“But wh—”
“Sloppy thinking, Alice. Really sloppy.”
Smack.
Something drew a stinging line across her legs. Taka cried out; the inner voice sneered told you so.
“Please,” she whimpered.
“Back of the class, cunt.” Something cold tickled her vulva. A faint rasping sound carried over her shoulder, like the sound of a fingernail on sandpaper.
“I can see why pine furniture used to be so cheap,” Desjardins remarked. “You get all these splinters...”
She stared hard at the tiled floor, the fish-to-bird transition, focused on that indefinable moment when background and foreground merged. She tried to lose herself in the exercise. She tried to think of nothing but the pattern.
She couldn’t escape the thought that Achilles had designed the floor for exactly that purpose.
Splice
She was safe. She was home. She was deep in the familiar abyss, water pressing down with the comforting weight of mountains, no light to betray her presence to the hunters overhead. No sound but her own heartbeat. No breath.
No breath...
But that was normal, wasn’t it? She was a creature of the deep sea, a glorious cyborg with electricity sparking in her chest, supremely adapted. She was immune to the bends. Her rapture owed nothing to nitrogen. She could not drown.
But somehow, impossibly, she was.
Her implants had stopped working. Or no, her implants had disappeared entirely, leaving nothing in her chest but a pounding heart, flopping on the bottom of a great bleeding hole where lung and machinery had once been. Her flesh cried out for oxygen. She could feel her blood turning to acid. She tried to open her mouth, tried to gasp, but even that useless reflex was denied her here; her hood stretched across her face like an impermeable skin. She panicked, thrashing towards a surface that might have been lightyears away. The very core of her was a yawning vacuum. She convulsed around her own emptiness.
Suddenly, there was light.
It was a single beam from somewhere overhead, skewering her through the darkness. She struggled towards it; gray chaos seethed at the edges of sight, blinding her peripheral vision as her eyes began to shut down. There was light above and oblivion on all sides. She reached for the light.
A hand seized her wrist and lifted her into atmosphere. Suddenly she could breathe again; her lungs had been restored, her diveskin miraculously removed. She sank to her knees on a solid deck, sucked great whooping breaths.
She looked up, into the face of her salvation. A fleshless, pixelated caricature of herself grinned back; its eyes were empty whirling holes. “You’re not dead yet,” it said, and ripped out her heart.
It stood over her, frowning as she bled out on the deck. “Hello?” it asked, its voice turned strangely metallic. “Are you there? Are you there?”
She awoke. The real world was darker than her dream had been.
She remembered Rickett’s voice, thin and reedy: They even attack each other if you give ’em half a chance...
“Are you there?”
It was the voice from her dream. It was the ship’s voice. Phocoena.
I know what to do, she realized.
She turned in her seat. Sunset biotelemetry sparkled in the darkness behind her: a fading life-force, rendered in constellations of yellow and orange.
And for the first time, red.
“Hello?” she said.
“How long i been asleep?”
Ricketts was using the saccadal interface to talk. How weak do you have to be, Clarke wondered, before it’s too much effort to speak aloud?
“I don’t know,” she told the darkness. “A few hours, I guess.” And then, dreading the answer: “How are you feeling?”
“About same,” he lied. Or maybe not, if Phocoena was doing its job.
She climbed from her seat and stepped carefully back to the telemetry panel. A facet of isolation membrane glistened dimly beyond, barely visible to her uncapped eyes.
Ricketts’s antibodies and glucose metabolism had both gone critical while she’d slept. If she was reading the display right Phocoena had been able to compensate for the glucose to some extent, but the immune problems were out of its league. And an entirely new readout had appeared on the diagnostic panel, cryptic and completely unexpected: something called AND was increasing over time in Rickett’s body. She tapped the label and invoked the system glossary: AND expanded into Anomalous Nucleotide Duplex, which told her nothing. But there was a dotted horizontal line etched near the top of the y-axis, some critical threshold that Ricketts was approaching but had not yet met; and the label on that feature was one she knew.
Metastasis.
It can’t be long now, Clarke thought. Then, hating herself: Maybe long enough...
“Still there?” Ricketts asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s lonely in here.”
Under the cowl, maybe. Or inside his own failing flesh.
“Talk to me.”
Go ahead. You know you want an opening.
“About what?”
“Anything. Just—anything.”
You can’t exploit someone if you don’t even ask...
She took a breath. “You know what you said about the, the shredders? How someone was using them to try and crash everything?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think they’re supposed to crash the system at all,” she said.
A brief silence. “But that’s what they do. Ask anyone.”
“That’s not all they do. Taka said they breach dams and short out static-fields and who knows what. That one on the board was sitting in her MI for God knows how long, and it never even peeped until she’d figured out Seppuku. They’re attacking a lot of targets through the network, and they need the network to get to them.”
She looked into the darkness, past the telemetry panel, past the faint shimmer of reflecting membrane. Ricketts’s head was a dim crescent, its edges rough and smooth in equal measure: outlined hints of disheveled hair and contoured plastic. She couldn’t see his face. The headset would have covered his eyes even if her caps had been in. His body was an invisible suggestion of dark mass, too distant for the meager light of the display. It did not move.
She continued: “The shredders try to crash everything they can get their teeth into, so we just assume that whoever bred them wants them to succeed. But I think they’re counting on the firewalls and the—exorcists, right...?”
“Right.”
“Maybe they’re counting on those defenses to hold. Maybe they don’t want the network to collapse because they use it themselves. Maybe they just send the—the shredders out to kick up mud and noise, and keep everyone busy so they can sneak around and do their own thing without getting noticed.”