"Yah." Hopkinson's icon dives back into static.
"Creasy," Lubin says, "your people join up with Cheung's."
"Right."
There on the chessboard: at the tip of one of the residential wings, about twenty meters from Hydroponic. A familiar icon there, embedded in an irregular blob of green. The only green on the whole display, in fact. Yellow mixed with blue: so it would be in camera view if not for the ink, and also in—
"What's blue?" Clarke asks, knowing.
"Sonar shadow." Lubin doesn't look back. "Creasy, go to the airlock at the far end of Res-F. They're coming out there if they're coming out anywhere."
"Tune or tangle?" Creasy asks.
"Tune and report. Plant a phone and a charge, but do not detonate unless they are already in the water. Otherwise, acoustic trigger only. Understood?"
"Yeah, if I can even find the fucking place," Creasy buzzes. "Viz is zero in this shit…" His icon plunges back into the static, cutting an oblique path towards the green zone.
"Cheung, take both groups, same destination. Secure the airlock. Report back when you're on station."
"Got it."
"Yeager, get the cache and drop it twenty meters off the Physical Plant, bearing forty degrees. Everyone else maintain position. Tune in, and use your limpets. Runners, I want three people in a continuous loop, one always in contact. Go."
The remaining blips swing into motion. Lubin doesn't pause; he's already opening another window, this one a rotating architectural animatic of Atlantis punctuated by orange sparks. Clarke recognizes the spot from which one of those little stars is shining: it's right about where Grace Nolan's lackey painted an X on the hull.
"How long have you been planning this?" she asks quietly.
"Some time."
Since well before she even fine-tuned herself, judging by how utterly clueless she's proven herself to be. "Is everyone involved but me?"
"No." Lubin studies annotations.
"Ken."
"I'm busy."
"How did they do it? Keep from tipping us off like that?"
"Automated trigger," he says absently. Columns of numbers scroll up a sudden window, too fast for Clarke to make out. "Random number generator, maybe. They have a plan, but nobody knows when it's going to kick in so there's no pre-curtain performance anxiety to give the game away."
"But why would they go to all that trouble unless—"
— they know about fine tuning.
Yves Scanlon, she remembers. Rowan asked about him: He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow, she suggested.
And Lenie Clarke confirmed it, just minutes ago.
And here they are.
She doesn't know what hurts more: Lubin's lack of trust, or the hindsight realization of how justified it was.
She's never felt so tired in her life. Do we really have to do this all over again?
Maybe she said it aloud. Or maybe Lubin just caught some telltale body language from the corner of his eye. At any rate, his hands pause on the board. At last he turns to look at her. His eyes seem strangely translucent by the light of the board.
"We didn't start it," he says.
She can only shake her head.
"Choose a side, Lenie. It's past time."
For all she knows it's a trick question; she's never forgotten what Ken Lubin does to those he considers enemies. But as it turns out, she's spared the decision. Dale Creasy, big dumb bareknuckled headbasher that he is, rescues her.
"Fuck…" his vocoded voice grinds out over a background of hissing static.
Lubin's immediately back to business. "Creasy? You made it to Res-F?"
"No shit I made it. I coulda tuned those fuckers in blind, from the Sargasso fucking Sea…"
"Have any of them left the complex?"
"No, I–I don't think so, I—but fuck, man, there's a lot of them in there, and—"
"How many, exactly?"
"I don't know, exactly! Coupla dozen at least. But look, Lubin, there's somethin' off about 'em, about the way they send. I've never felt it before."
Lubin takes a breath: Clarke imagines his eyeballs rolling beneath the caps. "Could you be more specific?"
"They're cold, man. Almost all of 'em are like, fucking ice. I mean, I can tune 'em in, I know they're there, but I can't tell what they're feeling. I don't know if they're feeling anything. Maybe they're doped up on something. I mean, next to these guys you're a blubbering crybaby…"
Lubin and Clarke exchange looks.
"I mean, no offense," Creasy buzzes after a moment.
"One of Alyx's friends had a head cheese," Clarke says. "She called it a pet…"
And down here in this desert at the bottom of the ocean, in this hand-to-mouth microcosm, how common does something have to be before you'd give one to your ten-year-old daughter as a plaything?
"Go," Lubin says.
Lubin's squid is tethered to a cleat just offside the ventral 'lock. Clarke cranks the throttle; the vehicle leaps forward with a hydraulic whine.
Her jawbone vibrates with sudden input. Lubin's voice fills her head: "Creasy, belay my last order. Do not plant your charge, repeat, no charge. Plant the phone only, and withdraw. Cheung, keep your people at least twenty meters back from the airlock. Do not engage. Clarke is en route. She will advise."
I will advise, she thinks, and they will tell me to go fuck myself.
She's navigating blind, by bearing alone. Usually that's more than enough: at this range Atlantis should be a brightening smudge against the blackness. Now, nothing. Clarke brings up sonar. Green snow fuzzes ten degrees of forward arc: within it, the harder echoes of Corpseland, blurred by interference.
Now, just barely, she can see brief smears of dull light; they vanish when she focuses on them. Experimentally, she ignites her headlight and looks around.
Empty water to port. To starboard the beam sweeps across a billowing storm front of black smoke converging on her own vector. Within seconds she'll be in the thick of it. She kills the light before the smokescreen has a chance to turn it against her.
Somehow, the blackness beyond her eyecaps darkens a shade. She feels no tug of current, no sudden viscosity upon entering the zone. Now, however, the intermittent flashes are a bit brighter; fugitive glimmers of light through brief imperfections in the cover. None of them last long enough to illuminate more than strobe-frozen instants.
She doesn't need light. By now, she doesn't even need sonar: she can feel apprehension rising in the water around her, nervous excitement radiating from the rifters ahead, darker, more distant fears from within the spheres and corridors passing invisibly beneath her.
And something else, something both familiar and alien, something living but not alive.
The ocean hisses and snaps around her, as though she were trapped within a swarm of euphausiids. A click-train rattles faintly against her implants. She almost hears a voice, vocoded, indistinct; she hears no words. Echoes light up her sonar display right across the forward one-eighty, but she's deep in white noise; she can't tell whether the contacts number six or sixty.
Fear-stained bravado, just ahead. She pulls hard right, can't quite avoid the body swimming across her path. The nebula opens a brief, bright eye as they collide.
"Fuck! Clarke, is that y—"
Gone. Near-panic falling astern, but no injury: the brain lights up a certain way when the body breaks. It may have been Baker. It's getting so hard to tell, against this rising backdrop of icy sentience. Thought without feeling. It spreads out beneath the messy tangle of human emotions like a floor of black obsidian.
The last time she felt a presence like this, it was wired to a live nuke. The last time, there was only one of them.