“About, you know. The corpses. I hear Saliko’s feeling a little odd now, but you know Saliko.”
He thinks they did something to him...
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Clarke says. “Really.” She smiles, sighing inwardly at her own diplomacy.
Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.
It’s been a while since she’s let Kevin take her. He’s never been all that good at it, sadly. He has a harder time keeping it up than most kids his age, which actually isn’t all that uncommon among the local bottom-feeders. And the fact that he’s chosen a frigid bitch like Lenie Clarke to practice his moves on hasn’t helped the dynamic any. A man afraid to touch: a woman averse to contact. If these two have anything in common, it’s patience.
She figures she owes him. Besides, she wants to ask him some questions.
But today he’s a granite cock with a brain stem attached. fuck the foreplay: he pushes into her right off the top, not even a token tongue-lashing to make up for the lack of tropical irrigation. The friction pulls painfully at her labia; she reaches down discretely with one hand and spreads them. Walsh pumps on top of her, breath hissing through teeth clenched in a hard animal grin, his capped eyes hard and unreadable. They always keep their eyes masked during sex—Clarke’s tastes prevail, as usual— although Walsh usually wears too much heart on his face to hide with a couple of membranous eggshells. Not this time. There’s something behind his overlays that Clarke can’t quite make out, something focused on the space where she is but not on her. He pushes her up the pallet in rough thrusting increments; her head bumps painfully against the naked metal plating of the deck. They fuck without words amidst stale air and grafted machinery.
She doesn’t know what’s come over him. It’s a nice change, though, the closest thing to an honest-to-God rape she’s had in years. She closes her eyes and summons up images of Karl Acton.
Afterwards, though, the bruise she notices is on his arm: a corona of torn capillaries around a tiny puncture in the flesh of his inner elbow.
“What’s this?” She lays her lips around the injury and runs her tongue across the swelling.
“Oh, that. Grace is taking blood samples from everyone.”
Her head comes up. “What?”
“She’s not great at it. Took her a couple of tries to find a vein. You should see Lije. Looks like his arm got bushwhacked by a sea urchin.”
“Why’s Grace taking blood?”
“You didn’t hear? Lije came down with something. And Saliko’s started feeling under the weather too, and he visited Gene and Julia just a couple of days ago.”
“So Grace thinks—”
“Whatever the corpses gave him, it’s spreading.”
Clarke sits up. She’s been naked on the deck for half an hour, but this is the first time she’s felt the chill. “Grace thinks the corpses gave him something.”
“That’s what Gene thought. She’s going to find out.”
“How? She doesn’t have any medical training.”
Walsh shrugs. “You don’t need any to run MedBase.”
“Jesus semen-sucking Christ.” Clarke shakes her head in disbelief. “Even if Atlantis did want to sic some bug on us, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to use one from the standard database.”
“I guess she thinks it’s a place to start.”
There’s something in his voice.
“You believe her,” Clarke says.
“Well, not nec—”
“Has Julia come down with anything?”
“Not so far.”
“Not so far. Kevin, Julia hasn’t left Gene’s side since they broke him out. If anyone was going to catch anything, wouldn’t it be her? Saliko visited, what? Once?”
“Maybe twice.”
“And what about Grace? From what I hear she’s over there all the time. Is she sick?”
“She says she’s taking precaut—”
“Precautions,” Clarke snorts. “Spare me. Am I the only one left on the whole Ridge with a working set of frontal lobes? Abra came down with supersyph last year, remember? It took eight months for Charley Garcia to get rid of those buggy Ascaris in his gut, and I don’t remember anyone blaming the corpses for that. People get sick, Kevin, even down here. Especially down here. Half of us rot away before we even have a chance to go native.”
There it is again: something new, staring out from behind the glistening opacities of Walsh’s eyecaps. Something not entirely friendly.
She sighs. “What?”
“It’s just a precaution. I don’t see how it can hurt.”
“It can hurt quite a lot if people jump to conclusions without any facts.”
Walsh doesn’t move for a moment. Then he gets to his feet. “Grace is trying to get the facts,” he says, padding across the compartment. “You’re the one jumping to conclusions.”
Oh, Kevvy-boy, Clarke wonders. When did you start to grow a spine?
He grabs his diveskin off the chair. Squirming black synthetics embrace him like a lover.
“Thanks for the fuck,” he says. “I gotta go.”
Boilerplate
She finds Lubin floating halfway up the side of the windchime reservoir. Pipes, fiberop and miscellaneous components—mostly nonfunctional now, dismembered segments of circuits long-since broken—run in a band around the great tank’s equator. At the moment, the ambient currents are too sluggish to set either rocks or machinery to glowing; Lubin’s headlamp provides the only illumination.
“Abra said you were out here,” Clarke buzzes.
“Hold this pad, will you?”
She takes the little sensor. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“About?” Most of his attention seems to be focused on a blob of amber polymer erupting from one of the conduits.
Clarke maneuvers herself into his line of sight. “There’s this asinine rumor going around. Grace is telling people that Jerry sicced some kind of plague on Gene.”
Lubin’s vocoder tics in a mechanical interpretation of mmmm...
“She’s always had a missile up her ass about the corpses, but nobody takes her seriously. At least, they didn’t used to…”
Lubin taps a valve. “That’s it.”
“What?”
“Resin’s cracked around the thermostat. It’s causing an intermittent short.”
“Ken. Listen to me.”
He stares at her, waiting.
“Something’s changing. Grace never used to push it this hard, remember?”
“I never really butted heads with her myself,” Lubin buzzes.
“It used to be her against the world. But this bug Gene’s come down with, it’s changed things. I think people are starting to listen to her. It could get dicey.”
“For the corpses.”
“For all of us. Weren’t you the one warning me about what the corpses could do if they got their act together? Weren’t you the one who said—”
We may have to do something preemptive…
A small pit opens up in Clarke’s stomach.
“Ken,” she buzzes, slowly, “you do know Grace is fucking crazy, right?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment. She doesn’t give him any longer than that: “Seriously, you should just listen to her sometime. She talks as if the war never ended. Someone sneezes and it’s a biological attack.”