Behemoth by Peter Watts

far enough for those who still think in dryback terms. A mere twenty klicks from the bull’s-eye? What kind of safety margin is that? Back on shore the most simpleminded drone wouldn’t be fooled by such a trifling displacement. Finding the target missing, it would rise up and partition the world into a concentric gridwork, relentlessly checking off one quadrate after another until some inevitable telltale gave the game away. Shit, most machinery could just sit at the center of the search zone and see twenty kilometers in any direction.
    Even in the midwaters of the open ocean, twenty kilometers is no safe distance. No substrate exists there but water itself, no topography but gyres and seiches and Langmuir cells, thermoclines and haloclines that reflect and amplify as well as mask. The cavitation of submarines might propagate down vast distances, the miniscule turbulence of their passing detectable long after the vessels themselves are gone. Not even stealthed subs can avoid heating the water some infinitesimal amount; dolphins and machinery, hot on the trail, can tell the difference.
    But on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, twenty kilometers might as well be twenty parsecs. Light has no chance: the sun itself barely penetrates a few hundred meters from the surface. Hydrothermal vents throw up their corrosive vomit along oozing seams of fresh rock. Seafloor spreading sets the very floor of the world to grumbling, mountains pushing against each other in their millennial game of kick-the-continents. Topography that shames the Himalayas cascades along a jagged fracture splitting the crust from pole to pole. The ambience of the Ridge drowns out anything Atlantis might let slip, along any spectrum you’d care to name.
    You could still find a target with the right coordinates, but you’d miss a whole screaming city if those numbers were off by even a hair. A displacement of twenty kilometers should be more than enough to get out from under any attack centered on Atlantis’s present location, short of full-scale depth-saturation nukes perhaps.
    Which wouldn’t be entirely without precedent, now that Clarke thinks about it …
    She and Lubin cruise smoothly along a crack in a fan of ancient lava. Atlantis is far behind, Impossible Lake still klicks ahead. Headlamps and squidlamps are dark. They travel by the dim dashboard light of their sonar displays. Tiny iconized boulders and pillars pass by on the screens, mapped in emerald; the slightest sensations of pressure and looming mass press in from the scrolling darkness to either side.
    â€œRowan thinks things could get nasty,” Clarke buzzes.
    Lubin doesn’t comment.
    â€œShe figures, if this really is β ehemoth, Atlantis is gonna turn into Cognitive Dissonance Central. Get everybody all worked up.”
    Still nothing.
    â€œI reminded her who was in charge.”
    â€œAnd who is that, exactly?” Lubin buzzes at last.
    â€œCome on, Ken. We can shut them down any time we feel like it.”
    â€œThey’ve had five years to work on that.”
    â€œAnd what’s it got them?”
    â€œThey’ve also had five years to realize that they outnumber us twenty to one, that we don’t have nearly their technical expertise on a wide range of relevant subjects, and that a group of glorified pipe-fitters with antisocial personalities is unlikely to pose much threat in terms of organized opposition.”
    â€œThat was just as true when we wiped the floor with them the first time.”
    â€œNo.”
    She doesn’t understand why he’s doing this. It was Lubin more than anyone who put the corpses in their place after their first—and last—uprising. “Come on, Ken—”
    His squid is suddenly very close, almost touching.
    â€œYou’re not an idiot,” he buzzes at her side. “It’s never a good time to act like one.”
    Stung, she falls silent.
    His vocoder growls on in the darkness.