What’s that she’s holding? Clarke wonders. Friedman’s hand—the one that isn’t clasped to her partner’s—is just below the level of the table, out of the camera’s line of sight. She glances down at it, lifts it just barely into view…
And Gene Erickson, sunk deep into induced coma for the sake of his own convalescence, opens his eyes.
Holy shit, Clarke realizes. She tweaked his inhibitors.
She gets to her feet. “I gotta go.”
“Hey, no you don’t.” He reaches up, grabs her hand. “You’re not gonna make me eat all that produce myself, are you?” He smiles, but there’s just the slightest hint of pleading in his voice. “I mean, it has been a while…”
Lenie Clarke has come a long way in the past several years. She’s finally learned, for example, not to get involved with the kind of people who beat the crap out of her.
A pity she hasn’t yet learned how to get excited about any other kind. “I know, Kev. Really, though, right now—”
The panel bleats in front of them. “Lenie Clarke. If Lenie Clarke is anywhere in the circuit, could she please pick up?”
Rowan’s voice. Clarke reaches for the panel. Walsh’s hand falls away.
“Right here.”
“Lenie, do you think you could drop by sometime in the next little while? It’s rather important.”
“Sure.” She kills the connection, fakes an apologetic smile for her lover. “Sorry.”
“Well, you showed her, all right,” Walsh says softly.
“Showed her?”
“Who’s the boss.”
She shrugs. They turn away from each other.
She enters Atlantis through a small service ’lock that doesn’t even rate a number, fifty meters down the hull from Airlock Four. The corridor into which it emerges is cramped and empty. She stalks into more populated areas with her fins slung across her back, a trail of wet footprints commemorating her passage. Corpses in the way stand aside; she barely notices the tightened jaws and stony looks, or even a shit-eating appeasement grin from one of the more submissive members of the conquered tribe.
She knows where Rowan is. That’s not where she’s headed.
Of course Seger gets there first. An alarm must have gone up the moment Erickson’s settings changed; by the time Clarke reaches the medbay, Atlantis’sChief of Medicine is already berating Friedman out in the corridor.
“Your husband is not a toy, Julia. You could have killed him. Is that what you wanted?”
Swirls of scarred flesh curl up around Friedman’s throat, peek out along the wrist where she’s peeled back her diveskin. She bows her head. “I just wanted to talk to him…”
“Well, I hope you had something very important to say. If we’re lucky, you’ve only set his recovery back a few days. If not…” Seger waves an arm toward the medbay hatch; Erickson, safely unconscious again, is partially visible through the opening. “It’s not like you were giving him an antacid, for crying out loud. You were changing his brain chemistry.”
“I’m sorry.” Friedman won’t meet the doctor’s eyes. “I didn’t mean any—”
“I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.” Seger turns and glares at Clarke. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah. Cut her some slack. Her partner was nearly killed today.”
“He was indeed. Twice.” Friedman flinches visibly at Seger’s words. The doctor softens a bit. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
Clarke sighs. “Jerry, it was you people who built panels into our heads in the first place. You can’t complain when someone else figures out how to open them.”
“This” —Seger holds up Friedman’s confiscated remote—“is for use by qualified medical personnel. In anyone else’s hands, no matter how well-intentioned, it could kill.”
She’s overstating, of course. Rifter implants come equipped with failsafes that keep their settings within manufacturer’s specs; you can’t get around those without opening yourself up and tweaking the actual plumbing. Even so, there’s a fair bit of leeway. Back during the revolution, the corpses managed to coax a similar device into spazzing out a couple of rifters stuck in a flooding airlock.
Which is why they are no longer allowed such things. “We need that back,” Clarke says softly.
Seger shakes her head. “Come on, Lenie. You people can hurt yourselves far more with it than we could ever hurt you.”
Clarke holds out her hand. “Then we’ll just have to learn from our mistakes, won’t we?”
“You people are slow learners.”
She’s one to talk. Even after five years, Jerenice Seger can’t quite admit to the existence of the bridle and the bit between her teeth. Going from Top to Bottom is a tough transition for any corpse; doctors are the worst of the lot. It’s almost sad, the devotion with which Seger nurses her god complex.
“Jerry, for the last time. Hand it over.”
A tentative hand brushes against Clarke’s arm. Friedman shakes her head, still looking at the deck. “It’s okay, Lenie. I don’t mind, I don’t need it any more.”
“Julia, you—”
“Please, Lenie. I just want to get out of here.”
She starts away down the corridor. Clarke looks after her, then back at the doctor.
“It’s a medical device,” Seger says.
“It’s a weapon.”
“Was. Once. And if you’ll recall, it didn’t work very well.” Seger shakes her head sadly. “The war’s over, Lenie. It’s been over for years. I won’t start it up again if you won’t. And in the meantime—” She glances down the corridor. “I think your friend could use a bit of support.”
Clarke looks back along the hallway. Friedman has disappeared.
“Yeah. Maybe,” she says noncommittally.
Hope she gets some.
In Beebe Station the Comm cubby was a pipe-infested closet, barely big enough for two. Atlantis’s nerve center is palatial, a twilit grotto bejeweled by readouts and tangled luminous topographies. Tactical maps rotate miraculously in midair or glow from screens painted on the bulkheads. The miracle is not so much the technology that renders these extravagances: the miracle is that Atlantis contains such an obscene surplus of empty space, to be wasted on nothing more than moving light. A cabin would have done as well. A few couches with workpads and tactical contacts could have contained infinite intelligence, bounded in a nutshell. But no. A whole ocean stands on their heads, and these corpses squander volume as if sea-level was two steps down the hall.
Even in exile, they just don’t get it.
Right now the cavern’s fairly empty. Lubin and a few techs cluster at a nearby panel, cleaning up the latest downloads. The place will be full by the time they finish. Corpses gravitate to news of the world like flies to shit.
For now, though, it’s just Lubin’s crowd and Patricia Rowan, over on the far side of the compartment. Cryptic information streams across her contacts, turns her eyes into bright points of mercury. Light from a holo display catches the silver streaking her hair; that and the eyes give her the aspect of some subtle hologram in her own right.
Clarke approaches her. “Airlock Four’s blocked off.”
“They’re scrubbing it down. Everything between there and the infirmary. Jerry’s orders.”
“What for?”
“You know perfectly well. You saw Erickson.”
“Oh, come on. One lousy fish bite and Jerry thinks—”
“She’s not sure of anything yet. She’s just being careful.” A pause, then: “You should have warned us, Lenie.”