Oh Jesus. Oh God.
Luminous metal monsters stride through the wreckage, stabbing at the wounded.
She tries to hold it together. “They’re coming out of the walls, Ken. They were waiting inside, they blew the hull from inside and they’re coming through the walls…”
God damn you, Pat. Was this you? Was this you?
She remembers the lopsided chessboard on Lubin’s display. She remembers black pieces arranging themselves for an easy rout.
Only now does she remember: in chess, white always moves first.
That indifferent, alien intellect is nowhere to be found now. The gels must have turned to homogenous pulp the instant the hull imploded.
There were more than preshmeshed corpses and smart gels packed in F-3’s wet room. There was shrapnel, doubtless arranged in accordance with some theoretical projection of maximum spread. Clarke can see the fragments where they’ve come to rest—on the hull, embedded in ruptured LOX tanks, protruding from the far side of ragged entry wounds torn through the flesh of comrades and rivals. They look like metal daisies, like the blades of tiny perfect windmills. The mere rebound from the implosion would have been enough to set them soaring, to mow down anyone not already sucked to their death at mach speeds or torn apart on the jagged lip of the breach itself.
The smokescreen has all but dispersed.
Lubin’s calling a retreat. Most of those able to respond, already have. The preshmeshed figures clambering along the hulled remains of F-3 have to content themselves with the wounded and the dead. They’re crabs, ungainly and overweighted. Instead of claws they have needles, long, almost surgical things, extending from their gauntlets like tiny lances.
“Lenie. Do you read?”
She floats dumbly overhead, out of reach, watching them stab black bodies. Occasional bubbles erupt from the needle tips, race into the sky like clusters of shuddering silvery mushrooms.
Compressed air, injected into flesh. You can make a weapon out of almost anything.
“Lenie?”
“She could be dead, Ken. I can’t find Dale or Abra either.”
Other voices, too fuzzy to distinguish. Most of the white noise generators are still online, after all.
She tunes in the crabs. She wonders what they must be feeling now. She wonders what she’s feeling, too, but she can’t really tell. Maybe she feels like a head cheese.
The corpses, though, down there in their armor, mopping up. No shortage of feelings there. Determination. A surprising amount of fear. Anger, but distant; it isn’t driving them.
Not as much hate as she would have expected.
She rises. The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis lights the water, deceptively serene. She can barely hear buzzing rifter voices; she can’t make out any words. She can’t tune any of them in. She’s all alone at the bottom of the sea.
Suddenly she rises past some invisible line-of-sight, and her jawbone fills with chatter.
“—the bodies,” Lubin’s saying. “Bring terminals at personal discretion. Garcia’s waiting under Med for triage.”
“Med won’t hold half of us,” someone—oh, it’s Kevin!—buzzes faintly in the distance. “Way too many injured.”
“Anyone from F-3 not injured and not carrying injured, meet at the cache. Hopkinson?”
“Here.”
“Anything?”
“Think so, maybe. We’re getting a whole lot of brains in Res-E. Can’t tell who, but—”
“Yeager and Ng, bring your people straight up forty meters. Don’t change your lats and longs, but I want everybody well away from the hull. Hopkinson, get your people back to the Med Hab.”
“We’re okay—”
“Do it. We need donors.”
“Jesus,” someone says faintly, “We’re fucked…”
“No. They are.”
Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through the mutilating filter of her vocoder.
“Grace, they just—”
“Just what?” she buzzes. “Do you think they’re winning? What are they gonna do for an encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We’ve got enough charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we’re gonna use them.”
“Ken?”
A brief silence.
“Look, Ken,” Nolan buzzes, “I can be at the cache in—”
“Not necessary,” Lubin tells her. “Someone’s already en route.”
“Who’s—”
“Welcome back, by the way,” Lubin says to the anonymous soldier. “You know the target?”
“Yes.” A faint voice, too soft and distorted to pin down.
“The charge has to be locked down within a meter of the mark. Set it and back away fast. Don’t spend any more time than absolutely necessary in proximity to the hull, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Acoustic trigger. I’ll detonate from here. Blackout lifting in ten.”
My God, Clarke thinks, It’s you…
“Everyone at safe-distance,” Lubin reminds the troops. “Blackout lifting now.”
She’s well out of the white noise; there’s no obvious change in ambience. But the next vocoder she hears, still soft, is clearly recognizable.
“It’s down,” Julia Friedman buzzes.
“Back off,” Lubin says. “Forty meters. Stay away from the bottom.”
“Hey Avril,” Friedman says.
“Right here,” Hopkinson answers.
“When you tuned that wing, were there children?”
“Yeah. Yeah, there were.”
“Good,” buzzes Friedman. “Gene always hated kids.”
The channel goes dead.
At first, she thinks the retribution’s gone exactly as expected. The world pulses around her—a dull, almost subsonic drumbeat through brine and flesh and bone—and for all she knows, a hundred or more of the enemy are reduced to bloody paste. She doesn’t know how many rifters died in the first exchange, but surely this restores the lead.
She’s in an old, familiar place where it doesn’t seem to matter much either way.
Even the second explosion—same muffled thump, but softer somehow, more distant—even that doesn’t tip her off immediately. Secondary explosions would almost be inevitable, she imagines—pipes and powerlines suddenly ruptured, a cascade of high-pressure tanks with their feeds compromised—all kinds of consequences could daisy-chain from that initial burst. Bonus points for the home team, probably. Nothing more.
But something in the back of her mind says the second blast just felt wrong—the wrong resonance, perhaps, as if one were to ring a great antique church bell and hear a silvery tinkle. And the voices, when they come back online, are not cheering their latest victory over the rampaging Corpse Hordes, but so full of doubt and uncertainty that not even the vocoders can mask it.
“What the fuck was that—”
“Avril? Did you feel that out your way?”
“Avril? Anybody catching—anyone…”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Gardiner? David? Stan? Anyone—”
“Garcia, are you—I’m not getting—”
“It’s gone. I’m right here, it’s just fucking gone…”
“What are you talking about?”
“The whole bottom of the hab, it’s just—it must’ve set them both—”
“Both what? She only set one charge, and that was on—”