She's overstating, of course. Rifter implants come equipped with failsafes that keep their settings within manufacturer's specs; you can't get around those without opening yourself up and tweaking the actual plumbing. Even so, there's a fair bit of leeway. Back during the revolution, the corpses managed to coax a similar device into spazzing out a couple of rifters stuck in a flooding airlock.
Which is why they are no longer allowed such things. "We need that back," Clarke says softly.
Seger shakes her head. "Come on, Lenie. You people can hurt yourselves far more with it than we could ever hurt you."
Clarke holds out her hand. "Then we'll just have to learn from our mistakes, won't we?"
"You people are slow learners."
She's one to talk. Even after five years, Jerenice Seger can't quite admit to the existence of the bridle and the bit between her teeth. Going from Top to Bottom is a tough transition for any corpse; doctors are the worst of the lot. It's almost sad, the devotion with which Seger nurses her god complex.
"Jerry, for the last time. Hand it over."
A tentative hand brushes against Clarke's arm. Friedman shakes her head, still looking at the deck. "It's okay, Lenie. I don't mind, I don't need it any more."
"Julia, you—"
"Please, Lenie. I just want to get out of here."
She starts away down the corridor. Clarke looks after her, then back at the doctor.
"It's a medical device," Seger says.
"It's a weapon."
"Was. Once. And if you'll recall, it didn't work very well." Seger shakes her head sadly. "The war's over, Lenie. It's been over for years. I won't start it up again if you won't. And in the meantime—" She glances down the corridor. "I think your friend could use a bit of support."
Clarke looks back along the hallway. Friedman has disappeared.
"Yeah. Maybe," she says noncommittally.
Hope she gets some.
In Beebe Station the Comm cubby was a pipe-infested closet, barely big enough for two. Atlantis's nerve center is palatial, a twilit grotto bejeweled by readouts and tangled luminous topographies. Tactical maps rotate miraculously in midair or glow from screens painted on the bulkheads. The miracle is not so much the technology that renders these extravagances: the miracle is that Atlantis contains such an obscene surplus of empty space, to be wasted on nothing more than moving light. A cabin would have done as well. A few couches with workpads and tactical contacts could have contained infinite intelligence, bounded in a nutshell. But no. A whole ocean stands on their heads, and these corpses squander volume as if sea-level was two steps down the hall.
Even in exile, they just don't get it.
Right now the cavern's fairly empty. Lubin and a few techs cluster at a nearby panel, cleaning up the latest downloads. The place will be full by the time they finish. Corpses gravitate to news of the world like flies to shit.
For now, though, it's just Lubin's crowd and Patricia Rowan, over on the far side of the compartment. Cryptic information streams across her contacts, turns her eyes into bright points of mercury. Light from a holo display catches the silver streaking her hair; that and the eyes give her the aspect of some subtle hologram in her own right.
Clarke approaches her. "Airlock Four's blocked off."
"They're scrubbing it down. Everything between there and the infirmary. Jerry's orders."
"What for?"
"You know perfectly well. You saw Erickson."
"Oh, come on. One lousy fish bite and Jerry thinks—"
"She's not sure of anything yet. She's just being careful." A pause, then: "You should have warned us, Lenie."
"Warned you?"
"That Erickson might be vectoring ßehemoth. You left all of us exposed. If there was even a chance…"
But there's not, Clarke wants to rail. There's not. You chose this place because ßehemoth could never get here, not in a thousand years. I saw the maps, I traced out the currents with my own fingers. It's not ßehemoth. It's not.
It can't be.
Instead she says, "It's a big ocean, Pat. Lots of nasty predators with big pointy teeth. They didn't all get that way because of ßehemoth."
"This far down, they did. You know the energetics as well as I do. You were at Channer, Lenie. You knew what to look for."
Clarke jerks her thumb towards Lubin. "Ken was at Channer too, remember? You shitting on him like this?"
"Ken didn't deliberately spread that damn bug across a whole continent to pay back the world for his unhappy childhood." The silver eyes fix Clarke in a hard stare. "Ken was on our side."
Clarke doesn't speak for a moment. Finally, very slowly: "Are you saying I deliberately—"
"I'm not accusing you of anything. But it looks bad. Jerry's livid about this, and she won't be the only one. You're the Meltdown Madonna, for God's sake! You were willing to write off the whole world to get your revenge on us."
"If I wanted you dead," Clarke says evenly—If I stillwanted you dead, some inner editor amends— "You would be. Years ago. All I had to do was stand aside."
"Of course that's—"
Clarke cuts her off: "I protected you. When the others were arguing about whether to punch holes in the hull or just cut your power and let you suffocate—I was the one who held them back. You're alive because of me."
The corpse shakes her head. "Lenie, that doesn't matter."
"It damn well should."
"Why? We were only trying to save the world, remember? It wasn't our fault we failed, it was yours. And after we failed, we settled for saving our families, and you wouldn't even give us that. You hunted us down even at the bottom of the ocean. Who knows why you held back at the last minute?"
"You know," Clarke says softly.
Rowan nods. "I know. But most of the people down here don't expect rationality from you. Maybe you've just been toying with us all these years. There's no telling when you'll pull the trigger."
Clarke shakes her head dismissively. "What's that, the Gospel According to the Executive Club?"
"Call it what you want. It's what you have to deal with. It's what I have to deal with."
"We fish-heads have a few stories of our own, you know," Clarke says. "How you corpses programmed people like machinery so you could top up some bottom line. How you sent us into the world's worst shit-holes to do your dirty work, and when we ran into ßehemoth the first thing you did was try to kill us to save your own hides."
Suddenly the ventilators seem unnaturally loud. Clarke turns; Lubin and the corpses stare back from across the cave.
She looks away again, flustered.
Rowan smiles grimly. "See how easily it all comes back?" Her eyes glitter, target-locked. Clarke returns her gaze without speaking.
After a moment, Rowan relaxes a bit. "We're rival tribes, Lenie. We're each other's outgroup—but you know what's amazing? Somehow, in the past couple of years, we've started to forget all that. We live and let live, for the most part. We cooperate, and nobody even thinks it worthy of comment." She glances significantly across the room to Lubin and the techs. "I think that's a good thing, don't you?"
"So why should it change now?" Clarke asks.
"Because ßehemoth may have caught up with us at last, and people will say you let it in."
"That's horseshit."
"I agree, for what it's worth."
"And even if it was true, who cares?" Everyone's part mermaid down here, even the corpses. All retrofitted with the same deep-sea fish-genes, coding for the same stiff little proteins that ßehemoth can't get its teeth into.