She focuses. Everyone’s a suspect, after all. But although the ubiquitous undercurrent of rage simmers as always, none of it has risen to the surface. There is no obvious anger at being thwarted, no obvious fear of imminent discovery. This explosive development is more puzzle than provocation to these people, a game of Russian Roulette nested inside a scavenger hunt.
“So what do we do now?” Cheung asks.
Lubin floats above them all like Lucifer. “Everybody note the sonar profile. That’s how you’ll acquire the others; they’ll be too well-hidden for a visual sweep.”
A dozen pistols fire converging click-trains on the offending object.
“So do we leave it there, or what?”
“What if it’s booby-trapped?”
“What if it goes off?”
“Then we’ve got fewer corpses to worry about,” Gomez buzzes from what he might think of as a safe distance. “No skin off my fore.”
Lubin descends through the conjecture and reaches under the ledge.
Ng sculls away: “Hey, is that a good—”
Lubin grabs the device and yanks it free. Nothing explodes. He turns and surveys the assembled rifters. “When you find the others, don’t touch them. I’ll remove them myself.”
“Why bother,” Gomez buzzes softly.
It’s a rhetorical grumble, not even a serious challenge, but Lubin turns to face him anyway. “This was badly positioned,” he says. “Placed for concealment, not effect. We can do much better.”
Minds light up, encouraged, on all sides. But to Clarke, it’s as though Lubin’s words have opened a tiny gash in her diveskin; she feels the frigid Atlantic seeping up her spine.
What are you doing, Ken? What the fuck are you doing?
She tells himself he’s just playing to the gallery, saying whatever it takes to keep people motivated. He’s looking at her now, his head cocked just slightly to one side, as if in response to some unvoiced question. Belatedly, Clarke realizes what she’s doing: she’s trying to look into his head. She’s trying to tune him in.
It’s a futile effort, of course. Dangerous, even. Lubin hasn’t just been trained to block prying minds; he’s been conditioned, rewired, outfitted with subconscious defenses that can’t be lowered by any act of mere volition. Nobody’s ever been able to tunnel into Lubin’s head except Karl Acton, and whatever he saw in there, he took to his grave.
Now Lubin watches her, dark inside and out for all her unconscious efforts.
She remembers Acton, and stops trying.
Striptease
The final score is nine mines and no suspects. Either might be subject to change.
Atlantis itself is an exercise in scale-invariant complexity, repairs to retrofits to additions to a sprawling baseline structure that extends over hectares. There’s no chance that every nook and cranny has been explored. Then again, what chance is there that the culprits—constrained by time and surveillance and please God, small numbers—had any greater opportunity to plant explosives than the sweepers have had to find them? Neither side is omnipotent. Perhaps, on balance, that is enough.
As for who those culprits are, Clarke has tuned in three dozen of her fellows so far. She has run her fingers through the viscous darkness in all those heads and come up with nothing. Not even Gomez, or Yeager. Not even Creasy. Grave-dancers, for sure, all of them. But no diggers.
She hasn’t run into Grace Nolan lately, though.
Nolan’s the Big Red Button right now. She’s holding back for the moment; any alleged corpse treachery looks a little less asymmetrical in light of recent events. But the way things are going, Nolan’s got nothing to lose by letting this play out. There’s already more than enough sympathy out there for the Mad Bomber; if it turns out to be Nolan, the very act of unmasking her could boost her status more than harm it.
The leash is tenuous enough already. If it snaps there’s going to be ten kinds of shit in the cycler.
And that’s granting the charitable assumption that they even find the culprits. What do you look for, in the unlit basements of so many minds? Here, even the innocent are consumed with guilt; even the guilty wallow in self-righteousness. Every mind is aglow with the black light of PsychoHazard icons: which ones are powered by old wounds, which by recent acts of sabotage? You can figure it out, sometimes, if you can stand sticking your head into someone else’s tar pit, but context is everything. Hoping for a lucky break is playing the lottery; doing it right takes time, and leaves Clarke soiled.
Not doing it delivers the future into Grace Nolan’s hands.
There’s no time. I can’t be everywhere. Ken can’t be everywhere.
There’s an alternative, of course. Lubin suggested it, just after the bomb sweep. He was sweet about it, too, he made it sound as if she had a choice. As if he wouldn’t just go ahead and do it himself if she wasn’t up for it.
She knows why he gave her the option. Whoever shares this secret is going to get a bit of a boost in the local community. Lubin doesn’t need the cred; no rifter would be crazy enough to cross him.
She remembers a time, not so long ago, when she could make the same claim about herself.
She takes a breath, and opens a channel to whom it may concern. The next step, she knows, could kill her. She wonders—hardly for the first time— if that would really be such a bad thing.
Her audience numbers fewer than a dozen. There’s room for more; the medhab—even the lone sphere that hasn’t been commandeered as Bhanderi habitat—is bigger than most. Not present are even more that can be trusted, judging by the notes Clarke and Lubin have recently compared. But she wants to start small. Maybe ease into it a little. The ripple effect will kick in soon enough.
“I’m only going to do this once,” she says. “So pay attention.”
Naked to the waist, she splits herself open again.
“Don’t change anything except your neuroinhibitors. It probably throws out some overall balance with the other chemicals, but it all seems to come out in the wash eventually. Just don’t go outside for a while after you make the changes. Give everything a chance to settle.”
“How long?” Alexander asks.
Clarke has no idea. “Six hours, maybe. After that, you should be good to go. Ken will assign you to stations around the hubs.”
Her audience rustles, unhappy at the prospect of such prolonged confinement.
“So how do we tweak the inhibitors?” Mak’s broken nose is laced with fine beaded wires, a miniscule microelectric grid designed to amp up the healing process. It looks like an absurdly shrunken veil of mourning.
Clarke smiles despite herself. “You reduce them.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No fucking chance.”
“What about André?”
André died three years ago, the life spasming out of him on the seabed in a seizure that nearly tore him limb from limb. Seger laid the blame on a faulty neuroinhibitor pump. Human nerves aren’t designed for the abyss; the pressure sets them firing at the slightest provocation. You turn into a fleshy switchboard with no circuit-breakers and no insulation. Eventually, after a few minutes of quivering tetanus, the body runs out of neurotransmitters and just stops.