Starfish

Book 1: Rifters Trilogy

by Peter Watts

Genres: Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew - people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater - down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness.

Unfortunately, the only people suitable for longterm employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below?

Release date: September 16, 2014

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 320

Sample

DUET

CONSTRICTOR

WHEN the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe's armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and His name is Physics.
How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.
She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. The cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you're three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.
It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they've done to her.
It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She's so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she's scarcely aware of them anymore. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.
Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they're supposed to increase the apparent size of one's personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn't help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.
She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.
Ballard stands up. "Ready to go?"
"You're in charge," Clarke says.
"Only on paper." Ballard smiles. "No pecking order down here, Lenie. As far as I'm concerned, we're equals." After two days on the rift, Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn't always seem real.
Something hits Beebe from the outside.
Ballard's smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station's titanium skin.
"It takes awhile to get used to," Ballard says, "doesn't it?"
And again.
"I mean, that sounds big.…"
"Maybe we should turn the lights off," Clarke suggests. She knows they won't. Beebe's exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can't see it from inside—Beebe has no windows—but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—
Thud!—Most of the time.
"Remember back in training?" Ballard says over the sound. "When they told us that the fish were usually so—small.…"
Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There's no other sound.
"It must've gotten tired," Ballard says. "You'd think they'd figure it out." She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.
Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.
Better to face it outside, where she knows what's coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.
* * *
Going outside is like drowning, once a day.
Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector…The ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.
When she catches her breath, and loses it.
When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.
It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.
She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.
* * *
They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.
They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.
"I'll never get used to it," Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.
Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. "Thirty-four Centigrade." The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.
Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.
There's so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; sea-water boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at the Throat—it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.
Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace the water with milky veils.
The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.
It doesn't sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harpstring is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:
"LENIE—"
Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.
Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny, dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.
Then the pain reaches her.
She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.
She goes limp. Please get it over with if you're going to kill me just please God make it quick—She feels the urge to vomit, but the 'skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won't let her.
She shuts out the pain. She's had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There's another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife—you know, a knife, like the one you've got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.
Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It's like operating a marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only—Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoketrails of suspended gore.
The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.
Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I've had worse, she thinks.
Then: Why am I still alive?
Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.
"Jesus Christ," Ballard says in a distorted whisper. "Lenie? You okay?"
Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. "Yeah."
And if not, she knows, it's her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.
She's always asking for it.
* * *
Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them: Clarke's stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.
Ballard splits the face seal on her 'skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. "Jesus. Jesus! I don't believe it! My God, did you see that thing? They get so huge around here!" She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. "And to think they're usually just a few centimeters long…"
She starts to strip down, splitting her 'skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. "And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough, and it just came apart! Jesus!" Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she'd rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the 'skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.
Maybe she's got her other hung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night…
She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she's outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out—I really shouldn't mind.…
Ballard peels her 'skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyzer intake pokes out through her rib cage.
Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard's flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.
Prickly numbness is spreading, leaking through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.
She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.
Am I in shock? Am I fainting?
"I mean—" Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. "Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn't have told me you were okay if you weren't."
The tingling reaches the base of Clarke's skull. "I'm…fine," she says. "Nothing broke. I'm just bruised."
"Garbage. Take off your 'skin."
Clarke straightens, with effort. The numbness recedes a bit. "It's nothing I can't take care of myself."
Don't touch me. Please don't touch me.
Ballard steps forward without a word and unseals the 'skin around Clarke's forearm. She peels back the material and exposes an ugly purple bruise. She looks at Clarke with one raised eyebrow.
"Just a bruise," Clarke says. "I'll take care of it, really. Thanks anyway." She pulls her hand away from Ballard's ministrations.
Ballard looks at her for a moment. She smiles ever so slightly.
"Lenie," she says, "there's no need to feel embarrassed."
"About what?"
"You know. Me having to rescue you. You going to pieces when that thing attacked. It was perfectly understandable. Most people have a rough time adjusting. I'm just one of the lucky ones."
Right. You've always been one of the lucky ones, haven't you? I know your kind, Ballard, you've never failed at anything
"You don't have to feel ashamed about it," Ballard reassures her.
"I don't," Clarke says honestly. She doesn't feel much of anything anymore. Just the tingling. And the tension. And a vague sort of wonder that she's even alive.
* * *
The bulkhead is sweating.
The deep sea lays icy hands on the metal and, inside, Clarke watches the humid atmosphere bead and run down the wall. She sits rigid on her bunk under dim fluorescent light, every wall of the cubby within easy reach. The ceiling is too low. The room is too narrow. She feels the ocean compressing the station around her.
And all I can do is wait.…
The anabolic salve on her injuries is warm and soothing. Clarke probes the purple flesh of her arm with practiced fingers. The diagnostic tools in the Med cubby have vindicated her. She's lucky, this time: bones intact, epidermis unbroken. She seals up her 'skin, hiding the damage.
She shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.
That's me, she thinks. That's what I look like now. She tries to read what lies behind that glacial facade. Am I bored, horny, upset? How to tell, with her eyes hidden behind those corneal opacities? She sees no trace of the tension she always feels. I could be terrified. I could be pissing in my 'skin, and no one would know.
She leans forward. The reflection comes to meet her. They stare at each other, white to white, ice to ice. For a moment, they almost forget Beebe's ongoing war against pressure. For a moment, they don't mind the claustrophobic solitude that grips them.
How many times, Clarke wonders, have I wanted eyes as dead as these?
* * *
Beebe's metal viscera crowd the corridor beyond Clarke's cubby. She can barely stand erect. A few steps bring her into the lounge.
Ballard, back in shirtsleeves, is at one of the library terminals. "Rickets," she says.
"What?"
"Fish down here don't get enough trace elements. They're rotten with deficiency diseases. Doesn't matter how fierce they are. They bite too hard, they break their teeth on us."
Clarke stabs buttons on the food processor; the machine grumbles at her touch. "I thought there was all sorts of food at the rift. That's why things got so big."
"There's a lot of food. Just not very good quality."
A vaguely edible lozenge of sludge oozes from the processor onto Clarke's plate. She eyes it for a moment. I can relate.
"You're going to eat in your gear?" Ballard asks, as Clarke sits down at the lounge table.
Clarke blinks at her. "Yeah. Why?"
"Oh, nothing. It would just be nice to talk to someone with pupils in their eyes, you know?"
"Sorry. I can take them off if you—"
"No, it's no big thing. I can live with it." Ballard turns off the library and sits down across from Clarke. "So, how do you like the place so far?"
Clarke shrugs and keeps eating.
"I'm glad we're only down here for a year," Ballard says. "This place could get to you after a while."
"It could be worse."
"Oh, I'm not complaining. I was looking for a challenge, after all. What about you?"
"Me?"
"What brings you down here? What are you looking for?"
Clarke doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know, really," she says at last. "Privacy, I guess."
Ballard looks up. Clarke stares back, her face neutral.
"Well, I'll leave you to it, then," Ballard says pleasantly.
Clarke watches her disappear down the corridor. She hears the sound of a cubby hatch hissing shut.
Give it up, Ballard, she thinks. I'm not the sort of person you really want to know.
* * *
Almost start of the morning shift. The food processor disgorges Clarke's breakfast with its usual reluctance. Ballard, in Communications, is just getting off the phone. A moment later she appears in the hatchway.
"Management says—" She stops. "You've got blue eyes."
Clarke smiles faintly. "You've seen them before."
"I know. It's just kind of surprising, it's been awhile since I've seen you without your caps in."
Clarke sits down with her breakfast. "So, what does Management say?"
"We're on schedule. Rest of the crew comes down in three weeks, we go online in four." Ballard sits down across from Clarke. "I wonder sometimes why we're not online right now."
"I guess they just want to be sure everything works."
"Still, it seems like a long time for a dry run. And you'd think that…well, that they'd want to get the geothermal program up and running as fast as possible, after all that's happened."
After Lepreau and Winshire melted down, you mean.
"And there's something else," Ballard says. "I can't get through to Piccard."
Clarke looks up. Piccard Station is anchored on the Galápagos Rift; it is not a particularly stable mooring.
"You ever meet the couple there?" Ballard asks. "Ken Lubin, Lana Cheung?"
Clarke shakes her head. "They went through before me. I never met any of the other rifters except you."
"Nice people. I thought I'd call them up, see how things were going at Piccard, but nobody can get through."
"Line down?"
"They say it's probably something like that. Nothing serious. They're sending a 'scaphe down to check it out."
Maybe the seabed opened up and swallowed them whole, Clarke thinks. Maybe the hull had a weak plate; one's all it would take—
Something creaks, deep in Beebe's superstructure. Clarke looks around. The walls seem to have moved closer while she wasn't looking.
"Sometimes," she says, "I wish we didn't keep Beebe at surface pressure. Sometimes I wish we were pumped up to ambient. To take the strain off the hull." She knows it's an impossible dream; most gases kill outright when breathed at three hundred atmospheres. Even oxygen would do you in if it got above a fraction of a percent.
Ballard shivers dramatically. "If you want to risk breathing ninety-nine-percent hydrogen, you're welcome to it. I'm happy the way things are." She smiles. "Besides, you have any idea how long it would take to decompress afterward?"
In the Systems cubby, something bleats for attention.
"Seismic. Wonderful." Ballard disappears into Comm. Clarke follows.
An amber line is writhing across one of the displays. It looks like the EEG of someone caught in a nightmare.
"Get your eyes back in," Ballard says. "The Throat's acting up."
* * *
They can hear it all the way to Beebe; a malign, almost electrical hiss from the direction of the Throat. Clarke follows Ballard toward it, one hand running lightly along the guide rope. The distant smudge of light that marks their destination seems wrong somehow. The color is off. It ripples.
They swim into its glowing nimbus and see why. The Throat is on fire.
Sapphire auroras slide flickering across the generators. At the far end of the array, almost invisible with distance, a pillar of smoke swirls up into the darkness like a great tornado.
The sound it makes fills the abyss. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, and hears rattlesnakes.
"Jesus!" Ballard shouts over the noise. "It's not supposed to do that!"
Clarke checks her thermistor. It won't settle; water temperature goes from four degrees to thirty-eight and back again, within seconds. Myriad ephemeral currents tug at them as they watch.
"Why the light show?" Clarke calls back.
"I don't know!" Ballard answers. "Bioluminescence, I guess! Heat-sensitive bacteria!"
Without warning, the tumult dies.
The ocean empties of sound. Phosphorescent spiderwebs wriggle dimly on the metal, and vanish. In the distance, the tornado sighs and fragments into a few transient dust devils.
A gentle rain of black soot begins to fall in the copper light.
"Smoker," Ballard says into the sudden stillness. "A big one."
They swim to the place where the geyser erupted. There's a fresh wound in the seabed, a gash several meters long, between two of the generators.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," Ballard says. "That's why they built here, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be stable!"
"The rift's never stable," Clarke replies. Not much point in being here if it was.
Ballard swims up through the fallout and pops an access plate on one of the generators. "Well, according to this, there's no damage," she calls down, after looking inside. "Hang on, let me switch channels here—"
Clarke touches one of the cylindrical sensors strapped to her waist, and stares into the fissure. I should be able to fit through there, she decides.
And does.
"We were lucky," Ballard is saying above her. "The other generators are okay, too. Oh, wait a second; number two has a clogged cooling duct, but it's not serious. Backups can handle it until—Get out of there!"
Clarke looks up, one hand on the sensor she's planting. Ballard stares down at her through a chimney of fresh rock.
"Are you crazy?" Ballard shouts. "That's an active smoker!"
Clarke looks down again, deeper into the shaft. It twists out of sight in the mineral haze. "We need temperature readings," she says, "from inside the mouth."
"Get out of there! It could go off again and fry you!"
I suppose it could, at that, Clarke thinks. "It already blew," she calls back. "It'll take awhile to build up a fresh head." She twists a knob on the sensor; tiny explosive bolts blast into the rock, anchoring the device.
"Get out of there, now!"
"Just a second." Clarke turns the sensor on and kicks up out of the seabed. Ballard grabs Clarke's arm as she emerges, starts to drag her away from the smoker.
Clarke stiffens and pulls free. "Don't—" touch me! She catches herself. "I'm, out, okay? You don't have to—"
"Farther." Ballard keeps swimming. "Over here."
They're near the edge of the light now, the floodlit Throat on one side, blackness on the other. Ballard faces Clarke. "Are you out of your mind? We could have gone back to Beebe for a drone! We could have planted it on remote!"
Clarke doesn't answer. She sees something moving in the distance behind Ballard. "Watch your back," she says.
Ballard turns. The gulper undulates through the water like brown smoke, silent and endless; Clarke can't see the creature's tail, although several meters of serpentine flesh have come out of the darkness.
Ballard goes for her knife. After a moment, Clarke does too.
The gulper's jaw drops open like a great jagged scoop.
Ballard begins to launch herself at the thing, knife upraised.
Clarke puts her hand out. "Wait a minute. It's not coming at us."
The front end of the gulper is about ten meters distant now. Its tail pulls free of the murk.
"Are you crazy?" Ballard moves clear of Clarke's hand, still watching the monster.
"Maybe it isn't hungry," Clarke says. She can see its eyes, two tiny unwinking spots glaring at them from the tip of the snout.
"They're always hungry. Did you sleep through the briefings?"
The gulper closes its mouth and passes. It extends around them now, in a wide meandering arc. The head turns back to look at them. It opens its mouth.
"Fuck this," Ballard says, and charges.
Her first stroke opens a meter-long gash in the creature's side. The gulper stares at Ballard for a moment, as if astonished. Then, ponderously, it thrashes.
Clarke watches without moving. Why can't she just let it go? Why does she always have to prove she's better than everything?
Ballard strikes again; this time she slashes into a big tumorous swelling that has to be the stomach.
She frees the things inside.
They spill out through the wound: two giganturids and some misshapen creature Clarke doesn't recognize. One of the giganturids is still alive, and in a foul mood. It locks its teeth around the first thing it encounters.
Ballard. From behind.
"Lenie!" Ballard's knife hand is swinging in staccato arcs. The giganturid begins to come apart. Its jaws remain locked. The convulsing gulper crashes into Ballard and sends her spinning to the bottom.
Finally, Clarke begins to move.
The gulper collides with Ballard again. Clarke moves in low, hugging the bottom, and pulls the other woman clear.
Ballard's knife continues to dip and twist. The giganturid is a mutilated wreck behind the gills, but its grip remains unbroken. Ballard can't twist around far enough to reach the skull. Clarke comes in from behind and takes the creature's head in her hands.
It stares at her, malevolent and unthinking.
"Kill it!" Ballard shouts. "Jesus, what are you waiting for?"
Clarke closes her eyes, and clenches. The skull in her hand splinters like cheap plastic.
There is a silence.
After a while, she opens her eyes. The gulper is gone, fled back into darkness to heal or die. But Ballard's still there, and Ballard is angry.
"What's wrong with you?" she says.
Clarke unclenches her fists. Bits of bone and jellied flesh float about her fingers.
"You're supposed to back me up! Why are you so damned—passive all the time?"
"Sorry." Sometimes it works.
Ballard reaches behind her back. "I'm cold. I think it punctured my diveskin—"
Clarke swims behind her and looks. "A couple of holes. How are you otherwise? Anything feel broken?"
"It broke through the diveskin," Ballard says, as if to herself. "And when that gulper hit me, it could have—" She turns to Clarke and her voice, even distorted, carries a shocked uncertainty. "I could have been killed. I could have been killed!"
For an instant, it's as though Ballard's 'skin and eyes and selfassurance have all been stripped away. For the first time Clarke can see through to the weakness beneath, growing like a delicate tracery of hairline cracks.
You can screw up, too, Ballard. It isn't all fun and games. You know that now.
It hurts, doesn't it?
Somewhere inside, the slightest touch of sympathy. "It's okay," Clarke says. "Jeanette, it's—"
"You idiot!" Ballard hisses. She stares at Clarke like some malign and sightless old woman. "You just floated there! You just let it happen to me!"
Clarke feels her guard snap up again, just in time. This isn't just anger, she realizes. This isn't just the heat of the moment. She doesn't like me. She doesn't like me at all.
And then, dully surprised that she hasn't seen it before:
She never did.

A Niche

Beebe Station floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-gray planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights. There's an airlock for divers at the south pole and a docking hatch for 'scaphes at the north. In between there are girders and anchor lines, conduits and cables, metal armor and Lenie Clarke.
She's doing a routine visual check on the hull: standard procedure, once a week. Ballard is inside, testing some equipment in the Communications cubby. This is not entirely within the spirit of the buddy system. Clarke prefers it this way. Relations have been civil over the past couple of days—Ballard even resurrects her patented chumminess on occasion—but the more time they spend together, the more forced things get. Eventually, Clarke knows, something is going to break.
Besides, out here it seems only natural to be alone.
She's examining a cable clamp when a razormouth charges into the light. It's about two meters long, and hungry. It rams directly into the nearest of Beebe's floodlamps, mouth agape. Several teeth shatter against the crystal lens. The razormouth twists to one side, knocking the hull with its tail, and swims off until barely visible against the dark.
Clarke watches, fascinated. The razormouth swims back and forth, back and forth, then charges again.
The flood weathers the impact easily, doing more damage to its attacker. Over and over again the fish batters itself against the light. Finally, exhausted, it sinks twitching down to the muddy bottom.
"Lenie? Are you okay?"
Clarke feels the words buzzing in her lower jaw. She trips the sender in her diveskin: "I'm okay."
"I heard something out there," Ballard says. "I just wanted to make sure you were—"
"I'm fine," Clarke says. "Just a fish."
"They never learn, do they?"
"No. I guess not. See you later."
"See—"
Clarke switches off her receiver.
Poor stupid fish. How many millennia did it take for them to learn that bioluminescence equals food? How long will Beebe have to sit here before they learn that electric light doesn't?
We could keep our headlights off. Maybe they'd leave us alone—
She stares out past Beebe's electric halo. There is so much blackness there. It almost hurts to look at it. Without lights, without sonar, how far could she go into that viscous shroud and still return?
Clarke kills her headlight. Night edges a bit closer, but Beebe's lights keep it at bay. Clarke turns until she's face-to-face with the darkness. She crouches like a spider against Beebe's hull.
She pushes off.
The darkness embraces her. She swims, not looking back, until her legs grow tired. She doesn't know how far she's come.
But it must be light-years. The ocean is full of stars.
Behind her, the station shines brightest, with coarse yellow rays. In the opposite direction, she can barely make out the Throat, an insignificant sunrise on the horizon.
Everywhere else, living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clarke's field of view; something flees under cover of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth.
There are so many of them.
She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if something big has just passed very close. A delicious thrill dances through her body.
It nearly touched me, she thinks. I wonder what it was. The rift is full of monsters who don't know when to quit. It doesn't matter how much they eat. Their voracity i