Behemoth (13 page)

“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
βehemoth
.”

“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. Lisbeth'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 among 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 the corpse spirit while all my friends turn to sockeye.”

“Is anyone asking you to do that?”

“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. You're just 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

A
CHILLES
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 Gibraltar 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 Halloween. 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 murmured and sighed sweetly throughout. She remarked on how he obviously worshiped 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 accelerated 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 surprised 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 realized.
She was
complaining. And Achilles Desjardins, pattern-matcher extraordinaire, master of signal-from-noise, had missed it completely.