Dead air for a moment. Then: "I'm afraid that's right. If Ken hadn't killed it first, I think ßehemoth might have."

"Oh, fuck," someone says softly. The epithet hangs there in a room gone totally silent. Downstairs, the airlock gurgles.

"So it was sick," Dale Creasy says after a moment. "So what?"

Garcia shakes his head. "Dale, don't you remember how this fucker works?"

"Sure. Breaks your enzymes apart to get at the sulfur or something. But we're immune."

"We're immune," Garcia says patiently, "because we've got special genes that make enzymes too stiff for ßehemoth to break. And we got those genes from deepwater fish, Dale."

Creasy's still working it through. Someone else whispers "Shit shit shit," in a shaky voice. Downstairs, some latecomer's climbing the ladder; whoever it is stumbles on the first rung.

"I'm afraid Mr. Garcia's right," Seger says. "If the fish down here are vulnerable to this bug, then we probably are too."

Clarke shakes her head. "But—are you saying this thing isn't ßehemoth after all? It's something else?"

A sudden commotion around the ladder; the assembled rifters are pulling back as though it were electrified. Julia Friedman staggers up into view, her face the color of basalt. She stands on the deck, clinging to the railing around the hatch, not daring to let go. She looks around, blinking rapidly over undead eyes. Her skin glistens.

"It's still ßehemoth, more or less," Seger drones in the distance. From Atlantis. From the bolted-down, welded-tight, hermetically-sealed quarantined goddamned safety of fucking Atlantis. "That's why we couldn't pinpoint the nature of Mr. Erickson's infection: he came back positive for ßehemoth but of course we disregarded those findings because we didn't think it could be the problem. But this is a new variant, apparently. Speciation events of this sort are quite common when an organism spreads into new environments. This is basically—"

ßehemoth's evil twin brother, Clarke remembers.

"—ßehemoth Mark 2," Seger finishes.

Julia Friedman drops to her knees and vomits onto the deck

Babel Broadband. An overlapping collage of distorted voices:

"Of course I don't believe them. You saying you do?"

"That's bullshit. If you—"

"They admitted it up front. They didn't have to."

"Yeah, they suddenly come clean at the exact moment Julia goes symptomatic. What a coincidence."

"How'd they know that she—"

"They knew the incubation time. They must have. How else do you explain the timing here, dramatic irony?"

"Yeah, but what are we gonna do?"

They've abandoned the hab. It emptied like a blown ballast tank, rifters spilling onto a seabed already crowded even by dryback standards. Now it hangs above them like a gunmetal planet. Three lamps set around the ventral airlock lay bright overlapping circles onto the substrate. Black bodies swim at the periphery of that light, hints of restless motion behind shark-tooth rows of white, unblinking eyespots. Clarke thinks of hungry animals, kept barely at bay by the light of a campfire.

By rights, she should feel like one of them.