that Lenie still doesn't know about that—but in its own repressed way, it's almost as intimate. There's a protectiveness, not to be taken lightly. If you attack one, you better watch out for the other.

And yet, from the sound of it, Ken Lubin is beginning to draw different alliances…

She decides to risk it. "Lenie, has it occurred to you that Ken might be—"

"That's crazy." The rifter kills the question before she has to answer it.

"Why?" Rowan asks. "Who else has the expertise? Who else is addicted to killing people?"

"You gave him that. He was on your payroll."

Rowan shakes her head. "I'm sorry, Lenie, but you know that isn't true. We instilled his threat-response reflex, yes. But that was only to make sure he took the necessary steps—"

"To make sure he killed people," Lenie interjects.

"—in the event of a security breach. He was never supposed to get—addicted to it. And you know as well as I do: Ken has the know-how, he has access, he has grudges going all the way back to childhood. The only thing that kept him on the leash was Guilt Trip, and Spartacus took care of that."

"Spartacus was five years ago," the rifter points out. "And Ken hasn't gone on any killing sprees since then. If you'll remember, he was one of exactly two people who prevented your last uprising from turning into The Great Corpse Massacre."

She sounds as if she's trying to convince herself as much as anyone. "Lenie—"

But she's having none of it. "Guilt Trip was just something you people laid onto his brain after he came to work for you. He didn't have it before, and he didn't have it afterwards, and you know why? Because he has rules, Pat. He came up with his own set of rules, and he damn well stuck to them, and no matter how much he wanted to, he never killed anyone without a reason."

"That's true," Rowan admits. "Which is why he started inventing reasons."

Lenie, strobing slowly, looks out a porthole and doesn't answer.

"Maybe you don't know that part of the story," Rowan continues. "You never wondered why we'd assign him to the rifter program in the first place? Why we'd waste a Black Ops Black Belt on the bottom of the ocean, scraping barnacles off geothermal pumps? It was because he'd started to slip up, Lenie. He was making mistakes, he was leaving loose ends all over the place. Of course he always tied them up with extreme prejudice, but that was rather the point. On some subconscious level, Ken was deliberately slipping up so that he'd have an excuse to seal the breach afterwards.

"Beebe Station was so far out in the boondocks that it should have been virtually impossible to encounter anything he could interpret as a security breach, no matter how much he bent his rules. That was our mistake, in hindsight." Not even one of our bigger ones, more's the pity. "But my point is, people with addictions sometimes fall off the wagon. People with self-imposed rules of conduct have been known to bend and twist and rationalize those rules to let them both have their cake and eat it. Seven years ago, our psych people told us that Ken was a classic case in point. There's no reason to believe it isn't just as true today."

The rifter doesn't speak for a moment. Her disembodied face, a pale contrast against the darkness of her surroundings, flashes on and off like a beating heart.

"I don't know," she says at last. "I met one of your psych people once, remember? You sent him down to observe us. We didn't like him much."

Rowan nods. "Yves Scanlon."

"I tried to look him up when I got back to land." Look him up: Leniespeak for hunt him down. "He wasn't home."

"He was decirculated." Rowan says, her own euphemism—as always—easily trumping the other woman's.

"Ah."

But since the subject has come up... "He—he had a theory about you people," Rowan says. "He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow. That you entered some heightened state of awareness when you spent too long on the bottom of the sea, with all those synthetics in your blood. Quantum signals from the brainstem. Some kind of Ganzfeld effect."

"Scanlon was an idiot," Lenie remarks.

"No doubt. But was he wrong?"

Lenie smiles faintly.

"I see," Rowan says.

"It's not mind-reading. Nothing like that."

"But maybe, if you could…what would be the word, scan?"

"We called it fine-tuning," Lenie says, her voice as opaque as her eyes.

"If you could fine-tune anybody who might have…"

"Already done. It was Ken who suggested it, in fact. We didn't find anything."

"Did you fine-tune Ken?"

"You can't—" She stops.

"He blocked you, didn't he?" Rowan nods to herself. "If it's anything like Ganzfeld scanning, he blocks it without even thinking. Standard procedure."

They sit without speaking for a few moments.

"I don't think it's Ken," Clarke says after a while. "I know him, Pat. I've known him for years."

"I've known him longer."

"Not the same way."

"Granted. But if not Ken, who?"

"Shit, Pat, the whole lot of us! Everybody has it in for you guys now. They're convinced that Jerry and her buddies—"

"That's absurd."

"Is it really?" Rowan glimpses the old Lenie Clarke, the predatory one, smiling in the intermittent light. "Supposing you'd kicked our asses five years ago, and we'd been living under house arrest ever since. And then some bug passed through our hands on its way to you, and corpses started dropping like flies. Are you saying you wouldn't suspect?"

"No. No, of course we would." Rowan heaves a sigh. "But I'd like to think we wouldn't go off half-cocked without any evidence at all. We'd at least entertain the possibility that you were innocent."

"As I recall, when the shoe was on the other foot guilt or innocence didn't enter into it. You didn't waste any time sterilizing the hot zones, no matter who was inside. No matter what they'd done."

"Good rationale. One worthy of Ken Lubin and his vaunted ethical code."

Lenie snorts. "Give it a rest, Pat. I'm not calling you a liar. But we've already cut you more slack than you cut us, back then. And there are a lot of people in there with you. You sure none of them are doing anything behind your back?"

A bright moment: a dark one.

"Anyway, there's still some hope we could dial this down," Clarke says. "We're looking at ß-max ourselves. If it hasn't been tweaked, we won't find anything."

A capillary of dread wriggles through Rowan's insides.

"How will you know one way or the other?" she asks. "None of you are pathologists."

"Well, they aren't gonna trust your experts. We may not have tenure at LU but we've got a degree or two in the crowd. That, and access to the biomed library, and—"

"No," Rowan whispers. The capillary grows into a thick, throbbing artery. She feels blood draining from her face to feed it.

Lenie sees it immediately. "What?" She leans forward, across the armrest of her seat. "Why does that worry you?"

Rowan shakes her head. "Lenie, you don't know. You're not trained, you don't get a doctorate with a couple of days' reading. Even if you get the right results, you'll probably misinterpret them…"

"What results? Misinterpret how?"

Rowan watches her, suddenly wary: the way she looked when they met for the first time, five years ago.

The rifter looks back steadily. "Pat, don't hold out on me. I'm having a tough enough time keeping the dogs away as it is. If you've got something to say, say it."

Tell her.

"I didn't know myself until recently," Rowan begins. "ßehemoth may have been—I mean, the original ßehemoth, not this new strain—it was tweaked."

"Tweaked." The word lies thick and dead in the space between them.

Rowan forces herself to continue. "To adapt it to aerobic environments. And to increase its reproductive rate, for faster production. There were commercial applications. Nobody was trying to bring down the world, of course, it wasn't a bioweapons thing at all…but evidently something went wrong."

"Evidently." Clarke's face is an expressionless mask.

"I'm sure you can see the danger here, if your people stumble across these modifications without really knowing what they're doing. Perhaps they know enough to recognize a tweak, but not enough to tell what it does. Perhaps they don't know how to tell old tweaks from more recent ones. Or perhaps the moment they see any evidence of engineering, they'll conclude the worst and stop looking. They could come up with something they thought was evidence, and the only ones qualified to prove them wrong would be ignored because they're the enemy."

Clarke watches her like a statue. Maybe the reconciliation of the past few years hasn't been enough. Maybe this new development, this additional demand for even more understanding, has done nothing but shatter the fragile trust the two of them have built. Maybe Rowan has just lost all credibility in this woman's eyes. Maybe she's just blown her last chance to avoid meltdown.

Endless seconds fossilize in the cold, thick air.

"Fuck," the rifter says at last, very softly. "It's all over if this gets out."

Rowan dares to hope. "We've just got to make sure it doesn't."

Clarke shakes her head. "What am I supposed to do, tell Rama to stop looking? Sneak into the hab and smash the sequencer? They already think I'm in bed with you people." She emits a small, bitter laugh. "If I take any action at all I've lost them. They don't trust me as it is."

Rowan leans back her seat and closes her eyes. "I know." She feels a thousand years old.

"You fucking corpses. You never could leave anything alone, could you?"

"We're just people, Lenie. We make…mistakes…" And suddenly the sheer, absurd, astronomical magnitude of that understatement sinks home in the most unexpected way, and Patricia Rowan can't quite suppress a giggle.

It's the most undignified sound she's made in years. Lenie arches an eyebrow.

"Sorry," Rowan says.

"No problem. It was pretty hilarious." The rifter's patented half-smile flickers at the corner of her mouth.

But it's gone in the next second. "Pat, I don't think we can stop this."

"We have to."

"Nobody's talking any more. Nobody's listening. Just one little push could send it all over the edge. If they even knew we were talking here…"

Rowan shakes her head in hopeful, reassuring denial. But Lenie's right. Rowan knows her history, after all. She knows her politics. You're well past the point of no return when simply communicating with the other side constitutes an act of treason.

"Remember the very first time we met?" Lenie asks. "Face to face?"

Rowan nods. She'd turned the corner and Lenie Clarke was just there, right in front of her, fifty kilograms of black rage inexplicably transported to the heart of their secret hideaway. "Eighty meters in that direction," she says, pointing over her shoulder.

"You sure about that?" Lenie asks.

"Most certainly," Rowan says. "I thought you were going to kill m—"

And stops, ashamed.

"Yes," she says after a while. "That was the first time we met. Really."

Lenie faces forward, at her own bank of dead readouts. "I thought you might have, you know, been part of the interview process. Back before your people did their cut'n'paste in my head. You can never tell what bits might have got edited out, you know?"