Peter Watts - Behemoth

She would not have been able to mistake the victim in that virtual dungeon for anyone else. Desjardins had tuned the specs to three decimal places.

Mandelbrot immediately gave up on Alice and began head-butting Desjardins, purring loudly. Desjardins ignored her.

"I need some technical info," he said, almost apologetically. "And some details on your friends. I was actually hoping to sweet-talk it out of you, though." He gestured at the sensorium, savoring the horror on her face. "Guess I forgot to put that stuff away."

She shook her head, a spasm, a panicky twitch. "I–I d-don't think you did…" she managed after a moment.

"Maybe not." Achilles shrugged. "But hey, look on the bright side. That's the first time you've actually been right about me."

It made sense, at last: the impulse purchases routed almost unconsciously through anonymous credit lines, the plastic sheeting and portable incinerator, the dynamic-inversion sound damper. The casual snoop into Alice's master calendar and contact list. That was the great thing about being a 'lawbreaker on the Trip; when everybody knew you were chained to the post, nobody bothered putting up fences around the yard.

"Please," Alice quavered, her lip trembling, her eyes bright and terrified. "Achilles…"

Somewhere in the basement of Desjardins's mind, a last rusty link crumbled to powder.

"Call me Killjoy," he said.

The first round goes to the corpses.

A rifter by the name of Lisbeth Mak—kind of a wallflower, Clarke barely even remembers the name— came upon a corpse crawling like an armored cockroach around the outside of the primary physical plant. It didn't matter whether he had a good reason to be there. It didn't matter whether or not this constituted a violation of quarantine. Mak did what a lot of fish-heads might have done regardless; she got cocky. Decided to teach this stumpfucking dryback a lesson, but decided to warm him up first. So she swam easy circles around her helpless and lumbering prey, made the usual derisive comments about diving bells with feet, called loudly and conspicuously for someone to bring her one of those pneumatic drills from the tool shed: she had herself a crab to shell.

She forgot entirely about the headlamp on the corpse's helmet. It hadn't been shining when she caught the poor fucker—obviously he'd been trying to avoid detection, and there was enough ambient light around that part of the structure even for dryback eyes. When he flashed that peeper at her, her eyecaps turned dead flat white in their haste to compensate.

She was only blind for a second or two, but it was more than enough for the corpse to get his licks in. Preshmesh vs. copolymer is no contest at all. By the time Mak, bruised and bloodied, called for backup, the corpse was already heading back inside.

Now Clarke and Lubin stand in Airlock Five while the ocean drains away around them. Clarke splits her face seal, feels herself reinflate like a fleshy balloon. The inner hatch hisses and swings open. Bright light, painfully intense, spills in from the space beyond. Clarke steps back as her eyecaps adjust, raising her hands against possible attack. None comes. A gang of corpses jam the wet room, but only one stands in the front rank: Patricia Rowan.

Between Rowan and rifters, an isolation membrane swirls with oily iridescence.

"The consensus is that you should stay in the airlock for the time being," Rowan says.

Clarke glances at Lubin. He's watching the welcoming committee with blank, impassive eyes.

"Who was it?" Clarke asks calmly.

"I don't think that's really important," Rowan says.

"Lisbeth might think otherwise. Her nose is broken."

"Our man says he was defending himself."

"A man in 300-bar preshmesh armor defending himself against an unarmed woman in a diveskin."

"A corpse defending himself from a fishhead ," someone says from within the committee. "Whole other thing."

Rowan ignores the intrusion. "Our man resorted to fists," she says, "because that was the only approach that had any real hope of succeeding. You know as well as we do what we're defending ourselves from."

"What I know is that none of you are supposed to leave Atlantis without prior authorization. Those were the rules, even before the quarantine. You agreed to them."

"We weren't allowed much of a choice," Rowan remarks mildly.

"Still."

"Fuck the rules ," says another corpse. "They're trying to kill us. Why are we arguing protocol?"

Clarke blinks. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know damn well what it—"

Rowan holds up a hand. The dissident falls silent.

"We found a mine," Rowan says, in the same voice she might use to report that the head was out of toilet paper.

" What ?"

"Nothing special. Standard demolition charge. Might have even been one of the same ones Ken wired up before we—" She hesitates, choosing her words— "came to terms a few years back. I'm told it would have isolated us from primary life-support and flooded a good chunk of Res-C. Somewhere between thirty to a hundred killed from the implosion alone."

Clarke stares at Lubin, notes the slightest shake of the head.

"I didn't know," Clarke says softly.

Rowan smiles faintly. "You'll understand there might be some skepticism on that point."

"I'd like to see it," Lubin says.

"I'd like to see my daughter in the sunlight," Rowan tells him. "It's not going to happen."

Clarke shakes her head. "Pat, listen. I don't know where it came from. I—"

"I do," Rowan says mildly. "There are piles of them stashed at the construction caches. A hundred or more at Impossible Lake alone."

"We'll find out who planted it. But you can't keep it. You're not allowed weapons."

"Do you seriously expect us to simply hand it back to the people who planted it in the first place?"

"Pat, you know me."

"I know all of you," Rowan says. "The answer is no."

"How did you find it?" Lubin asks from out of left field.

"By accident. We lost our passive acoustics and sent someone out to check the antennae."

"Without informing us beforehand."

"It seemed fairly likely that you people were causing the interference. Informing you would not have been a wise idea even if you hadn't been mining our hulls."

"Hulls," Lubin remarks. "So you found more than one."

No one speaks.

Of course not, Clarke realizes. They're not going to tell us anything. They're gearing up for war.

And they're going to get slaughtered…

"I wonder if you've found them all," Lubin muses.

They stand without speaking, gagged by the synthetic black skin across their faces. Behind their backs, behind the impenetrable mass of the inner hatch, the corpses return to whatever plots and counterplans they're drawing. Ahead, past the outer hatch, a gathering crowd of rifters waits for answers. Around them and within them, machinery pumps and sparks and readies them for the abyss. By the time the water rises over their heads they are incompressible.

Lubin reaches for the outer hatch. Clarke stops him.

"Grace," she buzzes.

"Could be anyone." He rises, weightless in the flooded compartment. One hand reaches up to keep the ceiling at bay. It's an odd image, this humanoid silhouette floating against the bluish-white walls of the airlock. His eyecaps almost look like holes cut from black paper, letting the light shine through from behind.

"In fact," he continues, "I'm not entirely convinced they're telling the truth."

"The corpses? Why would they lie? How would it serve them?"

"Sow dissension among the enemy. Divide and conquer."

"Come on, Ken. It's not as though there's a pro-corpse faction ready to rise up on their behalf and…"