Behemoth

So now Ken doesn't have much of what you'd call a conscience, and if that's your definition of a psycho then I guess he is one. But he didn't choose it."

"What difference does it make?" Alyx demands.

"It's not like he went out shopping for an evil makeover."

"So what? When did any psycho ever get to choose his own brain chemistry?"

It's a pretty good point, Clarke has to admit.

Has the sudden fear of discovery simply eclipsed her rage, or is it the same old excuse—that Lenie Clarke, gorged on revenge for a thousand lifetimes, has lost the stomach for it?

Maybe it's a burial plot, she thinks, suddenly giddy.

He sculls backward a few meters. The mechanical bellhop spins a quarter-turn, spits muddy water from its thrusters, and heels.

She can feel the corpses inside, their fear and apprehension and blind pants-pissing desperation radiating a good ten meters into the water.

Light ahead and to the right; the far end of the outcropping cuts the edges of that brightening haze like a jumble of black shattered glass.

"It would be unwise to move her without a coccoon," Lubin says softly. "Perhaps Dimitri could scare one up."

Gantries and habslabs and shadows.

"Bring terminals at personal discretion. Garcia's waiting under Med for triage."

The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis lights the water, deceptively serene.

The preshmeshed figures clambering along the hulled remains of F-3 have to content themselves with the wounded and the dead. They're crabs, ungainly and overweighted.

The cries rise in her head before they reach her ears; raw chemical panic lighting up the reptile brain like sodium flares, the smarter mammalian overlay helpless and confused, its vaunted cognition shattering like cheap crystal in the backwash.

Back at Juan de Fuca, they were able to make some pretty shrewd inferences from changes in signal strength.

A sudden blue tint suffuses the sonar display.

"Attention, everyone. Attention. This is it.

"Atlantis has preempted."

Now they're reading perfidy all over the place.

It's as though someone's kicked over an anthill in there: every brain in Atlantis is suddenly lit up along the whole fight-flight axis.

And there's that look on his face, the slightest arching of the eyebrows, that sense of deadpan— amusement, almost— seeping out from behind his eyecaps.

Rowan watches her, suddenly wary: the way she looked when they met for the first time, five years ago.

The rifter looks back steadily. "Pat, don't hold out on me. I'm having a tough enough time keeping the dogs away as it is. If you've got something to say, say it."

Lenie spares an impatient glance, catches the expression on Rowan's face and double-takes. "What?"

People with self-imposed rules of conduct have been known to bend and twist and rationalize those rules to let them both have their cake and eat it.