Behemoth by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online Page B

Nobody else speaks.
    â€œSo why should we care?” Clarke asks.
    It’s supposed to be rhetorical. Garcia answers anyway: “Because the treatments only stop β ehemoth from turning our guts to mush. They don’t stop it from turning little harmless fish into big nasty motherfucking fish that tear into anything that moves.”
    â€œGene was attacked twenty klicks away.”
    â€œLenie, we’re moving there. It’s gonna be right in our backyard.”
    â€œForget there . Who’s to say it hasn’t reached here already?” Alexander wonders.
    â€œNobody’s been nailed around here,” Creasy says.
    â€œWe’ve lost some natives.”
    Creasy waves an arm in a barely-visible gesture of dismissal. “Natives. Don’t mean shit.”
    â€œMaybe we should stop sleeping outside, for a while at least…”
    â€œCrap to that. I can’t sleep in a stinking hab .”
    â€œFine. Get yourself eaten.”
    â€œLenie?” Chen again. “You’ve messed with sea monsters before.”
    â€œI never saw what got Gene,” Clarke says, “but the fish back at Channer, they were—flimsy. Big and mean, but sometimes their teeth would break on you when they bit. Missing some kind of trace nutrient, I think. You could tear them apart with your bare hands.”
    â€œThis thing pretty much tore Gene apart,” says a voice Clarke can’t pin down.
    â€œI said sometimes, ” she emphasizes. “But yeah—they could be dangerous.”
    â€œ Dangerous, felch.” Creasy growls in metal. “Could they have pulled that number on Gene?”
    â€œYes,” says Ken Lubin.
    He’s been here all along, of course. Now he takes center stage. A cone of light flares from his forehead to his forearm. He holds his hand out like a beggar’s, its fingers curled slightly around something laying across the palm.
    â€œHoly shit,” buzzes Creasy, suddenly subdued.
    â€œWhere’d that come from?” Chen asks.
    â€œSeger pulled it out of Erickson before she glued him up,” Lubin says.
    â€œDoesn’t look especially flimsy to me.”
    â€œIt is, rather,” Lubin remarks. “This is the part that broke off, in fact. Between the ribs.”
    â€œWhat, you mean that’s just the tip ?” Garcia says.
    â€œLooks like a fucking stiletto,” Nolan buzzes softly.
    Chen’s mask swings between Clarke and Lubin. “When you were at Channer. You slept outside with these mothers?”
    â€œSometimes.” Clarke shrugs. “Assuming this is the same thing, which I—”
    â€œAnd they didn’t try to eat you?”
    â€œThey keyed on the light. As long as you kept your lamps off, they pretty much left you alone.”
    â€œWell, shit,” Creasy says. “No problem, then.”
    Lubin’s headlamp sweeps across the assembled rifters and settles on Chen. “You were on a telemetry run when Erickson was attacked?”
    Chen nods. “We never got the download, though.”
    â€œSo someone needs to make another trip out there anyway. And since Lenie and I have experience with this kind of thing…”
    His beam hits Clarke full in the face. The world collapses down to a small bright sun floating in a black void.
    Clarke raises her hand against the brilliance. “Turn that somewhere else, will you?”
    Darkness returns. The rest of the world comes back into dim, dark focus. Maybe I could just swim away, she muses as her eyecaps readjust. Maybe no one would notice. But that’s bullshit and she knows it. Ken Lubin has just picked her out of the crowd; there’s no easy way to get out of this. And besides, he’s right. They’re the only two that have been down this road before. The only two still alive, at least.
    Thanks a lot, Ken.
    â€œFine,” she says at last.

ZOMBIE
    T WENTY kilometers separate Atlantis and Impossible Lake. Not