"It's still ßehemoth, more or less," Seger drones in the distance. From Atlantis. From the bolted-down, welded-tight, hermetically-sealed quarantined goddamned safety of fucking Atlantis. "That's why we couldn't pinpoint the nature of Mr. Erickson's infection: he came back positive for ßehemoth but of course we disregarded those findings because we didn't think it could be the problem. But this is a new variant, apparently. Speciation events of this sort are quite common when an organism spreads into new environments. This is basically—"
ßehemoth's evil twin brother, Clarke remembers.
"—ßehemoth Mark 2," Seger finishes.
Julia Friedman drops to her knees and vomits onto the deck
Babel Broadband. An overlapping collage of distorted voices:
"Of course I don't believe them. You saying you do?"
"That's bullshit. If you—"
"They admitted it up front. They didn't have to."
"Yeah, they suddenly come clean at the exact moment Julia goes symptomatic. What a coincidence."
"How'd they know that she—"
"They knew the incubation time. They must have. How else do you explain the timing here, dramatic irony?"
"Yeah, but what are we gonna do?"
They've abandoned the hab. It emptied like a blown ballast tank, rifters spilling onto a seabed already crowded even by dryback standards. Now it hangs above them like a gunmetal planet. Three lamps set around the ventral airlock lay bright overlapping circles onto the substrate. Black bodies swim at the periphery of that light, hints of restless motion behind shark-tooth rows of white, unblinking eyespots. Clarke thinks of hungry animals, kept barely at bay by the light of a campfire.
By rights, she should feel like one of them.
Grace Nolan's no longer in evidence. She disappeared into the darkness a few minutes ago, one supportive arm around Julia Friedman, helping her back home. That act of apparent altruism seems to have netted her extra cred: Chen and Hopkinson are standing in for her on the point-counterpoint. Garcia's raising token questions, but the prevailing mood does not suggest any great willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt.
"Hey, Dimi," Chen buzzes. "How's it going in there?"
"Stinks like a hospital." Alexander's airborne voice makes a conspicuous contrast against the background of waterlogged ones. "Almost done, though. Somebody better be growing me a new skin." He's still inside, sterilizing anything that Friedman or her bodily fluids might have come into contact with. Grace Nolan asked for volunteers.
She's started giving orders. People have started taking them.
"I say we just drill the fuckers." Creasy buzzes from somewhere nearby.
Clarke remembers holes burned through biosteel. "Let's hold off on the whole counterstrike thing at for a bit. It might be tougher for them to find a cure if we smear them into the deck."
"As if they're looking for a fucking cure."
She ignores the remark. "They want blood samples from everyone. Some of the rest of us might be infected. It obviously doesn't show up right away."
"It showed up fast enough with Gene," someone points out.
"Being gutted alive probably increases your level of exposure a bit. But Julia didn't show anything for, what—two weeks?"
"I'm not giving them any blood," Creasy growls with a voice like scrap metal. "They'll be fucking giving blood if they try and make me."
Clarke shakes her head, exasperated. "Dale, they can't make anyone do anything and they know it. They're asking. If you want them to beg, I'm sure it can be arranged. What's your problem? You've been collecting bloods on your own anyway."
"If we could take our tongues off Patricia Rowan's clit for a moment, I have a message from Gene."
Grace Nolan swims into the circle of light like a pitch-black pack animal, asserting dominance. Campfires don't bother her.
"Grace," Chen buzzes. "How's Julia?"
"How do you think? She's sick. But I got her tucked in at least, and the diagnostics are running for all the good they'll do."
"And Gene?" Clarke asks.
"He was awake for a little while. He said, and I quote,I told them those baby-boners did something to me. Maybe they'll believe me when my wife dies."
"Hey," Walsh pipes up. "He's obviously feeling bet—"
"The corpses would never risk spreading something like this without already having a cure," Nolan cuts in. "It could get back to them too easily."
"Right." Creasy again. "So I say we drill the fuckers one bulkhead at a time until they hand it over."
Uncertainty and acquiescence mix in the darkness.
"You know, just to play devil's advocate here, I gotta say there's a slim chance they're telling the truth."
That's Charley Garcia, floating off to the side.
"I mean, bugs mutate, right?" he continues. "Especially when people throw shitloads of drugs at them, and you can bet they bought out the whole pharm when this thing first got out. So who's to say it couldn't have gone from Mark I to ßeta-max all on its own?"
"Fucking big coincidence if you ask me," Creasy buzzes.
Garcia's vocoder ticks, a verbal shrug. "I'm just saying."
"And if they were going to pull some kind of biowar shit, why wait until now?" Clarke adds, grasping the straw. "Why not four years ago?"
"They didn't have ßehemoth four years ago," Nolan says.
Walsh: "They could've brought down a culture."
"What, for old times' sake? fucking nostalgia? They didn't have shit until Gene served it up to 'em warm and steaming."
"You oughtta get out more, Grace," Garcia buzzes. "We've been building bugs from mail-order parts for fifty years. Once they had the genes sequenced, the corpses could've built ßehemoth from scratch any time they felt like it."
"Or anything else, for that matter," Hopkinson adds. "Why use something that takes all this time just to make a few of us sick? Supercol would've dropped us in a day."
"It would've dropped Gene in a day," Nolan buzzes. "Before he had any chance to infect the rest of us. A fast bug wouldn't have a chance out here—we're spread out, we're isolated, we don't even breathe most of the time. Even when we go inside we keep our skins on. This thing has to be slow if it's gonna spread. These stumpfucks know exactly what they're doing."
"Besides," Baker adds, "a Supercol epidemic starts on the bottom of the goddamn ocean and we're not gonna connect the dots? They'd be sockeye the moment they tried."
"They know it, too."
"ßehemoth gives them an alibi, though," Chen says. "Doesn't it?"
Fuck, Jelaine. Clarke's been thinking exactly the same thing. Why'd you have to bring that up?
Nolan grabs the baton in an instant. "That's right. That's right. ßehemoth comes all the way over from Impossible Lake, no way anybodycan accuse them of planting it there—they just tweak it a bit on its way through Atlantis, pass it on to us, and how are we supposed to know the difference?"
"Especially since they conveniently destroyed the samples," Creasy adds.
Clarke shakes her head. "You're a plumber with gills, Dale. You wouldn't have a clue what to do with those samples if Seger handed them to you in a ziplock bag. Same goes for Grace's little science-fair project with the blood."
"So that's your contribution." Nolan twists through the water until she's a couple of meters off Clarke's bow. "None of us poor dumb fishheads got tenure or augments, so we've just gotta trust everything to the wise old gel-jocks who fucked us over in the first place."