Peter Watts - Behemoth

"No." Clarke shook her head. "You? It was you down there?" Not Grace. Not Seger. Not the corpses or the rifters or the M&Ms or even two lousy guys on a boat.

You. All along.

"I can't take all the credit," Desjardins admitted. "Alice helped me tweak ßehemoth."

"Reluctantly, I'd guess," Lubin said.

Oh, Achilles. One chance to fix the mess I made and you fucked it up. One chance to make peace and you threaten everyone I ever knew. One lousy, faint hope, and you—

How dare you. How dare you.

A thin, final straw vanished in her hand.

She stepped forward. Lubin reached out with one mutilated hand, and held her back.

Desjardins ignored her. "I'm not an idiot, Ken. You're not the main attack force, you're just all you could scrape together on short notice. But you're not an idiot either, so there are reinforcements on the way." He held up his hand to preempt any protest. "That's okay, Ken, really. I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, and I took all the necessary precautions. Although thanks to you, I do seem to have lost a certain finesse when it comes to my big guns…"

His eyes jiggled slightly in their sockets. His fingers twitched. Clarke remembered Ricketts, sweet-talking his way into Phocoena with a wink and a glance.

The image on the wall dissolved. Numbers appeared in its place.

"Now I am in real-time contact with these guys. Can you see them, Ken? Channel 6?"

Lubin nodded.

"Then you know what they are."

Clarke knew too. Four sets of lats and longs. Depth readings, zeroed. Targeting ranges. A row of little flashing icons that said holding.

"I don't want to do this," Desjardins said. "It was going to be my retirement home, after all. I never wanted to blow it up, just—hobble parts of it. Smooth the transition, so to speak. But if I'm gonna be dead anyway—"

She twisted in Lubin's grip. But even mutilated, Lubin was immovable. His hand shackled her arm like a granite claw, oily with coagulating fluids. She could only slip in his grasp; she could not break free.

"I do have other options," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Contingency villas, you might say. I can go to one of those instead." He lifted a hand to the telemetry. "You've got a lot more riding on this than me."

He planned it for years, she realized . Even when we thought he was helping us. And ever since we've been cowering in the dark like good little rabbits while our lines went dark and our contacts dried up and it was him all along, cutting us off, fumigating the place so there wouldn't be any uncooperative tenants around when his luck ran out and he needed a place to hide…

"You asshole," she whispered, straining.

He didn't look at her. "So when are the cavalry coming, Ken? How did you call them in? How much do they know?"

"I tell you," Lubin said, "and you call off the attack."

"No, Ken, you call off your attack. Use whatever clever code words you set in place to shut down your sub's autopilot, or to convince Helsinki that you were mistaken, or whatever it takes."

"And you blow up Atlantis anyway."

"What for? I have other options, as I said. Why waste all those perfectly good hostages for no payoff? They're worth way more to me alive."

"For now."

" Now is all we've got, buddy."

Clarke glared: from the man who had tried to kill her, to the man who'd risked his life to stop him. Every hour you're in this place, you kill more people than ever lived in Atlantis, she thought.

Every hour I kill more people, by leaving you here.

And Ken Lubin was about to cut a deal.

She could see it in his stance, in that ruined blind face that had been at her side and behind her back all these years. He wasn't entirely inscrutable. Not to her. Not even now.

"I know you, Ken," Desjardins was saying. "We go way back, you and I. We're soul mates. We make our own rules, and by God we live by them. People don't matter. Populations don't matter. What matters is the rules , am I right, Ken? What matters is the mission .

"If you don't deal, the mission fails."

" Ken ," she whispered.

"But you can save them," the 'lawbreaker continued. "Isn't that why you came back in the first place? Just give me your stats and the mission succeeds. You walk away, I abort the strike, and before I disappear I'll even send you a fix for that nasty new strain of ßehemoth your buddies have been wrestling with. I gather by now a fair number of them are seriously under the weather back there."

She remembered a floating machine that had used his voice: If killing ten saves a thousand, it's a deal. She remembered Patricia Rowan, torn apart on the inside, the face she presented to the world cold and unflinching: I tried to serve the greater good .

"Or," Desjardins said, "you can try and take me out, and kill everyone you came up here to save." His eyes were locked on Lubin's. It was as though the two of them shared their own pocket universe, as though Clarke didn't even exist. "Your choice. But you really shouldn't take too long making up your mind—your tweaks are fucking things up all over the place. I don't know even how long I can keep control of these circuits."

She thought of what Patricia Rowan would have done, faced with this choice. She thought of the millions dead who would not have died, if only she had .

She remembered Ken Lubin himself, a million years ago: Is there anything you wouldn't do, for the chance to take it back?

"No," she said softly.

Desjardins raised an eyebrow and—finally— deigned to look at her. "I wasn't talking to you. But if I were Lenie Clarke—" He smiled. " — I wouldn't be shameless enough to pretend I gave a flying fuck about the rest of the world."

She twisted in Lubin's grasp and kicked , as hard as she could. Her boot plunged deep into the gash in his thigh. Lubin staggered and cried out.

And Clarke was free, and springing forward.

She launched herself directly at Desjardins. He won't risk it , she told herself. It's his only leverage, he's dead if he hits the button, he must know he's—

Desjardins's eyes flickered left. His fingers twitched. And a tiny thread of doubt blossomed into full-blown horror as the numbers on the wall began to move…

Holding transmuted into a whole new word, again and again and again along the bottom of the board. Clarke tried desperately not to read it, drove forward on the wings of some frantic infantile hope maybe if I don't see it it won't happen, maybe there's still time , but she did see it, she couldn't help seeing it, spelled out in quadruplicate full-stop before the whole board went dark:

Commit.

With the next step she toppled.

Something hummed deep in her head. Her bones sang with subtle electricity. Her legs collapsed beneath her, her arms were dead weights at her sides. Her skull cracked painfully against the back of a workstation, cracked again against the floor. Her lung deflated with a tired sigh—she tried to hold her breath but suddenly she was slack-jawed and drooling. Her bladder voided. Implants clicked and stuttered in her chest.

"You gotta love the symmetry," a voice remarked from somewhere on the other side of the universe. "The ultimate victim, you know? The ultimate victim, and the most powerful woman in the world all rolled into one tight little bod. And I , well, I'm the last word in one or two things myself…"

She couldn't feel a heartbeat. Darkness roared up from somewhere deep in her skull, swept swirling across her eyes.