Peter Watts - Behemoth

"Yes."

"Are you looking forward to it?"

It's been so many years since he's had an excuse to kill someone. And Ken Lubin once made a career out of finding excuses.

He tweaks his throttle and pulls away.

Trouble dawns like a sunrise, smearing the darkness ahead.

"Anyone else supposed to be out here?" Clarke asks. The on-site floods are keyed to wake up when approached, but she and Lubin aren't nearly close enough to have triggered them.

"Just us," Lubin buzzes.

The glow is coarse and unmistakable. It spreads laterally, a diffuse false dawn hanging in the void. Two or three dark gaps betray the presence of interposed topography.

"Stop," Lubin says. Their squids settle down beside a tumbledown outcropping, its jumbled edges reflecting dimly in the haze.

He studies the schematic on his dashboard. A reflected fingernail of light traces his profile.

He turns his squid to port. "This way. Keep to the bottom."

They edge closer to the light, keeping it to starboard. The glow expands, resolves, reveals an impossibility: a lake at the bottom of the ocean. The light shines from beneath its surface; Clarke thinks of a swimming pool at night, lit by submerged spotlights in the walls. Slow extravagant waves, top-heavy things from some low-gravity planet, break into shuddering globules against the near shore. The lake extends beyond the hazy limits of rifter vision.

It always hits her like a hallucination, although she knows the pedestrian truth: it's just a salt seep, a layer of mineralized water so dense it lies on the bottom of the ocean the way an ocean lies at the bottom of the sky. It's a major selling point to anyone in search of camouflage. The halocline reflects all manner of pings and probes, hides everything beneath as though there were nothing here but soft, deep mud.

A soft, brief scream of electronics. For the merest instant Clarke thinks she sees a drop of luminous blood on her dashboard. She focuses. Nothing.

"Did you—?"

"Yes." Lubin's playing with his controls. "This way." He steers closer to the shores of Impossible Lake. Clarke follows.

The next time it's unmistakable: a brilliant pinpoint of red light, laser-bright, flickering on and off within the jagged topography of the dashboard display. The squids cry out with each flash.

A deadman alarm. Somewhere ahead, a rifter's heart has stopped.

They're cruising out over the lake now, just offshore. Roiling greenish light suffuses Lubin and his mount from below. A hypersaline globule shatters in slow motion against the squid's underside. Light rising through the interface bends in odd ways. It's like looking down through the radium-lit depths of a nuclear waste-storage lagoon. A grid of bright pinpoint suns shine far below that surface, where the surveyors have planted their lamps. The solid substrate beneath is hidden by distance and diffraction.

The deadman alarm has stabilized to a confidence bubble about forty meters straight ahead. Its ruby icon beats like a heart on the screen. The squids bleat in synch.

"There," Clarke says. The horizon's absurdly inverted here, darkness overhead, milky light beneath. A dark spot hangs at the distant, fuzzy interface between. It appears to be floating on the surface of the lens.

Clarke nudges her throttle up a bit.

"Wait," Lubin buzzes. She looks back over her shoulder.

"The waves," Lubin says.

They're smaller here than they were back near the shore, which makes sense since there's no rising substrate to push the peaks above baseline. They're rippling past in irregular spasms, though, not the usual clockwork procession, and now that she traces them back they seem to be radiating out from…

Shit …

She's close enough to see limbs now, attenuate sticklike things slapping the surface of the lake into a local frenzy. Almost as though the rifter ahead is a poor swimmer, in over his head and panicking…

"He's alive ," she buzzes. The deadman icon pulses, contradicting her.

"No," Lubin says.

Only fifteen meters away now, the enigma erupts writhing from the surface of the Lake in a nimbus of shredded flesh. Too late, Clarke spots the larger, darker shape thrashing beneath it. Too late, she resolves the mystery: meal, interrupted. The thing that was eating it heads straight for her.

It can't b—

She twists, not quite fast enough. The monster's mouth takes the squid with room to spare. Half a dozen finger-sized teeth splinter against the machine like brittle ceramic. The squid torques in her hands; some sharp-edged metal protuberance smashes into her leg with a thousand kilograms of predatory momentum behind it. Something snaps below the knee. Pain rips through her calf.

It's been six years. She's forgotten the moves.

Lubin hasn't. She can hear his squid bearing in, cranked to full throttle. She curls into a ball, grabs the gas billy off her calf in a belated countermeasure. She hears a meaty thud; hydraulics cough. In the next instant a great scaly mass staggers against her, batting her down through the boiling interface.

Heavy water glows on all sides. The world is fuzzy and whirling. She shakes her head to lock it into focus. The action wavers and bulges overhead, writhing through the shattered refractory surface of Impossible Lake. Lubin must have rammed the monster with his squid. Damage may have been inflicted on both sides—now the squid's corkscrewing down into the lens, riderless and uncontrolled. Lubin hangs in the water facing an opponent twice his size, half of it mouth. If there are eyes, Clarke can't make them out through this wobbling discontinuity.

She's slowly falling up, she realizes. She scissor-kicks without thinking; her leg screams as something tears it from the inside. She screams too, a ratcheting torn-metal sound. Floaters swarm across her eyes in the wake of the cresting pain. She rises from the lake just as the monster opens its mouth and—

— holy shit—

— disconnects its jaw, right at the base, the mouth dropping open way too fast and suddenly it's closed again and Lubin's just gone , nothing to suggest where he went except the memory of blurred motion between one instant and the next.

She does perhaps the most stupid thing she's ever done in her life. She charges.

The leviathan turns to face her, more ponderously now, but still with all the time in the world. She kicks with one leg, drags the other like a useless throbbing anchor. The monster's serrated mouth grimaces, a mangled profusion of teeth, way too many still intact. She tries to duck past, to come up under the belly or at least the side but it just wallows there, turning effortlessly to face every clumsy approach.

And then, through the top of its head, it belches .

The bubbles do not arise from any natural openings. They erupt through the flesh itself, tearing their own way, splitting the soft skull from within. For a second or two the monster hangs motionless; then it shivers, an electric spasm that seizes the whole body. One-legged, Clarke gets underneath and stabs its belly. She can feel more bubbles erupt inside as the billy discharges, a seismic eruption of flesh.

The monster convulses, dying. Its jaw drops open like some ludicrous flapping drawbridge. The water seethes with regurgitated flesh.

A few meters away, the grinning shredded remains of something in a diveskin settle gently onto the surface of Impossible Lake, within a lumpy cloud of its own entrails.

"You okay?"

Lubin's at her side. She shakes her head, more in amazement than reply. "My leg…" Now, in the aftermath, it hurts even more.

He probes her injury. She yelps; the vocoder turns it into a mechanical bark. "Your fibula's broken," Lubin reports. "Diveskin didn't tear, at least."