Another click. The exoskeleton stretched its legs back and forced hers apart, a meter off the floor.
— the reces—oh God—it's got all those lethal recessives, they start to express and the whole genotype—it collapses…
Achilles laid something hard and dry and room-temperature across the back of her right thigh. "Anything? Or should I just get started back here?"
"It self-destructs!" she blurted. "It dies off! Past some critical density…"
"Mmmm."
She couldn't tell if that had been the answer he was looking for. It made sense. As if sense would matter in this godforsaken—
"So why hasn't it died off?" he asked curiously.
"It—it—it hasn't hit the threshold yet. You keep burning it before it gets enough of a foothold."
No sound or motion for an eternity.
"Not bad," Achilles said finally.
Relief crashed through her like a wave. Some inner voice berated her for it, reminded her that she was still captive and Achilles Desjardins could change the rules whenever he pleased, but she ignored it and savored the tiny reprieve.
"So it is a counteragent," she babbled. "I was right all along. It's programmed to outcompete ßehemoth and then take itself out of the picture."
From somewhere behind her shoulder, the sense of a trap snapping shut.
"You've never heard the term relict population, then?" The weight lifted from her thigh. "You think a bug that hid for four billion years wouldn't be able to find some little corner, somewhere, where Seppuku couldn't get at it? One's all it would take, you know. One's all it took the first time. And then Seppuku takes itself out of the picture, as you say, and ßehemoth comes back stronger than ever. What does Seppuku do then, I wonder? Rise from the grave?"
"But wh—"
"Sloppy thinking, Alice. Really sloppy."
Smack.
Something drew a stinging line across her legs. Taka cried out; the inner voice sneered told you so.
"Please," she whimpered.
"Back of the class, cunt." Something cold tickled her vulva. A faint rasping sound carried over her shoulder, like the sound of a fingernail on sandpaper.
"I can see why pine furniture used to be so cheap," Desjardins remarked. "You get all these splinters…"
She stared hard at the tiled floor, the fish-to-bird transition, focused on that indefinable moment when background and foreground merged. She tried to lose herself in the exercise. She tried to think of nothing but the pattern.
She couldn't escape the thought that Achilles had designed the floor for exactly that purpose.
Splice
She was safe. She was home. She was deep in the familiar abyss, water pressing down with the comforting weight of mountains, no light to betray her presence to the hunters overhead. No sound but her own heartbeat. No breath.
No breath…
But that was normal, wasn't it? She was a creature of the deep sea, a glorious cyborg with electricity sparking in her chest, supremely adapted. She was immune to the bends. Her rapture owed nothing to nitrogen. She could not drown.
But somehow, impossibly, she was.
Her implants had stopped working. Or no, her implants had disappeared entirely, leaving nothing in her chest but a pounding heart, flopping on the bottom of a great bleeding hole where lung and machinery had once been. Her flesh cried out for oxygen. She could feel her blood turning to acid. She tried to open her mouth, tried to gasp, but even that useless reflex was denied her here; her hood stretched across her face like an impermeable skin. She panicked, thrashing towards a surface that might have been lightyears away. The very core of her was a yawning vacuum. She convulsed around her own emptiness.
Suddenly, there was light.
It was a single beam from somewhere overhead, skewering her through the darkness. She struggled towards it; gray chaos seethed at the edges of sight, blinding her peripheral vision as her eyes began to shut down. There was light above and oblivion on all sides. She reached for the light.
A hand seized her wrist and lifted her into atmosphere. Suddenly she could breathe again; her lungs had been restored, her diveskin miraculously removed. She sank to her knees on a solid deck, sucked great whooping breaths.
She looked up, into the face of her salvation. A fleshless, pixelated caricature of herself grinned back; its eyes were empty whirling holes. "You're not dead yet," it said, and ripped out her heart.
It stood over her, frowning as she bled out on the deck. "Hello?" it asked, its voice turned strangely metallic. "Are you there? Are you there?"
She awoke. The real world was darker than her dream had been.
She remembered Rickett's voice, thin and reedy: They even attack each otherif you give 'em half a chance…
"Are you there?"
It was the voice from her dream. It was the ship's voice. Phocoena.
I know what to do, she realized.
She turned in her seat. Sunset biotelemetry sparkled in the darkness behind her: a fading life-force, rendered in constellations of yellow and orange.
And for the first time, red.
"Hello?" she said.
"How long i been asleep?"
Ricketts was using the saccadal interface to talk. How weak do you have to be, Clarke wondered, before it's too much effort to speak aloud?
"I don't know," she told the darkness. "A few hours, I guess." And then, dreading the answer: "How are you feeling?"
"About same," he lied. Or maybe not, if Phocoena was doing its job.
She climbed from her seat and stepped carefully back to the telemetry panel. A facet of isolation membrane glistened dimly beyond, barely visible to her uncapped eyes.
Ricketts's antibodies and glucose metabolism had both gone critical while she'd slept. If she was reading the display right Phocoena had been able to compensate for the glucose to some extent, but the immune problems were out of its league. And an entirely new readout had appeared on the diagnostic panel, cryptic and completely unexpected: something called AND was increasing over time in Rickett's body. She tapped the label and invoked the system glossary: AND expanded into Anomalous Nucleotide Duplex, which told her nothing. But there was a dotted horizontal line etched near the top of the y-axis, some critical threshold that Ricketts was approaching but had not yet met; and the label on that feature was one she knew.
Metastasis.
It can't be long now, Clarke thought. Then, hating herself: Maybe long enough…
"Still there?" Ricketts asked.
"Yes."
"It's lonely in here."
Under the cowl, maybe. Or inside his own failing flesh.
"Talk to me."
Go ahead. You know you want an opening.
"About what?"
"Anything. Just—anything."
You can't exploit someone if you don't even ask…
She took a breath. "You know what you said about the, the shredders? How someone was using them to try and crash everything?"
"Yes."
"I don't think they're supposed to crash the system at all," she said.
A brief silence. "But that's what they do. Ask anyone."
"That's not all they do. Taka said they breach dams and short out static-fields and who knows what. That one on the board was sitting in her MI for God knows how long, and it never even peeped until she'd figured out Seppuku. They're attacking a lot of targets through the network, and they need the network to get to them."