Behemoth (30 page)

“To make me focus on F-3.”

Anger,
she realizes.

“But what's the point?” she asks. “Some kind of bluff, did they think we'd mistake those
things
for people?” It seems ridiculous; even Creasy knew there was something off, and he's never met a head cheese before. Then again, what do corpses know about fine-tuning? How would
they
know the difference?

“Not a diversion,” Lubin murmurs in the void. “No other place they could come out that sonar wouldn't…”

“Well, what—”

“Pull them back,” he snaps suddenly. “They're mask—they're luring us in and
masking
something.
Pull them b
—”

The abyss
clenches
.

It's a brief squeeze around Clarke's body, not really painful. Not up here.

In the next instant, a sound:
Whoompf
. A swirl of turbulence. And suddenly the water's full of mechanical screams.

She spins. The smokescreen below is in sudden motion, shredded and boiling in the wake of some interior disturbance, lit from within by flickering heat-lightning.

She squeezes the throttle for dear life. The squid drags her down.

“Clarke!
” The sound of the detonation has evidently passed the Nerve Hab. “What's going on?”

A symphony of tearing metal. A chorus of voices in discord. Not so many as there should be, she realizes.

We must have lost a generator,
she realizes dully.
I can hear them screaming
.

I can hear them dying
.…

And not just hear them. The cries rise in her head before they reach her ears; raw chemical panic lighting up the reptile brain like sodium flares, the smarter mammalian overlay helpless and confused, its vaunted cognition shattering like cheap crystal in the backwash.

“Clarke! Report!”

Anger now, thin veins of grim determination among the panic. Lights shine more brightly through the thinning murk. They're the wrong size, somehow, the wrong color. Not rifter lamps. Her sonar squeals in the face of some imminent collision: another squid slews by, out of control, its rider luminous with an agony of broken bones.

“It wasn't me, I swear it! They did it
themselves—
”

Creasy tumbles away, his pain fading into others'.

Res-F's hull sprawls across sonar, its smooth contours all erased, jagged edges everywhere: the gaping mouths of caves lined with twisted metal teeth. One of them spits something metallic at her; it bounces off the squid with a clank. Vocoder voices grind and grate on all sides. A gap opens in the tattered cloud-bank ahead: Clarke sees a great lumbering shape, an armored cyclops. Its single eye shines balefully with the wrong kind of light. It reaches for her.

She pulls to port, catches a glimpse of something spinning in the chaos directly ahead. A dark mass thuds flaccidly against the squid's bow and caroms toward her face. She ducks. A diveskinned arm cuffs her in passing.

“Lenie!”

Dead gray eyes watch, oblivious and indifferent, as she twists away.

Oh Jesus. Oh God.

Luminous metal monsters stride through the wreckage, stabbing at the wounded.

She tries to hold it together. “They're coming out of the walls, Ken. They were waiting inside, they blew the hull from
inside
and they're coming through the walls…”

God damn you, Pat. Was this you? Was this you?

She remembers the lopsided chessboard on Lubin's display. She remembers black pieces arranging themselves for an easy rout.

Only now does she remember: in chess, white always moves first.

*   *   *

That indifferent, alien intellect is nowhere to be found now. The gels must have turned to pulp the instant the hull imploded.

There were more than preshmeshed corpses and smart gels packed in F-3's wet room. There was shrapnel, doubtless arranged in accordance with some theoretical projection of maximum spread. Clarke can see the fragments where they've come to rest—on the hull, embedded in ruptured LOX tanks, protruding from the far side of ragged entry wounds torn through the flesh of comrades and rivals. They look like metal daisies, like the blades of tiny perfect windmills. The mere rebound from the implosion would have been enough to set them soaring, to mow down anyone not already sucked to their death at mach speeds or torn apart on the jagged lip of the breach itself.

The smokescreen has all but dispersed.

Lubin's calling a retreat. Most of those able to respond already have. The preshmeshed figures clambering along the hulled remains of F-3 have to content themselves with the wounded and the dead. They're crabs, ungainly and overweighted. Instead of claws they have needles, long, almost surgical things, extending from their gauntlets like tiny lances.

“Lenie. Do you read?”

She floats dumbly overhead, out of reach, watching them stab black bodies. Occasional bubbles erupt from the needle tips, race into the sky like clusters of shuddering silvery mushrooms.

Compressed air, injected into flesh. Instant embolism. You can make a weapon out of almost anything.

“Lenie?”

“She could be dead, Ken. I can't find Dale or Abra either.”

Other voices, too fuzzy to distinguish. Most of the white noise generators are still online, after all.

She tunes in the crabs. She wonders what they must be feeling now. She wonders what
she's
feeling, too, but she can't really tell. Maybe she feels like a head cheese.

The corpses, though, down there in their armor, mopping up. No shortage of feelings there. Determination. A surprising amount of fear. Anger, but distant; it isn't driving them.

Not as much hate as she would have expected.

She rises. The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis lights the water, deceptively serene. She can barely hear buzzing rifter voices; she can't make out any words. She can't tune any of them in. She's all alone at the bottom of the sea.

Suddenly she rises past some invisible line-of-sight, and her jawbone fills with chatter.

“—the bodies,” Lubin's saying. “Bring terminals at personal discretion. Garcia's waiting under Med for triage.”

“Med won't hold half of us,” someone—
oh, it's Kevin!
—buzzes faintly in the distance. “Way too many injured.”

“Anyone from F-3 not injured and not carrying injured, meet at the cache. Hopkinson?”

“Here.”

“Anything?”

“Think so, maybe. We're getting a whole lot of brains in Res-E. Can't tell who, but—”

“Yeager and Ng, bring your people straight up forty meters. Don't change your lats and longs, but I want everybody well away from the hull. Hopkinson, get your people back to the Med Hab.”

“We're okay—”

“Do it. We need donors.”

“Jesus,” someone says faintly. “We're fucked…”

“No.
They
are.”

Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through the mutilating filter of her vocoder.

“Grace, they just—”

“Just
what
?” she buzzes. “Do you think they're
winning
? What are they gonna do for an encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We've got enough charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we're gonna use them.”

“Ken?”

A brief silence.

“Look, Ken,” Nolan buzzes, “I can be at the cache in—”

“Not necessary,” Lubin tells her. “Someone's already en route.”

“Who's—”

“Welcome back, by the way,” Lubin says to the anonymous soldier. “You know the target?”

“Yes.” A faint voice, too soft and distorted to pin down.

“The charge has to be locked down within a meter of the mark. Set it and
back away fast
. Don't spend any more time than absolutely necessary in proximity to the hull, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Acoustic trigger. I'll detonate from here. Blackout lifting in ten.”

My God
, Clarke thinks,
It's you
 …

“Everyone at safe distance,” Lubin reminds the troops. “Blackout lifting
now
.”

She's well out of the white noise; there's no obvious change in ambience. But the next vocoder she hears, still soft, is clearly recognizable.

“It's down,” Julia Friedman buzzes.

“Back off,” Lubin says. “Forty meters. Stay away from the bottom.”

“Hey Avril,” Friedman says.

“Right here,” Hopkinson answers.

“When you tuned that wing, were there children?”

“Yeah. Yeah, there were.”

“Good,” buzzes Friedman. “Gene always hated kids.”

The channel goes dead.

*   *   *

At first, she thinks the retribution's gone exactly as expected. The world pulses around her—a dull, almost subsonic drumbeat through brine and flesh and bone—and for all she knows, a hundred or more of the enemy are reduced to bloody paste. She doesn't know how many rifters died in the first exchange, but surely this restores the lead.

She's in an old, familiar place where it doesn't seem to matter much either way.

Even the second explosion—same muffled thump, but softer somehow, more distant—even that doesn't tip her off immediately. Secondary explosions would almost be inevitable, she imagines—pipes and power lines suddenly ruptured, a cascade of high-pressure tanks with their feeds compromised—all kinds of consequences could daisy-chain from that initial burst. Bonus points for the home team, probably. Nothing more.

But something in the back of her mind says the second blast just
felt
wrong—the wrong resonance, perhaps, as if one were to ring a great antique church bell and hear a silvery tinkle. And the voices, when they come back online, are not cheering their latest victory over the rampaging Corpse Hordes, but so full of doubt and uncertainty that not even the vocoders can mask it.

“What the fuck was
that
—”

“Avril? Did you feel that out your way?”

“Avril? Anybody catching—anyone…”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Gardiner? David? Stan?
Anyone
—”

“Garcia, are you—I'm not getting—”

“It's gone. I'm right here, it's just fucking
gone
…”

“What are you talking about?”

“The whole bottom of the hab, it's just—it must've set them
both
—”

“Both
what
? She only set one charge, and that was on—”

“Ken? Ken? Lubin,
where the fuck are you?
”

“This is Lubin.”

Silence in the water.

“We've lost the medhab.” His voice is like rusty iron.

“What—”

“How did—”

“Shut the fuck up,”
Lubin snarls across the nightscape.

There's silence again, almost. A few, on open channels, continue to emit metal groans.

“Evidently an unpacked charge was attached to the hab,” Lubin continues. “It must have been set off by the same signal we used on Atlantis. From this point on, no omnidirectional triggers. There may be other charges set to detonate on multiple pings. Everyone—”

“This is Atlantis speaking.”

The words boom across the seabed like the Voice of God, unsullied by any interference.
Ken forgot to black back out,
Clarke realizes.
Ken's started
shouting
at the troops
.

Ken's losing it
 …

“You may think you are in a position of strength,” the voice continues. “You are not. If you destroy this facility, your own deaths are assured.”

She doesn't recognize the voice. Odd. It speaks with such authority.

“You are infected with Mark Two. You are
all
infected. Mark Two is highly contagious during an asymptomatic incubation period of several weeks. Without intervention you will all be dead within two months.

“We have a cure.”

Dead silence. Not even Grace Nolan says
I told you so
.

“We've trip-wired all relevant files and cultures to prevent unauthorized access. Kill us and you kill yourselves.”

“Prove it,” Lubin replies.

“Certainly. Just wait a while. Or if you're feeling impatient, do that mind-reading trick of yours. What do you call it?
Tuning in?
I'm told it separates the trustworthy from the liars, most of the time.”

Nobody corrects him.

“State your terms,” Lubin says.

“Not to you. We will only negotiate with Lenie Clarke.”

“Lenie Clarke may be dead,” Lubin says. “We haven't been able to contact her since you blew the res.” He must know better by now: she's high in the water, her insides resonating to the faint tapping of click trains. She keeps quiet. Let him play out the game in his own way. It might be his last.

“That would be very bad news for all of us,” Atlantis replies calmly. “Because this offer expires if she's not at Airlock Six within a half hour. That is all.”

Silence.

“It's a trick,” Nolan says.

“Hey,
you
said they had a cure,” someone else buzzes—Clarke can't tell who, the channels are fuzzing up again. The white noise generators must be back online.

“So what if they do?” Nolan buzzes. “I don't trust them to share it with us, and I
sure
as shit don't trust Lenie fucking Clarke to be my ambassador. How do you think those fuckers found out about fine-tuning in the first place? Every one of our dead is thanks to her.”