"No. They are."
Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through the mutilating filter of her vocoder.
"Grace, they just—"
"Just what?" she buzzes. "Do you think they're winning? What are they gonna do for an encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We've got enough charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we're gonna use them."
"Ken?"
A brief silence.
"Look, Ken," Nolan buzzes, "I can be at the cache in—"
"Not necessary," Lubin tells her. "Someone's already en route."
"Who's—"
"Welcome back, by the way," Lubin says to the anonymous soldier. "You know the target?"
"Yes." A faint voice, too soft and distorted to pin down.
"The charge has to be locked down within a meter of the mark. Set it and back away fast. Don't spend any more time than absolutely necessary in proximity to the hull, do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Acoustic trigger. I'll detonate from here. Blackout lifting in ten."
My God, Clarke thinks, It's you…
"Everyone at safe-distance," Lubin reminds the troops. "Blackout lifting now."
She's well out of the white noise; there's no obvious change in ambience. But the next vocoder she hears, still soft, is clearly recognizable.
"It's down," Julia Friedman buzzes.
"Back off," Lubin says. "Forty meters. Stay away from the bottom."
"Hey Avril," Friedman says.
"Right here," Hopkinson answers.
"When you tuned that wing, were there children?"
"Yeah. Yeah, there were."
"Good," buzzes Friedman. "Gene always hated kids."
The channel goes dead.
At first, she thinks the retribution's gone exactly as expected. The world pulses around her—a dull, almost subsonic drumbeat through brine and flesh and bone—and for all she knows, a hundred or more of the enemy are reduced to bloody paste. She doesn't know how many rifters died in the first exchange, but surely this restores the lead.
She's in an old, familiar place where it doesn't seem to matter much either way.
Even the second explosion—same muffled thump, but softer somehow, more distant—even that doesn't tip her off immediately. Secondary explosions would almost be inevitable, she imagines—pipes and powerlines suddenly ruptured, a cascade of high-pressure tanks with their feeds compromised—all kinds of consequences could daisy-chain from that initial burst. Bonus points for the home team, probably. Nothing more.
But something in the back of her mind says the second blast just felt wrong—the wrong resonance, perhaps, as if one were to ring a great antique church bell and hear a silvery tinkle. And the voices, when they come back online, are not cheering their latest victory over the rampaging Corpse Hordes, but so full of doubt and uncertainty that not even the vocoders can mask it.
"What the fuck was that—"
"Avril? Did you feel that out your way?"
"Avril? Anybody catching—anyone…"
"Jesus fucking Christ, Gardiner? David? Stan? Anyone—"
"Garcia, are you—I'm not getting—"
"It's gone. I'm right here, it's just fucking gone…"
"What are you talking about?"
"The whole bottom of the hab, it's just—it must've set them both—"
"Both what? She only set one charge, and that was on—"
"Ken? Ken? Lubin, where the fuck are you?"
"This is Lubin."
Silence in the water.
"We've lost the med hab." His voice is like rusty iron.
"What—"
"How did—"
"Shut the fuck up," Lubin snarls across the nightscape.
There's silence again, almost. A few, on open channels, continue to emit metal groans.
"Evidently an unpacked charge was attached to the hab," Lubin continues. "It must have been set off by the same signal we used on Atlantis. From this point on, no omnidirectional triggers. There may be other charges set to detonate on multiple pings. Everyone—"
"This is Atlantis speaking."
The words boom across the seabed like the Voice of God, unsullied by any interference. Ken forgot to black back out, Clarke realizes. Ken's started shoutingat the troops.
Ken's losing it…
"You may think you are in a position of strength," the voice continues. "You are not. Even if you destroy this facility, your own deaths are assured."
She doesn't recognize the voice. Odd. It speaks with such authority.
"You are infected with Mark II. You are all infected. Mark II is highly contagious during an asymptomatic incubation period of several weeks. Without intervention you will all be dead within two months.
"We have a cure."
Dead silence. Not even Grace Nolan says I told you so.
"We've tripwired all relevant files and cultures to prevent unauthorized access. Kill us and you kill yourselves."
"Prove it," Lubin replies.
"Certainly. Just wait a while. Or if you're feeling impatient, do that mind-reading trick of yours. What do you call it? Tuning in? I'm told it separates the trustworthy from the liars, most of the time."
Nobody corrects him.
"State your terms," Lubin says.
"Not to you. We will only negotiate with Lenie Clarke."
"Lenie Clarke may be dead," Lubin says. "We haven't been able to contact her since you blew the res." He must know better: she's high in the water, her insides resonating to the faint tapping of click trains. She keeps quiet. Let him play out the game in his own way. It might be his last.
"That would be very bad news for all of us," Atlantis replies calmly. "Because this offer expires if she's not at Airlock Six within a half hour. That is all."
Silence.
"It's a trick," Nolan says.
"Hey, you said they had a cure," someone else buzzes—Clarke can't tell who, the channels are fuzzing up again. The white noise generators must be back online.
"So what if they do?" Nolan buzzes. "I don't trust them to share it with us, and I sure as shit don't trust Lenie fucking Clarke to be my ambassador. How do you think those fuckers found out about fine-tuning in the first place? Every one of our dead is thanks to her."
Clarke smiles to herself. Such small numbers she concerns herself with. Such a tiny handful of lives. She feels her fingers clenching on the towbar. The squid gently pulls her forward; the water gently tugs her back.
"We can do what they say. We can tune them in, check out the story." She thinks that's Gomez, but the interference is rising around her as she travels. She's lost even the crude intonations of vocoded speech.
A buzz in her jaw: a beep just behind her ear. Someone tagging her on a private channel. Probably Lubin. He's King Tactical, after all. He's the one who knows where she is. Nobody else can see beyond the stumps of their own shattered limbs.
"And it proves what? That they're gonna…" — static— "it to us? Shit, even if they don't have a cure they've probably convinced a bunch of their buddies that they do, just so we won't be…" Nolan's voice fades out.
Lubin says something on open channel. Clarke can't make out the words. The beeping in her head seems more urgent now, although she knows that's impossible; the ambient hiss is drowning that signal along with all the others.
Nolan again: "Fuck off, Ken. Why we ever liste… you…can't even outsmart…ing corp…"