“It’s been almost a year since we got a signal from them,” he says. “Could’ve been any time since then.”
“Could’ve been last week,” Clarke remarks. There was once a time when their allies were much more faithful in their correspondence. Even so, extended silence doesn’t always mean anything. You had to wait until no one was listening. You had to be careful not to give the game away. Both corpse and rifter contacts went dark now and then, back in the early days. Even now, after a year of silence, it’s not unreasonable to keep hoping for news, someday. Any day.
Except now, of course. Except from here.
“Two months ago,” Lubin says. “At least.”
She doesn’t ask how he knows. She follows his magnified gaze back to shore.
Oh my God.
“They’re horses,” she whispers, amazed. “Wild horses. Holy shit.”
The animals are close enough now to be unmistakable. An image comes to her, unbidden: Alyx in her sea-floor prison, Alyx saying this is the best place I could possibly be. Clarke wonders what she’d say now, seeing these wild things.
On second thought, it probably wouldn’t impress her. She was a corpse kid, after all. She’d probably toured the world a dozen times before she was eight. Maybe even had a horse of her own.
The herd stampedes along the beach. “What are they doing out here?” Clarke wonders. Sable wasn’t a proper island even back before the rising seas partitioned it; it’s never been more than a glorified sand dune, crawling around the outer edges of the Shelf’s exhausted oil fields under the influence of wind and currents. She can’t even see any trees or shrubs on this particular island, just a mane of reedy grass running along its backbone. It seems absurd that such an insignificant speck of land could support creatures so large.
“Seals, too.” Lubin points along the shore to the north, although whatever he sees is too distant for Clarke’s unmagnified vision. “Birds. Vegetation.”
The dissonance of it sinks in. “Why the sudden interest in wildlife, Ken? I never took you for a nature lover.”
“It’s all healthy,” he says.
“What?”
“No carcasses, no skeletons. Nothing even looks sick.” Lubin slips the binocs from his skull and slides them back into his fanny pack. “The grass is rather brown, but I suspect that’s normal.” He sounds almost disappointed for some—
ßehemoth, she realizes. That’s what he’s looking for. Hoping for. Up here the world burns its hot zones—at least, it burns those small enough to carry any hope of containment in exchange for the lives and land lost to the flame. ßehemoth threatens the entire biosphere, after all; nobody gives a damn about collateral damage when the stakes are that high.
But Sable is healthy. Sable is unburned. Which means the destruction around them has nothing to do with ecological containment.
Someone is hunting them.
Clarke can’t really blame them, whoever they are. She’d have been dying up here with everyone else if the corpses had had their way. Atlantis was only built for the Movers and Shakers of the world; Clarke and her buddies were just another handful of the moved and the shaken as far as that elite was concerned. The only difference was that Achilles Desjardins had told them where the party was, so they could crash it before the lights went out.
So if this is the anger of those left behind, she can hardly begrudge it. She can’t even dismiss it as misplaced. After all, ßehemoth is her fault.
She looks back at the aftermath. Whoever did this isn’t nearly as good as Desjardins was. They’re not bad, mind you; they were smart enough to deduce Atlantis’s general whereabouts, anyway. The variant of ßehemoth they rejigged utterly defeats the retrofitted immunity that was supposed to protect its citizenry. The fact that they even got close enough to seed ß-Max in the right vicinity may have won them the game, judging from the body count that was starting up as Phocoena went into the field.
But they still haven’t found the nest. They prowl the neighborhood, they’ve burned this lonely outpost on the frontier, but after all this time Atlantis itself continues to elude them. Now, Desjardins—it took him less than a week to winnow three hundred and sixty million square kilometers of seabed down to a single set of lats and longs. He not only painted the bullseye, he pulled the strings and erased the tracks and arranged the rides to get them there.
Achilles, my friend, Clarke thinks. We could really use your help about now. But Achilles Desjardins is dead. He died during Rio. Even being CSIRA’s best ’lawbreaker doesn’t do you much good when a plane drops on your head.
For all Clarke knows, he may have been killed by the same people who did this.
Lubin is walking back along the platform. Clarke follows. Wind slices around her, frigid and biting; she could almost swear she feels its teeth through the diveskin, although that must be her imagination. Nearby, some accidental wind-tunnel of pipes and plating moans as if haunted.
“What month is it?” she asks aloud.
“June.” Lubin’s heading for the helipad.
It seems a lot colder than it should be. Maybe this is what passes for balmy since the Gulf Stream shut down. Clarke’s never been able to wrap her head around that paradox: that global warming should somehow have turned eastern Europe into Siberia...
Metal stairs lead up to the pad. But Lubin, reaching them, doesn’t climb; he steps behind them and drops to one knee, intent on the underside of the frame. Clarke bends down at his side. She sees nothing but scraped, painted metal.
Lubin sighs. “You should go back,” he says.
“Not a chance.”
“Past this point I won’t be able to return you. I can afford a forty-six hour delay more than I can afford someone slowing me down once we get to the mainland.”
“We’ve been over this, Ken. What makes you think I’m going to be any easier to convince now?”
“Things are worse than I expected.”
“How, exactly? It’s already the end of the world.”
He points at a spot under the stairs where the paint’s been scraped off.
Clarke shrugs. “I don’t see anything.”
“Right.” Lubin turns and starts back towards the scorched remains of the control hut.
She sets out after him. “So?”
“I left a backup recorder behind. Looked like a rivet.” He brings his hand out, holds thumb and forefinger close together, almost touching, for scale. “Even painted it over. I would never have been able to find it.” The forefinger extends; Lubin’s pointing hand describes an imaginary line between hut and staircase. “Nice short line-of-sight to minimize power consumption. Omnidirectional broadcast; impossible to backtrack. Enough memory for a week’s worth of routine chatter, plus anything they might have sent our way.”
“That’s not much,” Clarke remarks.
“It wasn’t a long-term record. When it ran out of new memory it overwrote the old.”
A black box, then. A moving record of the recent past. “So you were expecting something like this,” she surmises.
“I was expecting that if something happened, I’d at least be able to retrieve some kind of log. I wasn’t expecting to lose the recorder. I was the only one who knew it was here.”
They’ve returned to the radio shack. The blackened door frame still stands, an absurd rectangle rising from the rubble. Lubin, perhaps out of some cryptic respect for standard procedure, passes through it. Clarke simply steps over the knee-high tatters of the nearest wall.