Static, pure and random. Light, rising below. Airlock Six is dead ahead, and all the static in the world can't drown out the single presence waiting behind it.
Clarke can tell by the guilt. There's only one other person down here with so twisted a footprint.
Baptism
Rowan pulls open the airlock before it's even finished draining. Seawater cascades around Clarke's ankles into the wet room.
Clarke strips off her fins and steps clear of the lock. She leaves the rest of her uniform in place, presents the usual shadow-self; only her face flap is unsealed. Rowan stands aside to let her pass. Clarke slings the fins securely across her back and pans the spartan compartment. There's not a link of preshmesh to be seen. Normally, one whole bulkhead would be lined with diving armor.
"How many have you lost?" she asks softly.
"We don't know yet. More than these."
Small potatoes, Clarke reflects. For both of us.
But the war is still young…
"I honestly didn't know," Rowan says.
There's no second sight, here in the near-vacuum of a sea-level atmosphere. Clarke says nothing.
"They didn't trust me. They still don't." Rowan's eyes flicker to a fleck of brightness up where the bulkhead meets the ceiling: a pinhead lens. Just a few days ago, before the corpses spined up again, rifters would have watched events unfold through that circuit. Now, Rowan's own kind will be keeping tabs.
She stares at the rifter with a strange, curious intensity that Clarke has never seen before. It takes Clarke a moment to recognize what's changed; for the first time in Clarke's memory, Rowan's eyes have gone dark. The feeds to her ConTacs have been shut off, her gaze stripped of commentary or distraction. There's nothing in there now but her.
A leash and collar could hardly convey a clearer message.
"Come on," Rowan says. "They're in one of the labs."
Clarke follows her out of the wet room. They turn right down a corridor suffused in bright pink light. Emergency lighting, she realizes; her eyecaps boost it to idiotic nursery ambience. Rowan's eyes will be serving up the dim insides of a tube, blood-red like the perfused viscera of some man-eating monster.
They turn left at a t-junction, step across the yellowjacket striping of a dropgate.
"So what's the catch?" she asks. The corpses aren't going to just hand over their only leverage with no strings attached.
Rowan doesn't look back. "They didn't tell me."
Another corner. They pass an emergency docking hatch set into the outer bulkhead; a smattering of valves and readouts disfigure the wall to one side. For a moment Clarke wonders if Harpodon is affixed to the other side, but no. Wrong section.
Suddenly, Rowan stops and turns.
"Lenie, if anything should—"
Something kicks Atlantis in the side. Somewhere behind them, metal masses collide with a crash.
The pink lights flicker.
"Wha—"
Another kick, harder this time. The deck jumps: Clarke stumbles to the same sound of metal on metal, and this time recognizes it: the dropgates.
The lights go out.
"Pat, what the fuck are your peo—"
"Not mine." Rowan's voice trembles in the darkness.
She hovers a meter away, an indistinct silhouette, dark gray on black.
No commotion, Clarke notes. No shouting, nobody running down the halls, no intercom…
It's so quiet it's almost peaceful.
"They've cut us off," Rowan says. Her edges have resolved, still not much detail but the corpse's shape is clearer now at least. Hints and glints of the bulkheads are coming into view as well. Clarke looks around for the light source and spies a constellation of pale winking pinpoints a few meters behind them. The docking hatch.
"Did you hear me? Lenie?" Rowan's voice is leaving worried and approaching frantic. "Are you there?"
"Right here." Clarke reaches out and touches the corpse lightly on the arm. Rowan's ghostly shape startles briefly at the contact.
"Do you—are you—"
"I don't know, Pat. I wasn't expecting this either."
"They've cut us off. You hear the dropgates fall? They hulled us. The bastards hulled us. Ahead and behind. We're flooded on both sides. We're trapped."
"They didn't hull this segment, though," Clarke points out. "They're trying to contain us, not kill us."
"I wouldn't bet on it," says one of the bulkheads.
Blind Rowan jumps in the darkness.
"As a matter of fact," the bulkhead continues, "we are going to kill the corpse." It speaks in a tinny vibrato, thick with distortion: a voice mutilated twice in succession, once by vocoder, once by limpetphone stuck to the outside of the hull. Inanely, Clarke wonders if she sounded this bad to Alyx.
She can't tell who it is. She thinks the voice is female. "Grace?"
"They weren't going to give you shit, Lenie. They don't have shit to give you. They were fishing for hostages and you went ambling innocently into their trap. But we look after our own. Even you, we look after."
"What the fuck are you talking about? How do you know?"
"How do we know?" The bulkhead vibrates like a great Jew's harp. "You're the one that showed us how to tune in! And it works, sweetie, it works like sex and we're reading a whole bunch of those stumpfucks down in the medlab and believe me the guilt is just oozing across that hull. By the way, if I were you I'd seal up my diveskin. You're about to be rescued."
"Grace, wait! Hang on a second!" Clarke turns to the corpse. "Pat?"
Rowan isn't shaking her head. Rowan isn't speaking up in angry denial. Rowan isn't doing any of the things that an innocent person—or even a guilty one, for that matter—should be doing when threatened with death.
"Pat, you—fuck no, don't tell me you—"
"Of course I didn't, Lenie. But it makes sense, doesn't it? They tricked us both…"
Something clanks against the hull.
"Wait!" Clarke stares at the ceiling, at the walls, but her adversary is invisible and untouchable. "Pat's not part of this!"
"Right. I heard." A gargling, metal-shredding sound that might be laughter. "She's the head of the fucking board of directors and she didn't know anything. I believe that."
"Tune her in, then! See for yourself!"
"The thing is, Len, us novices aren't that good at tuning in singles. Signal's too weak. So it wouldn't prove much. Say bye-bye, Pattie."
"Bye," Rowan whispers. Something on the other side of the bulkhead begins whining.
"Fuck you Nolan, you back off right now or I swear I'll kill you myself! Do you hear me? Pat didn't know! She's no more in control than—"
— than I am, she almost says, but suddenly there's a new light source here in the corridor, a single crimson point. It flares, blindingly intense even to Lenie Clarke's bleached vision, and dies in the next instant.
The world explodes with the sound of pounding metal.
Rowan's silhouette has folded down into a cringing shape in the corner. Something's slicing across Clarke's darkened field of view like a roaring white laser. Water, she realizes after a moment. Water forced through a little hole in the ceiling by the weight of an ocean. If she were to pass her arm through that pencil-thin stream, it would shear right off.
In seconds the water's up to her ankles.
She starts towards Rowan, desperate to do something, knowing there's nothing left to do. The compartment glows sudden, sullen red: another eye winks on the outer wall. It opens, and goes dark, and a second thread of killing sea drills the air. Ricochets spray back from the inner wall like liquid shrapneclass="underline" needle-sharp pain explodes in Clarke's shoulder. Suddenly she's on her back, water closing over her face, her skull ringing from its impact with the deck.