Behemoth (18 page)

“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 One to
β
-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
β
ehemoth 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
β
ehemoth 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.”

“
β
ehemoth 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
.
β
ehemoth 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 zip-lock 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 fish-heads 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 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?”

“If you think I need one,” Clarke buzzes evenly, “stop talking out your ass and make a fucking move.”

Nolan hangs in the water, unmoving. Her vocoder
tick-tick-tick
s 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 farther 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 wind chimes 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 unfocused now, the echo smeared by a half-dozen white-noise generators started up to keep the corpses 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 toward 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 farther. Some pixelate 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.

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

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

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