Peter Watts - Behemoth

"They've got smart gels down there. A lot of them, I don't know how many, twenty or thirty maybe. Packed together at the end of the wing, probably right in the wet room. I don't know how we didn't pick them up before. Maybe they just…get lost in the background noise until you jam them together."

Lag. "Any sense of what they're doing?" Back at Juan de Fuca, they were able to make some pretty shrewd inferences from changes in signal strength.

"No, they're all just— in there. Thinking all over each other. If there was just one or two I might be able to get some kind of reading, but—"

"They played me," Lubin says overtop of her.

"Played?" What's that in his voice? Surprise? Uncertainty? Clarke's never heard it there before.

"To make me focus on F-3."

Anger , she realizes.

"But what's the point?" she asks. "Some kind of bluff, did they think we'd mistake those things for people?" It seems ridiculous; even Creasy knew there was something off, and he's never met a head cheese before. Then again, what do corpses know about fine-tuning? How would they know the difference?

"Not a diversion," Lubin murmurs in the void. "No other place they could come out that sonar wouldn't…"

"Well, what—"

"Pull them back," he snaps suddenly. "They're mask—they're luring us in and masking something. Pull them b— "

The abyss clenches .

It's a brief squeeze around Clarke's body, not really painful. Not up here.

In the next instant, a sound: Whoompf . A swirl of turbulence. And suddenly the water's full of mechanical screams.

She spins. The smokescreen below is in sudden motion, shredded and boiling in the wake of some interior disturbance, lit from within by flickering heat-lightning.

She squeezes the throttle for dear life. The squid drags her down.

" Clarke! " The sound of the detonation has evidently passed the Nerve Hab. "What's going on?"

A symphony of tearing metal. A chorus of voices in discord. Not so many as there should be, she realizes.

We must have lost a generator, she realizes dully. I can hear them screaming.

I can hear them dying…

And not just hear them. The cries rise in her head before they reach her ears; raw chemical panic lighting up the reptile brain like sodium flares, the smarter mammalian overlay helpless and confused, its vaunted cognition shattering like cheap crystal in the backwash.

" Clarke! Report!"

Anger now, thin veins of grim determination among the panic. Lights shine more brightly through the thinning murk. They're the wrong size, somehow, the wrong color. Not rifter lamps. Her sonar squeals in the face of some imminent collision: another squid slews by, out of control, its rider luminous with an agony of broken bones.

"It wasn't me, I swear it! They did it themselves —"

Creasy tumbles away, his pain fading into others'.

Res-F's hull sprawls across sonar, its smooth contours all erased, jagged edges everywhere: the gaping mouths of caves lined with twisted metal teeth. One of them spits something metallic at her; it bounces off the squid with a clank. Vocoder voices grind and grate on all sides. A gap opens in the tattered cloud-bank ahead: Clarke sees a great lumbering shape, an armored cyclops. Its single eye shines balefully with the wrong kind of light. It reaches for her.

She pulls to port, catches a glimpse of something spinning in the chaos directly ahead. A dark mass thuds flaccidly against the squid's bow and caroms towards her face. She ducks. A diveskinned arm cuffs her in passing.

" Lenie! "

Dead gray eyes watch, oblivious and indifferent, as she twists away.

Oh Jesus. Oh God.

Luminous metal monsters stride through the wreckage, stabbing at the wounded.

She tries to hold it together. "They're coming out of the walls, Ken. They were waiting inside, they blew the hull from inside and they're coming through the walls…"

God damn you, Pat. Was this you? Was this you?

She remembers the lopsided chessboard on Lubin's display. She remembers black pieces arranging themselves for an easy rout.

Only now does she remember: in chess, white always moves first.

That indifferent, alien intellect is nowhere to be found now. The gels must have turned to homogenous pulp the instant the hull imploded.

There were more than preshmeshed corpses and smart gels packed in F-3's wet room. There was shrapnel, doubtless arranged in accordance with some theoretical projection of maximum spread. Clarke can see the fragments where they've come to rest—on the hull, embedded in ruptured LOX tanks, protruding from the far side of ragged entry wounds torn through the flesh of comrades and rivals. They look like metal daisies, like the blades of tiny perfect windmills. The mere rebound from the implosion would have been enough to set them soaring, to mow down anyone not already sucked to their death at mach speeds or torn apart on the jagged lip of the breach itself.

The smokescreen has all but dispersed.

Lubin's calling a retreat. Most of those able to respond, already have. The preshmeshed figures clambering along the hulled remains of F-3 have to content themselves with the wounded and the dead. They're crabs, ungainly and overweighted. Instead of claws they have needles, long, almost surgical things, extending from their gauntlets like tiny lances.

"Lenie. Do you read?"

She floats dumbly overhead, out of reach, watching them stab black bodies. Occasional bubbles erupt from the needle tips, race into the sky like clusters of shuddering silvery mushrooms.

Compressed air, injected into flesh. You can make a weapon out of almost anything.

"Lenie?"

"She could be dead, Ken. I can't find Dale or Abra either."

Other voices, too fuzzy to distinguish. Most of the white noise generators are still online, after all.

She tunes in the crabs. She wonders what they must be feeling now. She wonders what she's feeling, too, but she can't really tell. Maybe she feels like a head cheese.

The corpses, though, down there in their armor, mopping up. No shortage of feelings there. Determination. A surprising amount of fear. Anger, but distant; it isn't driving them.

Not as much hate as she would have expected.

She rises. The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis lights the water, deceptively serene. She can barely hear buzzing rifter voices; she can't make out any words. She can't tune any of them in. She's all alone at the bottom of the sea.

Suddenly she rises past some invisible line-of-sight, and her jawbone fills with chatter.

"— the bodies," Lubin's saying. "Bring terminals at personal discretion. Garcia's waiting under Med for triage."

"Med won't hold half of us," someone— oh, it's Kevin! — buzzes faintly in the distance. "Way too many injured."

"Anyone from F-3 not injured and not carrying injured, meet at the cache. Hopkinson?"

"Here."

"Anything?"

"Think so, maybe. We're getting a whole lot of brains in Res-E. Can't tell who, but—"

"Yeager and Ng, bring your people straight up forty meters. Don't change your lats and longs, but I want everybody well away from the hull. Hopkinson, get your people back to the Med Hab."

"We're okay—"

"Do it. We need donors."

"Jesus," someone says faintly, "We're fucked…"

"No. They are."

Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through the mutilating filter of her vocoder.

"Grace, they just—"

"Just what ?" she buzzes. "Do you think they're winning ? What are they gonna do for an encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We've got enough charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we're gonna use them."