“Ken? Ken? Lubin, where the fuck are you?”
“This is Lubin.”
Silence in the water.
“We’ve lost the med hab.” His voice is like rusty iron.
“What—”
“How did—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Lubin snarls across the nightscape.
There’s silence again, almost. A few, on open channels, continue to emit metal groans.
“Evidently an unpacked charge was attached to the hab,” Lubin continues. “It must have been set off by the same signal we used on Atlantis. From this point on, no omnidirectional triggers. There may be other charges set to detonate on multiple pings. Everyone—”
“This is Atlantis speaking.”
The words boom across the seabed like the Voice of God, unsullied by any interference. Ken forgot to black back out, Clarke realizes. Ken’s started shouting at the troops.
Ken’s losing it…
“You may think you are in a position of strength,” the voice continues. “You are not. Even if you destroy this facility, your own deaths are assured.”
She doesn’t recognize the voice. Odd. It speaks with such authority.
“You are infected with Mark II. You are all infected. Mark II is highly contagious during an asymptomatic incubation period of several weeks. Without intervention you will all be dead within two months.
“We have a cure.”
Dead silence. Not even Grace Nolan says I told you so.
“We’ve tripwired all relevant files and cultures to prevent unauthorized access. Kill us and you kill yourselves.”
“Prove it,” Lubin replies.
“Certainly. Just wait a while. Or if you’re feeling impatient, do that mind-reading trick of yours. What do you call it? Tuning in? I’m told it separates the trustworthy from the liars, most of the time.”
Nobody corrects him.
“State your terms,” Lubin says.
“Not to you. We will only negotiate with Lenie Clarke.”
“Lenie Clarke may be dead,” Lubin says. “We haven’t been able to contact her since you blew the res.” He must know better: she’s high in the water, her insides resonating to the faint tapping of click trains. She keeps quiet. Let him play out the game in his own way. It might be his last.
“That would be very bad news for all of us,” Atlantis replies calmly. “Because this offer expires if she’s not at Airlock Six within a half hour. That is all.”
Silence.
“It’s a trick,” Nolan says.
“Hey, you said they had a cure,” someone else buzzes—Clarke can’t tell who, the channels are fuzzing up again. The white noise generators must be back online.
“So what if they do?” Nolan buzzes. “I don’t trust them to share it with us, and I sure as shit don’t trust Lenie fucking Clarke to be my ambassador. How do you think those fuckers found out about fine-tuning in the first place? Every one of our dead is thanks to her.”
Clarke smiles to herself. Such small numbers she concerns herself with. Such a tiny handful of lives. She feels her fingers clenching on the towbar. The squid gently pulls her forward; the water gently tugs her back.
“We can do what they say. We can tune them in, check out the story.” She thinks that’s Gomez, but the interference is rising around her as she travels. She’s lost even the crude intonations of vocoded speech.
A buzz in her jaw: a beep just behind her ear. Someone tagging her on a private channel. Probably Lubin. He’s King Tactical, after all. He’s the one who knows where she is. Nobody else can see beyond the stumps of their own shattered limbs.
“And it proves what? That they’re gonna…” —static— “it to us? Shit, even if they don’t have a cure they’ve probably convinced a bunch of their buddies that they do, just so we won’t be…” Nolan’s voice fades out.
Lubin says something on open channel. Clarke can’t make out the words. The beeping in her head seems more urgent now, although she knows that’s impossible; the ambient hiss is drowning that signal along with all the others.
Nolan again: “Fuck off, Ken. Why we ever liste… you…can’t even outsmart…ing corp…”
Static, pure and random. Light, rising below. Airlock Six is dead ahead, and all the static in the world can’t drown out the single presence waiting behind it.
Clarke can tell by the guilt. There’s only one other person down here with so twisted a footprint.
Baptism
Rowan pulls open the airlock before it’s even finished draining. Seawater cascades around Clarke’s ankles into the wet room.
Clarke strips off her fins and steps clear of the lock. She leaves the rest of her uniform in place, presents the usual shadow-self; only her face flap is unsealed. Rowan stands aside to let her pass. Clarke slings the fins securely across her back and pans the spartan compartment. There’s not a link of preshmesh to be seen. Normally, one whole bulkhead would be lined with diving armor.
“How many have you lost?” she asks softly.
“We don’t know yet. More than these.”
Small potatoes, Clarke reflects. For both of us.
But the war is still young…
“I honestly didn’t know,” Rowan says.
There’s no second sight, here in the near-vacuum of a sea-level atmosphere. Clarke says nothing.
“They didn’t trust me. They still don’t.” Rowan’s eyes flicker to a fleck of brightness up where the bulkhead meets the ceiling: a pinhead lens. Just a few days ago, before the corpses spined up again, rifters would have watched events unfold through that circuit. Now, Rowan’s own kind will be keeping tabs.
She stares at the rifter with a strange, curious intensity that Clarke has never seen before. It takes Clarke a moment to recognize what’s changed; for the first time in Clarke’s memory, Rowan’s eyes have gone dark. The feeds to her ConTacs have been shut off, her gaze stripped of commentary or distraction. There’s nothing in there now but her.
A leash and collar could hardly convey a clearer message.
“Come on,” Rowan says. “They’re in one of the labs.”
Clarke follows her out of the wet room. They turn right down a corridor suffused in bright pink light. Emergency lighting, she realizes; her eyecaps boost it to idiotic nursery ambience. Rowan’s eyes will be serving up the dim insides of a tube, blood-red like the perfused viscera of some man-eating monster.
They turn left at a t-junction, step across the yellowjacket striping of a dropgate.
“So what’s the catch?” she asks. The corpses aren’t going to just hand over their only leverage with no strings attached.
Rowan doesn’t look back. “They didn’t tell me.”
Another corner. They pass an emergency docking hatch set into the outer bulkhead; a smattering of valves and readouts disfigure the wall to one side. For a moment Clarke wonders if Harpodon is affixed to the other side, but no. Wrong section.
Suddenly, Rowan stops and turns.
“Lenie, if anything should—”
Something kicks Atlantis in the side. Somewhere behind them, metal masses collide with a crash.
The pink lights flicker.
“Wha—”
Another kick, harder this time. The deck jumps: Clarke stumbles to the same sound of metal on metal, and this time recognizes it: the dropgates.