Rifters 1 - Starfish Read online

  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 a while 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; seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon's 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 harp string 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 smoke-trails 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, unzipping 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 lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it i
n 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 electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.

  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 — okay," 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 any more. 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 her cubby. Clarke 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 a while 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, 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 Galapagos 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 ambie
nt. 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 one or two 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 afterwards?"

  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 towards it, one hand running lightly along the guide rope. The distant smudge of light that marks their destination seems wrong, somehow. The color is different. 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. A 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.