Crouched over the dashboard, Lubin read reams of diagnostic arcana and called instructions over his shoulder. Behind him, Clarke—up to her elbows in crystals and circuitry—did the actual cutting. Lubin told her which card to extract; she did so. He told her which array to peel from its surface, using a tri-pronged tool with delicate whisker-thin fingers. She obeyed. She waited while he ran checks and double-checks on the rest of the system, reseated the lobotomized unit at his command, poised herself to yank it again should any remnant of the monster have somehow escaped containment. Satisfied at last that Miri was clean, Lubin told Clarke to lock and reboot. She did it without question.

He never told her outright to destroy the infected component. That was just too obvious a measure to mention.

It was, after all, a part of her.

She didn't know how, exactly; the perverse logic that had spawned and twisted these electronic demons was something better left to hackers and evolutionary ecologists. But back at the beginning, she'd been the template. This thing had taken its lead from her; it was a reflection, however perverse, of Lenie Clarke. And irrational though it seemed, she couldn't shake the sense that it still owed something of itself to the flesh and blood it was modeled after. She had raged, and hated, for so very long; perhaps these reflections weren't so distorted after all.

She resolved to find out.

She was no codemeister. She knew nothing about growing programs or pruning software to specs. She did, however, know how to snap prefab components together, and Phocoena's lockers and glove compartments were overflowing with the legacy of five years' service. The little sub had carried a thousand survey instruments to Impossible Lake, served in the repair and maintenance of them all. It had slipped across thermoclines and through Langmuir Cells, seeding drogues and TDRs into the water column. It had spied on corpses and moved supplies and served as a general workhorse far beyond anything its designers had ever intended. After five years, it had accumulated more than enough building blocks for Lenie Clarke to play with.

She found a Cohen board in the bottom of a drawer, plugged a battery onto one of its sockets and a generic OS chip onto another. A tracery of whisker-thin filaments flickered briefly between the new components as the board's autodiscovery routines sniffed them out and made introductions. She had to look a little harder for a user interface; she couldn't risk a wireless hookup. Finally she found an old fiberop headset with an integrated infrared keyboard, and plugged it in. More flickering handshakes.