Behemoth (33 page)

“Or maybe they don't have to,” Lubin says.

“What, you mean…” Something dawns on Hopkinson's face.
“Pest control?”

Lubin nods.

Silence falls around the implications. Why spend valuable resources acquiring and following your target through territory which might be saturated with trip wires? Why risk giving yourself away when it's cheaper and simpler to trick your enemies into poisoning their own well?

“Shit,” Hopkinson breathes. “Like leaving poisoned food out for the ants, so they bring it back to the queen…”

Alexander's nodding. “And that's where it came from …
β
ehemoth was never supposed to show up anywhere around here, and all of a sudden, just like magic…”

“
β
-max came from goddamned
Atlantis,
” Nolan snaps. “For all we know the strain out at the lake's just baseline. We've only got the corpses' say-so that it isn't.”

“Yeah, but even the baseline strain wasn't supposed to show up out there—”

“Am I the only one who remembers the corpses built the baseline in the first place?”
Nolan glares around the room, white eyes blazing. “Rowan
admitted
it, for Chrissakes!”

Her gaze settles on Clarke, pure antimatter. Clarke feels her hands bunching into fists at her side, feels the corner of her mouth pull back in a small sneer. None of her body language, she realizes, is likely to defuse the situation.

Fuck it,
she decides, and takes one provocative step forward.

“Oh,
right,
” Nolan says, and charges.

Lubin moves. It seems so effortless. One instant he's sitting at the console; the next, Nolan's crumpling to the deck like a broken doll. In the barely perceptible time between Clarke thinks she saw Lubin rising from his chair, thinks she glimpsed his elbow in Nolan's diaphragm and his knee in her back. She may have even heard something, like the snapping of a tree branch across someone's leg. Now her rival lies flat on her back, motionless but for a sudden, manic fluttering of fingers and eyelids.

Everyone else has turned to stone.

Lubin pans across those still standing. “We are confronted with a common threat. No matter where
β
-max came from, we're unlikely to cure it without the corpses' help now that Bhanderi's dead. The corpses also have relevant expertise in other areas.”

Nolan gurgles at their feet, her arms in vague motion, her legs conspicuously immobile.

“For example,” Lubin continues, “Grace's back is broken at the third lumbar vertebra. Without help from Atlantis she'll spend the rest of her life paralyzed from the waist down.”

Chen blanches. “
Jesus,
Ken!” Shocked from her own paralysis, she kneels at Nolan's side.

“It would be unwise to move her without a cocoon,” Lubin says softly. “Perhaps Dimitri could scare one up.”

It only sounds like a suggestion. The airlock's cycling in seconds.

“As for the rest of you good people,” Lubin remarks in the same even tone, “I trust you can see that the situation has changed, and that cooperation with Atlantis is now in our best interest.”

They probably see exactly what Clarke does: a man who, without a second thought, has just snapped the spine of his own lieutenant to win an argument. Clarke stares down at her vanquished enemy. Despite the open eyes and the twitches, Nolan doesn't seem entirely conscious.

Take that, murderer. Stumpfucking shit-licking cunt. Does it hurt,
sweetie
?
Not enough. Not nearly enough.

But the exultation is forced. She remembers how she felt as Rowan died, how she felt afterward: cold, killing rage, the absolute stone certainty that Nolan was going to pay with her life. And yet here she lies, helpless, broken by someone else's hand—and somehow, there's only charred emptiness where rage burned incandescent less than an hour before.

I could finish the job,
she reflects.
If Ken didn't stop me
.

Is she so disloyal to the memory of her friend, that she takes so little pleasure in this? Has the sudden fear of discovery simply eclipsed her rage, or is it the same old excuse—that Lenie Clarke, gorged on revenge for a thousand lifetimes, has lost the stomach for it?

Five years ago I didn't care if millions of innocents died. Now I'm too much of a coward even to punish the guilty
.

Some, she imagined, might even consider that an improvement …

“—are still uncertainties,” Lubin's saying, back at the console. “Maybe whoever sent the drone is responsible for
β
-max, maybe not. If they are, they've already made their move. If not, they're not
ready
to move. Even if they know
exactly
where we are—and I think that unlikely—they either don't have all their pieces in place yet, or they're biding their time for some other reason.”

He unfreezes the numbers on the board, wasting no more attention on the thing gurgling on the deck behind him.

Chen glances uneasily at Nolan, but Lubin's message is loud and clear:
I'm in charge. Get over it
.

“What reason?” she asks after a moment.

Lubin shrugs.

“How much time do we have?”

“More than if we tip our hand.” Lubin folds his arms across his chest and stretches isometrically. Muscles and tendons flex disconcertingly beneath his diveskin. “If they know we're on to them they may feel their hand has been forced, move now rather than later. So we play along to buy time. We edit the drone's memory and release it with some minor systems glitch that would explain any delay in its return. We'll also have to search the lake site for surveillance devices, and cut a grid within at least a half kilometer of Atlantis and the trailer park. Lane's right: it's unlikely that an AUV planted those mines, but if one did there'll be a detonator somewhere within LFAM range.”

“Okay.” Hopkinson looks away from her fallen comrade with evident effort. “So we—we make up with Atlantis, we fake out the drone, and we comb the area for other nasties. Then what?”

“Then I go back,” Lubin tells her.

“What, to the lake?”

Lubin smiles faintly. “Back to N'Am.”

Hopkinson whistles in tuneless surprise. “Well, I guess if
anyone
can take them on…”

Take on who, exactly?
Clarke wonders. No one asks aloud.
Who
is everyone left behind.
Them. They
are dedicated to our destruction.
They
sniff along the Mid Atlantic Ridge, obsessed in their endless myopic search for that one set of coordinates to feed into their torpedoes.

No one asks why, either. There is no
why
behind the hunt: it's just what
they
do. Don't go rooting around for reasons. Asking
why
accomplishes nothing: there are too many reasons to count, none of the living lack for motive. This fractured, bipolar microcosm stagnates and festers on the ocean floor, every reason for its existence reduced to an axiom: just
because
.

And yet, how many of the people here—how many of the rifters, how many, even of the drybacks—really brought the curtain down? For every corpse with blood on her hands, how many others—family, friends, drones who maintain plumbing and machinery and flesh—are guilty of nothing but association?

And if Lenie Clarke hadn't been so furiously intent on revenge that she could write off an entire world as an incidental expense, would any of it have come to this?

Alyx,
Rowan said.

Clarke shakes her head. “No you don't.”

Lubin speaks to the screen. “The most we can do down here is buy time. We have to
use
it.”

“Yes, but—”

“We're blind and deaf and under attack. The ruse has failed, Lenie. We need to know what we're facing, which means we have to
face
it. End of discussion.”

“Not you,” Clarke says.

Lubin turns to face her, one eyebrow raised.

She looks back, completely unfazed. “We.”

*   *   *

He refuses three times before they even get outside.

“Someone needs to take charge here,” he insists as the airlock floods. “You're the obvious choice. No one will give you any trouble now that Grace has been sidelined.”

Clarke feels a chill in her gut. “Is
that
what that was? She'd served her purpose and you wanted me back in play so you just—broke her in half?”

“I'd wager it's no worse than what
you
had in mind for her.”

“I'm going.” she says. The hatch drops away beneath them.

“Do you honestly think you can force me to take you?” He brakes, turns, kicks out from under the light.

She follows. “Do you think
you
can afford to do this without any backup at all?”

“More than I can afford an untrained sidekick who's signed up for all the wrong reasons.”

“You don't know shit about my reasons.”

“You'll hold me back,” Lubin buzzes. “I stand much better odds if I don't have to keep watching out for you. If you get in trouble—”

“Then you'll ditch me,” she says. “In a second. I know what your battlefield priorities are. Shit, Ken, I
know
you.”

“Recent events would suggest otherwise.”

She stares at him, adamant. He scissors rhythmically on into darkness.

Where's he going?
she wonders.
There's nothing on this bearing
 …

“You can't deny that you're not equipped for this kind of op,” he points out. “You don't have the training.”

“Which must make it pretty embarrassing for you, given that I got all the way across N'Am before you and your army and all your ballyhooed
training
could even catch up with me.” She smiles under her mask, not kindly; he can't see it but maybe he can tune in the sentiment. “I beat you, Ken. Maybe I wasn't nearly as smart, or as well-trained, and maybe I didn't have all of N'Am's muscle backing me up, but I stayed ahead of you for
months
and you know it.”

“You had quite a lot of help,” he points out.

“Maybe I still do.”

His rhythm falters. Perhaps he hasn't thought of that.

She takes the opening. “Think about it, Ken. All those virtual viruses getting together, muddying my tracks, running interference, turning me into a fucking myth…”

“Anemone wasn't working for you,” he buzzes. “It was
using
you. You were just—”

“A tool. A meme in a plan for Global Apocalypse. Give me a break, Ken, it's not like I could forget that shit even if I tried. But so what? I was still the vector. It liked me enough to keep
you
lot off my back, anyway. Who's to say it isn't still out there? Where else do those software demons come from? You think it's a coincidence they name themselves after me?”

Barely discernible, his silhouette extends an arm. Click trains spray the water. He starts off again, his bearing slightly altered.

“Are you suggesting,” he buzzes, “that if you go back and announce yourself to Anemone—whatever's become of it—that it's going to throw some sort of magic shield around you?”

“Maybe n—”

“It's
changed
. It was
always
changing, from moment to moment. It couldn't possibly have survived the way we remember it, and if the things we've encountered recently are any indication of what it's turned into, you don't want to renew the acquaintance.”

“Maybe,” Clarke admits. “But maybe some part of its basic agenda
hasn't
changed. It's alive, right? That's what everyone keeps saying. Doesn't matter that it was built out of electrons instead of carbon,
Life's just self-replicating information shaped by natural selection
so it's in the club. And
we've
got genes in us that haven't changed in a million generations. Why should this thing be any different? How do you know there isn't some protect-Lenie subroutine snoozing in the code somewhere? And by the way, where the fuck are we
going?
”

Lubin's headlamp spikes to full intensity, lays a bright jiggling oval on the substrate ahead. “There.”

It's a patch of bone-gray mud like any other. She can't see so much as a pebble to distinguish it.

Maybe it's a burial plot
, she thinks, suddenly giddy.
Maybe this is where he's been feeding his habit all these years, on devolved natives and MIAs and now on the stupid little girl who wouldn't take no for an answer
 …

Lubin thrusts one arm into the ooze. The mud shudders around his shoulder, as if something beneath were pushing back. Which is exactly what's happening; Ken's awakened something under the surface. He pulls his arm back up and the thing follows, heaving into view. Clumps and chalky clouds cascade from its sides as it clears the substrate.

It's a swollen torus about a meter and a half wide. A dotted line of hydraulic nozzles ring its equator. Two layers of flexible webbing stretch across the hole in its center, one on top, one on the bottom; a duffle bag, haphazardly stuffed with lumpy objects, occupies the space between. Through the billowing murk and behind clumps of mud still adhering to its surface, it shines slick as a diveskin.

“I packed a few things away for a return trip,” Lubin buzzes. “As a precaution.”

He sculls backward a few meters. The mechanical bellhop spins a quarter-turn, spits muddy water from its thrusters, and heels.

They start back.

“So that's your plan,” Lubin buzzes after a while. “Find something that evolved to help you destroy the world, hope that it's got a better nature you can appeal to, and—”