"There's someone else," Clarke buzzes back. "Rama Bhanderi."
Sudden, complete silence. Clarke can barely believe she said it herself.
Chen's vocoder stutters in awkward preamble. "Uh, Len. Rama went native."
"Not yet. Not completely. Borderline at most."
"Bhanderi?" The water vibrates with Nolan's mechanical derision. "He's a fish by now!"
"He's still coherent," Clarke insisted. "I talked to him just the other day. We can bring him back."
"Lenie," Walsh says, "nobody's ever—"
"Bhanderi does know his shit," Garcia cuts in. "Used to, anyway."
"Literally," Creasy adds. "I heard he tweaked E. coli to secrete psychoactives. You walk around with that shit in your gut, you're in permanent self-sustaining neverland." Grace Nolan turns and stares at him; Creasy doesn't take the hint. "He had some of his customers eating out of their own ends, just for the feedback high."
"Great," Nolan buzzes. "A drooling idiot and a fecal chemist. Our problems are over."
"All I'm saying is, we don't want to cut our own throats," Clarke argues. "If the corpses aren't lying to us, they're our best chance at beating this thing."
Cheung: "You're saying we should trust them?"
"I'm saying maybe we don't have to. I'm saying, give me a chance to talk to Rama and see if he can help. If not, we can always blow up Atlantis next week."
Nolan cuts the water with her hand. "His fucking mind is gone!"
"He had enough of it left to tell me what happened at the woodpile," Clarke buzzes quietly.
Nolan stares at Clarke, a sudden, indefinable tension in the body behind the mask.
"Actually," Garcia remarks from offside, "I think I might have to side with Lenie on this one."
"I don't," Creasy responds instantly.
"Probably couldn't hurt to check it out." Hopkinson's voice vibrates out from somewhere in the cheap seats. "Like Lenie says, we can always kill them later."
It's not exactly momentum. Clarke runs with it anyway. "What are they going to do, hold their breath and make a mad dash for the surface? We can afford to wait."
"Can Gene afford to wait? Can Julia?" Nolan looks around the circle. "How long do any of us have?"
"And if you're wrong, you'll kill every last one of those fuckers and then find out they were trying to help us after all." Clarke shakes her head. "No. I won't let you."
"You won't l—"
Clarke cranks the volume a notch and cuts her off. "This is the plan, people. Everybody gives blood if they haven't already. I'll track down Rama and see if I can talk him into helping. Nobody fucks with the corpses in the meantime."
This is it, she thinks. Raise or call. The moment stretches.
Nolan looks around at the assembly. Evidently she doesn't like what she sees. "Fine," she buzzes at last. "All you happy little r's and K's can do what you like. I know what I'm gonna do."
"You," Clarke tells her, "are going to back off, and shut up, and not do a single fucking thing until we get some information we can count on. And until then, Grace, if I find you within fifty meters of Atlantis or Rama Bhanderi, I will personally rip the tubes out of your chest."
Suddenly they're eyecap to eyecap. "You're talking pretty big for someone who doesn't have her pet psycho backing her up." Nolan's vocoder is very low; her words are mechanical whispers, meant for Clarke alone. "Where's your bodyguard, corpsefucker?"
"Don't need one," Clarke buzzes evenly. "If you don't believe me, stop talking out your ass and make a fucking move."
Nolan hangs in the water, unmoving. Her vocoder tick-tick-ticks like a Geiger counter.
"Hey, Grace," Chen buzzes hesitantly from the sidelines. "Really, you know? Can't hurt to try."
Nolan doesn't appear to have heard her. She doesn't answer for the longest time. Then, finally, she shakes her head.
"Fuck it. Try, then."
Clarke lets the silence resume for a few more seconds. Then she turns and slowly, deliberately, fins out of the light. She doesn't look back; hopefully, the rest of the pack will read it as an act of supreme confidence. But inside she's pissing herself. Inside, she only wants to run— from this new-and-improved reminder of her own virulent past, from the tide and the tables turning against her. She wants to just dive off the Ridge and go native, keep going until hunger and isolation leave her brain as smooth and flat and reptilian as Bhanderi's might be by now. She wants nothing more than to just give in.
She swims into the darkness, and hopes the others do likewise. Before Grace Nolan can change their minds.
She chooses an outlying double-decker a little further downslope from the others. It doesn't have a name—some of the habs have been christened, Cory's Reach or BeachBall or Abandon All Hope, but there weren't any labels pasted across this hull the last time she was in the neighborhood and there aren't any now.
Nobody's left no-trespassing signs at the airlock, either, but two pairs of fins glisten on the drying rack inside and soft moist sounds drift down from the dry deck.
She climbs the ladder. Ng and someone's back are fucking on a pallet in the lounge. Evidently, even Lubin's windchimes weren't enough to divert their interest. Clarke briefly considers breaking it up and filling them in on recent events.
Fuck it. They'll find out soon enough.
She steps around them and checks out the hab's comm board. It's a pretty sparse setup, just a few off-the-shelf components to keep it in the loop. Clarke plays with the sonar display, pans across the topography of the Ridge and the rash of Platonic icons laid upon it. Here are the main generators, wireframe skyscrapers looming over the ridge to the south. Here's Atlantis, a great lumpy ferris wheel laid on its side—fuzzy and unfocussed now, the echo smeared by a half-dozen white-noise generators started up to keep prying ears from listening in on the recent deliberations. Nobody's used those generators since the Revolt. Clarke was surprised that they were even still in place, much less in working order.
She wonders if someone's taken an active hand in extending the warranty.
A sprinkling of silver bubbles dusts the display: all the semi-abandoned homes of those who hardly know the meaning of the word. She can actually see those people if she cranks up the rez: the display loses range but gains detail, and the local sea-space fills with shimmering sapphire icons as translucent as cave fish. Their implants bounce hard reflective echoes from within the flesh, little opaque organ-clusters of machinery.
It's simple enough to label the creatures on the screen—each contains an ID-transponder next to the heart, for easy identification. There's a whole layer of intelligence that Clarke can access with a single touch. She doesn't, as a rule. Nobody does. Rifter society has its own odd etiquette. Besides, it usually isn't necessary. Over the years you learn to read the raw echoes. Creasy's implants put out a bit of fuzz on the dorsal aspect; Yeager's bum leg lists him slightly to port when he moves. Gomez's massive bulk would be a giveaway even to a dryback. The transponders are an intrusive redundancy, a cheat sheet for novices. Rifters generally have no use for such telemetry; corpses, these days, have no access to it.
Occasionally, though—when distance bleeds any useful telltales from an echo, or when the target itself has changed—cheat sheets are the only option.