"Mmm."
"Of course, we're basing the whole theory on a couple of samples that got dragged up without any protection against temperature or pressure changes." Jarvis snorts. "Might as well have sent them in a paper bag. But this time we're doing it right— hey, is that light I see down there?"
There's a vague yellow glow smudging the darkness directly below. Joel calls up a topographic display: Beebe. The geothermal array over at the rift proper lays out a sequence of hard green echoes bearing 340°. And just to the left of that, about a hundred meters off the east-most generator, something squirts a unique acoustic signature at four-second intervals.
Joel taps commands to the dive planes. The 'scaphe pulls out of its spiral and coasts off to the northeast. Beebe Station, never more than a bright stain, fades to stern.
The ocean floor resolves suddenly in the 'scaphe's headlights; bone-gray ooze slides past, occasional outcroppings, great squashed marshmallows of lava and pumice. In the cockpit a flashing point of light slo-mo's towards the center of the topographic display.
Something charges them from overhead; the dull wet sound of its impact reverberates briefly through the hull. Joel looks up through the dorsal port but sees nothing. Several more impacts, staggered. The 'scaphe whirs implacably onward.
"There."
It looks almost like a lifeboat canister, three meters long. Readouts twinkle from a panel on one rounded end. It's resting on a carpet of giant tubeworms, their feathery crowns extended in full filter-feeding mode. Joel thinks of the baby Moses, nestled in a clump of mutant bulrushes.
"Wait a second," Jarvis says. "Kill the lights first."
"What for?"
"You don't need them, do you?"
"Well, no. I can use instruments if I have to. But why—"
"Just do it, okay?" Jarvis, the chatterbox, is suddenly all business.
Darkness floods the cockpit, retreats a bit before the glow of the readouts. Joel grabs a pair of eyephones off a hook to his left. The sea floor reappears before him courtesy of the ventral photoamps, faded to blue and black.
He coaxes the 'scaphe into position directly above the canister, listens to the clank and creak of grapples flexing beneath the deck; metal claws the color of slate extend across his field of view.
"Spray it before you pick it up," Jarvis says.
Joel reaches out and taps the control codes without looking. The 'phones show him a nozzle extending from Jarvis's tank, taking aim like a skinny cobra.
"Do it."
The nozzle ejaculates gray-blue murk, sprays back and forth along the length of the canister, sweeping the benthos on either side. The tubeworms yank back into their tunnels and shut the doors; the whole featherduster forest vanishes in an instant, leaving a crowd of sealed leathery tubes.
The nozzle spews its venom.
One of the tubes opens, almost hesitantly. Something dark and stringy drifts out, twitching. The gray plume sweeps across it; it sags, lifeless, across the sill of its burrow. Other tubes are opening now. Invertebrate corpses slump back into sight.
"What's in this stuff?" Joel whispers.
"Cyanide. Rotenone. Some other things. Sort of a cocktail."
The nozzle sputters for a few seconds and runs dry. Automatically, Joel retracts it.
"Okay," Jarvis says. "Let's grab it and go home."
Joel doesn't move.
"Hey," Jarvis says.
Joel shakes his head, plays the machinery. The 'scaphe extends its arms in a metal hug, pulls the canister off the bottom. Joel strips the 'phones from his eyes and taps the controls. They begin rising.
"That was a pretty thorough rinse," Joel remarks after a while.
"Yes. Well, the sample's costing us a fair bit. Don't want to contaminate it."
"I see."
"You can turn the lights back on," Jarvis says. "How long before we break the surface?"
Joel trips the floods. "Twenty minutes. Half hour."
"I hope the lifter pilot doesn't get too bored." Jarvis is all chummy again.
"There is no pilot. It's a smart gel."
"Really? You don't say." Jarvis frowns. "Those are scary things, those gels. You know one suffocated a bunch of people in London a while back?"
Yes, Joel's about to say, but Jarvis is back in spew mode. "No shit. It was running the subway system over there, perfect operational record, and then one day it just forgets to crank up the ventilators when it's supposed to. Train slides into station fifteen meters underground, everybody gets out, no air, boom."
Joel's heard this before. The punchline's got something to do with a broken clock, if he remembers it right.
"These things teach themselves from experience, right?" Jarvis continues. "So everyone just assumed it had learned to cue the ventilators on something obvious. Body heat, motion, CO2 levels, you know. Turns out instead it was watching a clock on the wall. Train arrival correlated with a predictable subset of patterns on the digital display, so it started the fans whenever it saw one of those patterns."
"Yeah. That's right." Joel shakes his head. "And vandals had smashed the clock, or something."
"Hey. You did hear about it."
"Jarvis, that story's ten years old if it's a day. That was way back when they were starting out with these things. Those gels have been debugged from the molecules up since then."
"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"
"Because a gel's been running the lifter for the better part of a year now, and it's had plenty of opportunity to fuck up. It hasn't."
"So you like these things?"
"Fuck no," Joel says, thinking about Ray Stericker. Thinking about himself. "I'd like 'em a lot better if they did screw up sometimes, you know?"
"Well, I don't like 'em or trust 'em. You've got to wonder what they're up to."
Joel nods, distracted by Jarvis' digression. But then his mind returns to dead tube worms, and undeclared no-dive zones, and an anonymous canister drenched with enough poison to kill a fucking city.
I've got to wonder what all of us are.
Ghosts
It's hideous.
Nearly a meter across. Probably smaller when Clarke started working on it, but it's a real monster now. Scanlon thinks back to his v-school days, and remembers: starfish are supposed to be all in one plane. Flat disks with arms. Not this one. Clarke has grafted bits and pieces together at all angles and produced a crawling Gordian knot, some pieces red, some purple, some white. Scanlon thinks the original body may have been orange, before.
"They regenerate," she buzzes at his shoulder. "And they've got really primitive immune systems, so there's no tissue rejection problems to speak of. It makes them easier to fix if something goes wrong with them."
Fix. As if this is actually some sort of improvement. "So, it was broken?" Scanlon asks. "What was wrong with it, exactly?"
"It was scratched. It had this cut on its back. And there was another starfish nearby, all torn up. Way too far gone for even me to help, but I figured I could use some of the pieces to patch this little guy together."
This little guy. This little guy drags itself around between them in slow pathetic circles, leaving tangled tracks in the mud. Filaments of parasitic fungus trail from ragged seams, not quite healed. Extra limbs, asymmetrically grafted, catch on rocks; the body lurches, perpetually unstable.