At least she was good for something. At least she could act as your own personal confessional before she vaporized. For the first time in your life you got to use someone as a rag to wipe off your dirty conscience, and you didn't even have to kill her afterward.

He didn't deny it, even to himself. There would have been no point. Besides, he'd hardly benefited from his actions. He was just as dead as the others. He had to be.

It was the only thing that made any sense.

*

The puzzle consisted of several large pieces in primary colors. They only fit together one way.

People had been conscripted, built, and trained. Flesh and organs had been scooped out and discarded, the cavities stuffed with machinery and sown up. The resulting creatures were able to live in an abyss three thousand meters down, on the southern tip of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. There they had tended larger machines, stealing power from deep within the earth in the name of supply and demand.

There were not many reasons why anyone would wish to launch a nuclear attack against such a facility.

At first glance it might have been an act of war. But N'AmPac had built both the facility and the rifters. N'AmPac had been drinking ravenously from Juan de Fuca's geothermal well. And it had been N'AmPac, judging by the evidence, that had planted the seabed nukes that had destroyed it all.

Not war, then. At least, not of the political sort.

Corporate security, perhaps. Perhaps the rifters knew something best kept secret. Ken Lubin very nearly qualified as such a hazard. But Ken Lubin was a valuable commodity, and it would have been bad economics to discard something that merely needed a tune-up. That was why they'd sent him to the bottom of the ocean in the first place, on sabbatical from a world he'd begun to threaten more than serve. (Just a temporary assignment, they'd said, until your— instincts stabilize a bit.) A world of fish and ice-cold humans with no interests beyond their own tormented inertia, no industrial secrets to steal or protect, no security breaches to seal with extreme prejudice…

No. Ken Lubin was the closest the team had come to any sort of intel threat, and if his bosses had wanted him dead, they wouldn't have bothered sending him to Channer Vent in the first place. Besides, there were far more efficient ways of killing five people than vaporizing several square kilometers of seabed.

It was inexorable: the seabed itself had been the target. Channer Vent posed a threat, somehow, and had to be wiped off the map. And the rifters had become a part of that threat, or the GA would have evacuated them beforehand; corporations were ruthless but they were never gratuitous. You don't throw away any investment unless you have to.