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 the hazy limits of rifter vision.
It always hits her like a hallucination, although she knows the pedestrian truth: it’s just a salt seep, a layer of mineralized water so dense it lies on the bottom of the ocean the way an ocean lies at the bottom of the sky. It’s a major selling point to anyone in search of camouflage. The halocline reflects all manner of pings and probes, hides everything beneath as though there were nothing here but soft, deep mud.
A soft, brief scream of electronics. For the merest instant Clarke thinks she sees a drop of luminous blood on her dashboard. She focuses. Nothing.
“Did you—?”
“Yes.” Lubin’s playing with his controls. “This way.” He steers closer to the shores of Impossible Lake. Clarke follows.
The next time it’s unmistakable: a brilliant pinpoint of red light, laser-bright, flickering on and off within the jagged topography of the dashboard display. The squids cry out with each flash.
A deadman alarm. Somewhere ahead, a rifter’s heart has stopped.
They’re cruising out over the lake now, just offshore. Roiling greenish light suffuses Lubin and his mount from below. A hypersaline globule shatters in slow motion against the squid’s underside. Light rising through the interface bends in odd ways. It’s like looking down through the radium-lit depths of a nuclear waste-storage lagoon. A grid of bright pinpoint suns shine far below that surface, where the surveyors have planted their lamps. The solid substrate beneath is hidden by distance and diffraction.
The deadman alarm has stabilized to a confidence bubble about forty meters straight ahead. Its ruby icon beats like a heart on the screen. The squids bleat in synch.
“There,” Clarke says. The horizon’s absurdly inverted here, darkness overhead, milky light beneath. A dark spot hangs at the distant, fuzzy interface between. It appears to be floating on the surface of the lens.