Between Rowan and rifters, an isolation membrane swirls with oily iridescence.
“The consensus is that you should stay in the airlock for the time being,” Rowan says.
Clarke glances at Lubin. He’s watching the welcoming committee with blank, impassive eyes.
“Who was it?” Clarke asks calmly.
“I don’t think that’s really important,” Rowan says.
“Lisbeth might think otherwise. Her nose is broken.”
“Our man says he was defending himself.”
“A man in 300-bar preshmesh armor defending himself against an unarmed woman in a diveskin.”
“A corpse defending himself from a fishhead,” someone says from within the committee. “Whole other thing.”
Rowan ignores the intrusion. “Our man resorted to fists,” she says, “because that was the only approach that had any real hope of succeeding. You know as well as we do what we’re defending ourselves from.”
“What I know is that none of you are supposed to leave Atlantis without prior authorization. Those were the rules, even before the quarantine. You agreed to them.”
“We weren’t allowed much of a choice,” Rowan remarks mildly.
“Still.”
“Fuck the rules,” says another corpse. “They’re trying to kill us. Why are we arguing protocol?”
Clarke blinks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know damn well what it—”
Rowan holds up a hand. The dissident falls silent.
“We found a mine,” Rowan says, in the same voice she might use to report that the head was out of toilet paper.
“What?”
“Nothing special. Standard demolition charge. Might have even been one of the same ones Ken wired up before we—” She hesitates, choosing her words— “came to terms a few years back. I’m told it would have isolated us from primary life-support and flooded a good chunk of Res-C. Somewhere between thirty to a hundred killed from the implosion alone.”
Clarke stares at Lubin, notes the slightest shake of the head.
“I didn’t know,” Clarke says softly.
Rowan smiles faintly. “You’ll understand there might be some skepticism on that point.”
“I’d like to see it,” Lubin says.
“I’d like to see my daughter in the sunlight,” Rowan tells him. “It’s not going to happen.”
Clarke shakes her head. “Pat, listen. I don’t know where it came from. I—”
“I do,” Rowan says mildly. “There are piles of them stashed at the construction caches. A hundred or more at Impossible Lake alone.”
“We’ll find out who planted it. But you can’t keep it. You’re not allowed weapons.”
“Do you seriously expect us to simply hand it back to the people who planted it in the first place?”
“Pat, you know me.”
“I know all of you,” Rowan says. “The answer is no.”
“How did you find it?” Lubin asks from out of left field.
“By accident. We lost our passive acoustics and sent someone out to check the antennae.”
“Without informing us beforehand.”
“It seemed fairly likely that you people were causing the interference. Informing you would not have been a wise idea even if you hadn’t been mining our hulls.”
“Hulls,” Lubin remarks. “So you found more than one.”
No one speaks.
Of course not, Clarke realizes. They’re not going to tell us anything. They’re gearing up for war.
And they’re going to get slaughtered…
“I wonder if you’ve found them all,” Lubin muses.
They stand without speaking, gagged by the synthetic black skin across their faces. Behind their backs, behind the impenetrable mass of the inner hatch, the corpses return to whatever plots and counterplans they’re drawing. Ahead, past the outer hatch, a gathering crowd of rifters waits for answers. Around them and within them, machinery pumps and sparks and readies them for the abyss. By the time the water rises over their heads they are incompressible.
Lubin reaches for the outer hatch. Clarke stops him.
“Grace,” she buzzes.
“Could be anyone.” He rises, weightless in the flooded compartment. One hand reaches up to keep the ceiling at bay. It’s an odd image, this humanoid silhouette floating against the bluish-white walls of the airlock. His eyecaps almost look like holes cut from black paper, letting the light shine through from behind.
“In fact,” he continues, “I’m not entirely convinced they’re telling the truth.”
“The corpses? Why would they lie? How would it serve them?”
“Sow dissension among the enemy. Divide and conquer.”
“Come on, Ken. It’s not as though there’s a pro-corpse faction ready to rise up on their behalf and...”
He just looks at her.
“You don’t know,” she buzzes, so softly she can barely feel the vibration in her own jaw. “It’s all just guesses and suspicions. Rama hasn’t had a chance to—you can’t be sure.”
“I’m not.”
“We don’t really know anything.” She hesitates, then edits herself: “I don’t know anything. You do.”
“Not enough to matter. Not yet.”
“I saw you, tracking them along the corridors.”
He doesn’t nod. He doesn’t have to.
“Who?”
“Rowan, mainly.”
“And what’s it like in there?”
“A lot like it is in there,” he says, pointing at her.
Stay out of my head, you fucker. But she knows, at this range, it’s not a matter of choice. You can’t just choose to not feel something. Whether those feelings are yours or someone else’s is really beside the point.
So she only says, “Think you could be a little less vague?”
“She feels very guilty about something. I don’t know what. There’s no shortage of possibilities.”
“Told you.”
“Our own people, though,” he continues. “Are not quite so conflicted, and much more easily distracted. And I can’t be everywhere. And we’re running out of time.”
You bastard, she thinks. You asshole. You stumpfucker.
He floats above her, waiting.
“Okay,” she says at last. “I’ll do it.”
Lubin pulls the latch. The outer hatch slides back, opening a rectangle of murky darkness in a stark white frame. They rise into a nightscape stippled with waiting eyes.
Lenie Clarke is a little bit twisted, even by Rifter standards.
Rifters don’t worry much about privacy, for one thing. Not as much as you might expect from a population of rejects and throwaways. You might think the only ones who could ever regard this place as an improvement would be those with the most seriously fucked-up baselines for comparison, and you’d be right. You might also think that such damaged creatures would retreat into their shells like hermit crabs with half their limbs ripped away, cringing at the slightest shadow, or lashing out furiously at any hint of intrusion. It does happen, occasionally. But down here, the endless heavy night anesthetizes even if it doesn’t heal. The abyss lays dark hands on the wounded and the raging, and somehow calms them. There are, after all, three hundred sixty degrees of escape from any conflict. There are no limiting resources to fight over; these days, half the habs are empty anyway. There is little need for territoriality, because there is so much territory.