Peter Watts - Starfish

She looks around at them: Brander, Nakata, Caraco, Fischer. They look back, waiting. There's something in Nakata's face, Fischer thinks, something like recognition, but Lenie Clarke doesn't seem to notice. She doesn't seem to notice any of them, really.

She shrugs. "I'm changing the sodium on number two. A couple of you could come along, I guess."

She doesn't seem exactly human. There is something familiar about her, though.

What do you think, Shadow? Do I know her?

But Shadow isn't talking.

There's a street where none of the buildings have windows. The streetlamps shine down with a sick coppery light on masses of giant clams and big ropy brownish things emerging from mucous-gray cylinders (tube worms, he remembers: Riftia fuckinghugeous , or something). Natural chimneys rise here and there above the invertebrate multitudes, pillars of basalt and silicon and crystallized sulfur. Every time Fischer visits the Throat, he thinks of really bad acne.

Lenie Clarke leads them on a flight down Main Street: Fischer, Caraco, a couple of cargo squids on remote. The generators lean up over them on both sides. A dark curtain billows across the road directly ahead, and it sparkles . A school of small fish darts around the edges of the streaming cloud.

"That's the problem," Lenie buzzes. She looks back at Fischer and Caraco. "Mud plume. Too big to redirect."

They've come past eight generators so far. That leaves six up ahead, drowning in silt. Double shift, even if they call out Lubin and Brander.

He hopes they don't have to. Not Brander, anyway.

Lenie fins off towards the plume. The squids whine softly behind, dragging their tools. Fischer steels himself to follow.

"Shouldn't we check thermal?" Caraco calls out. "I mean, what if it's hot?"

He was wondering that himself, actually. He's been wondering about such things ever since he overheard Caraco and Nakata comparing rumors from the Mendocino fracture. Nakata heard it was a really old minisub, with Plexiglas ports. Caraco heard they were thermoacrylate. Nakata said it got wedged inside the center of the rift zone. Caraco said no, it was just cruising over the seabed and a smoker blew up under it.

They agreed on how fast the viewports melted, though. Even the skeletons went to ash. Which didn't make much difference anyway, since every bone in every body had already been smashed by the ambient pressure.

Caraco makes a lot of sense, in Fischer's opinion, but Lenie Clarke doesn't even answer. She just fins off into that black sparkly cloud and disappears. At the spot she disappears the mud glows suddenly, a phosphorescent wake. The fish swarm towards it.

"She doesn't even care, sometimes," Fischer buzzes softly. "Like, whether she lives or dies…"

Caraco looks at him for a moment, then kicks off towards the plume.

Clarke's voice buzzes out of the cloud. "Not much time."

Caraco dives into the roiling wall with a splash of light. A knot of fish— a couple of them are a fair size now, Fischer sees— swirl in her wake.

Go on , Shadow says.

Something moves.

He spins around. For a moment there's only Main Street, fading in distance.

Then something big and black and…and lopsided appears from behind one of the generators.

" Jeez. " Fischer's legs move of their own volition. "They're coming!" he tries to yell. The vocoder scales it down to a croak.

Stupid. Stupid. They warned us, the sparkles bring in the little fish and the little fish bring in the big fish and if we don't watch it we just get in the way.

The plume is right in front of him now, a wall of sediment, a river on the bottom of the ocean. He dives in. Something nips lightly at his calf.

Everything goes black, with occasional sparkles. He turns his headlight on; the flowing mud swallows the beam half a meter from his face.

But Clarke can see it, somehow: "Turn it off."

"I can't see—"

"Good. Maybe they won't either."

He kills the light. In the darkness he gropes the gas billy from its sheath on his leg.

Caraco, from a distance: "I thought they were blind…"

"Some of them."

And they've got other senses to fall back on. Fischer runs through the list: smell, sound, pressure waves, bioelectric fields … Nothing relies on vision down here. It's just one of the options.

He hopes the plume blocks more than just light.

But even as he watches, the darkness is lifting. Black murk turns brown, then almost gray. Faint light filters in from the floodlamps on Main Street.

It's the eyecaps, he realizes. They're compensating. Cool.

He still can't see very far, though. It's like being caught in dirty fog.

"Remember." Clarke, very close. "They're not as tough as they look. They probably won't do much real damage."

A sonar pistol stutters nearby. "I'm not getting anything," Caraco buzzes. Milky sediment swirls on all sides. Fischer puts his arm out; it fades at the elbow.

"Oh shit." Caraco.

"Are you—"

"Something's on my leg something's Christ it's big—"

" Lenie— " Fischer cries.

A bump from behind. A slap on the back of his head. A shadow, black and spiny, fades into the murk.

Hey, that wasn't so—

Something clamps onto his leg. He looks down: jaws, teeth, a monstrous head fading away into the murk.

Oh Jeez—

He jams his billy against scaly flesh. Something gives, like gelatin. A soft thump. The flesh bloats, ruptures; bubbles explode from the rip.

Something else smashes him from behind. His chest is in a vise. He lashes out, blindly. Mud and ash and black blood billow into his face.

He grabs blindly, twists. There's a broken tooth in his hand, half as long as his forearm; he tightens his grip and it splinters. He drops it, brings the billy around and jams it into the thing on his side. Another explosion of meat and compressed CO 2.

The pressure lifts from his chest. Whatever's clamped onto his leg isn't moving. Fischer lets himself sink, drifts down against the base of a barite chimney.

Nothing charges him.

"Everyone okay." Lenie's vocoded monotone. Fischer grunts yes.

"Thank God for bad nutrition," Caraco buzzes. "We're fucked if these guys ever get enough vitamins."

Fischer reaches down, pries the dead monster's jaws off his calf. He wishes he had breath to catch.

Shadow?

Right here.

Was this what it was like for you?

No. This didn't take so long.

He lies against the bottom and tries to shut his eyes. He can't; the diveskin bonds to the surface of the eyecaps, traps the eyelids in little cul-de-sacs. I'm sorry, Shadow. I'm so sorry.

I know, she says. It's okay.

Lenie Clarke stands naked in Medical, spraying the bruises on her leg. No, not naked; the caps are still on her eyes. All Fischer can see is skin.

It's not enough.

A trickle of blood crawls down her side from just below the water intake. She absently wipes it away and reloads the hypo.

Her breasts are small, almost adolescent, bumps. No hips. Her body's as pale as her face, except for the bruises and the fresh pink seams that access the implants. She looks anorexic.

She's the first adult Fischer's ever wanted.

She looks up and sees him in the doorway. "Strip down," she tells him, and goes back to work.

He splits his 'skin and starts to peel. Lenie finishes with her leg and stabs an ampoule into the cut in her side. The blood clots like magic.

"They warned us about the fish," Fischer says, "but they said they were really fragile. They said we could just beat them off with our hands if we had to."