And down here in this desert at the bottom of the ocean, in this hand-to-mouth microcosm, how common does something have to be before you’d give one to your ten-year-old daughter as a plaything?
“Go,” Lubin says.
Lubin’s squid is tethered to a cleat just offside the ventral ’lock. Clarke cranks the throttle; the vehicle leaps forward with a hydraulic whine.
Her jawbone vibrates with sudden input. Lubin’s voice fills her head: “Creasy, belay my last order. Do not plant your charge, repeat, no charge. Plant the phone only, and withdraw. Cheung, keep your people at least twenty meters back from the airlock. Do not engage. Clarke is en route. She will advise.”
I will advise, she thinks, and they will tell me to go fuck myself.
She’s navigating blind, by bearing alone. Usually that’s more than enough: at this range Atlantis should be a brightening smudge against the blackness. Now, nothing. Clarke brings up sonar. Green snow fuzzes ten degrees of forward arc: within it, the harder echoes of Corpseland, blurred by interference.
Now, just barely, she can see brief smears of dull light; they vanish when she focuses on them. Experimentally, she ignites her headlight and looks around.
Empty water to port. To starboard the beam sweeps across a billowing storm front of black smoke converging on her own vector. Within seconds she’ll be in the thick of it. She kills the light before the smokescreen has a chance to turn it against her.
Somehow, the blackness beyond her eyecaps darkens a shade. She feels no tug of current, no sudden viscosity upon entering the zone. Now, however, the intermittent flashes are a bit brighter; fugitive glimmers of light through brief imperfections in the cover. None of them last long enough to illuminate more than strobe-frozen instants.
She doesn’t need light. By now, she doesn’t even need sonar: she can feel apprehension rising in the water around her, nervous excitement radiating from the rifters ahead, darker, more distant fears from within the spheres and corridors passing invisibly beneath her.
And something else, something both familiar and alien, something living but not alive.
The ocean hisses and snaps around her, as though she were trapped within a swarm of euphausiids. A click-train rattles faintly against her implants. She almost hears a voice, vocoded, indistinct; she hears no words. Echoes light up her sonar display right across the forward one-eighty, but she’s deep in white noise; she can’t tell whether the contacts number six or sixty.
Fear-stained bravado, just ahead. She pulls hard right, can’t quite avoid the body swimming across her path. The nebula opens a brief, bright eye as they collide.
“Fuck! Clarke, is that y—”
Gone. Near-panic falling astern, but no injury: the brain lights up a certain way when the body breaks. It may have been Baker. It’s getting so hard to tell, against this rising backdrop of icy sentience. Thought without feeling. It spreads out beneath the messy tangle of human emotions like a floor of black obsidian.
The last time she felt a presence like this, it was wired to a live nuke. The last time, there was only one of them.
She pulls the squid into a steep climb. More sonar pings bounce off her implants, a chorus of frightened machine voices rise in her wake. She ignores them. The hissing in her flesh fades with each second. Within a few moments she’s above the worst of it.
“Ken, you there?”
No answer for a moment: this far from the Hab there’s a soundspeed lag. “Report,” He says at last. His voice is burred but understandable.
“They’ve got smart gels down there. A lot of them, I don’t know how many, twenty or thirty maybe. Packed together at the end of the wing, probably right in the wet room. I don’t know how we didn’t pick them up before. Maybe they just...get lost in the background noise until you jam them together.”
Lag. “Any sense of what they’re doing?” Back at Juan de Fuca, they were able to make some pretty shrewd inferences from changes in signal strength.
“No, they’re all just—in there. Thinking all over each other. If there was just one or two I might be able to get some kind of reading, but—”
“They played me,” Lubin says overtop of her.
“Played?” What’s that in his voice? Surprise? Uncertainty? Clarke’s never heard it there before.
“To make me focus on F-3.”
Anger, she realizes.
“But what’s the point?” she asks. “Some kind of bluff, did they think we’d mistake those things for people?” It seems ridiculous; even Creasy knew there was something off, and he’s never met a head cheese before. Then again, what do corpses know about fine-tuning? How would they know the difference?
“Not a diversion,” Lubin murmurs in the void. “No other place they could come out that sonar wouldn’t...”
“Well, what—”
“Pull them back,” he snaps suddenly. “They’re mask—they’re luring us in and masking something. Pull them b—”
The abyss clenches.
It’s a brief squeeze around Clarke’s body, not really painful. Not up here.
In the next instant, a sound: Whoompf. A swirl of turbulence. And suddenly the water’s full of mechanical screams.
She spins. The smokescreen below is in sudden motion, shredded and boiling in the wake of some interior disturbance, lit from within by flickering heat-lightning.
She squeezes the throttle for dear life. The squid drags her down.
“Clarke!” The sound of the detonation has evidently passed the Nerve Hab. “What’s going on?”
A symphony of tearing metal. A chorus of voices in discord. Not so many as there should be, she realizes.
We must have lost a generator, she realizes dully. I can hear them screaming.
I can hear them dying…
And not just hear them. The cries rise in her head before they reach her ears; raw chemical panic lighting up the reptile brain like sodium flares, the smarter mammalian overlay helpless and confused, its vaunted cognition shattering like cheap crystal in the backwash.
“Clarke! Report!”
Anger now, thin veins of grim determination among the panic. Lights shine more brightly through the thinning murk. They’re the wrong size, somehow, the wrong color. Not rifter lamps. Her sonar squeals in the face of some imminent collision: another squid slews by, out of control, its rider luminous with an agony of broken bones.
“It wasn’t me, I swear it! They did it themselves—”
Creasy tumbles away, his pain fading into others’.
Res-F’s hull sprawls across sonar, its smooth contours all erased, jagged edges everywhere: the gaping mouths of caves lined with twisted metal teeth. One of them spits something metallic at her; it bounces off the squid with a clank. Vocoder voices grind and grate on all sides. A gap opens in the tattered cloud-bank ahead: Clarke sees a great lumbering shape, an armored cyclops. Its single eye shines balefully with the wrong kind of light. It reaches for her.
She pulls to port, catches a glimpse of something spinning in the chaos directly ahead. A dark mass thuds flaccidly against the squid’s bow and caroms towards her face. She ducks. A diveskinned arm cuffs her in passing.
“Lenie!”
Dead gray eyes watch, oblivious and indifferent, as she twists away.