Clarke shakes her head. “Rama hasn’t pull off any miracles either.”
“The difference is that nobody thinks Rama’s trying to kill us.”
She pulls up a chair and sits down beside him. The empty display stares back at her like a personal rebuke.
“Ken,” she says at last, “you know me.”
His face is as unreadable as his eyes.
“Did you have me followed?” she asks.
“No. But I availed myself of the information when it came my way.”
“Who was it? Grace?”
“What’s important is that Rowan admitted ßehemoth was tweaked. It will be common knowledge within the hour. The timing couldn’t be worse.”
“If you availed yourself of the information, you’ll know Pat’s explanation for that. And you’ll know why she was so scared of what Rama might find. Is it so impossible she might be telling the truth?”
He shakes his head. “But this is the second time they’ve waited to report an unpleasant fact until just before we would have discovered it ourselves, sans alibi. Don’t expect it to go over well.”
“Ken, we still don’t have any real evidence.”
“We will soon,” Lubin tells her.
She looks the question.
“If Rowan’s telling the truth, then ßehemoth samples from Impossible Lake will show the same tweaks as the strain that killed Gene.” Lubin leans back in the chair, interlocking his fingers behind his head. “Jelaine and Dimitri took a sub about ten minutes ago. If things go well we’ll have a sample within five hours, a verdict in twelve.”
“And if things don’t go well?”
“It will take longer.”
Clarke snorts. “That’s just great, Ken, but in case you haven’t noticed not everybody shares your sense of restraint. You think Grace is going to wait until the facts are in? You’ve given her all the credibility she ever wanted, she’s out there right now passing all kinds of judgment and—”
—And you went to her first, you fucker. After all we’ve been through, after all these years you were the one person I’d trust with my life and you confided in her before you—
“Were you even going to tell me?” she cries.
“It wouldn’t have served any purpose.”
“Not your purpose, perhaps. Which is what, exactly?”
“Minimizing risk.”
“Any animal could say that much.”
“It’s not the most ambitious aspiration,” Lubin admits. “But then again, ‘destroying the world’ has already been taken.”
She feels it like a slap across the face.
After a moment he adds, “I don’t hold it against you. You know that. But you’re hardly in a position to pass judgment.”
“I know that, you cocksucker. I don’t need you to remind me every fucking chance you get.”
“I’m talking about strategy,” Lubin says patiently. “Not morals. I’ll entertain your what-ifs. I’ll admit that Rowan might be telling the truth. But assume, for the moment, that she isn’t. Assume that the corpses have been waging clandestine biological warfare on us. Even knowing that, would you attack them?”
She knows it’s rhetorical.
“I didn’t think so,” he says after a moment. “Because no matter what they’ve done, you’ve done worse. But the rest of us don’t have quite so much to atone for. We don’t think we do deserve to die at the hands of these people. I respect you a great deal, Lenie, but this is one issue you can’t be trusted on. You’re too hamstrung by your own guilt.”
She doesn’t speak for a long time. Finally: “Why her? Of all people?”
“Because if we’re at war, we need firebrands. We’ve gotten lazy and complacent and weak; half of us spend most of our waking hours hallucinating out on the ridge. Nolan’s impulsive and not particularly bright, but at least she gets people motivated.”
“And if you’re wrong—even if you’re right—the innocent end up paying right along with the guilty.”
“That’s nothing new,” Lubin says. “And it’s not my problem.”
“Maybe it should be.”
He turns back to his board. The display springs to light, columns of inventory and arcane abbreviations that must have some tactical relevance for the upcoming campaign.
My best friend. I’d trust him with my life, she reminds herself, and repeats the thought for emphasis: with my life.
He’s a sociopath.
He wasn’t born to it. There are ways of telling: a tendency to self-contradiction and malapropism, short attention-span. Gratuitous use of hand gestures during speech. Clarke’s had plenty of time to look it all up. She even got a peek at Lubin’s psych profile back at Sudbury. He doesn’t meet any of the garden-variety criteria except one—and is conscience really so important, after all? Having one doesn’t guarantee goodness; why should its lack make a man evil?
Yet after all the rationalizations, there he is: a man without a conscience, consigning Alyx and everyone like her to a fate which seems to arouse nothing but indifference in him.
He doesn’t care.
He can’t care. He doesn’t have the wiring.
“Huh,” Lubin grunts, staring at the board “That’s interesting.”
He’s brought up a visual of one of Atlantis’s physical plants, a great cylindrical module several stories high. Strange black fluid, a horizontal geyser of ink, jets from an exhaust vent in its side. Charcoal thunderheads billow into the water, eclipsing the view.
“What is that?” Clarke whispers.
Lubin’s pulling up other windows now: seismo, vocoder traffic, a little thumbnail mosaic of surveillance cams spread around inside and outside the complex.
All Atlantis’s inside cams are dead.
Voices are rising on all channels. Three of the outside cameras have gone ink-blind. Lubin brings up the PA menu, speaks calmly into the abyss.
“Attention, everyone. Attention. This is it.
“Atlantis has preempted.”
Now they’re reading perfidy all over the place. Lubin’s switchboard is a mob scene of competing voices, tuned fishheads reporting that their assigned corpses are abruptly up, focused, and definitely in play. It’s as though someone’s kicked over an anthill in there: every brain in Atlantis is suddenly lit up along the whole fight-flight axis.
“Everyone shut up. These are not secure channels.” Lubin’s voice squelches the others like a granite slab grinding over pebbles. “Take your positions. Blackout in sixty.”
Clarke leans over his shoulder and toggles a hardline into corpseland. “Atlantis, what’s going on?” No answer. “Pat? Comm? Anyone, respond.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Lubin says, bringing up sonar. Half the exterior cams are useless by now, enveloped in black fog. But the sonar image is crisp and clear: Atlantis spreads across the volumetric display like a grayscale crystalline chessboard. Black pieces—the two-tone flesh-and-metal echoes of rifter bodies—align themselves in some coordinated tactical ballet. White is nowhere to be seen.
Clarke shakes her head. “There was nothing? No warning at all?” She can’t believe it; there’s no way the corpses could have masked their own anticipation if they’d been planning something. The expectant tension in their own heads would have been obvious to any tuned rifter within twenty meters, well in advance of anything actually happening.