Rifters 1 - Starfish Page 7

  Joel had seen rifters before. He'd ferried a couple out to Beebe about a month ago, just after construction had ended. One of them had seemed almost normal, had gone out of her way to chat and joke around as if trying to compensate for the fact that she looked like a zombie. Joel had forgotten her name.

  The other one hadn't said a word.

  One of the 'scaphe's tactical screens beeped a progress report. "Bottom's rising again," Joel called back. "Thirty five hundred. We're almost there."

  "Thanks," one of them — Fischer, according to his shoulder tag — said. Everyone else just sat there.

  A pressure hatch separated the 'scaphe's cockpit from the passenger compartment. If you sealed it you could use the aft chamber as an airlock, or even pressurize it for saturation dives if you didn't mind the hassle of decompression. You could also just swing the hatch shut if you wanted a bit of privacy, if you didn't like leaving your back exposed to certain passengers. That would be bad manners, of course. Joel tried idly to think of some socially acceptable excuse for slamming that big metal disk in their faces, but gave up after a few moments.

  Now, the dorsal hatch — the one leading up into the lifter's cockpit — that one was closed, and that felt wrong. Usually they kept it open until just before the drop. Ray and Joel would shoot the shit for however long the trip would take — three hours, if you were going to Channer.

  Yesterday, without warning, Ray Stericker had dropped the hatch shut fifteen minutes into the flight. He hadn't said an unnecessary word the whole time, had barely even used the intercom. And today — well, today there wasn't anyone up there to talk to any more.

  Joel looked out one of the side ports. The skin of the lifter blocked his view just a few centimeters on the other side; metal fabric stretched across carbon-fiber ribs, a gray expanse sucked into concave squares by the hard vacuum inside. The 'scaphe rode tucked into an oval hollow in the lifter's center. The only port that showed anything but gray skin was the one between Joel's feet; ocean, a long way down.

  Not so far down now, though. He could hear the hisses and sighs of the lifter's ballast bags deflating overhead. Sharper sounds, more distant, cracked through the hull as electrical arcs heated the air in a couple of trim bags. This was still regular autopilot territory, but Ray used to do it all himself anyway. If it weren't for the closed hatch, Joel couldn't have told the difference.

  The head cheese was doing a bang-up job.

  He'd actually seen it a few days ago, during a delivery to an undersea rig just out of Gray's Harbor. Ray had hit a stud and the top of the box had slid away like white mercury, slipping back into a little groove at the edge of the casing and revealing a transparent panel underneath.

  Beneath that panel, packed in clear fluid, was a ridged layer of goo, a bit too gray to be mozzarella. Dashes of brownish glass perforated the goo in neat parallel rows.

  "I'm not supposed to open it up like this," Ray had said. "But fuck 'em. It's not as though the blighter's photosensitive."

  "So what are those little brown bits?"

  "Indium tin oxide over glass. Semiconductor."

  "Jesus. And it's working right now?"

  "Even as we speak."

  "Jesus," Joel had said again. And then: "I wonder how you program something like this."

  Ray had snorted at that. "You don't. You teach it. Learns through positive reinforcement, like a bloody baby."

  A sudden, smooth shift in momentum. Joel pulled back to the present; the lifter was hanging stable, five meters over the waves. Right on target. Nothing but empty ocean on the surface, of course; Beebe's transponder was thirty meters straight down. Shallow enough to home in on, too deep to be a navigational hazard. Or to serve as a midwater hitching post for charter boats hunting Channer's legendary sea monsters.

  The cheese printed out a word on the 'scaphe's tactical board: Launch?

  Joel's finger wavered over the OK key, then came down. Docking latches clanked open; the lifter reeled Joel Kita and his cargo down to the water. Sunlight squinted through viewports for a few seconds as the 'scaphe swung in its harness. A wavetop batted at the forward port.

  The world jerked once, slewed sideways, and turned green.

  Joel opened the ballast tanks and looked back over his shoulder. "Going down, folks. Your last glimpse of sunlight. Enjoy it while you can."

  "Thanks," said Fischer.

  Nobody else moved.

  Crush

  Pre-adapted.

  Even now, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Fischer doesn't know what Scanlon meant by that.

  He doesn't feel pre-adapted, not if that means he's supposed to be at home here. Nobody even talked to him on the way down. Nobody talked much to anyone else, either, but when they didn't talk to Fisher it seemed especially personal. And one of them, Brander— it's hard to tell with the eyecaps and all, but Fischer thinks Brander keeps looking at him, like they know each other from somewhere. Brander looks mean.

  Everything's out in the open down here; pipes and cable bundles and ventilation ducts are all tacked onto the bulkheads in plain sight. He saw it on the vids before he came down, but those somehow left the impression of a brighter place, full of light and mirrors. The wall he's facing now, for instance; there should be a mirror there. But it's just a gray metal bulkhead with a greasy, unfinished sheen to it.

  Fischer shifts his weight from one foot to the other. At one end of the lounge Lubin leans against a library pedestal, his capped eyes pointed at them with blank disinterest. Lubin's said only one thing to them in the five minutes they've been here:

  "Clarke's still outside. She's coming in."

  Something clanks under the floor. Water and nitrox mix, gurgling, nearby. The sound of a hatch swinging open, movement from below.

  She climbs up into the lounge, droplets beading across her shoulders. Her diveskin paints her black below the neck, a skinny silhouette, almost sexless. Her hood is undone; blond hair, plastered against her skull, frames a face paler than Fischer's ever seen. Her mouth is a wide thin line. Her eyes, capped like his own, are blank white ovals in a child's face.

  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 Car
aco 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 CO2.

  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."

  Lenie sprays the cut in her side with a hypo, wipes off the residue. "You're lucky they told you that much." She pulls her diveskin tunic off a hanger, slides into it. "They barely mentioned the giantism when they sent us down."

  "That's stupid. They must've known."

  "They say this is the only vent where the fish get this big. That they've found, anyway."

  "Why? What's so special here?"

  Lenie shrugs.

  Fischer has stripped to the waist. Lenie looks at him. "Leggings too. It got your calf, right?"

  He shakes his head. "That's okay."

  She looks down. His diveskin's only a couple of millimeters thick, it doesn't hide anything. He feels his erection going soft under her gaze.

  Lenie's cold white eyes track back to his face. Fischer feels his face heating before he remembers: she can't see his eyes. No one can.

  It's almost safe in here.

  "Bruising's the biggest problem," Lenie says at last. "They don't puncture the diveskin all that often, but the force of the bite still gets through." Her hand is on his arm, firm and professional, probing the edges of Fischer's injury. It hurts, but he doesn't mind.

  She uncaps a tube of anabolic salve. "Here. Rub this in."

  The pain fades on contact. His flesh goes warm and tingly where he applies the ointment. He reaches out, a little bit scared, and touches Lenie's arm. "Thanks."

  She twists out of reach without a word, bending down to seal the 'skin on her leg. Fischer watches the leggings slide up her body. They seem almost alive. They are almost alive, he remembers. The 'skin's got these reflexes, changes its permeability and thermal conductivity in response to body temperature. Maintains, what's the word, homeostasis.

  Now he watches it swallowing Lenie's body like some slick black amoebae but she's showing through underneath, black ice instead of white but still the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. She's so far away. There's someone inside telling him to watch it—

  —Go away, Shadow—

  —but he can't help himself, he can almost touch her, she's bent over sealing her boots and his hand cares
ses the air just above her shoulder, traces the outline of her curved back so close it could feel her body heat if that stupid diveskin wasn't in the way, and—

  And she straightens, bumping into his hand. Her face comes up; something burns behind her eyecaps. He pulls back but it's too late; her whole body's gone rigid and furious.

  I just touched her. I didn't do anything wrong I just touched her—

  She takes a single step forward. "Don't do that again," she says, her voice so flat he wonders for a second how her vocoder could work out of the water.

  "I'm not—I didn't—"

  "I don't care," she says. "Don't do it again."

  Something moves at the corner of his eye. "Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?" Brander's voice.

  She shakes her head. "No."

  "Okay, then." Brander sounds disappointed. "I'll be upstairs."

  Movement again. Sounds, receding.

  "I'm sorry," Fischer says.

  "Fine," Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wet room.

  Autoclave

  Nakata nearly bumps into her at the base of the ladder. Clarke glares; Nakata moves aside, baring teeth in a submissive primate smile.

  Brander's in the lounge, pecking at the library: "You—?"

  "I'm fine." She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's almost feeling sorry for Fischer.

  Not his fault. He didn't mean any harm.

  She closes the hatch behind her. It's safe to hit something now, if she wants. She looks around half-heartedly for a target, finally just drops onto her bunk and stares at the ceiling.