It’s a fate that will strike Clarke as quickly as Rowan, if she waits too long. It seems wrong to save herself while Rowan gasps for breath. But Clarke has her own brainstem, and it won’t let sick, irrational guilt stand in the way of its own preservation. She watches as her hands move of their own accord, sealing her face flap, starting up the machinery in her flesh. She abandons Rowan to face her fate alone. Her body floods like the corridor, but to opposite effect. The ocean slides through her chest, sustaining life instead of stealing it. She becomes the mermaid again, while her friend dies before her eyes.
But Rowan’s not giving up, not yet, not yet. The body isn’t resigned no matter what the mind may have accepted. There’s just a small pocket of air up near the ceiling but the corpse’s stiff, clumsy legs are still kicking, hands still clawing against the pipes and why doesn’t she just fucking give up?
Ambient pressure kicks past some critical threshold. Unleashed neurotransmitters sing through the wiring in her head. Suddenly, Lenie Clarke is in Patricia Rowan’s mind. Lenie Clarke is learning how it feels to die.
Goddamn you Pat, why can’t you just give up? How can you do this to me?
She sinks to the bottom of the compartment. She stares resolutely at the deck, her eyelids pinned open, while the swirling turbulence fades by degrees and the roar of inrushing water dies back and all that’s left is that soft, erratic scratching, that pathetic feeble clawing of frozen flesh against biosteel…
Eventually the sound of struggling stops. The vicarious anguish, the sadness and regret go on a little longer. Lenie Clarke waits until the last little bit of Patricia Rowan dies in her head. She lets the silence stretch before tripping her vocoder.
“Grace. Can you hear me?”
Her mechanical voice is passionless and dead level.
“Course you can. I’m going to fucking kill you, Grace.”
Her fins float off to one side, still loosely tethered to her diveskin. Clarke retrieves them, pulls them over her feet.
“There’s a docking hatch right in front of me, Grace. I’m going to open it, and I’m going to come out there and I’m going to gut you like a fish. If I were you I’d start swimming.”
Maybe she already has. At any rate, there’s no answer.
Clarke kicks down the corridor, gaze fixed immovably on the docking hatch. Its sparkling mosaic of readouts, unquenchable even by the Atlantic itself, lights her way.
“Got your head start, Grace? Won’t do you any good.”
Something soft bumps into her from behind. Clarke flinches, wills herself not to look.
“Ready or not, here I come.”
She undogs the hatch.
Tag
There’s nobody out there.
They’ve left evidence behind—a couple of point-welders still squatting against the hull on tripod legs, the limpet transceiver stuck to the alloy a few meters away—but of Nolan and any other perpetrators, there’s no sign. Clarke smiles grimly to herself.
Let them run.
But she can’t find anyone else, either. None of Lubin’s sentries at their assigned posts. Nobody monitoring the surveillance limpets festooning Atlantis in the wake of the Corpses’ exercise in channel-switching. She flies over the very medlab on which, she’s been assured, any number of rifter troops are fine-tuning the would-be hostage-takers lurking within. Nothing. Gantries and habslabs and shadows. Blinking lights in some places, recent darkness in others where the beacons or the portholes have been smashed or blacked out. Epochal darkness everywhere else.
No other rifters, anywhere.
Maybe the corpses had some weapon, something even Ken didn’t suspect. Maybe they touched a button and everyone just vanished…
But no. She can feel the corpses inside, their fear and apprehension and blind pants-pissing desperation radiating a good ten meters into the water. Not the kind of feelings you’d expect in the wake of overwhelming victory. If the corpses even know what’s going on, it’s not making them feel any better.
She kicks off into the abyss, heading for Lubin’s nerve hab. Now, finally, she can tune in faint stirrings from the water ahead. But no: it’s just more of the same. More fear, more uncertainty. How can she still be reading Atlantis from this range? How can these sensations be getting stronger as the corpses recede behind her?
It’s not much of a mystery. Pretending otherwise barely brings enough comfort to justify the effort.
Faint LFAM chatter rises in the water around her. Not much, considering; by now she can feel dozens of rifters, all subdued, all afraid. Hardly any of them speak aloud. A constellation of dim stars pulses faintly ahead. Someone crosses Clarke’s path, ten or fifteen meters ahead, invisible but for a brief eclipse of running lights. His mind quails, washing over hers.
So many of them have collected around the hab. They mill about like stunned fish or merely hang motionless in the water, waiting. Maybe this is all there is, maybe these are all the rifters left in the world. Apprehension hangs about them like a cloud.
Perhaps Grace Nolan is here. Clarke feels cold, cleansing anger at the prospect. A dozen rifters turn at her thoughts and stare with dead white eyes.
“What’s going on?” Clarke buzzes. “Where is she?”
“Fuck off, Len. We’ve got bigger problems right now.” She doesn’t recognize the speaker.
Clarke swims toward the hab; most of the rifters part for her. Half a dozen block her way. Gomez. Cramer. Others in back, too black and distant to recognize in the brainstem ambience.
“Is she in there?” Clarke says.
“You back off,” Cramer tells her. “You not be giving no orders here.”
“Oh, I’m not ordering anybody. It’s completely up to you. You can either get out of my way, or try and stop me.”
“Is that Lenie?” Lubin’s voice, air-normal channel.
“Yeah,” Cramer buzzes after a moment. “She be pretty—”
“Let her in,” Lubin says.
It’s a private party, by invitation only. Ken Lubin. Jelaine Chen and Dimitri Alexander. Avril Hopkinson.
Grace Nolan.
Lubin doesn’t even look around as Clarke climbs up from the wet room. “Deal with it later. We need you in on this, Len, but we need Grace too. Either of you lays a hand on the other, I’ll take my own measures.”
“Understood,” Nolan says evenly.
Clarke looks at her, and says nothing.
“So.” Lubin returns his attention to the monitor. “Where were we?”
“I’m pretty sure it didn’t see us,” Chen says. “It was too preoccupied with the site itself, and that model doesn’t have wraparound vision.” She taps the screen twice in quick succession; the image at its center freezes and zooms.
It looks like your garden-variety squid, but with a couple of manipulator arms at the front end and no towbar at the back. An AUV of some kind. It’s obviously not from around here.
Hopkinson sucks breath through clenched teeth. “That’s it, then. They found us.”
“Maybe not,” Chen says. “You can’t teleop something that deep, not in that kind of terrain. It had to be running on its own. Whoever sent it wouldn’t know what it found until it got back to the surface.”
“Or until it doesn’t report back on schedule.”
Chen shrugs. “It’s a big, dangerous ocean. It doesn’t come back, they chalk it up to a mudslide or a faulty nav chip. No reason to suspect we had anything to do with it.”