Sunlight hasn't touched these waters for a million years. Atmospheres accumulate by the hundreds here, the trenches could swallow a dozen Everests without burping. They say life itself got started in the deep sea. Maybe. It can't have been an easy birth, judging by the life that remains—monstrous things, twisted into nightmare shapes by lightless pressure and sheer chronic starvation.

Even here, inside the hull, the abyss weighs on you like the vault of a cathedral. It's no place for trivial loudmouth bullshit. If you speak at all, you keep it down. But these tourists just don't seem to give a shit.

Joel Kita's used to hearing a 'scaphe breathe around him, hearing it talk in clicks and hisses. He relies on those sounds; the readouts only confirm what the beast has already told him by the grumbling of its stomach. But Ceratius is a leisure craft, fully insulated, packed with excess headroom and reclining couches and little drink'n'drug dispensers set into the back of each seat. All he can hear today is the cargo, babbling.

He glances back over his shoulder. The tour guide, a mid-twenties Hindian with a zebra cut— Preteela someone— flashes him a brief, rueful smile. She's a relict, and she knows it. She can't compete with the onboard library, she doesn't come with 3-d animations or wraparound soundtrack. She's just a prop, really. These people pay her salary not because she does anything useful, but because she doesn't. What's the point of being rich if you only buy the essentials?

There are eight of them. One old guy in a codpiece, still closing on his first century, fiddles with his camera controls. The others are plugged into headsets, running a program carefully designed to occupy them through the descent without being so impressive that the actual destination is an anticlimax. It's a thin line, these days. Simulations are almost always better than real life, and real life gets blamed for the poor showing.

Joel wishes this particular program was a bit better at holding the cargo's interest; they might shut up if they were paying more attention. They probably don't care whether Channer's sea monsters live up to the hype anyway. These people aren't down here because the abyss is impressive, they're here because it costs so much.

He runs his eyes across the control board. Even that seems excessive; climate control and indive entertainment take up a good half of the panel. Bored, he picks one of the headset feeds at random and taps in, sending the signal to a window on his main display.

An eighteenth-century woodcut of a Kraken comes to life through the miracle of modern animation. Crudely-rendered tentacles wrap around the masts of a galleon, pull it beneath chunky carved waves. A female voice, designed to maximize attention from both sexes: "We have always peopled the sea with monsters—"

Joel tunes out.

Mr. Codpiece comes up behind him, lays a familiar hand on his shoulder. Joel resists the urge to shrug it off. That's another problem with these tour subs; no real cockpit, just a set of controls at the front end of the passenger lounge. You can't shut yourself away from the cargo.

"Quite a layout," Mr. Codpiece says.

Joel reminds himself of his professional duties, and smiles.

"Been doing this run for long?" The whitecap's skin glows with a golden tan of cultured xanthophylls. Joel's smile grows a little more brittle. He's heard all about the benefits, of course; UV protection, higher blood oxygen, more energy — they say it even cuts down on your food requirements, not that any of these people have to worry about grocery money. Still, it's too bloody freakish for Joel's tastes. Implants should be made out of meat, or at least plastic. If people were meant to photosynthesize they'd have leaves.

"I said—"

Joel nods. "Couple of years."

A grunt. "Didn't know Seabed Safaris was around that long."

"I don't work for Seabed Safaris," Joel says, as politely as possible. "I freelance." The whitecap probably doesn't know any better, comes from a generation when everyone pledged allegiance to the same master year after year. Nobody thought it was such a bad thing back then.

"Good for you." Mr. Codpiece gives him a fatherly pat on the shoulder.

Joel nudges the rudders a bit to port. They've been cruising just off the southeastern shoulder of the rift, floodlights doused; sonar shows a featureless landscape of mud and boulders. The rift itself is another five or ten minutes away. On the screen, the tourist program talks about giant squids attacking lifeboats during the Second World War, offers up a parade of archival photos as evidence; human legs, puckered with fist-sized conical wounds where horn-rimmed suckers cored out gobbets of flesh.

"Nasty. We going to be seeing any giant squids?"

Joel shakes his head. "Different tour."

The program launches into a litany of deepwater nasties; a piece of flesh washed up onto a Florida beach, hinting at the existence of octopus thirty meters across. Giant eel larvae. Hypothesized monsters that might once have fed on the great whales, anonymously dying out for lack of food.

Joel figures that ninety percent of this is bullshit, and the rest doesn't really count. Even giant squids don't go down into the really deep sea; hardly anything does. No food. Joel's been rooting around down here for years, and he's never seen any real monsters.

Except right here, of course. He touches a control; outside, a high-frequency speaker begins whining at the abyss.

"Hydrothermal vents bubble and boil along spreading zones in all of the world's oceans," the program chatters, "feeding crowds of giant clams and tubeworms over three meters long." Stock footage of a vent community. "And yet, even at the spreading zones, it is only the filter-feeders and muckrakers that become giants. The fish, vertebrates like ourselves, are few and far between— and only a few centimeters long." An eelpout wriggles feebly across the display, looking more like a dismembered finger than a fish.

"Except here," the program adds after a dramatic pause. "For there is something special about this tiny part of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, something unexplained. Here there be dragons."

Joel hits another control. External bait lights flash to life across the bioluminescent spectrum; the cabin lights dim. To the denizens of the rift, drawn in by the sonics, a veritable school of food fish has suddenly appeared in their midst.

"We don't know the secret of the Channer Vent. We don't know how it creates its strange and fascinating giants." The program's visual display goes dark. "We only know that here, on the shoulder of the Axial Volcano, we have finally tracked the monsters to their lair."

Something thumps against the outer hull. The acoustics of the passenger compartment make the sound seem unnaturally loud.

At last, the passengers shut up. Mr. Codpiece mutters something and heads back to his seat, a giant chloroplast in a hurry.

"This concludes our introduction. The external cameras are linked to your headsets and can be aimed using normal head movements. Focus and record using the joystick on your right armrest. You may also wish to enjoy the view directly, through any of the cabin viewports. If you require assistance our guide and pilot are at your service. Seabed Safaris welcomes you to the Channer Vent, and hopes that you enjoy the remainder of your tour."

Two more thumps. A grey flash out the forward port; a sinuous belly caught for a moment in the headlight, a swirl of fin. On Joel's systems board, icons representing the outside cams dip and wiggle.

Superfluous Preteela slides into the copilot's seat. "Regular feeding frenzy out there."

Joel lowers his voice. "In here. Out there. What's the difference?"

She smiles, a safe, silent gesture of agreement. She's got a great smile. Almost makes up for the striped hair. Joel catches sight of something on the back of her left hand; looks like a ref tattoo, but somehow he doubts that it's authentic. Fashion statement, more likely.

"You sure they can spare you?" he asks wryly.

She looks back. The cargo's starting up again: Look at that. Hey, it broke its tooth on us. Christ aren't they ugly—

"They'll manage," Preteela says.

Something looms up on the other side of the viewport: mouth like a sackful of needles, a tendril hanging from the lower jaw with a glowing bulb on the end. The jaw gapes wide enough to dislocate, snaps shut. Its teeth slide harmlessly across the viewport. A flat black eye glares in at them.

"What's that?" Preteela wants to know.

"You're the tour guide."

"Never seen anything like it before."

"Me neither." He sends a trickle of electricity out through the hull. The monster, startled, flashes off into the darkness. Intermittent impacts resonate through Ceratius, drawing renewed gasps from the cargo.

"How long until we're actually at Channer?"

Joel glances at tactical. "We're pretty much there already. Medium-sized hot fissure about fifty meters to the left."

"What's that?" A row of bright dots, evenly spaced, has just moved onto the screen.

"Surveyer's stakes." Another row marches into range behind the first. "For the geothermal program, you know?"

"How about a quick drive-by? I bet those generators are pretty impressive."

"I don't think the generators are in yet. They're just laying the foundations."

"It'd still make a nice addition to the tour."

"We're supposed to steer clear. We'd catch royal shit if anyone's out there."

"Well?" That smile again, more calculated this time. "Is there?"

"Probably not," Joel admits. Construction's been on hold for a couple of weeks, a fact which he finds particularly irritating; he's up for some fairly hefty contracts if the Grid Authority ever gets off its corporate ass and finishes what they started.

Preteela looks at him expectantly. Joel shrugs. "It's pretty unstable in there. Could get bumped around a bit."

"Dangerous?"

"Depends on your definition. Probably not."

"So let's do it." Preteela lays a conspiratorial hand briefly on his shoulder.

Ceratius noses around to a new heading. Joel kills the bait lights and cranks the sonics up for one screeching, farewell burst. The monsters outside — those that haven't already retired gracefully, their tiny fish brains having figured out that metal is inedible — run screaming into the night, lateral lines burning. There's a moment of surprised silence from the cargo. Preteela Someone steps smoothly into the gap. "Folks, we're taking a small detour to check out a new arrival on the rift. If you tap into the sonar feed you'll see that we're approaching a checkerboard of acoustic beacons. The Grid Authority has laid these out in the course of constructing one of the new geothermal stations we've been hearing so much about. As you may know, similar projects are underway at spreading zones all the way from the Galapagos to the Aleutians. When these go online, people will actually be living full-time here on the rift—"

Joel can't believe it. Preteela's big chance to scoop the library and she ends up talking exactly like it does. He quietly aborts a midbrain fantasy he's been nurturing. Try to get into fantasy-Preteela's jumpsuit now and she'd probably start reciting a cheery blow-by-blow.

He switches on the external floods. Mud. More mud. On sonar the grid crawls towards them, a monotonous constellation.

Something catches Ceratius, slews it around. The hull thermistor spikes briefly.

"Thermal, folks." Joel calls back over his shoulder. "Nothing to worry about."

A dim coppery sun resolves to starboard. It's a torch on a pole, basically, a territorial marker beating back the abyss with a sodium bulb and a VLF heartbeat. It's the Grid Authority, pissing on a rock for all and sundry: This is our hellhole.

The line of towers stretches away to port, each crowned by a floodlight. Intersecting it, another line recedes directly ahead like streetlights on a smoggy night. They shine down on a strange unfinished landscape of plastic and metal. Great metal casings lie against the bottom like derailed boxcars. Teardrop ROVs sit dormant on flat plastic puddles frozen harder than basalt. Sharp-edged conduits protrude from those congealed surfaces like hollow bones sawn off below the joint.

Way up on one of the port towers, something dark and fleshy assaults the light.

Joels checks the camera icons: all zoomed, pointing up and left. Preteela, conserving O₂, has retired her patter while the whitecaps gape. Fine. They want more mindless piscine violence, give 'em more mindless piscine violence. Ceratius angles up and to port.

It's an anglerfish. She bashes herself repeatedly against the floodlight, oblivious to Ceratius' approach. Her dorsal spine lashes; the lure at its end, a glowing worm-shaped thing, luminesces furiously.

Preteela's back at his shoulder. "It's really doing a number on that light, isn't it?"

She's right. The top of the transponder is shaking under the impact of the big fish's blows, which is odd; these beasts are big, but they aren't very strong. And come to think of it, the tower's shaking back and forth even when the angler isn't touching it…

"Oh, shit." Joel grabs the controls. Ceratius rears up like something living. Transponder glow drops off the bottom of the viewport; total darkness drops in from above, swallowing the view. Startled shouts from the cargo. Joel ignores them.

On all sides, the dull distant sound of something roaring.

Joel hits the throttle. Ceratius climbs. Something slaps from behind; the stern slides to port, pulling the bow back after it. The blackness beyond the viewport boils sudden muddy brown against the cabin lights.

The hull thermister spikes twice, three times. Ambient temperature flips from 4°C to 280, then back again. At lesser pressures the Ceratius would be dropping through live steam. Here it only spins, skidding for traction against the superheated water.

Finally, it finds some. Ceratius ascends into welcome icewater. A fish skeleton pirouettes past the viewport, all teeth and spines, every vestige of flesh boiled away.

Joel looks back over his shoulder. Preteela's fingers are locked around the back of his seat, their knuckles the same color as the dancing bones outside. The cargo are dead quiet.

"Another thermal?" Preteela says in a shaky voice.

Joel shakes his head. "Seabed cracked open. It's really thin around here." He manages a brief laugh. "Told you things could get a bit unstable."

"Uh huh." She releases her grip on Joel's chair. Fingernail imprints linger in the foam. She leans over, whispers "Bring the cabin lights up a bit, will you? Sort of a nice living-room level—" and then she's headed aft, tending the cargo: "Well, that was exciting. But Joel assures us that little blowups like this happen all the time. Nothing to be worried about, although they can catch you offguard."

Joel raises the cabin lights. The cargo sit quietly, still ostriched into their headsets. Preteela bustles among them, smoothing feathers. "And of course we still have the rest of our tour to look forward to…"

He ups the gain on sonar, focusses aft. A luminous storm swirls across the tactical display. Beneath it, a fresh ridge of oozing rock disfigures the GA's construction grid.

Preteela is back at his elbow. "Joel?"

"Yeah."

"They say people are going to be living down there?"

"Uh huh."

"Wow. Who?"

He looks at her. "Haven't you seen the PR threads? Only the best and the brightest. Holding back the everlasting night to stoke the fires of civilization."

"Seriously, Joel. Who?"

He shrugs. "Fucked if I know."

Benthos

Duet

Constrictor

When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.

Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe's armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.

How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.

She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.

Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you're three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.

It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they've done to her.

It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She's so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she's scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they're supposed to increase the apparent size of one's personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn't help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.

She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.

Ballard stands up. "Ready to go?"

"You're in charge," Clarke says.

"Only on paper." Ballard smiles. "No pecking order down here, Lenie. As far as I'm concerned, we're equals." After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn't always seem real.

Something hits Beebe from the outside.

Ballard's smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station's titanium skin.

"It takes a while to get used to," Ballard says, "doesn't it?"

And again.

"I mean, that sounds big—"

"Maybe we should turn the lights off," Clarke suggests. She knows they won't. Beebe's exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can't see it from inside—Beebe has no windows— but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—

Thud!

—most of the time.

"Remember back in training?" Ballard says over the sound, "When they told us that the fish were usually so—small…"

Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There's no other sound.

"It must've gotten tired," Ballard says. "You'd think they'd figure it out." She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.

Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.

Better to face it outside, where she knows what's coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.

* * *

Going outside is like drowning, once a day.

Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.

When she catches her breath, and loses it.

When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.

It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.

She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.

* * *

They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.

They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.

"I'll never get used to it," Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.

Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. "Thirty four Centigrade." The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.

Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.

There's so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon's Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.

Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace the water with milky veils.

The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.

It doesn't sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:

"LENIE—"

Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.

Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.

Then the pain reaches her.

She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.

She goes limp. Please get it over with if you're going to kill me just please God make it quick— She feels the urge to vomit, but the 'skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won't let her.

She shuts out the pain. She's had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There's another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife—you know, a knife, like the one you've got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.

Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It's like operating a marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only — Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoke-trails of suspended gore.

The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.

Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I've had worse, she thinks.

Then: Why am I still alive?

Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.

"Jesus Christ," Ballard says in a distorted whisper. "Lenie? You okay?"

Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. "Yeah."

And if not, she knows, it's her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.

She's always asking for it.

* * *

Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke's stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.

Ballard splits the face seal on her 'skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. "Jesus. Jesus! I don't believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!" She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. "And to think they're usually just a few centimeters long..."

She starts to strip down, unzipping her 'skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. "And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!" Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she'd rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the 'skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.

Maybe she's got her other lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night... She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she's outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out— I really shouldn't mind...

Ballard peels her 'skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.

Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard's flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.

Prickly numbness is spreading, leaking through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.

She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.

Am I in shock? Am I fainting?

"I mean—" Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. "Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn't have told me you were okay if you weren't."

The tingling reaches the base of Clarke's skull. "I'm — okay," she says. "Nothing broke. I'm just bruised."

"Garbage. Take off your 'skin."

Clarke straightens, with effort. The numbness recedes a bit. "It's nothing I can't take care of myself."

Don't touch me. Please don't touch me.

Ballard steps forward without a word and unseals the 'skin around Clarke's forearm. She peels back the material and exposes an ugly purple bruise. She looks at Clarke with one raised eyebrow.

"Just a bruise," Clarke says. "I'll take care of it, really. Thanks anyway." She pulls her hand away from Ballard's ministrations.

Ballard looks at her for a moment. She smiles ever so slightly.

"Lenie," she says, "there's no need to feel embarrassed."

"About what?"

"You know. Me having to rescue you. You going to pieces when that thing attacked. It was perfectly understandable. Most people have a rough time adjusting. I'm just one of the lucky ones."

Right. You've always been one of the lucky ones, haven't you? I know your kind, Ballard, you've never failed at anything...

"You don't have to feel ashamed about it," Ballard reassures her.

"I don't," Clarke says, honestly. She doesn't feel much of anything any more. Just the tingling. And the tension. And a vague sort of wonder that she's even alive.

* * *

The bulkhead is sweating.

The deep sea lays icy hands on the metal and, inside, Clarke watches the humid atmosphere bead and run down the wall. She sits rigid on her bunk under dim fluorescent light, every wall of the cubby within easy reach. The ceiling is too low. The room is too narrow. She feels the ocean compressing the station around her.

And all I can do is wait...

The anabolic salve on her injuries is warm and soothing. Clarke probes the purple flesh of her arm with practiced fingers. The diagnostic tools in the Med cubby have vindicated her. She's lucky, this time; bones intact, epidermis unbroken. She seals up her 'skin, hiding the damage.

She shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.

That's me, she thinks. That's what I look like now. She tries to read what lies behind that glacial facade. Am I bored, horny, upset? How to tell, with her eyes hidden behind those corneal opacities? She sees no trace of the tension she always feels. I could be terrified. I could be pissing in my 'skin and no one would know.

She leans forward. The reflection comes to meet her. They stare at each other, white to white, ice to ice. For a moment, they almost forget Beebe's ongoing war against pressure. For a moment, they don't mind the claustrophobic solitude that grips them.

How many times, Clarke wonders, have I wanted eyes as dead as these?

* * *

Beebe's metal viscera crowd the corridor beyond her cubby. Clarke can barely stand erect. A few steps bring her into the lounge.

Ballard, back in shirtsleeves, is at one of the library terminals. "Rickets," she says.

"What?"

"Fish down here don't get enough trace elements. They're rotten with deficiency diseases. Doesn't matter how fierce they are. They bite too hard, they break their teeth on us."

Clarke stabs buttons on the food processor; the machine grumbles at her touch. "I thought there was all sorts of food at the rift. That's why things got so big."

"There's a lot of food. Just not very good quality."

A vaguely edible lozenge of sludge oozes from the processor onto Clarke's plate. She eyes it for a moment. I can relate.

"You're going to eat in your gear?" Ballard asks, as Clarke sits down at the lounge table.

Clarke blinks at her. "Yeah. Why?"

"Oh, nothing. It would just be nice to talk to someone with pupils in their eyes, you know?"

"Sorry. I can take them off if you —"

"No, it's no big thing. I can live with it." Ballard turns off the library and sits down across from Clarke. "So, how do you like the place so far?"

Clarke shrugs and keeps eating.

"I'm glad we're only down here for a year," Ballard says. "This place could get to you after a while."

"It could be worse."

"Oh, I'm not complaining. I was looking for a challenge, after all. What about you?"

"Me?"

"What brings you down here? What are you looking for?"

Clarke doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know, really," she says at last. "Privacy, I guess."

Ballard looks up. Clarke stares back, her face neutral.

"Well, I'll leave you to it, then," Ballard says pleasantly.

Clarke watches her disappear down the corridor. She hears the sound of a cubby hatch hissing shut.

Give it up, Ballard, she thinks. I'm not the sort of person you really want to know.

* * *

Almost start of the morning shift. The food processor disgorges Clarke's breakfast with its usual reluctance. Ballard, in Communications, is just getting off the phone. A moment later she appears in the hatchway.

"Management says—" She stops. "You've got blue eyes."

Clarke smiles faintly. "You've seen them before."

"I know. It's just kind of surprising, it's been a while since I've seen you without your caps in."

Clarke sits down with her breakfast. "So, what does Management say?"

"We're on schedule. Rest of the crew comes down in three weeks, we go online in four." Ballard sits down across from Clarke. "I wonder sometimes why we're not online right now."

"I guess they just want to be sure everything works."

"Still, it seems like a long time for a dry run. And you'd think that — well, they'd want to get the geothermal program up and running as fast as possible, after all that's happened."

After Lepreau and Winshire melted down, you mean.

"And there's something else," Ballard says. "I can't get through to Piccard."

Clarke looks up. Piccard Station is anchored on the Galapagos Rift; it is not a particularly stable mooring.

"You ever meet the couple there?" Ballard asks. "Ken Lubin, Lana Cheung?"

Clarke shakes her head. "They went through before me. I never met any of the other Rifters except you."

"Nice people. I thought I'd call them up, see how things were going at Piccard, but nobody can get through."

"Line down?"

"They say it's probably something like that. Nothing serious. They're sending a 'scaphe down to check it out."

Maybe the seabed opened up and swallowed them whole, Clarke thinks. Maybe the hull had a weak plate—one's all it would take—

Something creaks, deep in Beebe's superstructure. Clarke looks around. The walls seem to have moved closer while she wasn't looking.

"Sometimes," she says, "I wish we didn't keep Beebe at surface pressure. Sometimes I wish we were pumped up to ambient. To take the strain off the hull." She knows it's an impossible dream; most gases kill outright when breathed at three hundred atmospheres. Even oxygen would do you in if it got above one or two percent.

Ballard shivers dramatically. "If you want to risk breathing ninety-nine percent hydrogen, you're welcome to it. I'm happy the way things are." She smiles. "Besides, you have any idea how long it would take to decompress afterwards?"

In the Systems cubby, something bleats for attention.

"Seismic. Wonderful." Ballard disappears into Comm. Clarke follows.

An amber line is writhing across one of the displays. It looks like the EEG of someone caught in a nightmare.

"Get your eyes back in," Ballard says. "The Throat's acting up."

* * *

They can hear it all the way to Beebe; a malign, almost electrical hiss from the direction of the Throat. Clarke follows Ballard towards it, one hand running lightly along the guide rope. The distant smudge of light that marks their destination seems wrong, somehow. The color is different. It ripples.

They swim into its glowing nimbus and see why. The Throat is on fire.

Sapphire auroras slide flickering across the generators. At the far end of the array, almost invisible with distance, a pillar of smoke swirls up into the darkness like a great tornado.

The sound it makes fills the abyss. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, and hears rattlesnakes.

"Jesus!" Ballard shouts over the noise. "It's not supposed to do that!"

Clarke checks her thermistor. It won't settle; water temperature goes from four degrees to thirty eight and back again, within seconds. A myriad ephemeral currents tug at them as they watch.

"Why the light show?" Clarke calls back.

"I don't know!" Ballard answers. "Bioluminescence, I guess! Heat-sensitive bacteria!"

Without warning, the tumult dies.

The ocean empties of sound. Phosphorescent spiderwebs wriggle dimly on the metal and vanish. In the distance, the tornado sighs and fragments into a few transient dust devils.

A gentle rain of black soot begins to fall in the copper light.

"Smoker," Ballard says into the sudden stillness. "A big one."

They swim to the place where the geyser erupted. There's a fresh wound in the seabed, a gash several meters long, between two of the generators.

"This wasn't supposed to happen," Ballard says. "That's why they built here, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be stable!"

"The rift's never stable," Clarke replies. Not much point in being here if it was.

Ballard swims up through the fallout and pops an access plate on one of the generators. "Well, according to this there's no damage," she calls down, after looking inside. "Hang on, let me switch channels here—"

Clarke touches one of the cylindrical sensors strapped to her waist, and stares into the fissure. I should be able to fit through there, she decides.

And does.

"We were lucky," Ballard is saying above her. "The other generators are okay too. Oh, wait a second; number two has a clogged cooling duct, but it's not serious. Backups can handle it until—get out of there!"

Clarke looks up, one hand on the sensor she's planting. Ballard stares down at her through a chimney of fresh rock.

"Are you crazy?" Ballard shouts. "That's an active smoker!"

Clarke looks down again, deeper into the shaft. It twists out of sight in the mineral haze. "We need temperature readings," she says, "from inside the mouth."

"Get out of there! It could go off again and fry you!"

I suppose it could at that, Clarke thinks. "It already blew," she calls back. "It'll take a while to build up a fresh head." She twists a knob on the sensor; tiny explosive bolts blast into the rock, anchoring the device.

"Get out of there, now!"

"Just a second." Clarke turns the sensor on and kicks up out of the seabed. Ballard grabs her arm as she emerges, starts to drag her away from the smoker.

Clarke stiffens and pulls free. "Don't—" touch me! She catches herself. "I'm out, okay? You don't have to—"

"Further." Ballard keeps swimming. "Over here."

They're near the edge of the light now, the floodlit Throat on one side, blackness on the other. Ballard faces Clarke. "Are you out of your mind? We could have gone back to Beebe for a drone! We could have planted it on remote!"

Clarke doesn't answer. She sees something moving in the distance behind Ballard. "Watch your back," she says.

Ballard turns, and sees the gulper sliding toward them. It undulates through the water like brown smoke, silent and endless; Clarke can't see the creature's tail, although several meters of serpentine flesh have come out of the darkness.

Ballard goes for her knife. After a moment, Clarke does too.

The gulper's jaw drops open like a great jagged scoop.

Ballard begins to launch herself at the thing, knife upraised.

Clarke puts her hand out. "Wait a minute. It's not coming at us."

The front end of the gulper is about ten meters distant now. Its tail pulls free of the murk.

"Are you crazy?" Ballard moves clear of Clarke's hand, still watching the monster.

"Maybe it isn't hungry," Clarke says. She can see its eyes, two tiny unwinking spots glaring at them from the tip of the snout.

"They're always hungry. Did you sleep through the briefings?"

The gulper closes its mouth and passes. It extends around them now, in a great meandering arc. The head turns back to look at them. It opens its mouth.

"Fuck this," Ballard says, and charges.

Her first stroke opens a meter-long gash in the creature's side. The gulper stares at Ballard for a moment, as if astonished. Then, ponderously, it thrashes.

Clarke watches without moving. Why can't she just let it go? Why does she always have to prove she's better than everything?

Ballard strikes again; this time she slashes into a great tumorous swelling that has to be the stomach.

She frees the things inside.

They spill out through the wound; two huge giganturids and some misshapen creature Clarke doesn't recognize. One of the giganturids is still alive, and in a foul mood. It locks its teeth around the first thing it encounters.

Ballard. From behind.

"Lenie!" Ballard's knife hand is swinging in staccato arcs. The giganturid begins to come apart. Its jaws remain locked. The convulsing gulper crashes into Ballard and sends her spinning to the bottom.

Finally, Clarke begins to move.

The gulper collides with Ballard again. Clarke moves in low, hugging the bottom, and pulls the other woman clear.

Ballard's knife continues to dip and twist. The giganturid is a mutilated wreck behind the gills, but its grip remains unbroken. Ballard can't twist around far enough to reach the skull. Clarke comes in from behind and takes the creature's head in her hands.

It stares at her, malevolent and unthinking.

"Kill it!" Ballard shouts. "Jesus, what are you waiting for?"

Clarke closes her eyes, and clenches. The skull in her hand splinters like cheap plastic.

There is a silence.

After a while, she opens her eyes. The gulper is gone, fled back into darkness to heal or die. But Ballard's still there, and Ballard is angry.

"What's wrong with you?" she says.

Clarke unclenches her fists. Bits of bone and jellied flesh float about her fingers.

"You're supposed to back me up! Why are you so damned — passive all the time?"

"Sorry." Sometimes it works.

Ballard reaches behind her back. "I'm cold. I think it punctured my diveskin—"

Clarke swims behind her and looks. "A couple of holes. How are you otherwise? Anything feel broken?"

"It broke through the diveskin," Ballard says, as if to herself. "And when that gulper hit me, it could have—" She turns to Clarke and her voice, even distorted, carries a shocked uncertainty. "—I could have been killed. I could have been killed!"

For an instant, it's as though Ballard's 'skin and eyes and self-assurance have all been stripped away. For the first time Clarke can see through to the weakness beneath, growing like a delicate tracery of hairline cracks.

You can screw up too, Ballard. It isn't all fun and games. You know that now.

It hurts, doesn't it?

Somewhere inside, the slightest touch of sympathy. "It's okay," Clarke says. "Jeanette, it's—"

"You idiot!" Ballard hisses. She stares at Clarke like some malign and sightless old woman. "You just floated there! You just let it happen to me!"

Clarke feels her guard snap up again, just in time. This isn't just anger, she realizes. This isn't just the heat of the moment. She doesn't like me. She doesn't like me at all.

And then, dully surprised that she hasn't seen it before:

She never did.

A Niche

Beebe Station floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-gray planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights. There's an airlock for divers at the south pole and a docking hatch for 'scaphes at the north. In between there are girders and anchor lines, conduits and cables, metal armor and Lenie Clarke.

She's doing a routine visual check on the hull; standard procedure, once a week. Ballard is inside, testing some equipment in the communications cubby. This is not entirely within the spirit of the buddy system. Clarke prefers it this way. Relations have been civil over the past couple of days—Ballard even resurrects her patented chumminess on occasion—but the more time they spend together, the more forced things get. Eventually, Clarke knows, something is going to break.

Besides, out here it seems only natural to be alone.

She's examining a cable clamp when a razormouth charges into the light. It's about two meters long, and hungry. It rams directly into the nearest of Beebe's floodlamps, mouth agape. Several teeth shatter against the crystal lens. The razormouth twists to one side, knocking the hull with its tail, and swims off until barely visible against the dark.

Clarke watches, fascinated. The razormouth swims back and forth, back and forth, then charges again.

The flood weathers the impact easily, doing more damage to its attacker. Over and over again the fish batters itself against the light. Finally, exhausted, it sinks twitching down to the muddy bottom.

"Lenie? Are you okay?"

Clarke feels the words buzzing in her lower jaw. She trips the sender in her diveskin: "I'm okay."

"I heard something out there," Ballard says. "I just wanted to make sure you were—"

"I'm fine," Clarke says. "Just a fish."

"They never learn, do they?"

"No. I guess not. See you later."

"See—"

Clarke switches off her receiver.

Poor stupid fish. How many millennia did it take for them to learn that bioluminescence equals food? How long will Beebe have to sit here before they learn that electric light doesn't?

We could keep our headlights off. Maybe they'd leave us alone—

She stares out past Beebe's electric halo. There is so much blackness there. It almost hurts to look at it. Without lights, without sonar, how far could she go into that viscous shroud and still return?

Clarke kills her headlight. Night edges a bit closer, but Beebe's lights keep it at bay. Clarke turns until she's face to face with the darkness. She crouches like a spider against Beebe's hull.

She pushes off.

The darkness embraces her. She swims, not looking back, until her legs grow tired. She doesn't know how far she's come.

But it must be light-years. The ocean is full of stars.

Behind her, the station shines brightest, with coarse yellow rays. In the opposite direction, she can barely make out the Throat, an insignificant sunrise on the horizon.

Everywhere else, living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clarke's field of view; something flees under cover of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth.

There are so many of them.

She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if something big has just passed very close. A delicious thrill dances through her body.

It nearly touched me, she thinks. I wonder what it was. The rift is full of monsters who don't know when to quit. It doesn't matter how much they eat. Their voracity is as much a part of them as their elastic bellies, their unhinging jaws. Ravenous dwarves attack giants twice their own size, and sometimes win. The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.

But even a desert has oases, and sometimes the deep hunters find them. They come upon the malnourishing abundance of the rift and gorge themselves; their descendants grow huge and bloated over such delicate bones—

My light was off, and it left me alone. I wonder—

She turns it back on. Her vision clouds in the sudden glare, then clears. The ocean reverts to unrelieved black. No nightmares accost her. The beam lights empty water wherever she points it.

She switches it off. There's a moment of absolute darkness while her eyecaps adjust to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.

They are so beautiful. Lenie Clarke rests on the bottom of the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her. And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.

* * *

"What the hell is wrong with you? You've been gone for over three hours, did you know that? Why didn't you answer me?"

Clarke bends over and removes her fins. "I guess I turned my receiver off," she says. "I was—wait a second, did you say—"

"You guess? Have you forgotten every safety reg they drilled into us? You're supposed to have your receiver on from the moment you leave Beebe until you get back!"

"Did you say three hours?"

"I couldn't even come out after you, I couldn't find you on sonar! I just had to sit here and hope you'd show up!"

It only seems a few minutes since she pushed off into the darkness. Clarke climbs up into the lounge, suddenly chilled.

"Where were you, Lenie?" Ballard demands, coming up behind her. Clarke hears the slightest plaintive tone in her voice.

"I—I must've been on the bottom," Clarke says. "that's why sonar didn't get me. I didn't go far."

Was I asleep? What was I doing for three hours?

"I was just — wandering around. I lost track of the time. I'm sorry."

"Not good enough. Don't do it again."

There's a brief silence. It's ended by the sudden, familiar impact of flesh on metal.

"Christ!" Ballard snaps. "I'm turning the externals off right now!"

Whatever it is gets in two more hits by the time Ballard reaches Comm. Clarke hears her punch a couple of buttons.

Ballard comes back into the lounge. "There. Now we're invisible."

Something hits them again. And again.

"Or maybe not," Clarke says.

Ballard stands in the lounge, listening to the rhythm of the assault. "They don't show up on sonar," she says, almost whispering. "Sometimes, when I hear them coming at us, I tune it down to extreme close range. But it looks right through them."

"No gas bladders. Nothing to bounce an echo off of."

"We show up just fine out there, most of the time. But not those things. You can't find them, no matter how high you turn the gain. They're like ghosts."

"They're not ghosts." Almost unconsciously, Clarke has been counting the beats: eight — nine—

Ballard turns to face her. "They've shut down Piccard," she says, and her voice is small and tight.

"What?"

"The grid office says it's just some technical problem. But I've got a friend in Personnel. I phoned him when you were outside. He says Lana's in the hospital. And I get the feeling—" Ballard shakes her head. "It sounded like Ken Lubin did something down there. I think maybe he attacked her."

Three thumps from outside, in rapid succession. Clarke can feel Ballard's eyes on her. The silence stretches.

"Or maybe not," Ballard says. "We got all those personality tests. If he was violent, they would've picked it up before they sent him down."

Clarke watches her, listens to the pounding of an intermittent fist.

"Or maybe — maybe the rift changed him somehow. Maybe they misjudged the pressure we'd all be under. So to speak." Ballard musters a feeble smile. "Not the physical danger so much as the emotional stress, you know? Everyday things. Just being outside could get to you after a while. Seawater sluicing through your chest. Not breathing for hours at a time. It's like—living without a heartbeat—"

She looks up at the ceiling; the sounds from outside are a bit more erratic, now.

"Outside's not so bad," Clarke says. At least you're incompressible. At least you don't have to worry about the plates giving in.

"I don't think you'd change suddenly. It would just sort of sneak up on you, little by little. And then one day you'd just wake up changed, you'd be different somehow, only you'd never have noticed the transition. Like Ken Lubin."

She looks at Clarke, and her voice drops a bit.

"And you."

"Me." Clarke turns Ballard's words over in her mind, waits for the onset of some reaction. She feels nothing but her own indifference. "I don't think you have much to worry about. I'm not the violent type."

"I know. I'm not worried about my own safety, Lenie. I'm worried about yours."

Clarke looks at her from behind the impervious safety of her lenses, and doesn't answer.

"You've changed since you came down here," Ballard says. "You're withdrawing from me, you're exposing yourself to unnecessary risks. I don't know exactly what's happening to you. It's almost like you're trying to kill yourself."

"I'm not," Clarke says. She tries to change the subject. "Is Lana Cheung all right?"

Ballard studies her for a moment. She takes the hint. "I don't know. I couldn't get any details."

Clarke feels something knotting up inside her.

"I wonder what she did to set him off?" she murmurs.

Ballard stares at her, openmouthed. "What she did? I can't believe you said that!"

"I only meant—"

"I know what you meant."

The outside pounding has stopped. Ballard does not relax. She stands hunched over in those strange, loose-fitting clothes that Drybacks wear, and stares at the ceiling as though she doesn't believe in the silence. She looks back at Clarke.

"Lenie, you know I don't like to pull rank, but your attitude is putting both of us at risk. I think this place is really getting to you. I hope you can get back online here, I really do. Otherwise I may have to recommend you for a transfer."

Clarke watches Ballard leave the lounge. You're lying, she realizes. You're scared to death, and it's not just because I'm changing.

It's because you are.

* * *

Clarke finds out five hours after the fact: something has changed on the ocean floor.

We sleep and the earth moves she thinks, studying the topographic display. And next time, or the time after, maybe it'll move right out from under us.

I wonder if I'll have time to feel anything.

She turns at a sound behind her. Ballard is standing in the lounge, swaying slightly. Her face seems somehow disfigured by the concentric rings in her eyes, by the dark hollows around them. Naked eyes are beginning to look alien to Clarke.

"The seabed shifted," Clarke says. "There's a new outcropping about two hundred meters west of us."

"That's odd. I didn't feel anything."

"It happened about five hours ago. You were asleep."

Ballard glances up sharply. Clarke studies the haggard lines of her face. On second thought...

"I — would've woken up," Ballard says. She squeezes past Clarke into the cubby and checks the topographic display.

"Two meters high, twelve long," Clarke recites.

Ballard doesn't answer. She punches some commands into a keyboard; the topographic image dissolves, reforms into a column of numbers.

"Just as I thought," she says. "No heavy seismic activity for over forty-two hours."

"Sonar doesn't lie," Clarke says calmly.

"Neither does seismo," Ballard answers.

There's a brief silence. There's a standard procedure for such things, and they both know what it is.

"We have to check it out," Clarke says.

But Ballard only nods. "Give me a moment to change."

* * *

They call it a squid; a jet-propelled cylinder about a meter long, with a headlight at the front end and a towbar at the back. Clarke, floating between Beebe and the seabed, checks it over with one hand. Her other hand grips a sonar pistol. She points the pistol into blackness; ultrasonic clicks sweep the night, give her a bearing.

"That way," she says, pointing.

Ballard squeezes down on her own squid's towbar. The machine pulls her away. After a moment Clarke follows. Bringing up the rear, a third squid carries an assortment of sensors in a nylon bag.

Ballard's traveling at nearly full throttle. The lamps on her helmet and squid stab the water like twin lighthouse beacons. Clarke, her own lights doused, catches up about halfway to their destination. They cruise along a couple of meters over the muddy substrate.

"Your lights," Ballard says.

"We don't need them. Sonar works in the dark."

"Are you breaking regs for the sheer thrill of it, now?"

"The fish down here, they key on things that glow—"

"Turn your lights on. That's an order."

Clarke doesn't answer. She watches the beams beside her, Ballard's squid shining steady and unwavering, Ballard's headlamp slicing the water in erratic arcs as she moves her head—

"I told you," Ballard says, "turn your—Christ!"

It was just a glimpse, caught for a moment in the sweep of Ballard's headlight. She jerks her head around and it slides back out of sight. Then it looms up in the squid's beam, huge and terrible.

The abyss is grinning at them, teeth bared.

A mouth stretches across the width of the beam, extends into darkness on either side. It is crammed with conical teeth the size of human hands, and they do not look the least bit fragile.

Ballard makes a strangled sound and dives into the mud. The benthic ooze boils up around her in a seething cloud; she disappears in a torrent of planktonic corpses.

Lenie Clarke stops and waits, unmoving. She stares transfixed at that threatening smile. Her whole body feels electrified, she's never been so explicitly aware of herself. Every nerve fires and freezes at the same time. She is terrified.

But she's also, somehow, completely in control of herself. She reflects on this paradox as Ballard's abandoned squid slows and stops itself, scant meters from that endless row of teeth. She wonders at her own analytical clarity as the third squid, with its burden of sensors, decelerates past and takes up position beside Ballard's.

There in the light, the grin does not change.

Clarke raises her sonar pistol and fires. We're here, she realizes, checking the readout. That's the outcropping.