"It's like a— a carousel," Clarke buzzes, remembering an old picture from an even older time. "Without horses…"
"Don't block those beams," Lubin buzzes. He's hanging off to one side, aiming a sonar pistol at the structure. "They're too weak to hurt you unless you get it in the eye, but you don't want to interfere with what they're doing."
"And that is?" Brander says.
Lubin doesn't answer.
What in the world— But Clarke's confusion is only partly directed at the mechanism before her. The rest dwells on a disorienting sense of alien cognition, very strong now, not her, not Brander, but somehow familiar.
Ken? That you?
"This isn't what we saw on sonar," Brander's saying. Clarke feels his confusion even as he talks over it. "Whatever we saw was moving around."
"Whatever we saw was probably planting this," Lubin buzzes. "It's long gone by now."
"But what is…" Brander's voice trails down to a mechanical croak.
No. It's not Lubin. She knows that now.
"It's thinking," she says. "It's alive."
Lubin's got another instrument out now. Clarke can't see the visual readout but its telltale tic tic ticking carries clearly through the water.
"It's radioactive," he says.
Alice Nakata's voice comes to them in the endless darkness between Beebe and the Land of the Carousel.
"— Judy—" it whispers, almost too faint to make out. " — scatter— lay—"
"Alice?" Clarke's got her vocoder cranked loud enough to hurt her own ears. "We can't hear you. Say again?"
"— just— no sign—"
Clarke can barely distinguish the words. Somehow, though, she can hear the fear in them.
A small tremor shudders past, raising clouds of mud and swamping Nakata's signal. Lubin throttles up his squid and pulls away. Clarke and Brander follow suit. Somewhere in the darkness ahead, Beebe draws closer in decibel fractions.
The next words they hear manage to cut through the noise: "Judy's gone!"
"Gone?" Brander echoes. "Gone where?"
"She just disappeared!" The voice hisses softly from every direction. "I was talking to her. She was up above the deep scattering layer, she was— I was telling her about the signal we saw and she said she saw something too and then she was gone…"
"Did you check sonar?" Lubin wants to know.
"Yes! Yes of course I checked the sonar!" Nakata's words are increasingly clear. "As soon as she was cut off I checked but I saw nothing for sure. There was something, maybe, but the scattering layer is very thick today, I could not be sure. And it's been fifteen minutes now and she still hasn't come back…"
"Sonar wouldn't pick her up anyway," Brander says softly. "Not through the DSL."
Lubin ignores him. "Listen, Alice. Did she say what she saw?"
"No. Just something, she said, and then I heard nothing more."
"Your sonar contact. How big?"
"I don't know! It was just there for a second, and the layer—"
"Could it have been a sub? Alice?"
"I don't know!" the voice cries, disembodied and anguished. "Why would it? Why would anyone?"
Nobody answers. The squids race on.
Ecdysis
They dump her out of the airlock, still caught in the tangleweb. She knows better than to fight under these conditions, but the situation's got to change pretty soon. She thinks they may have tried gassing her in the 'lock. Why else would they leave their headsets on after the lock had drained? What about that faint hiss that lasted a few seconds too long after blowdown? It's a pretty subtle cue, but you don't spend most of a year on the rift without learning what an airlock sounds like. There was something a bit off about that one.
No matter. You'd be surprised how much O2 can be electrolyzed from just the little bit of water left sloshing around in the ol' thoracic plumbing. Judy Caraco can hold her breath until the cows come home, whatever the fuck that means. And now, maybe they think their gas-chamber-that-blows-like-an-airlock has got her doped or unconscious or just very laid back. Maybe now they'll take her out of this fucking net.
She waits, limp. Sure enough there's a soft electrical cackle and the web falls away, all those sticky molecular tails polarizing flat like Velcro slicking down to cat fur. She stares out through glassy unblinking eyecaps— no cues they can read there— and counts three, with maybe more behind her.
They're zombies, or something.
Their skin looks rotten with jaundice. Fingernails are barely distinguishable from fingers. Faces are slightly distorted, blurred behind stretched, yellowish membrane. Waxy, dark ovals protrude through the film where their mouths should be.
Body condoms, Caraco realizes after a moment. What is this? Do they think I'm contagious?
And a moment later: Am I?
One of them reaches towards her holding something like a handgun.
She lashes out with one arm. She'd rather have kicked— more strength in the legs— but the refsuckers that brought her in didn't bother taking off her flippers. She connects: a nose, it feels like. A nose under latex. A satisfying crunch. Someone's found sudden cause to regret their own presumption.
There's a moment's shocked silence. Caraco uses it, flips onto her side and swings one flippered foot backwards, heel first, into the back of someone's knee. A woman cries out, a startled face topples past, a smear of red hair plastered against its cheek, and Judy Caraco is reaching down to get those big clown-foot flippers off in time to—
The tip of a shockprod hovers ten centimeters from her nose. It doesn't waver a millimeter. After a moment's indecision— how far can I push this, anyway? — Caraco stops moving.
"Get up," says the man with the prod. She can barely see, through the condom, shadows where his eyes should be.
Slowly, she takes off her fins and stands. She never had a chance, of course. She knew that all along. But they obviously want her alive for something, or they would never have bothered bringing her on board. And she, in turn, wants to make it clear that these fuckers are not going to intimidate her, no matter how many of them there are.
There's catharsis to be had in even a losing fight.
"Calm down," the man says— one of four, she sees now, including the one backing out of the compartment with a red stain spreading under his caul. "We're not trying to hurt you. But you know you shouldn't have tried to leave."
"Leave?" His clothes— all of their clothes— are uniform but not uniforms: loose-fitting white jumpsuits with an unmistakable look of disposability. No insignia. No name tags. Caraco turns her attention to the sub itself.
"Now we're going to get you out of that diveskin," the prodmaster continues. "And we're going to give you a quick medical workup. Nothing too intrusive, I assure you."
Not a large craft, judging from the curvature of the bulkhead. But fast. Caraco knew that from the moment it resolved out of the murk above her. She didn't see much, then, but she saw enough. This boat has wings. It could lap an orca on steroids.
"Who are you guys?" she asks.
"Your cooperation would make us all very grateful," Prodmaster says, as if she hasn't spoken, "And then maybe you can tell us exactly what you're trying to escape from out here in the middle of the Pacific."