Starfish

It's too obvious. He knows she sees through it before the words are even out of his mouth. But it's also a perfectly reasonable request from someone in his role. Routine evaluation, after all.

She watches him for a moment, her head cocked a bit to one side. Her face, expressionless as usual, somehow conveys the impression of a slight smile. Finally she sits down again.

She taps on a menu. "This is the Throat." A cluster of luminous rectangles nested in a background of contour lines. "Thermal readout." The image erupts into psychedelic false color, red and yellow hot spots pulsing at irregular intervals along the main fissure. "You don't usually bother with thermal when you're tending," Clarke explains. "When you're out there you find that stuff out sooner first-hand anyway." The psychedelia fades back to green and gray.

And what happens if someone gets taken by surprise out there and you don't have the readings in here to know they're in trouble? Scanlon doesn't ask aloud. Just another cut corner.

Clarke pans, finds a pair of alphanumeric icons. "Alice and Ken." Another red hot-spot slides into view in the upper left corner of the display.

No, wait a minute; she turned thermal off…

"Hey," Scanlon says, "that's a deadman switch — "

No audio alarm. Why isn't there an alarm — His eyes dart across the half-familiar console. Where is it, where — shit —

The alarm's been disabled.

"Look!" Scanlon points at the display. "Can't you —»

Clarke looks up at him, almost lazily. She doesn't seem to understand.

He jabs his thumb down. "Somebody just died out there!"

She looks at the screen, slowly shakes her head. "No —»

"You stupid bitch, you cut off the alarm!"

He hits a control icon. The station starts howling. Scanlon jumps back, startled, bumps the bulkhead. Clarke watches him, frowning slightly.

"What's wrong with you?" He reaches out and grabs her by the shoulders. "Do something! Call Lubin, call — " The alarm is deafening. He shakes her, hard, pulls her up out of the chair —

And remembers, too late: you don't touch Lenie Clarke.

Something happens in her face. It almost crumples, right there in front of him. Lenie Clarke the ice queen is suddenly nowhere to be seen. In her place there's only a beaten, blind little kid, body shaking, mouth moving in the same pattern over and over, he can't hear over the alarm but her lips shape the words, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry —

All in the few scant seconds before she crystallizes.

She seems to harden against the sound, against Scanlon's assault. Her face goes completely blank. She rises out of the chair, centimeters taller than she should be. One hand comes up, grabs Yves Scanlon by the throat. Pushes.

He staggers backwards into the lounge, flailing. The table appears to one side; he reaches out, steadies himself.

Suddenly, Beebe falls silent again.

Scanlon takes a deep breath. Another vampire has appeared in his peripheral vision, standing impassively at the mouth of the corridor; he ignores it. Directly ahead, Lenie Clarke is sitting down again in Communications, her back turned. Scanlon steps forward.

"It's Karl," she says before he can speak.

It takes a moment to register: Acton.

"But — that was months ago," Scanlon says. "You lost him."

"We lost him." She breathes, slowly. "He went down a smoker. It erupted."

"I'm sorry," Scanlon says. "I — didn't know."

"Yeah." Her voice is tight with controlled indifference. "He's too far down to — we can't get him back. Too dangerous." She turns to face him, impossibly calm. "Deadman switch still works, though. It'll keep screaming until the battery runs down." She shrugs. "So we keep the alarm off."

"I don't blame you," Scanlon says softly.

"Imagine," Clarke tells him, "how much your approval comforts me."

He turns to leave.

"Wait," she says. "I can zoom in for you. I can show you exactly where he died, maximum res."

"That's not necessary."

She stabs controls. "No problem. Naturally you're interested. What kind of mechanic wouldn't want to know the performance specs on his own creation?" She reshapes the display like a sculptor, hones it down and down until there's nothing left but a tangle of faint green lines and a red pulsing dot.

"He got wedged into an ancillary crevice," she says. "Looks like a tight fit even now, when all the flesh has been boiled away. Don't know how he managed to get down there when he was all in one piece." There's no stress in her voice at all. She could be talking about a friend's vacation.

Scanlon can feel her eyes on him; he keeps his on the screen.

"Fischer," he says. "What happened to him?"