But that was normal, wasn't it? She was a creature of the deep sea, a glorious cyborg with electricity sparking in her chest, supremely adapted. She was immune to the bends. Her rapture owed nothing to nitrogen. She could not drown.

But somehow, impossibly, she was.

Her implants had stopped working. Or no, her implants had disappeared entirely, leaving nothing in her chest but a pounding heart, flopping on the bottom of a great bleeding hole where lung and machinery had once been. Her flesh cried out for oxygen. She could feel her blood turning to acid. She tried to open her mouth, tried to gasp, but even that useless reflex was denied her here; her hood stretched across her face like an impermeable skin. She panicked, thrashing towards a surface that might have been lightyears away. The very core of her was a yawning vacuum. She convulsed around her own emptiness.

Suddenly, there was light.

It was a single beam from somewhere overhead, skewering her through the darkness. She struggled towards it; gray chaos seethed at the edges of sight, blinding her peripheral vision as her eyes began to shut down. There was light above and oblivion on all sides. She reached for the light.

A hand seized her wrist and lifted her into atmosphere. Suddenly she could breathe again; her lungs had been restored, her diveskin miraculously removed. She sank to her knees on a solid deck, sucked great whooping breaths.

She looked up, into the face of her salvation. A fleshless, pixelated caricature of herself grinned back; its eyes were empty whirling holes. "You're not dead yet," it said, and ripped out her heart.

It stood over her, frowning as she bled out on the deck. "Hello?" it asked, its voice turned strangely metallic. "Are you there? Are you there?"

She awoke. The real world was darker than her dream had been.

She remembered Rickett's voice, thin and reedy: They even attack each other if you give 'em half a chance...

"Are you there?"

It was the voice from her dream. It was the ship's voice. Phocoena.

I know what to do, she realized.

She turned in her seat. Sunset biotelemetry sparkled in the darkness behind her: a fading life-force, rendered in constellations of yellow and orange.

And for the first time, red.

"Hello?" she said.

"How long i been asleep?"

Ricketts was using the saccadal interface to talk. How weak do you have to be, Clarke wondered, before it's too much effort to speak aloud?

"I don't know," she told the darkness. "A few hours, I guess." And then, dreading the answer: "How are you feeling?"

"About same," he lied. Or maybe not, if Phocoena was doing its job.

She climbed from her seat and stepped carefully back to the telemetry panel. A facet of isolation membrane glistened dimly beyond, barely visible to her uncapped eyes.