Free Behemoth by Peter Watts

suffered injuries and malfunctions beyond the skill of their own off-the-shelf medical machinery. Some needed help to stay alive; others, to die in something less than agony.
    And all the qualified doctors were on the other side.
    No one was going to trust their injured comrades to the tender mercies of a thousand sore losers just because the corpses had the only hospital for four thousand klicks. So they grafted a couple of habs together fifty meters off Atlantis’s shoulder, and furnished it with medical equipment pillaged from enemy infirmaries. Fiberop let the corpses’ meat-cutters practice their art by remote control; explosive charges planted on Atlantis’s hull inspired those same meat-cutters to be extra careful in matters of potential malpractice. The losers took very good care of the winners, on pain of implosion.
    Eventually tensions eased. Rifters stopped avoiding Atlantis out of distrust, and began avoiding it out of indifference instead. Gradually, the realization dawned that the rest of the world posed a greater threat to rifters and corpses alike than either did to the other. Lubin took down the charges somewhere during year three, when most everyone had forgotten about them anyway.
    The med hab still gets a fair bit of use. Injuries happen. Injuries are inevitable, given rifter tempers and the derived weakness of rifter bones. But at the moment it holds only two occupants, and the corpses are probably thanking their portfolios that the rifters cobbled this facility together all those years ago. Otherwise, Clarke and Lubin might have dragged themselves into Atlantis—and everyone knows where they’ve been.
    As it is, they only ventured close enough to hand off Irene Lopez and the thing that dined upon her. Two clamshell sarcophagi, dropped from one of Atlantis’s engineering locks on short notice, devoured that evidence and are even now sending their findings up fiberop umbilicals. In the meantime Clarke and Lubin lie side by side on a pair of operating tables, naked as cadavers themselves. It’s been a long time since any corpse dared give an order to a rifter, but they’ve acquiesced to Jerenice Seger’s “strong recommendation” that they get rid of their diveskins. It was a tougher concession than Clarke lets on. It’s not that simple nudity discomfits her; Lubin has never tripped Clarke’s usual alarms. But the autoclave isn’t just sterilizing her diveskin; it’s destroying it, melting it back down to a useless slurry of protein and petroleum. She’s trapped, naked and vulnerable, in this tiny bubble of gas and spun metal. For the first time in years, she can’t simply step outside. For the first time in years the ocean can kill her—all it has to do is crush this fragile eggshell and clench around her like a freezing liquid fist …
    It’s a temporary vulnerability, of course. New diveskins are on the way, are being extruded right now. Clarke just has to hold out another fifteen or twenty minutes. But in the meantime she feels worse than naked. She feels skinned alive.
    It doesn’t seem to bother Lubin much. Nothing does. Of course, Lubin’s teleop is being a lot less invasive than Clarke’s. It’s only taking samples: blood, skin, swabs from around the eyes and anus and seawater intake. Clarke’s machine is digging deep into the flesh of her leg, displacing muscle and resetting bone and waving its gleaming chopstick arms like some kind of chrome spider performing an exorcism. Occasionally the smell of her own cauterizing flesh wafts faintly up the table. Presumably her injury is under repair, although she can’t really tell; the table’s neuroinduction field has her paralyzed and insensate below the stomach.
    â€œHow much longer?” she asks. The teleop ignores her without dropping a stitch.
    â€œI don’t think there’s anyone there,” Lubin says. “It’s on