They, too, owe their voices to imperfect machinery.
Clarke calls the meeting to order with a question: “Is Julia here?”
“She’s looking on Gene,” Nolan buzzes overhead. “I’ll fill her in.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Stable. Still unconscious. Been too long, if you ask me.”
“Getting dragged twenty klicks with your guts hanging out, it’s pretty much a miracle that he’s even alive,” Yeager chimes in.
“Yeah,” Nolan says, “or maybe Seger’s deliberately keeping him under. Julia says—”
Clarke breaks in: “Don’t we have a tap on the telemetry from that line?”
“Not any more.”
“What’s Gene still doing in corpseland anyway?” Chen wonders. “He hates it in there. We’ve got our own med hab.”
“He’s quarantined,” Nolan says. “Seger’s thinking ßehemoth.”
Shadows shift at this news. Obviously not all the assembled are fully up to speed.
“Shit.” Charley Garcia fades into half-view. “How’s that even possible? I thought—”
“Nothing’s certain yet,” Clarke buzzes.
“Certain?” A silhouette glides across the circle, briefly eclipsing the sapphire embers on the seabed. Clarke recognizes Dale Creasy. This is first time she’s seen him for days; she was starting to think he’d gone native.
“Fuck, there’s even a chance,” he continues. “I mean, ßehemoth—”
She decides to nip it in the bud. “So what if it’s ßehemoth?”
A school of pale eyes turn in her direction.
“We’re immune, remember?” she reminds them. “Anybody down here not get the treatments?”
Lubin’s windchimes groan softly. Nobody else speaks.
“So why should we care?” Clarke asks.
It’s supposed to be rhetorical. Garcia answers anyway: “Because the treatments only stop ßehemoth from turning our guts to mush. They don’t stop it from turning little harmless fish into big nasty motherfucking fish that tear into anything that moves.”
“Gene was attacked twenty klicks away.”
“Lenie, we’re moving there. It’s gonna be right in our back yard.”
“Forget there. Who’s to say it hasn’t reached here already?” Alexander wonders.
“Nobody’s been nailed around here,” Creasy says.
“We’ve lost some natives.”
Creasy waves an arm in a barely-visible gesture of dismissal. “Natives. Don’t mean shit.”
“Maybe we should stop sleeping outside, for a while at least…”
“Crap to that. I can’t sleep in a stinking hab.”
“Fine. Get yourself eaten.”
“Lenie?” Chen again. “You’ve messed with sea monsters before.”
“I never saw what got Gene,” Clarke says, “but the fish back at Channer, they were—flimsy. Big and mean, but sometimes their teeth would break on you when they bit. Missing some kind of trace nutrient, I think. You could tear them apart with your bare hands.”
“This thing pretty much tore Gene apart,” says a voice Clarke can’t pin down.
“I said sometimes,” she emphasizes. “But yeah—they could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous, felch.” Creasy growls in metal. “Could they have pulled that number on Gene?”
“Yes,” says Ken Lubin.
He takes center stage. A cone of light flares from his forehead to his forearm. He holds his hand out like a beggar’s, its fingers curled slightly around something laying across the palm.
“Holy shit,” buzzes Creasy, suddenly subdued.
“Where’d that come from?” Chen asks.
“Seger pulled it out of Erickson before she glued him up,” Lubin says.
“Doesn’t look especially flimsy to me.”
“It is, rather,” Lubin remarks. “This is the part that broke off, in fact. Between the ribs.”
“What, you mean that’s just the tip?” Garcia says.
“Looks like a fucking stiletto,” Nolan buzzes softly.
Chen’s mask swings between Clarke and Lubin. “When you were at Channer. You slept outside with these mothers?”
“Sometimes,” Clarke shrugs. “Assuming this is the same thing, which I—”
“And they didn’t try to eat you?”
“They keyed on the light. As long as you kept your lamps off, they pretty much left you alone.”
“Well, shit,” Creasy says. “No problem, then.”
Lubin’s headlamp sweeps across the assembled rifters and settles on Chen. “You were on a telemetry run when Erickson was attacked?”
Chen nods. “We never got the download, though.”
“So someone needs to make another trip out there anyway. And since Lenie and I have experience with this kind of thing...”
His beam hits Clarke full in the face. The world collapses down to a small bright sun floating in a black void.
Clarke raises her hand against the brilliance. “Turn that somewhere else, will you?”
Darkness returns. The rest of the world comes back into dim, dark focus. Maybe I could just swim away, she muses as her eyecaps readjust. Maybe no one would notice. But that’s bullshit and she knows it. Ken Lubin has just picked her out of the crowd; there’s no easy way to get out of this. And besides, he’s right. They’re the only two that have been down this road before. The only two still alive, at least.
Thanks a lot, Ken.
“Fine,” she says at last.
Zombie
Twenty kilometers separate Atlantis and Impossible Lake. Not far enough for those who still think in dryback terms. A mere twenty klicks from the bull’s-eye? What kind of safety margin is that? Back on shore the most simpleminded drone wouldn’t be fooled by such a trifling displacement: finding the target missing, it would rise up and partition the world into a concentric gridwork, relentlessly checking off one quadrate after another until some inevitable telltale gave the game away. Shit, most machinery could just sit at the center of the search zone and see twenty kilometers in any direction.
Even in the midwaters of the open ocean, twenty kilometers is no safe distance. No substrate exists there but water itself, no topography but gyres and seiches and Langmuir cells, thermoclines and haloclines that reflect and amplify as well as mask. The cavitation of submarines might propagate down vast distances, the miniscule turbulence of their passing detectable long after the vessels themselves are gone. Not even stealthed subs can avoid heating the water some infinitesimal amount; dolphins and machinery, hot on the trail, can tell the difference.
But on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, twenty kilometers might as well be twenty parsecs. Light has no chance: the sun itself barely penetrates a few hundred meters from the surface. Hydrothermal vents throw up their corrosive vomit along oozing seams of fresh rock. Seafloor spreading sets the very floor of the world to grumbling, mountains pushing against each other in their millennial game of kick-the-continents. Topography that shames the Himalayas cascades along a jagged fracture splitting the crust from pole to pole. The ambience of the Ridge drowns out anything Atlantis might let slip, along any spectrum you’d care to name.