Just like that, she lost the urge to breathe.
The descent continued. Lubin leaned against the wall of the elevator, his face a bloody cyclops mask. Clarke felt warm wetness on her upper lip: her nose was running. She reached up and gave it a scratch, inconspicuously jamming the plug in her left nostril tight against the leak.
Suddenly her body thrummed, deep inside, an almost subsonic quaking that vibrated her bones as though they were the parts of some great bass instrument. Faint nausea struck her in the throat. Her bowels quavered.
The two most likely options, Lubin had mused, are gas and infrasound.
She didn't know if gas was in Desjardins's arsenal—for all she knew the air around them was already saturated. But this was obviously some kind of squawkbox. The sound dish must stretch across the whole ceiling of the elevator, or maybe beneath the floor. The walls focused its vibrations, built resonances within the cage. The sound would be tuned to build intolerable harmonics in the lungs and middle ears, in the sinuses and trachea.
It made her sick even with her airways and hard cavities flooded; she could scarcely imagine the impact on unbuttressed flesh. The implants didn't deal with gastrointestinal gases—deep-sea pressure collapsed those soft pockets down with no ill effect—and acoustic attacks were generally tuned to harder, more predictable air spaces anyway. Desjardins's squawkbox was doing something down there, though. It was all she could do to keep from vomiting saline all over the compartment, from shitting in her diveskin. Any dryback would be on the floor by now, soiled and retching or unconscious. Clarke clenched at both ends and hung on.
The elevator stopped. The lights went out.
He knows, she thought. He figured it out, of course he figured it out. How could we think he wouldn't? How could he not notice?
Any second the elevator would lurched back into motion, drag them up through this ruined, booby-trapped derelict where sixty-five floors of countermeasures would turn them into—
Her head cleared. Her bones stopped tingling. Her bowels returned to the fold.
"Okay, guys." Desjardins's voice was tinny and distant in Clarke's flooded ears. "End of the line."
The doors slid open.
An oasis of bright machinery on a vast dark plain. That's what naked eyes would have seen: the Second Coming perhaps, a Christ-figure bathed in light and technology while all around was an infinite void.
To Lenie Clarke there was no darkness. The void was a converted parking garage, an empty gray cavern stretching half a city block on a side. Evenly-spaced rows of support pylons held the ceiling from the floor. Plumbing and fiberop emerged from the walls, crawled along their surfaces like a webbing of sparse vines. Cables converged into a loosely-bound trunk, winding along the floor to a horseshoe of workstations lit by chemical lightstrips.
Christ was someone Lenie Clarke had met before. She'd first encountered him in darkness much deeper than this, a prisoner of Ken Lubin. Back then, Achilles Desjardins had been a man convinced he was about to die.
It had been so much easier to read him, then.
Clotting blood cracked around Lubin's lips. His chest rose. Clarke shut down her own implants, yanking the plugs from her nose before the tide had fully receded within her. In the center of the room, in the heart of a high-tech horseshoe, Desjardins watched them approach.
"I thought I could make up for it," he said.
In some strange, twisted way it was actually good to see him again.
"For being a monster," he explained, as if someone had asked. "Why I joined the Patrol, you know? I couldn't change what I was, but I thought—you know, if I helped save the world, maybe that could make up for it somehow." His mouth spread in a rueful smile. "Pretty stupid, right? Look where it got me."
"Look where it got everyone," Lubin said.
Desjardins's smile vanished. There was no shielding on his eyes, and yet somehow he was suddenly as opaque as any rifter.
Please, Clarke thought. Let this all be some monstrous, stupid mistake. Tell us we've misread everything. Please. Prove us wrong.
"I know why you're here," he said, looking at Lubin.
"You let us in anyway," Lubin observed.
"Well, I'd hoped to be at a bit more of an advantage by now, but whatever. Nice trick with the implants, by the way. I didn't even realise they'd work without your diveskins sealed up. Pretty stupid mistake for Achilles the Master Pattern-Matcher, eh?" He shrugged. "I've had a lot on my mind lately."
"You let us in," Lubin repeated.
Desjardins nodded. "Yeah. That's far enough, by the way."
They were four meters from his fort. Lubin stopped. Clarke followed suit.
"You want us to kill you?" she asked. "Is that it?"
"Suicide By Rifter, huh?" He snorted a soft laugh. "There'd be a certain poetry to that, I guess. But no."
"What, then?"
He cocked his head; the gesture made him look about eight years old. "You were the ones who pulled that kin-selection trick with my Lenies, weren't you?"
Clarke nodded, swallowing on the realization: So he's behind those too.
He's guilty after all….
"I figured," Desjardins admitted. "It's the kind of thing that would only occur to someone who knew where they came from. Not many of those left up here. And the thing of it is, it's easy enough to do but it's not so simple to undo." He looked hopefully at Lubin. "But you said you knew how to—?"
Lubin bared his teeth in a bloody rictus. "I lied."
"Yeah. I kind of figured that too." Desjardins shrugged. "So I guess there's only one thing left to talk about, isn't there?"
Clarke shook her head. "What are you—"
Lubin tensed beside her. Desjardins's eyes flickered to the side for the merest instant; cued, the surface of a nearby wall sparkled and brightened before them. The image that resolved on the smart paint was hazy but instantly recognizable: a sonar composite.
"It's Atlantis," Clarke said, suddenly uncertain.
"I see it," Lubin said.
"Not real-time, of course," the 'lawbreaker explained. "The baud rate's a fucking trickle, and with all the range and cover issues I can only sneak in and grab a shot like this once in a while. But you get the idea."
Lubin stood motionless. "You're lying."
"Word of advice, Ken. You know how some of your people kind of just go off the deep end and wander into the black? You really shouldn't let them take squids when they go. You never know where their security transponders might end up."
"No." Clarke shook her head. "You? It was you down there?" Not Grace. Not Seger. Not the corpses or the rifters or the M&Ms or even two lousy guys on a boat.
You. All along.
"I can't take all the credit," Desjardins admitted. "Alice helped me tweak ßehemoth."
"Reluctantly, I'd guess," Lubin said.
Oh, Achilles. One chance to fix the mess I made and you fucked it up. One chance to make peace and you threaten everyone I ever knew. One lousy, faint hope, and you—
How dare you. How dareyou.
A thin, final straw vanished in her hand.
She stepped forward. Lubin reached out with one mutilated hand, and held her back.
Desjardins ignored her. "I'm not an idiot, Ken. You're not the main attack force, you're just all you could scrape together on short notice. But you're not an idiot either, so there are reinforcements on the way." He held up his hand to preempt any protest. "That's okay, Ken, really. I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, and I took all the necessary precautions. Although thanks to you, I do seem to have lost a certain finesse when it comes to my big guns…"