Starfish (Rifters Trilogy, 1)

Civilization rests on the backs of its outcasts. So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometers below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have preadapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place. It's a small price to keep the lights going, back on shore. But there are things among the cliffs and trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find, and enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made of iron. At first, not even the rifters know what they have in them―and by the time anyone else finds out, the outcast and the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet...

A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew—people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater—down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness.

Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below?

Locus - Gary K. Wolfe

There are enough provocative ideas in Starfish to suggest that Watts does his homework and thinks things through, and enough skill at scene and dialogue writing to convince us that he's a fine craftsman...

CONTENTS 4 PRELUDE: CERATIUS 6 BENTHOS 14 DUET: CONSTRICTOR 15 A Niche 28 Housecleaning 46 ROME: NEOTENOUS 51 Elevator Boy 60 Crush 65 Autoclave 71 Waterbed 74 Doppelgänger 80 Angel 83 Feral 94 Shadow 96 BALLET: DANCER 100 Short-circuit 122 Critical Mass 134 NEKTON 146 DRYBACK: JUMP-START 147 Muckraker 151 Scream 162 Bulrushes 182 Ghosts 189 SEINE: ENTROPY 204 Carousel 208 Ecdysis 214 Alibis 220 QUARANTINE: BUBBLE 227 Enema 231 Turncoat 239 HEAD CHEESE: THEME AND VARIATION 241 Ground Zero 246 Software 250 Racter 260 ENDGAME: NIGHT SHIFT 269 Scatter 272 Reptile 281 Skyhop 285 Floodlight 287 Sunrise 290 Jericho 293 Detritus 298 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 307 REFERENCES 309 When civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometres below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have pre-adapted them to dangerous environments, people used to broken bodies and chronic stress. Physically modified convicts are used in the Pacific for the exploitation of ocean-floor resources without diving equipment. But in the process they have become carriers of a microorganism that could wipe out humanity if they return to the surface