Behemoth by Peter Watts Page B

sky. It’s a major selling point to anyone in search of camouflage. The halocline reflects all manner of pings and probes, hides everything beneath as though there were nothing here but soft, deep mud.
    A soft, brief scream of electronics. For the merest instant Clarke thinks she sees a drop of luminous blood on her dashboard. She focuses. Nothing.
    â€œDid you—?”
    â€œYes.” Lubin’s playing with his controls. “This way.” He steers closer to the shores of Impossible Lake. Clarke follows.
    The next time it’s unmistakable: a brilliant pinpoint of red light, laser-bright, flickering on and off within the jagged topography of the dashboard display. The squids cry out with each flash.
    A deadman alarm. Somewhere ahead, a rifter’s heart has stopped.
    They’re cruising out over the lake now, just offshore. Roiling greenish light suffuses Lubin and his mount from below. A hypersaline globule shatters in slow motion against the squid’s underside. Light rising through the interface bends in odd ways. It’s like looking down through the radium-lit depths of a nuclear waste–storage lagoon. A grid of bright pinpoint suns shine far below that surface, where the surveyors have planted their lamps. The solid substrate beneath is hidden by distance and diffraction.
    The deadman alarm has stabilized to a confidence bubble about forty meters straight ahead. Its ruby icon beats like a heart on the screen. The squids bleat in synch.
    â€œThere,” Clarke says. The horizon’s absurdly inverted here, darkness overhead, milky light beneath. A dark spot hangs at the distant, fuzzy interface between. It appears to be floating on the surface of the lens.
    Clarke nudges her throttle up a bit.
    â€œWait,” Lubin buzzes. She looks back over her shoulder.
    â€œThe waves,” Lubin says.
    They’re smaller here than they were back near the shore, which makes sense since there’s no rising substrate to push the peaks above baseline. They’re rippling past in irregular spasms, though, not the usual clockwork procession, and now that she traces them back they seem to be radiating out from …
    Shit  …
    She’s close enough to see limbs now, attenuate sticklike things slapping the surface of the lake into a local frenzy. Almost as though the rifter ahead is a poor swimmer, in over his head and panicking …
    â€œHe’s alive, ” she buzzes. The deadman icon pulses, contradicting her.
    â€œNo,” Lubin says.
    Only fifteen meters away now, the enigma erupts writhing from the surface of the lake in a nimbus of shredded flesh. Too late, Clarke spots the larger, darker shape thrashing beneath it. Too late, she resolves the mystery: meal, interrupted. The thing that was eating it heads straight for her.
    *   *   *
    It can’t b—
    She twists, not quite fast enough. The monster’s mouth takes the squid with room to spare. Half a dozen finger-sized teeth splinter against the machine like brittle ceramic. The squid torques in her hands; some sharp-edged metal protuberance smashes into her leg with a thousand kilograms of predatory momentum behind it. Something snaps below the knee. Pain rips through her calf.
    It’s been six years. She’s forgotten the moves.
    Lubin hasn’t. She can hear his squid bearing in, cranked to full throttle. She curls into a ball, grabs the gas billy off her calf in a belated countermeasure. She hears a meaty thud; hydraulics cough. In the next instant a great scaly mass staggers against her, batting her down through the boiling interface.
    Heavy water glows on all sides. The world is fuzzy and whirling. She shakes her head to lock it into focus. The action wavers and bulges overhead, writhing through the shattered refractory surface of Impossible Lake. Lubin must have rammed the monster with his squid. Damage may have been inflicted on both sides—now the squid’s