Behemoth (26 page)

But back then, not even Nolan was entirely without pity. Once the runaways were well and truly dead, once the moral of the story had properly sunk in, the rifters mated the wounded sub to the nearest docking hatch and let the corpses reclaim the bodies.
Harpodon
hasn't moved in all the years since. It's still grafted onto the service lock, protruding from the body of Atlantis like a parasitic male anglerfish fused to the flank of his gigantic mate. It's not a place that anybody goes.

Which makes it the perfect spot for Patricia Rowan to consort with the enemy.

The diver 'lock is an elongate blister distending the deck of the cockpit, just aft of the copilot's seat where Rowan sits staring at rows of dark instruments. It gurgles behind her; she hears a tired pneumatic sigh as its coffin lid swings open, hears the soft slap of wet feet against the plates.

She's left the lights off, of course—it wouldn't do for anyone to know of her presence here—but some flashing beacon, way along the curve of Atlantis's hull, sends pulses of dim brightness through the viewports. The cockpit interior blinks lazily in and out of existence, a jumbled topography of metal viscera keeping the abyss at bay.

Lenie Clarke climbs into the pilot's seat beside her.

“Anyone see you?” Rowan asks, not turning her head.

“If they had,” the rifter says, “they'd probably be finishing the job right now.” Referring, no doubt, to the injuries sustained by
Harpodon
in days gone by. “Any progress?”

“Eight of the samples tested positive. No fix yet.” Rowan takes a deep breath. “How goes the battle on your end?”

“Maybe you could pick a different expression. Something a bit less literal.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I don't think I can hold them back, Pat.”

“Surely you can,” Rowan says. “You're the Meltdown Madonna, remember? The Alpha Femme.”

“Not any more.”

Rowan turns to look at the other woman.

“Grace is—some of them are taking steps.” Lenie's face switches on and off in the pulsating gloom. “They're mine-laying again. Right out in the open this time.”

Rowan considers. “What does Ken think about that?”

“Actually, I think he's okay with it.”

Lenie sounds as though she'd been surprised by that. Rowan isn't. “Mine-laying
again
?” she repeats. “So you know who set them the first time?”

“Not really. Not yet. Not that it matters.” Lenie sighs. “Hell, some people still think you planted the first round yourselves.”

“That's absurd, Lenie. Why would we?”

“To give you an—excuse, I guess. Or as some kind of last-ditch self-destruct, to take us out with you. I don't know.” Lenie shrugs. “I'm not saying they're making sense. I'm just telling you where they're at.”

“And how are we supposed to be putting together all this ordinance, when you people control our fabrication facilities?”

“Ken says you can get a standard Calvin cycler to make explosives if you tweak the wiring the right way.”

Ken again.

Rowan still isn't sure how to broach the subject. There's a bond between Lenie and Ken, a connection both absurd and inevitable between two people for whom the term
friendship
should be as alien as a Europan microbe. It's nothing sexual—the way Ken swings it hardly could be, although Rowan suspects that Lenie still doesn't know about that—but in its own repressed way, it's almost as intimate. There's a protectiveness, not to be taken lightly. If you attack one, you better watch out for the other.

And yet, from the sound of it, Ken Lubin is beginning to draw different alliances …

She decides to risk it. “Lenie, has it occurred to you that Ken might be—”

“That's crazy.” The rifter kills the question before she has to answer it.

“Why?” Rowan asks. “Who else has the expertise? Who else is addicted to killing people?”

“You
gave him that. He was on
your
payroll.”

Rowan shakes her head. “I'm sorry, Lenie, but you know that isn't true. We instilled his threat-response reflex, yes. But that was only to make sure he took the necessary steps—”

“To make sure he killed people,” Lenie interjects.

“—in the event of a security breach. He was never supposed to get—addicted to it. And you know as well as I do: Ken has the know-how, he has access, he has grudges going all the way back to childhood. The only thing that kept him on the leash was Guilt Trip, and Spartacus took care of
that
.”

“Spartacus was five years ago,” the rifter points out. “And Ken hasn't gone on any killing sprees since then. If you'll remember, he was one of exactly two people who
prevented
your last uprising from turning into The Great Corpse Massacre.”

She sounds as if she's trying to convince herself as much as anyone. “Lenie—”

But she's having none of it. “Guilt Trip was just something you people laid onto his brain after he came to work for you. He didn't have it before, and he didn't have it afterward, and you know why? Because he has
rules,
Pat. He came up with his own set of rules, and he damn well stuck to them, and no matter how much he wanted to, he never killed
anyone
without a reason.”

“That's true,” Rowan admits. “Which is why he started inventing reasons.”

Lenie, strobing slowly, looks out a porthole and doesn't answer.

“Maybe you don't know that part of the story,” Rowan continues. “You never wondered why we'd assign him to the rifter program in the first place? Why we'd waste a Black Ops Black Belt on the bottom of the ocean, scraping barnacles off geothermal pumps? It was because he'd started to slip up, Lenie. He was making mistakes, he was leaving loose ends all over the place. Of course he always tied them up with extreme prejudice, but that was rather the point. On some subconscious level, Ken was
deliberately
slipping up so that he'd have an excuse to seal the breach afterward.

“Beebe Station was so far out in the boondocks that it should have been virtually impossible to encounter anything he could interpret as a
security breach,
no matter how much he bent his rules. That was our mistake, in hindsight.”
Not even one of our bigger ones, more's the pity.
“But my point is, people with addictions sometimes fall off the wagon. People with self-imposed rules of conduct have been known to bend and twist and rationalize those rules to let them both have their cake and eat it. Seven years ago, our psych people told us that Ken was a classic case in point. There's no reason to believe it isn't just as true today.”

The rifter doesn't speak for a moment. Her disembodied face, a pale contrast against the darkness of her surroundings, flashes on and off like a beating heart.

“I don't know,” she says at last. “I met one of your
psych people
once, remember? You sent him down to
observe
us. We didn't like him much.”

Rowan nods. “Yves Scanlon.”

“I tried to look him up when I got back to land.”
Look him up:
Leniespeak for
hunt him down.
“He wasn't home.”

“He was decirculated,” Rowan says, her own euphemism—as always—easily trumping the other woman's.

“Ah.”

But since the subject has come up … “He—he had a theory about you people,” Rowan says. “He thought that rifter brains might be … sensitive, somehow. That you entered some heightened state of awareness when you spent too long on the bottom of the sea, with all those synthetics in your blood. Quantum signals from the brainstem. Some kind of Ganzfeld effect.”

“Scanlon was an idiot,” Lenie remarks.

“No doubt. But was he wrong?”

Lenie smiles faintly.

“I see,” Rowan says.

“It's not mind-reading. Nothing like that.”

“But maybe, if you could … what would be the word,
scan?
”

“We called it
fine-tuning,
” Lenie says, her voice as opaque as her eyes.

“If you could fine-tune anybody who might have…”

“Already done. It was Ken who suggested it, in fact. We didn't find anything.”

“Did you
fine-tune
Ken?”

“You can't—” She stops.

“He blocked you, didn't he?” Rowan nods to herself. “If it's anything like Ganzfeld scanning, he blocks it without even thinking. Standard procedure.”

They sit without speaking for a few moments.

“I don't think it's Ken,” Clarke says after a while. “I know him, Pat. I've known him for years.”

“I've known him longer.”

“Not the same way.”

“Granted. But if not Ken, who?”

“Shit, Pat, the whole lot of us!
Everybody
has it in for you guys now. They're convinced that Jerry and her buddies—”

“That's absurd.”

“Is it really?” Rowan glimpses the old Lenie Clarke, the predatory one, smiling in the intermittent light. “Supposing you'd kicked
our
asses five years ago, and we'd been living under house arrest ever since. And then some bug passed through our hands on its way to you, and corpses started dropping like flies. Are you saying you wouldn't suspect?”

“No. No, of course we would.” Rowan heaves a sigh. “But I'd like to think we wouldn't go off half-cocked without any evidence at all. We'd at least entertain the
possibility
that you were innocent.”

“As I recall, when the shoe was on the other foot guilt or innocence didn't enter into it.
You
didn't waste any time sterilizing the hot zones, no matter who was inside. No matter what they'd done.”

“Good rationale. One worthy of Ken Lubin and his vaunted ethical code.”

Lenie snorts. “Give it a rest, Pat. I'm not calling you a liar. But we've already cut you more slack than you cut us, back then. And there are a lot of people in there with you. You sure none of them are doing anything behind your back?”

A bright moment: a dark one.

“Anyway, there's still some hope we could dial this down,” Clarke says. “We're looking at
β
-max ourselves. If it hasn't been tweaked, we won't find anything.”

A capillary of dread wriggles through Rowan's insides.

“How will you know one way or the other?” she asks. “None of you are pathologists.”

“Well, we aren't gonna trust
your
experts. We may not have tenure at LU but we've got a degree or two in the crowd. That, and access to the biomed library, and—”

“No,”
Rowan whispers. The capillary grows into a thick, throbbing artery. She feels blood draining from her face to feed it.

Lenie sees it immediately. “What?” She leans forward, across the armrest of her seat. “Why does that worry you?”

Rowan shakes her head. “Lenie, you don't
know
. You're not trained, you don't get a doctorate with a couple of days' reading. Even if you get the right results, you'll probably misinterpret them…”

“What results? Misinterpret
how
?”

Rowan watches her, suddenly wary: the way she looked when they met for the first time, five years ago.

The rifter looks back steadily. “Pat, don't hold out on me. I'm having a tough enough time keeping the dogs away as it is. If you've got something to say, say it.”

Tell her.

“I didn't know myself until recently,” Rowan begins. “
β
ehemoth may have been—I mean, the
original
β
ehemoth, not this new strain—it was tweaked.”

“Tweaked.” The word lies thick and dead in the space between them.

Rowan forces herself to continue. “To adapt it to aerobic environments. And to increase its reproductive rate, for faster production. There were commercial applications. Nobody was trying to bring down the world, of course, it wasn't a bioweapons thing at all … but evidently something went wrong.”

“Evidently.” Clarke's face is an expressionless mask.

“I'm sure you can see the danger here, if your people stumble across these modifications without really knowing what they're doing. Perhaps they know enough to recognize a tweak, but not enough to tell what it does. Perhaps they don't know how to tell old tweaks from more recent ones. Or perhaps the moment they see any evidence of engineering, they'll conclude the worst and stop looking. They could come up with something they thought was
evidence,
and the only ones qualified to prove them wrong would be ignored because they're the enemy.”

Clarke watches her like a statue. Maybe the reconciliation of the past few years hasn't been enough. Maybe this new development, this additional demand for even more understanding, has done nothing but shatter the fragile trust the two of them have built. Maybe Rowan has just lost all credibility in this woman's eyes, blown her last chance to avoid meltdown.

Endless seconds fossilize in the cold, thick air.

“Fuck,” the rifter says at last, very softly. “It's all over if this gets out.”

Rowan dares to hope. “We've just got to make sure it doesn't.”

Clarke shakes her head. “What am I supposed to do, tell Rama to stop looking? Sneak into the hab and smash the sequencer? They already think I'm in bed with you people.” She emits a small, bitter laugh. “If I take any action at all I've lost them. They don't trust me as it is.”

Rowan leans back her seat and closes her eyes. “I know.” She feels a thousand years old.

“You fucking corpses. You never could leave anything alone, could you?”