Starfish (Rifters Series #1)

First Chapter

The hatch drops open. Green incandescence spills into the room. He climbs down the ladder, diveskin sealed, only his face exposed. His eyes, already capped, are featureless glass balls. But they are not as dead as they should be, somehow. Something stares through those blank lenses, and it almost shines.

His blind eyes scan the compartment like radar dishes. They lock onto hers: "You're Lenie Clarke?" The voice is too loud, too normal. We talk in whispers here, Clarke realizes.

They are not alone now. Lubin, Brander, Caraco have appeared at the edges of her vision, drifting into the room like indifferent wraiths. They take up positions around the edge of the lounge, waiting. Fischer's replacement doesn't seem to notice them. "I'm Acton," he tells Clarke. "And I bring gifts from the overworld. Behold!" He extends his clenched fist, opens it palm up. Clarke sees five metal cylinders there, each no more than two centimeters long. Acton turns slowly, theatrically, showing his trinkets to the other Rifters. "One for each of you," he says. "They go into your chest, right next to the seawater intake."

Overhead, the docking hatch swings shut. From behind it a postcoital tattoo, metal on metal, heralds the shuttle's escape to the surface. They wait there for a few moments: Rifters, newcomer, five new gadgets to dilute their humanity a little further. Finally, Clarke reaches out to touch one. "What do they do?" she says, her voice neutral.

Acton snaps his fingers shut, stares about the lounge with eyeless intensity. "Why, Ms. Clarke," he replies, "They tell us when we're dead."

In Communications, Acton spills his trinkets onto a control console. Clarke stands behind him, filling the cubby. Caraco and Brander look in through the hatchway.

Lubin has disappeared.

"The program's only four months old," Acton says, "and it's lost two people at Piccard, one each at Cousteau and Link, and Fischer makes five. Not the kind of record you want to trumpet to the world, eh?"

Nobody says anything. Clarke and Brander stand impassive; Caraco shifts on her feet. Acton sweeps his blank shiny eyes over them all. "Christ but you're a lively lot. You sure Fischer's the only one down here who cashed in?"

"These things are supposed to save our lives?" Clarke asks.

"Nah. They don't care that much about us. These just help you find the bodies."

He turns to the console, plays it with practiced fingers. The topographic display flashes to life on the main screen. "Mmmm." Acton traces along the luminous contours with one finger. "So this is Beebe here in the center, and this must be the rift proper-Jesus, there's a lot of geography out here." He points at a cluster of hard green rectangles halfway to the edge of the screen. "These are the generators?"

Clarke nods.

Acton picks up one of the little cylinders. "They say they've already sent down the software for these things." Silence. "Well, I guess we'll find out, won't we?" He fingers the object in his hand, presses one end of it.

Beebe Station screams aloud.

Clarke jerks back at the sound; her head cracks painfully against an overhead pipe. The station continues to howl, wordless and despairing.

Acton touches a control; the scream stops as if guillotined.

Clarke glances at the others, shaken. They appear unmoved. Of course. For the first time she wonders what their eyes would show, naked.

"Well," Acton says, "we know the audio alarm works. But you get a visual signal too." He points at the screen: dead center, within the phosphor icon that is Beebe, a crimson dot pulses like a heart under glass.

"It keys on myoelectricity in the chest," he explains. "Goes off automatically if your heart stops."

Behind her, Clarke feels Brander turning for the hatchway.

"Maybe my etiquette is out of date-" Acton says.

His voice is suddenly very quiet. Nobody else seems to notice.

"-but I've always thought it was-rude-to walk away when someone's talking to you."

There's no obvious threat in the words. Acton's tone seems pleasant enough. It doesn't matter. In an instant Clarke sees all the signs again; the reasoned words, the deadened voice, the sudden slight tension of a body rising to critical mass. Something familiar is growing behind Acton's eyecaps.

"Brander," she says quietly, "why don't you hang around and hear the man out?"

Behind her, the sounds of motion stop.

Before her, Acton relaxes ever so slightly.

Within her, something deeper than the Rift stirs in its sleep.

"They're a snap to install," Acton says. "It takes about five minutes. GA says deadman switches are standard issue from now on."

I know you, she thinks. I don't remember but I'm sure I've seen you before somewhere...

A tiny knot forms in her stomach. Acton smiles at her, as though sending some secret greeting.

Acton is about to be baptized. Clarke is looking forward to it.

They stand together in the airlock, their diveskins clinging like shadows. The deadman switch, newly installed, itches in Clarke's chest. She remembers the first time she dropped into the ocean this way, remembers the person who held her hand through that drowning ordeal.

That person is gone now. The deep sea broke her and spat her out. Clarke wonders if it will do the same to Acton.

She floods the airlock.

By now the feeling is almost sensual; her insides folding flat, the ocean rushing into her, cold and unstoppable like a lover. At 4°C the Pacific slides through the plumbing in her chest, anesthetizing the parts of her that can still feel. The water rises over her head; her eyecaps show her the submerged walls of the lock with crystal precision.

It's not like that with Acton. He's trying to fall in on himself; he only falls into Clarke. She senses his panic, watches him convulse, sees his knees buckle in a space far too narrow to permit collapse.

He needs more room, she thinks, smiling to herself, and opens the outer hatch. They drop.

She glides down and out, arcing away from under Beebe's oppressive bulk. She leaves the floodlit circle behind, skims into the welcoming darkness with her headlight doused. She feels the presence of the seabed a couple of meters beneath her. She's free again.

After a few moments she remembers Acton. She turns back the way she came. Beebe's floodlamps stain the darkness with dirty light; the station, bloated and angular, pulls against the cables holding it down. Light pours from its lower surface like feeble rocket exhaust. Pinned face-down in that glare, Acton lies unmoving on the bottom.

Reluctantly, she swims closer. "Acton?"

He doesn't move.

"Acton?" She's back in the light now. Her shadow cuts him in half.

At last he looks up. "It'ssss-"

He seems surprised by the sound of his own transmuted voice.

He puts his hand to his throat. "I'm not-breathing-" he buzzes.

She doesn't answer.

He looks back down. There's something on the bottom, a few centimeters from his face. Clarke drifts closer; a tiny shrimplike creature trembles on the substrate.

"What is it?" Acton asks.

"Something from the surface. It must have come down on the 'scaphe."

"But it's-dancing-"

She sees. The jointed legs flex and snap, the carapace arches to some insane inner rhythm. It seems so brittle a life; perhaps the next spasm, or the next, will shatter it.

"It's a seizure," she says after a while. "It doesn't belong here. The pressure makes the nerves fire too fast, or something."

"Why doesn't that happen to us?"

Maybe it does. "Our implants. They pump us full of neuroinhibitors whenever we go outside."

"Oh. Right," Acton buzzes softly. Gently, he reaches out to the creature. Takes it in the palm of his hand.

Crushes it.

Clarke hits him from behind. Acton bounces off the seabed, his hand flying open; fragments of shell, of watery flesh swirl in the water. He kicks, rights himself, stares at Clarke without speaking. His eyecaps shine almost yellow in the light.

"You asshole," Clarke says very quietly.

"It didn't belong here," Acton buzzes.

"Neither do we."

"It was suffering. You said so yourself."

"I said the nerves fired too fast, Acton. Nerves carry pleasure as well as pain. How do you know it wasn't dancing for fucking joy?"

She pushes off the bottom and kicks furiously into the abyss. She wants to reach into Acton's body and tear everything out, sacrifice that gory tangle of viscera and machinery to the monsters at the rift. She can't remember ever being so angry. She tells herself she doesn't know why.

--Copyright © Peter Watts. All Rights Reserved.