Behemoth (17 page)

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

J
ERENICE
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 chimes. 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 CO
2
.

“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
β
ehemoth. 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
β
ehemoth. 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
β
ehemoth.”

Exchanged glances among a roomful of blank eyes. Off in the distance, Lubin's wind chimes 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
β
ehemoth.”

Dead air for a moment. Then: “I'm afraid that's right. If Ken hadn't killed it first, I think
β
ehemoth 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
β
ehemoth 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
β
ehemoth 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
β
ehemoth, 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
β
ehemoth but of course we disregarded those findings because we didn't think it could be the problem. But this is a new variant, apparently. Virulent speciation is quite common when an organism spreads into new environments. This is basically—”

βehemoth's evil twin brother,
Clarke remembers.

“—
β
ehemoth Mark Two,” 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 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.'
”