“It’s like they weren’t even expecting it themselves,” she murmurs.
“They probably weren’t,” Lubin says.
“How could they not be? Are you saying it was some kind of accident?”
Lubin, his attention on the board, doesn’t answer. A sudden blue tint suffuses the sonar display. At first it looks as though the whole view has been arbitrarily blue-shifted; but after a moment clear spots appear, like haphazard spatterings of acid eating holes in a colored gel. Within moments most of the tint has corroded away, leaving random scraps of color laying across Atlantis like blue shadows. Except they’re not shadows, Clarke sees now: they’re volumes, little three-dimensional clots of colored shade clinging to bits of hull and outcropping.
A single outside camera, mounted at a panoramic distance, shows a few diffuse glowing spots in a great inky storm front. It’s as though Atlantis were some great bioluminescent Kraken in the throes of a panic attack. All the other outside cams are effectively blind. It doesn’t matter, though. Sonar looks through that smokescreen as if it wasn’t even there. Surely they know that…
“They wouldn’t be this stupid,” Clarke murmurs.
“They’re not,” Lubin says. His fingers dance on the board like manic spiders. A scattering of yellow pinpoints appears on the display. They swell into circles, a series of growing overlapping spotlit areas, each centered on—
Camera locations, Clarke realizes. The yellow areas are those under direct camera surveillance. Or they would be, if not for the smokescreen. Lubin’s obviously based his analysis on geometry and not real-time viz.
“Blackout now.” Lubin’s finger comes down; the white noise generators come up. The chessboard fuzzes with gray static. On the board, rifter icons—naked little blips now, without form or annotation—have formed into a series of five discrete groups around the complex. One blip from each is rising in the water column, climbing above the zone of interference.
You planned it right down to the trim, didn’t you? she thinks. You mapped a whole campaign around this moment and you never told me…
The highest icon flickers and clarifies into two conjoined blips: Creasy, riding a squid. His voice buzzes on the channel a moment later. “This is Dale, on station.”
Another icon clears the noise. “Hannuk.” Two more: “Abra.” “Deb.”
“Avril on station,” Hopkinson reports.
“Hopkinson,” Lubin says. “Forget the Cave; they’ll have relocated. It won’t be obvious. Split up your group, radial search.”
“Yah.” Hopkinson’s icon dives back into static.
“Creasy,” Lubin says, “your people join up with Cheung’s.”
“Right.”
There on the chessboard: at the tip of one of the residential wings, about twenty meters from Hydroponic. A familiar icon there, embedded in an irregular blob of green. The only green on the whole display, in fact. Yellow mixed with blue: so it would be in camera view if not for the ink, and also in—
“What’s blue?” Clarke asks, knowing.
“Sonar shadow.” Lubin doesn’t look back. “Creasy, go to the airlock at the far end of Res-F. They’re coming out there if they’re coming out anywhere.”
“Tune or tangle?” Creasy asks.
“Tune and report. Plant a phone and a charge, but do not detonate unless they are already in the water. Otherwise, acoustic trigger only. Understood?”
“Yeah, if I can even find the fucking place,” Creasy buzzes. “Viz is zero in this shit…” His icon plunges back into the static, cutting an oblique path towards the green zone.
“Cheung, take both groups, same destination. Secure the airlock. Report back when you’re on station.”
“Got it.”
“Yeager, get the cache and drop it twenty meters off the Physical Plant, bearing forty degrees. Everyone else maintain position. Tune in, and use your limpets. Runners, I want three people in a continuous loop, one always in contact. Go.”
The remaining blips swing into motion. Lubin doesn’t pause; he’s already opening another window, this one a rotating architectural animatic of Atlantis punctuated by orange sparks. Clarke recognizes the spot from which one of those little stars is shining: it’s right about where Grace Nolan’s lackey painted an X on the hull.
“How long have you been planning this?” she asks quietly.
“Some time.”
Since well before she even fine-tuned herself, judging by how utterly clueless she’s proven herself to be. “Is everyone involved but me?”
“No.” Lubin studies annotations.
“Ken.”
“I’m busy.”
“How did they do it? Keep from tipping us off like that?”
“Automated trigger,” he says absently. Columns of numbers scroll up a sudden window, too fast for Clarke to make out. “Random number generator, maybe. They have a plan, but nobody knows when it’s going to kick in so there’s no pre-curtain performance anxiety to give the game away.”
“But why would they go to all that trouble unless—”
—they know about fine tuning.
Yves Scanlon, she remembers. Rowan asked about him: He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow, she suggested.
And Lenie Clarke confirmed it, just minutes ago.
And here they are.
She doesn’t know what hurts more: Lubin’s lack of trust, or the hindsight realization of how justified it was.
She’s never felt so tired in her life. Do we really have to do this all over again?
Maybe she said it aloud. Or maybe Lubin just caught some telltale body language from the corner of his eye. At any rate, his hands pause on the board. At last he turns to look at her. His eyes seem strangely translucent by the light of the board.
“We didn’t start it,” he says.
She can only shake her head.
“Choose a side, Lenie. It’s past time.”
For all she knows it’s a trick question; she’s never forgotten what Ken Lubin does to those he considers enemies. But as it turns out, she’s spared the decision. Dale Creasy, big dumb bareknuckled headbasher that he is, rescues her.
“Fuck…” his vocoded voice grinds out over a background of hissing static.
Lubin’s immediately back to business. “Creasy? You made it to Res-F?”
“No shit I made it. I coulda tuned those fuckers in blind, from the Sargasso fucking Sea…”
“Have any of them left the complex?”
“No, I—I don’t think so, I—but fuck, man, there’s a lot of them in there, and—”
“How many, exactly?”
“I don’t know, exactly! Coupla dozen at least. But look, Lubin, there’s somethin’ off about ’em, about the way they send. I’ve never felt it before.”
Lubin takes a breath: Clarke imagines his eyeballs rolling beneath the caps. “Could you be more specific?”
“They’re cold, man. Almost all of ’em are like, fucking ice. I mean, I can tune ’em in, I know they’re there, but I can’t tell what they’re feeling. I don’t know if they’re feeling anything. Maybe they’re doped up on something. I mean, next to these guys you’re a blubbering crybaby…”
Lubin and Clarke exchange looks.
“I mean, no offense,” Creasy buzzes after a moment.
“One of Alyx’s friends had a head cheese,” Clarke says. “She called it a pet…”