Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

By Peter Watts

Starfish lit the fuse. Maelstrom was the explosion. But five years into the aftermath, things aren't quite so simple as they once seemed...

Lenie Clarke--rifter, avenger, amphibious deep-sea cyborg--has destroyed the world. Once exploited for her psychological addiction to dangerous environments, she emerged in the wake of a nuclear blast to serve up vendetta from the ocean floor. The horror she unleashed--an ancient, apocalyptic microbe called ßehemoth--has been free in the world for half a decade now, devouring the biosphere from the bottom up. North America lies in ruins beneath the thumb of an omnipotent psychopath. Digital monsters have taken Clarke's name, wreaking havoc throughout the decimated remnants of something that was once called Internet. Governments have fallen across the globe; warlords and suicide cults rise from the ashes, pledging fealty to the Meltdown Madonna. All because five years ago, Lenie Clarke had a score to settle.

But she has learned something in the meantime: she destroyed the world for a fallacy.

Now, cowering at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, rifters and the technoindustrial "corpses" who created them hide from a world in its death throes. But they cannot hide forever: something is tracking them, down amongst the lightless cliffs and trenches of the Midatlantic Ridge. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably towards the very bottom of the world, and Lenie Clarke must finally confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds. . . .

Behemoth: ß-Max is the first of two volumes. The story will conclude in ßehemoth: Seppuku.



At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466881136

Peter Watts

Peter Watts is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Blindsight.

Book preview

COUNTERSTRIKE

FIRST there is only the sound, in darkness. Drifting on the slope of an undersea mountain, Lenie Clarke resigns herself to the imminent loss of solitude.

She’s far enough out for total blindness. Atlantis, with its gantries and beacons and portholes bleeding washed-out light into the abyss, is hundreds of meters behind her. No winking telltales, no conduits or parts caches pollute the darkness this far out. The caps on her eyes can coax light enough to see from the merest sparkle, but they can’t create light where none exists. Here, none does. Three thousand meters, three hundred atmospheres, three million kilograms per square meter have squeezed every last photon out of creation. Lenie Clarke is as blind as any dryback.

After five years on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, she still likes it this way.

But now the soft mosquito whine of hydraulics and electricity rises around her. Sonar patters softly against her implants. The whine shifts subtly in pitch, then fades. Faint surge as something coasts to a stop overhead.

Shit. The machinery in her throat turns the epithet into a soft buzz. Already?

I gave you an extra half hour. Lubin’s voice. His words are fuzzed by the same technology that affects hers; by now the distortion is more familiar than the baseline.

She’d sigh, if breath were possible out here.

Clarke trips her headlamp. Lubin is caught in the ignited beam, a black silhouette studded with subtle implementation. The intake on his chest is a slotted disk, chrome on black. Corneal caps turn his eyes into featureless translucent ovals. He looks like a creature built exclusively from shadow and hardware; Clarke knows of the humanity behind the facade, although she doesn’t spread it around.

A pair of squids hovers at his side. A nylon bag hangs from one of the meter-long vehicles, lumpy with electronics. Clarke fins over to the other, flips a toggle from slave to manual. The little machine twitches and unfolds its towbar.

On impulse, she kills her headlight. Darkness swallows everything again. Nothing stirs. Nothing twinkles. Nothing attacks.

It’s just not the same.

Something wrong? Lubin buzzes.

She remembers a whole different ocean, on the other side of the world. Back on Channer Vent you’d turn your lights off and the stars would come out, a thousand bioluminescent constellations: fish lit up like runways at night; glowing arthropods; little grape-sized ctenophores flashing with complex iridescence. Channer sang like a siren, lured all those extravagant midwater exotics down deeper than they swam anywhere else, fed them strange chemicals and turned them monstrously beautiful. Back at Beebe Station, it was only dark when your lights were on.

But Atlantis is no Beebe Station, and this place is no Channer Vent. Here, the only light shines from indelicate, ham-fisted machinery. Headlamps carve arid tunnels through the blackness, stark and ugly as burning sodium. Turn them off, and … nothing.

Which is, of course, the whole point.

It was so beautiful, she says.

He doesn’t have to ask. "It was. Just don’t forget why."

She grabs her towbar. It’s just—it’s not the same, you know? Sometimes I almost wish one of those big toothy fuckers would charge out of the dark and try to take a bite out of me…

She hears the sound of Lubin’s squid throttling up, invisibly close. She squeezes her own throttle, prepares to follow him.

The signal reaches her LFAM and her skeleton at the same time. Her bones react with a vibration deep in the jaw: the modem just beeps at her.

She trips her receiver. Clarke.

Ken find you okay? It’s an airborne voice, unmutilated by the contrivances necessary for underwater speech.

Yeah. Clarke’s own words sound ugly and mechanical in contrast. We’re on our way up now.

Okay. Just checking. The voice falls silent for a moment. Lenie?

Still here.

Just … well, be careful, okay? Patricia Rowan tells her. You know how I worry.

*   *   *

The water lightens indiscernibly as they ascend. Somehow their world has changed from black to blue when she wasn’t looking; Clarke can never pinpoint the moment when that happens.

Lubin hasn’t spoken since Rowan signed off. Now, as navy segues into azure, Clarke says it aloud. You still don’t like her.

I like her fine, Lubin buzzes. I don’t trust her.

Because she’s a corpse. Nobody has called them corporate executives for years.

"Was a corpse." The machinery in his throat can’t mask the grim satisfaction in that emphasis.

"Was a corpse," Clarke repeats.

No.

Why, then?

You know the list.

She does. Lubin doesn’t trust Rowan because once upon a time, Rowan called shots. It was at her command that they were all recruited so long ago, damaged goods damaged further: memories rewritten, motives rewired, conscience itself refitted in the service of some indefinable, indefensible greater good.

Because she was a corpse, Clarke repeats.

Lubin’s vocoder emits something that passes for a grunt.

She knows where he’s coming from. To this day, she still isn’t certain what parts of her own childhood were real and which were mere inserts, installed after the fact. And she’s one of the lucky ones; at least she survived the blast that turned Channer Vent into thirty square kilometers of radioactive glass. At least she wasn’t smashed to pulp by the resulting tsunami, or incinerated along with the millions on N’AmPac’s refugee strip.

Not that she shouldn’t have been, of course. If you want to get technical about it, all those other millions were nothing but collateral. Not their fault—not even Rowan’s, really—that Lenie Clarke wouldn’t sit still enough to present a decent target.

Still. There’s fault, and there’s fault. Patricia Rowan might have the blood of millions on her hands, but after all hot zones don’t contain themselves: It takes resources and resolve, every step of the way. Cordon the infected area; bring in the lifters; reduce to ash. Lather, rinse, repeat. Kill a million to save a billion, kill ten to save a hundred. Maybe even kill ten to save eleven—the principle’s the same, even if the profit margin’s lower. But none of that machinery runs itself, you can’t ever take your hand off the kill switch. Rowan never threw a massacre without having to face the costs, and own them.

It was so much easier for Lenie Clarke. She just sowed her little trail of infection across the world and went to ground without ever looking back. Even now her victims pile up in an ongoing procession, an exponential legacy that must have surpassed Rowan’s a dozen times over. And she doesn’t have to lift a finger.

No one who calls himself a friend of Lenie Clarke has any rational grounds for passing judgment on Patricia Rowan. Clarke dreads the day when that simple truth dawns on Ken Lubin.

The squids drag them higher. By now there’s a definite gradient, light above fading to darkness below. To Clarke this is the scariest part of the ocean, the half-lit midwater depths where real squid roam: boneless tentacled monsters thirty meters long, their brains as cold and quick as superconductors. They’re twice as large as they used to be, she’s been told. Five times more abundant. Apparently it all comes down to better day care. Architeuthis larvae grow faster in the warming seas, their numbers unconstrained by predators long since fished out of existence.

She’s never actually seen one, of course. She hopes she never will—according to the sims the population is crashing for want of prey, and the ocean’s vast enough to keep the chances of a random encounter astronomically remote anyway. But occasionally the drones catch ghostly echoes from massive objects passing overhead: hard shouts of chitin and cartilage, faint landscapes of surrounding flesh that sonar barely sees at all. Fortunately, Archie rarely descends into true darkness.

The ambient hue intensifies as they rise—colors don’t survive photoamplification in dim light, but this close to the surface the difference between capped and naked eyes is supposed to be minimal. Sometimes Clarke has an impulse to put that to the test, pop the caps right out of her eyes and see for herself, but it’s an impossible dream. The diveskin wraps around her face and bonds directly to the photocollagen. She can’t even blink.

Surge, now. Overhead, the skin of the ocean writhes like dim mercury. It tilts and dips and scrolls past in an endless succession of crests and troughs, twisting a cool orb glowing on the other side, tying it into playful dancing knots. A few moments later they break through the surface and look onto a world of sea and moonlit sky.

They are still alive. A three-thousand-meter free ascent in the space of forty minutes, and not so much as a burst capillary. Clarke swallows against the isotonic saline in throat and sinuses, feels the machinery sparking in her chest, and marvels again at the wonder of a breathless existence.

Lubin’s all business, of course. He’s maxed his squid’s buoyancy and is using it as a floating platform for the receiver. Clarke sets her own squid to station-keeping and helps him set up.

They slide up and down silver swells, the moon bright enough to render their eyecaps redundant. The unpacked antennae cluster bobs on its tether, eyes and ears jostling in every direction, tracking satellites, compensating for the motion of the waves. One or two low-tech wireframes scan for ground stations.

Too slowly, signals accumulate.

The broth gets thinner with each survey. Oh, the ether’s still full of information—the little histograms are creeping up all the way into the centimeter band, there’s chatter along the whole spectrum—but density’s way down.

Of course, even the loss of signal carries its own ominous intelligence.

Not much out there, Clarke remarks, nodding at the readouts.

Mmm. Lubin’s slapped a mask onto his mask, diveskin hood nested within VR headset. Halifax is still online. He’s dipping here and there into the signals, sampling a few of the channels as they download. Clarke grabs another headset and strains to the west.

Nothing from Sudbury, she reports after a few moments.

He doesn’t remind her that Sudbury’s been dark since Rio. He doesn’t point out the vanishingly small odds of Achilles Desjardins having survived. He doesn’t even ask her when she’s going to give up and accept the obvious. He only says, Can’t find London either. Odd.

She moves up the band.

They’ll never get a comprehensive picture this way, just sticking their fingers into the stream; the real analysis will have to wait until they get back to Atlantis. Clarke can’t understand most of the languages she does sample, although moving pictures fill in a lot of the blanks. Much rioting in Europe, amid fears that βehemoth has hitched a ride on the Southern Countercurrent; an exclusive enclave of those who’d been able to afford the countertweaks, torn apart by a seething horde of those who hadn’t. China and its buffers are still dark—have been for a couple of years now—but that’s probably more of a defense against apocalypse than a surrender unto it. Anything flying within five hundred clicks of their coast still gets shot down without warning, so at least their military infrastructure is still functional.

Another M&M coup, this time in Mozambique. That’s a total of eight now, and counting. Eight nations seeking to hasten the end of the world in the name of Lenie Clarke. Eight countries fallen under the spell of this vicious, foul thing that she’s

Reviews for Behemoth

[Jeff Cortazzo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

wow - another incredibly dense dive (hah) into the near future

[crazybatcow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's similar in content to book 1 of this series (Starfish) in that it's set underwater. Though there is less about "Rifter" culture (guess we know all about that now from the earlier book) and more about dealing with the aftermath of Lenie's escapades spreading Behemoth on Earth. The political aftermath more so that actually trying to deal with Behemoth itself. It's a bit more action-suspenseful than book one - a mini-battle going on underwater type thing - but a bit less apocalypse-suspenseful because there is not really a huge global threat being uncovered.Still, there's lots of sci-fi tech (which I don't really think is that far out from reality) and some strife which makes the story quite interesting... though a lot of the characters, and personal interactions, are not very "real" feeling. Watts is very strong in his sci-fi/future tech components, not quite as strong in his interpersonal relationships components.

[francescadefreitas · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was interested in Achilles' reaction to his changed, er, body chemistry, but didn't buy the changes to Lenie or Ken's personalities. The gratuitous introductions of characters only to kill them off was irritating, and several times the violence made me nauseous.

[slothman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Starfish and Maelstrom, a new life-form, dubbed βehemoth, is discovered deep in the ocean trenches and released on the surface, where it begins to outcompete other life at the most basic levels of the food chain. This book is the first half of the novel βehemoth, which deals with how the world reacts to the release of the organism: one group retreating underwater to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to hide, the other taking drastic action to contain the threat of a dangerous microbe.Watts keeps up the pace of his cautionary future; I don't want to live there, but the book is a page-turner.