"Shit," Hopkinson breathes. "Like leaving poisoned food out for the ants, so they bring it back to the queen…"

Alexander's nodding. "And that's where it came from…ßehemoth was never supposed to show up anywhere around here, and all of a sudden, just like magic…"

"ß-max came from goddamned Atlantis," Nolan snaps. "For all we know the strain out at the Lake's just baseline. We've only got the corpses' say-so that it isn't."

"Yeah, but even the baseline strain wasn't supposed to show up out there—"

"Am I the only one who remembers the corpses built the baseline in the first place?" Nolan glares around the room, white eyes blazing. "Rowan admitted it, for Chrissakes!"

Her gaze settles on Clarke, pure antimatter. Clarke feels her hands bunching into fists at her side, feels the corner of her mouth pull back in a small sneer. None of her body language, she realizes, is intended to defuse the situation.

Fuck it, she decides, and takes one provocative step forward.

"Oh, right," Nolan says, and charges.

Lubin moves. It seems so effortless. One instant he's sitting at the console; the next, Nolan's crumpling to the deck like a broken doll. In the barely-perceptible time between Clarke thinks she saw Lubin rising from his chair, thinks she glimpsed his elbow in Nolan's diaphragm and his knee in her back. She may have even heard something, like the snapping of a tree branch across someone's leg. Now her rival lies flat on her back, motionless but for a sudden, manic fluttering of fingers and eyelids.

Everyone else has turned to stone.

Lubin pans across those still standing. "We are confronted with a common threat. No matter where ß-max came from, we're unlikely to cure it without the corpses's help now that Bhanderi's dead. The corpses also have relevant expertise in other areas."

Nolan gurgles at their feet, her arms in vague motion, her legs conspicuously immobile.

"For example," Lubin continues, "Grace's back is broken at the third lumbar vertebra. Without help from Atlantis she'll spend the rest of her life paralysed from the waist down."

Chen blanches. "Jesus, Ken!" Shocked from her paralysis, she kneels at Nolan's side.

"It would be unwise to move her without a coccoon," Lubin says softly. "Perhaps Dimitri could scare one up."

It only sounds like a suggestion. The airlock's cycling in seconds.

"As for the rest of you good people," Lubin remarks in the same even tone, "I trust you can see that the situation has changed, and that cooperation with Atlantis is now in our best interest."

They probably see exactly what Clarke does: a man who, without a second thought, has just snapped the spine of his own lieutenant to win an argument. Clarke stares down at her vanquished enemy. Despite the open eyes and the twitches, Nolan doesn't seem entirely conscious.

Take that, murderer. Stumpfucking shit-licking cunt. Does it hurt, sweetie? Not enough. Not nearly enough.

But the exultation is forced. She remembers how she felt as Rowan died, how she felt afterward: cold, killing rage, the absolute stone certainty that Nolan was going to pay with her life. And yet here she lies, helpless, broken by someone else's hand-and somehow, there's only charred emptiness where rage burned incandescent less than an hour before.

I could finish the job, she reflects. If Ken didn't stop me.

Is she so disloyal to the memory of her friend, that she takes so little pleasure in this? Has the sudden fear of discovery simply eclipsed her rage, or is it the same old excuse—that Lenie Clarke, gorged on revenge for a thousand lifetimes, has lost the stomach for it?

Five years ago I didn't care if millions of innocents died. Now I'm too much of a coward even to punish the guilty.

Some, she imagined, might even consider that an improvement…

"— are still uncertainties," Lubin's saying, back at the console. "Maybe whoever sent the drone is responsible for ß-max, maybe not. If they are, they've already made their move. If not, they're not ready to move. Even if they know exactly where we are—and I think that unlikely—they either don't have all their pieces in place yet, or they're biding their time for some other reason."

He unfreezes the numbers on the board, wasting no more attention on the thing gurgling on the deck behind him.

Chen glances uneasily at Nolan, but Lubin's message is loud and clear: I'm in charge. Get over it.

"What reason?" she asks after a moment.

Lubin shrugs.

"How much time do we have?"

"More than if we tip our hand." Lubin folds his arms across his chest and stretches isometrically. Muscles and tendons flex disconcertingly beneath his diveskin. "If they know we're on to them they may feel their hand has been forced, move now rather than later. So we play along to buy time. We edit the drone's memory and release it with some minor systems glitch that would explain any delay in its return. We'll also have to search the Lake site for surveillance devices, and cut a grid within at least a half-kilometer of Atlantis and the trailer park. Lane's right: it's unlikely that an AUV planted those mines, but if one did there'll be a detonator somewhere within LFAM range."

"Okay." Hopkinson looks away from her fallen comrade with evident effort. "So we—we make up with Atlantis, we fake out the drone, and we comb the area for other nasties. Then what?"

"Then I go back," Lubin tells her.

"What, to the Lake?"

Lubin smiles faintly. "Back to N'Am."

Hopkinson whistles in tuneless surprise. "Well, I guess if anyone can take them on…"

Take on who, exactly? Clarke wonders. No one asks aloud. Who is everyone left behind. Them. They are dedicated to our destruction They sniff along the Mid Atlantic Ridge, obsessed in their endless myopic search for that one set of coordinates to feed into their torpedoes.

No one asks why, either. There is no why behind the hunt: it's just what they do. Don't go rooting around for reasons. Asking why accomplishes nothing: there are too many reasons to count, none of the living lack for motive. This fractured, bipolar microcosm stagnates and festers on the ocean floor, every reason for its existence reduced to an axiom: just because.

And yet, how many of the people here—how many of the rifters, how many, even of the drybacks— really brought the curtain down? For every corpse with blood on her hands, how many others—family, friends, drones who maintain plumbing and machinery and flesh—are guilty of nothing but association?

And if Lenie Clarke hadn't been so furiously intent on revenge that she could write off an entire world as an incidental expense, would any of it have come to this?

Alyx, Rowan said.

"No you don't." Clarke shakes her head.

Lubin speaks to the screen. "The most we can do down here is buy time. We have to use that time."

"Yes, but—"

"We're blind and deaf and under attack. The ruse has failed, Lenie. We need to know what we're facing, which means we have to face it. Hoping for the best is no longer a viable option."

"Not you," Clarke says.

Lubin turns to face her, one eyebrow raised in silent commentary.

She looks back, completely unfazed. "We."

He refuses three times before they even get outside.

"Someone needs to take charge here," he insists as the airlock floods. "You're the obvious choice. No one will give you any trouble now that Grace has been sidelined."

Clarke feels a chill in her gut. "Is that what that was? She'd served her purpose and you wanted me back in play so you just—broke her in half?"

"I'd wager it's no worse than what you had in mind for her."