Behemoth by Peter Watts Page A

“Back then they saw the whole world backing us up. They knew we’d had help tracking them down. They inferred some kind of ground-based infrastructure. At the very least, they knew we could blow the whistle and turn them into a great pulsing bull’s-eye for anyone with lats and longs and a smart torp.”
    A great luminous shark-fin swells on her screen, a massive stone blade thrusting up from the seabed. Lubin disappears briefly as it passes between them.
    â€œBut now we’re on our own,” he says, reappearing. “Our groundside connections have dried up. Maybe they’re dead, maybe they’ve turned. Nobody knows. Can you even remember the last time we had a changing of the guard?”
    She can, just barely. Anyone qualified for the diveskin is bound to be more comfortable down here than in dryback company at the best of times, but a few rifters went topside at the very beginning anyway. Back when there might have been some hope of turning the tide.
    Not since. Risking your life to watch the world end isn’t anyone’s idea of shore leave.
    â€œBy now we’re just as scared as the corpses,” Lubin buzzes. “We’re just as cut off, and there are almost a thousand of them. We’re down to fifty-eight at last count.”
    â€œWe’re seventy at least.”
    â€œThe natives don’t count. Fifty-eight of us would be any use in a fight, and only fifty could last a week in full gravity if they had to. And a number of those have … authority issues that make them unwilling to organize.”
    â€œWe’ve got you,” Clarke says. Lubin, the professional hunter-killer, so recently freed from any leash but his own self-control. No glorified pipe-fitter here, she reflects.
    â€œThen you should listen to me. And I’m starting to think we may have to do something preemptive.”
    They cruise in silence for a few moments.
    â€œThey’re not the enemy, Ken,” she says at last. “Not all of them. Some of them are just kids, you know, they’re not responsible…”
    â€œThat’s not the point.”
    From some indefinable distance, the faint sound of falling rock.
    â€œKen,” she buzzes, too softly: she wonders if he can hear her.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you looking forward to it?”
    It’s been so many years since he’s had an excuse to kill someone. And Ken Lubin once made a career out of finding excuses.
    He tweaks his throttle and pulls away.
    *   *   *
    Trouble dawns like a sunrise, smearing the darkness ahead.
    â€œAnyone else supposed to be out here?” Clarke asks. The on-site floods are keyed to wake up when approached, but she and Lubin aren’t nearly close enough to have triggered them.
    â€œJust us,” Lubin buzzes.
    The glow is coarse and unmistakable. It spreads laterally, a diffuse false dawn hanging in the void. Two or three dark gaps betray the presence of interposed topography.
    â€œStop,” Lubin says. Their squids settle down beside a tumbledown outcropping, its jumbled edges reflecting dimly in the haze.
    He studies the schematic on his dashboard. A reflected fingernail of light traces his profile.
    He turns his squid to port. “This way. Keep to the bottom.”
    They edge closer to the light, keeping it to starboard. The glow expands, resolves, reveals an impossibility: a lake at the bottom of the ocean. The light shines from beneath its surface; Clarke thinks of a swimming pool at night, lit by submerged spotlights in the walls. Slow extravagant waves, top-heavy things from some low-gravity planet, break into shuddering globules against the near shore. The lake extends beyond the hazy limits of rifter vision.
    It always hits her like a hallucination, although she knows the pedestrian truth: it’s just a salt seep, a layer of mineralized water so dense it lies on the bottom of the ocean the way an ocean lies at the bottom of the