Peter Watts - Behemoth

"What's this?" She lays her lips around the injury and runs her tongue across the swelling.

"Oh, that. Grace is taking blood samples from everyone."

Her head comes up. "What?"

"She's not great at it. Took her a couple of tries to find a vein. You should see Lije. Looks like his arm got bushwhacked by a sea urchin."

"Why's Grace taking blood?"

"You didn't hear? Lije came down with something. And Saliko's started feeling under the weather too, and he visited Gene and Julia just a couple of days ago."

"So Grace thinks—"

"Whatever the corpses gave him, it's spreading."

Clarke sits up. She's been naked on the deck for half an hour, but this is the first time she's felt the chill. "Grace thinks the corpses gave him something."

"That's what Gene thought. She's going to find out."

"How? She doesn't have any medical training."

Walsh shrugs. "You don't need any to run MedBase."

"Jesus semen-sucking Christ." Clarke shakes her head in disbelief. "Even if Atlantis did want to sic some bug on us, they wouldn't be stupid enough to use one from the standard database."

"I guess she thinks it's a place to start."

There's something in his voice.

"You believe her," Clarke says.

"Well, not nec—"

"Has Julia come down with anything?"

"Not so far."

" Not so far. Kevin, Julia hasn't left Gene's side since they broke him out. If anyone was going to catch anything, wouldn't it be her? Saliko visited, what? Once?"

"Maybe twice."

"And what about Grace ? From what I hear she's over there all the time. Is she sick?"

"She says she's taking precaut—"

"Precautions," Clarke snorts. "Spare me. Am I the only one left on the whole Ridge with a working set of frontal lobes? Abra came down with supersyph last year, remember? It took eight months for Charley Garcia to get rid of those buggy Ascaris in his gut, and I don't remember anyone blaming the corpses for that . People get sick, Kevin, even down here. Especially down here. Half of us rot away before we even have a chance to go native."

There it is again: something new, staring out from behind the glistening opacities of Walsh's eyecaps. Something not entirely friendly.

She sighs. "What?"

"It's just a precaution. I don't see how it can hurt."

"It can hurt quite a lot if people jump to conclusions without any facts."

Walsh doesn't move for a moment. Then he gets to his feet. "Grace is trying to get the facts," he says, padding across the compartment. " You're the one jumping to conclusions."

Oh, Kevvy-boy , Clarke wonders. When did you start to grow a spine?

He grabs his diveskin off the chair. Squirming black synthetics embrace him like a lover.

"Thanks for the fuck," he says. "I gotta go."

She finds Lubin floating halfway up the side of the windchime reservoir. Pipes, fiberop and miscellaneous components—mostly nonfunctional now, dismembered segments of circuits long-since broken—run in a band around the great tank's equator. At the moment, the ambient currents are too sluggish to set either rocks or machinery to glowing; Lubin's headlamp provides the only illumination.

"Abra said you were out here," Clarke buzzes.

"Hold this pad, will you?"

She takes the little sensor. "I wanted to talk to you."

"About?" Most of his attention seems to be focused on a blob of amber polymer erupting from one of the conduits.

Clarke maneuvers herself into his line of sight. "There's this asinine rumor going around. Grace is telling people that Jerry sicced some kind of plague on Gene."

Lubin's vocoder tics in a mechanical interpretation of mmmm …

"She's always had a missile up her ass about the corpses, but nobody takes her seriously. At least, they didn't used to…"

Lubin taps a valve. "That's it."

"What?"

"Resin's cracked around the thermostat. It's causing an intermittent short."

"Ken. Listen to me. "

He stares at her, waiting.

"Something's changing. Grace never used to push it this hard, remember?"

"I never really butted heads with her myself," Lubin buzzes.

"It used to be her against the world. But this bug Gene's come down with, it's changed things. I think people are starting to listen to her. It could get dicey."

"For the corpses."

"For all of us. Weren't you the one warning me about what the corpses could do if they got their act together? Weren't you the one who said—"

We may have to do something preemptive…

A small pit opens up in Clarke's stomach.

"Ken," she buzzes, slowly, "you do know Grace is fucking crazy, right?"

He doesn't answer for a moment. She doesn't give him any longer than that: "Seriously, you should just listen to her sometime. She talks as if the war never ended. Someone sneezes and it's a biological attack."

Behind his headlamp, Lubin's silhouette moves subtly; Clarke gets the sense of a shrug. "There are some interesting coincidences," he says. "Gene enters Atlantis with serious injuries. Jerry operates on him in a medbay where our surveillance is compromised, then puts him into quarantine."

"Quarantine because of ßehemoth ," Clarke points out.

"As you've pointed out yourself on occasion, we've all been immunized against ßehemoth. I'm surprised you don't find that rationale more questionable." When Clarke says nothing, he continues: "Gene is released into the wild suffering from an opportunistic infection which our equipment can't identify, and which so far has failed to respond to treatment."

"But you were there, Ken. Jerry wanted to keep Gene in quarantine. Dale beat the crap out of her for trying. Isolating Patient Zero is a pretty short-sighted strategy for spreading the plague."

"I suppose," Lubin buzzes, "Grace might say they knew we'd break him out regardless, so they put up a big show of resistance knowing someone would cite it in their favor down the road."

"So they fought to keep him contained, therefore they wanted to set him loose?" Clarke peers suggestively at Lubin's electrolysis intake. "You getting enough O 2there, Ken?"

"I'm saying that's the sort of rationale Grace might invoke."

"That's pretty twisted even for—" Realization sinks in. "She's actually saying that, isn't she?"

His headlight bobs slightly.

"You've heard the rumors. You know all about them." She shakes her head, disgusted at herself. "As if I'd ever have to bring you up to speed on anything…"

"I'm keeping an ear open."

"Well maybe you could do a bit more than that. I mean, I know you like to keep out of these things, but Grace is fucking psycho . She's spoiling for a fight and she doesn't care who gets caught in the backwash."

Lubin hovers, unreadable. "I would have expected you to be a bit more sympathetic."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," he buzzes after a moment. "But whatever you think of Grace's behavior, her fears might not be entirely unfounded."

"Come on, Ken. The war's over." She takes his silence as acknowledgment. "So why would the corpses want to start it up again?"

"Because they lost."

"Ancient history."

"You thought yourself oppressed once," he points out. "How much blood did it take before you were willing to call it even?"

His metal voice, so calm, so even, is suddenly so close it seems to be coming from inside her own head.

"I–I was wrong about that," she says after a while.

"It didn't stop you." He turns back to his machinery.

"Ken," she says.

He looks back at her.