"We've lost—"

"You've lost one more layer of denial. That's all. ßehemoth's here, Pat. I don't know how, but there's nothing you can do about it and why should you even bother? It's not going to do anything except rub your noses in something you'd rather not think about, and you'll adapt to that soon enough. You've done it before. A month from now you'll have forgotten about it all over again."

"Then please—" Rowan begins, and stops herself.

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Clarke waits while the other woman braces herself, yet again, for the subordinate role.

"Give us that month," Rowan whispers at last.

 

Nemesis

 

Clarke doesn't often go into the residential quarter. She doesn't remember ever having been in this particular section. The corridor here is sheathed in lattice paint and wired up to a mural generator. A forest of antlered coral crowds the port bulkhead; surgeonfish school and swirl to starboard, like the nodes of some abstract and diffuse neural net. A mesh of fractured sunlight dances across everything. Clarke can't tell whether the illusion is purely synthetic, or powered by archived footage of a real coral reef. She wouldn't even know how to tell the difference; of all the sea creatures which have made her acquaintance over the years, none have lived in sunlight.

A lot of families along here, Clarke figures. Adults don't go in for evocations of the wild kingdom as a rule; it's kind of hard to retain that aesthetic once you've grasped the concept of irony.

Here it is: D-18. She taps the doorbell. A muffled musical chime drifts through the closed hatch; a reedy thread of music, a faint voice, the sounds of motion.

The hatch swings open. A stocky girl of about ten looks out at her from under spiky blond bangs. The music wafts around her from the interior of the compartment—Lex's flute, Clarke realizes.

The smile dies on the girl's face the instant she lays eyes on Lenie Clarke.

"Hi," Clarke says. "I was looking for Alyx." She tries a smile of her own on for size.

It doesn't fit. The girl takes a stumbling step backward. "Lex…"

The music stops. "What? Who is it?"

The blonde girl steps aside, nervous as a cat. Alyx Rowan sits blinded on a couch in the center of the room. One of her hands lowers the flute; the other reaches up to the mother-of-pearl 'phones covering her eyes.

"Hey, Lex," Clarke says. "Your mom said you'd be here."

"Lenie! You passed!"

"Passed?"

"Quarantine! They said you and psycho-man were locked up for tests or something. I guess you aced them." A wheeled rectangular pedestal about a meter high squats in front of the couch, a little obelisk with the same opalescent finish as Alyx's headset. Alyx sets her 'phones down on top of it, next to an identical pair already at rest.

Clarke limps into the room. Alyx's face clouds instantly. "What happened to your leg?"

"Rogue squid. Rudder got me."

Alyx's friend mutters something from the corner of Clarke's eye and disappears into the corridor. Clarke turns in her wake.

"Your friend doesn't like me much."

Alyx waves a dismissive hand. "Kelly spooks easy. One look and she just flashfeeds all the shit her mom ever spewed about you guys. She's nice, but she doesn't high-grade her sources at all." The girl shrugs, dismissing the subject. "So what's up?"

"You know that quarantine I was buzzing on about a while back?"

Alyx frowns. "That guy that got bitten. Erickson."

"Yeah. Well, it looks like he came down with something after all, and the basic thumbnail is we've decided to invoke a kind of No Fish-heads policy in Atlantis for the time being."

"You're letting them kick you out?"

"I actually think it's a good idea," Clarke admits.

"Why? What's he got?"

Clarke shakes her head. "It's not really a medical thing, although that's—part of it. It's just—feelings are running kind of high right now, on both sides. Your mom and I thought it'd be better if your guys and our guys kept out of each other's way. Just for a while."

"How come? What's going on?"

"Your mom didn't—?" It belatedly occurs to Clarke that Patricia Rowan might have opted to keep certain things from her daughter. For that matter, she doesn't even know how much of Atlantis's adult population has been brought up to speed. Corpses aren't keen on full disclosure just as a matter of general principle.

Not that Lenie Clarke gives a great crimson turd about corpse sensibilities. Still. She doesn't want to get in between Pat and—

"Lenie?" Alyx is staring at her, brow furrowed. She's one of the very few people that Clarke can comfortably show her naked eyes to; right now, though, Clarke's glad her caps are in.

She takes a couple of paces across the carpet. Another facet of the pedestal comes into view. Some kind of control panel runs in a strip just below its upper edge, a band of dark perspex twinkling with red and blue icons. A luminous jagged waveform, like an EEG, scrolls horizontally along its length.

"What's this?" Clarke asks, seizing on the diversion. It's far too big to be any kind of game interface.

"That? Oh." Alyx shrugs. "That's Kelly's. It's a head cheese."

"What!"

"You know, a smart gel. Neuron culture with—"

"I know what it is, Lex. I just—I guess I'm surprised to see one here, after…"

"Wanna see it?" Alyx taps a brief tattoo on the top of the cabinet. The nacreous surface swirls briefly and clears: beneath the newly-transparent façade, a slab of pinkish-gray tissue sits within its circular rim like a bowl of fleshy oatmeal. Flecks of brown glass punctuate the pudding in neat perforated lines.

"It's not very big," Alyx says. "Way smaller than the ones they had back in the old days. Kelly says it's about the same as a cat."

So it's evil at least, if not hugely intelligent. "What's it for?" Clarke wonders. Surely they wouldn't be stupid enough to use these things after—

"It's kind of a pet," Alyx says apologetically. "She calls it Rumble."

"A pet?"

"Sure. It thinks, sort of. It learns to do stuff. Even if no one really knows how, exactly."

"Oh, so you heard about that, did you?"

"It's a lot smaller than the ones that, you know, worked for you."

"They didn't w—"

"It's really harmless. It's not hooked into life support or anything."

"So what does it do? You teach it tricks?" The porridge of brains glistens like an oozing sore.

"Kind of. It talks back if you say stuff to it. Doesn't always make a lot of sense, but that's what makes it fun. And if you tweak the audio feed right it plays these really cool color patterns in time to music." Alyx grabs her flute off the couch, gestures at the eyephones. "Wanna see?"

"A pet," Clarke murmurs. You bloody corpses…

"We're not, you know," Alyx says sharply. "Not all of us."

"Sorry? Not what?"

"Corpses. What does that mean, anyway? My mom? Me?"

Did I say that out loud? "Just—corporate types, I guess." She's never spent much time pondering the origin of the term, any more than she's lost sleep over the etiology of chair or fumarole.

"Well in case you didn't notice, there's a lot of other people in here. Crunchers and doctors and just families."

"Yeah, I know. Of course I know—"

"But you just lump us all together, you know? If we don't have a bunch of pipes in our chest we're all just corpses as far as you're concerned."

"Well—sorry." And then, belatedly defensive: "I'm not slagging you, you know. It's just a word."

"Yeah, well it's not just a word to all you fishheads."

"Sorry." Clarke says again. A distance seems to open between them, although neither has moved.

"Anyway," she says after a while, "I just wanted you to know I won't be inside for a while. We can still talk, of course, but—"

Movement from the hatchway. A large stocky man steps into the compartment, dark hair combed back, eyebrows knotted together, his whole body a telegraph of leashed hostility. Kelly's father.

"Ms. Clarke," he says evenly.

Her guts tighten into a hard, angry knot. She knows that look. She knows that stance, she saw it herself more times than she could count when she was Kelly's age. She knows what fathers do, she knows what hers did, but she's not a little girl any more and Kelly's dad looks very much in need of a lesson...

But she has to keep reminding herself. None of it happened.

 

Portrait of the Sadist as an Adolescent

 

Achilles Desjardins learned to spoof the skeeters eventually, of course. Even as a child he knew the score. In a world kept under constant surveillance for its own protection there were only watched and watchers, and he knew which side of the lens he wanted to be on. Beating off was not the kind of thing he could do in front of an audience.

It was barely even the kind of thing he could do in private, for that matter. He had, after all, been raised with certain religious beliefs; clinging to the coattails of the Nouveaux Séparatistes, the Catholic miasma had persisted in Quebec long after it had faded into kitschy irrelevance everywhere else. Those beliefs haunted Achilles every night as he milked himself, as the sick hateful images flickered through his mind and hardened his penis. It barely mattered that the skeeters were offline, wobbling drunkenly under the influence of the magnetic mobiles he'd hung over his bed and desk and drawers. It barely mattered that he was already going to hell, even if he never touched himself again for the rest of his life—for hadn't Jesus said if you do these things even in your heart, then you have committed them in eyes of God? Achilles was already damned by his own unbidden thoughts. What more could he lose by acting on them?

Shortly after his eleventh birthday his penis began leaving actual evidence behind, a milky fluid squirted onto the sheets in the course of his nightly debauchery. He didn't dare ask the encyclopedia about it for two weeks; it took him that long to figure out how to doctor the enquiry logs so Mom and Dad wouldn't find out. Cracking the private settings on the household Maytag took another three days. You could never tell what trace elements that thing might be scanning for. By the time Achilles actually dared to launder his bedsheets they smelled a lot like Andrew Trites down at the community center, who was twice the size of anyone else in his cohort and whom nobody wanted to stand next to at the rapitrans stop.

 

 

 

"I think—" Achilles began at thirteen.

He no longer believed in the Church. He was after all an empiricist at heart, and God couldn't withstand so much as ten seconds' critical scrutiny from anyone who'd already figured out the ugly truth about the Easter Bunny. Paradoxically, though, damnation somehow seemed more real than ever, on some primal level that resisted mere logic. And as long as damnation was real, confession couldn't hurt.

"—I'm a monster," he finished.

It wasn't as risky a confession as it might have been. His confidante wasn't especially trustworthy—he'd downloaded it from the net (from Maelstrom, he corrected himself; that's what everyone was calling it now), and it might be full of worms and trojans even if he had scrubbed it every which way—but he'd also kellered all the I/O except voice and he could delete the whole thing the moment it tried anything funny. He'd do that anyway, once he was finished. No way was he going to leave it ticking after he'd spilled his guts to it.

Dad would go totally triploid if he knew Achilles had brought a wild app anywhere near their home net, but Achilles wasn't about to risk using the house filters even if Dad had stopped spying since Mom died. And anyway, Dad wasn't going to find out. He was downstairs, cowled in his sensorium with the rest of the province—the rest of the country now, Achilles had to keep reminding himself—immersed in the pomp and ceremony of Quebec's very first Independence Day. Sullen, resentful Penny—her days of idolizing Big Brother long past—would have gladly sold him out in a second, but these days she pretty much lived in her rapture helmet. By now it must have worn the grooves right out of her temporal lobes.

It was the birthday of the last new country in the world, and Achilles Desjardins was alone in his bedroom with his confessor.

"What kind of monster?" asked TheraPal 6.2, its voice studiously androgynous.

He'd learned the word that very morning. He pronounced it carefully: "A misogynist."

"I see," TheraPal murmered in his ear.

"I have these—I get these feelings. About hurting them. Hurting girls."

"And how do they make you feel?" The voice had edged subtly into the masculine.

"Good. Awful. I mean—I like them. The feelings, I mean."

"Could you be more specific?" There was no shock or disgust in the voice. Of course, there couldn't be—the program didn't have feelings, it wasn't even a Turing app. It was basically just a fancy menu. Still, stupidly, Achilles felt strangely relieved.

"It's—sexy," he admitted. "Just, just thinking about them that way."

"What way, exactly?"

"You know, helpless. Vulnerable. I, I like the looks on their faces when they're...you know..."

"Go on," said TheraPal.

"Hurting," Achilles finished miserably.

"Ah," said the app. "How old are you, Achilles?"

"Thirteen."

"Do you have any friends who are girls?"

"Sure."

"And how do you feel about them?"

"I told you!" Achilles hissed, barely keeping his voice down. "I get—"

"No," TheraPal broke in gently. "I'm asking how you feel about them personally, when you're not sexually aroused. Do you hate them?"

Well, no. Andrea was really smart, and he could always go to her for help with his debugs. And Martine—one time, Achilles had just about killed Martine's older brother when he was picking on her. Martine didn't have a mean bone in her body, but that asshole brother of hers was so...

"I—I like them," he said, his forehead crinkling at the paradox. "I like them a lot. They're great. Except the ones I want to, you know, and even then it's only when I..."

TheraPal waited patiently.

"Everything's fine," Achilles said at last. "Except when I want to..."

"I see," the app said after a moment. "Achilles, I have some good news for you. You're not a misogynist after all."

"No?"

"A misogynist is someone who hates women, who fears them or thinks them inferior in some way. Is that you?"

"No, but—but what am I, then?"

"That's easy," TheraPal told him. "You're a sexual sadist. It's a completely different thing."

"Really?"

"Sex is a very old instinct, Achilles, and it didn't evolve in a vacuum. It coevolved with all sorts of other basic drives—fighting for mates, territoriality, competition for resources. Even healthy sex has a strong element of violence to it. Sex and aggression share many of the same neurological paths."

"Are you—are you saying everyone's like me?" It seemed too much to hope for.

"Not exactly. Most people have a sort of switch that suppresses violent impulses during sex. Some people's switches work better than others. The switches in clinical sadists don't work very well at all."

"And that's what I am," Achilles murmered.

"Very likely," TheraPal said, "although it's impossible to be sure without a proper clinical checkup. I seem unable to access your network right now, but I could provide a list of nearby affiliated medbooths if you tell me where we are."

Behind him, the Achilles's bedroom door creaked softly on its hinges. He turned, and froze instantly at his core.

The door to his bedroom had swung open. His father stood framed in the darkness beyond.

"Achilles," TheraPal said in the whirling, receding distance, "for you own health—not to mention your peace of mind—you really should visit one of our affiliates. A contractually-guaranteed diagnosis is the first step to treatment, and treatment is the first step to a healthy life."

He couldn't have heard, Achilles told himself. TheraPal spoke directly to his earbud, and Dad couldn't have stopped the telltale from flashing if he'd been listening in. Dad didn't hack.

He couldn't have heard TheraPal. He could've heard Achilles, though.

"If you're worried about the cost, our rates—" Achilles deleted the app almost without thinking, sick to his stomach.

His father hadn't moved.

His father didn't move much, these days. The short fuse, the hair-trigger had rusted into some frozen state between grief and indifference over the years. His once-fiery and defiant Catholicism had turned against itself with the fall of the Church, a virulent rage of betrayal that had burned him out and left him hollow. By the time Achilles' mom had died there'd barely even been sorrow. (A glitch in the therapy he'd said dully, coming back from the hospital. The wrong promoters activated, the body somehow innoculated against its own genes, devouring itself. There was nothing he could do. They'd signed a waiver.)

Now he stood there in the darkened hallway, swaying slightly, his fists not even clenched. It had been years since he'd raised a hand against his children.

So what am I afraid of? Achilles wondered, his stomach knotted.

He knows. He knows. I'm afraid he knows...

The corners of his father's mouth tightened by some infinitesimal degree. It wasn't a smile. It wasn't a snarl. In later years, the adult Achilles Desjardins would look back and recognise it as a kind of acknowledgment, but at the time he had no idea what it meant. He only knew that his father simply turned and walked down the hall to the master bedroom, and closed the door behind him, and never mentioned that night ever again.

In later years, he also realised that TheraPal must have been stringing him along. Its goal, after all, had been to attract customers, and you didn't do that by rubbing their faces in unpleasant truths. The program had simply been trying to make him feel better as a marketting strategy.

And yet, that didn't mean it had lied, necessarily. Why bother, if the truth would do the job? And it all made so much sense. Not a sin, but a malfunction. A thermostat, set askew through no fault of his own. All life was machinery, mechanical contraptions built of proteins and nucleic acids and electricity; what machine ever got creative control over its own specs? It was a liberating epiphany, there at the dawn of the sovereign Quebec: Not Guilty, by reason of faulty wiring.

Odd, though.

You'd have expected it to bring the self-loathing down a notch or two in the years that followed.

 

Bedside Manor

 

Gene Erickson and Julia Friedman live in a small single-deck hab about two hundred meters southeast of Atlantis. Julia has always done most of the housekeeping: Gene gets notoriously twitchy in enclosed spaces. For him, home is the open ridge: the hab is a necessary evil, for sex and feeding and those occasional times when the his own darkdreams prove insufficiently diverting. Even then, he treats it the way a pearl diver of two hundred years past would treat a diving bell: a place to gulp the occasional breath of air before returning to the deep.

Now, of course, it's more of an ICU.

Lenie Clarke emerges from the airlock and lays her fins on an incongruous welcome mat laid to one side. The main compartment is dim even to rifter eyes, a grey-on-grey wash of twilight punctuated by the bright chromatic readouts on the comm board. The air smells of mould and metal; more faintly, of vomit and disinfectant. Life-support systems gurgle underfoot. Open hatches gape like black mouths: storage; head; sleeping cubby. An electronic metronome beeps somewhere nearby. A heart monitor, counting down.

Julia Friedman steps into view.

"He's still—oh." She's taken off her diveskin in favor of a thermochrome turtleneck that mostly covers her scars. It's strange to see rifter eyes atop dryback clothing. "Hi, Lenie."

"Hi. How's he doing?"

"Okay." She turns in the hatchway, sags with her spine against the frame: half in darkness, half in twilight. She turns her face to the darkness, to the person within it. "Could be better, I guess. He's asleep. He's sleeping a lot."

"I'm surprised you could even keep him inside."

"Yeah. I think he'd rather be out there, even now, but…he's doing it for me, I think. Because I asked him." Friedman shakes her head. "It was too easy."

"What was?"

"Convincing him." She takes a breath. "You know how much he loves the outdoors."

"Are Jerry's antibiotics helping?"

"Maybe. I guess. It's hard to say, you know? She can always say he'd be worse without them, no matter how bad it gets."

"Is that what she's saying?"

"Oh, Gene hasn't talked to her since he came back. He doesn't trust them." She stares at the deck. "He blames her for this."

"For being sick?"

"He thinks they did something to him."

Clarke remembers. "What exactly does he—?"

"I don't know. Something." Friedman glances up: her armored eyes lock onto Clarke's for an instant, then slide off to the side. "It's taking a long time to clear up, you know? For a simple infection. Do you think?"

"I don't really know, Julia."

"Maybe ßehemoth's mixing things up somehow. Making things worse."

"I don't know if it works like that."

"Maybe I've got it too, by now." Friedman almost seems to be talking to herself. "I mean, I'm with him a lot…"

"We could check you out, if you wanted."

Friedman looks at her. "You were infected, weren't you? Before."

"Only with ßehemoth," Clarke says, careful to draw the distinction. "It didn't kill me. Didn't even make me sick."

"It would have, though. Eventually. Right?"

"If I hadn't got my retrofits. But I did. We all did." She tries a smile. "We're rifters, Julia. We're tough little motherfuckers. He'll pull through. I know it."

It's not much, Clarke knows. Reassuring deception is all she can offer Julia Friedman at the moment. She knows better than to touch; Freedman's not keen on physical contact. She'd endure a comforting hand on the shoulder, perhaps—even take it in the spirit in which it was intended—but Grace Friedman is very selective with her personal space. It's one of the few ways in which Clarke feels a kinship with the woman. Each can see the other flinch, even when neither does.

Friedman looks back into the darkness. "Grace says you helped get him out of there."

Clarke shrugs, a bit surprised that Nolan would give her the credit.

"I would've been there too, you know. Only…" Friedman's voice trails off. The hab's ventilators sigh into the silence.

"Only you think maybe he'd have been better off where he was," Clarke suggests.

"Oh, no. Well, maybe partly. I don't know if Dr. Seger's as bad as they think, anyway."

"They?"

"Gene and—Grace."

Ah.

"It's just, I didn't know…I didn't know if he'd even want me there." Friedman flashes a rueful smile. "I'm not much of a fighter, Lenie. Not like you, not like—I just kind of roll with the punches."

"He could have been with Grace all along if he'd wanted to, Julia. He's with you."

Friedman laughs, a bit too quickly. "Oh, no. That's not what I meant." But Clarke's words seem to have perked her up a bit.

"Anyway," Clarke says, "I guess I'll leave you guys alone. I just wanted to stop by, see how he was doing."

"I'll tell him," Friedman says. "He'll appreciate it."

"Sure. No problem." She bends to retrieve her fins.

"And you should come by again, when he's awake. He'd like that." She hesitates, looking away; chestnut curls obscure her face. "Not many people come by, you know. Except Grace. Saliko was by a while back."

Clarke shrugs. "Rifters aren't big on social skills." And you really ought to know that by now, she doesn't add. Julia Friedman just doesn't get it, sometimes. It's as though, scars and history notwithstanding, she's a rifter in name only, an honorary member allowed past the gate on her husband's credentials.

Which begs the question of what I'm doing here, she realizes.

"I think they take him too seriously sometimes," Friedman says.

"Seriously?" Clarke glances at the airlock. The hab seems suddenly, subtly smaller.

"About, you know. The corpses. I hear Saliko's feeling a little odd now, but you know Saliko."

He thinks they did something to him...

"I wouldn’t worry about it," Clarke says. "Really." She smiles, sighing inwardly at her own diplomacy.

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.

 

 

 

It's been a while since she's let Kevin take her. He's never been all that good at it, sadly. He has a harder time keeping it up than most kids his age, which actually isn't all that uncommon among the local bottom-feeders. And the fact that he's chosen a frigid bitch like Lenie Clarke to practice his moves on hasn't helped the dynamic any. A man afraid to touch: a woman averse to contact. If these two have anything in common, it's patience.

She figures she owes him. Besides, she wants to ask him some questions.

But today he's a granite cock with a brain stem attached. fuck the foreplay: he pushes into her right off the top, not even a token tongue-lashing to make up for the lack of tropical irrigation. The friction pulls painfully at her labia; she reaches down discretely with one hand and spreads them. Walsh pumps on top of her, breath hissing through teeth clenched in a hard animal grin, his capped eyes hard and unreadable. They always keep their eyes masked during sex—Clarke's tastes prevail, as usual— although Walsh usually wears too much heart on his face to hide with a couple of membranous eggshells. Not this time. There's something behind his overlays that Clarke can't quite make out, something focused on the space where she is but not on her. He pushes her up the pallet in rough thrusting increments; her head bumps painfully against the naked metal plating of the deck. They fuck without words amidst stale air and grafted machinery.

She doesn't know what's come over him. It's a nice change, though, the closest thing to an honest-to-God rape she's had in years. She closes her eyes and summons up images of Karl Acton.

Afterwards, though, the bruise she notices is on his arm: a corona of torn capillaries around a tiny puncture in the flesh of his inner elbow.

"What's this?" She lays her lips around the injury and runs her tongue across the swelling.

"Oh, that. Grace is taking blood samples from everyone."

Her head comes up. "What?"

"She's not great at it. Took her a couple of tries to find a vein. You should see Lije. Looks like his arm got bushwhacked by a sea urchin."

"Why's Grace taking blood?"

"You didn't hear? Lije came down with something. And Saliko's started feeling under the weather too, and he visited Gene and Julia just a couple of days ago."

"So Grace thinks—"

"Whatever the corpses gave him, it's spreading."

Clarke sits up. She's been naked on the deck for half an hour, but this is the first time she's felt the chill. "Grace thinks the corpses gave him something."

"That's what Gene thought. She's going to find out."

"How? She doesn't have any medical training."

Walsh shrugs. "You don't need any to run MedBase."

"Jesus semen-sucking Christ." Clarke shakes her head in disbelief. "Even if Atlantis did want to sic some bug on us, they wouldn't be stupid enough to use one from the standard database."

"I guess she thinks it's a place to start."

There's something in his voice.

"You believe her," Clarke says.

"Well, not nec—"

"Has Julia come down with anything?"

"Not so far."

"Not so far. Kevin, Julia hasn't left Gene's side since they broke him out. If anyone was going to catch anything, wouldn't it be her? Saliko visited, what? Once?"

"Maybe twice."

"And what about Grace? From what I hear she's over there all the time. Is she sick?"

"She says she's taking precaut—"

"Precautions," Clarke snorts. "Spare me. Am I the only one left on the whole Ridge with a working set of frontal lobes? Abra came down with supersyph last year, remember? It took eight months for Charley Garcia to get rid of those buggy Ascaris in his gut, and I don't remember anyone blaming the corpses for that. People get sick, Kevin, even down here. Especially down here. Half of us rot away before we even have a chance to go native."

There it is again: something new, staring out from behind the glistening opacities of Walsh's eyecaps. Something not entirely friendly.

She sighs. "What?"

"It's just a precaution. I don't see how it can hurt."

"It can hurt quite a lot if people jump to conclusions without any facts."

Walsh doesn't move for a moment. Then he gets to his feet. "Grace is trying to get the facts," he says, padding across the compartment. "You're the one jumping to conclusions."

Oh, Kevvy-boy, Clarke wonders. When did you start to grow a spine?

He grabs his diveskin off the chair. Squirming black synthetics embrace him like a lover.

"Thanks for the fuck," he says. "I gotta go."

 

Boilerplate

 

She finds Lubin floating halfway up the side of the windchime reservoir. Pipes, fiberop and miscellaneous components—mostly nonfunctional now, dismembered segments of circuits long-since broken—run in a band around the great tank's equator. At the moment, the ambient currents are too sluggish to set either rocks or machinery to glowing; Lubin's headlamp provides the only illumination.

"Abra said you were out here," Clarke buzzes.

"Hold this pad, will you?"

She takes the little sensor. "I wanted to talk to you."

"About?" Most of his attention seems to be focused on a blob of amber polymer erupting from one of the conduits.

Clarke maneuvers herself into his line of sight. "There's this asinine rumor going around. Grace is telling people that Jerry sicced some kind of plague on Gene."

Lubin's vocoder tics in a mechanical interpretation of mmmm...

"She's always had a missile up her ass about the corpses, but nobody takes her seriously. At least, they didn't used to…"

Lubin taps a valve. "That's it."

"What?"

"Resin's cracked around the thermostat. It's causing an intermittent short."

"Ken. Listen to me."

He stares at her, waiting.

"Something's changing. Grace never used to push it this hard, remember?"

"I never really butted heads with her myself," Lubin buzzes.

"It used to be her against the world. But this bug Gene's come down with, it's changed things. I think people are starting to listen to her. It could get dicey."

"For the corpses."

"For all of us. Weren't you the one warning me about what the corpses could do if they got their act together? Weren't you the one who said—"

We may have to do something preemptive…

A small pit opens up in Clarke's stomach.

"Ken," she buzzes, slowly, "you do know Grace is fucking crazy, right?"

He doesn't answer for a moment. She doesn't give him any longer than that: "Seriously, you should just listen to her sometime. She talks as if the war never ended. Someone sneezes and it's a biological attack."

Behind his headlamp, Lubin's silhouette moves subtly; Clarke gets the sense of a shrug. "There are some interesting coincidences," he says. "Gene enters Atlantis with serious injuries. Jerry operates on him in a medbay where our surveillance is compromised, then puts him into quarantine."

"Quarantine because of ßehemoth," Clarke points out.

"As you've pointed out yourself on occasion, we've all been immunized against ßehemoth. I'm surprised you don't find that rationale more questionable." When Clarke says nothing, he continues: "Gene is released into the wild suffering from an opportunistic infection which our equipment can't identify, and which so far has failed to respond to treatment."

"But you were there, Ken. Jerry wanted to keep Gene in quarantine. Dale beat the crap out of her for trying. Isolating Patient Zero is a pretty short-sighted strategy for spreading the plague."

"I suppose," Lubin buzzes, "Grace might say they knew we'd break him out regardless, so they put up a big show of resistance knowing someone would cite it in their favor down the road."

"So they fought to keep him contained, therefore they wanted to set him loose?" Clarke peers suggestively at Lubin's electrolysis intake. "You getting enough O2 there, Ken?"

"I'm saying that's the sort of rationale Grace might invoke."

"That's pretty twisted even for—" Realization sinks in. "She's actually saying that, isn't she?"

His headlight bobs slightly.

"You've heard the rumors. You know all about them." She shakes her head, disgusted at herself. "As if I'd ever have to bring you up to speed on anything..."

"I'm keeping an ear open."

"Well maybe you could do a bit more than that. I mean, I know you like to keep out of these things, but Grace is fucking psycho. She's spoiling for a fight and she doesn't care who gets caught in the backwash."

Lubin hovers, unreadable. "I would have expected you to be a bit more sympathetic."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," he buzzes after a moment. "But whatever you think of Grace's behavior, her fears might not be entirely unfounded."

"Come on, Ken. The war's over." She takes his silence as acknowledgment. "So why would the corpses want to start it up again?"

"Because they lost."

"Ancient history."

"You thought yourself oppressed once," he points out. "How much blood did it take before you were willing to call it even?"

His metal voice, so calm, so even, is suddenly so close it seems to be coming from inside her own head.

"I—I was wrong about that," she says after a while.

"It didn't stop you." He turns back to his machinery.

"Ken," she says.

He looks back at her.

"This is bullshit. It's a bunch of ifs strung together. A hundred to one Gene just picked up something from the fish that bit him."

"Okay."

"It's not like there can't be a hundred nasty bugs down here we haven't discovered yet. A few years ago nobody'd even heard of ßehemoth."

"I'm aware of that."

"So we can't let this escalate. Not without at least some evidence."

His eyes shine yellow-white in the backscatter from his headlamp. "If you're serious about evidence, you could always collect some yourself."

"How?"

He taps the left side of his chest. Where the implants are.

She goes cold. "No."

"If Seger's hiding anything, you'd know it."

"She could be hiding lots of things from lots of people. It wouldn't prove what she was hiding."

"You'd know what Nolan was feeling too, since you seem so concerned with her motives."

"I know what her motives are. I don't need to fuck with my brain chemistry to confirm it."

"The medical risks are minimal," he points out.

"That's not the point. It wouldn't prove anything. You know you can't read specific thoughts, Ken."

"You wouldn't have to. Reading guilt would be suffic—"

"I said no."

"Then I don't know what to tell you." He turns away again. His headlamp transforms the reservoir's plumbing into a tiny, high-contrast cityscape tilted on edge. Clarke watches him work—tracking pathways, tapping pipes, making small changes to tabletop architecture. A pinpoint sun flares hissing at his fingertips, blinding her for an instant. By the time her caps have adjusted the light has settled on the skin of the tank. The water shimmers prismatically around it like a heat mirage on a hot day; at lesser depths it would explode into steam on the spot.

"There's another way," she buzzes. Lubin shuts off the spot-welder.

"There is." He turns to face her. "But I wouldn't get my hopes up."

 

 

 

Back when the trailer park was just getting set up, someone had the clever idea of turning a hab into a mess hall: a row of cyclers, a couple of prep surfaces for the daring, and a handful of foldaway tables scattered with studied randomness around the dry deck. The effect was intended to suggest a café patio. The cramped reality is more like the backstage shed where the furniture gets stored for winter.

One thing that has caught on, though, is the garden. By now it covers half the wet deck, a tangle of creeping greenery lit by solar-spectrum sticks planted among its leaves like bioluminescent bamboo. It isn't even hydroponic. The little jungle erupts from boxes of rich dark earth—diatomaceous ooze, actually, beefed up with organic supplements—that were once discrete but which have since now disappeared under an overflow of compost, spilling messily across the plating.

It's the best-smelling bubble of atmosphere on the whole Ridge. Clarke swings the airlock hatch open onto that tableau and takes a deep breath, only half of appreciation. The other half is resolve: Grace Nolan looks up from the far side of the oasis, tying off the vines of something that might have been snow peas back before the patents landed on them.

But Nolan smiles beneath translucent eyes as Clarke steps onto the deck. "Hey, Lenie!"

"Hi Grace. I thought we could maybe have a talk."

Nolan pops a pod into her mouth, a slick black amphibian feeding in the lush greenery of some long-extinct wetland. She chews, for longer than is probably necessary. "About..."

"About Atlantis. Your blood work." Clarke takes a breath. "About whatever problem you have with me."

"God no," Nolan says. "I've got no problem with you, Len. People fight sometimes. No big deal. Don't take it so seriously."

"Okay then. Let's talk about Gene."

"Sure." Nolan straightens, grabs a chair off the bulkhead and folds it down. "And while we're at it, let's talk about Sal and Lije and Lanie."

Lanie too, now? "You think the corpses are behind it."

Nolan shrugs. "It's no big secret."

"And you base that on what, exactly? Anything show up in the bloods?"

"We're still collecting samples. Lizbeth's set up in the med hab, by the way, if you want to contribute. I think you should."

"What if you don't find anything?" Clarke wonders.

"I don't think we will. Seger's smart enough to cover her tracks. But you never know."

"You know it's possible that the corpses have nothing to do with this."

Nolan leans back in her chair and stretches. "Sweetie, I can't tell you how surprised I am to hear you say that."

"So show me some evidence."

Nolan smiles, shaking her head. "Here's a bit of an exercise for you. Say you're swimming through shark-infested waters. Big sickle-finned stumpfucks all over the place, and they're looking you up and down and you know the only reason they're not tearing into you right now is because you've got your billy out, and they've seen what that billy can do to fishies like them. So they keep their distance, but that makes 'em hate you even more, right? Because you've already killed some of 'em. These are really smart sharks. They hold grudges.

"So you swim along for a little while, all these cold dead pissed-off eyes and teeth always just out of range, and you come across—oh, say Ken. Or what's left of him. A bit of entrail, half a face, ID patch just floating around amongst all those sharks. What do you do, Len? Do you decide there isn't any evidence? Do you say Hey, I can't prove anything, I didn't see this go down? Do you say, Let's not jump to any conclusions..."

"That's a really shitty analogy," Clarke says softly.

"I think it's a great fucking analogy."

"So what are you going to do?"

"I can tell you what I'm not going to do," Nolan assures her. "I'm not going to sit back and have faith in the goodness of corpse spirit while all my friends turn to sockeye."

"Is anyone asking you to do that?"

"Not yet. Any time now, I figure."

Clarke sighs. "Grace, I'm only saying, for the good of all of us—"

"Fuck you," Nolan snarls suddenly. "Fuck you. You don't give a shit about us."

It's as if someone flipped a switch. Clarke stares, astonished.

Nolan glares eyelessly back, her body trembling with sudden rage. "You really want to know my problem with you? You sold us out. We were this close to pulling the plug on those stumpfucks. We could've forced their own goddamn entrails down their throats, and you stopped us, you fucker."

"Grace," she tries, "I know how you fe—"

"Horseshit! You don't have a fucking clue how I feel!"

What did they do to you, Clarke wonders, to turn you into this?

"They did things to me too," she says softly.

"Sure they did. And you got yours back, didn't you? And correct me if I'm wrong but didn't you end up fucking over a whole lot of innocent people in the mix? You never gave a shit about them. And maybe it was too much trouble to work it through but a fair number of us fish-heads lost people to your grand crusade along with everyone else. You didn't give a shit about them either, as long as you got your kick at the cat. Fine. You got it. But the rest of us are still waiting, aren't we? We don't even want to mow down millions of innocent people, we just want to get at the assholes who actually fucked us over—and you of all people come crawling over here on Patricia Rowan's leash to tell me I don't have the right?" Nolan shakes her head in disgust. "I don't believe we let you stop us before, and I sure as shit don't believe you're going to stop us now."

Her hatred radiates through the compartment like infrared. Clarke is distantly amazed that the vines beside her don't blacken and burst into flame.

"I came to you because I thought we could work something out," she says.

"You came because you know you're losing it."

The words ignite a small, cold knot of anger under Clarke's diaphragm. "Is that what you think."

"You never gave a shit about working things out." Nolan growls. "You just sat off on your own, I'm the Meltdown Madonna, I'm Mermaid of the fucking Apocalypse, I get to stand off to the side and make the rules. But the rabble isn't falling into line this time, sweetie, and it scares you. I scare you. So spare me the dreck about altruism and diplomacy. This is just you trying to keep your little tin throne from going sockeye. It's been nice talking to you."

She grabs her fins and stalks into the airlock.

 

Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Man

 

Achilles Desjardins couldn't remember the last time he'd had consensual sex with a real woman. He could, however, remember the first time he'd refused it:

It was 2046 and he'd just saved the Mediterranean. That's how N'AmWire was presenting it, anyway. All he'd really done was deduce the existence of a strange attractor in the Gulf of Cádiz, a persistent little back-eddy that no one else had bothered to look for. According to the sims it was small enough to tweak with albedo dampers; the effects would proliferate through the Strait of Gibralter and—if the numbers were right—stave off the collapse of the Med by an easy decade. Or until the Gulf Stream failed again, whichever came first. It was only a reprieve, not outright salvation, but it was just what CSIRA needed to make everyone forget the Baltic fiasco. Besides, nobody ever looked ahead more than ten years anyway.

So for a while, Achilles Desjardins had been a star. Even Lertzmann had pretended to like him for the better part of a month, told him he was fast-tracked for senior status just as soon as they got the security checks out of the way. Unless he had a bunch of butchered babies in his past he'd be getting his shots before Hallowe'en. Hell, he'd probably be getting them even if he did have a bunch of butchered babies in his past. Background checks were nothing but empty ritual in the higher ranks of the Patrol; you could be a serial killer and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference once Guilt Trip was bubbling in your brain. You'd be just as thoroughly enslaved to the Greater Good.

Aurora, her name was. She wore the zebra hair that had been fashionable at the time, and an endearingly-tasteless armload of faux refugee branding scars. They'd hooked up at some CSIRA soirée hosted from the far side of the world by the EurAfrican Assembly. Their jewelry sniffed each other's auras to confirm a mutual interest (which still meant something, back then), and their path chips exchanged the usual clean bills of health (which didn't). So they left the party, dropped three hundred meters from CSIRA's executive stratosphere to the Sudbury Streets—then another fifty into the subterranean bowels of Pickering's Pile, where the pathware was guaranteed hackproof and tested for twice the usual range of STDs to boot. They gave blood behind a cute little r'n'r couple who broke up on the spot when one of them tested positive for an exotic trematode infesting his urinary tract.

Desjardins had yet to acquire most of the tailored chemicals that would cruise his system in later years; he could still safely imbibe all manner of tropes and mood-changers. So he and Aurora grabbed a booth just off the bar while their bloods ran, stroked the little psychotropic amphibians clambering about in the tabletop terrarium. Dim green light filtered in from the great underground tank in which the Pile was immersed, a radium-glow mock-up of an old nuclear-storage lagoon visible through the plexi walls. After a few minutes one of the in-house butterflies lit on their table, its membranous wings sparkling with refracted data: green on all wavelengths.

"Told you," Aurora said, and kissed his nose.

 

 

 

Pickering's Pile rented fuck-cubbies by the minute. They split five hours between them.

He fucked her inside and out. Outside, he was the consummate caring lover. He tongued her nipples, teeth carefully sheathed. He left trails of kisses from throat to vagina, gently explored every wet aperture, breath shaky with fevered restraint. Every move deliberate, every signal unmistakable: he would rather die than hurt this woman.

Inside, he was tearing her apart. No caresses in there; he slapped her so hard her fucking head just about came off. Inside she was screaming. Inside, he beat her until she didn't have the strength to flinch when the whip came down.

She murmered and sighed sweetly throughout. She remarked on how he obviously worshipped women, on what a change this made from the usual rough-and-tumble, on how she didn't know if she belonged on this pedestal. Desjardins patted himself on the back. He didn't mention the tiny scars on her back, the telltale little lozenges of fresh pink skin that spoke of topical anabolics. Evidently Aurora had use for accellerated healing. Perhaps she had recently escaped from an abusive relationship. Perhaps he was her sanctuary.

Even better. He imagined some past partner, beating her.

"Oh, fuck it," she said, four hours in. "Just hit me."

He froze, terrified, betrayed by body language or telepathy or a lucky guess for all he knew. "What?"

"You're so gentle," Aurora told him. "Let's get rough."

"You don't—" He had to stifle a surprized laugh. "I mean, what?"

"Don't look so startled." She come-hithered a smile. "Haven't you ever smacked a woman before?"

Those were hints, he realised. She was complaining. And Achilles Desjardins, pattern-matcher extraordinaire, master of signal-from-noise, had missed it completely.

"I kind of minored in asphyx," she suggested now. "And I don't see that belt of yours getting any kind of work-out…"

It was everything he'd ever dreamed of, and hated himself for. It was his most shameful fantasy come to life. It was perfect. Oh, you glorious bitch. You are just asking for it, aren't you? And I'm just the one to give it to you.

Except he wasn't. Suddenly, Achilles Desjardins was as soft as a dollar.

"You serious?" he asked, hoping she wouldn't notice, knowing she already had. "I mean—you want me to hurt you?"

"Achilles the hero." She cocked her head mischieviously. "Don't get out much, do you?"

"I do okay," he said, defensive despite himself. "But—"

"It's just a scene, kiddo. Nothing radical. I'm not asking you to kill me or anything."

Too bad. But his own unspoken bravado didn't fool him for an instant. Achilles Desjardins, closet sadist, was suddenly scared to death.

"You mean acting," he said. "Silk cords, safe words, that kinda thing."

She shook her head. "I mean," she said patiently, "I want to bleed. I want to hurt. I want you to hurt me, lover."

What's wrong with me? he wondered. She's just what I've always wanted. I can't believe my luck.

And an instant later: If it is luck...

He was, after all, on the cusp of his life. Background checks were in progress. Risk assessments were underway. Just below the surface, the system was deciding whether Achilles Desjardins could be trusted to daily decide the fate of millions. Surely they already knew his secret—the mechanics had looked inside his head, they'd have noticed any missing or damaged wiring. Maybe this was a test, to see if he could control his impulses. Maybe Guilt Trip wasn't quite the failsafe they'd told him it was, maybe enough wonky neurons screwed it up, maybe his baseline depravity was a potential loophole of some kind. Or maybe it was a lot simpler. Maybe they just couldn't afford to risk investing too much PR in a hero who couldn't control inclinations that some of the public might still find—unpleasant…

Aurora curled her lip and bared her neck. "Come on, kid. Do me."

She was the glimmer in the eye of every partner he'd ever had, that hard little twinkle that always seemed to say Better be careful, you sick twisted piece of shit. One slip and you're finished. She was six-year-old Penny, broken and bleeding and promising not to tell. She was his father, standing in a darkened hallway, staring through him with unreadable eyes that said I know something about you, son, and you'll never know exactly what it is…

"Rory," Desjardins said carefully, "have you ever talked to anyone about this?"

"All the time." She was still smiling, but a sudden wariness tinged her voice.

"No, I mean someone—you know—"

"Professional." The smile was gone. "Some piece of corpsy wetware that sucks down my account while telling me that I don't know my own mind, it's all just low self-esteem and my father raped me when I was preverbal." She reached for her clothes. "No, Achilles, I haven't. I'd rather spend my time with people who accept me for who I am than with misguided assholes who try to change me into what I'm not." She pulled up her panties. "I guess you just don't run into those types at official functions any more."

He tried: "You don't have to go."

He tried: "It was just so unexpected, you know?"

He tried: "It's just, you know, it seems to disrespectful—"

Aurora sighed. "Kiddo, if you really respected me you'd at least give me credit for knowing what I like."

"But I like you," he blundered, free-falling in smoke and flame. "How am I supposed to enjoy hurting you when—"

"Hey, you think I enjoyed everything I did to get you off?"

She left him in the cubby with a flaccid penis, fifty minutes left on the clock and the stunning, humiliating realization that he was forever trapped within his own disguise. I'll never let it out, he realised. No matter how much I want to, no matter who asks me, no matter how safe it seems. I'll never be sure there isn't an open circuit somewhere. I'll never be sure it isn't a trap. I'm gonna be undercover for the rest of my life, I'm too fucking terrified to come out.

His Dad would have been proud. He was a good Catholic boy after all.

But Achilles Desjardins was nothing if not practised at the art of adaptation. By the time he emerged, chastened and alone, he was already beginning to rebuild his defenses. Maybe it was better this way. The biology was irrefutable, after all: sex was violence, literally, right down to the neurons. The same synapses lit up whether you fucked or fought, the same drive to violate and subjugate. It didn't matter how gentle you were on the outside, it didn't matter how much you pretended: even the most consensual intercourse was nothing more than the rape of a victim who'd given up.

If I do all this and have not love, I am as sounding brass, he thought.

He knew it in the floor of his brain, he knew it in the depths of his id. Sadism was hardwired, and sex—sex was more than violent. It was disrespect. There was no need to inflict it on another human being, here in the middle of the twenty-first century. There was no right to. Especially not for monsters with broken switches. He had a home sensorium that could satify any lust he could imagine, serve up virtual victims at such high rez that even he might be fooled.

There were other advantages, too. Never again the elaborate courtship rituals that he always seemed to fuck up at. Never again the fear of infection, the ludicrous efforts to romanticise path scans and pass blood work off as foreplay. Never again that hard twinkle in your victim's eyes, maybe knowing.

He had it worked out. Hell, he had a new Paradigm of Life.

From now on, Achilles Desjardins would be a civilised man. He would inflict his vile passions on machinery, not flesh—and he would save himself a shitload of embarrassment in the bargain. Aurora had been for the best, a narrow escape in the nick of time. Head full of bad wiring in that one, no doubt about it. Pain and pleasure centers all crosswired.

He didn't need to mix it up with a freak like that.

 

Fire Drill

 

She wakes up lost at sea.

She's not sure what called her back, exactly—she remembers a gentle push, as if someone was nudging her awake—yet she's perfectly alone out here. That was the whole point of the exercise. She could have slept anywhere in the trailer park, but she needed the solitude. So she swam out past Atlantis, past the habs and the generators, past the ridges and fissures that claw the neighborhood. Finally she arrived here, at this distant little outcropping of pumice and polymetallics, and fell into wide-eyed sleep.

Only now something has nudged her awake, and she has lost her bearings.

She pulls the sonar pistol off her thigh and sweeps the darkness. After a few seconds a fuzzy metropolitan echo comes back, just barely teasing the left edge of her sweep. She takes more direct aim and fires again. Atlantis and its suburbs come back dead center.

And a harder echo, smaller, nearer. Closing.

It's not an intercept course. A few more pings resolve a vector tracking past to starboard. Whoever it is probably doesn't even know she's here—or didn't, until she let loose with sonar.

They're moving pretty damned fast for someone without a squid. Curious, Clarke moves to intercept. She keeps her headlamp low, barely bright enough to tell substrate from seawater. The mud scrolls by like a treadmill. Pebbles and the occasional brittle star accent the monotony.

The bow wave catches her just before the body does. A shoulder rams into her side, pushes her into the bottom; mud billows up around her. A fin slaps Clarke in the face. She grabs blindly through the zeroed viz and catches hold of an arm.

"What the fuck!"

The arm yanks out of her grasp, but her expletive seems to have had some effect. The thrashing stops, at least. The muddy clouds continue to swirl, but by now it's all inertia.

"Who..." It's a rough, grating sound, even for a vocoder.

"It's Lenie." She brightens her headlamp; a billion suspended particles blind her in bright fog. She fins up into clearer water and points her beam at the bottom.

Something moves down there. "Shiiit...lights down..."

"Sorry." She dims the lamp. "Rama? That you?"

Bhanderi rises from the murk. "Lenie." A mechanical whisper. "Hi."

She supposes she's lucky he still recognizes her. Hell, she's lucky he can still talk. It's not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It's not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a writeoff. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running water. Clarke imagines the fissures of the brain smoothing out over time, devolving back to some primordial fish-state more suited to their chosen habitat.

Rama Bhanderi isn't that far gone yet, though. He still even comes inside occasionally.

"What's the rush?" Clarke buzzes at him. She doesn't really expect an answer.

She gets one, though: "ru...dopamine, maybe...Epi..."

It clicks after a second: dopamine rush. Is he still human enough to deliver bad puns? "No, Rama. I mean, why the hurry?"

He hangs beside her like a black wraith, barely visible in the dim ember of her headlamp. "Ah...ah...I'm not...." his voice trails off.

"Boom," he says after a moment. "Blew it up. Waayyyy too bright."

A nudge, she remembers. Enough to wake her. "Blew what? Who?"

"Are you real?" he asks distantly. "...I...think you're a histamine glitch..."

"It's Lenie, Rama. For real. What blew up?"

"...acetylcholine, maybe..." His hand passes back and forth in front of his face. "Only I'm not cramping..."

This is useless.

"...don't like her any more," Bhanderi buzzes softly. "And he chased me..."

Something tightens in her throat. She moves towards him. "Who? Rama, what—"

"Back off," he grates. "I'm all...territorial..."

"Sorry...I..."

Bhanderi turns and fins away. She starts after him and stops, realizing: there's another way.

She brightens her lamp. The muddy storm front still hangs beneath her, just off the bottom. It won't settle for hours in this dense, sluggish water.

Neither will the trails that lead to it.

One of them is hers: a narrow muddy contrail kicked into suspension as she arrowed in from the east. The other trail extends back along a bearing of 345°. Clarke follows it.

She's not heading for Atlantis, she soon realizes. Bhanderi's trail veers to port, along a line that should keep her well off the southwest shoulder of the complex. There's not much along that route, as far as Clarke can remember. Maybe a woodpile, one of several caches of prefab parts scattered about in anticipation of future expansion, back when the corpses first arrived. Sure enough, the water ahead begins to lighten. Clarke douses her own beam and sonars the brightness ahead. A jumble of hard Euclidean echoes bounce back, all from objects significantly larger than a human body.

She kicks forward. The diffuse glow resolves into four point sources: sodium floods, one at each corner of the woodpile. Stacked slabs of plastic and biosteel lie on pallets within the lit area. Curved slices of habhull lay piled on the substrate like great nested clamshells. Larger shapes loom in the murky distance: storage tanks, heat exchangers, the jackets of emergency reactors never assembled.

The distance is murky, Clarke realizes. Far murkier than usual.

She fins up into the water column and coasts above the industrial subscape. Something leans against the light like a soft dark wall, just past the furthest lamppost. She's been expecting it ever since she spoke to Bhanderi. Now it spreads out ahead of her in silent confirmation, a great billowing cloud of mud blown off the bottom and lingering, virtually weightless, in the aftermath of some recent explosion.

Of course, the corpses stockpiled blasting caps along with everything else...

Something tickles the corner of Clarke's eye, some small disarray somehow out of place among the organized chaos directly below. Two slabs of hull plating have been pulled from their stacks and laid out on the mud. Buckshot scatters of acne blemish their surfaces. Clarke arcs down for a closer look. No, those aren't innocuous clots of mud or a recent colony of benthic invertebrates. They're holes, punched through three centimeters of solid biosteel. Their edges are smooth, melted and instantly congealed by some intense heat source. Carbon scoring around each breach conveys a sense of bruising, of empty eyes battered black.

Clarke goes cold inside.

Someone's gearing up for the finals.

 

Family Values

 

Ever since the founding of Atlantis, Jakob and Jutta Holtzbrink have kept to themselves. It wasn't always thus. Back on the surface, they were flamboyant even by corpse standards. They seemed to delight in the archaic contrast they presented to the world at large; their history together predates the Millennium, they were married so very long ago that the ceremony actually took place in a church. Jutta even took her husband's surname. Women did things like that back then, Rowan remembers. Sacrificed little bits of their own identity for the good of the Patriarchy, or whatever it was called.

An old-fashioned couple, and proud of it. When they appeared in public—which they did often—they appeared together, and they stood out.

Public doesn't exist here in Atlantis, of course. Public was left behind to fend for itself. Atlantis was the crème de la crème from the very beginning, only movers and shakers and those worker bees who cared for them, deep in the richest parts of the hive.

Down here, Jutta and Jakob don't get out much. The escape changed them. It changed everyone of course, humbled the mighty, rubbed their noses in their own failures even though, goddammit, they still made the best of it, adapted even to Doomsday, saw the market in lifeboats and jumped on board before anyone else. These days, mere survival is a portfolio to take pride in. But the Holtzbrincks have not availed themselves of even that half-assed and self-serving consolation. ßehemoth hasn't touched them in the flesh, not a single particle, and yet somehow it seems to have made them almost physically smaller.

They spend most of their time in their suite, plugged into virtual environments far more compelling than the confines of this place could ever be. They come out to get their meals, of course—in-suite food production is a thing of the past, ever since the rifters confiscated "their share" of the resource base—but even then, they retreat back into their quarters with their trays of Cycler food and hydroponic produce, to eat behind closed doors. It's a minor and inoffensive quirk, this sudden desire for privacy from their peers. Patricia Rowan never gave it much thought until that day in the Comm Cave when Ken Lubin, in search of clues, had asked What about the fish? Perhaps they hitched a ride. Are the larvae planktonic?

And Jerry Seger, impatient with this turncoat killer posing as a deep thinker, dismissed him as she would a child: If it had been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.

Maybe it would have, Rowan muses now.

The Holtzbrincks made their mark in pharmaceuticals, stretching back even to the days before gengineering. They've kept up with the times, of course. When the first hydrothermal ecosystems were discovered, back before the turn of the century, an earlier generation of Holtzbrincks had been there—reveling in new Domains, sifting through cladograms of freshly-discovered species, new microbes, new enzymes built to work at temperatures and pressures long thought impossibly hostile to any form of life. They catalogued the cellular machinery ticking sluggishly in bedrock kilometers deep, germs living so slowly they hadn't divided since the French Revolution. They tweaked the sulfur-reducers that choked to death on oxygen, coaxed them into devouring oil slicks and curing strange new kinds of cancer. The Holtzbrink Empire, it was said, held patents on half the Archaebacteria.

Now Patricia Rowan sits across from Jakob and Jutta in their living room, and wonders what else they might have patented in those last days on earth.

"I'm sure you've heard the latest," she says. "Jerry just confirmed it. ßehemoth's made it to Impossible Lake."

Jakob nods, a birdlike gesture including shoulders as well as head. But his words carry denial: "No, I don't think so. I saw the stats. Too salty." He licks his lips, stares at the floor. "ßehemoth wouldn't like it."

Jutta puts a comforting hand on his knee.

He's a very old man, his conquests all in the past. He was born too early, grew too old for eternal youth. By the time the tweaks were available—every defective base pair snipped out, every telomere reinforced—his body had already been wearing out for the better part of a century. There's a limit to how much you can fix so late in the game.

Rowan gently explains. "Not in the Lake itself, Jakob. Somewhere nearby. One of the hot vents."

He nods and nods and will not look at her.

Rowan glances at Jutta; Jutta looks back, helplessness on her face.

Rowan presses on: "As you know, this wasn't supposed to happen. We studied the bug, we studied the oceanography, we chose this place very carefully. But we missed something."

"Goddamn Gulf Stream shut down," the old man says. His voice is stronger than his body, although not by much. "They said it would happen. Change all the currents. Turn England into goddamn Siberia."

Rowan nods. "We've looked at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing seems to fit. I think maybe there might be something about ßehemoth itself that we're missing." She leans forward slightly. "Your people did a lot of prospecting out around the Rim of Fire, didn’t they? Back in the thirties?"

"Sure. Everyone was. Those bloody Archaea, it was the gold rush of the Twenty-First."

"Your people spent a lot of time on Juan de Fuca back then. They never encountered ßehemoth?"

"Mmmm." Jakob Holtzbrink shakes his head. His shoulders don't move.

"Jakob, you know me. You know I've always been a staunch supporter of corporate confidentiality. But we're all on the same side here, we're all in the same boat so to speak. If you know anything, anything at all…"

"Oh, Jakob never did any of the actual research," Jutta interjects. "Surely you know that, he was really more of a people person."

"Yes, of course. But he also took a real interest in the cutting edge. He was always quite excited about new discoveries, remember?" Rowan laughs softly. "There was a time back there when we thought the man practically lived in a submarine."

"I just took the tours, you know. Jutta's right, I didn't do any of the research. That was the gel-jocks, Jarvis and that lot." For the first time, Jakob meets Rowan's eye. "Lost that whole team when ßehemoth broke out, you know. CSIRA was conscripting our people right across the globe. Just waltzed right in, drafted them out from under our noses." He snorts. "Goddamn greater good."

Jutta squeezes his knee. They glance at each other; she smiles. He puts his hand over hers.

His eyes drift back to the floor. Very gently, he begins nodding again.

"Jakob wasn't close to the research teams," Jutta explains. "Scientists aren't all that good with people, as you know. It would be a disaster to let some of those people act as spokespersons, but they still resented the way Jakob presented their findings sometimes."

Rowan smiles patiently. "The thing is, Jakob, I've been thinking. About ßehemoth, and how old it is—"

"Oldest goddamn life on the planet," Jakob says. "The rest of us, we just dropped in later. Martian meteor or something. Bloody ßehemoth, it's the only thing that actually started here."

"But that's the thing, isn't it? ßehemoth doesn't just predate other life, it predates photosynthesis. It predates oxygen. It's over four billion years old. And all the other really ancient bugs we've found, the Archaebacteria and the Nanoliths and so forth, they're still anaerobes to this day. You only find them in reducing environments. And yet here's ßehemoth, even older, and oxygen doesn't bother it at all."

Jacob Holtzbrink stops rocking.

"Smart little bug," he says. "Keeps up with the times. Has those, what do you call them, like Pseudomonas has—"

"Blachford genes. Change their own mutation rate under stress."

"Right. Right. Blachford genes." Jakob brings one hand up, runs it over a sparsely-haired and liver-spotted scalp. "It adapted. Adapted to oxygen, and adapted to living inside fishes, and now it's adapting to every other goddamn nook and cranny on the goddamn planet."

"Only it never adapted to low temperature and high salinity in combination," Rowan observes. "It never adapted to the single biggest habitat on Earth. The deep sea stumped it for billions of years. The deep sea would still be stumping it if the Channer outbreak hadn't happened."

"What are you saying?" Jutta wonders, a sudden slight sharpness in her voice. Her husband says nothing.

Rowan takes a breath. "All our models are based on the assumption that ßehemoth has been in its present form for hundreds of millions of years. The advent of oxygen, hypotonic host bodies—all that happened in the deep, deep Precambrian. And we know that not much has changed since then, Blachford genes or no Blachford genes—because if it had, ßehemoth would have ruled the world long before now. We know it can't disperse through the abyss because it hasn't dispersed through the abyss, in all the millions of years it's had to try. And when someone suggests that maybe it hitched a ride in the ichthyoplankton, we dismiss them out of hand not because anybody's actually checked—who had the time, the way things were going?—but because if it could disperse that way, it would have dispersed that way. Millions of years ago."

Jakob Holtzbrink clears his throat.

Rowan lays it on the table: "What if ßehemoth hasn't had millions of years? What if it's only had a few decades?"

"Well, that's—" Jutta begins.

"Then we're not sure of anything any more, are we? Maybe we're not talking about a few isolated relicts here and there. Maybe we're talking about epicenters. And maybe it's not that ßehemoth isn't able to spread out, but that it's only just now got started."

That avian rocking again, and the same denial: "Nah. Nah. It's old. RNA template, mineralized walls. Big goddamned pores all over it, that's why it can't hack cold seawater. Leaks like a sieve." A bubble of saliva appears at the corner of his mouth; Jutta absently reaches up to brush it away. Jakob raises his hand irritably, pre-empting her. Her hands drop into her lap.

"The pyranosal sequences. Primitive. Unique. That woman, that doctor: Jerenice. She found the same thing. It's old."

"Yes," Rowan agrees, "it's old. Maybe something changed it, just recently."

Jakob's rubbing his hands, agitated. "What, some mutation? Lucky break? Damn unlucky for the rest of us."

"Maybe someone changed it," Rowan says.

There. It's out.

"I hope you're not suggesting," Jutta begins, and falls silent.

Rowan leans forward and lays her hand on Jakob's knee. "I know how it was out there, thirty, forty years ago. It was a gold rush mentality, just as you said. Everybody and their organcloner was setting up labs on the rift, doing all kinds of in situ work—"

"Of course it was in situ, you ever try to duplicate those conditions in a lab—"

"But your people were at the forefront. You not only had your own research, you had your eye on everyone else's. You were too good a businessman to do it any other way. And so I'm coming to you, Jakob. I'm not making any claims or accusing anyone of anything, do you understand? I just think that if anyone in Atlantis might have any ideas about anything that might have happened out there, you'd be the one. You're the expert, Jakob. Can you tell me anything?"

Jutta shakes her head. "Jacob doesn't know anything, Patricia. Neither of us knows anything. And I do take your implication."

Rowan keeps her eyes locked on the old man. He stares at the floor, he stares through the floor, through the deck plating and the underlying pipes and conduits, through the wires and fullerene and biosteel, through seawater and oozing, viscous rock into some place that she can only imagine. When he speaks, his voice seems to come from there.

"What do you want to know?"

"Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might want to take an organism like ßehemoth, and tweak it?"

"More than you can count," says the distant voice. This frail body it's using scarcely seems animate.

"Such as?"

"Targeted delivery. Drugs, genes, replacement organelles. Its cell wall, you've never seen anything like it. Nothing has. No immune response to worry about, slips past counterintrusion enzymes like they were blind and deaf. Target cell takes it right in, lyses the wall, COD. Like a biodegradable buckyball."

"What else?"

"The ultimate pep pill. Under the right conditions the thing pumps out ATP so fast you could roll a car over single-handed. Makes mitochondria look like yesterday's sockeye. Soldier with ßehemoth in his cells might even give an exoskel a run for the money, if you feed him enough."

"And if ßehemoth were tweaked properly," Rowan amends.

"Aye," whispers the old man. "There's the rub."

Rowan chooses her words very carefully. "Might there have been any…less precise applications? MAD machines? Industrial terrorism?"

"You mean, like what it does now? No. W—someone would have to be blind and stupid and insane all at once to design something like that."

"But you'd have to increase the reproductive rate quite a bit, wouldn't you? To make it economically viable."

He nods, his eyes still on far-focus. "Those deep-rock dwellers, they live so slow you're lucky if they divide once a decade."

"And that would mean they'd have to eat a lot more, wouldn't it? To support the increased growth rate."

"Of course. Child knows that much. But that's not why you'd do it, nobody would do that because they wanted something that could—it would just be a, an unavoidable—"

"A side effect," Jutta suggests.

"A side effect," he repeats. His voice hasn't changed. It still rises, calm and distant, from the center of the earth. But there are tears on Jakob Holtzbrinck's face.

"So nobody did it deliberately. They were aiming for something else, and things just—went wrong. Is that what you're saying?"

"You mean, hypothetically?" The corners of his mouth lift and crinkle in some barely-discernible attempt at a smile. A tear runs down one of those fleshy creases and drops off his chin.

"Yes, Jakob. Hypothetically."

The head bobs up and down.

"Is there anything we can do? Anything we haven't tried?"

Jakob shakes his head. "I'm just a corpse. I don't know."

She stands. The old man stares down into his own thoughts. His wife stares up at Rowan.

"What he's told you," she says. "Don't take it the wrong way."

"What do you mean?"

"He didn't do this, any more than you did. He's no worse than the rest of you."

Rowan inclines her head. "I know, Fran."

She excuses herself. The last thing she sees, as the hatch seals them off, is Fran Holtzbrink sliding a lucid dreamer over her husband's bowed head.

There's nothing to be done about it now. No point in recriminations, no shortage of fingers pointing in any direction. Still, she's glad she paid the visit. Even grateful, in an odd way. It's a selfish gratitude, but it will have to do. Patricia Rowan takes whatever solace she can in the fact that the buck doesn't stop with her any more. It doesn't even stop with Lenie Clarke, Mermaid of the Apocalypse. Rowan starts down the pale blue corridor of Res-D, glancing one more time over her shoulder.

The buck stops back there.

 

Portrait of the Sadist as a Free Man

 

The technical term was fold catastrophe. Seen on a graph it was a tsunami in cross-section, the smooth roof of an onrushing wave reaching forward, doubling back beneath the crest and plummeting in a smooth glassy arc to some new, low-energy equilibrium that left no stone standing on another.

Seen on the ground it was a lot messier: power grids failing; life-support and waste-management systems seizing up; thoroughfares choked with angry, frenzied mobs pushed one meal past revolution. The police in their exoskels had long since retreated from street level; pacification botflies swarmed overhead, scything through the mobs with gas and infrasound.

There was also a word for the leading edge of the wave, that chaotic inflection point where the trajectory reversed itself before crashing: breakpoint. Western N'AmPac had pulled through that hairpin turn sometime during the previous thirty-four hours; everything west of the Rockies was pretty much a writeoff. CSIRA had slammed down every kind of barrier to keep it contained; people, goods, electrons themselves had been frozen in transit. To all intents and purposes the world ended at the Cordillera. Only 'lawbreakers could reach through that barrier now, to do what they could.

It wouldn't be enough. Not this time.

Of course, the system had been degrading for decades. Centuries, even. Desjardins owed his very job to that vibrant synergism between entropy and human stupidity; without it, damage control wouldn't be the single largest industry on the planet. Eventually everything had been bound to fall apart, anyone with a pair of eyes and an IQ even slightly above room temperature knew that. But there'd been no ironclad reason why it had had to happen quite as quickly as it had. They could have bought another decade or two, a little more time for those who still had faith in human ingenuity to go on deluding themselves.

But the closer you got to breakpoint, the harder it was to suture the cracks back together. Even equilibria were unstable, so close to the precipice. Forget butterflies: with a planet teetering this close to the edge, the fluttering of an aphid's wings might be enough to push it over.

It was 2051, and it was Achilles Desjardins sworn duty to squash Lenie Clarke like an insect of whatever kind.

He watched her handiwork spread across across the continent like a web of growing cracks shattering the surface of a frozen lake. His inlays gulped data from a hundred feeds: confirmed and probable sightings over the previous two months, too stale to be any use in a manhunt but potential useful for predicting the next ßehemoth outbreak. Memes and legends of the Meltdown Madonna, far more numerous and metastatic—a reproductive strategy for swarms of virtual wildlife Desjardins had only just discovered and might never fully understand. Reality and Legend in some inadvertant alliance, ßehemoth blooming everywhere they converged; firestorms and blackouts coming up from behind, an endless ongoing toll of innocent lives preempted for the greater good.

It was a lie, Desjardins knew. N'Am was past breakpoint despite all those draconian measures. It would take a while for the whole system to shake out; it was a long drop from crest to trough. But Desjardins was nothing if not adept at reading the numbers. He figured two weeks—three at the most—before the rest of the continent followed N'AmPac into anarchy.

A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a fresh riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave their lives in defence of glassy spires and luxury enclaves—defeated not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the sheer weight of flesh against their muzzles. The weapons died of exhaustion, disappeared beneath a tide of live bodies scrambling over dead ones. The crowd breached the gates as he watched, screaming in triumph. Thirty thousand voices in superposition: a keening sea, its collective voice somehow devoid of any humanity. It sounded almost mechanical. It sounded like the wind.

Desjardins killed the channel before the mob learned what he already knew: the spires were empty, the corpses they'd once sheltered long since gone to ground.

Or to sea, rather.

A light hand brushed against his back. He turned, startled; Alice Jovellanos was at his shoulder. Desjardins shot a furtive glance back to his board when he saw who was with her; Rome burned there on a dozen insets. He reached for the cutoff.

"Don't." Lenie Clarke slipped the visor from her face and stared at the devastation with eyes as blank as eggshells. Her face was calm and expressionless, but when she spoke again, her voice trembled.

"Leave it on."

 

 

 

He had first met her two weeks before. He'd been tracking her for months, searching the archives, delving into her records, focusing his superlative pattern-matching skills on the cryptic, incomplete jigsaw called Lenie Clarke. But those assembled pieces had revealled more than a brood sac for the end of the world, as Rowan had put it. They'd revealled a woman whose entire childhood had been pretense, programmed to ends over which she'd had no awareness or control. All this time she had been trying to get home, trying to rediscover her own past.

Ken Lubin, slaved to his own brand of Guilt Trip, had been trying to kill her. Desjardins had tried to get in his way; at the time it had seemed the only decent thing to do. It seemed odd, in retrospect, that such an act of kindness could have been triggered by his own awakening psychopathy.

His rescue attempt had not gone well. Lubin had intercepted him before Clarke even showed up in Sault-Saint Marie. Desjardins had sat out the rest of the act tied to a chair in a pitch-black room, half the bones in his face broken.

Surprisingly, it had not been Ken Lubin who had done that to him.

And yet somehow they were now all on what might loosely be called the same side: he and Alice and Kenny and Lenie, all working together under the banner of grayness and moral ambiguity and righteous vendetta. Spartacus had freed Lubin from Guilt Trip as it had freed Desjardins. The 'lawbreaker had to admit to a certain sympatico with the taciturn assassin, even now; he knew how it felt to be wrenched back into a position of genuine culpability, after years of letting synthetic neurotransmitters make all the tough decisions. Crippling anxiety. Guilt.

At first, anyway. Now the guilt was fading. Now there was only fear.

From a thousand directions the world cried out in desperate need of his attention. It was his sworn duty to offer it: to provide salvation or, failing that, to bail until the last piece of flotsam sank beneath the waves. Not so long ago it would have been more than a duty. It would have been a compulsion, a drive, something he could not prevent himself from doing. At this very moment he should be dispatching emergency teams, rerouting vital supplies, allocating lifters and botflies to reinforce the weakening quarantine.

Fuck it, he thought, and killed the feeds. Somehow he sensed Lenie Clarke flinching behind him as the display went dark.

"Did you get a fix?" Jovellanos asked. She'd taken a shot at it herself, but she'd only been a senior 'lawbreaker for a week: hardly enough time to get used to her inlays, let alone develop the seventh sense that Desjardins had honed over half a decade. The sharpest fix she'd been able to get on the vanished corpses was somewhere in the North Atlantic.

Desjardins nodded and reached out to the main board. Clarke's onyx reflection moved up behind him, staring back from the dark surface. Desjardins suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder. She was right here in his cubby: just a girl, half his size. A skinny little K-selector that half the world wanted to kill and the other half wanted to die for.

Without even having met her, he had thrown away everything to come to her aid. When he'd finally met her face-to-face, she'd scared him more than Lubin had. But something had happened to Clarke since then. The ice-queen affect hadn't changed at all, but something behind it seemed—smaller, somehow. Almost fragile.

Alice didn't seem to notice, though. She'd been been the rifters's self-appointed mascot from the moment she'd seen a chance to get back at the Evil Corporate Oligarchy, or whatever she was calling it this week.

Desjardins opened a window on the board: a false-color satcam enhance of open ocean, a multihued plasma of color-coded contours.

"I thought of that," Alice piped up, "but even if you could make out a heatprint against the noise, the circulation's so slow down there—"

"Not temperature," Desjardins interrupted. "Turbidity."

"Even so, the circulation—"

He shot her a look. "Shut up and learn, okay?"

She fell silent, the hurt obvious in her eyes. She'd been walking on eggshells ever since she'd admitted to infecting him.

Desjardins turned back to the board. "There's a lot of variation over time, of course. Everything from whitecaps to squid farts." He tapped an icon; layers of new data superimposed themselves atop the baseline, a translucent parfait. "You'd never get a track with a single snapshot, no matter how fine the rez. I had to look at mean values over a three-month period."

The layers merged. The amorphous plasma disappeared; hard-edged contrails and splotches condensed from that mist.

Desjardins's fingers played across the board. "Now cancel everything that shows up in the NOAA database," —A myriad luminous scars faded into transparency— "Gulf Stream leftovers," —a beaded necklace from Florida to England went dark—"and any listed construction sites or upwells inconsistent with minimum allowable structure size."

A few dozen remaining pockmarks disappeared. The North Atlantic was dark and featureless but for a single bright blemish, positioned almost exactly in its center.

"So that's it," Clarke murmered.

Desjardins shook his head. "We still have to correct for lateral displacement during ascent. Midwater currents and the like." He called forth algorithms: the blemish jiggled to the northwest and stopped.

39°20'14"N 25°16'03"W, said the display.

"Dead northeast of the Atlantis Fracture Zone," Desjardins said. "Lowest vorticity in the whole damn basin."

"You said turbidity." Clarke's reflection, a bright bullseye in its chest, shook its head. "But if there's no vorticity—"

"Bubbles," Alice exclaimed, clueing in.

Desjardins nodded. "You don't build a retirement home for a few thousand people without doing some serious welding. That's gonna generate sagans of waste gas. Hence, turbidity."

Clarke was still skeptical. "We welded at Channer. The pressure crushed the bubbles down to nothing as soon as they formed."

"For point-welding, sure. But these guys must be fusing whole habs together: higher temperatures, greater outgassing, more thermal inertia." Finally, he turned to face her. "We're not talking about a boiling cauldron here. It's just fine fizz by the time it hits the surface. Not even visible to the naked eye. But it's enough to reduce light penetration, and that's what we're seeing right here."

He tapped the tumor on the board.

Clarke stared at it a moment, her face expressionless. "Anybody else know about this?" she asked finally.

Desjardins shook his head. "Nobody even knows I was working on it."

"You wouldn't mind keeping it that way?"

He snorted. "Lenie, I don't even want to think about what would happen if anyone found out I was spending time on this. And not that you're unwelcome or anything, but the fact that you guys are even hanging around out here is a major risk. Do you—"

"It's taken care of, Killjoy," Alice said softly. "I told you. I catch on fast."

She did, too. Promoted in the wake of his desertion, it had taken her only a few hours to figure out that some plus-thousand corpses had quietly slipped off the face of the earth. It had taken her less than two days to get him back onto the CSIRA payroll, his mysterious absence obscured by alibis and bureaucratic chaff. She'd started the game with an unfair advantage, of course: preinfected with Spartacus, Guilt Trip had never affected her. She'd begun her tenure with all the powers of a senior 'lawbreaker and none of the restraints. Of course she had the wherewithall to get Lenie Clarke into CSIRA's inner sanctum.

But even now, Spartacus bubbled in Desjardins's head like acid, eating away at the chains Guilt Trip had forged. It had already freed his conscience; soon, he very much feared, Spartacus would destroy it utterly.

He looked at Alice. You did this to me, he thought, and examined the feelings the accusation provoked. There had been anger at first, a sense of profound betrayal. Something bordering on hatred, even.

Now he wasn't sure any more. Alice—Alice was a complication, his undoing and his salvation all rolled into one willowy chassis. She had saved his ass, for now. She had information that could be vital, for later. It seemed like a good idea to play along, for the time being at least. As for the rifters, the sooner he helped them on their way the sooner they'd drop out of the equation.

And all the while, some persistent splinter in the back of his mind contemplated the options that might soon be available to a man without a leash…

Alice Jovellanos offered him a tentative smile, ever hopeful. Achilles Desjardins smiled back.

"You catch on fast," he repeated. "That you do."

Hopefully not fast enough.

 

Confessional

 

Jerenice Seger wants to make an announcement.

She won't make it to Clarke or Lubin. She won't even tell them what it's about. "I don't want there to be any misunderstanding," she says. "I want to address your whole community." Her pixelated likeness stares out from the board, grimly defiant. Patricia Rowan stands in the background; she doesn't look pleased either.

"Fine," Lubin says at last, and kills the connection.

Seger, Clarke reflects. Seger's making the announcement. Not Rowan. "Medical news," she says aloud.

"Bad news." Lubin replies, sealing up his gauntlets.

Clarke sets the board for LFAM broadband. "Better summon the troops, I guess."

Lubin's heading down the ladder. "Ring the chimes for me, will you?"

"Why? Where you going?" The chimes serve to heads-up those rifters who leave their vocoders offline, but Lubin usually boots them up himself.

"I want to check something out," he says.

The airlock hisses shut behind him.

 

 

 

Of course, even at their present numbers they can't all fit into the nerve hab at once.

It might have been easier if rifter modules followed the rules. They've been designed to interconnect, each self-contained sphere puckered by six round mouths two meters across. Each can lock lips with any other, or with pieces of interposing corridor—and so the whole structure grows, lumpy and opportunistic, like a great skeleton of long bones and empty skulls assembling itself across the seabed. That's the idea, anyway. A few basic shapes, infinitely flexible in combination.

But no. Here the hab modules sprout like solitary mushrooms across the substrate. Rifters live alone, or in pairs, or whatever social assemblage fits the moment. A crowd of rifters is almost an oxymoron. The nerve habs are among the largest structures in the whole trailer park, and they only hold a dozen or so on their main decks. Given the territorial perimeters that most rifters develop in the abyss, it doesn't hold them comfortably.

It's already getting congested by the time Clarke returns from priming the windchimes. Chen and Cramer converge on her tail as she glides up into the airlock. On the wet deck, Abra Cheung ascends the ladder ahead of her. Clarke follows her up—the airlock cycling again at her back—into a knot of eight or nine people who have arrived during her absence.

Grace Nolan's at the center of the action, bellied up to the Comm panel. Sonar shows a dozen others still en route. Clarke wonders idly if the hab's scrubbers are up to this kind of load. Maybe there is no announcement. Maybe Seger's just trying to get them to overdose on their own CO2.

"Hi." Kevin Walsh appears at her side, hovering hopefully at the edge of her public-comfort perimeter. He seems back to his old self. In front of them, Gomez turns and notices Clarke. "Hey, Len. News from the corpses, I hear."

Clarke nods.

"You're tight with those assholes. Know what it's about?"

She shakes her head. "Seger's the mouthpiece, though. I figure something medical."

"Yeah. Probably." Gomez sucks air softly through stained teeth. "Anybody seen Julia? She should be here for this."

Cheung purses her lips. "What, after spending the last week and a half with Gene? You can breathe that air if you want."

"I saw her out by one of the woodpiles not too long ago," Hopkinson volunteers.

"How'd she seem?"

"You know Julia. A black hole with tits."

"I mean physically. She seem sick at all?"

"How would I know? You think she was out there in a bra and panties?" Hopkinson shrugs. "Didn't say anything, anyway."

Faintly, through bulkheads and conversation, the cries of tortured rock.

"Okay then," Nolan says from the board. "Enough dicking around. Let's rack 'em up and shoot 'em down." She taps an icon on the panel. "You're on, Seger. Make it good."

"Is everyone there?" Seger's voice.

"Of course not. We can't all fit into a hab."

"I'd rather—"

"You're hooked into all the LFAM channels. Anyone within five hundred meters can hear you just fine."

"Well." A pause, the silence of someone deciding how best to proceed across a minefield. "As you know, Atlantis has been quarantined for several days now. Ever since we learned about ßehemoth. Now we've all had the retrofits, so there was every reason to expect that this wasn't a serious problem. The quarantine was merely a precaution."

"Was," Nolan notes. Downstairs the airlock is cycling again.

Seger forges on. "We analyzed the—the samples that Ken and Lenie brought back from Impossible Lake, and everything we found was consistent with ßehemoth. Same peculiar RNA, same stereoisomerization of—"

"Get to the point," Nolan snaps.

"Grace?" Clarke says. Nolan looks at her.

"Shut up and let the woman finish," Clarke suggests. Nolan snorts and turns away.

"Anyway," Seger continues after a moment, "the results were perfectly straightforward, so we incinerated the infected remains as a containment measure. After digitizing them, of course."

"Digitizing?" That's Chen.

"A high-res destructive scan, enough to let us simulate the sample right down to the molecular level," Seger explains. "Model tissues give us much of the same behavior as a wet sample, but without the attendant risks."

Charley Garcia climbs into view. The bulkheads seem to sneak a little closer with each new arrival. Clarke swallows, the air thickening around her.

Seger coughs. "I was working with one of those models and, well, I noticed an anomaly. I believe that the fish you brought back from Impossible Lake was infected with ßehemoth."

Exchanged glances amongst a roomful of blank eyes. Off in the distance, Lubin's windchimes manage a final reedy moan and fall silent, the reservoir exhausted.

"Well, of course," Nolan says after a moment. "So what?"

"I'm, um, I'm using infected in the pathological sense, not the symbiotic one." Seger clears her throat. "What I mean to say is—"

"It was sick," Clarke says. "It was sick with ßehemoth."

Dead air for a moment. Then: "I'm afraid that's right. If Ken hadn't killed it first, I think ßehemoth might have."

"Oh, fuck," someone says softly. The epithet hangs there in a room gone totally silent. Downstairs, the airlock gurgles.

"So it was sick," Dale Creasy says after a moment. "So what?"

Garcia shakes his head. "Dale, don't you remember how this fucker works?"

"Sure. Breaks your enzymes apart to get at the sulfur or something. But we're immune."

"We're immune," Garcia says patiently, "because we've got special genes that make enzymes too stiff for ßehemoth to break. And we got those genes from deepwater fish, Dale."

Creasy's still working it through. Someone else whispers "Shit shit shit," in a shaky voice. Downstairs, some latecomer's climbing the ladder; whoever it is stumbles on the first rung.

"I'm afraid Mr. Garcia's right," Seger says. "If the fish down here are vulnerable to this bug, then we probably are too."

Clarke shakes her head. "But—are you saying this thing isn't ßehemoth after all? It's something else?"

A sudden commotion around the ladder; the assembled rifters are pulling back as though it were electrified. Julia Friedman staggers up into view, her face the color of basalt. She stands on the deck, clinging to the railing around the hatch, not daring to let go. She looks around, blinking rapidly over undead eyes. Her skin glistens.

"It's still ßehemoth, more or less," Seger drones in the distance. From Atlantis. From the bolted-down, welded-tight, hermetically-sealed quarantined goddamned safety of fucking Atlantis. "That's why we couldn't pinpoint the nature of Mr. Erickson's infection: he came back positive for ßehemoth but of course we disregarded those findings because we didn't think it could be the problem. But this is a new variant, apparently. Speciation events of this sort are quite common when an organism spreads into new environments. This is basically—"

ßehemoth's evil twin brother, Clarke remembers.

"—ßehemoth Mark 2," Seger finishes.

Julia Friedman drops to her knees and vomits onto the deck

 

 

 

Babel Broadband. An overlapping collage of distorted voices:

"Of course I don't believe them. You saying you do?"

"That's bullshit. If you—"

"They admitted it up front. They didn't have to."

"Yeah, they suddenly come clean at the exact moment Julia goes symptomatic. What a coincidence."

"How'd they know that she—"

"They knew the incubation time. They must have. How else do you explain the timing here, dramatic irony?"

"Yeah, but what are we gonna do?"

They've abandoned the hab. It emptied like a blown ballast tank, rifters spilling onto a seabed already crowded even by dryback standards. Now it hangs above them like a gunmetal planet. Three lamps set around the ventral airlock lay bright overlapping circles onto the substrate. Black bodies swim at the periphery of that light, hints of restless motion behind shark-tooth rows of white, unblinking eyespots. Clarke thinks of hungry animals, kept barely at bay by the light of a campfire.

By rights, she should feel like one of them.

Grace Nolan's no longer in evidence. She disappeared into the darkness a few minutes ago, one supportive arm around Julia Friedman, helping her back home. That act of apparent altruism seems to have netted her extra cred: Chen and Hopkinson are standing in for her on the point-counterpoint. Garcia's raising token questions, but the prevailing mood does not suggest any great willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt.

"Hey, Dimi," Chen buzzes. "How's it going in there?"

"Stinks like a hospital." Alexander's airborne voice makes a conspicuous contrast against the background of waterlogged ones. "Almost done, though. Somebody better be growing me a new skin." He's still inside, sterilizing anything that Friedman or her bodily fluids might have come into contact with. Grace Nolan asked for volunteers.

She's started giving orders. People have started taking them.

"I say we just drill the fuckers." Creasy buzzes from somewhere nearby.

Clarke remembers holes burned through biosteel. "Let's hold off on the whole counterstrike thing at for a bit. It might be tougher for them to find a cure if we smear them into the deck."

"As if they're looking for a fucking cure."

She ignores the remark. "They want blood samples from everyone. Some of the rest of us might be infected. It obviously doesn't show up right away."

"It showed up fast enough with Gene," someone points out.

"Being gutted alive probably increases your level of exposure a bit. But Julia didn't show anything for, what—two weeks?"

"I'm not giving them any blood," Creasy growls with a voice like scrap metal. "They'll be fucking giving blood if they try and make me."

Clarke shakes her head, exasperated. "Dale, they can't make anyone do anything and they know it. They're asking. If you want them to beg, I'm sure it can be arranged. What's your problem? You've been collecting bloods on your own anyway."

"If we could take our tongues off Patricia Rowan's clit for a moment, I have a message from Gene."

Grace Nolan swims into the circle of light like a pitch-black pack animal, asserting dominance. Campfires don't bother her.

"Grace," Chen buzzes. "How's Julia?"

"How do you think? She's sick. But I got her tucked in at least, and the diagnostics are running for all the good they'll do."

"And Gene?" Clarke asks.

"He was awake for a little while. He said, and I quote, I told them those baby-boners did something to me. Maybe they'll believe me when my wife dies."

"Hey," Walsh pipes up. "He's obviously feeling bet—"

"The corpses would never risk spreading something like this without already having a cure," Nolan cuts in. "It could get back to them too easily."

"Right." Creasy again. "So I say we drill the fuckers one bulkhead at a time until they hand it over."

Uncertainty and acquiescence mix in the darkness.

"You know, just to play devil's advocate here, I gotta say there's a slim chance they're telling the truth."

That's Charley Garcia, floating off to the side.

"I mean, bugs mutate, right?" he continues. "Especially when people throw shitloads of drugs at them, and you can bet they bought out the whole pharm when this thing first got out. So who's to say it couldn't have gone from Mark I to ßeta-max all on its own?"

"Fucking big coincidence if you ask me," Creasy buzzes.

Garcia's vocoder ticks, a verbal shrug. "I'm just saying."

"And if they were going to pull some kind of biowar shit, why wait until now?" Clarke adds, grasping the straw. "Why not four years ago?"

"They didn't have ßehemoth four years ago," Nolan says.

Walsh: "They could've brought down a culture."

"What, for old times' sake? fucking nostalgia? They didn't have shit until Gene served it up to 'em warm and steaming."

"You oughtta get out more, Grace," Garcia buzzes. "We've been building bugs from mail-order parts for fifty years. Once they had the genes sequenced, the corpses could've built ßehemoth from scratch any time they felt like it."

"Or anything else, for that matter," Hopkinson adds. "Why use something that takes all this time just to make a few of us sick? Supercol would've dropped us in a day."

"It would've dropped Gene in a day," Nolan buzzes. "Before he had any chance to infect the rest of us. A fast bug wouldn't have a chance out here—we're spread out, we're isolated, we don't even breathe most of the time. Even when we go inside we keep our skins on. This thing has to be slow if it's gonna spread. These stumpfucks know exactly what they're doing."

"Besides," Baker adds, "a Supercol epidemic starts on the bottom of the goddamn ocean and we're not gonna connect the dots? They'd be sockeye the moment they tried."

"They know it, too."

"ßehemoth gives them an alibi, though," Chen says. "Doesn't it?"

Fuck, Jelaine. Clarke's been thinking exactly the same thing. Why'd you have to bring that up?

Nolan grabs the baton in an instant. "That's right. That's right. ßehemoth comes all the way over from Impossible Lake, no way anybody can accuse them of planting it there—they just tweak it a bit on its way through Atlantis, pass it on to us, and how are we supposed to know the difference?"

"Especially since they conveniently destroyed the samples," Creasy adds.

Clarke shakes her head. "You're a plumber with gills, Dale. You wouldn't have a clue what to do with those samples if Seger handed them to you in a ziplock bag. Same goes for Grace's little science-fair project with the blood."

"So that's your contribution." Nolan twists through the water until she's a couple of meters off Clarke's bow. "None of us poor dumb fishheads got tenure or augments, so we've just gotta trust everything to the wise old gel-jocks who fucked us over in the first place."

"There's someone else," Clarke buzzes back. "Rama Bhanderi."

Sudden, complete silence. Clarke can barely believe she said it herself.

Chen's vocoder stutters in awkward preamble. "Uh, Len. Rama went native."

"Not yet. Not completely. Borderline at most."

"Bhanderi?" The water vibrates with Nolan's mechanical derision. "He's a fish by now!"

"He's still coherent," Clarke insisted. "I talked to him just the other day. We can bring him back."

"Lenie," Walsh says, "nobody's ever—"

"Bhanderi does know his shit," Garcia cuts in. "Used to, anyway."

"Literally," Creasy adds. "I heard he tweaked E. coli to secrete psychoactives. You walk around with that shit in your gut, you're in permanent self-sustaining neverland." Grace Nolan turns and stares at him; Creasy doesn't take the hint. "He had some of his customers eating out of their own ends, just for the feedback high."

"Great," Nolan buzzes. "A drooling idiot and a fecal chemist. Our problems are over."

"All I'm saying is, we don't want to cut our own throats," Clarke argues. "If the corpses aren't lying to us, they're our best chance at beating this thing."

Cheung: "You're saying we should trust them?"

"I'm saying maybe we don't have to. I'm saying, give me a chance to talk to Rama and see if he can help. If not, we can always blow up Atlantis next week."

Nolan cuts the water with her hand. "His fucking mind is gone!"

"He had enough of it left to tell me what happened at the woodpile," Clarke buzzes quietly.

Nolan stares at Clarke, a sudden, indefinable tension in the body behind the mask.

"Actually," Garcia remarks from offside, "I think I might have to side with Lenie on this one."

"I don't," Creasy responds instantly.

"Probably couldn't hurt to check it out." Hopkinson's voice vibrates out from somewhere in the cheap seats. "Like Lenie says, we can always kill them later."

It's not exactly momentum. Clarke runs with it anyway. "What are they going to do, hold their breath and make a mad dash for the surface? We can afford to wait."

"Can Gene afford to wait? Can Julia?" Nolan looks around the circle. "How long do any of us have?"

"And if you're wrong, you'll kill every last one of those fuckers and then find out they were trying to help us after all." Clarke shakes her head. "No. I won't let you."

"You won't l—"

Clarke cranks the volume a notch and cuts her off. "This is the plan, people. Everybody gives blood if they haven't already. I'll track down Rama and see if I can talk him into helping. Nobody fucks with the corpses in the meantime."

This is it, she thinks. Raise or call. The moment stretches.

Nolan looks around at the assembly. Evidently she doesn't like what she sees. "Fine," she buzzes at last. "All you happy little r's and K's can do what you like. I know what I'm gonna do."

"You," Clarke tells her, "are going to back off, and shut up, and not do a single fucking thing until we get some information we can count on. And until then, Grace, if I find you within fifty meters of Atlantis or Rama Bhanderi, I will personally rip the tubes out of your chest."

Suddenly they're eyecap to eyecap. "You're talking pretty big for someone who doesn't have her pet psycho backing her up." Nolan's vocoder is very low; her words are mechanical whispers, meant for Clarke alone. "Where's your bodyguard, corpsefucker?"

"Don't need one," Clarke buzzes evenly. "If you don't believe me, stop talking out your ass and make a fucking move."

Nolan hangs in the water, unmoving. Her vocoder tick-tick-ticks like a Geiger counter.

"Hey, Grace," Chen buzzes hesitantly from the sidelines. "Really, you know? Can't hurt to try."

Nolan doesn't appear to have heard her. She doesn't answer for the longest time. Then, finally, she shakes her head.

"Fuck it. Try, then."

Clarke lets the silence resume for a few more seconds. Then she turns and slowly, deliberately, fins out of the light. She doesn't look back; hopefully, the rest of the pack will read it as an act of supreme confidence. But inside she's pissing herself. Inside, she only wants to run— from this new-and-improved reminder of her own virulent past, from the tide and the tables turning against her. She wants to just dive off the Ridge and go native, keep going until hunger and isolation leave her brain as smooth and flat and reptilian as Bhanderi's might be by now. She wants nothing more than to just give in.

She swims into the darkness, and hopes the others do likewise. Before Grace Nolan can change their minds.

 

 

 

She chooses an outlying double-decker a little further downslope from the others. It doesn't have a name—some of the habs have been christened, Cory's Reach or BeachBall or Abandon All Hope, but there weren't any labels pasted across this hull the last time she was in the neighborhood and there aren't any now.

Nobody's left no-trespassing signs at the airlock, either, but two pairs of fins glisten on the drying rack inside and soft moist sounds drift down from the dry deck.

She climbs the ladder. Ng and someone's back are fucking on a pallet in the lounge. Evidently, even Lubin's windchimes weren't enough to divert their interest. Clarke briefly considers breaking it up and filling them in on recent events.

Fuck it. They'll find out soon enough.

She steps around them and checks out the hab's comm board. It's a pretty sparse setup, just a few off-the-shelf components to keep it in the loop. Clarke plays with the sonar display, pans across the topography of the Ridge and the rash of Platonic icons laid upon it. Here are the main generators, wireframe skyscrapers looming over the ridge to the south. Here's Atlantis, a great lumpy ferris wheel laid on its side—fuzzy and unfocussed now, the echo smeared by a half-dozen white-noise generators started up to keep prying ears from listening in on the recent deliberations. Nobody's used those generators since the Revolt. Clarke was surprised that they were even still in place, much less in working order.

She wonders if someone's taken an active hand in extending the warranty.

A sprinkling of silver bubbles dusts the display: all the semi-abandoned homes of those who hardly know the meaning of the word. She can actually see those people if she cranks up the rez: the display loses range but gains detail, and the local sea-space fills with shimmering sapphire icons as translucent as cave fish. Their implants bounce hard reflective echoes from within the flesh, little opaque organ-clusters of machinery.

It's simple enough to label the creatures on the screen—each contains an ID-transponder next to the heart, for easy identification. There's a whole layer of intelligence that Clarke can access with a single touch. She doesn't, as a rule. Nobody does. Rifter society has its own odd etiquette. Besides, it usually isn't necessary. Over the years you learn to read the raw echoes. Creasy's implants put out a bit of fuzz on the dorsal aspect; Yeager's bum leg lists him slightly to port when he moves. Gomez's massive bulk would be a giveaway even to a dryback. The transponders are an intrusive redundancy, a cheat sheet for novices. Rifters generally have no use for such telemetry; corpses, these days, have no access to it.

Occasionally, though—when distance bleeds any useful telltales from an echo, or when the target itself has changed—cheat sheets are the only option.

Clarke slides the range to maximum: the hard bright shapes fall together, shrinking into the center of the display like cosmic flotsam sucked towards a black hole. Other topography creeps into range around the outer edges of the screen, vast and dim and fractal. Great dark fissures race into view, splitting and criss-crossing the substrate. A dozen rough mounds of vomited zinc-and-silver precipitate litter the bottom, some barely a meter high, one fifty times that size. The very seafloor bends up to the east. The shoulders of great mountains loom just out of range.

Occasional smudges of blue light drift in the middle distance, and further. Some pixellate slow meandering courses across a muddy plain; others merely drift. There's no chance of a usable profile at such distances, but neither is there any need. The transponder overlay is definitive.

Bhanderhi's southwest, halfway to the edge of the scope. Clarke notes the bearing and disables the overlay, sliding the range back to its default setting. Atlantis and its environs swell back out across the display and—

Wait a second—

A single echo, almost hidden in the white noise of the generators. A blur without detail, an unexpected wart on one of the tubular passageways that connect Atlantis's modules one to another. The nearest camera hangs off a docking gantry twenty-five meters east and up. Clarke taps into the line: a new window opens, spills grainy green light across the display.