Behemoth (22 page)

She forgot entirely about the headlamp on the corpse's helmet. It hadn't been shining when she caught the poor fucker—obviously he'd been trying to avoid detection, and there was enough ambient light around that part of the structure even for dryback eyes. When he flashed that peeper at her, her eyecaps turned dead flat white in their haste to compensate.

She was only blind for a second or two, but it was more than enough for the corpse to get his licks in. Preshmesh versus copolymer is no contest at all. By the time Mak, bruised and bloodied, called for backup, the corpse was already heading back inside.

Now Clarke and Lubin stand in Airlock Five while the ocean drains away around them. Clarke splits her face seal, feels herself reinflate like a fleshy balloon. The inner hatch hisses and swings open. Bright light, painfully intense, spills in from the space beyond. Clarke steps back as her eyecaps adjust, raising her hands against possible attack. None comes. A gang of corpses jam the wet room, but only one stands in the front rank: Patricia Rowan.

Between Rowan and rifters, an isolation membrane swirls with oily iridescence.

“The consensus is that you should stay in the airlock for the time being,” Rowan says.

Clarke glances at Lubin. He's watching the welcoming committee with blank, impassive eyes.

“Who was it?” Clarke asks calmly.

“I don't think that's really important,” Rowan says.

“Lisbeth might think otherwise. Her nose is broken.”

“Our man says he was defending himself.”

“A man in three-hundred-bar preshmesh armor defending himself against an unarmed woman in a diveskin.”

“A corpse defending himself from a
fish-head,
” someone says from within the committee. “Whole other thing.”

Rowan ignores the intrusion. “Our man resorted to fists,” she says, “because that was the only approach that had any real hope of succeeding. You know as well as we do what we're defending ourselves from.”

“What I know is that none of you are supposed to leave Atlantis without prior authorization. Those were the rules, even before the quarantine. You agreed to them.”

“We weren't allowed much of a choice,” Rowan remarks mildly.

“Still.”

“Fuck the
rules,
” says another corpse.”They're trying to kill us. Why are we arguing protocol?”

Clarke blinks. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know damn well what it—”

Rowan holds up a hand. The dissident falls silent.

“We found a mine,” Rowan says, in the same voice she might use to report that the head was out of toilet paper.

“What?”

“Nothing special. Standard demolition charge. Might have even been one of the same ones Ken wired up before we”—she hesitates, choosing her words—“came to terms a few years back. I'm told it would have isolated us from primary life-support and flooded a good chunk of Res-C. Somewhere between thirty to a hundred killed from the implosion alone.”

Clarke stares at Lubin, notes the slightest shake of the head.

“I didn't know,” Clarke says softly.

Rowan smiles faintly. “You'll understand there might be some skepticism on that point.”

“I'd like to see it,” Lubin says.

“I'd like to see my daughter in the sunlight,” Rowan tells him. “It's not going to happen.”

Clarke shakes her head. “Pat, listen. I don't know where it came from. I—”

“I do,” Rowan says mildly. “There are piles of them stashed at the construction caches. A hundred or more at Impossible Lake alone.”

“We'll find out who planted it. But you can't keep it. You're not allowed weapons.”

“Do you seriously expect us to simply hand it back to the people who planted it in the first place?”

“Pat, you
know
me.”

“I know
all
of you,” Rowan says. “The answer is no.”

“How did you find it?” Lubin asks from out of left field.

“By accident. We lost our passive acoustics and sent someone out to check the antennae.”

“Without informing us beforehand.”

“It seemed fairly likely that you people were causing the interference. Informing you would not have been a wise idea even if you
hadn't
been mining our hulls.”

“Hulls,” Lubin remarks. “So you found more than one.”

No one speaks.

Of course not,
Clarke realizes.
They're not going to tell us anything. They're gearing up for war
.

And they're going to get slaughtered
 …

“I wonder if you've found them all,” Lubin muses.

*   *   *

They stand without speaking, gagged by the synthetic black skin across their faces. Behind their backs, behind the impenetrable mass of the inner hatch, the corpses return to whatever plots and counterplans they're drawing. Ahead, past the outer hatch, a gathering crowd of rifters waits for answers. Around them and within them, machinery pumps and sparks and readies them for the abyss. By the time the water rises over their heads they are incompressible.

Lubin reaches for the outer hatch. Clarke stops him.

“Grace,” she buzzes.

“Could be anyone.” He rises, weightless in the flooded compartment. One hand reaches up to keep the ceiling at bay. It's an odd image, this humanoid silhouette floating against the bluish-white walls of the airlock. His eyecaps almost look like holes cut from black paper, letting the light shine through from behind.

“In fact,” he continues, “I'm not entirely convinced they're telling the truth.”

“The corpses? Why would they lie? How would it serve them?”

“Sow dissension among the enemy. Divide and conquer.”

“Come on, Ken. It's not as though there's a pro-corpse faction ready to rise up on their behalf and…”

He just looks at her.

“You don't know,” she buzzes, so softly she can barely feel the vibration in her own jaw. “It's all just guesses and suspicions. Rama hasn't had a chance to—you can't be sure.”

“I'm not.”

“We don't really know anything.” She hesitates, then edits herself: “
I
don't know anything.
You
do.”

“Not enough to matter. Not yet.”

“I saw you, tracking them along the corridors.”

He doesn't nod. He doesn't have to.

“Who?”

“Rowan, mainly.”

“And what's it like in there?”

“A lot like it is in
there,
” he says, pointing at her.

Stay out of my head, you fucker
. But she knows, at this range, it's not a matter of choice. You can't just
choose
to not feel something. Whether those feelings are yours or someone else's is really beside the point.

So she only says, “Think you could be a little less vague?”

“She feels very guilty about
something
. I don't know what. There's no shortage of possibilities.”

“Told you.”

“Our own people, though,” he continues, “are not quite so conflicted, and much more easily distracted. And I can't be everywhere. And we're running out of time.”

You bastard,
she thinks.
You asshole. You stumpfucker
.

He floats above her, waiting.

“Okay,” she says at last. “I'll do it.”

Lubin pulls the latch. The outer hatch slides back, opening a rectangle of murky darkness in a stark white frame. They rise into a nightscape stippled with waiting eyes.

*   *   *

Lenie Clarke is a little bit twisted, even by Rifter standards.

Rifters don't worry much about privacy, for one thing. Not as much as you might expect from a population of rejects and throwaways. You might think the only ones who could ever regard this place as an
improvement
would be those with the most seriously fucked-up baselines for comparison, and you'd be right. You might also think that such damaged creatures would retreat into their shells like hermit crabs with half their limbs ripped away, cringing at the slightest shadow, or lashing out furiously at any hint of intrusion. It does happen, occasionally. But down here, the endless heavy night anesthetizes even if it doesn't heal. The abyss lays dark hands on the wounded and the raging, and somehow calms them. There are, after all, three hundred sixty degrees of escape from any conflict. There are no limiting resources to fight over; these days, half the habs are empty anyway. There is little need for territoriality, because there is so much territory.

So most of the habs are unguarded and unclaimed. Occupants come and go, rise into any convenient bubble to fuck or feed or—more rarely—socialize, before returning to their natural environment. Any place is as good as any other. There's little need to stand jealous guard over anything so ubiquitous as a Calvin cycler or a repair bench, and there's hardly more that rifters need beyond these basics. Privacy is everywhere; swim two minutes in any direction and you can be lost forever. Why erect walls around recycled air?

Lenie Clarke has her reasons.

She's not entirely alone in this. A few other rifters have laid exclusive claims, pissed territorially on this cubby or that deck or—in very rare cases—an entire hab. They've nested refuge within refuge, the ocean against the world at large, an extra bubble of alloy and atmosphere against their own kind. There are locks on the doors in such places. Habs do not come with locks—their dryback designers had safety issues—but the private and the paranoid have made do, welding or growing their own fortifications onto the baseline structure.

Clarke isn't greedy. Her claim is a small one, a cubby on the upper deck of a hab anchored sixty meters northeast of Atlantis. It's scarcely larger than her long-lost quarters on Beebe Station; she thinks that may have been why she chose it. It doesn't even have a porthole.

She doesn't spend much time here. In fact, she hasn't been here since she and Walsh started fucking. But it doesn't matter how much time she actually spends in this cramped, spartan closet; what matters is the comforting knowledge that it's
hers,
that it's
here,
that no one can ever come in unless she lets them. And that it's available when she needs it.

She needs it now.

She sits naked on the cubby's pallet, bathed in light cranked almost dryback-bright; the readouts she'll be watching are color-coded, and she doesn't want to lose that information. A handpad lies on the neoprene beside her, tuned to her insides. Mosaics of green and blue glow on its face: tiny histograms, winking stars, block-cap letters forming cryptic acronyms. There's a mirror on the opposite bulkhead; she ignores it as best she can, but her empty white eyes keep catching their own reflection.

One hand absently fingers her left nipple; the other holds a depolarizing scalpel against the seam in her chest. Her skin invaginates smoothly along that seam, forms a wrinkle, a puckered geometric groove in her thorax: three sides of a rectangle, a block-C, pressed as if by a cookie cutter into the flesh between left breast and diaphragm and midline.

Clarke opens herself at the sternum.

She unlatches her ribs at the costochondrals and pulls them back; there's a slight resistance and a faint, disquieting sucking sound as the monolayer lining splits along the seam. A dull ache as air rushes into her thorax—it's a chill, really, but deep-body nerves don't distinguish temperature from pain. The mechanics who transformed her hinged four of her ribs on the left side. Clarke hooks her fingers under the fleshy panel and folds it back, exposing the machinery beneath. Sharper, stronger pain stabs forth from intercostals never designed for such flexibility. There are bruises in their future.

She takes a tool from a nearby tray and starts playing with herself.

The flexible tip of the tool, deep within her thorax, slips neatly over a needle-thin valve and locks tight. She's still impressed at how easily she can feel her way around in there. The tool's handle contains a thumbwheel set to some astronomical gear ratio. She moves it a quarter turn; the tip rotates a fraction of a degree.

The handpad at her side bleeps in protest: NTR and GABA flicker from green to yellow on its face. One of the histogram bars lengthens a smidgen; two others contract.

Another quarter turn. More complaints from the pad.

It's such a laughably crude invasion, more rape than seduction. Was there any real need for these fleshy hinges, for the surgical butchery that carved this trap door into her chest? The pad taps wirelessly into the telemetry from her implants; that channel flows both ways, sends commands into the body as well as taking information out of it. Minor adjustments, little tweaks around approved optima, are as simple as tapping on a touchpad and feeling the machinery respond from inside.

But the tweaks Lenie Clarke is about to indulge in are
way
beyond “minor.”

The Grid Authority never claimed to own the bodies of their employees, not officially at least. They owned everything they put inside, though. Clarke smiles to herself.
They could probably charge me with vandalism
.

If they'd really wanted to keep her from putting her grubby paws all over company property then they shouldn't have left this service panel in her chest. But they were on such a steep curve, back then. The brownouts weren't waiting; Hydro-Q wasn't waiting; the GA couldn't wait either. The whole geothermal program was fast-tracked, rearguard, and on the fly; the rifters themselves were a short term stopgap even on that breakneck schedule. Lenie Clarke and her buddies were prototypes, field tests, and final product all rolled into one. How could any accountant justify sealing up the implants on Monday when you'd only have to cut your way back in on Wednesday to fix a faulty myocell, or install some vital component that the advance sims had overlooked?