Behind his headlamp, Lubin’s silhouette moves subtly; Clarke gets the sense of a shrug. “There are some interesting coincidences,” he says. “Gene enters Atlantis with serious injuries. Jerry operates on him in a medbay where our surveillance is compromised, then puts him into quarantine.”
“Quarantine because of ßehemoth,” Clarke points out.
“As you’ve pointed out yourself on occasion, we’ve all been immunized against ßehemoth. I’m surprised you don’t find that rationale more questionable.” When Clarke says nothing, he continues: “Gene is released into the wild suffering from an opportunistic infection which our equipment can’t identify, and which so far has failed to respond to treatment.”
“But you were there, Ken. Jerry wanted to keep Gene in quarantine. Dale beat the crap out of her for trying. Isolating Patient Zero is a pretty short-sighted strategy for spreading the plague.”
“I suppose,” Lubin buzzes, “Grace might say they knew we’d break him out regardless, so they put up a big show of resistance knowing someone would cite it in their favor down the road.”
“So they fought to keep him contained, therefore they wanted to set him loose?” Clarke peers suggestively at Lubin’s electrolysis intake. “You getting enough O2 there, Ken?”
“I’m saying that’s the sort of rationale Grace might invoke.”
“That’s pretty twisted even for—” Realization sinks in. “She’s actually saying that, isn’t she?”
His headlight bobs slightly.
“You’ve heard the rumors. You know all about them.” She shakes her head, disgusted at herself. “As if I’d ever have to bring you up to speed on anything...”
“I’m keeping an ear open.”
“Well maybe you could do a bit more than that. I mean, I know you like to keep out of these things, but Grace is fucking psycho. She’s spoiling for a fight and she doesn’t care who gets caught in the backwash.”
Lubin hovers, unreadable. “I would have expected you to be a bit more sympathetic.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” he buzzes after a moment. “But whatever you think of Grace’s behavior, her fears might not be entirely unfounded.”
“Come on, Ken. The war’s over.” She takes his silence as acknowledgment. “So why would the corpses want to start it up again?”
“Because they lost.”
“Ancient history.”
“You thought yourself oppressed once,” he points out. “How much blood did it take before you were willing to call it even?”
His metal voice, so calm, so even, is suddenly so close it seems to be coming from inside her own head.
“I—I was wrong about that,” she says after a while.
“It didn’t stop you.” He turns back to his machinery.
“Ken,” she says.
He looks back at her.
“This is bullshit. It’s a bunch of ifs strung together. A hundred to one Gene just picked up something from the fish that bit him.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not like there can’t be a hundred nasty bugs down here we haven’t discovered yet. A few years ago nobody’d even heard of ßehemoth.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“So we can’t let this escalate. Not without at least some evidence.”
His eyes shine yellow-white in the backscatter from his headlamp. “If you’re serious about evidence, you could always collect some yourself.”
“How?”
He taps the left side of his chest. Where the implants are.
She goes cold. “No.”
“If Seger’s hiding anything, you’d know it.”
“She could be hiding lots of things from lots of people. It wouldn’t prove what she was hiding.”
“You’d know what Nolan was feeling too, since you seem so concerned with her motives.”
“I know what her motives are. I don’t need to fuck with my brain chemistry to confirm it.”
“The medical risks are minimal,” he points out.
“That’s not the point. It wouldn’t prove anything. You know you can’t read specific thoughts, Ken.”
“You wouldn’t have to. Reading guilt would be suffic—”
“I said no.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.” He turns away again. His headlamp transforms the reservoir’s plumbing into a tiny, high-contrast cityscape tilted on edge. Clarke watches him work—tracking pathways, tapping pipes, making small changes to tabletop architecture. A pinpoint sun flares hissing at his fingertips, blinding her for an instant. By the time her caps have adjusted the light has settled on the skin of the tank. The water shimmers prismatically around it like a heat mirage on a hot day; at lesser depths it would explode into steam on the spot.
“There’s another way,” she buzzes. Lubin shuts off the spot-welder.
“There is.” He turns to face her. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
Back when the trailer park was just getting set up, someone had the clever idea of turning a hab into a mess halclass="underline" a row of cyclers, a couple of prep surfaces for the daring, and a handful of foldaway tables scattered with studied randomness around the dry deck. The effect was intended to suggest a café patio. The cramped reality is more like the backstage shed where the furniture gets stored for winter.
One thing that has caught on, though, is the garden. By now it covers half the wet deck, a tangle of creeping greenery lit by solar-spectrum sticks planted among its leaves like bioluminescent bamboo. It isn’t even hydroponic. The little jungle erupts from boxes of rich dark earth—diatomaceous ooze, actually, beefed up with organic supplements—that were once discrete but which have since now disappeared under an overflow of compost, spilling messily across the plating.
It’s the best-smelling bubble of atmosphere on the whole Ridge. Clarke swings the airlock hatch open onto that tableau and takes a deep breath, only half of appreciation. The other half is resolve: Grace Nolan looks up from the far side of the oasis, tying off the vines of something that might have been snow peas back before the patents landed on them.
But Nolan smiles beneath translucent eyes as Clarke steps onto the deck. “Hey, Lenie!”
“Hi Grace. I thought we could maybe have a talk.”
Nolan pops a pod into her mouth, a slick black amphibian feeding in the lush greenery of some long-extinct wetland. She chews, for longer than is probably necessary. “About...”
“About Atlantis. Your blood work.” Clarke takes a breath. “About whatever problem you have with me.”
“God no,” Nolan says. “I’ve got no problem with you, Len. People fight sometimes. No big deal. Don’t take it so seriously.”
“Okay then. Let’s talk about Gene.”
“Sure.” Nolan straightens, grabs a chair off the bulkhead and folds it down. “And while we’re at it, let’s talk about Sal and Lije and Lanie.”
Lanie too, now? “You think the corpses are behind it.”
Nolan shrugs. “It’s no big secret.”
“And you base that on what, exactly? Anything show up in the bloods?”
“We’re still collecting samples. Lizbeth’s set up in the med hab, by the way, if you want to contribute. I think you should.”
“What if you don’t find anything?” Clarke wonders.
“I don’t think we will. Seger’s smart enough to cover her tracks. But you never know.”