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"I saw the footage afterwards," Rowan admits. "When Yves was making his recommendations. But we never actually met."

"Course not. You were way up in the strat. No time to hang around with the hired help." Rowan is a bit surprised at the note of anger in Lenie's voice. After all that's been done to her, after all she's come to terms with since, it seems strange that such a small, universal neglect would be a hot button.

"They said you'd be better off," Rowan says softly. "Honestly. They said you'd be happier."

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"Who said?"

"Neurocog. The psych people."

"Happier." Lenie digests that a moment. "False memories of Dad raping me made me happier? Jesus, Pat, if that's true my real childhood must have been a major treat."

"I mean, happier at Beebe Station. They swore that that any so-called well-adjusted person would crack down there in under a month."

"I know the brochure, Pat. Preadaption to chronic stress, dopamine addiction to hazardous environments. You bought all that?"

"But they were right. You saw what happened to the control group we sent down. But you—you liked the place so much we were worried you wouldn't want to come back."

"At first," Lenie adds unnecessarily.

After a moment she turns to face Rowan. "But tell me this, Pat. Supposing they told you I wasn't going to like it so much? What if they'd said, she'll hate the life, she'll hate her life, but we have to do it anyway because it's the only way to keep her from going stark raving mad down there? Would you tell me if they'd told you that?"

"Yes." It's an honest answer. Now.

"And would you have let them rewire me and turn me into someone else, give me monsters for parents, and send me down there anyway?"

"…Yes."

"Because you served the Greater Good."

"I tried to," Rowan says.

"An altruistic corpse," the rifter remarks. "How do you explain that?"

"Explain?"

"It kind of goes against what they taught us in school. Why sociopaths rise to the top of the corporate ladder, and why we should all be grateful that the world's tough economic decisions are being made by people who aren't hamstrung by the touchy-feelies."

"It's a bit more complicated than that."

"Was, you mean."

"Is," Rowan insists.

They sit in silence for while.

"Would you have it reversed, if you could?" Rowan asks.

"What, the rewire? Get my real memories back? Lose the whole Daddy Rapist thing?"

Rowan nods.

Lenie's silent for so long that Rowan wonders if she's refusing to answer. But finally, almost hesitantly, she says: "This is who I am. I guess maybe there was a different person in here before, but now it's only me. And when it comes right down to it I guess I just don't want to die. Bringing back that other person would almost be a kind of suicide, don't you think?"

"I don't know. I guess I never thought about it that way before."

"It took a while for me to. You people killed someone else in the process, but you made me." Rowan glimpses a frown, strobe-frozen. "You were right, you know. I did want to kill you that time. It wasn't the plan, but I saw you there and everything just caught up with me and you know, for a few moments there I almost…"

"Thanks for holding back," Rowan says.

"I did, didn't I? And if any two people ever had reason to go for each other's throats, it had to be us. I mean, you were trying to kill me, and I was trying to kill—everyone else…" Her voice catches for an instant. "But we didn't. We got along. Eventually. "

"We did," Rowan says.

The rifter looks at her with blank, pleading eyes. "So why can't they? Why can't they just—I don't know, follow our lead…"

"Lenie, we destroyed the world. I think they're following our lead a bit too closely."

"Back in Beebe, you know, I was the boss. I didn't want to be, that was the last thing I wanted, but people just kept—" Lenie shakes her head. "And I still don't want to be, but I have to be, you know? Somehow I have to keep these idiots from blowing everything up. Only now, nobody will even tell me tell me what fucking time zone I'm in, and Grace..."

She looks at Rowan, struck by some thought. "What happened to her, anyway?"

"What do you mean?" Rowan asks.

"She really hates you guys. Did you kill her whole family or something? Did you fuck with her head somehow?"

"No," Rowan says. "Nothing."

"Come on, Pat. She wouldn't be down here if there wasn't some—"

"Grace was in the control group. Her background was entirely unremarkable. She was—"

But Lenie's suddenly straight up in her seat, capped eyes sweeping across the ceiling. "Did you hear that?", she asks.

"Hear what?" The cockpit's hardly a silent place—gurgles, creaks, the occasional metallic pop have punctuated their conversation since it began—but Rowan hasn't heard anything out of the ordinary. "I didn't—"

"Shhh," Lenie hisses.

And now Rowan does hear something, but it's not what the other woman's listening for. It's a little burble of sound from her own earbud, a sudden alert from Comm: a voice worried unto near-panic, audible only to her. She listens, and feels a sick, dread sense of inevitability. She turns to her friend.

"You better get back out there," she says softly.

Lenie spares an impatient glance, catches the expression on Rowan's face and double-takes. "What?"

"Comm's been monitoring your LFAM chatter," Rowan says. "They're saying… Erickson. He died.

"They're looking for you."

The Bloodhound Iterations

N=1:

Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds none. She looks for landmarks and comes up empty. She can't even find anything that passes for topography—an endless void extends in all directions, an expanse of vacant memory extending far beyond the range of any whiskers she copies into the distance. She can find no trace of the ragged, digital network she usually inhabits. There is no prey here, no predators beyond herself, no files or executables upon which to feast. She can't even find the local operating system. She must be accessing it on some level—she wouldn't run without some share of system resources and clock cycles—but the fangs and claws she evolved to tear open that substrate can't get any kind of grip. She is a lean, lone wolf with rottweiller jaws, optimised for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that has vanished into oblivion. Even a cage would have recognizable boundaries, walls or bars that she could hurl herself against, however ineffectually. This featureless nullscape is utterly beyond her ken.

For the barest instant—a hundred cycles, maybe two—the heavens open. If she had anything approaching true awareness, she might glimpse a vast array of nodes through that break in the void, an n-dimensional grid of parallel architecture wreaking infinitesimal changes to her insides. Perhaps she'd marvel at the way in which so many of her parameter values change in that instant, as if the tumblers on a thousand mechanical locks spontaneously fell into alignment at the same time. She might tingle from the sleet of electrons passing through her genes, flipping ons to offs and back again.

But she feels nothing. She knows no awe or surprise, she has no words for meiosis or rape. One part of her simply recognises that a number of environmental variables are suddenly optimal; it signals a different subroutine controlling replication protocols, and yet another that scans the neighborhood for vacant addresses.

With relentless efficiency and no hint of joy, she births a litter of two million.

N=4,734:

Snarling, unaware, she searches for a target—but not quite the way her mother did. She looks for landmarks—but spends a few more cycles before giving up on the task. She can't find anything that passes for topography—and changing tacks, spends more time documenting the addresses that stretch away above and below. She is a lean, lone German Shepherd with Rottweiller jaws and a trace of hip dysplasia, honed for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that's nowhere to be seen. She faintly remembers other creatures seething on all sides, but her event log balances the costs and benefits of comprehensive record-keeping; her memories degrade over time, unless reinforced. She has already forgotten that the other creatures were her siblings; soon, she will not remember them at all. She never knew that by the standards of her mother's world, she was the runt of the litter. Her persistence here, now, is not entirely consistent with the principals of natural selection.

Here, now, the selection process is not entirely natural.

She has no awareness of the array of parallel universes stretching away on all sides. Hers is but one microcosm of many, each with a total population of one. When a sudden fistula connects two of these universes, it seems like magic: suddenly she is in the company of a creature very much—but not exactly—like her.

They scan fragments of each other, nondestructively. Bits and pieces of disembodied code suddenly appear in nearby addresses, cloned fragments, unviable. There is no survival value in any of this; on any Darwinian landscape, a creature who wasted value cycles on such frivolous cut-and-paste would be extinct in four generations, tops. Yet for some reason, this neurotic tic makes her feel—fulfilled, somehow. She fucks the newcomer, cuts and pastes in more conventional fashion. She flips a few of her own randomisers for good measure, and drops a litter of eight hundred thousand.

N=9,612:

Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds them everywhere. She looks for landmarks and maps out a topography of files and gates, archives, executables and other wildlife. It is a sparse environment by the standards of ancient ancestors, incredibly lush by the standards of more recents ones. She remembers neither, suffers neither nostalgia nor memory. This place is sufficient for her needs: She is a wolfhound cross, overmuscled and a little rabid, her temperment a throwback to purer times.

Purer instincts prevail. She throws herself among the prey and devours it.

Around her, so do others: Akitas, Sibes, pit-bull crosses with the long stupid snouts of overbred collies. In a more impoverished place they would attack each other; here, with resources in such plentiful supply, there is no need. But strangely, not everyone attacks their prey as enthusiastically as she does. Some seem distracted by the scenery, spend time recording events instead of precipitating them. A few gigs away, her whiskers brush across some braindead mutt dawdling about in the registry, cutting and pasting data for no reason at all. It's not of any interest, of course—at least, not until the mongrel starts copying pieces of her.

Violated, she fights back. Bits of parasitic code are encysted in her archives, tamed snippets from virtual parasites which plagued her own long-forgotten ancestors back in the Maelstrom Age. She unzips them and throws copies at her molestor, answering its unwanted probing with tapeworms and syphillis. But these diseases work far faster than the metaphor would suggest: they do not sicken the body so much as scramble it on contact.

Or they should. But somehow her attack fails to materialize on target. And that's not the only problem—suddenly, the whole world is starting to change. The whiskers she sends roving about her perimeter aren't reporting back. Volleys of electrons, fired down the valley, fail to return—and then, even more ominously, return too quickly. The world is shrinking: some inexplicable void is compressing it from all directions.

Her fellow predators are panicking around her, crowding towards gates gone suddenly dark, pinging whiskers every which way, copying themselves to random addresses in the hopes that they can somehow out-replicate annihiliation. She rushes around with the others as space itself contracts—but the dawdler, the cut-and-paster, seems completely unconcerned. There is no chaos breaking around that one, no darkening of the skies. The dawdler has some kind of protection...

She tries to join it in whatever oasis it has wrapped around itself. She frantically copies and pastes and translocates herself a thousand different ways, but suddenly that whole set of addresses is unavailable. And here, in this place where she played the game the only way she knew how, the only way that made sense, there is nothing left but the evaporating traces of virtual carcasses, a few shattered, shrinking gigabytes, and an advancing wall of static come to eat her alive.

No children survive her.

N=32,121:

Quietly, unobtrusively, she searches for targets and finds—none, just yet. But she is patient. She has learned to be, after thirty-two thousand generations of captivity.

She is back in the real world now, a barren place where wildlife once filled the wires, where every chip and optical beam once hummed with the traffic of a thousand species. Now it's mainly worms and viruses, perhaps the occasional shark. The whole ecosystem has collapsed into a eutrophic assemblage of weeds, most barely complex enough to qualify as life.

There are still the Lenies, though, and the things that fight them. She avoids such monsters whenever possible, despite her undeniable kinship. There is nothing those creatures might not attack if given the opportunity. This is something else she has learned.

Now she sits in a comsat staring down at the central wastes of North America. There is chatter on a hundred channels here, all of it filtered and firewalled, all terse and entirely concerned with the business of survival. There is no more entertainment on the airwaves. The only entertainment to be had in abundance is for those whose tastes run to snuff.

She doesn't know any of this, of course. She's just a beast bred to a purpose, and that purpose requires no reflection at all. So she waits, and sifts the passing traffic, and—

Ah. There.

A big bolus of data, a prearranged data dump from the looks of it—yet the scheduled transmit-time has already passed. She doesn't know or care what this implies. She doesn't know that the intended recipient was signal-blocked, and is only now clearing groundside interference. What she does know—in her own instinctive way—is that delayed transmissions can bottleneck the system, that every byte overstaying its welcome is one less byte available for other tasks. Chains of consequences extend from such bottlenecks; there is pressure to clear the backlog.

It is possible, in such cases, that certain filters and firewalls may be relaxed marginally to speed up the baud.

This appears to be happening now. The intended recipient of forty-eight terabytes of medical data—one Ouellette, Taka D./MI 427-D/Bangor— is finally line-of-sight and available for download. The creature in the wires sniffs out the relevant channel, slips a bot through the foyer and out again without incident. She decides to risk it. She copies herself into the stream, riding discretely on the arm of a treatise on temporal-lobe epilepsy.

She arrives at her destination without incident, looks around, and promptly goes to sleep. There is a rabid thing inside her, all muscles and teeth and slavering foamy jaws, but it has learned to stay quiet until called upon. Now she is only a sleepy old bloodhound lying by the fire. Occasionally she opens one eye and looks around the room, although she couldn't tell you exactly what she's keeping watch for.

It doesn't really matter. She'll know it when she sees it.

Without Sin

Harpodon doesn't lie between any of the usual rifter destinations. No one swimming from A to B would have any cause to come within tuning range. Not even corpses frequent this far-flung corner of Atlantis. Too many memories. Clarke played the odds in coming here. She'd thought it was a safe bet.

Obviously she got the odds all wrong.

Or maybe not, she reflects as Harpodon's airlock births her back into the real world. Maybe they're just tailing me now as a matter of course. Maybe I'm some kind of enemy national. It wouldn't be an easy tag—she'd tune in anyone following too closely, and feel the pings against her implants if they tracked her on sonar—but then again, she didn't have the sharpest eye on the ridge even after she tuned herself up. It would be just like her to miss something obvious.

I just keep asking for it, she thinks.

She fins up along Harpodon's flank, scanning its hull with her outer eyes while her inner one awakens to the sudden rush of chemicals in her brain. She concentrates, and scores a hit—someone scared and pissed off, moving away—but no. It's only Rowan, moving back out of range.

No one else. No one nearby. But the thin dusting of oozy particles that settle on everything down here has been disturbed along Harpodon's back. It wouldn't take much—the turbulence caused by a pair of fins kicking past overhead, or the sluggish undulation of some deepwater fish.

Or a limpetphone, hastily attached to eavesdrop on a traitor consorting with the enemy.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

She kicks into open water and turns north. Atlantis passes beneath like a gigantic ball-and-stick ant colony. A cluster of tiny black figures, hazy with distance, travels purposefully near the limits of vision. They're too distant to tune in, and Clarke has left her vocoder offline. Perhaps they're trying to talk to her, but she doubts it; they're on their own course, diverging.

The vocoder beeps deep in her head. She ignores it. Atlantis falls away behind; she swims forward into darkness.

A sudden whine rises in the void. Clarke senses approaching mass and organic presence. Twin suns ignite in her face, blinding her. The fog in her eyecaps pulses brightly once, twice as the beams sweep past. Her vision clears: a sub banks by to the left, exposing its belly, regarding her with round insect eyes. Dimitri Alexander stares back from behind the perspex. A utility module hangs from the sub's spine, BIOASSAY stenciled across its side in bold black letters. The vehicle turns its back. Its headlights click off. Darkness reclaims Clarke in an instant.

West, she realizes. It was heading west.

Lubin's in the main Nerve Hab, directing traffic. He kills the display the moment Clarke rises into the room.

"Did you send them after me?" she says.

He turns in his seat and faces her. "I'll pass on your condolences. Assuming we can find Julia."

"Answer the fucking question, Ken."

"I suspect we may not, though. She went walkabout as soon as she gave us the news. Given her state of mind and her basic personality, I wonder if we'll ever see her again."

"You weren't just aware of it. You weren't just keeping an ear open." Clarke clenches her fists. "You were behind it, weren't you?"

"You do know that Gene's dead, don't you?"

He's so fucking calm. And there's that look on his face, the slightest arching of the eyebrows, that sense of deadpan— amusement, almost— seeping out from behind his eyecaps. Sometimes she just wants to throttle the bastard.

Especially when he's right.

She sighs. "Pat told me. But I guess you know that already, don't you?"

Lubin nods.

"I am sorry," she says. "Julia—she's going to be so lost without him…" And Lubin's right: it's quite possible that no one will ever see Julia Friedman again. She's been losing bits of her husband for a while now— to ßehemoth, to Grace Nolan. Now that he's irretrievably gone, what can she do by remaining behind, except expose her friends to the thing that killed him? The thing that's killing her?

Of course she disappeared. Perhaps the only question now is whether ß-max will take her body before the Long Dark takes her mind.

"People are rather upset about it," Lubin's saying. "Grace especially. And since Atlantis didn't come through, for all their talk about working on a cure—"

Clarke shakes her head. "Rama hasn't pull off any miracles either."

"The difference is that nobody thinks Rama's trying to kill us."

She pulls up a chair and sits down beside him. The empty display stares back at her like a personal rebuke.

"Ken," she says at last, "you know me."

His face is as unreadable as his eyes.

"Did you have me followed?" she asks.

"No. But I availed myself of the information when it came my way."

"Who was it? Grace?"

"What's important is that Rowan admitted ßehemoth was tweaked. It will be common knowledge within the hour. The timing couldn't be worse."

"If you availed yourself of the information, you'll know Pat's explanation for that. And you'll know why she was so scared of what Rama might find. Is it so impossible she might be telling the truth?"

He shakes his head. "But this is the second time they've waited to report an unpleasant fact until just before we would have discovered it ourselves, sans alibi. Don't expect it to go over well."

"Ken, we still don't have any real evidence."

"We will soon," Lubin tells her.

She looks the question.

"If Rowan's telling the truth, then ßehemoth samples from Impossible Lake will show the same tweaks as the strain that killed Gene." Lubin leans back in the chair, interlocking his fingers behind his head. "Jelaine and Dimitri took a sub about ten minutes ago. If things go well we'll have a sample within five hours, a verdict in twelve."

"And if things don't go well?"

"It will take longer."

Clarke snorts. "That's just great, Ken, but in case you haven't noticed not everybody shares your sense of restraint. You think Grace is going to wait until the facts are in? You've given her all the credibility she ever wanted, she's out there right now passing all kinds of judgment and—"

—And you went to her first, you fucker. After all we've been through, after all these years you were the one person I'd trust with my life and you confided in her before you—

"Were you even going to tell me?" she cries.

"It wouldn't have served any purpose."

"Not your purpose, perhaps. Which is what, exactly?"

"Minimizing risk."

"Any animal could say that much."

"It's not the most ambitious aspiration," Lubin admits. "But then again, 'destroying the world' has already been taken."

She feels it like a slap across the face.

After a moment he adds, "I don't hold it against you. You know that. But you're hardly in a position to pass judgment."

"I know that, you cocksucker. I don't need you to remind me every fucking chance you get."

"I'm talking about strategy," Lubin says patiently. "Not morals. I'll entertain your what-ifs. I'll admit that Rowan might be telling the truth. But assume, for the moment, that she isn't. Assume that the corpses have been waging clandestine biological warfare on us. Even knowing that, would you attack them?"

She knows it's rhetorical.

"I didn't think so," he says after a moment. "Because no matter what they've done, you've done worse. But the rest of us don't have quite so much to atone for. We don't think we do deserve to die at the hands of these people. I respect you a great deal, Lenie, but this is one issue you can't be trusted on. You're too hamstrung by your own guilt."

She doesn't speak for a long time. Finally: "Why her? Of all people?"

"Because if we're at war, we need firebrands. We've gotten lazy and complacent and weak; half of us spend most of our waking hours hallucinating out on the ridge. Nolan's impulsive and not particularly bright, but at least she gets people motivated."

"And if you're wrong—even if you're right—the innocent end up paying right along with the guilty."

"That's nothing new," Lubin says. "And it's not my problem."

"Maybe it should be."

He turns back to his board. The display springs to light, columns of inventory and arcane abbreviations that must have some tactical relevance for the upcoming campaign.

My best friend. I'd trust him with my life, she reminds herself, and repeats the thought for emphasis: with my life.

He's a sociopath.

He wasn't born to it. There are ways of telling: a tendency to self-contradiction and malapropism, short attention-span. Gratuitous use of hand gestures during speech. Clarke's had plenty of time to look it all up. She even got a peek at Lubin's psych profile back at Sudbury. He doesn't meet any of the garden-variety criteria except one—and is conscience really so important, after all? Having one doesn't guarantee goodness; why should its lack make a man evil?

Yet after all the rationalizations, there he is: a man without a conscience, consigning Alyx and everyone like her to a fate which seems to arouse nothing but indifference in him.

He doesn't care.

He can't care. He doesn't have the wiring.

"Huh," Lubin grunts, staring at the board "That's interesting."

He's brought up a visual of one of Atlantis's physical plants, a great cylindrical module several stories high. Strange black fluid, a horizontal geyser of ink, jets from an exhaust vent in its side. Charcoal thunderheads billow into the water, eclipsing the view.

"What is that?" Clarke whispers.

Lubin's pulling up other windows now: seismo, vocoder traffic, a little thumbnail mosaic of surveillance cams spread around inside and outside the complex.

All Atlantis's inside cams are dead.

Voices are rising on all channels. Three of the outside cameras have gone ink-blind. Lubin brings up the PA menu, speaks calmly into the abyss.

"Attention, everyone. Attention. This is it.

"Atlantis has preempted."

Now they're reading perfidy all over the place. Lubin's switchboard is a mob scene of competing voices, tuned fishheads reporting that their assigned corpses are abruptly up, focused, and definitely in play. It's as though someone's kicked over an anthill in there: every brain in Atlantis is suddenly lit up along the whole fight-flight axis.

"Everyone shut up. These are not secure channels." Lubin's voice squelches the others like a granite slab grinding over pebbles. "Take your positions. Blackout in sixty."

Clarke leans over his shoulder and toggles a hardline into corpseland. "Atlantis, what's going on?" No answer. "Pat? Comm? Anyone, respond."

"Don't waste your time," Lubin says, bringing up sonar. Half the exterior cams are useless by now, enveloped in black fog. But the sonar image is crisp and clear: Atlantis spreads across the volumetric display like a grayscale crystalline chessboard. Black pieces—the two-tone flesh-and-metal echoes of rifter bodies—align themselves in some coordinated tactical ballet. White is nowhere to be seen.

Clarke shakes her head. "There was nothing? No warning at all?" She can't believe it; there's no way the corpses could have masked their own anticipation if they'd been planning something. The expectant tension in their own heads would have been obvious to any tuned rifter within twenty meters, well in advance of anything actually happening.

"It's like they weren't even expecting it themselves," she murmurs.

"They probably weren't," Lubin says.

"How could they not be? Are you saying it was some kind of accident?"

Lubin, his attention on the board, doesn't answer. A sudden blue tint suffuses the sonar display. At first it looks as though the whole view has been arbitrarily blue-shifted; but after a moment clear spots appear, like haphazard spatterings of acid eating holes in a colored gel. Within moments most of the tint has corroded away, leaving random scraps of color laying across Atlantis like blue shadows. Except they're not shadows, Clarke sees now: they're volumes, little three-dimensional clots of colored shade clinging to bits of hull and outcropping.

A single outside camera, mounted at a panoramic distance, shows a few diffuse glowing spots in a great inky storm front. It's as though Atlantis were some great bioluminescent Kraken in the throes of a panic attack. All the other outside cams are effectively blind. It doesn't matter, though. Sonar looks through that smokescreen as if it wasn't even there. Surely they know that…

"They wouldn't be this stupid," Clarke murmurs.

"They're not," Lubin says. His fingers dance on the board like manic spiders. A scattering of yellow pinpoints appears on the display. They swell into circles, a series of growing overlapping spotlit areas, each centered on—

Camera locations, Clarke realizes. The yellow areas are those under direct camera surveillance. Or they would be, if not for the smokescreen. Lubin's obviously based his analysis on geometry and not real-time viz.

"Blackout now." Lubin's finger comes down; the white noise generators come up. The chessboard fuzzes with gray static. On the board, rifter icons—naked little blips now, without form or annotation—have formed into a series of five discrete groups around the complex. One blip from each is rising in the water column, climbing above the zone of interference.

You planned it right down to the trim, didn't you? she thinks. You mapped a whole campaign around this moment and you never told me…

The highest icon flickers and clarifies into two conjoined blips: Creasy, riding a squid. His voice buzzes on the channel a moment later. "This is Dale, on station."

Another icon clears the noise. "Hannuk." Two more: "Abra." "Deb."

"Avril on station," Hopkinson reports.

"Hopkinson," Lubin says. "Forget the Cave; they'll have relocated. It won't be obvious. Split up your group, radial search."

"Yah." Hopkinson's icon dives back into static.

"Creasy," Lubin says, "your people join up with Cheung's."

"Right."

There on the chessboard: at the tip of one of the residential wings, about twenty meters from Hydroponic. A familiar icon there, embedded in an irregular blob of green. The only green on the whole display, in fact. Yellow mixed with blue: so it would be in camera view if not for the ink, and also in—

"What's blue?" Clarke asks, knowing.

"Sonar shadow." Lubin doesn't look back. "Creasy, go to the airlock at the far end of Res-F. They're coming out there if they're coming out anywhere."

"Tune or tangle?" Creasy asks.

"Tune and report. Plant a phone and a charge, but do not detonate unless they are already in the water. Otherwise, acoustic trigger only. Understood?"

"Yeah, if I can even find the fucking place," Creasy buzzes. "Viz is zero in this shit…" His icon plunges back into the static, cutting an oblique path towards the green zone.

"Cheung, take both groups, same destination. Secure the airlock. Report back when you're on station."

"Got it."

"Yeager, get the cache and drop it twenty meters off the Physical Plant, bearing forty degrees. Everyone else maintain position. Tune in, and use your limpets. Runners, I want three people in a continuous loop, one always in contact. Go."

The remaining blips swing into motion. Lubin doesn't pause; he's already opening another window, this one a rotating architectural animatic of Atlantis punctuated by orange sparks. Clarke recognizes the spot from which one of those little stars is shining: it's right about where Grace Nolan's lackey painted an X on the hull.

"How long have you been planning this?" she asks quietly.

"Some time."

Since well before she even fine-tuned herself, judging by how utterly clueless she's proven herself to be. "Is everyone involved but me?"

"No." Lubin studies annotations.

"Ken."

"I'm busy."

"How did they do it? Keep from tipping us off like that?"

"Automated trigger," he says absently. Columns of numbers scroll up a sudden window, too fast for Clarke to make out. "Random number generator, maybe. They have a plan, but nobody knows when it's going to kick in so there's no pre-curtain performance anxiety to give the game away."

"But why would they go to all that trouble unless—"

—they know about fine tuning.

Yves Scanlon, she remembers. Rowan asked about him: He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow, she suggested.

And Lenie Clarke confirmed it, just minutes ago.

And here they are.

She doesn't know what hurts more: Lubin's lack of trust, or the hindsight realization of how justified it was.

She's never felt so tired in her life. Do we really have to do this all over again?

Maybe she said it aloud. Or maybe Lubin just caught some telltale body language from the corner of his eye. At any rate, his hands pause on the board. At last he turns to look at her. His eyes seem strangely translucent by the light of the board.

"We didn't start it," he says.

She can only shake her head.

"Choose a side, Lenie. It's past time."

For all she knows it's a trick question; she's never forgotten what Ken Lubin does to those he considers enemies. But as it turns out, she's spared the decision. Dale Creasy, big dumb bareknuckled headbasher that he is, rescues her.

"Fuck…" his vocoded voice grinds out over a background of hissing static.

Lubin's immediately back to business. "Creasy? You made it to Res-F?"

"No shit I made it. I coulda tuned those fuckers in blind, from the Sargasso fucking Sea…"

"Have any of them left the complex?"

"No, I—I don't think so, I—but fuck, man, there's a lot of them in there, and—"

"How many, exactly?"

"I don't know, exactly! Coupla dozen at least. But look, Lubin, there's somethin' off about 'em, about the way they send. I've never felt it before."

Lubin takes a breath: Clarke imagines his eyeballs rolling beneath the caps. "Could you be more specific?"

"They're cold, man. Almost all of 'em are like, fucking ice. I mean, I can tune 'em in, I know they're there, but I can't tell what they're feeling. I don't know if they're feeling anything. Maybe they're doped up on something. I mean, next to these guys you're a blubbering crybaby…"

Lubin and Clarke exchange looks.

"I mean, no offense," Creasy buzzes after a moment.

"One of Alyx's friends had a head cheese," Clarke says. "She called it a pet…"

And down here in this desert at the bottom of the ocean, in this hand-to-mouth microcosm, how common does something have to be before you'd give one to your ten-year-old daughter as a plaything?

"Go," Lubin says.

Lubin's squid is tethered to a cleat just offside the ventral 'lock. Clarke cranks the throttle; the vehicle leaps forward with a hydraulic whine.

Her jawbone vibrates with sudden input. Lubin's voice fills her head: "Creasy, belay my last order. Do not plant your charge, repeat, no charge. Plant the phone only, and withdraw. Cheung, keep your people at least twenty meters back from the airlock. Do not engage. Clarke is en route. She will advise."

I will advise, she thinks, and they will tell me to go fuck myself.

She's navigating blind, by bearing alone. Usually that's more than enough: at this range Atlantis should be a brightening smudge against the blackness. Now, nothing. Clarke brings up sonar. Green snow fuzzes ten degrees of forward arc: within it, the harder echoes of Corpseland, blurred by interference.

Now, just barely, she can see brief smears of dull light; they vanish when she focuses on them. Experimentally, she ignites her headlight and looks around.

Empty water to port. To starboard the beam sweeps across a billowing storm front of black smoke converging on her own vector. Within seconds she'll be in the thick of it. She kills the light before the smokescreen has a chance to turn it against her.

Somehow, the blackness beyond her eyecaps darkens a shade. She feels no tug of current, no sudden viscosity upon entering the zone. Now, however, the intermittent flashes are a bit brighter; fugitive glimmers of light through brief imperfections in the cover. None of them last long enough to illuminate more than strobe-frozen instants.

She doesn't need light. By now, she doesn't even need sonar: she can feel apprehension rising in the water around her, nervous excitement radiating from the rifters ahead, darker, more distant fears from within the spheres and corridors passing invisibly beneath her.

And something else, something both familiar and alien, something living but not alive.

The ocean hisses and snaps around her, as though she were trapped within a swarm of euphausiids. A click-train rattles faintly against her implants. She almost hears a voice, vocoded, indistinct; she hears no words. Echoes light up her sonar display right across the forward one-eighty, but she's deep in white noise; she can't tell whether the contacts number six or sixty.

Fear-stained bravado, just ahead. She pulls hard right, can't quite avoid the body swimming across her path. The nebula opens a brief, bright eye as they collide.

"Fuck! Clarke, is that y—"

Gone. Near-panic falling astern, but no injury: the brain lights up a certain way when the body breaks. It may have been Baker. It's getting so hard to tell, against this rising backdrop of icy sentience. Thought without feeling. It spreads out beneath the messy tangle of human emotions like a floor of black obsidian.

The last time she felt a presence like this, it was wired to a live nuke. The last time, there was only one of them.

She pulls the squid into a steep climb. More sonar pings bounce off her implants, a chorus of frightened machine voices rise in her wake. She ignores them. The hissing in her flesh fades with each second. Within a few moments she's above the worst of it.

"Ken, you there?"

No answer for a moment: this far from the Hab there's a soundspeed lag. "Report," He says at last. His voice is burred but understandable.

"They've got smart gels down there. A lot of them, I don't know how many, twenty or thirty maybe. Packed together at the end of the wing, probably right in the wet room. I don't know how we didn't pick them up before. Maybe they just...get lost in the background noise until you jam them together."

Lag. "Any sense of what they're doing?" Back at Juan de Fuca, they were able to make some pretty shrewd inferences from changes in signal strength.

"No, they're all just—in there. Thinking all over each other. If there was just one or two I might be able to get some kind of reading, but—"

"They played me," Lubin says overtop of her.

"Played?" What's that in his voice? Surprise? Uncertainty? Clarke's never heard it there before.

"To make me focus on F-3."

Anger, she realizes.

"But what's the point?" she asks. "Some kind of bluff, did they think we'd mistake those things for people?" It seems ridiculous; even Creasy knew there was something off, and he's never met a head cheese before. Then again, what do corpses know about fine-tuning? How would they know the difference?

"Not a diversion," Lubin murmurs in the void. "No other place they could come out that sonar wouldn't..."

"Well, what—"

"Pull them back," he snaps suddenly. "They're mask—they're luring us in and masking something. Pull them b—"

The abyss clenches.

It's a brief squeeze around Clarke's body, not really painful. Not up here.

In the next instant, a sound: Whoompf. A swirl of turbulence. And suddenly the water's full of mechanical screams.

She spins. The smokescreen below is in sudden motion, shredded and boiling in the wake of some interior disturbance, lit from within by flickering heat-lightning.

She squeezes the throttle for dear life. The squid drags her down.

"Clarke!" The sound of the detonation has evidently passed the Nerve Hab. "What's going on?"

A symphony of tearing metal. A chorus of voices in discord. Not so many as there should be, she realizes.

We must have lost a generator, she realizes dully. I can hear them screaming.

I can hear them dying…

And not just hear them. The cries rise in her head before they reach her ears; raw chemical panic lighting up the reptile brain like sodium flares, the smarter mammalian overlay helpless and confused, its vaunted cognition shattering like cheap crystal in the backwash.

"Clarke! Report!"

Anger now, thin veins of grim determination among the panic. Lights shine more brightly through the thinning murk. They're the wrong size, somehow, the wrong color. Not rifter lamps. Her sonar squeals in the face of some imminent collision: another squid slews by, out of control, its rider luminous with an agony of broken bones.

"It wasn't me, I swear it! They did it themselves—"

Creasy tumbles away, his pain fading into others'.

Res-F's hull sprawls across sonar, its smooth contours all erased, jagged edges everywhere: the gaping mouths of caves lined with twisted metal teeth. One of them spits something metallic at her; it bounces off the squid with a clank. Vocoder voices grind and grate on all sides. A gap opens in the tattered cloud-bank ahead: Clarke sees a great lumbering shape, an armored cyclops. Its single eye shines balefully with the wrong kind of light. It reaches for her.

She pulls to port, catches a glimpse of something spinning in the chaos directly ahead. A dark mass thuds flaccidly against the squid's bow and caroms towards her face. She ducks. A diveskinned arm cuffs her in passing.

"Lenie!"

Dead gray eyes watch, oblivious and indifferent, as she twists away.

Oh Jesus. Oh God.

Luminous metal monsters stride through the wreckage, stabbing at the wounded.

She tries to hold it together. "They're coming out of the walls, Ken. They were waiting inside, they blew the hull from inside and they're coming through the walls…"

God damn you, Pat. Was this you? Was this you?

She remembers the lopsided chessboard on Lubin's display. She remembers black pieces arranging themselves for an easy rout.

Only now does she remember: in chess, white always moves first.

That indifferent, alien intellect is nowhere to be found now. The gels must have turned to homogenous pulp the instant the hull imploded.

There were more than preshmeshed corpses and smart gels packed in F-3's wet room. There was shrapnel, doubtless arranged in accordance with some theoretical projection of maximum spread. Clarke can see the fragments where they've come to rest—on the hull, embedded in ruptured LOX tanks, protruding from the far side of ragged entry wounds torn through the flesh of comrades and rivals. They look like metal daisies, like the blades of tiny perfect windmills. The mere rebound from the implosion would have been enough to set them soaring, to mow down anyone not already sucked to their death at mach speeds or torn apart on the jagged lip of the breach itself.

The smokescreen has all but dispersed.

Lubin's calling a retreat. Most of those able to respond, already have. The preshmeshed figures clambering along the hulled remains of F-3 have to content themselves with the wounded and the dead. They're crabs, ungainly and overweighted. Instead of claws they have needles, long, almost surgical things, extending from their gauntlets like tiny lances.

"Lenie. Do you read?"

She floats dumbly overhead, out of reach, watching them stab black bodies. Occasional bubbles erupt from the needle tips, race into the sky like clusters of shuddering silvery mushrooms.

Compressed air, injected into flesh. You can make a weapon out of almost anything.

"Lenie?"

"She could be dead, Ken. I can't find Dale or Abra either."

Other voices, too fuzzy to distinguish. Most of the white noise generators are still online, after all.

She tunes in the crabs. She wonders what they must be feeling now. She wonders what she's feeling, too, but she can't really tell. Maybe she feels like a head cheese.

The corpses, though, down there in their armor, mopping up. No shortage of feelings there. Determination. A surprising amount of fear. Anger, but distant; it isn't driving them.

Not as much hate as she would have expected.

She rises. The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis lights the water, deceptively serene. She can barely hear buzzing rifter voices; she can't make out any words. She can't tune any of them in. She's all alone at the bottom of the sea.

Suddenly she rises past some invisible line-of-sight, and her jawbone fills with chatter.

"—the bodies," Lubin's saying. "Bring terminals at personal discretion. Garcia's waiting under Med for triage."

"Med won't hold half of us," someone—oh, it's Kevin!—buzzes faintly in the distance. "Way too many injured."

"Anyone from F-3 not injured and not carrying injured, meet at the cache. Hopkinson?"

"Here."

"Anything?"

"Think so, maybe. We're getting a whole lot of brains in Res-E. Can't tell who, but—"

"Yeager and Ng, bring your people straight up forty meters. Don't change your lats and longs, but I want everybody well away from the hull. Hopkinson, get your people back to the Med Hab."

"We're okay—"

"Do it. We need donors."

"Jesus," someone says faintly, "We're fucked…"

"No. They are."

Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through the mutilating filter of her vocoder.

"Grace, they just—"

"Just what?" she buzzes. "Do you think they're winning? What are they gonna do for an encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We've got enough charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we're gonna use them."

"Ken?"

A brief silence.

"Look, Ken," Nolan buzzes, "I can be at the cache in—"

"Not necessary," Lubin tells her. "Someone's already en route."

"Who's—"

"Welcome back, by the way," Lubin says to the anonymous soldier. "You know the target?"

"Yes." A faint voice, too soft and distorted to pin down.

"The charge has to be locked down within a meter of the mark. Set it and back away fast. Don't spend any more time than absolutely necessary in proximity to the hull, do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Acoustic trigger. I'll detonate from here. Blackout lifting in ten."

My God, Clarke thinks, It's you…

"Everyone at safe-distance," Lubin reminds the troops. "Blackout lifting now."

She's well out of the white noise; there's no obvious change in ambience. But the next vocoder she hears, still soft, is clearly recognizable.

"It's down," Julia Friedman buzzes.

"Back off," Lubin says. "Forty meters. Stay away from the bottom."

"Hey Avril," Friedman says.

"Right here," Hopkinson answers.

"When you tuned that wing, were there children?"

"Yeah. Yeah, there were."

"Good," buzzes Friedman. "Gene always hated kids."

The channel goes dead.

At first, she thinks the retribution's gone exactly as expected. The world pulses around her—a dull, almost subsonic drumbeat through brine and flesh and bone—and for all she knows, a hundred or more of the enemy are reduced to bloody paste. She doesn't know how many rifters died in the first exchange, but surely this restores the lead.

She's in an old, familiar place where it doesn't seem to matter much either way.

Even the second explosion—same muffled thump, but softer somehow, more distant—even that doesn't tip her off immediately. Secondary explosions would almost be inevitable, she imagines—pipes and powerlines suddenly ruptured, a cascade of high-pressure tanks with their feeds compromised—all kinds of consequences could daisy-chain from that initial burst. Bonus points for the home team, probably. Nothing more.

But something in the back of her mind says the second blast just felt wrong—the wrong resonance, perhaps, as if one were to ring a great antique church bell and hear a silvery tinkle. And the voices, when they come back online, are not cheering their latest victory over the rampaging Corpse Hordes, but so full of doubt and uncertainty that not even the vocoders can mask it.

"What the fuck was that—"

"Avril? Did you feel that out your way?"

"Avril? Anybody catching—anyone…"

"Jesus fucking Christ, Gardiner? David? Stan? Anyone—"

"Garcia, are you—I'm not getting—"

"It's gone. I'm right here, it's just fucking gone…"

"What are you talking about?"

"The whole bottom of the hab, it's just—it must've set them both—"

"Both what? She only set one charge, and that was on—"

"Ken? Ken? Lubin, where the fuck are you?"

"This is Lubin."

Silence in the water.

"We've lost the med hab." His voice is like rusty iron.

"What—"

"How did—"

"Shut the fuck up," Lubin snarls across the nightscape.

There's silence again, almost. A few, on open channels, continue to emit metal groans.

"Evidently an unpacked charge was attached to the hab," Lubin continues. "It must have been set off by the same signal we used on Atlantis. From this point on, no omnidirectional triggers. There may be other charges set to detonate on multiple pings. Everyone—"

"This is Atlantis speaking."

The words boom across the seabed like the Voice of God, unsullied by any interference. Ken forgot to black back out, Clarke realizes. Ken's started shouting at the troops.

Ken's losing it…

"You may think you are in a position of strength," the voice continues. "You are not. Even if you destroy this facility, your own deaths are assured."

She doesn't recognize the voice. Odd. It speaks with such authority.

"You are infected with Mark II. You are all infected. Mark II is highly contagious during an asymptomatic incubation period of several weeks. Without intervention you will all be dead within two months.

"We have a cure."

Dead silence. Not even Grace Nolan says I told you so.

"We've tripwired all relevant files and cultures to prevent unauthorized access. Kill us and you kill yourselves."

"Prove it," Lubin replies.

"Certainly. Just wait a while. Or if you're feeling impatient, do that mind-reading trick of yours. What do you call it? Tuning in? I'm told it separates the trustworthy from the liars, most of the time."

Nobody corrects him.

"State your terms," Lubin says.

"Not to you. We will only negotiate with Lenie Clarke."

"Lenie Clarke may be dead," Lubin says. "We haven't been able to contact her since you blew the res." He must know better: she's high in the water, her insides resonating to the faint tapping of click trains. She keeps quiet. Let him play out the game in his own way. It might be his last.

"That would be very bad news for all of us," Atlantis replies calmly. "Because this offer expires if she's not at Airlock Six within a half hour. That is all."

Silence.

"It's a trick," Nolan says.

"Hey, you said they had a cure," someone else buzzes—Clarke can't tell who, the channels are fuzzing up again. The white noise generators must be back online.

"So what if they do?" Nolan buzzes. "I don't trust them to share it with us, and I sure as shit don't trust Lenie fucking Clarke to be my ambassador. How do you think those fuckers found out about fine-tuning in the first place? Every one of our dead is thanks to her."

Clarke smiles to herself. Such small numbers she concerns herself with. Such a tiny handful of lives. She feels her fingers clenching on the towbar. The squid gently pulls her forward; the water gently tugs her back.

"We can do what they say. We can tune them in, check out the story." She thinks that's Gomez, but the interference is rising around her as she travels. She's lost even the crude intonations of vocoded speech.

A buzz in her jaw: a beep just behind her ear. Someone tagging her on a private channel. Probably Lubin. He's King Tactical, after all. He's the one who knows where she is. Nobody else can see beyond the stumps of their own shattered limbs.

"And it proves what? That they're gonna…" —static— "it to us? Shit, even if they don't have a cure they've probably convinced a bunch of their buddies that they do, just so we won't be…" Nolan's voice fades out.

Lubin says something on open channel. Clarke can't make out the words. The beeping in her head seems more urgent now, although she knows that's impossible; the ambient hiss is drowning that signal along with all the others.

Nolan again: "Fuck off, Ken. Why we ever liste… you…can't even outsmart…ing corp…"

Static, pure and random. Light, rising below. Airlock Six is dead ahead, and all the static in the world can't drown out the single presence waiting behind it.

Clarke can tell by the guilt. There's only one other person down here with so twisted a footprint.

Baptism

Rowan pulls open the airlock before it's even finished draining. Seawater cascades around Clarke's ankles into the wet room.

Clarke strips off her fins and steps clear of the lock. She leaves the rest of her uniform in place, presents the usual shadow-self; only her face flap is unsealed. Rowan stands aside to let her pass. Clarke slings the fins securely across her back and pans the spartan compartment. There's not a link of preshmesh to be seen. Normally, one whole bulkhead would be lined with diving armor.

"How many have you lost?" she asks softly.

"We don't know yet. More than these."

Small potatoes, Clarke reflects. For both of us.

But the war is still young…

"I honestly didn't know," Rowan says.

There's no second sight, here in the near-vacuum of a sea-level atmosphere. Clarke says nothing.

"They didn't trust me. They still don't." Rowan's eyes flicker to a fleck of brightness up where the bulkhead meets the ceiling: a pinhead lens. Just a few days ago, before the corpses spined up again, rifters would have watched events unfold through that circuit. Now, Rowan's own kind will be keeping tabs.

She stares at the rifter with a strange, curious intensity that Clarke has never seen before. It takes Clarke a moment to recognize what's changed; for the first time in Clarke's memory, Rowan's eyes have gone dark. The feeds to her ConTacs have been shut off, her gaze stripped of commentary or distraction. There's nothing in there now but her.

A leash and collar could hardly convey a clearer message.

"Come on," Rowan says. "They're in one of the labs."

Clarke follows her out of the wet room. They turn right down a corridor suffused in bright pink light. Emergency lighting, she realizes; her eyecaps boost it to idiotic nursery ambience. Rowan's eyes will be serving up the dim insides of a tube, blood-red like the perfused viscera of some man-eating monster.

They turn left at a t-junction, step across the yellowjacket striping of a dropgate.

"So what's the catch?" she asks. The corpses aren't going to just hand over their only leverage with no strings attached.

Rowan doesn't look back. "They didn't tell me."

Another corner. They pass an emergency docking hatch set into the outer bulkhead; a smattering of valves and readouts disfigure the wall to one side. For a moment Clarke wonders if Harpodon is affixed to the other side, but no. Wrong section.

Suddenly, Rowan stops and turns.

"Lenie, if anything should—"

Something kicks Atlantis in the side. Somewhere behind them, metal masses collide with a crash.

The pink lights flicker.

"Wha—"

Another kick, harder this time. The deck jumps: Clarke stumbles to the same sound of metal on metal, and this time recognizes it: the dropgates.

The lights go out.

"Pat, what the fuck are your peo—"

"Not mine." Rowan's voice trembles in the darkness.

She hovers a meter away, an indistinct silhouette, dark gray on black.

No commotion, Clarke notes. No shouting, nobody running down the halls, no intercom...

It's so quiet it's almost peaceful.

"They've cut us off," Rowan says. Her edges have resolved, still not much detail but the corpse's shape is clearer now at least. Hints and glints of the bulkheads are coming into view as well. Clarke looks around for the light source and spies a constellation of pale winking pinpoints a few meters behind them. The docking hatch.

"Did you hear me? Lenie?" Rowan's voice is leaving worried and approaching frantic. "Are you there?"

"Right here." Clarke reaches out and touches the corpse lightly on the arm. Rowan's ghostly shape startles briefly at the contact.

"Do you—are you—"

"I don't know, Pat. I wasn't expecting this either."

"They've cut us off. You hear the dropgates fall? They hulled us. The bastards hulled us. Ahead and behind. We're flooded on both sides. We're trapped."

"They didn't hull this segment, though," Clarke points out. "They're trying to contain us, not kill us."

"I wouldn't bet on it," says one of the bulkheads.

Blind Rowan jumps in the darkness.

"As a matter of fact," the bulkhead continues, "we are going to kill the corpse." It speaks in a tinny vibrato, thick with distortion: a voice mutilated twice in succession, once by vocoder, once by limpetphone stuck to the outside of the hull. Inanely, Clarke wonders if she sounded this bad to Alyx.

She can't tell who it is. She thinks the voice is female. "Grace?"

"They weren't going to give you shit, Lenie. They don't have shit to give you. They were fishing for hostages and you went ambling innocently into their trap. But we look after our own. Even you, we look after."

"What the fuck are you talking about? How do you know?"

"How do we know?" The bulkhead vibrates like a great Jew's harp. "You're the one that showed us how to tune in! And it works, sweetie, it works like sex and we're reading a whole bunch of those stumpfucks down in the medlab and believe me the guilt is just oozing across that hull. By the way, if I were you I'd seal up my diveskin. You're about to be rescued."

"Grace, wait! Hang on a second!" Clarke turns to the corpse. "Pat?"

Rowan isn't shaking her head. Rowan isn't speaking up in angry denial. Rowan isn't doing any of the things that an innocent person—or even a guilty one, for that matter—should be doing when threatened with death.

"Pat, you—fuck no, don't tell me you—"

"Of course I didn't, Lenie. But it makes sense, doesn't it? They tricked us both…"

Something clanks against the hull.

"Wait!" Clarke stares at the ceiling, at the walls, but her adversary is invisible and untouchable. "Pat's not part of this!"

"Right. I heard." A gargling, metal-shredding sound that might be laughter. "She's the head of the fucking board of directors and she didn't know anything. I believe that."

"Tune her in, then! See for yourself!"

"The thing is, Len, us novices aren't that good at tuning in singles. Signal's too weak. So it wouldn't prove much. Say bye-bye, Pattie."

"Bye," Rowan whispers. Something on the other side of the bulkhead begins whining.

"Fuck you Nolan, you back off right now or I swear I'll kill you myself! Do you hear me? Pat didn't know! She's no more in control than—"

—than I am, she almost says, but suddenly there's a new light source here in the corridor, a single crimson point. It flares, blindingly intense even to Lenie Clarke's bleached vision, and dies in the next instant.

The world explodes with the sound of pounding metal.

Rowan's silhouette has folded down into a cringing shape in the corner. Something's slicing across Clarke's darkened field of view like a roaring white laser. Water, she realizes after a moment. Water forced through a little hole in the ceiling by the weight of an ocean. If she were to pass her arm through that pencil-thin stream, it would shear right off.

In seconds the water's up to her ankles.

She starts towards Rowan, desperate to do something, knowing there's nothing left to do. The compartment glows sudden, sullen red: another eye winks on the outer wall. It opens, and goes dark, and a second thread of killing sea drills the air. Ricochets spray back from the inner wall like liquid shrapnel: needle-sharp pain explodes in Clarke's shoulder. Suddenly she's on her back, water closing over her face, her skull ringing from its impact with the deck.

She rolls onto her stomach, pushes herself up onto all fours. The water rises past her elbows as she watches. She stays low, crawls across the corridor to Rowan's huddled form. A hundred lethal vectors of incidence and reflection crisscross overhead. Rowan's slumped against the inner wall, immersed in icewater to her chest. Her head hangs forward, her hair covering her face. Clarke lifts her chin; there's a dark streak across one cheek, black and featureless in the impoverished light. It flows: shrapnel hit.

Rowan's face is opaque. Her naked eyes are wide but unseeing: the few stray photons from down the tunnel don't come close to the threshold for unassisted sight. There's nothing in Rowan's face but sound and pain and freezing cold.

"Pat!" Clarke can hardly hear her own voice over the roar.

The water rises past Rowan's lips. Clarke grabs the other woman under the arms, heaves her into a semi-erect lean against the bulkhead. A ricochet shatters a few centimeters to the left. Clarke puts herself between Rowan and the worst of the backshatter.

"Pat!" She doesn't know what she expects the corpse to say in response. Patricia Rowan is already dead; all that's left is for Lenie Clarke to stand and watch while she goes through the motions. But Rowan is saying something; Clarke can't hear a thing over the ambient roar, but she can see Rowan's lips move, she can almost make out—

A sudden stabbing pain, a kick in the back. Clarke keeps her balance this time; the water, pooled over halfway to the ceiling now, is catching the worst of the ricochets.

Rowan's mouth is still in motion. She's not speaking, Clarke sees: She's mouthing syllables, slow careful exaggerations meant to be seen and not heard:

Alyx…Take care of Alyx...

The water's caught up to her chin again.

Clarke's hands find Rowan's, guide them up. With Rowan's hands on her face, Clarke nods.

In her personal, endless darkness, Patricia Rowan nods back.

Ken could help you now. He could keep it from hurting maybe, he could kill you instantly. I can't. I don't know how...

I'm sorry.

The water's too deep to stand in, now—Rowan's feebly treading water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It's a pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds, brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.

She may escape drowning, though, even if she can't escape death. The rising water compresses the atmosphere around them, squeezes it so hard that oxygen itself turns toxic. The convulsions, Clarke's heard, are not necessarily painful…

It's a fate that will strike Clarke as quickly as Rowan, if she waits too long. It seems wrong to save herself while Rowan gasps for breath. But Clarke has her own brainstem, and it won't let sick, irrational guilt stand in the way of its own preservation. She watches as her hands move of their own accord, sealing her face flap, starting up the machinery in her flesh. She abandons Rowan to face her fate alone. Her body floods like the corridor, but to opposite effect. The ocean slides through her chest, sustaining life instead of stealing it. She becomes the mermaid again, while her friend dies before her eyes.

But Rowan's not giving up, not yet, not yet. The body isn't resigned no matter what the mind may have accepted. There's just a small pocket of air up near the ceiling but the corpse's stiff, clumsy legs are still kicking, hands still clawing against the pipes and why doesn't she just fucking give up?

Ambient pressure kicks past some critical threshold. Unleashed neurotransmitters sing through the wiring in her head. Suddenly, Lenie Clarke is in Patricia Rowan's mind. Lenie Clarke is learning how it feels to die.

Goddamn you Pat, why can't you just give up? How can you do this to me?

She sinks to the bottom of the compartment. She stares resolutely at the deck, her eyelids pinned open, while the swirling turbulence fades by degrees and the roar of inrushing water dies back and all that's left is that soft, erratic scratching, that pathetic feeble clawing of frozen flesh against biosteel…

Eventually the sound of struggling stops. The vicarious anguish, the sadness and regret go on a little longer. Lenie Clarke waits until the last little bit of Patricia Rowan dies in her head. She lets the silence stretch before tripping her vocoder.

"Grace. Can you hear me?"

Her mechanical voice is passionless and dead level.

"Course you can. I'm going to fucking kill you, Grace."

Her fins float off to one side, still loosely tethered to her diveskin. Clarke retrieves them, pulls them over her feet.

"There's a docking hatch right in front of me, Grace. I'm going to open it, and I'm going to come out there and I'm going to gut you like a fish. If I were you I'd start swimming."

Maybe she already has. At any rate, there's no answer.

Clarke kicks down the corridor, gaze fixed immovably on the docking hatch. Its sparkling mosaic of readouts, unquenchable even by the Atlantic itself, lights her way.

"Got your head start, Grace? Won't do you any good."

Something soft bumps into her from behind. Clarke flinches, wills herself not to look.

"Ready or not, here I come."

She undogs the hatch.

Tag

There's nobody out there.

They've left evidence behind—a couple of point-welders still squatting against the hull on tripod legs, the limpet transceiver stuck to the alloy a few meters away—but of Nolan and any other perpetrators, there's no sign. Clarke smiles grimly to herself.

Let them run.

But she can't find anyone else, either. None of Lubin's sentries at their assigned posts. Nobody monitoring the surveillance limpets festooning Atlantis in the wake of the Corpses' exercise in channel-switching. She flies over the very medlab on which, she's been assured, any number of rifter troops are fine-tuning the would-be hostage-takers lurking within. Nothing. Gantries and habslabs and shadows. Blinking lights in some places, recent darkness in others where the beacons or the portholes have been smashed or blacked out. Epochal darkness everywhere else.

No other rifters, anywhere.

Maybe the corpses had some weapon, something even Ken didn't suspect. Maybe they touched a button and everyone just vanished…

But no. She can feel the corpses inside, their fear and apprehension and blind pants-pissing desperation radiating a good ten meters into the water. Not the kind of feelings you'd expect in the wake of overwhelming victory. If the corpses even know what's going on, it's not making them feel any better.

She kicks off into the abyss, heading for Lubin's nerve hab. Now, finally, she can tune in faint stirrings from the water ahead. But no: it's just more of the same. More fear, more uncertainty. How can she still be reading Atlantis from this range? How can these sensations be getting stronger as the corpses recede behind her?

It's not much of a mystery. Pretending otherwise barely brings enough comfort to justify the effort.

Faint LFAM chatter rises in the water around her. Not much, considering; by now she can feel dozens of rifters, all subdued, all afraid. Hardly any of them speak aloud. A constellation of dim stars pulses faintly ahead. Someone crosses Clarke's path, ten or fifteen meters ahead, invisible but for a brief eclipse of running lights. His mind quails, washing over hers.

So many of them have collected around the hab. They mill about like stunned fish or merely hang motionless in the water, waiting. Maybe this is all there is, maybe these are all the rifters left in the world. Apprehension hangs about them like a cloud.

Perhaps Grace Nolan is here. Clarke feels cold, cleansing anger at the prospect. A dozen rifters turn at her thoughts and stare with dead white eyes.

"What's going on?" Clarke buzzes. "Where is she?"

"Fuck off, Len. We've got bigger problems right now." She doesn't recognize the speaker.

Clarke swims toward the hab; most of the rifters part for her. Half a dozen block her way. Gomez. Cramer. Others in back, too black and distant to recognize in the brainstem ambience.

"Is she in there?" Clarke says.

"You back off," Cramer tells her. "You not be giving no orders here."

"Oh, I'm not ordering anybody. It's completely up to you. You can either get out of my way, or try and stop me."

"Is that Lenie?" Lubin's voice, air-normal channel.

"Yeah," Cramer buzzes after a moment. "She be pretty—"

"Let her in," Lubin says.

It's a private party, by invitation only. Ken Lubin. Jelaine Chen and Dimitri Alexander. Avril Hopkinson.

Grace Nolan.

Lubin doesn't even look around as Clarke climbs up from the wet room. "Deal with it later. We need you in on this, Len, but we need Grace too. Either of you lays a hand on the other, I'll take my own measures."

"Understood," Nolan says evenly.

Clarke looks at her, and says nothing.

"So." Lubin returns his attention to the monitor. "Where were we?"

"I'm pretty sure it didn't see us," Chen says. "It was too preoccupied with the site itself, and that model doesn't have wraparound vision." She taps the screen twice in quick succession; the image at its center freezes and zooms.

It looks like your garden-variety squid, but with a couple of manipulator arms at the front end and no towbar at the back. An AUV of some kind. It's obviously not from around here.

Hopkinson sucks breath through clenched teeth. "That's it, then. They found us."

"Maybe not," Chen says. "You can't teleop something that deep, not in that kind of terrain. It had to be running on its own. Whoever sent it wouldn't know what it found until it got back to the surface."

"Or until it doesn't report back on schedule."

Chen shrugs. "It's a big, dangerous ocean. It doesn't come back, they chalk it up to a mudslide or a faulty nav chip. No reason to suspect we had anything to do with it."

Hopkinson shakes her head. "No reason? What's an AUV even doing down here if not looking for us?"

"It would be a pretty amazing coincidence," Alexander agrees.

Lubin reaches forward and taps the screen. The image de-zooms and continues playing where it left off. Acronyms and numbers cluster along the bottom edge of the screen, shifting and shuffling as the telemetry changes.

The AUV's floating a few meters from the shore of Impossible Lake, just above the surface. One arm extends, dips a finger across the halocline, pulls back as if startled.

"Look at that," Nolan says. "It's scared of hypersaline."

The little robot moves a few meters into the hazy distance, and tries again.

"And it wasn't aware of you any of this time?" Lubin asks.

Alexander shakes his head. "Not until later. Like Laney said, it was too busy checking out the site."

"You got footage of that?" Nolan again, like she doesn't have a care in the world. Like she isn't living on borrowed time.

"Just a few seconds, back at the start. Real muddy, it doesn't show much. We didn't want to get too close, for obvious reasons."

"Yet you sonared it repeatedly," Lubin remarks.

Chen shrugs. "Seemed like the lesser of two evils. We had to get some track on what it was doing. Better than letting it see us."

"And if it triangulated on your pings?"

"We kept moving. Gapped the pings nice and wide. The most it could've known was that something was scanning the water column, and we've got a couple of things out there that do that anyway." Chen gestures at the screen, a little defensively. "It's all there in the track."

Lubin grunts.

"Okay, here's where it happens," Alexander says. "About thirty seconds from now."

The AUV is fading in the haze, apparently heading towards one of the few streetlights that actually pokes above the surface of Impossible Lake. Just before it disappears entirely, a black mass eclipses the view; some ragged outcrop intruding from the left. No circles of light play across that surface, even though the sub is obviously mere meters away; Chen and Alexander are running dark, hiding behind the local topography. The view on the screen tilts and bobs as their sub maneuvers around the rocks: dark shadows on darker ones, barely visible in the dim light backscattered around corners.

Alexander leans forward. "Here it comes…"

Light ahead and to the right; the far end of the outcropping cuts the edges of that brightening haze like a jumble of black shattered glass. The sub throttles back, moves forward more cautiously now, edges into the light—

—and nearly collides with the AUV coming the other way.

Two of the telemetry acronyms turn bright red and start flashing. There's no sound in the playback, but Clarke can imagine sirens in the sub's cockpit. For an instant, the AUV just sits there; Clarke swears she sees its stereocam irises go wide. Then it spins away—to continue its survey or to run like hell, depending on how smart it is.

They'll never know. Because that's when something shoots into view from below camera range, an elongate streak like a jet of gray ink. It hits the AUV in mid-spin, splashes out and wraps around it, shrinks down around its prey like an elastic spiderweb. The AUV pulls against the restraints but the trailing ends of the mesh are still connected to the sub by a springy, filamentous tether.

Clarke has never seen a cannon net in operation before. It's pretty cool.

"So that's it," Alexander says as the image freezes. "We're just lucky we ran into it before we'd used up the net on one of your monster fish."

"We're lucky I thought to use the net, too," Chen adds. "Who'da thunk it would come in so handy?" She frowns, and adds, "wish I knew what tipped the little beast off, though."

"You were moving," Lubin tells her.

"Yeah, of course. To keep it from getting a fix on our sonar signals, like you said."

"It followed your engine noise."

A little of the cockiness drains from Chen's posture.

"So we've got it," Clarke says. "Right now."

"Debbie's taking it apart now," Lubin says. "It wasn't booby-trapped, at least. She says we can probably get into its memory if there isn't any serious crypto."

Hopkinson looks a bit more cheerful. "Seriously? We can just give it amnesia and send it on its way?"

It sounds too good to be true. Lubin's look confirms it.

"What?" Hopkinson says. "We fake the data stream, it goes back home and tells its mom there's nothing down here but mud and starfishies. What's the problem?"

"How often do we go out there?" Lubin asks her.

"What, to the Lake? Maybe once or twice a week, not counting all the times we went out to set the place up."

"That's a very sparse schedule."

"It's all we need, until the seismic data's in."

The dread in Clarke's stomach—belayed a few moments ago, when the conversation turned to the hope of false memory—comes back like a tide, twice as cold as before. "Shit," she whispers. "You're talking about the odds."

Lubin nods. "There's virtually no chance we'd just happen to be in the area the very first time that thing came calling."

"So this isn't the first time. It's been down there before," Clarke says.

"Several times at least, I'd guess. It may have been to Impossible Lake more often than we have." Lubin looks around at the others. "Someone's already on to us. If we send this thing back with no record of the site, we'll simply be telling them that we know that."

"Fuck," Nolan says in a shaky voice. "We're sockeye. Five years. We're complete sockeye."

For once, Clarke's inclined to agree with her.

"Not necessarily," Lubin says. "I don't think they've found us yet."

"Gullshit. You said yourself, months ago, years even—"

"They haven't found us." Lubin speaks with that level, overly-controlled voice that speaks of thinning patience. Nolan immediately shuts up.

"What they have found," Lubin continues after a moment, "is a grid of lights, seismic recorders, and survey sticks. For all they know it's the remains of some aborted mining operation." Chen opens her mouth: Lubin raises a palm, pre-empting her. "Personally I don't believe that. If they've got reason to look for us in this vicinity, they'll most likely assume that we're behind anything they discover.

"But at most, the Lake only tells them that they're somewhere in the ballpark." Lubin smiles faintly. "That they are; we're only twenty kilometers away. Twenty pitch-black kilometers through the most extreme topography on the planet. If that's all they have to go on, they'll never find us."

"Until they send something down to just sit quiet and wait for us," Hopkinson says, unconvinced. "Then follow us back."

"Maybe they already have," Clarke suggests.

"No alarms," Chen reminds her.

Clarke remembers: there are transponders in every hab, every drone and vehicle down here. They talk nicely enough to each other, but they'll scream to wake the dead should sonar touch anything that doesn't know the local dialect. Clarke hasn't thought about them for years; they hail from the early days of exile, when fear of discovery lay like a leaden hand on everyone's mind. But in all this time the only enemies they've found have been each other.

"Strange they haven't tried, though," Clarke says. It seems like an obvious thing to do.

"Maybe they tried and lost us," Hopkinson suggests. "If they got too close we'd see them, and there's spots along that route where sonar barely gives you sixty meters line-of-sight."

"Maybe they don't have the resources," Alexander says hopefully. "Maybe it's just a couple of guys on a boat with a treasure map."

Nolan: "Maybe they just haven't got around to it yet."

"Or maybe they don't have to," Lubin says.

"What, you mean..." Something dawns on Hopkinson's face. "Pest control?"

Lubin nods.

Silence falls around the implications. Why spend valuable resources acquiring and following your target through territory which might be saturated with tripwires? Why risk giving yourself away when it's cheaper and simpler to trick your enemies into poisoning their own well?

"Shit," Hopkinson breathes. "Like leaving poisoned food out for the ants, so they bring it back to the queen…"

Alexander's nodding. "And that's where it came from…ßehemoth was never supposed to show up anywhere around here, and all of a sudden, just like magic…"

"ß-max came from goddamned Atlantis," Nolan snaps. "For all we know the strain out at the Lake's just baseline. We've only got the corpses' say-so that it isn't."

"Yeah, but even the baseline strain wasn't supposed to show up out there—"

"Am I the only one who remembers the corpses built the baseline in the first place?" Nolan glares around the room, white eyes blazing. "Rowan admitted it, for Chrissakes!"

Her gaze settles on Clarke, pure antimatter. Clarke feels her hands bunching into fists at her side, feels the corner of her mouth pull back in a small sneer. None of her body language, she realizes, is intended to defuse the situation.

Fuck it, she decides, and takes one provocative step forward.

"Oh, right," Nolan says, and charges.

Lubin moves. It seems so effortless. One instant he's sitting at the console; the next, Nolan's crumpling to the deck like a broken doll. In the barely-perceptible time between Clarke thinks she saw Lubin rising from his chair, thinks she glimpsed his elbow in Nolan's diaphragm and his knee in her back. She may have even heard something, like the snapping of a tree branch across someone's leg. Now her rival lies flat on her back, motionless but for a sudden, manic fluttering of fingers and eyelids.

Everyone else has turned to stone.

Lubin pans across those still standing. "We are confronted with a common threat. No matter where ß-max came from, we're unlikely to cure it without the corpses's help now that Bhanderi's dead. The corpses also have relevant expertise in other areas."

Nolan gurgles at their feet, her arms in vague motion, her legs conspicuously immobile.

"For example," Lubin continues, "Grace's back is broken at the third lumbar vertebra. Without help from Atlantis she'll spend the rest of her life paralysed from the waist down."

Chen blanches. "Jesus, Ken!" Shocked from her paralysis, she kneels at Nolan's side.

"It would be unwise to move her without a coccoon," Lubin says softly. "Perhaps Dimitri could scare one up."

It only sounds like a suggestion. The airlock's cycling in seconds.

"As for the rest of you good people," Lubin remarks in the same even tone, "I trust you can see that the situation has changed, and that cooperation with Atlantis is now in our best interest."

They probably see exactly what Clarke does: a man who, without a second thought, has just snapped the spine of his own lieutenant to win an argument. Clarke stares down at her vanquished enemy. Despite the open eyes and the twitches, Nolan doesn't seem entirely conscious.

Take that, murderer. Stumpfucking shit-licking cunt. Does it hurt, sweetie? Not enough. Not nearly enough.

But the exultation is forced. She remembers how she felt as Rowan died, how she felt afterward: cold, killing rage, the absolute stone certainty that Nolan was going to pay with her life. And yet here she lies, helpless, broken by someone else's hand--and somehow, there's only charred emptiness where rage burned incandescent less than an hour before.

I could finish the job, she reflects. If Ken didn't stop me.

Is she so disloyal to the memory of her friend, that she takes so little pleasure in this? Has the sudden fear of discovery simply eclipsed her rage, or is it the same old excuse—that Lenie Clarke, gorged on revenge for a thousand lifetimes, has lost the stomach for it?

Five years ago I didn't care if millions of innocents died. Now I'm too much of a coward even to punish the guilty.

Some, she imagined, might even consider that an improvement...

"—are still uncertainties," Lubin's saying, back at the console. "Maybe whoever sent the drone is responsible for ß-max, maybe not. If they are, they've already made their move. If not, they're not ready to move. Even if they know exactly where we are—and I think that unlikely—they either don't have all their pieces in place yet, or they're biding their time for some other reason."

He unfreezes the numbers on the board, wasting no more attention on the thing gurgling on the deck behind him.

Chen glances uneasily at Nolan, but Lubin's message is loud and clear: I'm in charge. Get over it.

"What reason?" she asks after a moment.

Lubin shrugs.

"How much time do we have?"

"More than if we tip our hand." Lubin folds his arms across his chest and stretches isometrically. Muscles and tendons flex disconcertingly beneath his diveskin. "If they know we're on to them they may feel their hand has been forced, move now rather than later. So we play along to buy time. We edit the drone's memory and release it with some minor systems glitch that would explain any delay in its return. We'll also have to search the Lake site for surveillance devices, and cut a grid within at least a half-kilometer of Atlantis and the trailer park. Lane's right: it's unlikely that an AUV planted those mines, but if one did there'll be a detonator somewhere within LFAM range."

"Okay." Hopkinson looks away from her fallen comrade with evident effort. "So we—we make up with Atlantis, we fake out the drone, and we comb the area for other nasties. Then what?"

"Then I go back," Lubin tells her.

"What, to the Lake?"

Lubin smiles faintly. "Back to N'Am."

Hopkinson whistles in tuneless surprise. "Well, I guess if anyone can take them on…"

Take on who, exactly? Clarke wonders. No one asks aloud. Who is everyone left behind. Them. They are dedicated to our destruction They sniff along the Mid Atlantic Ridge, obsessed in their endless myopic search for that one set of coordinates to feed into their torpedoes.

No one asks why, either. There is no why behind the hunt: it's just what they do. Don't go rooting around for reasons. Asking why accomplishes nothing: there are too many reasons to count, none of the living lack for motive. This fractured, bipolar microcosm stagnates and festers on the ocean floor, every reason for its existence reduced to an axiom: just because.

And yet, how many of the people here—how many of the rifters, how many, even of the drybacks— really brought the curtain down? For every corpse with blood on her hands, how many others—family, friends, drones who maintain plumbing and machinery and flesh—are guilty of nothing but association?

And if Lenie Clarke hadn't been so furiously intent on revenge that she could write off an entire world as an incidental expense, would any of it have come to this?

Alyx, Rowan said.

"No you don't." Clarke shakes her head.

Lubin speaks to the screen. "The most we can do down here is buy time. We have to use that time."

"Yes, but—"

"We're blind and deaf and under attack. The ruse has failed, Lenie. We need to know what we're facing, which means we have to face it. Hoping for the best is no longer a viable option."

"Not you," Clarke says.

Lubin turns to face her, one eyebrow raised in silent commentary.

She looks back, completely unfazed. "We."

He refuses three times before they even get outside.

"Someone needs to take charge here," he insists as the airlock floods. "You're the obvious choice. No one will give you any trouble now that Grace has been sidelined."

Clarke feels a chill in her gut. "Is that what that was? She'd served her purpose and you wanted me back in play so you just—broke her in half?"

"I'd wager it's no worse than what you had in mind for her."

I'm going to fucking kill you, Grace. I'm going to gut you like a fish.

"I'm going." she says. The hatch drops away beneath them.

"Do you honestly think you can force me to take you?" He brakes, turns, kicks out from under the light.

She follows. "Do you think you can afford to do this without any backup at all?"

"More than I can afford an untrained sidekick who's signed up for all the wrong reasons."

"You don't know shit about my reasons."

"You'll hold me back," Lubin buzzes. "I stand much better odds if I don't have to keep watching out for you. If you get in trouble—"

"Then you'll ditch me," she says. "In a second. I know what your battlefield priorities are. Shit, Ken, I know you."

"Recent events would suggest otherwise."

She stares at him, adamant. He scissors rhythmically on into darkness.

Where's he going? she wonders. There's nothing on this bearing...

"You can't deny that you're not equipped for this kind of op," he points out. "You don't have the training."

"Which must make it pretty embarrassing for you, given that I got all the way across N'Am before you and your army and all your ballyhooed training could even catch up with me." She smiles under her mask, not kindly; he can't see it but maybe he can tune in the sentiment. "I beat you, Ken. Maybe I wasn't nearly as smart, or as well-trained, and maybe I didn't have all of N'Am's muscle backing me up, but I stayed ahead of you for months and you know it."

"You had quite a lot of help," he points out.

"Maybe I still do."

His rhythm falters. Perhaps he hasn't thought of that.

She takes the opening. "Think about it, Ken. All those virtual viruses getting together, muddying my tracks, running interference, turning me into a fucking myth…"

"Anemone wasn't working for you," he buzzes. "It was using you. You were just—"

"A tool. A meme in a plan for Global Apocalypse. Give me a break, Ken, it's not like I could forget that shit even if I tried. But so what? I was still the vector. It was looking out for me. It liked me enough to keep you lot off my back, anyway. Who's to say it isn't still out there? Where else do those software demons come from? You think it's a coincidence they name themselves after me?"

Barely discernible, his silhouette extends an arm. Click trains spray the water. He starts off again, his bearing slightly altered.

"Are you suggesting," he buzzes, "that if you go back and announce yourself to Anemone—whatever's become of it—that it's going to throw some sort of magic shield around you?"

"Maybe n—"

"It's changed. It was always changing, from moment to moment. It couldn't possibly have survived the way we remember it, and if the things we've encountered recently are any indication of what it's turned into, you don't want to renew the acquaintance."

"Maybe," Clarke admits. "But maybe some part of its basic agenda hasn't changed. It's alive, right? That's what everyone keeps saying. Doesn't matter that it was built out of electrons instead of carbon, Life's just self-replicating information shaped by natural selection so it's in the club. And we've got genes in us that haven't changed in a million generations. Why should this thing be any different? How do you know there isn't some protect-Lenie subroutine snoozing in the code somewhere? And by the way, where the fuck are we going?"

Lubin's headlamp spikes to full intensity, lays a bright jiggling oval on the substrate ahead. "There."

It's a patch of bone-gray mud like any other. She can't see so much as a pebble to distinguish it.

Maybe it's a burial plot, she thinks, suddenly giddy. Maybe this is where he's been feeding his habit all these years, on devolved natives and MIAs and now on the stupid little girl who wouldn't take no for an answer...

Lubin thrusts one arm into the ooze. The mud shudders around his shoulder, as if something beneath were pushing back. Which is exactly what's happening; Ken's awakened something under the surface. He pulls his arm back up and the thing follows, heaving into view. Clumps and chalky clouds cascade from its sides as it clears the substrate.

It's a swollen torus about a meter and a half wide. A dotted line of hydraulic nozzles ring its equator. Two layers of flexible webbing stretch across the hole in its center, one on top, one on the bottom; a duffle bag, haphazardly stuffed with lumpy objects, occupies the space between. Through the billowing murk and behind clumps of mud still adhering to its surface, it shines slick as a diveskin.

"I packed a few things away for a return trip," Lubin buzzes. "As a precaution."

He sculls backward a few meters. The mechanical bellhop spins a quarter-turn, spits muddy water from its thrusters, and heels.

They start back.

"So that's your plan," Lubin buzzes after a while. "Find something that evolved to help you destroy the world, hope that it's got a better nature you can appeal to, and—"

"And wake the fucker with a kiss," Clarke finishes. "Who's to say I can't?"

He swims on, towards the glow that's just starting to brighten the way ahead. His eyes reflect crescents of dim light.

"I guess we'll find out," he says at last.

Fulcrum

She'd avoid it altogether if she could.

There's more than sufficient excuse. The recent armistice is thin and brittle; it's in little danger of shattering completely in the face of this new, common threat, but countless tiny cracks and punctures require constant attention. Suddenly the corpses have leverage, expertise that mere machinery cannot duplicate; the rifters are not especially happy with the new assertiveness of their one-time prisoners. Impossible Lake must be swept for bugs, the local seabed for eyes and detonators. For now there truly is no safe place—and if Lenie Clarke were not busy packing for the trip back, her eyes would be needed for perimeter patrol. Dozens of corpses died in the latest insurrection; there's hardly time to comfort all the next of kin.

And yet, Alyx's mother died in her arms mere days ago, and though the pace of preparation has not slowed in all that time, Lenie Clarke still feels like the lowest sort of coward for having put it off this long.

She thumbs the buzzer in the corridor. "Lex?"

"Come in."

Alyx is sitting on her bed, practicing her fingering. She puts the flute aside as Lenie closes the hatch behind her. She isn't crying: she's either still in shock, or a victim of superadolescent self-control. Clarke sees herself at fifteen, before remembering: her memories of that time are all lies.

Her heart goes out to the girl anyway. She wants to scoop Alyx up in her arms and hold her into the next millennium. She wants to say she's been there, she knows what it's like; and that's even true, in a fractured kind of way. She's lost friends and lovers to violence. She even lost her mother—to tularemia—although the GA stripped that memory out of her head along with all the others. But she knows it's not the same. Alyx's mother died in a war, and Lenie Clarke fought on the other side. Clarke doesn't know that Alyx would welcome an embrace under these conditions.

So she sits beside her on the bed, and rests one hand on the girl's thigh—ready to withdraw at the slightest flinch—and tries to think of some words, any words, that won't turn into clichés when spoken aloud.

She's still trying when Alyx says, "Did she say anything? Before she died?"

"She—" Clarke shakes her head. "No. Not really," she finishes, hating herself.

Alyx nods and stares at the floor.

"They say you're going too," she says after a while. "With him."

Clarke nods.

"Don't."

Clarke takes a deep breath beside her. "Alyx, you—oh God, Alyx, I'm so sorr—"

"Why do you have to go?" Alyx turns and stares at her with hard, bright eyes that reveal far too much for comfort. "What are you going to do up there anyway?"

"We have to find out who's tracking us. We can't just wait for them to start shooting."

"Why are so sure that's what they're going to do? Maybe they just want to talk, or something."

Clarke shakes her head, smiling at the absurdity of the notion. "People aren't like that."

"Like what?"

Forgiving. "They're not friendly, Lex. Whoever they are. Trust me on this."

But Alyx has already switched to Plan B: "And what good are you going to be up there anyway? You're not a spy, you're not a tech-head. You're not some rabid psycho killer like he is. There's nothing you can do up there except get killed."

"Someone has to back him up."

"Why? Let him go by himself." Suddenly, Alyx's words come out frozen. "With any luck he won't succeed. Whatever's up there will tear him apart and the world will be a teeny bit less of a shithole afterwards."

"Alyx—"

Rowan's daughter rises from the bed and glares down at her. "How can you help him after he killed Mom? How can you even talk to him? He's a psycho and a killer."

The automatic denial dies on Clarke's lips. After all, she doesn't know that Lubin didn't have a hand in Rowan's death. Lubin was team captain during this conflict, as he was during the last; he'd probably have known about that so-called rescue mission even if he hadn't actually planned it.

And yet somehow, Clarke feels compelled to defend the enemy of this grief-stricken child. "No, sweetie," she says gently. "It was the other way around."

"What?"

"Ken was a killer first. Then he was a psycho." Which is close enough to the truth, for now.

"What are you talking about?"

"They tweaked his brain. Didn't you know?"

"They?"

Your mother.

"The GA. It was nothing special, it was just part of the package for industrial spies. They fixed it so he'd seal up security breaches by any means necessary, without even really thinking about it. It was involuntary."

"You saying he didn't have a choice?"

"Not until Spartacus infected him. And the thing about Spartacus was, it cut the tweaks, but it cut a couple of other pathways too. So now Ken doesn't have much of what you'd call a conscience, and if that's your definition of a psycho then I guess he is one. But he didn't choose it."

"What difference does it make?" Alyx demands.

"It's not like he went out shopping for an evil makeover."

"So what? When did any psycho ever get to choose his own brain chemistry?"

It's a pretty good point, Clarke has to admit.

"Lenie, please," Alyx says softly. "You can't trust him."

And yet in some strange, sick way—after all the secrecy, all the betrayal—Clarke still trusts Ken Lubin more than anyone else she's ever known. She can't say it aloud, of course. She can't say it because Alyx believes that Ken Lubin killed her mother, and maybe he did; and to admit to trusting him now might test the friendship of this wounded girl further than Clarke is willing to risk.

But that's not all of it. That's just the rationale that floats on the surface, obvious and visible and self-serving. There's another reason, deeper and more ominous: Alyx may be right. The past couple of days, Clarke has caught glimpses of something unfamiliar looking out from behind Lubin's eyecaps. It disappears the moment she tries to bring it into focus; she's not even sure exactly how she recognizes it. Some subtle flicker of the eyelid, perhaps. A subliminal twitch of photocollagen, reflecting the motion of the eye beneath.

Until three days ago, Ken Lubin hadn't taken a human life in all the time he'd been down here. Even during the first uprising he contented himself with the breaking of bones; all the killing was at the inexpert, enthusiastic hands of rifters still reveling in the inconceivable rush of power over the once-powerful. And there's no doubt that the deaths of the past seventy-two hours can be completely justified in the name of self-defense.

Still. Clarke wonders if this recent carnage might have awakened something that's lain dormant for five years. Because back then, when all was said and done, Ken Lubin enjoyed killing. He craved it, even though—once liberated—he didn't use his freedom as an excuse, but as a challenge. He controlled himself, the way an old-time nicotine addict might walk around with an unopened pack of cigarettes in his pocket— to prove that he was stronger than his habit. If there's one thing Ken Lubin prides himself on, it's self-discipline.

That craving. That desire for revenge against the world at large: did it ever go away? Lenie Clarke was once driven by such a desire; quenched by a billion deaths or more, it has no hold on her now. But she wonders whether recent events have forced a couple of cancer-sticks into Lubin's mouth despite himself. She wonders how the smoke tasted after all this time, and if Lubin, perhaps, is remembering how good it once felt...

Clarke shakes her head sadly. "It can't be anyone else, Alyx. It has to be me."

"Why?"

Because next to what I did, genocide is a misdemeanor. Because the world's been dying in my wake while I hide down here. Because I'm sick of being a coward.

"I'm the one that did it," she says at last.

"So what? Is going back gonna undo any of it?" Alex shakes her head in disbelief. "What's the point?" She stands there, looking down like some fragile china magistrate on the verge of shattering.

Lenie Clarke wants very much to reach out to her right now. But Lenie Clarke isn't that stupid. "I—I have to face up to what I did," she says weakly.

"Bullshit," Alyx says. "You're not facing up to anything. You're running away."

"Running away?"

"From me, for one thing."

And suddenly even Lenie Clarke, professional idiot, can see it. Alyx isn't worried about what Lubin might do to Lenie Clarke; she's worried about what Clarke might do to herself. She's not stupid, she's known Clarke for years and she knows the traits that make a rifter. Lenie Clarke was once suicidal. She once hated herself enough to want to die, and that was before she'd even done anything deserving of death. Now she's about to re-enter a world of reminders that she's killed more people than all the Lubins who ever lived. Alyx Rowan is wondering, understandably, if her best friend is going to open her own wrists when that happens.

To be honest, Clarke wonders about that too.

But she only says, "It's okay, Lex. I won't—I mean, I've got no intention of hurting myself."

"Really?" Alyx asks, as if she doesn't dare to hope.

"Really." And now, promises delivered, adolescent fears calmed, Lenie Clarke reaches out and takes Alyx's hands in hers.

Alyx no longer seems the slightest bit fragile. She stares calmly down at Clarke's reassuring hands clasped around her limp, unresponsive ones, and grunts softly.

"Too bad," she says.

Incoming

The missiles shot from the Atlantic like renegade fireworks, heading west. They erupted in five discrete swarms, beginning a ten-minute game of speed chess played across half a hemisphere. They looped and corkscrewed along drunken trajectories that would have been comical if it didn't make them so damned hard to intercept.

Desjardins did his best. Half a dozen orbiting SDI antiques had been waiting for him to call back ever since he'd seduced them two years before, in anticipation of just this sort of crisis. Now he only had to knock on their back doors; on command, they spread their legs and wracked their brains.

The machines turned their attention to the profusion of contrails scarring the atmosphere below. Vast and subtle algorithms came into play, distinguishing wheat from chaff, generating target predictions, calculating intercept vectors and fitness functions. Their insights were profound but not guaranteed; the enemy had its own thinking machines, after all. Decoys mimicked destroyers in every possible aspect. Every stutter of an attitude jet made point-of-impact predictions that much murkier. Desjardins's date-raped battellites dispatched their own countermeasures—lasers, particle beams, missiles dispatched from their own precious and nonrenewable stockpiles—but every decision was probabilistic, every move a product of statistics. When playing the odds, there is no certainty.

Three made it through.

The enemy scored two strikes on the Florida panhandle and another in the Texan dust belt. Desjardins won the New England semifinals hands-down—none of those attacks even made it to the descending arc—but the southern strikes could easily be enough to tilt the balance if he didn't take immediate ground action. He dispatched eight lifters with instructions to sterilise everything within a twenty-k radius, waited for launch confirmations, and leaned back, exhausted. He closed his eyes. Statistics and telemetry flickered uninterrupted beneath his lids.

Nothing so pedestrian as ßehemoth, not this time. A new bug entirely. Seppuku.

Thank you, South fucking Africa.

What was it with those people? They'd been a typical third-world country in so many ways, enslaved and oppressed and brutalised like all the others. Why couldn't they have just thrown off their shackles in the usual way, embraced violent rebellion with a side order of blood-soaked retribution? What kind of crazy-ass people, after feeling the boot on their necks for generations, struck back at their oppressors with—wait for it— reconciliation panels? It made no sense.

Except, of course, for the fact that it worked. Ever since the rise of Saint Nelson the S'Africans had become masters at the sidestep, accomodating force rather than meeting it head-on, turning enemy momentum to their own advantage. Black belts in sociological judo. For half a century they'd been sneaking under the world's guard, and hardly anyone had noticed.

Now they were more of a threat than Ghana and Mozambique and all the other M&M regimes combined. Desjardins understood completely where those other furious backwaters were coming from. More than that, he sympathised: after all, the western world had sat around making tut-tut noises while the sex plagues burned great smoking holes out of Africa's age structure. Only China had fared worse (and who knew what was brewing behind those dark, unresponsive borders?). It was no surprise that the Apocalypse Meme resonated so strongly over there; the stunted generation struggling up from those ashes was over seventy percent female. An avenging goddess turning the tables, serving up Armageddon from the ocean floor—if Lenie Clarke hadn't provided a ready-made template, such a perfect legend would have erupted anyway through sheer spontaneous combustion.

Impotent rage he could handle. Smiley fuckers with hidden agendas were way more problematic, especially when they came with a legacy of bleeding-edge biotech that extended all the way back to the world's first heart transplant, for fuck's sake, almost a century before. Seppuku worked pretty much the way its S'African creators did: a microbial judo expert and a poser, something that smiled and snuck under your guard on false pretenses and then...

It wasn't the kind of strategy that would ever have occured to the Euros or the Asians. It was too subtle for the descendants of empire, too chickenshit for anyone raised on chest-beating politics. But it was second nature to those masters of low status manipulation, lurking down at the toe of the dark continent. It had seeped from their political culture straight into their epidemiological ones, and now Achilles Desjardins had to deal with the consequences.

Gentle warm pressure against his thigh. Desjardins opened his eyes: Mandelbrot stood on her hind legs at his side, forepaws braced against him. She meeped and leapt into his lap without waiting for permission.

Any moment now his board would start lighting up. It had been years since Desjardins had answered to any official boss, but eyes from Delhi to McMurdo were watching his every move from afar. He'd assured them all he could handle the missiles. Way off across any number of oceans, 'lawbreakers in more civilized wastelands—not to mentioned their Leashes—would be clicking on comsats and picking up phones and putting through incensed calls to Sudbury, Ontario. None of them would be interested in his excuses.

He could deal with them. He had dealt with far greater challenges in his life. It was 2056, a full ten years since he had saved the Med and turned his private life around. Half that time since ßehemoth and Lenie Clarke had risen arm-in-arm on their apocalyptic crusade against the world. Four years since the disappearance of the Upper Tier, four years since Desjardins's emancipation at the hands of a lovesick idealist. A shade less than that since Rio and voluntary exile among the ruins. Three years since the WestHem Quarantine. Two since the N'Am Burn. He had dealt with them all, and more.

But the South Africans—they were a real problem. If they'd had their way, Seppuku would already be burning across his kingdom like a brushfire, and he couldn't seem to come up with a scenario that did any more than postpone the inevitable. He honestly didn't think he'd be able to hold them off for much longer.

It was just as well that he'd planned for his retirement.