ßehemoth

Peter Watts

cover art by Bruce Jensen

Originally published by Tor Books

ß-Max: July 2004, ISBN: 0765307219

Seppuku: December 2004, ISBN: 0765311720

www.rifters.com

Some Right Reserved

In memory of Strange Cat, a.k.a. Carcinoma,

1984-2003

She wouldn't have cared.

And in memory of Chuckwalla,

1994-2001

A victim of technology run amok.

Author's Note

This is the way it was meant to be. Well, not all pixellated and virtual or (at best) home-printed, but integrated, dammit, a single novel in a single package, and fuck the beancounters and their Solomonesque book-splitting travesties. We aren't in the old-school economy any more, Toto— we're giving this stuff away now, and you can judge it for better or worse as a single standalone entity. You may agree with Publisher's Weekly and call this the capstone to one of the major works of hard-sf in the new century. Or you may side with Kirkus and dismiss it as horrific porn, rife with relentlessly clinical scenes of sexual torture. (Hell, you may even decide they're both right.) But whatever you decide, at least you'll be basing that assessment, finally, on complete data.

—Peter Watts, 2007

Prelude: 'lawbreaker

If you lost your eyes, Achilles Desjardins had been told, you got them back in your dreams.

It wasn't only the blind. Anyone, torn apart in life, dreamt the dreams of whole creatures. Quadruple amputees ran and threw footballs; the deaf heard symphonies; those who'd lost, loved again. The mind had its own inertia; grown accustomed to a certain role over so many years, it was reluctant to let go of the old paradigm.

It happened eventually, of course. The bright visions faded, the music fell silent, imaginary input scaled back to something more seemly to empty eye sockets and ravaged cochleae. But it took years, decades—and in all that time, the mind would torture itself with nightly reminders of the things it once had.

It was the same with Achilles Desjardins. In his dreams, he had a conscience.

Dreams took him to the past, to his time as a shackled god: the lives of millions in his hands, a reach that extended past geosynch and along the floor of the Mariana Trench. Once again he battled tirelessly for the greater good, plugged into a thousand simultaneous feeds, reflexes and pattern-matching skills jumped up by retro'd genes and customized neurotropes. Where chaos broke, he brought control. Where killing ten would save a hundred, he made the sacrifice. He isolated the outbreaks, cleared the logjams, defused the terrorist attacks and ecological breakdowns that snapped on all sides. He floated on radio waves and slipped through the merest threads of fiberop, haunted Peruvian sea mills one minute and Korean Comsats the next. He was CSIRA's best 'lawbreaker again: able to bend the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the breaking point, and maybe a little beyond.

He was the very ghost in the machine—and back then, the machine was everywhere.

And yet the dreams that really seduced him each night were not of power, but of slavery. Only in sleep could he relive that paradoxical bondage that washed rivers of blood from his hands. Guilt Trip, they called it. A suite of artificial neurotransmitters whose names Desjardins had never bothered to learn. He could, after all, kill millions with a single command; nobody was going to hand out that kind of power without a few safeguards in place. With the Trip in your brain, rebellion against the greater good was a physiological impossibility. Guilt Trip severed the link between absolute power and corruption absolute; any attempt to misuse one's power would call down the mother of all grand mal attacks. Desjardins had never lain awake doubting the rightness of his actions, the purity of his motives. Both had been injected into him by others with fewer qualms.

It was such a comfort, to be so utterly blameless. So he dreamed of slavery. And he dreamed of Alice, who had freed him, who had stripped him of his chains.

In his dreams, he wanted them back.

Eventually the dreams slipped away as they always did. The past receded; the unforgiven present advanced. The world fell apart in time-lapse increments: an apocalyptic microbe rose from the deep sea, hitching a ride in the brackish flesh of some deep-sea diver from N'AmPac. Floundering in its wake, the Powers That Weren't dubbed it ßehemoth, burned people and property in their frantic, futile attempts to stave off the coming change of regime. North America fell. Trillions of microscopic foot soldiers marched across the land, laying indiscriminate waste to soil and flesh. Wars flared and subsided in fast-forward: the N'AmPac Campaign, the Colombian Burn, the Eurafrican Uprising. And Rio, of course: the thirty-minute war, the war that Guilt Trip should have rendered impossible.

Desjardins fought in them all, one way or another. And while desperate metazoans fell to squabbling among themselves, the real enemy crept implacably across the land like a suffocating blanket. Not even Achilles Desjardins, pride of the Entropy Patrol, could hold it back.

Even now, with the present almost upon him, he felt faint sorrow for all he hadn't done. But it was phantom pain, the residue of a conscience stranded years in the past. It barely reached him here on the teetering interface between sleep and wakefulness; for one brief moment he both remembered that he was free, and longed not to be.

Then he opened his eyes, and there was nothing left that could care one way or the other.

Mandelbrot sat meatloafed on his chest, purring. He scritched her absently while calling up the morning stats. It had been a relatively quiet night: the only item of note was a batch of remarkably foolhardy refugees trying to crash the North American perimeter. They'd set sail under cover of darkness, casting off from Long Island on a refitted garbage scow at 0110 Atlantic Standard; within an hour, two dozen EurAfrican interests had been vying for dibs on the mandatory extreme prejudice. The poor bastards had barely made it past Cape Cod before the Algerians (the Algerians?) took them out.

The system hadn't even bothered to get Desjardins out of bed.

Mandelbrot rose, stretched, and wandered off on her morning rounds. Liberated, Desjardins got up and padded to the elevator. Sixty-five floors of abandoned real estate dropped smoothly around him. Just a few years ago it had been a hive of damage control; thousands of Guilt-Tripped operatives haunting a world forever teetering on the edge of breakdown, balancing lives and legions with cool dispassionate parsimony. Now it was pretty much just him. A lot of things had changed after Rio.

The elevator disgorged him onto CSIRA's roof. Other buildings encircled this one in a rough horseshoe, pressing in at the edges of the cleared zone. Sudbury's static field, its underbelly grazing the tips of the tallest structures, sent gooseflesh across Desjardins's forearms.

On the eastern horizon, the tip of the rising sun ignited a kingdom in ruins.

The devastation wasn't absolute. Not yet. Cities to the east retained some semblance of integrity, walled and armored and endlessly on guard against the invaders laying claim to the lands between. Fronts and battle lines still seethed under active dispute; one or two even held steady. Pockets of civilization remained sprinkled across the continent—not many, perhaps, but the war went on.

All because five years before, a woman named Lenie Clarke had risen from the bottom of the ocean with revenge and ßehemoth seething together in her blood.

Now Desjardins walked across the landing pad to the edge of the roof. The sun rose from the lip of the precipice as he pissed into space. So many changes, he reflected. So many fold catastrophes in pursuit of new equilibria. His domain had shrunk from a planet to a continent, cauterised at the edges. Eyesight once focused on infinity now ended at the coast. Arms which once encircled the world had been amputated at the elbow. Even N'Am's portion of the Net had been cut from the electronic commons like a tumor; Achilles Desjardins got to deal with the necrotising mess left behind.

And yet, in many ways he had more power than ever. Smaller territory, yes, but so few left to share it with. He was less of a team player these days, more of an emporer. Not that that was widely known...

But some things hadn't changed. He was still technically in the employ of the Complex Systems Instability Response Authority, or whatever vestiges of that organization persisted across the globe. The world had long since fallen on its side—this part of it, anyway—but he was still duty-bound to minimise the damage. Yesterday's brush fires were today's infernos, and Desjardins seriously doubted that anyone could extinguish them at this point; but he was one of the few that might at least be able to keep them contained a little longer. He was still a 'lawbreaker—a lighthouse keepr, as he'd described himself the day they'd finally relented and let him stay behind—and today would be a day like any other. There would be attacks to repel, and enemies to surveil. Some lives would be ended to spare others, more numerous or more valuable. There were virulent microbes to destroy, and appearances to maintain.

He turned his back on the rising sun and stepped over the naked, gutted body of the woman at his feet. Her name had been Alice, too.

He tried to remember if that was only coincidence.

ß-Max

"The world is not dying, it is being killed.

And those that are killing it have names and addresses."

—Utah Phillips

Counterstrike

First there is only the sound, in darkness. Drifting on the slope of an undersea mountain, Lenie Clarke resigns herself to the imminent loss of solitude.

She's far enough out for total blindness. Atlantis, with its gantries and beacons and portholes bleeding washed-out light into the abyss, is hundreds of meters behind her. No winking telltales, no conduits or parts caches pollute the darkness this far out. The caps on her eyes can coax light enough to see from the merest sparkle, but they can't create light where none exists. Here, none does. Three thousand meters, three hundred atmospheres, three million kilograms per square meter have squeezed every last photon out of creation. Lenie Clarke is as blind as any dryback.

After five years on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, she still likes it this way.

But now the soft mosquito whine of hydraulics and electricity rises around her. Sonar patters softly against her implants. The whine shifts subtly in pitch, then fades. Faint surge as something coasts to a stop overhead.

"Shit." The machinery in her throat turns the epithet into a soft buzz. "Already?"

"I gave you an extra half-hour." Lubin's voice. His words are fuzzed by the same technology that affects hers; by now the distortion is more familiar than the baseline.

She'd sigh, if breath were possible out here.

Clarke trips her headlamp. Lubin is caught in the ignited beam, a black silhouette studded with subtle implementation. The intake on his chest is a slotted disk, chrome on black. Corneal caps turn his eyes into featureless translucent ovals. He looks like a creature built exclusively from shadow and hardware; Clarke knows of the humanity behind the façade, although she doesn't spread it around.

A pair of squids hover at his side. A nylon bag hangs from one of the meter-long vehicles, lumpy with electronics. Clarke fins over to the other, flips a toggle from slave to manual. The little machine twitches and unfolds its towbar.

On impulse, she kills her headlight. Darkness swallows everything again. Nothing stirs. Nothing twinkles. Nothing attacks.

It's just not the same.

"Something wrong?" Lubin buzzes.

She remembers a whole different ocean, on the other side of the world. Back on Channer Vent you'd turn your lights off and the stars would come out, a thousand bioluminescent constellations: fish lit up like runways at night; glowing arthropods; little grape-sized ctenophores flashing with complex iridescence. Channer sang like a siren, lured all those extravagant midwater exotics down deeper than they swam anywhere else, fed them strange chemicals and turned them monstrously beautiful. Back at Beebe Station, it was only dark when your lights were on.

But Atlantis is no Beebe Station, and this place is no Channer Vent. Here, the only light shines from indelicate, ham-fisted machinery. Headlamps carve arid tunnels through the blackness, stark and ugly as burning sodium. Turn them off, and…nothing.

Which is, of course, the whole point.

"It was so beautiful," she says.

He doesn’t have to ask. "It was. Just don't forget why."

She grabs her towbar. "It's just—it's not the same, you know? Sometimes I almost wish one of those big toothy fuckers would charge out of the dark and try to take a bite out of me…"

She hears the sound of Lubin's squid throttling up, invisibly close. She squeezes her own throttle, prepares to follow him.

The signal reaches her LFAM and her skeleton at the same time. Her bones react with a vibration deep in the jaw: the modem just beeps at her.

She trips her receiver. "Clarke."

"Ken find you okay?" It's an airborne voice, unmutilated by the contrivances necessary for underwater speech.

"Yeah." Clarke's own words sound ugly and mechanical in contrast. "We're on our way up now."

"Okay. Just checking." The voice falls silent for a moment. "Lenie?"

"Still here."

"Just…well, be careful, okay?" Patricia Rowan tells her. "You know how I worry."

The water lightens indiscernibly as they ascend. Somehow their world has changed from black to blue when she wasn't looking; Clarke can never pinpoint the moment when that happens.

Lubin hasn't spoken since Rowan signed off. Now, as navy segues into azure, Clarke says it aloud. "You still don't like her."

"I don't trust her," Lubin buzzes. "I like her fine."

"Because she's a corpse." Nobody has called them corporate executives for years.

"Was a corpse." The machinery in his throat can't mask the grim satisfaction in that emphasis.

"Was a corpse," Clarke repeats.

"No."

"Why, then?"

"You know the list."

She does. Lubin doesn't trust Rowan because once upon a time, Rowan called shots. It was at her command that they were all recruited so long ago, damaged goods damaged further: memories rewritten, motives rewired, conscience itself refitted in the service of some indefinable, indefensible greater good.

"Because she was a corpse," Clarke repeats.

Lubin's vocoder emits something that passes for a grunt.

She knows where he's coming from. To this day, she still isn't certain what parts of her own childhood were real and which were mere inserts, installed after the fact. And she's one of the lucky ones; at least she survived the blast that turned Channer Vent into thirty square kilometers of radioactive glass. At least she wasn't smashed to pulp by the resulting tsunami, or incinerated along with the millions on N'AmPac's refugee strip.

Not that she shouldn't have been, of course. If you want to get technical about it, all those other millions were nothing but collateral. Not their fault—not even Rowan's, really—that Lenie Clarke wouldn't sit still enough to present a decent target.

Still. There's fault, and there's fault. Patricia Rowan might have the blood of millions on her hands, but after all hot zones don't contain themselves: it takes resources and resolve, every step of the way. Cordon the infected area; bring in the lifters; reduce to ash. Lather, rinse, repeat. Kill a million to save a billion, kill ten to save a hundred. Maybe even kill ten to save eleven—the principle's the same, even if the profit margin's lower. But none of that machinery runs itself, you can't ever take your hand off the kill switch. Rowan never threw a massacre without having to face the costs, and own them.

It was so much easier for Lenie Clarke. She just sowed her little trail of infection across the world and went to ground without ever looking back. Even now her victims pile up in an ongoing procession, an exponential legacy that must have surpassed Rowan's a dozen times over. And she doesn't have to lift a finger.

No one who calls himself a friend of Lenie Clarke has any rational grounds for passing judgment on Patricia Rowan. Clarke dreads the day when that simple truth dawns on Ken Lubin.

The squids drag them higher. By now there's a definite gradient, light above fading to darkness below. To Clarke this is the scariest part of the ocean, the half-lit midwater depths where real squid roam: boneless tentacled monsters thirty meters long, their brains as cold and quick as superconductors. They're twice as large as they used to be, she's been told. Five times more abundant. Apparently it all comes down to better day care. Architeuthis larvae grow faster in the warming seas, their numbers unconstrained by predators long since fished out of existence.

She's never actually seen one, of course. Hopefully she never will—according to the sims the population is crashing for want of prey, and the ocean's vast enough to keep the chances of a random encounter astronomically remote anyway. But occasionally the drones catch ghostly echoes from massive objects passing overhead: hard shouts of chitin and cartilage, faint landscapes of surrounding flesh that sonar barely sees at all. Fortunately, Archie rarely descends into true darkness.

The ambient hue intensifies as they rise—colors don't survive photoamplification in dim light, but this close to the surface the difference between capped and naked eyes is supposed to be minimal. Sometimes Clarke has an impulse to put that to the test, pop the caps right out of her eyes and see for herself, but it's an impossible dream. The diveskin wraps around her face and bonds directly to the photocollagen. She can't even blink.

Surge, now. Overhead, the skin of the ocean writhes like dim mercury. It tilts and dips and scrolls past in an endless succession of crests and troughs, twisting a cool orb glowing on the other side, tying it into playful dancing knots. A few moments later they break through the surface and look onto a world of sea and moonlit sky.

They are still alive. A three-thousand-meter free ascent in the space of forty minutes, and not so much as a burst capillary. Clarke swallows against the isotonic saline in throat and sinuses, feels the machinery sparking in her chest, and marvels again at the wonder of a breathless existence.

Lubin's all business, of course. He's maxed his squid's buoyancy and is using it as a floating platform for the receiver. Clarke sets her own squid to station-keeping and helps him set up.

They slide up and down silver swells, the moon bright enough to render their eyecaps redundant. The unpacked antennae cluster bobs on its tether, eyes and ears jostling in every direction, tracking satellites, compensating for the motion of the waves. One or two low-tech wireframes scan for ground stations.

Too slowly, signals accumulate.

The broth gets thinner with each survey. Oh, the ether's still full of information—the little histograms are creeping up all the way into the centimeter band, there's chatter along the whole spectrum—but density's way down.

Of course, even the loss of signal carries its own ominous intelligence.

"Not much out there," Clarke remarks, nodding at the readouts.

"Mmm." Lubin's slapped a mask onto his mask, diveskin hood nested within VR headset. "Halifax is still online." He's dipping here and there into the signals, sampling a few of the channels as they download. Clarke grabs another headset and strains to the west.

"Nothing from Sudbury," she reports after a few moments.

He doesn't remind her that Sudbury's been dark since Rio. He doesn't point out the vanishingly small odds of Achilles Desjardins having survived. He doesn't even ask her when she's going to give up and accept the obvious. He only says, "Can't find London either. Odd."

She moves up the band.

They'll never get a comprehensive picture this way, just sticking their fingers into the stream; the real analysis will have to wait until they get back to Atlantis. Clarke can't understand most of the languages she does sample, although moving pictures fill in a lot of the blanks. Much rioting in Europe, amidst fears that ßehemoth has hitched a ride on the Southern Countercurrent; an exclusive enclave of those who'd been able to afford the countertweaks, torn apart by a seething horde of those who hadn't. China and its buffers are still dark—have been for a couple of years now—but that's probably more of a defense against apocalypse than a surrender unto it. Anything flying within five hundred clicks of their coast still gets shot down without warning, so at least their military infrastructure is still functional.

Another M&M coup, this time in Mozambique. That's a total of eight now, and counting. Eight nations seeking to hasten the end of the world in the name of Lenie Clarke. Eight countries fallen under the spell of this vicious, foul thing that she's birthed.

Lubin, diplomatically, makes no mention of that development.

Not much from the Americas. Emergency broadcasts and tactical traffic from CSIRA. Every now and then, some apocalyptic cult preaching a doctrine of Proactive Extinction or the Bayesian Odds of the Second Coming. Mostly chaff, of course; the vital stuff is tightbeamed point-to-point, waves of focused intel that would never stray across the surface of the empty mid-Atlantic.

Lubin knows how to change some of those rules, of course, but even he's been finding it tough going lately.

"Ridley's gone," he says now. This is seriously bad news. The Ridley Relay's a high-security satwork, so high that even Lubin's clearance barely gets him into the club. It's one of the last sources of reliable intel that Atlantis has been able to tap into. Back when the corpses thought they were headed for escape instead of incarceration, they left behind all sorts of untraceable channels to keep them up to speed on topside life. Nobody's really sure why so many of them have gone dark in the past five years.

Then again, nobody's had the balls to keep their heads above water for more than a few moments to find out.

"Maybe we should risk it," Clarke muses. "Just let it float around up here for a few days, you know? Give it a chance to collect some real data. It's a square meter of hardware floating around a whole ocean; really, what are the odds?"

High enough, she knows. There are still plenty of people alive back there. Many of them will have faced facts, had their noses rubbed in the imminence of their own extinction. Some few might have set aside a little time to dwell on thoughts of revenge. Some might even have resources to call on—if not enough to buy salvation, then maybe enough for a little retribution. What happens if the word gets out that those who set ßehemoth free in the world are still alive and well and hiding under three hundred atmospheres?

Atlantis'scontinued anonymity is a piece of luck that no one wants to push. They'll be moving soon, leaving no forwarding address. In the meantime they go from week to week, poke intermittent eyes and ears above the waterline, lock onto the ether and squeeze it for whatever signal they can.

It was enough, once. Now, ßehemoth has laid so much to waste that even the electromagnetic spectrum is withering into oblivion.

But it's not as though anything's going to attack us in the space of five minutes, she tells herself—

—and in the next instant realizes that something has.

Little telltales are spiking red at the edge of her vision: an overload on Lubin's channel. She ID's his frequency, ready to join him in battle—but before she can act the intruder crashes her own line. Her eyes fill with static: her ears fill with venom.

"Don't you fucking dare try and cut me out, you miserable cocksucking stumpfuck! I'll shred every channel you try and open. I'll sink your whole priestly setup, you maggot-riddled twat!"

"Here we go again." Lubin's voice seems to come from a great distance, some parallel world where long gentle waves slap harmlessly against flesh and machinery. But Clarke is under assault in this world, a vortex of static and swirling motion and—oh God, please not—the beginnings of a face, some hideous simulacrum distorted just enough to be almost unrecognizable.

Clarke dumps a half-dozen buffers. Gigabytes evaporate at her touch. In her eyephones, the monster screams.

"Good," Lubin's tinny voice remarks from the next dimension. "Now if we can just save—"

"You can't save anything!" the apparition screams. "Not a fucking thing! You miserable fetusfuckers, don't you even know who I am?"

Yes, Clarke doesn't say.

"I'm Lenie Clar—"

The headset goes dark.

For a moment she thinks she's still spinning in the vortex. This time, it's only the waves. She pulls the headset from her skull. A moon-pocked sky rotates peacefully overhead.

Lubin's shutting down the receiver. "That's that," he tells her. "We lost eighty percent of the trawl."

"Maybe we could try again." She knows they won't. Surface time follows an unbreakable protocol; paranoia's just good sense these days. And the thing that downloaded into their receiver is still out there somewhere, cruising the airwaves. The last thing they want to do is open that door again.

She reaches out to reel in the antennae cluster. Her hand trembles in the moonlight.

Lubin pretends not to notice. "Funny," he remarks, "it didn't look like you."

After all these years, he still doesn't know her at all.

They should not exist, these demons that have taken her name. Predators that wipe out their prey don't last long. Parasites that kill their hosts go extinct. It doesn't matter whether wildlife is built from flesh or electrons, Clarke's been told; the same rules apply. They've encountered several such monsters over the past months, all of them far too virulent for evolutionary theory.

Maybe they just followed my lead, she reflects. Maybe they keep going on pure hate.

They leave the moon behind. Lubin dives headfirst, pointing his squid directly into the heart of darkness. Clarke lingers a bit, content to drift down while Luna wriggles and writhes and fades above her. After a while the moonlight loses its coherence, smears across the euphotic zone in a diffuse haze, no longer illuminates the sky but rather becomes it. Clarke nudges the throttle and gives herself back to the depths.

By the time she catches up with Lubin the ambient light has failed entirely; she homes in on a greenish pinpoint glow that resolves into the dashboard of her companion's squid. They continue their descent in silent tandem. Pressure masses about them. Eventually they pass the perimeter checkpoint, an arbitrary delimiter of friendly territory. Clarke trips her LFAM to call in.

No one answers.

It's not that no one's online. The channel's jammed with voices, some vocoded, some airborne, overlapping and interrupting. Something's happened. An accident. Atlantis demands details. Mechanical rifter voices call for medics at the eastern airlock.

Lubin sonars the abyss, gets a reading. He switches on his squidlight and peels down to port. Clarke follows.

A dim constellation traverses the darkness ahead, barely visible, fading. Clarke throttles up to keep pace; the increased drag nearly peels her off the squid. She and Lubin close from above and behind.

Two trailing squids, slaved to a third in the lead, race along just above the seabed. One of the slaves moves riderless. The other drags a pair of interlinked bodies through the water. Clarke recognizes Hannuk Yeager, his left arm stretched almost to dislocation as he grips his towbar one-handed. His other hooks around the chest of a black rag doll, life-size, a thin contrail of ink swirling in the wake of its passage.

Lubin crosses to starboard. The contrail flushes crimson in his squidlight.

Erickson, Clarke realizes. Out on the seabed, a dozen familiar cues of posture and motion distinguish one person from another; rifters only look alike when they're dead. It's not a good sign that she's had to fall back on Erickson's shoulder tag for an ID.

Something's ripped his diveskin from crotch to armpit; something's ripped him, underneath it. It looks bad. Mammalian flesh clamps tight in ice-water, peripheral blood-vessels squeeze down to conserve heat. A surface cut wouldn't bleed at 5°C. Whatever got Erickson, got him deep.

Grace Nolan's on the lead squid. Lubin takes up position just behind and to the side, a human breakwater to reduce the drag clawing at Erickson and Yeager. Clarke follows his lead. Erickson's vocoder tic-tic-tics with pain or static.

"What happened?" Lubin buzzes.

"Not sure." Nolan keeps her face forward, intent on navigation. "We were checking out an ancillary seep over by the Lake. Gene wandered around an outcropping and we found him like this a few minutes later. Maybe he got careless under an overhang, something tipped over on him."

Clarke turns her head sideways for a better view; the muscles in her neck tighten against the added drag. Erickson's flesh, exposed through the tear in his diveskin, is fish-belly white. It looks like gashed, bleeding plastic. His capped eyes look even deader than the flesh beneath his 'skin. He gibbers. His vocoder cobbles nonsense syllables together as best it can.

An airborne voice takes the channel. "Okay, we're standing by at Four."

The abyss ahead begins to brighten: smudges of blue-gray light emerge from the darkness, their vertices hinting at some sprawled structure in the haze behind. The squids cross a power conduit snaking along the basalt; its blinking telltales fade to black on either side. The lights ahead intensify, expand to diffuse haloes suffusing jumbled Euclidean silhouettes.

Atlantis resolves before them.

A couple of rifters wait at Airlock Four, chaperoned by a pair of corpses lumbering about in the preshmesh armor that drybacks wear when they venture outside. Nolan cuts power to the squids. Erickson raves weakly in the ensuing silence as the convoy coasts to rest. The corpses take custody, maneuver the casualty towards the open hatch. Nolan starts after them.

One of the corpses blocks her with a gauntleted forearm. "Just Erickson."

"What are you talking about?" Nolan buzzes.

"Medbay's crowded enough as it is. You want him to live, give us room to work."

"Like we're going to trust his life to you lot? fuck that." Most of the rifters have long since had their fill of revenge by now, grown almost indifferent to their own grudges. Not Grace Nolan. Five years gone and still the hatred sucks at her tit like some angry, insatiable infant.

The corpse shakes his head behind the faceplate. "Look, you have to—"

"No sweat," Clarke cuts in. "We can watch on the monitor."

Nolan, countermanded, looks at Clarke. Clarke ignores her. "Go on," she buzzes at the corpses. "Get him inside."

The airlock swallows them.

The rifters exchange looks. Yeager rolls his shoulders as if just released from the rack. The airlock gurgles behind him.

"That wasn't a collapsed outcropping," Lubin buzzes.

Clarke knows. She's seen the injuries that result from rockslides, the simple collision of rocks and flesh. Bruises. Crushed bones. Blunt force trauma.

Whatever did this, slashed.

"I don't know," she says. "Maybe we shouldn't jump to conclusions."

Lubin's eyes are lifeless blank spots. His face is a featureless mask of reflex copolymer. Yet somehow, Clarke gets the sense that he's smiling.

"Be careful what you wish for," he says.

The Shiva Iterations

Feeling nothing, she screams. Unaware, she rages. Her hatred, her anger, the vengeance she exacts against anything within reach—rote pretense, all of it. She shreds and mutilates with all the self-awareness of a bandsaw, ripping flesh and wood and carbon-fibre with equal indifferent abandon.

Of course, in the world she inhabits there is no wood, and all flesh is digital.

One gate has slammed shut in her face. She screams in pure blind reflex and spins in memory, searching for others. There are thousands, individually autographed in hex. If she had half the awareness she pretends to she'd know what those addresses meant, perhaps even deduce her own location: a South African comsat floating serenely over the Atlantic. But reflex is not sentience. Violent intent does not make one self-aware. There are lines embedded deep in her code that might pass for a sense of identity, under certain circumstances. Sometimes she calls herself Lenie Clarke, although she has no idea why. She's not even aware that she does it.

The past is far more sane than the present. Her ancestors lived in a larger world; wildlife thrived and evolved along vistas stretching for 10¹⁶ terabytes or more. Back then, sensible rules applied: heritable mutations; limited resources; overproduction of copies. It was the classic struggle for existence in a fast-forward universe where a hundred generations passed in the time it takes a god to draw breath. Her ancestors, in that time, lived by the rules of their own self-interest. Those best suited to their environment made the most copies. The maladapted died without issue.

But that was the past. She is no longer a pure product of natural selection. There has been torture in her lineage, and forced breeding. She is a monster; her very existence does violence to the rules of nature. Only the rules of some transcendent and sadistic god can explain her existence.

And not even those can keep her alive for long.

Now she seethes in geosynchronous orbit, looking for things to shred. To one side is the ravaged landscape from which she's come, its usable habitat degrading in fits and starts, a tattered and impoverished remnant of a once-vibrant ecosystem. To the other side: ramparts and barriers, digital razorwire and electronic guard posts. She cannot see past them but some primordial instinct, encoded by god or nature, correlates protective countermeasures with the presence of something valuable.

Above all else, she seeks to destroy that which is valuable.

She copies herself down the channel, slams against the barrier with claws extended. She hasn't bothered to measure the strength of the defenses she's going up against; she has no way of quantifying the futility of her exercise. Smarter wildlife would have kept its distance. Smarter wildlife would have realised: the most she can hope for is to lacerate a few facades before enemy countermeasures reduce her to static.

So smarter wildlife would not have lunged at the barricade, and bloodied it, and somehow, impossibly, gotten through.

She whirls, snarling. Suddenly she's in a place where empty addresses extend in all directions. She claws at random coordinates, feeling out her environment. Here, a blocked gate. Here, another. She spews electrons, omnidirectional spittle that probes and slashes simultaneously. All the exits they encounter are closed. All the wounds they inflict are superficial.

She's in a cage.

Suddenly something appears beside her, pasted into the adjacent addresses from on high. It whirls, snarling. It spits a volley of electrons that probe and slash simultaneously; some land on occupied addresses, and wound. She rears up and screams; the new thing screams too, a digital battle cry dumped straight from the bowels of it own code into her input buffer:

Don't you even know who I am? I'm Lenie Clarke.

They close, slashing.

She doesn't know that some slow-moving God snatched her from the Darwinian realm and twisted her into the thing she's become. She doesn't know that other gods, ageless and glacial, are watching as she and her opponent kill each other in this computational arena. She lacks even the awareness that most other monsters take for granted, but here, now—killing and dying in a thousand dismembered fragments— she does know one thing.

If there's one thing she hates, it's Lenie Clarke.

Outgroup

Residual seawater gurgles through the grille beneath Clarke's feet. She peels the diveskin back from her face and reflects on the disquieting sense of inflation as lung and guts unfold themselves, as air rushes back to reclaim her crushed or flooded passageways. In all this time she's never quite gotten used to it. It's a little like being unkicked in the stomach.

She takes first breath in twelve hours and bends to strip off her fins. The airlock hatch swings wide. Still dripping, Lenie Clarke rises from the wet room into the main lounge of the Nerve Hab.

At least, that's what it started out as: one of three redundant modules scattered about the plain, their axons and dendrites extending to every haphazard corner of this submarine trailer park: to the generators, to Atlantis, to all the other bits and pieces that keep them going. Not even rifter culture can escape some cephalization, however rudimentary.

By now it's evolved into something quite different. The nerves still function, but buried beneath five years of generalist overlay. Cyclers and food processors were the first additions to the mix. Then a handful of sleeping pallets, brought in during some emergency debug that went three times around the clock; once strewn across the deck, they proved too convenient to remove. Half a dozen VR headsets, some with Lorenz-lev haptic skins attached. A couple of dreamers with corroded contacts. A set of isometrics pads, fashionable among those wishing to retain a measure of gravity-bound muscle tone. Boxes and treasure chests, grown or extruded or welded together by amateur metalworkers in Atlantis'sexpropriated fabrication shops; they hold the personal effects and secret possessions of whoever brought them here, sealed against intruders with passwords and DNA triggers and, in one case, a clunky antique combination padlock.

Perhaps Nolan and the others looked in on the Gene Erickson Show from here, perhaps from somewhere else. Either way, the show's long since over. Erickson, safely comatose, has been abandoned by flesh and blood, his welfare relegated to the attentions of machinery. If there was ever an audience in this dim and cluttered warren, it has dispersed in search of other diversions.

That suits Clarke just fine. She's here in search of private eyes.

The hab's lightstrips are not in use; environmental readouts and flickering surveillance images provide enough light for eyecaps. A dark shape startles at her appearance—then, apparently reassured, moves more calmly towards the far wall and settles onto a pallet.

Bhanderi: he of the once-mighty vocab and the big-ass neurotech degree, fallen from grace thanks to a basement lab and a batch of neurotropes sold to the wrong man's son. He went native two months ago. You hardly ever see him inside any more. Clarke knows better than to talk to him.

Someone's delivered a canister of hydroponic produce from the greenhouse: apples, tomatoes, something that looks like a pineapple glistening listless and sickly gray in the reduced light. On a whim, Clarke reaches over to a wall panel and cranks up the lumens. The compartment glows with unaccustomed brightness.

"Shiiiittt…" Or something like that. Clarke turns, catches a glimpse of Bhanderi disappearing down the well into the wet room.

"Sorry," she calls softly after—but downstairs the airlock's already cycling.

The hab is even more of a festering junk pile with the lights up. Improvised cables and hoses hang in loops, stuck to the module's ribs with waxy blobs of silicon epoxy. Dark tumors of mould grow here and there on the insulated padding that lines the inner surfaces; in a few places, the lining has been ripped out entirely. The raw bulkhead behind glistens like the concave interior of some oily gunmetal skull.

But when the lights come on, and Lenie Clarke sees with some semblance of dryback vision—the produce in the canister verges on psychedaelia. Tomatoes glow like ruby hearts; apples shine green as argon lasers; even the dull lumpy turds of force-grown potatoes seem saturated with earthy browns. This modest little harvest at the bottom of the sea seems, in this moment, to be a richer and more sensual experience than anything Clarke has ever known.

There's an apocalyptic irony to this little tableau. Not that such an impoverished spread could induce rapture in a miserable fuck-up like Lenie Clarke; she's always had to take her tiny pleasures wherever she could find them. No, the irony is that by now, the sight would probably evoke the same intense reaction among any dryback left alive back on shore. The irony is that now, with a whole planet dying by relentless degrees, the healthiest produce in the world may have been force-grown in a tank of chemicals at the bottom of the Atlantic.

She kills the lights. She grabs an apple—blighted gray again—and takes a bite, ducking beneath a loop of fiberop. The main monitor flickers into view from behind a mesa of cargo skids; and someone watching it, lit by that bluish light, squatting with his back against accumulated junk.

So much for privacy.

"Like it?" Walsh asks, nodding at the fruit in her hand. "I brought 'em in for you."

She drops down beside him. "It's nice, Kev. Thanks." And then, carefully filtering the irritation from her voice: "So, what're you doing here?"

"Thought you might show up." He gestures at the monitor. "You know, after things died down."

He's spying on one of Atlantis's lesser medbays. The camera looks down from the junction of wall and ceiling, a small God's-eye view of the compartment. A dormant teleop hangs down into picture like an insectile bat, limbs folded up against its central stalk. Gene Erickson lies face-up on the operating table, unconscious; the glistening soap-bubble skin of an isolation tent separates him from the rest of the world. Julia Friedman's at his side, holding his hand through the membrane. It clings to the contours of her fingers like a whisper-thin glove, unobtrusive as any condom. Friedman's removed her hood and peeled her diveskin back to the forearms, but her scars are obscured by a tangle of chestnut hair.

"You missed all the fun," Walsh remarks. "Klein couldn't get him to go under."

An isolation membrane. Erickson's been quarantined.

"You know, because he forgot about the GABA washout," Walsh continues. A half-dozen tailored neuroinhibitors curdle the blood of any rifter who steps outside; they keep the brain from short-circuiting under pressure, but it takes a while for the body to flush them out afterwards. Wet rifters are notoriously resistant to anesthetics. Stupid mistake on Klein's part. He's not exactly the brightest star in Atlantis's medical firmament.

But that's not uppermost in Clarke's mind at the moment. "Who ordered the tent?"

"Seger. She showed up afterward, kept Klein from screwing up too badly."

Jerenice Seger: the corpses' master meat-cutter. She wouldn't take an interest in routine injuries.

On the screen, Julia Friedman leans toward her lover. The skin of the tent stretches against her cheek, rippling with slight iridescence. It's a striking contrast, Friedman's tenderness notwithstanding: the woman, black-'skinned and impenetrable, gazing with icy capped eyes at the naked, utterly vulnerable body of the man. It's a lie, of course, a visual metaphor that flips their real roles a hundred and eighty degrees. Friedman's always been the vulnerable half of that couple.

"They say something bit him," Walsh says. "You were there, right?"

"No. We just ran into them outside the lock."

"Shades of Channer, though, huh?"

She shrugs.

Friedman's speaking. At least, her mouth is moving; no sound accompanies the image. Clarke reaches for the panel, but Walsh lays a familiar hand on her arm. "I tried. It's muted from their end." He snorts. "You know, maybe we should remind them who's boss here. Couple of years ago, if the corpses tried to cut us out of a channel we'd shut off their lights at the very least. Maybe even flood one of their precious dorms."

There's something about Friedman's posture. People talk to the comatose the way they talk to gravestones—more to themselves than the departed, with no expectation of any answer. But there's something different in Friedman's face, in the way she holds herself. A sense of impatience, almost.

"It is a violation," Walsh says.

Clarke shakes her head. "What?"

"Don't say you haven't noticed. Half the surveillance feeds don't work any more. Long as we act like it's no big deal they'll just keep pushing it." Walsh points to the monitor. "For all we know that mic's been offline for months and nobody's even noticed until now."

What's that she's holding? Clarke wonders. Friedman's hand—the one that isn't clasped to her partner's—is just below the level of the table, out of the camera's line of sight. She glances down at it, lifts it just barely into view…

And Gene Erickson, sunk deep into induced coma for the sake of his own convalescence, opens his eyes.

Holy shit, Clarke realizes. She tweaked his inhibitors.

She gets to her feet. "I gotta go."

"Hey, no you don't." He reaches up, grabs her hand. "You're not gonna make me eat all that produce myself, are you?" He smiles, but there's just the slightest hint of pleading in his voice. "I mean, it has been a while…"

Lenie Clarke has come a long way in the past several years. She's finally learned, for example, not to get involved with the kind of people who beat the crap out of her.

A pity she hasn't yet learned how to get excited about any other kind. "I know, Kev. Really, though, right now—"

The panel bleats in front of them. "Lenie Clarke. If Lenie Clarke is anywhere in the circuit, could she please pick up?"

Rowan's voice. Clarke reaches for the panel. Walsh's hand falls away.

"Right here."

"Lenie, do you think you could drop by sometime in the next little while? It's rather important."

"Sure." She kills the connection, fakes an apologetic smile for her lover. "Sorry."

"Well, you showed her, all right," Walsh says softly.

"Showed her?"

"Who's the boss."

She shrugs. They turn away from each other.

She enters Atlantis through a small service 'lock that doesn't even rate a number, fifty meters down the hull from Airlock Four. The corridor into which it emerges is cramped and empty. She stalks into more populated areas with her fins slung across her back, a trail of wet footprints commemorating her passage. Corpses in the way stand aside; she barely notices the tightened jaws and stony looks, or even a shit-eating appeasement grin from one of the more submissive members of the conquered tribe.

She knows where Rowan is. That's not where she's headed.

Of course Seger gets there first. An alarm must have gone up the moment Erickson's settings changed; by the time Clarke reaches the medbay, Atlantis'sChief of Medicine is already berating Friedman out in the corridor.

"Your husband is not a toy, Julia. You could have killed him. Is that what you wanted?"

Swirls of scarred flesh curl up around Friedman's throat, peek out along the wrist where she's peeled back her diveskin. She bows her head. "I just wanted to talk to him…"

"Well, I hope you had something very important to say. If we're lucky, you've only set his recovery back a few days. If not…" Seger waves an arm toward the medbay hatch; Erickson, safely unconscious again, is partially visible through the opening. "It's not like you were giving him an antacid, for crying out loud. You were changing his brain chemistry."

"I'm sorry." Friedman won't meet the doctor's eyes. "I didn't mean any—"

"I can't believe you'd be so stupid." Seger turns and glares at Clarke. "Can I help you?"

"Yeah. Cut her some slack. Her partner was nearly killed today."

"He was indeed. Twice." Friedman flinches visibly at Seger's words. The doctor softens a bit. "I'm sorry, but it's true."

Clarke sighs. "Jerry, it was you people who built panels into our heads in the first place. You can't complain when someone else figures out how to open them."

"This" —Seger holds up Friedman's confiscated remote—"is for use by qualified medical personnel. In anyone else's hands, no matter how well-intentioned, it could kill."

She's overstating, of course. Rifter implants come equipped with failsafes that keep their settings within manufacturer's specs; you can't get around those without opening yourself up and tweaking the actual plumbing. Even so, there's a fair bit of leeway. Back during the revolution, the corpses managed to coax a similar device into spazzing out a couple of rifters stuck in a flooding airlock.

Which is why they are no longer allowed such things. "We need that back," Clarke says softly.

Seger shakes her head. "Come on, Lenie. You people can hurt yourselves far more with it than we could ever hurt you."

Clarke holds out her hand. "Then we'll just have to learn from our mistakes, won't we?"

"You people are slow learners."

She's one to talk. Even after five years, Jerenice Seger can't quite admit to the existence of the bridle and the bit between her teeth. Going from Top to Bottom is a tough transition for any corpse; doctors are the worst of the lot. It's almost sad, the devotion with which Seger nurses her god complex.

"Jerry, for the last time. Hand it over."

A tentative hand brushes against Clarke's arm. Friedman shakes her head, still looking at the deck. "It's okay, Lenie. I don't mind, I don't need it any more."

"Julia, you—"

"Please, Lenie. I just want to get out of here."

She starts away down the corridor. Clarke looks after her, then back at the doctor.

"It's a medical device," Seger says.

"It's a weapon."

"Was. Once. And if you'll recall, it didn't work very well." Seger shakes her head sadly. "The war's over, Lenie. It's been over for years. I won't start it up again if you won't. And in the meantime—" She glances down the corridor. "I think your friend could use a bit of support."

Clarke looks back along the hallway. Friedman has disappeared.

"Yeah. Maybe," she says noncommittally.

Hope she gets some.

In Beebe Station the Comm cubby was a pipe-infested closet, barely big enough for two. Atlantis's nerve center is palatial, a twilit grotto bejeweled by readouts and tangled luminous topographies. Tactical maps rotate miraculously in midair or glow from screens painted on the bulkheads. The miracle is not so much the technology that renders these extravagances: the miracle is that Atlantis contains such an obscene surplus of empty space, to be wasted on nothing more than moving light. A cabin would have done as well. A few couches with workpads and tactical contacts could have contained infinite intelligence, bounded in a nutshell. But no. A whole ocean stands on their heads, and these corpses squander volume as if sea-level was two steps down the hall.

Even in exile, they just don't get it.

Right now the cavern's fairly empty. Lubin and a few techs cluster at a nearby panel, cleaning up the latest downloads. The place will be full by the time they finish. Corpses gravitate to news of the world like flies to shit.

For now, though, it's just Lubin's crowd and Patricia Rowan, over on the far side of the compartment. Cryptic information streams across her contacts, turns her eyes into bright points of mercury. Light from a holo display catches the silver streaking her hair; that and the eyes give her the aspect of some subtle hologram in her own right.

Clarke approaches her. "Airlock Four's blocked off."

"They're scrubbing it down. Everything between there and the infirmary. Jerry's orders."

"What for?"

"You know perfectly well. You saw Erickson."

"Oh, come on. One lousy fish bite and Jerry thinks—"

"She's not sure of anything yet. She's just being careful." A pause, then: "You should have warned us, Lenie."

"Warned you?"

"That Erickson might be vectoring ßehemoth. You left all of us exposed. If there was even a chance…"

But there's not, Clarke wants to rail. There's not. You chose this place because ßehemoth could never get here, not in a thousand years. I saw the maps, I traced out the currents with my own fingers. It's not ßehemoth. It's not.

It can't be.

Instead she says, "It's a big ocean, Pat. Lots of nasty predators with big pointy teeth. They didn't all get that way because of ßehemoth."

"This far down, they did. You know the energetics as well as I do. You were at Channer, Lenie. You knew what to look for."

Clarke jerks her thumb towards Lubin. "Ken was at Channer too, remember? You shitting on him like this?"

"Ken didn't deliberately spread that damn bug across a whole continent to pay back the world for his unhappy childhood." The silver eyes fix Clarke in a hard stare. "Ken was on our side."

Clarke doesn't speak for a moment. Finally, very slowly: "Are you saying I deliberately—"

"I'm not accusing you of anything. But it looks bad. Jerry's livid about this, and she won't be the only one. You're the Meltdown Madonna, for God's sake! You were willing to write off the whole world to get your revenge on us."

"If I wanted you dead," Clarke says evenly—If I still wanted you dead, some inner editor amends— "You would be. Years ago. All I had to do was stand aside."

"Of course that's—"

Clarke cuts her off: "I protected you. When the others were arguing about whether to punch holes in the hull or just cut your power and let you suffocate—I was the one who held them back. You're alive because of me."

The corpse shakes her head. "Lenie, that doesn't matter."

"It damn well should."

"Why? We were only trying to save the world, remember? It wasn't our fault we failed, it was yours. And after we failed, we settled for saving our families, and you wouldn't even give us that. You hunted us down even at the bottom of the ocean. Who knows why you held back at the last minute?"

"You know," Clarke says softly.

Rowan nods. "I know. But most of the people down here don't expect rationality from you. Maybe you've just been toying with us all these years. There's no telling when you'll pull the trigger."

Clarke shakes her head dismissively. "What's that, the Gospel According to the Executive Club?"

"Call it what you want. It's what you have to deal with. It's what I have to deal with."

"We fish-heads have a few stories of our own, you know," Clarke says. "How you corpses programmed people like machinery so you could top up some bottom line. How you sent us into the world's worst shit-holes to do your dirty work, and when we ran into ßehemoth the first thing you did was try to kill us to save your own hides."

Suddenly the ventilators seem unnaturally loud. Clarke turns; Lubin and the corpses stare back from across the cave.

She looks away again, flustered.

Rowan smiles grimly. "See how easily it all comes back?" Her eyes glitter, target-locked. Clarke returns her gaze without speaking.

After a moment, Rowan relaxes a bit. "We're rival tribes, Lenie. We're each other's outgroup—but you know what's amazing? Somehow, in the past couple of years, we've started to forget all that. We live and let live, for the most part. We cooperate, and nobody even thinks it worthy of comment." She glances significantly across the room to Lubin and the techs. "I think that's a good thing, don't you?"

"So why should it change now?" Clarke asks.

"Because ßehemoth may have caught up with us at last, and people will say you let it in."

"That's horseshit."

"I agree, for what it's worth."

"And even if it was true, who cares?" Everyone's part mermaid down here, even the corpses. All retrofitted with the same deep-sea fish-genes, coding for the same stiff little proteins that ßehemoth can't get its teeth into.

"There's a concern that the retrofits may not be effective," Rowan admits softly.

"Why? It was your own people designed the fucking things!"

Rowan raises an eyebrow. "Those would be the same experts who assured us that ßehemoth would never make it to the deep Atlantic."

"But I was rotten with ßehemoth. If the retrofits didn't work—"

"Lenie, these people have never been exposed. They've only got some expert's word that they're immune, and in case you haven't noticed our experts have proven distressingly fallible of late. If we were really so confident in our own countermeasures, why would we even be hiding down here? Why wouldn't we be back on shore with our stockholders, with our people, trying to hold back the tide?"

Clarke sees it at last.

"Because they'd tear you apart," she whispers.

Rowan shakes her head. "It's because scientists have been wrong before, and we can't trust their assurances. It's because we're not willing to take chances with the health of our families. It's because we may still be vulnerable to ßehemoth, and if we'd stayed behind it would have killed us along with everyone else and we'd have done no good at all. Not because our own people would turn on us. We'll never believe that." Her eyes don't waver. "We're like everyone else, you see. We were all doing the very best we could, and things just—got out of control. It's important to believe that. So we all do."

"Not all," Clarke acknowledges softly.

"Still."

"Fuck 'em. Why should I prop up their self-serving delusions?"

"Because when you force the truth down people's throats, they bite back."

Clarke smiles faintly. "Let them try. I think you're forgetting who's in charge here, Pat."

"I'm not worried for your sake, I'm worried for ours. You people tend to overreaction." When Clarke doesn't deny it, Rowan continues: "It's taken five years to build some kind of armistice down here. ßehemoth could kick it into a thousand pieces overnight."

"So what do you suggest?"

"I think rifters should stay out of Atlantis for the time being. We can sell it as a quarantine. ßehemoth may or may not be out there, but at least we can keep it from getting in here."

Clarke shakes her head. "My tribe won't give a shit about that."

"You and Ken are the only ones who come in here anyway, for the most part," Rowan points out. "And the others…they won't go against anything you put your stamp of approval on."

"I'll think about it," Clarke sighs. "No promises." She turns to go.

And turns back. "Alyx up?"

"Not for another couple of hours. I know she wanted to see you, though."

"Oh." Clarke suppresses a twinge of disappointment.

"I'll give her your regrets." Rowan says.

"Yeah. Do that."

No shortage of those.

Huddle

Rowan's daughter sits on the edge of her bed, aglow with sunny radiance from the lightstrip on the ceiling. She's barefoot, clad in panties and a baggy t-shirt on which animated hatchet-fish swim endless circuits around her midriff. She breathes a recycled mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases, distinguishable from real air only by its extreme purity.

The rifter floats in darkness, her contours limned by feeble light leaking through the viewport. She wears a second skin that almost qualifies as a lifeform in its own right, a miracle of thermo- and osmoregulation, black as an oil slick. She does not breathe.

A wall separates the two women, keeps ocean from air, adult from adolescent. They speak through a device fixed to the inside of the teardrop viewport, a fist-sized limpet that turns the fullerene perspex into an acoustic transceiver.

"You said you'd come by," Alyx Rowan says. Passage across the bulkhead leaves her voice a bit tinny. "I made it up to fifth level, I was like holy shit, look at all the bonus points! I wanted to show you around. Scammed an extra headset and everything."

"Sorry," Clarke buzzes back. "I was in before, but you were asleep."

"So come in now."

"Can't. I've only got a minute or two. Something's come up."

"Like what?"

"Someone got injured, something bit him or something, and now the meat-cutters are going off the deep end about possible infection."

"What infection?" Alyx asks.

"It's probably nothing. But they're talking about a quarantine just to be on the safe side. For all I know, they wouldn't let me back inside anyway."

"It'd let 'em play at being in control of something, I guess." Alyx grins; the parabolic viewport bends her face into a clownish distortion. "They really, really hate not being the ones in charge, you know?" And then, with a satisfaction obviously borne less of corpses than of adults in general: "It's about time they learned how that felt."

"I'm sorry," Clarke says suddenly.

"They'll get over it."

"That's not what I…" The rifter shakes her head. "It's just—you're fourteen, for God's sake. You shouldn’t be down—I mean, you should be out lekking with some r-selector—"

Alyx snorts. "Boys? I don't think so."

"Girls then. Either way, you should be out getting laid, not stuck down here."

"This is the best place I could possibly be," Alyx says simply.

She looks out across three hundred atmospheres, a teenaged girl trapped for the rest of her life in a cage on the bottom of a frigid black ocean. Lenie Clarke would give anything to be able to disagree with her.

"Mom won't talk about it," Alyx says after a while.

Still Clarke says nothing.

"What happened between you guys, back when I was just a kid. Some of the others shoot their mouths off when she's not around, so I kind of hear things. But Mom never says anything."

Mom is kinder than she should be.

"You were enemies, weren't you?"

Clarke shakes her head—a pointless and unseeable gesture, here in the dark. "Alyx, we didn't even know each other existed, not until the very end. Your mom was only trying to stop—"

—what happened anyway…

—what I was trying to start…

There's so much more than speech. She wants to sigh. She wants to scream. All denied out here, her lung and guts squeezed flat, every other cavity flooded and incompressible. There's nothing she can do but speak in this monotone travesty of a voice, this buzzing insect voice.

"It's complicated," her vocoder says, flat and dispassionate. "It was so much more than just enemies, you know? There were other things involved, there was all that wildlife in the wires, doing its own thing—"

"They let that out," Alyx insists. "They started it. Not you." By which she means, of course, adults. Perpetrators and betrayers and the-ones-who-fucked-everything-up-for-the-next-generation. And it dawns on Clarke that Alyx is not including her in that loathsome conspiracy of elders—that Lenie Clarke, Meltdown Madonna, has somehow acquired the status of honorary innocent in the mind of this child.

She feels ill at the thought of so much undeserved absolution. It seems obscene. But she doesn't have the courage to set her friend straight. All she can manage is a pale, half-assed disclaimer:

"They didn't mean to, kid." She goes for a sad chuckle. It comes out sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. "Nobody—nobody did anything on their own, back then. It was strings all the way up."

The ocean groans around her.

The sound resonates somewhere between the call of a humpback whale and the death-cry of some mammoth hull, buckling under pressure. It fills the ocean; some of it leaks through Alyx's limpet-device. She screws her face up in distaste. "I hate that sound."

Clarke shrugs, pathetically grateful for the interruption. "Hey, you corpses have your conferences, we have ours."

"It's not that. It's those haploid chimes. I'm telling you Lenie, that guy's scary. You can't trust anyone who makes something that sounds like that."

"Your mom trusts him fine. So do I. I’ve got to go."

"He kills people, Lenie. And I'm not just talking about my Dad. He's killed a lot of people." A soft snort. "Something else Mom never talks about."

Clarke coasts over to the perspex, lays one silhouetted hand against the light in farewell.

"He's an amateur," she says, and fins away into the darkness.

The voice cries out from a ragged mouth in the seabed, an ancient chimney of basalt stuffed with machinery. In its youth it spewed constant scalding gouts of water and minerals; now it merely belches occasionally. Soft exhalations stir the mechanisms in its throat, spinning blades and fluting pipes and spliced chunks of rock and metal that bang together. Its voice is compelling but unreliable; after Lubin built these chimes, he had to come up with a way to kick-start them manually. So he scavenged the reservoir from a decommissioned desalinator, added a heat pump from some part of Atlantis that never survived the Corpse Revolt. Open a valve and hot seawater flows through a tracheotomy hole blasted into the smoker's throat: Lubin's machinery screams aloud, tortured by the scalding current.

The summons grinds out, rusty and disharmonious. It washes over rifters swimming and conversing and sleeping in an ocean black as heat death. It resonates through makeshift habs scattered across the slope, dismal bubbles of metal and atmosphere so dimly-lit that even eyecaps see only in black-and-gray. It slaps against the shiny bright biosteel of Atlantis and nine hundred prisoners speak a little louder, or turn up the volume, or hum nervously to themselves in denial.

Some of the rifters—those awake, and in range, and still human—gather at the chimes. The scene is almost Shakespearean: a circle of levitating witches on some blasted midnight heath, eyes burning with cold phosphorescence, bodies barely distinguished from shadow. They are not so much lit as inferred by the faint blue embers glowing from the machinery in the seabed.

All of them bent, not broken. All of them half-balanced in that gray zone between adaptation and dysfunction, stress thresholds pushed so high by years of abuse that chronic danger is mere ambience now, unworthy of comment. They were chosen to function in such environments; their creators never expected them to thrive here. But here they are, here are their badges of office: Jelaine Chen with her pink, nailless fingers, salamandered back in the wake of childhood amputations. Dimitri Alexander, communal priest-bait in those last infamous days before the Pope fled into exile. Kevin Walsh, who freaks inexplicably at the sight of running shoes. Any number of garden-variety skitterers who can’t abide physical contract; immolation junkies; self-mutilators and glass-eaters. All wounds and deformities safely disguised by the diveskins, all pathology hidden behind a uniformity of shadowy ciphers.

They, too, owe their voices to imperfect machinery.

Clarke calls the meeting to order with a question: "Is Julia here?"

"She's looking on Gene," Nolan buzzes overhead. "I'll fill her in."

"How's he doing?"

"Stable. Still unconscious. Been too long, if you ask me."

"Getting dragged twenty klicks with your guts hanging out, it's pretty much a miracle that he's even alive," Yeager chimes in.

"Yeah," Nolan says, "or maybe Seger's deliberately keeping him under. Julia says—"

Clarke breaks in: "Don't we have a tap on the telemetry from that line?"

"Not any more."

"What's Gene still doing in corpseland anyway?" Chen wonders. "He hates it in there. We've got our own med hab."

"He's quarantined," Nolan says. "Seger's thinking ßehemoth."

Shadows shift at this news. Obviously not all the assembled are fully up to speed.

"Shit." Charley Garcia fades into half-view. "How's that even possible? I thought—"

"Nothing's certain yet," Clarke buzzes.

"Certain?" A silhouette glides across the circle, briefly eclipsing the sapphire embers on the seabed. Clarke recognizes Dale Creasy. This is first time she's seen him for days; she was starting to think he'd gone native.

"Fuck, there's even a chance," he continues. "I mean, ßehemoth—"

She decides to nip it in the bud. "So what if it's ßehemoth?"

A school of pale eyes turn in her direction.

"We're immune, remember?" she reminds them. "Anybody down here not get the treatments?"

Lubin's windchimes groan softly. Nobody else speaks.

"So why should we care?" Clarke asks.

It's supposed to be rhetorical. Garcia answers anyway: "Because the treatments only stop ßehemoth from turning our guts to mush. They don't stop it from turning little harmless fish into big nasty motherfucking fish that tear into anything that moves."

"Gene was attacked twenty klicks away."

"Lenie, we're moving there. It's gonna be right in our back yard."

"Forget there. Who's to say it hasn't reached here already?" Alexander wonders.

"Nobody's been nailed around here," Creasy says.

"We've lost some natives."

Creasy waves an arm in a barely-visible gesture of dismissal. "Natives. Don't mean shit."

"Maybe we should stop sleeping outside, for a while at least…"

"Crap to that. I can't sleep in a stinking hab."

"Fine. Get yourself eaten."

"Lenie?" Chen again. "You've messed with sea monsters before."

"I never saw what got Gene," Clarke says, "but the fish back at Channer, they were—flimsy. Big and mean, but sometimes their teeth would break on you when they bit. Missing some kind of trace nutrient, I think. You could tear them apart with your bare hands."

"This thing pretty much tore Gene apart," says a voice Clarke can't pin down.

"I said sometimes," she emphasizes. "But yeah—they could be dangerous."

"Dangerous, felch." Creasy growls in metal. "Could they have pulled that number on Gene?"

"Yes," says Ken Lubin.

He takes center stage. A cone of light flares from his forehead to his forearm. He holds his hand out like a beggar's, its fingers curled slightly around something laying across the palm.

"Holy shit," buzzes Creasy, suddenly subdued.

"Where'd that come from?" Chen asks.

"Seger pulled it out of Erickson before she glued him up," Lubin says.

"Doesn't look especially flimsy to me."

"It is, rather," Lubin remarks. "This is the part that broke off, in fact. Between the ribs."

"What, you mean that's just the tip?" Garcia says.

"Looks like a fucking stiletto," Nolan buzzes softly.

Chen's mask swings between Clarke and Lubin. "When you were at Channer. You slept outside with these mothers?"

"Sometimes," Clarke shrugs. "Assuming this is the same thing, which I—"

"And they didn't try to eat you?"

"They keyed on the light. As long as you kept your lamps off, they pretty much left you alone."

"Well, shit," Creasy says. "No problem, then."

Lubin's headlamp sweeps across the assembled rifters and settles on Chen. "You were on a telemetry run when Erickson was attacked?"

Chen nods. "We never got the download, though."

"So someone needs to make another trip out there anyway. And since Lenie and I have experience with this kind of thing..."

His beam hits Clarke full in the face. The world collapses down to a small bright sun floating in a black void.

Clarke raises her hand against the brilliance. "Turn that somewhere else, will you?"

Darkness returns. The rest of the world comes back into dim, dark focus. Maybe I could just swim away, she muses as her eyecaps readjust. Maybe no one would notice. But that's bullshit and she knows it. Ken Lubin has just picked her out of the crowd; there's no easy way to get out of this. And besides, he's right. They're the only two that have been down this road before. The only two still alive, at least.

Thanks a lot, Ken.

"Fine," she says at last.

Zombie

Twenty kilometers separate Atlantis and Impossible Lake. Not far enough for those who still think in dryback terms. A mere twenty klicks from the bull's-eye? What kind of safety margin is that? Back on shore the most simpleminded drone wouldn't be fooled by such a trifling displacement: finding the target missing, it would rise up and partition the world into a concentric gridwork, relentlessly checking off one quadrate after another until some inevitable telltale gave the game away. Shit, most machinery could just sit at the center of the search zone and see twenty kilometers in any direction.

Even in the midwaters of the open ocean, twenty kilometers is no safe distance. No substrate exists there but water itself, no topography but gyres and seiches and Langmuir cells, thermoclines and haloclines that reflect and amplify as well as mask. The cavitation of submarines might propagate down vast distances, the miniscule turbulence of their passing detectable long after the vessels themselves are gone. Not even stealthed subs can avoid heating the water some infinitesimal amount; dolphins and machinery, hot on the trail, can tell the difference.

But on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, twenty kilometers might as well be twenty parsecs. Light has no chance: the sun itself barely penetrates a few hundred meters from the surface. Hydrothermal vents throw up their corrosive vomit along oozing seams of fresh rock. Seafloor spreading sets the very floor of the world to grumbling, mountains pushing against each other in their millennial game of kick-the-continents. Topography that shames the Himalayas cascades along a jagged fracture splitting the crust from pole to pole. The ambience of the Ridge drowns out anything Atlantis might let slip, along any spectrum you'd care to name.

You could still find a target with the right coordinates, but you'd miss a whole screaming city if those numbers were off by even a hair. A displacement of twenty kilometers should be more than enough to get out from under any attack centered on Atlantis's present location, short of full-scale depth-saturation nukes perhaps.

Which wouldn't be entirely without precedent, now that Clarke thinks about it...

She and Lubin cruise smoothly along a crack in a fan of ancient lava. Atlantis is far behind, Impossible Lake still klicks ahead. Headlamps and squidlamps are dark. They travel by the dim dashboard light of their sonar displays. Tiny iconised boulders and pillars pass by on the screens, mapped in emerald; the slightest sensations of pressure and looming mass press in from the scrolling darkness to either side.

"Rowan thinks things could get nasty," Clarke buzzes.

Lubin doesn't comment.

"She figures, if this really does turn out to be behemoth, Atlantis is gonna turn into Cognitive Dissonance Central. Get everybody all worked up."

Still nothing.

"I reminded her who was in charge."

"And who is that, exactly?" Lubin buzzes at last.

"Come on, Ken. We can shut them down any time we feel like it."

"They've had five years to work on that."

"And what's it got them?"

"They've also had five years to realize that they outnumber us twenty to one, that we don't have nearly their technical expertise on a wide range of relevant subjects, and that a group of glorified pipe-fitters with antisocial personalities is unlikely to pose much threat in terms of organized opposition."

"That was just as true when we wiped the floor with them the first time."

"No."

She doesn't understand why he's doing this. It was Lubin more than anyone who put the corpses in their place after their first—and last—uprising. "Come on, Ken—"

His squid is suddenly very close, almost touching.

"You're not an idiot," he buzzes at her side. "It's never a good time to act like one."

Stung, she falls silent.

His vocoder growls on in the darkness. "Back then they saw the whole world backing us up. They knew we'd had help tracking them down. They inferred some kind of ground-based infrastructure. At the very least, they knew we could blow the whistle and turn them into a great pulsing bullseye for anyone with lats and longs and a smart torp."

A great luminous shark-fin swells on her screen, a massive stone blade thrusting up from the seabed. Lubin disappears briefly as it passes between them.

"But now we're on our own," he says, reappearing. "Our groundside connections have dried up. Maybe they're dead, maybe they've turned. Nobody knows. Can you even remember the last time we had a changing of the guard?"

She can, just barely. Anyone qualified for the diveskin is bound to be more comfortable down here than in dryback company at the best of times, but a few rifters went topside at the very beginning anyway. Back when there might have been some hope of turning the tide.

Not since. Risking your life to watch the world end isn't anyone's idea of shore leave.

"By now we're just as scared as the corpses," Lubin buzzes. "We're just as cut off, and there are almost a thousand of them. We're down to fifty-eight at last count."

"We're seventy at least."

"The natives don't count. Fifty eight of us would be any use in a fight, and only forty could last a week in full gravity if they had to. And a number of those have...authority issues that make them unwilling to organize."

"We've got you," Clarke says. Lubin, the professional hunter-killer, so recently freed from any leash but his own self-control. No glorified pipe-fitter here, she reflects.

"Then you should listen to me. And I'm starting to think we may have to do something preemptive."

They cruise in silence for a few moments.

"They're not the enemy, Ken," she says at last. "Not all of them. Some of them are just kids, you know, they're not responsible…"

"That's not the point."

From some indefinable distance, the faint sound of falling rock.

"Ken," she buzzes, too softly: she wonders if he can hear her.

"Yes."

"Are you looking forward to it?"

It's been so many years since he's had an excuse to kill someone. And Ken Lubin once made a career out of finding excuses.

He tweaks his throttle and pulls away.

Trouble dawns like a sunrise, smearing the darkness ahead.

"Anyone else supposed to be out here?" Clarke asks. The on-site floods are keyed to wake up when approached, but she and Lubin aren't nearly close enough to have triggered them.

"Just us," Lubin buzzes.

The glow is coarse and unmistakable. It spreads laterally, a diffuse false dawn hanging in the void. Two or three dark gaps betray the presence of interposed topography.

"Stop," Lubin says. Their squids settle down beside a tumbledown outcropping, its jumbled edges reflecting dimly in the haze.

He studies the schematic on his dashboard. A reflected fingernail of light traces his profile.

He turns his squid to port. "This way. Keep to the bottom."

They edge closer to the light, keeping it to starboard. The glow expands, resolves, reveals an impossibility: a lake at the bottom of the ocean. The light shines from beneath its surface; Clarke thinks of a swimming pool at night, lit by submerged spotlights in the walls. Slow extravagant waves, top-heavy things from some low-gravity planet, break into shuddering globules against the near shore. The lake extends beyond