There were other advantages, too. Never again the elaborate courtship rituals that he always seemed to fuck up at. Never again the fear of infection, the ludicrous efforts to romanticise path scans and pass blood work off as foreplay. Never again that hard twinkle in your victim’s eyes, maybe knowing.
He had it worked out. Hell, he had a new Paradigm of Life.
From now on, Achilles Desjardins would be a civilised man. He would inflict his vile passions on machinery, not flesh—and he would save himself a shitload of embarrassment in the bargain. Aurora had been for the best, a narrow escape in the nick of time. Head full of bad wiring in that one, no doubt about it. Pain and pleasure centers all crosswired.
He didn’t need to mix it up with a freak like that.
Fire Drill
She wakes up lost at sea.
She’s not sure what called her back, exactly—she remembers a gentle push, as if someone was nudging her awake—yet she’s perfectly alone out here. That was the whole point of the exercise. She could have slept anywhere in the trailer park, but she needed the solitude. So she swam out past Atlantis, past the habs and the generators, past the ridges and fissures that claw the neighborhood. Finally she arrived here, at this distant little outcropping of pumice and polymetallics, and fell into wide-eyed sleep.
Only now something has nudged her awake, and she has lost her bearings.
She pulls the sonar pistol off her thigh and sweeps the darkness. After a few seconds a fuzzy metropolitan echo comes back, just barely teasing the left edge of her sweep. She takes more direct aim and fires again. Atlantis and its suburbs come back dead center.
And a harder echo, smaller, nearer. Closing.
It’s not an intercept course. A few more pings resolve a vector tracking past to starboard. Whoever it is probably doesn’t even know she’s here—or didn’t, until she let loose with sonar.
They’re moving pretty damned fast for someone without a squid. Curious, Clarke moves to intercept. She keeps her headlamp low, barely bright enough to tell substrate from seawater. The mud scrolls by like a treadmill. Pebbles and the occasional brittle star accent the monotony.
The bow wave catches her just before the body does. A shoulder rams into her side, pushes her into the bottom; mud billows up around her. A fin slaps Clarke in the face. She grabs blindly through the zeroed viz and catches hold of an arm.
“What the fuck!”
The arm yanks out of her grasp, but her expletive seems to have had some effect. The thrashing stops, at least. The muddy clouds continue to swirl, but by now it’s all inertia.
“Who...” It’s a rough, grating sound, even for a vocoder.
“It’s Lenie.” She brightens her headlamp; a billion suspended particles blind her in bright fog. She fins up into clearer water and points her beam at the bottom.
Something moves down there. “Shiiit...lights down...”
“Sorry.” She dims the lamp. “Rama? That you?”
Bhanderi rises from the murk. “Lenie.” A mechanical whisper. “Hi.”
She supposes she’s lucky he still recognizes her. Hell, she’s lucky he can still talk. It’s not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It’s not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a writeoff. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running water. Clarke imagines the fissures of the brain smoothing out over time, devolving back to some primordial fish-state more suited to their chosen habitat.
Rama Bhanderi isn’t that far gone yet, though. He still even comes inside occasionally.
“What’s the rush?” Clarke buzzes at him. She doesn’t really expect an answer.
She gets one, though: “ru...dopamine, maybe...Epi...”
It clicks after a second: dopamine rush. Is he still human enough to deliver bad puns? “No, Rama. I mean, why the hurry?”
He hangs beside her like a black wraith, barely visible in the dim ember of her headlamp. “Ah...ah...I’m not....” his voice trails off.
“Boom,” he says after a moment. “Blew it up. Waayyyy too bright.”
A nudge, she remembers. Enough to wake her. “Blew what? Who?”
“Are you real?” he asks distantly. “...I...think you’re a histamine glitch...”
“It’s Lenie, Rama. For real. What blew up?”
“...acetylcholine, maybe...” His hand passes back and forth in front of his face. “Only I’m not cramping...”
This is useless.
“...don’t like her any more,” Bhanderi buzzes softly. “And he chased me...”
Something tightens in her throat. She moves towards him. “Who? Rama, what—”
“Back off,” he grates. “I’m all...territorial...”
“Sorry...I...”
Bhanderi turns and fins away. She starts after him and stops, realizing: there’s another way.
She brightens her lamp. The muddy storm front still hangs beneath her, just off the bottom. It won’t settle for hours in this dense, sluggish water.
Neither will the trails that lead to it.
One of them is hers: a narrow muddy contrail kicked into suspension as she arrowed in from the east. The other trail extends back along a bearing of 345°. Clarke follows it.
She’s not heading for Atlantis, she soon realizes. Bhanderi’s trail veers to port, along a line that should keep her well off the southwest shoulder of the complex. There’s not much along that route, as far as Clarke can remember. Maybe a woodpile, one of several caches of prefab parts scattered about in anticipation of future expansion, back when the corpses first arrived. Sure enough, the water ahead begins to lighten. Clarke douses her own beam and sonars the brightness ahead. A jumble of hard Euclidean echoes bounce back, all from objects significantly larger than a human body.
She kicks forward. The diffuse glow resolves into four point sources: sodium floods, one at each corner of the woodpile. Stacked slabs of plastic and biosteel lie on pallets within the lit area. Curved slices of habhull lay piled on the substrate like great nested clamshells. Larger shapes loom in the murky distance: storage tanks, heat exchangers, the jackets of emergency reactors never assembled.
The distance is murky, Clarke realizes. Far murkier than usual.
She fins up into the water column and coasts above the industrial subscape. Something leans against the light like a soft dark wall, just past the furthest lamppost. She’s been expecting it ever since she spoke to Bhanderi. Now it spreads out ahead of her in silent confirmation, a great billowing cloud of mud blown off the bottom and lingering, virtually weightless, in the aftermath of some recent explosion.
Of course, the corpses stockpiled blasting caps along with everything else...
Something tickles the corner of Clarke’s eye, some small disarray somehow out of place among the organized chaos directly below. Two slabs of hull plating have been pulled from their stacks and laid out on the mud. Buckshot scatters of acne blemish their surfaces. Clarke arcs down for a closer look. No, those aren’t innocuous clots of mud or a recent colony of benthic invertebrates. They’re holes, punched through three centimeters of solid biosteel. Their edges are smooth, melted and instantly congealed by some intense heat source. Carbon scoring around each breach conveys a sense of bruising, of empty eyes battered black.