Behemoth by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online Page A

Lubin built these chimes, he had to come up with a way to kick-start them manually. So he scavenged the reservoir from a decommissioned desalinator, added a heat pump from some part of Atlantis that never survived the Corpse Revolt. Open a valve and hot seawater flows through a tracheotomy hole blasted into the smoker’s throat: Lubin’s machinery screams aloud, tortured by the scalding current.
    The summons grinds out, rusty and disharmonious. It washes over rifters swimming and conversing and sleeping in an ocean black as heat death. It resonates through makeshift habs scattered across the slope, dismal bubbles of metal and atmosphere so dimly lit that even eyecaps see only in black-and-gray. It slaps against the shiny bright biosteel of Atlantis and nine hundred prisoners speak a little louder, or turn up the volume, or hum nervously to themselves in denial.
    Some of the rifters—those awake, and in range, and still human—gather at the chimes. The scene is almost Shakespearean: a circle of levitating witches on some blasted midnight heath, eyes burning with cold phosphorescence, bodies barely distinguished from shadow. They are not so much lit as inferred by the faint blue embers glowing from the machinery in the seabed.
    All of them bent, not broken. All of them half-balanced in that gray zone between adaptation and dysfunction, stress thresholds pushed so high by years of abuse that chronic danger is mere ambience now, unworthy of comment. They were chosen to function in such environments; their creators never expected them to thrive here. But here they are, here are their badges of office: Jelaine Chen with her pink, nailless fingers, salamandered back in the wake of childhood amputations. Dimitri Alexander, communal priest-bait in those last infamous days before the Pope fled into exile. Kevin Walsh, who freaks inexplicably at the sight of running shoes. Any number of garden-variety skitterers who can’t abide physical con-tact; immolation junkies; self-mutilators and glass-eaters. All wounds and deformities safely disguised by the diveskins, all pathology hidden behind a uniformity of shadowy ciphers.
    They, too, owe their voices to imperfect machinery.
    Clarke calls the meeting to order with a question: “Is Julia here?”
    â€œShe’s looking on Gene,” Nolan buzzes overhead. “I’ll fill her in.”
    â€œHow’s he doing?”
    â€œStable. Still unconscious. Been too long, if you ask me.”
    â€œGetting dragged twenty klicks with your guts hanging out, it’s pretty much a miracle that he’s even alive,” Yeager chimes in.
    â€œYeah,” Nolan says, “or maybe Seger’s deliberately keeping him under. Julia says—”
    Clarke breaks in: “Don’t we have a tap on the telemetry from that line?”
    â€œNot any more.”
    â€œWhat’s Gene still doing in corpseland anyway?” Chen wonders. “He hates it in there. We’ve got our own med hab.”
    â€œHe’s quarantined,” Nolan says. “Seger’s thinking β ehemoth.”
    Shadows shift at this news. Obviously not all the assembled are fully up to speed.
    â€œShit.” Charley Garcia fades into half-view. “How’s that even possible? I thought—”
    â€œNothing’s certain yet,” Clarke buzzes.
    â€œCertain?” A silhouette glides across the circle, briefly eclipsing the sapphire embers on the seabed. Clarke recognizes Dale Creasy. This is first time she’s seen him for days; she was starting to think he’d gone native.
    â€œFuck, there’s even a chance, ” he continues. “I mean, βehemoth —”
    She decides to nip it in the bud. “So what if it’s β ehemoth?”
    A school of pale eyes turn in her direction.
    â€œWe’re immune, remember?” she reminds them. “Anybody down here not get the treatments?”
    Lubin’s windchimes groan softly.