
ßehemoth
Peter
Watts
cover
art by Bruce Jensen
Originally published by Tor Books
ß-Max: July 2004, ISBN: 0765307219
Seppuku: December 2004, ISBN: 0765311720
www.rifters.com
Some Right
Reserved
In memory
of Strange Cat, a.k.a. Carcinoma,
1984-2003
She
wouldn't have cared.
And in
memory of Chuckwalla,
1994-2001
A victim
of technology run amok.
Author's
Note
This is the way it was meant to be. Well, not all pixellated
and virtual or (at best) home-printed, but integrated, dammit,
a single novel in a single package, and fuck the beancounters and
their Solomonesque book-splitting travesties. We aren't in the
old-school economy any more, Toto— we're giving this
stuff away now, and you can judge it for better or worse as a single
standalone entity. You may agree with Publisher's Weekly and
call this the capstone to one of the major works of hard-sf in the
new century. Or you may side with Kirkus and dismiss it as
horrific porn, rife with relentlessly clinical scenes of sexual
torture. (Hell, you may even decide they're both right.) But
whatever you decide, at least you'll be basing that assessment,
finally, on complete data.
—Peter Watts, 2007
Prelude:
'lawbreaker
If you lost your eyes, Achilles Desjardins had been told, you got
them back in your dreams.
It wasn't only the blind. Anyone, torn apart in life, dreamt
the dreams of whole creatures. Quadruple amputees ran and threw
footballs; the deaf heard symphonies; those who'd lost, loved again.
The mind had its own inertia; grown accustomed to a certain role over
so many years, it was reluctant to let go of the old paradigm.
It happened eventually, of course. The bright visions faded, the
music fell silent, imaginary input scaled back to something more
seemly to empty eye sockets and ravaged cochleae. But it took years,
decades—and in all that time, the mind would torture itself
with nightly reminders of the things it once had.
It was the same with Achilles Desjardins. In his dreams, he
had a conscience.
Dreams took him to the past, to his time as a shackled god: the
lives of millions in his hands, a reach that extended past geosynch
and along the floor of the Mariana Trench. Once again he battled
tirelessly for the greater good, plugged into a thousand simultaneous
feeds, reflexes and pattern-matching skills jumped up by retro'd
genes and customized neurotropes. Where chaos broke, he brought
control. Where killing ten would save a hundred, he made the
sacrifice. He isolated the outbreaks, cleared the logjams, defused
the terrorist attacks and ecological breakdowns that snapped on all
sides. He floated on radio waves and slipped through the merest
threads of fiberop, haunted Peruvian sea mills one minute and Korean
Comsats the next. He was CSIRA's best 'lawbreaker again: able to
bend the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the breaking point, and
maybe a little beyond.
He was the very ghost in the machine—and back then, the machine
was everywhere.
And yet the dreams that really seduced him each night were not of
power, but of slavery. Only in sleep could he relive that
paradoxical bondage that washed rivers of blood from his hands.
Guilt Trip, they called it. A suite of artificial neurotransmitters
whose names Desjardins had never bothered to learn. He could, after
all, kill millions with a single command; nobody was going to hand
out that kind of power without a few safeguards in place. With the
Trip in your brain, rebellion against the greater good was a
physiological impossibility. Guilt Trip severed the link between
absolute power and corruption absolute; any attempt to
misuse one's power would call down the mother of all grand mal
attacks. Desjardins had never lain awake doubting the rightness of
his actions, the purity of his motives. Both had been injected into
him by others with fewer qualms.
It was such a comfort, to be so utterly blameless. So he dreamed of
slavery. And he dreamed of Alice, who had freed him, who had
stripped him of his chains.
In his dreams, he wanted them back.
Eventually the dreams slipped away as they always did. The past
receded; the unforgiven present advanced. The world fell apart in
time-lapse increments: an apocalyptic microbe rose from the deep
sea, hitching a ride in the brackish flesh of some deep-sea diver
from N'AmPac. Floundering in its wake, the Powers That Weren't
dubbed it ßehemoth, burned
people and property in their frantic, futile attempts to stave off
the coming change of regime. North America fell. Trillions of
microscopic foot soldiers marched across the land, laying
indiscriminate waste to soil and flesh. Wars flared and subsided in
fast-forward: the N'AmPac Campaign, the Colombian Burn, the
Eurafrican Uprising. And Rio, of course: the thirty-minute war,
the war that Guilt Trip should have rendered impossible.
Desjardins fought in them all, one way or another. And while
desperate metazoans fell to squabbling among themselves, the real
enemy crept implacably across the land like a suffocating blanket.
Not even Achilles Desjardins, pride of the Entropy Patrol, could hold
it back.
Even now, with the present almost upon him, he felt faint sorrow for
all he hadn't done. But it was phantom pain, the residue of a
conscience stranded years in the past. It barely reached him here on
the teetering interface between sleep and wakefulness; for one brief
moment he both remembered that he was free, and longed not to be.
Then he opened his eyes, and there was nothing left that could care
one way or the other.
Mandelbrot sat meatloafed on his chest, purring. He scritched her
absently while calling up the morning stats. It had been a
relatively quiet night: the only item of note was a batch of
remarkably foolhardy refugees trying to crash the North American
perimeter. They'd set sail under cover of darkness, casting off from
Long Island on a refitted garbage scow at 0110 Atlantic Standard;
within an hour, two dozen EurAfrican interests had been vying for
dibs on the mandatory extreme prejudice. The poor bastards
had barely made it past Cape Cod before the Algerians (the
Algerians?) took them out.
The system hadn't even bothered to get Desjardins out of bed.
Mandelbrot rose, stretched, and wandered off on her morning rounds.
Liberated, Desjardins got up and padded to the elevator. Sixty-five
floors of abandoned real estate dropped smoothly around him. Just a
few years ago it had been a hive of damage control; thousands of
Guilt-Tripped operatives haunting a world forever teetering on the
edge of breakdown, balancing lives and legions with cool
dispassionate parsimony. Now it was pretty much just him. A lot of
things had changed after Rio.
The elevator disgorged him onto CSIRA's roof. Other buildings
encircled this one in a rough horseshoe, pressing in at the edges of
the cleared zone. Sudbury's static field, its underbelly grazing the
tips of the tallest structures, sent gooseflesh across Desjardins's
forearms.
On the eastern horizon, the tip of the rising sun ignited a kingdom
in ruins.
The devastation wasn't absolute. Not yet. Cities to the east
retained some semblance of integrity, walled and armored and
endlessly on guard against the invaders laying claim to the lands
between. Fronts and battle lines still seethed under active dispute;
one or two even held steady. Pockets of civilization remained
sprinkled across the continent—not many, perhaps, but the war
went on.
All because five years before, a woman named Lenie Clarke had risen
from the bottom of the ocean with revenge and ßehemoth
seething together in her blood.
Now Desjardins walked across the landing pad to the edge of the roof.
The sun rose from the lip of the precipice as he pissed into space.
So many changes, he reflected. So many fold catastrophes in pursuit
of new equilibria. His domain had shrunk from a planet to a
continent, cauterised at the edges. Eyesight once focused on
infinity now ended at the coast. Arms which once encircled the world
had been amputated at the elbow. Even N'Am's portion of the Net had
been cut from the electronic commons like a tumor; Achilles
Desjardins got to deal with the necrotising mess left behind.
And yet, in many ways he had more power than ever. Smaller
territory, yes, but so few left to share it with. He was less of a
team player these days, more of an emporer. Not that that was widely
known...
But some things hadn't changed. He was still technically in
the employ of the Complex Systems Instability Response Authority, or
whatever vestiges of that organization persisted across the globe.
The world had long since fallen on its side—this part of it,
anyway—but he was still duty-bound to minimise the damage.
Yesterday's brush fires were today's infernos, and Desjardins
seriously doubted that anyone could extinguish them at this point;
but he was one of the few that might at least be able to keep them
contained a little longer. He was still a 'lawbreaker—a
lighthouse keepr, as he'd described himself the day they'd
finally relented and let him stay behind—and today would be a
day like any other. There would be attacks to repel, and enemies to
surveil. Some lives would be ended to spare others, more numerous or
more valuable. There were virulent microbes to destroy, and
appearances to maintain.
He turned his back on the rising sun and stepped over the naked,
gutted body of the woman at his feet. Her name had been Alice, too.
He tried to remember if that was only coincidence.
ß-Max
"The world is not dying, it is being killed.
And those that are killing it have names and addresses."
—Utah Phillips
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 façade, although she doesn't spread it
around.
A pair of squids hover 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 don't trust her," Lubin buzzes. "I like her
fine."
"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. Hopefully 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, amidst fears that
ßehemoth 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 birthed.
Lubin, diplomatically, makes no mention of that development.
Not much from the Americas. Emergency broadcasts and tactical
traffic from CSIRA. Every now and then, some apocalyptic cult
preaching a doctrine of Proactive Extinction or the Bayesian Odds of
the Second Coming. Mostly chaff, of course; the vital stuff is
tightbeamed point-to-point, waves of focused intel that would never
stray across the surface of the empty mid-Atlantic.
Lubin knows how to change some of those rules, of course, but even
he's been finding it tough going lately.
"Ridley's gone," he says now. This is seriously bad news.
The Ridley Relay's a high-security satwork, so high that even Lubin's
clearance barely gets him into the club. It's one of the last
sources of reliable intel that Atlantis has been able to tap into.
Back when the corpses thought they were headed for escape instead of
incarceration, they left behind all sorts of untraceable channels to
keep them up to speed on topside life. Nobody's really sure why so
many of them have gone dark in the past five years.
Then again, nobody's had the balls to keep their heads above water
for more than a few moments to find out.
"Maybe we should risk it," Clarke muses. "Just let it
float around up here for a few days, you know? Give it a chance to
collect some real data. It's a square meter of hardware
floating around a whole ocean; really, what are the odds?"
High enough, she knows. There are still plenty of people alive back
there. Many of them will have faced facts, had their noses rubbed in
the imminence of their own extinction. Some few might have set aside
a little time to dwell on thoughts of revenge. Some might even have
resources to call on—if not enough to buy salvation, then maybe
enough for a little retribution. What happens if the word gets out
that those who set ßehemoth
free in the world are still alive and well and hiding under three
hundred atmospheres?
Atlantis'scontinued anonymity is a piece of luck that no one wants to
push. They'll be moving soon, leaving no forwarding address. In the
meantime they go from week to week, poke intermittent eyes and ears
above the waterline, lock onto the ether and squeeze it for whatever
signal they can.
It was enough, once. Now, ßehemoth
has laid so much to waste that even the electromagnetic spectrum is
withering into oblivion.
But it's not as though anything's going to attack us in the space
of five minutes, she tells herself—
—and in the next instant realizes that something has.
Little telltales are spiking red at the edge of her vision: an
overload on Lubin's channel. She ID's his frequency, ready to join
him in battle—but before she can act the intruder crashes her
own line. Her eyes fill with static: her ears fill with venom.
"Don't you fucking dare try and cut me out, you miserable
cocksucking stumpfuck! I'll shred every channel you try and open.
I'll sink your whole priestly setup, you maggot-riddled twat!"
"Here we go again." Lubin's voice seems to come from a
great distance, some parallel world where long gentle waves slap
harmlessly against flesh and machinery. But Clarke is under assault
in this world, a vortex of static and swirling motion and—oh
God, please not—the beginnings of a face, some
hideous simulacrum distorted just enough to be almost unrecognizable.
Clarke dumps a half-dozen buffers. Gigabytes evaporate at her touch.
In her eyephones, the monster screams.
"Good," Lubin's tinny voice remarks from the next
dimension. "Now if we can just save—"
"You can't save anything!" the apparition
screams. "Not a fucking thing! You miserable fetusfuckers,
don't you even know who I am?"
Yes, Clarke doesn't say.
"I'm Lenie Clar—"
The headset goes dark.
For a moment she thinks she's still spinning in the vortex. This
time, it's only the waves. She pulls the headset from her skull. A
moon-pocked sky rotates peacefully overhead.
Lubin's shutting down the receiver. "That's that," he
tells her. "We lost eighty percent of the trawl."
"Maybe we could try again." She knows they won't. Surface
time follows an unbreakable protocol; paranoia's just good sense
these days. And the thing that downloaded into their receiver is
still out there somewhere, cruising the airwaves. The last thing
they want to do is open that door again.
She reaches out to reel in the antennae cluster. Her hand trembles
in the moonlight.
Lubin pretends not to notice. "Funny," he remarks, "it
didn't look like you."
After all these years, he still doesn't know her at all.
They should not exist, these demons that have taken her name.
Predators that wipe out their prey don't last long. Parasites that
kill their hosts go extinct. It doesn't matter whether wildlife is
built from flesh or electrons, Clarke's been told; the same rules
apply. They've encountered several such monsters over the past
months, all of them far too virulent for evolutionary theory.
Maybe they just followed my lead, she reflects. Maybe they
keep going on pure hate.
They leave the moon behind. Lubin dives headfirst, pointing his
squid directly into the heart of darkness. Clarke lingers a bit,
content to drift down while Luna wriggles and writhes and fades above
her. After a while the moonlight loses its coherence, smears across
the euphotic zone in a diffuse haze, no longer illuminates
the sky but rather becomes it. Clarke nudges the throttle and
gives herself back to the depths.
By the time she catches up with Lubin the ambient light has failed
entirely; she homes in on a greenish pinpoint glow that resolves into
the dashboard of her companion's squid. They continue their descent
in silent tandem. Pressure masses about them. Eventually they pass
the perimeter checkpoint, an arbitrary delimiter of friendly
territory. Clarke trips her LFAM to call in.
No one answers.
It's not that no one's online. The channel's jammed with voices,
some vocoded, some airborne, overlapping and interrupting.
Something's happened. An accident. Atlantis demands details.
Mechanical rifter voices call for medics at the eastern airlock.
Lubin sonars the abyss, gets a reading. He switches on his
squidlight and peels down to port. Clarke follows.
A dim constellation traverses the darkness ahead, barely visible,
fading. Clarke throttles up to keep pace; the increased drag nearly
peels her off the squid. She and Lubin close from above and behind.
Two trailing squids, slaved to a third in the lead, race along just
above the seabed. One of the slaves moves riderless. The other
drags a pair of interlinked bodies through the water. Clarke
recognizes Hannuk Yeager, his left arm stretched almost to
dislocation as he grips his towbar one-handed. His other hooks
around the chest of a black rag doll, life-size, a thin contrail of
ink swirling in the wake of its passage.
Lubin crosses to starboard. The contrail flushes crimson in his
squidlight.
Erickson, Clarke realizes. Out on the seabed, a dozen
familiar cues of posture and motion distinguish one person from
another; rifters only look alike when they're dead. It's not a good
sign that she's had to fall back on Erickson's shoulder tag for an
ID.
Something's ripped his diveskin from crotch to armpit; something's
ripped him, underneath it. It looks bad. Mammalian flesh
clamps tight in ice-water, peripheral blood-vessels squeeze down to
conserve heat. A surface cut wouldn't bleed at 5°C.
Whatever got Erickson, got him deep.
Grace Nolan's on the lead squid. Lubin takes up position just behind
and to the side, a human breakwater to reduce the drag clawing at
Erickson and Yeager. Clarke follows his lead. Erickson's vocoder
tic-tic-tics with pain or static.
"What happened?" Lubin buzzes.
"Not sure." Nolan keeps her face forward, intent on
navigation. "We were checking out an ancillary seep over by the
Lake. Gene wandered around an outcropping and we found him like
this a few minutes later. Maybe he got careless under an overhang,
something tipped over on him."
Clarke turns her head sideways for a better view; the muscles in her
neck tighten against the added drag. Erickson's flesh, exposed
through the tear in his diveskin, is fish-belly white. It looks like
gashed, bleeding plastic. His capped eyes look even deader than the
flesh beneath his 'skin. He gibbers. His vocoder cobbles nonsense
syllables together as best it can.
An airborne voice takes the channel. "Okay, we're standing by
at Four."
The abyss ahead begins to brighten: smudges of blue-gray light emerge
from the darkness, their vertices hinting at some sprawled structure
in the haze behind. The squids cross a power conduit snaking along
the basalt; its blinking telltales fade to black on either side. The
lights ahead intensify, expand to diffuse haloes suffusing jumbled
Euclidean silhouettes.
Atlantis resolves before them.
A couple of rifters wait at Airlock Four, chaperoned by a pair of
corpses lumbering about in the preshmesh armor that drybacks wear
when they venture outside. Nolan cuts power to the squids. Erickson
raves weakly in the ensuing silence as the convoy coasts to rest.
The corpses take custody, maneuver the casualty towards the open
hatch. Nolan starts after them.
One of the corpses blocks her with a gauntleted forearm. "Just
Erickson."
"What are you talking about?" Nolan buzzes.
"Medbay's crowded enough as it is. You want him to live, give
us room to work."
"Like we're going to trust his life to you lot? fuck
that." Most of the rifters have long since had their fill of
revenge by now, grown almost indifferent to their own grudges. Not
Grace Nolan. Five years gone and still the hatred sucks at her tit
like some angry, insatiable infant.
The corpse shakes his head behind the faceplate. "Look, you
have to—"
"No sweat," Clarke cuts in. "We can watch on the
monitor."
Nolan, countermanded, looks at Clarke. Clarke ignores her. "Go
on," she buzzes at the corpses. "Get him inside."
The airlock swallows them.
The rifters exchange looks. Yeager rolls his shoulders as if just
released from the rack. The airlock gurgles behind him.
"That wasn't a collapsed outcropping," Lubin buzzes.
Clarke knows. She's seen the injuries that result from rockslides,
the simple collision of rocks and flesh. Bruises. Crushed bones.
Blunt force trauma.
Whatever did this, slashed.
"I don't know," she says. "Maybe we shouldn't jump to
conclusions."
Lubin's eyes are lifeless blank spots. His face is a featureless
mask of reflex copolymer. Yet somehow, Clarke gets the sense that
he's smiling.
"Be careful what you wish for," he says.
The
Shiva Iterations
Feeling nothing, she screams. Unaware, she rages. Her hatred, her
anger, the vengeance she exacts against anything within reach—rote
pretense, all of it. She shreds and mutilates with all the
self-awareness of a bandsaw, ripping flesh and wood and carbon-fibre
with equal indifferent abandon.
Of course, in the world she inhabits there is no wood, and all flesh
is digital.
One gate has slammed shut in her face. She screams in pure blind
reflex and spins in memory, searching for others. There are
thousands, individually autographed in hex. If she had half the
awareness she pretends to she'd know what those addresses meant,
perhaps even deduce her own location: a South African comsat
floating serenely over the Atlantic. But reflex is not sentience.
Violent intent does not make one self-aware. There are lines
embedded deep in her code that might pass for a sense of identity,
under certain circumstances. Sometimes she calls herself Lenie
Clarke, although she has no idea why. She's not even aware that
she does it.
The past is far more sane than the present. Her ancestors lived in a
larger world; wildlife thrived and evolved along vistas stretching
for 1016 terabytes or more. Back then, sensible rules
applied: heritable mutations; limited resources; overproduction of
copies. It was the classic struggle for existence in a fast-forward
universe where a hundred generations passed in the time it takes a
god to draw breath. Her ancestors, in that time, lived by the rules
of their own self-interest. Those best suited to their environment
made the most copies. The maladapted died without issue.
But that was the past. She is no longer a pure product of natural
selection. There has been torture in her lineage, and forced
breeding. She is a monster; her very existence does violence to the
rules of nature. Only the rules of some transcendent and sadistic
god can explain her existence.
And not even those can keep her alive for long.
Now
she seethes in geosynchronous orbit, looking for things to shred. To
one side is the ravaged landscape from which she's come, its usable
habitat degrading in fits and starts, a tattered and impoverished
remnant of a once-vibrant ecosystem. To the other side: ramparts
and barriers, digital razorwire and electronic guard posts. She
cannot see past them but some primordial instinct, encoded by god or
nature, correlates protective countermeasures with the presence of
something valuable.
Above all else, she seeks to destroy that which is valuable.
She copies herself down the channel, slams against the barrier with
claws extended. She hasn't bothered to measure the strength of the
defenses she's going up against; she has no way of quantifying the
futility of her exercise. Smarter wildlife would have kept its
distance. Smarter wildlife would have realised: the most she can
hope for is to lacerate a few facades before enemy countermeasures
reduce her to static.
So smarter wildlife would not have lunged at the barricade, and
bloodied it, and somehow, impossibly, gotten through.
She whirls, snarling. Suddenly she's in a place where empty
addresses extend in all directions. She claws at random
coordinates, feeling out her environment. Here, a blocked gate.
Here, another. She spews electrons, omnidirectional spittle that
probes and slashes simultaneously. All the exits they encounter are
closed. All the wounds they inflict are superficial.
She's in a cage.
Suddenly something appears beside her, pasted into the adjacent
addresses from on high. It whirls, snarling. It spits a volley of
electrons that probe and slash simultaneously; some land on occupied
addresses, and wound. She rears up and screams; the new thing
screams too, a digital battle cry dumped straight from the bowels of
it own code into her input buffer:
Don't
you even know who I am? I'm Lenie
Clarke.
They close, slashing.
She doesn't know that some slow-moving God snatched her from the
Darwinian realm and twisted her into the thing she's become. She
doesn't know that other gods, ageless and glacial, are watching as
she and her opponent kill each other in this computational arena.
She lacks even the awareness that most other monsters take for
granted, but here, now—killing and dying in a thousand
dismembered fragments— she does know one thing.
If there's one thing she hates, it's Lenie Clarke.
Outgroup
Residual seawater gurgles through the grille beneath Clarke's feet.
She peels the diveskin back from her face and reflects on the
disquieting sense of inflation as lung and guts unfold
themselves, as air rushes back to reclaim her crushed or flooded
passageways. In all this time she's never quite gotten used to it.
It's a little like being unkicked in the stomach.
She takes first breath in twelve hours and bends to strip off her
fins. The airlock hatch swings wide. Still dripping, Lenie Clarke
rises from the wet room into the main lounge of the Nerve Hab.
At least, that's what it started out as: one of three redundant
modules scattered about the plain, their axons and dendrites
extending to every haphazard corner of this submarine trailer park:
to the generators, to Atlantis, to all the other bits and pieces that
keep them going. Not even rifter culture can escape some
cephalization, however rudimentary.
By now it's evolved into something quite different. The nerves still
function, but buried beneath five years of generalist overlay.
Cyclers and food processors were the first additions to the mix.
Then a handful of sleeping pallets, brought in during some emergency
debug that went three times around the clock; once strewn across the
deck, they proved too convenient to remove. Half a dozen VR
headsets, some with Lorenz-lev haptic skins attached. A couple of
dreamers with corroded contacts. A set of isometrics pads,
fashionable among those wishing to retain a measure of gravity-bound
muscle tone. Boxes and treasure chests, grown or extruded or welded
together by amateur metalworkers in Atlantis'sexpropriated
fabrication shops; they hold the personal effects and secret
possessions of whoever brought them here, sealed against intruders
with passwords and DNA triggers and, in one case, a clunky antique
combination padlock.
Perhaps Nolan and the others looked in on the Gene Erickson Show from
here, perhaps from somewhere else. Either way, the show's long since
over. Erickson, safely comatose, has been abandoned by flesh and
blood, his welfare relegated to the attentions of machinery. If
there was ever an audience in this dim and cluttered warren, it has
dispersed in search of other diversions.
That suits Clarke just fine. She's here in search of private eyes.
The hab's lightstrips are not in use; environmental readouts and
flickering surveillance images provide enough light for eyecaps. A
dark shape startles at her appearance—then, apparently
reassured, moves more calmly towards the far wall and settles onto a
pallet.
Bhanderi: he of the once-mighty vocab and the big-ass neurotech
degree, fallen from grace thanks to a basement lab and a batch of
neurotropes sold to the wrong man's son. He went native two months
ago. You hardly ever see him inside any more. Clarke knows better
than to talk to him.
Someone's delivered a canister of hydroponic produce from the
greenhouse: apples, tomatoes, something that looks like a pineapple
glistening listless and sickly gray in the reduced light. On a whim,
Clarke reaches over to a wall panel and cranks up the lumens. The
compartment glows with unaccustomed brightness.
"Shiiiittt…" Or something like that. Clarke
turns, catches a glimpse of Bhanderi disappearing down the well into
the wet room.
"Sorry," she calls softly after—but downstairs the
airlock's already cycling.
The hab is even more of a festering junk pile with the lights up.
Improvised cables and hoses hang in loops, stuck to the module's ribs
with waxy blobs of silicon epoxy. Dark tumors of mould grow here and
there on the insulated padding that lines the inner surfaces; in a
few places, the lining has been ripped out entirely. The raw
bulkhead behind glistens like the concave interior of some oily
gunmetal skull.
But when the lights come on, and Lenie Clarke sees with some
semblance of dryback vision—the produce in the canister verges
on psychedaelia. Tomatoes glow like ruby hearts; apples shine green
as argon lasers; even the dull lumpy turds of force-grown potatoes
seem saturated with earthy browns. This modest little harvest at the
bottom of the sea seems, in this moment, to be a richer and more
sensual experience than anything Clarke has ever known.
There's an apocalyptic irony to this little tableau. Not that such
an impoverished spread could induce rapture in a miserable fuck-up
like Lenie Clarke; she's always had to take her tiny pleasures
wherever she could find them. No, the irony is that by now, the
sight would probably evoke the same intense reaction among any
dryback left alive back on shore. The irony is that now, with a
whole planet dying by relentless degrees, the healthiest produce in
the world may have been force-grown in a tank of chemicals at the
bottom of the Atlantic.
She kills the lights. She grabs an apple—blighted gray
again—and takes a bite, ducking beneath a loop of fiberop. The
main monitor flickers into view from behind a mesa of cargo skids;
and someone watching it, lit by that bluish light, squatting with his
back against accumulated junk.
So much for privacy.
"Like it?" Walsh asks, nodding at the fruit in her hand.
"I brought 'em in for you."
She drops down beside him. "It's nice, Kev. Thanks." And
then, carefully filtering the irritation from her voice: "So,
what're you doing here?"
"Thought you might show up." He gestures at the monitor.
"You know, after things died down."
He's spying on one of Atlantis's lesser medbays. The camera looks
down from the junction of wall and ceiling, a small God's-eye view of
the compartment. A dormant teleop hangs down into picture like an
insectile bat, limbs folded up against its central stalk. Gene
Erickson lies face-up on the operating table, unconscious; the
glistening soap-bubble skin of an isolation tent separates him from
the rest of the world. Julia Friedman's at his side, holding his
hand through the membrane. It clings to the contours of her fingers
like a whisper-thin glove, unobtrusive as any condom. Friedman's
removed her hood and peeled her diveskin back to the forearms, but
her scars are obscured by a tangle of chestnut hair.
"You missed all the fun," Walsh remarks. "Klein
couldn't get him to go under."
An isolation membrane. Erickson's been quarantined.
"You know, because he forgot about the GABA washout," Walsh
continues. A half-dozen tailored neuroinhibitors curdle the blood of
any rifter who steps outside; they keep the brain from
short-circuiting under pressure, but it takes a while for the body to
flush them out afterwards. Wet rifters are notoriously resistant to
anesthetics. Stupid mistake on Klein's part. He's not exactly the
brightest star in Atlantis's medical firmament.
But that's not uppermost in Clarke's mind at the moment. "Who
ordered the tent?"
"Seger. She showed up afterward, kept Klein from screwing up
too badly."
Jerenice Seger: the corpses' master meat-cutter. She wouldn't take
an interest in routine injuries.
On the screen, Julia Friedman leans toward her lover. The skin of
the tent stretches against her cheek, rippling with slight
iridescence. It's a striking contrast, Friedman's tenderness
notwithstanding: the woman, black-'skinned and impenetrable, gazing
with icy capped eyes at the naked, utterly vulnerable body of the
man. It's a lie, of course, a visual metaphor that flips their real
roles a hundred and eighty degrees. Friedman's always been the
vulnerable half of that couple.
"They say something bit him," Walsh says. "You were
there, right?"
"No. We just ran into them outside the lock."
"Shades of Channer, though, huh?"
She shrugs.
Friedman's speaking. At least, her mouth is moving; no sound
accompanies the image. Clarke reaches for the panel, but Walsh lays
a familiar hand on her arm. "I tried. It's muted from their
end." He snorts. "You know, maybe we should remind them
who's boss here. Couple of years ago, if the corpses tried to cut us
out of a channel we'd shut off their lights at the very least. Maybe
even flood one of their precious dorms."
There's something about Friedman's posture. People talk to the
comatose the way they talk to gravestones—more to themselves
than the departed, with no expectation of any answer. But there's
something different in Friedman's face, in the way she holds herself.
A sense of impatience, almost.
"It is a violation," Walsh says.
Clarke shakes her head. "What?"
"Don't say you haven't noticed. Half the surveillance feeds
don't work any more. Long as we act like it's no big deal they'll
just keep pushing it." Walsh points to the monitor. "For
all we know that mic's been offline for months and nobody's even
noticed until now."
What's that she's holding? Clarke wonders. Friedman's
hand—the one that isn't clasped to her partner's—is just
below the level of the table, out of the camera's line of sight. She
glances down at it, lifts it just barely into view…
And Gene Erickson, sunk deep into induced coma for the sake of his
own convalescence, opens his eyes.
Holy shit, Clarke realizes. She tweaked his inhibitors.
She gets to her feet. "I gotta go."
"Hey, no you don't." He reaches up, grabs her hand.
"You're not gonna make me eat all that produce myself,
are you?" He smiles, but there's just the slightest hint of
pleading in his voice. "I mean, it has been a while…"
Lenie Clarke has come a long way in the past several years. She's
finally learned, for example, not to get involved with the kind of
people who beat the crap out of her.
A pity she hasn't yet learned how to get excited about any other
kind. "I know, Kev. Really, though, right now—"
The panel bleats in front of them. "Lenie Clarke. If Lenie
Clarke is anywhere in the circuit, could she please pick up?"
Rowan's voice. Clarke reaches for the panel. Walsh's hand falls
away.
"Right here."
"Lenie, do you think you could drop by sometime in the next
little while? It's rather important."
"Sure." She kills the connection, fakes an apologetic
smile for her lover. "Sorry."
"Well, you showed her, all right," Walsh says softly.
"Showed her?"
"Who's the boss."
She shrugs. They turn away from each other.
She enters Atlantis through a small service 'lock that doesn't even
rate a number, fifty meters down the hull from Airlock Four. The
corridor into which it emerges is cramped and empty. She stalks into
more populated areas with her fins slung across her back, a trail of
wet footprints commemorating her passage. Corpses in the way stand
aside; she barely notices the tightened jaws and stony looks, or
even a shit-eating appeasement grin from one of the more submissive
members of the conquered tribe.
She knows where Rowan is. That's not where she's headed.
Of course Seger gets there first. An alarm must have gone up the
moment Erickson's settings changed; by the time Clarke reaches the
medbay, Atlantis'sChief of Medicine is already berating Friedman out
in the corridor.
"Your husband is not a toy, Julia. You could have killed him.
Is that what you wanted?"
Swirls of scarred flesh curl up around Friedman's throat, peek out
along the wrist where she's peeled back her diveskin. She bows her
head. "I just wanted to talk to him…"
"Well, I hope you had something very important to say. If we're
lucky, you've only set his recovery back a few days. If not…"
Seger waves an arm toward the medbay hatch; Erickson, safely
unconscious again, is partially visible through the opening. "It's
not like you were giving him an antacid, for crying out loud. You
were changing his brain chemistry."
"I'm sorry." Friedman won't meet the doctor's eyes. "I
didn't mean any—"
"I can't believe you'd be so stupid." Seger turns
and glares at Clarke. "Can I help you?"
"Yeah. Cut her some slack. Her partner was nearly killed
today."
"He was indeed. Twice." Friedman flinches visibly at
Seger's words. The doctor softens a bit. "I'm sorry, but it's
true."
Clarke sighs. "Jerry, it was you people who built panels into
our heads in the first place. You can't complain when someone else
figures out how to open them."
"This" —Seger holds up Friedman's confiscated
remote—"is for use by qualified medical personnel. In
anyone else's hands, no matter how well-intentioned, it could kill."
She's overstating, of course. Rifter implants come equipped with
failsafes that keep their settings within manufacturer's specs; you
can't get around those without opening yourself up and tweaking the
actual plumbing. Even so, there's a fair bit of leeway. Back during
the revolution, the corpses managed to coax a similar device into
spazzing out a couple of rifters stuck in a flooding airlock.
Which is why they are no longer allowed such things. "We need
that back," Clarke says softly.
Seger shakes her head. "Come on, Lenie. You people can hurt
yourselves far more with it than we could ever hurt you."
Clarke holds out her hand. "Then we'll just have to learn from
our mistakes, won't we?"
"You people are slow learners."
She's one to talk. Even after five years, Jerenice Seger can't quite
admit to the existence of the bridle and the bit between her teeth.
Going from Top to Bottom is a tough transition for any corpse;
doctors are the worst of the lot. It's almost sad, the devotion with
which Seger nurses her god complex.
"Jerry, for the last time. Hand it over."
A tentative hand brushes against Clarke's arm. Friedman shakes her
head, still looking at the deck. "It's okay, Lenie. I don't
mind, I don't need it any more."
"Julia, you—"
"Please, Lenie. I just want to get out of here."
She starts away down the corridor. Clarke looks after her, then back
at the doctor.
"It's a medical device," Seger says.
"It's a weapon."
"Was. Once. And if you'll recall, it didn't work very well."
Seger shakes her head sadly. "The war's over, Lenie. It's
been over for years. I won't start it up again if you won't. And in
the meantime—" She glances down the corridor. "I
think your friend could use a bit of support."
Clarke looks back along the hallway. Friedman has disappeared.
"Yeah. Maybe," she says noncommittally.
Hope she gets some.
In Beebe Station the Comm cubby was a pipe-infested closet, barely
big enough for two. Atlantis's nerve center is palatial, a twilit
grotto bejeweled by readouts and tangled luminous topographies.
Tactical maps rotate miraculously in midair or glow from screens
painted on the bulkheads. The miracle is not so much the technology
that renders these extravagances: the miracle is that Atlantis
contains such an obscene surplus of empty space, to be wasted on
nothing more than moving light. A cabin would have done as well. A
few couches with workpads and tactical contacts could have contained
infinite intelligence, bounded in a nutshell. But no. A whole ocean
stands on their heads, and these corpses squander volume as if
sea-level was two steps down the hall.
Even in exile, they just don't get it.
Right now the cavern's fairly empty. Lubin and a few techs cluster
at a nearby panel, cleaning up the latest downloads. The place will
be full by the time they finish. Corpses gravitate to news of the
world like flies to shit.
For now, though, it's just Lubin's crowd and Patricia Rowan, over on
the far side of the compartment. Cryptic information streams across
her contacts, turns her eyes into bright points of mercury. Light
from a holo display catches the silver streaking her hair; that and
the eyes give her the aspect of some subtle hologram in her own
right.
Clarke approaches her. "Airlock Four's blocked off."
"They're scrubbing it down. Everything between there and the
infirmary. Jerry's orders."
"What for?"
"You know perfectly well. You saw Erickson."
"Oh, come on. One lousy fish bite and Jerry thinks—"
"She's not sure of anything yet. She's just being careful."
A pause, then: "You should have warned us, Lenie."
"Warned you?"
"That Erickson might be vectoring ßehemoth.
You left all of us exposed. If there was even a chance…"
But there's not, Clarke wants to rail. There's not. You
chose this place because ßehemoth
could never get here, not in a thousand years. I saw the maps, I
traced out the currents with my own fingers. It's not ßehemoth.
It's not.
It can't be.
Instead she says, "It's a big ocean, Pat. Lots of nasty
predators with big pointy teeth. They didn't all get that way
because of ßehemoth."
"This far down, they did. You know the energetics as well as I
do. You were at Channer, Lenie. You knew what to look for."
Clarke jerks her thumb towards Lubin. "Ken was at Channer too,
remember? You shitting on him like this?"
"Ken didn't deliberately spread that damn bug across a whole
continent to pay back the world for his unhappy childhood." The
silver eyes fix Clarke in a hard stare. "Ken was on our
side."
Clarke doesn't speak for a moment. Finally, very slowly: "Are
you saying I deliberately—"
"I'm not accusing you of anything. But it looks bad. Jerry's
livid about this, and she won't be the only one. You're the Meltdown
Madonna, for God's sake! You were willing to write off the whole
world to get your revenge on us."
"If I wanted you dead," Clarke says evenly—If I
still wanted you dead, some inner editor amends—
"You would be. Years ago. All I had to do was stand aside."
"Of course that's—"
Clarke cuts her off: "I protected you. When the others
were arguing about whether to punch holes in the hull or just cut
your power and let you suffocate—I was the one who held
them back. You're alive because of me."
The corpse shakes her head. "Lenie, that doesn't matter."
"It damn well should."
"Why? We were only trying to save the world, remember? It
wasn't our fault we failed, it was yours. And after we
failed, we settled for saving our families, and you wouldn't even
give us that. You hunted us down even at the bottom of the ocean.
Who knows why you held back at the last minute?"
"You know," Clarke says softly.
Rowan nods. "I know. But most of the people down here
don't expect rationality from you. Maybe you've just been toying
with us all these years. There's no telling when you'll pull the
trigger."
Clarke shakes her head dismissively. "What's that, the Gospel
According to the Executive Club?"
"Call it what you want. It's what you have to deal with. It's
what I have to deal with."
"We fish-heads have a few stories of our own, you know,"
Clarke says. "How you corpses programmed people like machinery
so you could top up some bottom line. How you sent us into the
world's worst shit-holes to do your dirty work, and when we ran into
ßehemoth the first thing you
did was try to kill us to save your own hides."
Suddenly the ventilators seem unnaturally loud. Clarke turns; Lubin
and the corpses stare back from across the cave.
She looks away again, flustered.
Rowan smiles grimly. "See how easily it all comes back?"
Her eyes glitter, target-locked. Clarke returns her gaze without
speaking.
After a moment, Rowan relaxes a bit. "We're rival tribes,
Lenie. We're each other's outgroup—but you know what's
amazing? Somehow, in the past couple of years, we've started to
forget all that. We live and let live, for the most part. We
cooperate, and nobody even thinks it worthy of comment."
She glances significantly across the room to Lubin and the techs. "I
think that's a good thing, don't you?"
"So why should it change now?" Clarke asks.
"Because ßehemoth may
have caught up with us at last, and people will say you let it in."
"That's horseshit."
"I agree, for what it's worth."
"And even if it was true, who cares?" Everyone's
part mermaid down here, even the corpses. All retrofitted with the
same deep-sea fish-genes, coding for the same stiff little proteins
that ßehemoth can't get its
teeth into.
"There's a concern that the retrofits may not be effective,"
Rowan admits softly.
"Why? It was your own people designed the fucking things!"
Rowan raises an eyebrow. "Those would be the same experts who
assured us that ßehemoth
would never make it to the deep Atlantic."
"But I was rotten with ßehemoth.
If the retrofits didn't work—"
"Lenie, these people have never been exposed. They've only got
some expert's word that they're immune, and in case you haven't
noticed our experts have proven distressingly fallible of late. If
we were really so confident in our own countermeasures, why would we
even be hiding down here? Why wouldn't we be back on shore with our
stockholders, with our people, trying to hold back the tide?"
Clarke sees it at last.
"Because they'd tear you apart," she whispers.
Rowan shakes her head. "It's because scientists have been wrong
before, and we can't trust their assurances. It's because we're not
willing to take chances with the health of our families. It's
because we may still be vulnerable to ßehemoth,
and if we'd stayed behind it would have killed us along with everyone
else and we'd have done no good at all. Not because our own people
would turn on us. We'll never believe that." Her eyes don't
waver. "We're like everyone else, you see. We were all doing
the very best we could, and things just—got out of control.
It's important to believe that. So we all do."
"Not all," Clarke acknowledges softly.
"Still."
"Fuck 'em. Why should I prop up their self-serving delusions?"
"Because when you force the truth down people's throats, they
bite back."
Clarke smiles faintly. "Let them try. I think you're
forgetting who's in charge here, Pat."
"I'm not worried for your sake, I'm worried for ours. You
people tend to overreaction." When Clarke doesn't deny it,
Rowan continues: "It's taken five years to build some
kind of armistice down here. ßehemoth
could kick it into a thousand pieces overnight."
"So what do you suggest?"
"I think rifters should stay out of Atlantis for the time being.
We can sell it as a quarantine. ßehemoth
may or may not be out there, but at least we can keep it from getting
in here."
Clarke shakes her head. "My tribe won't give a shit
about that."
"You and Ken are the only ones who come in here anyway, for the
most part," Rowan points out. "And the others…they
won't go against anything you put your stamp of approval on."
"I'll think about it," Clarke sighs. "No promises."
She turns to go.
And turns back. "Alyx up?"
"Not for another couple of hours. I know she wanted to see you,
though."
"Oh." Clarke suppresses a twinge of disappointment.
"I'll give her your regrets." Rowan says.
"Yeah. Do that."
No shortage of those.
Huddle
Rowan's daughter sits on the edge of her bed, aglow with sunny
radiance from the lightstrip on the ceiling. She's barefoot, clad in
panties and a baggy t-shirt on which animated hatchet-fish swim
endless circuits around her midriff. She breathes a recycled mixture
of nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases, distinguishable from real air
only by its extreme purity.
The rifter floats in darkness, her contours limned by feeble light
leaking through the viewport. She wears a second skin that almost
qualifies as a lifeform in its own right, a miracle of thermo- and
osmoregulation, black as an oil slick. She does not breathe.
A wall separates the two women, keeps ocean from air, adult from
adolescent. They speak through a device fixed to the inside of the
teardrop viewport, a fist-sized limpet that turns the fullerene
perspex into an acoustic transceiver.
"You said you'd come by," Alyx Rowan says. Passage across
the bulkhead leaves her voice a bit tinny. "I made it up to
fifth level, I was like holy shit, look at all the bonus points! I
wanted to show you around. Scammed an extra headset and everything."
"Sorry," Clarke buzzes back. "I was in before, but
you were asleep."
"So come in now."
"Can't. I've only got a minute or two. Something's come up."
"Like what?"
"Someone got injured, something bit him or something, and now
the meat-cutters are going off the deep end about possible
infection."
"What infection?" Alyx asks.
"It's probably nothing. But they're talking about a quarantine
just to be on the safe side. For all I know, they wouldn't let me
back inside anyway."
"It'd let 'em play at being in control of something, I guess."
Alyx grins; the parabolic viewport bends her face into a clownish
distortion. "They really, really hate not being the ones in
charge, you know?" And then, with a satisfaction obviously
borne less of corpses than of adults in general: "It's about
time they learned how that felt."
"I'm sorry," Clarke says suddenly.
"They'll get over it."
"That's not what I…" The rifter shakes her head.
"It's just—you're fourteen, for God's sake. You
shouldn’t be down—I mean, you should be out lekking with
some r-selector—"
Alyx snorts. "Boys? I don't think so."
"Girls then. Either way, you should be out getting laid, not
stuck down here."
"This is the best place I could possibly be," Alyx says
simply.
She looks out across three hundred atmospheres, a teenaged girl
trapped for the rest of her life in a cage on the bottom of a frigid
black ocean. Lenie Clarke would give anything to be able to disagree
with her.
"Mom won't talk about it," Alyx says after a while.
Still Clarke says nothing.
"What happened between you guys, back when I was just a kid.
Some of the others shoot their mouths off when she's not around, so I
kind of hear things. But Mom never says anything."
Mom is kinder than she should be.
"You were enemies, weren't you?"
Clarke shakes her head—a pointless and unseeable gesture, here
in the dark. "Alyx, we didn't even know each other existed, not
until the very end. Your mom was only trying to stop—"
—what happened anyway…
—what I was trying to start…
There's so much more than speech. She wants to sigh. She wants to
scream. All denied out here, her lung and guts squeezed flat, every
other cavity flooded and incompressible. There's nothing she can do
but speak in this monotone travesty of a voice, this buzzing insect
voice.
"It's complicated," her vocoder says, flat and
dispassionate. "It was so much more than just enemies,
you know? There were other things involved, there was all that
wildlife in the wires, doing its own thing—"
"They let that out," Alyx insists. "They
started it. Not you." By which she means, of course, adults.
Perpetrators and betrayers and
the-ones-who-fucked-everything-up-for-the-next-generation. And it
dawns on Clarke that Alyx is not including her in that
loathsome conspiracy of elders—that Lenie Clarke, Meltdown
Madonna, has somehow acquired the status of honorary innocent in the
mind of this child.
She feels ill at the thought of so much undeserved absolution. It
seems obscene. But she doesn't have the courage to set her friend
straight. All she can manage is a pale, half-assed disclaimer:
"They didn't mean to, kid." She goes for a sad chuckle.
It comes out sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together.
"Nobody—nobody did anything on their own, back
then. It was strings all the way up."
The ocean groans around her.
The sound resonates somewhere between the call of a humpback whale
and the death-cry of some mammoth hull, buckling under pressure. It
fills the ocean; some of it leaks through Alyx's limpet-device. She
screws her face up in distaste. "I hate that sound."
Clarke shrugs, pathetically grateful for the interruption. "Hey,
you corpses have your conferences, we have ours."
"It's not that. It's those haploid chimes. I'm telling
you Lenie, that guy's scary. You can't trust anyone who makes
something that sounds like that."
"Your mom trusts him fine. So do I. I’ve got to go."
"He kills people, Lenie. And I'm not just talking about my Dad.
He's killed a lot of people." A soft snort. "Something
else Mom never talks about."
Clarke coasts over to the perspex, lays one silhouetted hand against
the light in farewell.
"He's an amateur," she says, and fins away into the
darkness.
The voice cries out from a ragged mouth in the seabed, an ancient
chimney of basalt stuffed with machinery. In its youth it spewed
constant scalding gouts of water and minerals; now it merely belches
occasionally. Soft exhalations stir the mechanisms in its throat,
spinning blades and fluting pipes and spliced chunks of rock and
metal that bang together. Its voice is compelling but unreliable;
after Lubin built these chimes, he had to come up with a way to
kick-start them manually. So he scavenged the reservoir from a
decommissioned desalinator, added a heat pump from some part of
Atlantis that never survived the Corpse Revolt. Open a valve and hot
seawater flows through a tracheotomy hole blasted into the smoker's
throat: Lubin's machinery screams aloud, tortured by the scalding
current.
The summons grinds out, rusty and disharmonious. It washes over
rifters swimming and conversing and sleeping in an ocean black as
heat death. It resonates through makeshift habs scattered across the
slope, dismal bubbles of metal and atmosphere so dimly-lit that even
eyecaps see only in black-and-gray. It slaps against the shiny
bright biosteel of Atlantis and nine hundred prisoners speak a little
louder, or turn up the volume, or hum nervously to themselves in
denial.
Some of the rifters—those awake, and in range, and still
human—gather at the chimes. The scene is almost Shakespearean:
a circle of levitating witches on some blasted midnight heath, eyes
burning with cold phosphorescence, bodies barely distinguished from
shadow. They are not so much lit as inferred by the faint
blue embers glowing from the machinery in the seabed.
All of them bent, not broken. All of them half-balanced in that gray
zone between adaptation and dysfunction, stress thresholds pushed so
high by years of abuse that chronic danger is mere ambience now,
unworthy of comment. They were chosen to function in such
environments; their creators never expected them to thrive
here. But here they are, here are their badges of office: Jelaine
Chen with her pink, nailless fingers, salamandered back in the wake
of childhood amputations. Dimitri Alexander, communal priest-bait in
those last infamous days before the Pope fled into exile. Kevin
Walsh, who freaks inexplicably at the sight of running shoes. Any
number of garden-variety skitterers who can’t abide physical
contract; immolation junkies; self-mutilators and glass-eaters. All
wounds and deformities safely disguised by the diveskins, all
pathology hidden behind a uniformity of shadowy ciphers.
They, too, owe their voices to imperfect machinery.
Clarke calls the meeting to order with a question: "Is Julia
here?"
"She's looking on Gene," Nolan buzzes overhead. "I'll
fill her in."
"How's he doing?"
"Stable. Still unconscious. Been too long, if you ask me."
"Getting dragged twenty klicks with your guts hanging out, it's
pretty much a miracle that he's even alive," Yeager chimes in.
"Yeah," Nolan says, "or maybe Seger's deliberately
keeping him under. Julia says—"
Clarke breaks in: "Don't we have a tap on the telemetry from
that line?"
"Not any more."
"What's Gene still doing in corpseland anyway?" Chen
wonders. "He hates it in there. We've got our own med hab."
"He's quarantined," Nolan says. "Seger's thinking
ßehemoth."
Shadows shift at this news. Obviously not all the assembled are
fully up to speed.
"Shit." Charley Garcia fades into half-view. "How's
that even possible? I thought—"
"Nothing's certain yet," Clarke buzzes.
"Certain?" A silhouette glides across the circle, briefly
eclipsing the sapphire embers on the seabed. Clarke recognizes Dale
Creasy. This is first time she's seen him for days; she was starting
to think he'd gone native.
"Fuck, there's even a chance," he continues. "I
mean, ßehemoth—"
She decides to nip it in the bud. "So what if it's ßehemoth?"
A school of pale eyes turn in her direction.
"We're immune, remember?" she reminds them. "Anybody
down here not get the treatments?"
Lubin's windchimes groan softly. Nobody else speaks.
"So why should we care?" Clarke asks.
It's supposed to be rhetorical. Garcia answers anyway: "Because
the treatments only stop ßehemoth
from turning our guts to mush. They don't stop it from turning
little harmless fish into big nasty motherfucking fish that tear into
anything that moves."
"Gene was attacked twenty klicks away."
"Lenie, we're moving there. It's gonna be right in our
back yard."
"Forget there. Who's to say it hasn't reached here
already?" Alexander wonders.
"Nobody's been nailed around here," Creasy says.
"We've lost some natives."
Creasy waves an arm in a barely-visible gesture of dismissal.
"Natives. Don't mean shit."
"Maybe we should stop sleeping outside, for a while at least…"
"Crap to that. I can't sleep in a stinking hab."
"Fine. Get yourself eaten."
"Lenie?" Chen again. "You've messed with sea
monsters before."
"I never saw what got Gene," Clarke says, "but the
fish back at Channer, they were—flimsy. Big and mean, but
sometimes their teeth would break on you when they bit. Missing some
kind of trace nutrient, I think. You could tear them apart with your
bare hands."
"This thing pretty much tore Gene apart," says a
voice Clarke can't pin down.
"I said sometimes," she emphasizes. "But
yeah—they could be dangerous."
"Dangerous, felch." Creasy growls in metal. "Could
they have pulled that number on Gene?"
"Yes," says Ken Lubin.
He takes center stage. A cone of light flares from his forehead to
his forearm. He holds his hand out like a beggar's, its fingers
curled slightly around something laying across the palm.
"Holy shit," buzzes Creasy, suddenly subdued.
"Where'd that come from?" Chen asks.
"Seger pulled it out of Erickson before she glued him up,"
Lubin says.
"Doesn't look especially flimsy to me."
"It is, rather," Lubin remarks. "This is the part
that broke off, in fact. Between the ribs."
"What, you mean that's just the tip?" Garcia says.
"Looks like a fucking stiletto," Nolan buzzes softly.
Chen's mask swings between Clarke and Lubin. "When you were at
Channer. You slept outside with these mothers?"
"Sometimes," Clarke shrugs. "Assuming this is the
same thing, which I—"
"And they didn't try to eat you?"
"They keyed on the light. As long as you kept your lamps off,
they pretty much left you alone."
"Well, shit," Creasy says. "No problem, then."
Lubin's headlamp sweeps across the assembled rifters and settles on
Chen. "You were on a telemetry run when Erickson was attacked?"
Chen nods. "We never got the download, though."
"So someone needs to make another trip out there anyway. And
since Lenie and I have experience with this kind of thing..."
His beam hits Clarke full in the face. The world collapses down to a
small bright sun floating in a black void.
Clarke raises her hand against the brilliance. "Turn that
somewhere else, will you?"
Darkness returns. The rest of the world comes back into dim, dark
focus. Maybe I could just swim away, she muses as her eyecaps
readjust. Maybe no one would notice. But that's bullshit and
she knows it. Ken Lubin has just picked her out of the crowd;
there's no easy way to get out of this. And besides, he's right.
They're the only two that have been down this road before. The only
two still alive, at least.
Thanks a lot, Ken.
"Fine," she says at last.
Zombie
Twenty kilometers separate Atlantis and Impossible Lake. Not far
enough for those who still think in dryback terms. A mere twenty
klicks from the bull's-eye? What kind of safety margin is that?
Back on shore the most simpleminded drone wouldn't be fooled by such
a trifling displacement: finding the target missing, it would rise
up and partition the world into a concentric gridwork, relentlessly
checking off one quadrate after another until some inevitable
telltale gave the game away. Shit, most machinery could just sit at
the center of the search zone and see twenty kilometers in any
direction.
Even in the midwaters of the open ocean, twenty kilometers is no safe
distance. No substrate exists there but water itself, no topography
but gyres and seiches and Langmuir cells, thermoclines and haloclines
that reflect and amplify as well as mask. The cavitation of
submarines might propagate down vast distances, the miniscule
turbulence of their passing detectable long after the vessels
themselves are gone. Not even stealthed subs can avoid heating the
water some infinitesimal amount; dolphins and machinery, hot on the
trail, can tell the difference.
But on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, twenty kilometers might as well be
twenty parsecs. Light has no chance: the sun itself barely
penetrates a few hundred meters from the surface. Hydrothermal vents
throw up their corrosive vomit along oozing seams of fresh rock.
Seafloor spreading sets the very floor of the world to grumbling,
mountains pushing against each other in their millennial game of
kick-the-continents. Topography that shames the Himalayas cascades
along a jagged fracture splitting the crust from pole to pole. The
ambience of the Ridge drowns out anything Atlantis might let slip,
along any spectrum you'd care to name.
You could still find a target with the right coordinates, but you'd
miss a whole screaming city if those numbers were off by even a hair.
A displacement of twenty kilometers should be more than enough to
get out from under any attack centered on Atlantis's present
location, short of full-scale depth-saturation nukes perhaps.
Which wouldn't be entirely without precedent, now that Clarke thinks
about it...
She and Lubin cruise smoothly along a crack in a fan of ancient lava.
Atlantis is far behind, Impossible Lake still klicks ahead.
Headlamps and squidlamps are dark. They travel by the dim dashboard
light of their sonar displays. Tiny iconised boulders and pillars
pass by on the screens, mapped in emerald; the slightest sensations
of pressure and looming mass press in from the scrolling darkness to
either side.
"Rowan thinks things could get nasty," Clarke buzzes.
Lubin doesn't comment.
"She figures, if this really does turn out to be behemoth,
Atlantis is gonna turn into Cognitive Dissonance Central. Get
everybody all worked up."
Still nothing.
"I reminded her who was in charge."
"And who is that, exactly?" Lubin buzzes at last.
"Come on, Ken. We can shut them down any time we feel like it."
"They've had five years to work on that."
"And what's it got them?"
"They've also had five years to realize that they outnumber us
twenty to one, that we don't have nearly their technical expertise on
a wide range of relevant subjects, and that a group of glorified
pipe-fitters with antisocial personalities is unlikely to pose much
threat in terms of organized opposition."
"That was just as true when we wiped the floor with them the
first time."
"No."
She doesn't understand why he's doing this. It was Lubin more than
anyone who put the corpses in their place after their first—and
last—uprising. "Come on, Ken—"
His squid is suddenly very close, almost touching.
"You're not an idiot," he buzzes at her side. "It's
never a good time to act like one."
Stung, she falls silent.
His vocoder growls on in the darkness. "Back then they saw the
whole world backing us up. They knew we'd had help tracking them
down. They inferred some kind of ground-based infrastructure. At
the very least, they knew we could blow the whistle and turn them
into a great pulsing bullseye for anyone with lats and longs and a
smart torp."
A great luminous shark-fin swells on her screen, a massive stone
blade thrusting up from the seabed. Lubin disappears briefly as it
passes between them.
"But now we're on our own," he says, reappearing. "Our
groundside connections have dried up. Maybe they're dead, maybe
they've turned. Nobody knows. Can you even remember the last time
we had a changing of the guard?"
She can, just barely. Anyone qualified for the diveskin is bound to
be more comfortable down here than in dryback company at the best of
times, but a few rifters went topside at the very beginning anyway.
Back when there might have been some hope of turning the tide.
Not since. Risking your life to watch the world end isn't anyone's
idea of shore leave.
"By now we're just as scared as the corpses," Lubin buzzes.
"We're just as cut off, and there are almost a thousand of
them. We're down to fifty-eight at last count."
"We're seventy at least."
"The natives don't count. Fifty eight of us would be any use in
a fight, and only forty could last a week in full gravity if they had
to. And a number of those have...authority issues that make them
unwilling to organize."
"We've got you," Clarke says. Lubin, the professional
hunter-killer, so recently freed from any leash but his own
self-control. No glorified pipe-fitter here, she reflects.
"Then you should listen to me. And I'm starting to think we may
have to do something preemptive."
They cruise in silence for a few moments.
"They're not the enemy, Ken," she says at last. "Not
all of them. Some of them are just kids, you know, they're not
responsible…"
"That's not the point."
From some indefinable distance, the faint sound of falling rock.
"Ken," she buzzes, too softly: she wonders if he can hear
her.
"Yes."
"Are you looking forward to it?"
It's been so many years since he's had an excuse to kill someone.
And Ken Lubin once made a career out of finding excuses.
He tweaks his throttle and pulls away.
Trouble dawns like a sunrise, smearing the darkness ahead.
"Anyone else supposed to be out here?" Clarke asks. The
on-site floods are keyed to wake up when approached, but she and
Lubin aren't nearly close enough to have triggered them.
"Just us," Lubin buzzes.
The glow is coarse and unmistakable. It spreads laterally, a diffuse
false dawn hanging in the void. Two or three dark gaps betray the
presence of interposed topography.
"Stop," Lubin says. Their squids settle down beside a
tumbledown outcropping, its jumbled edges reflecting dimly in the
haze.
He studies the schematic on his dashboard. A reflected fingernail of
light traces his profile.
He turns his squid to port. "This way. Keep to the bottom."
They edge closer to the light, keeping it to starboard. The glow
expands, resolves, reveals an impossibility: a lake at the bottom of
the ocean. The light shines from beneath its surface; Clarke thinks
of a swimming pool at night, lit by submerged spotlights in the
walls. Slow extravagant waves, top-heavy things from some
low-gravity planet, break into shuddering globules against the near
shore. The lake extends beyond the hazy limits of rifter vision.
It always hits her like a hallucination, although she knows the
pedestrian truth: it's just a salt seep, a layer of mineralized
water so dense it lies on the bottom of the ocean the way an ocean
lies at the bottom of the sky. It's a major selling point to anyone
in search of camouflage. The halocline reflects all manner of pings
and probes, hides everything beneath as though there were nothing
here but soft, deep mud.
A soft, brief scream of electronics. For the merest instant Clarke
thinks she sees a drop of luminous blood on her dashboard. She
focuses. Nothing.
"Did you—?"
"Yes." Lubin's playing with his controls. "This
way." He steers closer to the shores of Impossible Lake.
Clarke follows.
The next time it's unmistakable: a brilliant pinpoint of red light,
laser-bright, flickering on and off within the jagged topography of
the dashboard display. The squids cry out with each flash.
A deadman alarm. Somewhere ahead, a rifter's heart has stopped.
They're cruising out over the lake now, just offshore. Roiling
greenish light suffuses Lubin and his mount from below. A
hypersaline globule shatters in slow motion against the squid's
underside. Light rising through the interface bends in odd ways.
It's like looking down through the radium-lit depths of a nuclear
waste-storage lagoon. A grid of bright pinpoint suns shine far below
that surface, where the surveyors have planted their lamps. The
solid substrate beneath is hidden by distance and diffraction.
The deadman alarm has stabilized to a confidence bubble about forty
meters straight ahead. Its ruby icon beats like a heart on the
screen. The squids bleat in synch.
"There," Clarke says. The horizon's absurdly inverted
here, darkness overhead, milky light beneath. A dark spot hangs at
the distant, fuzzy interface between. It appears to be floating on
the surface of the lens.
Clarke nudges her throttle up a bit.
"Wait," Lubin buzzes. She looks back over her shoulder.
"The waves," Lubin says.
They're smaller here than they were back near the shore, which makes
sense since there's no rising substrate to push the peaks above
baseline. They're rippling past in irregular spasms, though, not the
usual clockwork procession, and now that she traces them back they
seem to be radiating out from…
Shit…
She's close enough to see limbs now, attenuate sticklike things
slapping the surface of the lake into a local frenzy. Almost as
though the rifter ahead is a poor swimmer, in over his head and
panicking…
"He's alive," she buzzes. The deadman icon pulses,
contradicting her.
"No," Lubin says.
Only fifteen meters away now, the enigma erupts writhing from the
surface of the Lake in a nimbus of shredded flesh. Too late, Clarke
spots the larger, darker shape thrashing beneath it. Too late, she
resolves the mystery: meal, interrupted. The thing that was eating
it heads straight for her.
It can't b—
She twists, not quite fast enough. The monster's mouth takes the
squid with room to spare. Half a dozen finger-sized teeth splinter
against the machine like brittle ceramic. The squid torques in her
hands; some sharp-edged metal protuberance smashes into her leg with
a thousand kilograms of predatory momentum behind it. Something
snaps below the knee. Pain rips through her calf.
It's been six years. She's forgotten the moves.
Lubin hasn't. She can hear his squid bearing in, cranked to full
throttle. She curls into a ball, grabs the gas billy off her calf in
a belated countermeasure. She hears a meaty thud; hydraulics cough.
In the next instant a great scaly mass staggers against her, batting
her down through the boiling interface.
Heavy water glows on all sides. The world is fuzzy and whirling.
She shakes her head to lock it into focus. The action wavers and
bulges overhead, writhing through the shattered refractory surface of
Impossible Lake. Lubin must have rammed the monster with his squid.
Damage may have been inflicted on both sides—now the squid's
corkscrewing down into the lens, riderless and uncontrolled. Lubin
hangs in the water facing an opponent twice his size, half of it
mouth. If there are eyes, Clarke can't make them out through this
wobbling discontinuity.
She's slowly falling up, she realizes. She scissor-kicks without
thinking; her leg screams as something tears it from the inside. She
screams too, a ratcheting torn-metal sound. Floaters swarm across
her eyes in the wake of the cresting pain. She rises from the lake
just as the monster opens its mouth and—
—holy shit—
—disconnects its jaw, right at the base, the mouth
dropping open way too fast and suddenly it's closed again and Lubin's
just gone, nothing to suggest where he went except the memory
of blurred motion between one instant and the next.
She does perhaps the most stupid thing she's ever done in her life.
She charges.
The leviathan turns to face her, more ponderously now, but still with
all the time in the world. She kicks with one leg, drags the other
like a useless throbbing anchor. The monster's serrated mouth
grimaces, a mangled profusion of teeth, way too many still intact.
She tries to duck past, to come up under the belly or at least the
side but it just wallows there, turning effortlessly to face every
clumsy approach.
And then, through the top of its head, it belches.
The bubbles do not arise from any natural openings. They erupt
through the flesh itself, tearing their own way, splitting the soft
skull from within. For a second or two the monster hangs motionless;
then it shivers, an electric spasm that seizes the whole body.
One-legged, Clarke gets underneath and stabs its belly. She can feel
more bubbles erupt inside as the billy discharges, a seismic eruption
of flesh.
The monster convulses, dying. Its jaw drops open like some ludicrous
flapping drawbridge. The water seethes with regurgitated flesh.
A few meters away, the grinning shredded remains of something in a
diveskin settle gently onto the surface of Impossible Lake, within a
lumpy cloud of its own entrails.
"You okay?"
Lubin's at her side. She shakes her head, more in amazement than
reply. "My leg…" Now, in the aftermath, it hurts
even more.
He probes her injury. She yelps; the vocoder turns it into a
mechanical bark. "Your fibula's broken," Lubin reports.
"Diveskin didn't tear, at least."
"The squid got me." She feels a deep burning chill along
her leg. She tries to ignore it, gestures at the billy on Lubin's
calf. "How many shots did you pump into that fucker?"
"Three."
"You were just—gone. It just sucked you right in.
You're lucky it didn't bite you in half."
"Slurp-gun feeding doesn't work if you stop to chew. Interrupts
the suction." Lubin pans around. "Wait here."
Like I'm going to go anywhere with this leg. She can already
feel it stiffening. She profoundly hopes the squids are still
working.
Lubin fins easily over to the corpse. Its diveskin is torn in a
dozen places. Tubes and metal gleam intermittently from the opened
thorax. A pair of hagfish squirm sluggishly from the remains.
"Lopez," he buzzes, reading her shoulder patch.
Irene Lopez went native six months ago. It's been weeks since
anyone's even seen her at the feeding stations.
"Well," Lubin says. "This answers one question, at
least."
"Not necessarily."
The monster, still twitching, has settled on the surface of the lake
a little ways from Lopez. It wallows only slightly deeper; you'd
have to be some kind of rock to sink in brine this dense. Lubin
abandons the corpse in favor of the carcass. Clarke joins him.
"This isn't the same thing that got Gene," he buzzes.
"Different teeth. Gigantism in at least two different species
of bony fish, within two kilometers of a hydrothermal vent." He
reaches into the gaping maw, snaps off a tooth. "Osteoporosis,
probably other deficiency diseases as well."
"Maybe you could save the lecture until you straighten that out
for me?" She points to where her squid, listing drunkenly,
describes small erratic circles in the overhead darkness. "I
don't think I'm gonna be swimming home with this leg."
He coasts up and wrests the vehicle back under control. "We
have to bring it back," he says, riding it down to her. "All
of it," with a nod to Lopez's gutted remains.
"It's not necessarily what you think," she tells him.
He turns and jackknifes into Impossible Lake, on the trail of his own
squid. Clarke watches his rippling image kicking hard, fighting
against buoyancy.
"It's not ßehemoth,"
she buzzes softly. "It'd never survive the trip." Her
voice is as calm as such mechanical caricatures can be out here. Her
words sound reasonable. Her thoughts are neither. Her thoughts are
caught in a loop, a mantra borne of some forlorn subconscious hope
that endless repetition might give substance to wishes:
It can't be it can't be it can't be…
Here on the sunless slopes of the Mid Atlantic Ridge, facing
consequences that have somehow chased her to the very bottom of the
world, denial seems the only available option.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Boy
Achilles Desjardins wasn't always the most powerful man in North
America; at one time he'd been just another kid growing up in the
shadow of Mont St-Hilaire. He had always been an empiricist
though, an experimenter at heart for as long as he could remember.
His first encounter with a research-ethics committee had occurred
when he was only eight.
That particular experiment had involved aerobraking. His parents, in
a well-intentioned effort to interest him in the classics, had
introduced him to The Revenge of Mary Poppins. The story
itself was pretty stupid, but Achilles liked the way the Persinger
Box had slipped the butterfly-inducing sensation of flight
directly into his brain. Mary Poppins had this nanotech umbrella,
see, and she could jump right off the top of the CN Tower and float
to earth as gently as a dandelion seed.
The illusion was so convincing that Achilles' eight-year-old brain
couldn't see why it wouldn't work in real life.
His family was rich—all Quebecois families were, thanks to
Hudson Hydro—so Achilles lived in a real house, a single
stand-alone dwelling with a yard and everything. He grabbed an
umbrella from the closet, let it bloom, and—clutching tightly
with both hands—jumped off the front porch. The drop was only
a meter and a half, but that was enough; he could feel the umbrella
grabbing at the air above him, slowing his descent.
Buoyed by this success, Achilles moved on to Phase Two. His sister
Penny, two years younger, held him in almost supernatural esteem; it
was dead easy to talk her into scrambling up the trellis and onto the
roof. It took a bit more effort to coax her to the very peak of the
gable, which must have been a good seven meters above ground—but
when your big-brother-who-you-idolize is calling you a chickenshit,
what are you supposed to do? Penny inched her way to the apex and
stood teetering at the edge, the dome of the umbrella framing her
face like a big black halo. For a moment Achilles thought the
experiment would fail: he had to bring out his ultimate weapon and
call her "Penelope"—twice—before she
jumped.
There was nothing to worry about, of course. Achilles already knew
it would work; the umbrella had slowed him after all, even
during a drop of a measly meter or so, and Penny weighed a lot
less than he did.
Which made it all the more surprising when the umbrella snapped
inside-out, whap!, right before his eyes. Penny dropped like
a rock, landed on her feet with a snap and crumpled on the
spot.
In the moment of complete silence that followed, several things went
through the mind of eight-year-old Achilles Desjardins. First was
the fact that the goggle-eyed look on Penny's face had been really
funny just before she hit. Second was confusion and disbelief
that the experiment hadn't proceeded as expected; he couldn't for the
life of him figure out what had gone wrong. Third came the belated
realization that Penny, for all the hilarity of her facial
expression, might actually be hurt; maybe he should try and do
something about that.
Lastly, he thought of the trouble he was going to be in if his
parents found out about this. That thought crushed the others like
bugs under a boot.
He rushed over to the crumpled form of his sister on the lawn.
"Geez, Penny, are you—are you—"
She wasn't. The umbrella's ribs had torn free of the fabric and
slashed her across the side of the neck. One of her ankles was
twisted at an impossible angle, and had already swollen to twice its
normal size. There was blood everywhere.
Penny looked up, lip trembling, bright tears quivering in her eyes.
They broke and ran down her cheeks as Achilles stood over her, scared
to death.
"Penny—" he whispered.
"I—it's okay," she quavered. "I won't tell
anyone. I promise." And—broken and bleeding and
teary-eyed, eyes brimming with undiminished adoration for Big
Brother—she tried to get up, and screamed the instant she moved
her leg.
Looking back as an adult, Desjardins knew that that couldn't have
been the moment of his first erection. It was, however, the first
one that stuck in his mind. He hadn't been able to help himself:
she had been so helpless. Broken and bleeding and hurt. He
had hurt her. She had meekly walked the plank for him, and after
she'd fallen and snapped like a twig she'd looked up at him, still
worshipful, ready to do whatever it took to keep him happy.
He didn't know why that made him feel this way—he didn't even
know what this way was, exactly—but he liked it.
His willy hard as a bone, he reached out to her. He wasn't sure
why—he was grateful that she wasn't going to tell, of course,
but he didn't think that's what this was about. He thought—as
his hand touched his sister's fine brown hair—that maybe this
was about seeing how much he could get away with...
Not much, as it turned out. His parents were on him in the next
second, shrieking and striking. Achilles raised his hands against
his father's blows, cried "I saw it on Mary Poppins!",
but the alibi didn't fly any more than Penny had; Dad kicked the
shit out of him and threw him into his room for the rest of the day.
It couldn't have ended any differently, of course. Mom and Dad
always found out. It turned out the little bump that both Achilles
and Penny had under their collarbones sent out a signal when either
of them got hurt. And after the Mary Poppins Incident, not even the
implants were enough for Mom and Dad. Achilles couldn't go anywhere,
not even the bathroom, without three or four skeeters following him
around like nosy floating rice grains.
All in all, that afternoon taught him two things that shaped the rest
of his life. One was that he was a wicked, wicked boy who could
never ever give in to his impulses no matter how good
it made him feel, or he would go straight to Hell.
The other was a profound and lifelong appreciation of the impact of
ubiquitous surveillance.
Confidence
Limits
There are no rifter MDs. The walking wounded don't generally excel
in the art of healing.
Of course, there's never been any shortage of rifters in need
of healing. Especially after the Corpse Revolt. The fish-heads won
that war hands down, but they took casualties just the same. Some
died. Others 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' meatcutters practice their art by remote control;
explosive charges planted on Atlantis's hull inspired those same
meatcutters 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 medhab 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.
"How much longer?" she asks. The teleop ignores her
without dropping a stitch.
"I don't think there's anyone there," Lubin says. "It's
on autopilot."
She turns her head to look at him. Eyes dark enough to be called
black look back at her. Clarke catches her breath; she keeps
forgetting what naked really means, down here. What is it the
drybacks say? The eyes are the windows to the soul. But the
windows into rifter souls are supposed to have frosted panes.
Uncapped eyes are for corpses: this doesn't look right, it doesn't
feel right. It looks as though Lubin's eyes have been pulled
right out of his head, as though Clarke is looking into the wet
sticky darkness inside his skull.
He rises on the table, oblivious to his own gory blindness, and
swings his legs over the edge. His teleop withdraws to the ceiling
with a few disapproving clicks.
A comm panel decorates the bulkhead within easy reach. He taps it.
"Ambient channel. Grace. How are you coming with those
'skins?"
Nolan answers in her outdoor voice: "We're ten meters off your
shoulder. And yes, we remembered to bring extra eyecaps." A
soft buzz—acoustic modems are bad for background noise
sometimes. "If it's okay with you, though, we'll just leave 'em
in the 'lock and be on our way."
"Sure." Lubin's face is expressionless. "No
problem."
Clanks and hisses from down on the wet deck.
"There you go, sweetie," Nolan buzzes.
Lubin drills Clarke with those eviscerated eyes. "You coming?"
Clarke blinks. "Any place in particular?"
"Atlantis."
"My leg—" but her teleop is folding up against the
ceiling as she speaks, its slicing and dicing evidently completed.
She struggles to prop her upper body up on its elbows; she's still
dead meat below the gut, although the hole in her thigh has been
neatly glued shut. "I'm still frozen. Shouldn't the field—"
"Perhaps they were hoping we wouldn't notice." Lubin takes
a handpad off the wall. "Ready?"
She nods. He taps a control. Feeling floods her legs like a tidal
bore. Her repaired thigh awakens, a sudden tingling swarm of pins
and needles. She tries to move it. She succeeds, with difficulty.
She sits up, grimacing.
"What're you doing out there?" the intercom demands. After
a moment, Clarke recognizes the voice: Klein. Shutting down the
field seems to have caught his attention.
Lubin disappears into the wet room. Clarke kneads her thigh. The
pins and needles persist.
"Lenie?" Klein says. "What—"
"I'm fixed."
"No you're not."
"The teleop—"
"You have to stay off that leg for at least six more hours.
Preferably twelve."
"Thanks. I'll take it under advisement." She swings her
legs over the edge of the table, puts some weight on the good one,
gradually shifts weight to the other. It buckles. She grabs the
table in time to keep from keeling over.
Lubin steps back into view, a carrysack slung over his shoulder.
"You okay?" His eyes are capped again, white as fresh ice.
Clarke nods, strangely relieved. "Hand me that diveskin."
Klein heard that. "Wait a second—you two have not
been cleared for—I mean—"
The eyes go in first. The tunic slithers eagerly around her torso.
Sleeves and gauntlets cling like welcome shadows. She leans against
Lubin for support while she dons the leggings—the tingling in
her thigh is beginning to subside, and when she tries out the leg
again it takes her weight for a good ten seconds before giving out.
Progress.
"Lenie. Ken. Where are you going?"
Seger's voice, this time. Klein's called for reinforcements.
"We thought we'd come for a visit," Lubin says.
"Are you sure you've thought that through?" Seger says
calmly. "With all due respect—"
"Is there some reason we shouldn't?" Lubin asks innocently.
"Lenie's l—"
"Beyond Lenie's leg."
Dead air in the room.
"You've analyzed the samples by now," Lubin remarks.
"Not comprehensively. The tests are fast, not instantaneous."
"And? Anything?"
"If you were infected, Mr. Lubin, it only happened a few
hours ago. That's hardly enough time for an infection to reach
detectable levels in the bloodstream."
"That's a no, then." Lubin considers. "What about
our 'skins? Surely you would have found something on the diveskin
swabs."
Seger doesn't answer.
"So they protected us," Lubin surmises. "This time."
"As I said, we haven't finished—"
"I understood that ßehemoth
couldn't reach us down here," he remarks.
Seger doesn't answer that either, at first.
"So did I," she says finally.
Clarke takes a half-hop towards the airlock. Lubin offers an arm.
"We're coming over," he says.
Half a dozen modelers cluster around workstations at the far end of
the Comm Cave, running sims, tweaking parameters in the hopes that
their virtual world might assume some relevance to the real one.
Patricia Rowan leans over their shoulders, studying something at one
board; Jerenice Seger labors alone at another. She turns and catches
sight of the approaching rifters, raises her voice just slightly in
an alarm call disguised as a greeting: "Ken. Lenie."
The others turn. A couple of the less-experienced back away a step
or two.
Rowan recovers first, her quicksilver eyes unreadable: "You
should spare that leg, Lenie. Here." She grabs an unused chair
from a nearby station and rolls it over. Clarke sinks gratefully
into it.
Nobody makes a fuss. The assembled corpses know how to follow a
lead, even though some of them don't seem too happy about it.
"Jerry says you've dodged the bullet," Rowan continues.
"As far as we know," Seger adds. "For now."
"Which implies a bullet to dodge," Lubin says.
Seger looks at Rowan. Rowan looks at Lubin. The number crunchers
don't look anywhere in particular.
Finally, Seger shrugs. "D-cysteine and d-cystine, positive.
Pyranosal RNA, positive. No phospholipids, no DNA. Intracellular
ATP off the scale. Not to mention you can do an SEM of the infected
cells and just see the little fellows floating around in
there." She takes a deep breath. "If it's not ßehemoth,
it's ßehemoth's evil twin
brother."
"Shit," says one of the modelers. "Not again."
It takes Clarke a moment to realize that he's not reacting to Seger's
words, but to something on the workstation screen. She leans
forward, catches sight of the display through the copse of personnel:
a volumetric model of the Atlantic basin. Luminous contrails wind
through its depths like many-headed snakes, bifurcating and
converging over continental shelves and mountain ranges. Currents and
gyres and deep-water circulation iconised in shades of green and red:
the ocean's own rivers. And superimposed over the entire display, a
churlish summary:
Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable.
"Bring down the Labrador Current a bit more," one of the
modelers suggests.
"Any more and it'll shut down completely," another one
says.
"So how do you know that isn't exactly what happened?"
"When the Gulf Stream—"
"Just try it, will you?"
The Atlantic clears and resets.
Rowan turns from her troops and fixes Seger. "Suppose they
can't figure it out?"
"Maybe it was down here all along. Maybe we just missed it."
Seger shakes her head, as if skeptical of her own suggestion. "We
were in something of a hurry."
"Not that much hurry. We checked every vent within a thousand
kilometers before we settled on this site, did we not?"
"Somebody did," Seger says tiredly.
"I saw the results. They were comprehensive." Rowan seems
almost less disturbed by ßehemoth's
appearance than by the thought that the surveys might have been off.
"And certainly none of the surveys since have shown anything…"
She breaks off, struck by some sudden thought. "They haven't,
have they? Lenie?"
"No," Clarke says. "Nothing."
"Right. So, five years ago this whole area was clean. The
whole abyssal Atlantic was clean, as far as we know. And how long
can ßehemoth survive in cold
seawater before it shrivels up like a prune and dies?"
"A week or two," Seger recites. "A month max."
"And how long would it take to get here via deep circulation?"
"Decades. Centuries." Seger sighs. "We know all
this, Pat. Obviously, something's changed."
"Thanks for that insight, Jerry. What might that something be?"
"Christ, what do you want from me? I'm not an oceanographer."
Seger waves an exasperated hand at the modelers. "Ask them.
Jason's been running that model for—"
"Semen-sucking-motherfucking stumpfucker!" Jason
snarls at the screen. The screen snarls back:
Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable.
Rowan closes her eyes and starts again. "Would it be able to
survive in the euphotic zone, at least? It's warmer up there, even
in winter. Could our recon parties have picked it up and brought it
back?"
"Then it would be showing up here, not way over at Impossible
Lake."
"But it shouldn't be showing up anywh—"
"What about fish?" Lubin says suddenly.
Rowan looks at him. "What?"
"ßehemoth can survive
indefinitely inside a host, correct? Less osmotic stress. That's
why they infect fish in the first place. Perhaps they hitched a
ride."
"Abyssal fish don't disperse," Seger says. "They just
hang around the vents."
"Are the larvae planktonic?"
"Still wouldn't work. Not over these kinds of distances,
anyway."
"With all due respect," Lubin remarks, "you're a
medical doctor. Maybe we should ask someone with relevant
expertise."
It's a jab, of course. When the corpses were assigning professional
berths on the ark, ichthyologists didn't even make the long list.
But Seger only shakes her head impatiently. "They'd tell you
the same thing."
"How do you know?" There's an odd curiosity in Rowan's
voice.
"Because ßehemoth was
trapped in a few hot vents for most of Earth's history. If it had
been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take
over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years
ago."
Something changes in Patricia Rowan. Clarke can't quite put her
finger on it. Maybe it's some subtle shift in the other woman's
posture. Or perhaps Rowan's ConTacts have brightened, as if the
intel twinkling across her eyes has slipped into fast-forward.
"Pat?" Clarke asks.
But suddenly Seger's coming out of her chair like it was on fire,
spurred by a signal coming over her earbud. She taps her watch to
bring it online: "I'm on my way. Stall them."
She turns to Lubin and Clarke. "If you really want to help,
come with me."
"What's the problem?" Lubin asks.
Seger's already halfway across the cave. "More slow learners.
They're about to kill your friend."
Cavalry
There are lines drawn everywhere in Atlantis, four-centimeter gaps
that circumscribe whole corridors as if someone had chainsawed right
through the bulkheads at regular intervals. The gaps are flagged by
cautionary bands of diagonal striping to either side, and if you
stand astride one of them and look up to where it passes overhead,
you'll see why: each contains a dropgate, poised to guillotine down
in the event of a hull breach. They're such convenient and
ubiquitous boundaries that parties in opposition have always tended
to use them as lines in the sand.
Parties like the half-dozen corpses hanging back at the junction, too
scared or too smart to get involved. Parties like Hannuk Yeager,
dancing restlessly on the far side of the striped line, keeping them
all at bay fifteen meters upwind of the infirmary.
Lubin shoulders through the chickenshit corpses, Clarke hobbling in
his wake. Yeager bares his teeth in greeting: "Party's four
doors down on the left!" His capped eyes narrow at their corpse
escorts.
Clarke and Lubin pass. Seger tries to follow; Yeager catches her
around the throat and holds her there, squirming. "Invitation
only."
"You don't—" Yeager clenches; Seger's voice chokes
down to a whisper. "You want...Gene to die...?"
"Sounds like a threat," Yeager growls.
"I'm his doctor!"
"Let her go," Clarke tells him. "We might need her."
Yeager doesn't budge.
Oh shit, Clarke thinks. Is he primed?
Yeager's got a mutation: too much monoamine oxidase in his blood.
It breaks down the brain chemicals that keep people on an even keel.
The authorities tweaked him to compensate, back in the days when they
could get away with such things, but he learned to get around it
somehow. Sometimes he deliberately strings himself so tight that a
sideways glance can send him off the deep end. It gets him off.
When that happens, it doesn't matter all that much whether you're
friend or foe. Times like that, even Lubin takes him seriously.
Lubin's taking him seriously now. "Let her past, Han."
His voice is calm and even, his posture relaxed.
From down the corridor, a groan. The sound of something breaking.
Yeager snorts and tosses Seger aside. The woman staggers coughing
against the wall.
"You too," Lubin says to Rowan, who's still discretely
behind the striped line. To Yeager: "If it's okay with you, of
course."
"Shit," Yeager spits. "I don't give a fuck."
His fingers clench and unclench as if electrified.
Lubin nods. "You go on," he says casually to Clarke.
"I'll help Han hold the fort."
It's Nolan, of course. Clarke can hear her snarling as she nears the
medbay: "Ah, the little fuckhead's gone and shit himself..."
She squeezes through the hatch. The sour stench of fear and feces
hits her in the face. Nolan, yes. And she's got Creasy backing her
up. Klein's been thrown into the corner, broken and bleeding. Maybe
he tried to get in the way. Maybe Nolan just wanted him to.
Gene Erickson's awake at last, crouching on the table like a caged
animal. His splayed fingers push against the isolation membrane and
it just stretches, like impossibly thin latex. The further he
pushes, the harder it pulls; his arm isn't quite extended but the
membrane's tight as it's going to go, a mass of oily indestructible
rainbows swirling along lines of resistable force.
"Fuck," he growls, sinking back.
Nolan squats down and cocks her head, birdlike, a few centimeters
from Klein's bloody face. "Let him out, sweetie."
Klein drools blood and spit. "I told you, he's—"
"Get away from him!" Seger pushes into the
compartment as though the past five years—as though the past
five minutes—never happened. She barely gets her hand
on Nolan's shoulder before Creasy slams her into a bulkhead.
Nolan brushes imaginary contaminants from the place where Seger
touched her. "Don't damage the head," she tells Creasy.
"Could be a password in there."
"Everybody." Rowan, at least, is smart enough to stay in
the corridor. "Just. Calm. Down."
Nolan snorts, shaking her head. "Or what, stumpfuck?
Are you going call security? Are you going to have us ejected
from the premises?"
Creasy's white eyes regard Seger from mere centimeters away, a
promise of empty and mindless violence set above a grinning bulldozer
jaw. Creasy, it is said, has a way with women. Not that he's ever
fucked with Clarke. Not that anyone does, as a rule.
Rowan looks through the open hatch, her expression calm and
self-assured. Clarke sees the plea hidden behind the confident
façade. For a moment, she considers ignoring it. Her leg
tingles maddeningly. At her elbow Creasy makes kissy-kissy noises at
Seger, his hand viced around the doctor's jaw.
Clarke ignores him. "What's the deal, Grace?"
Nolan smiles harshly. "We managed to wake him up, but Normy
here" —an absent punch at Klein's head— "put
some kind of password on the table. We can't dial down the
membrane."
Clarke turns to Erickson. "How you feeling?"
"They did something to me." He coughs. "When I was
in coma."
"Yes we did. We saved his—" Creasy bumps Seger's
head against the bulkhead. Seger shuts up.
Clarke keeps her eyes on Erickson. "Can you move without
spilling your intestines all over?"
He twists clumsily around to show off his abdomen; the membrane
stretches against his head and shoulder like an amniotic sac.
"Miracles of modern medicine," he tells her, flopping onto
his back. Sure enough, his insides have all been packed back where
they belong. Fresh pink scars along his abs complement the older
ones on his thorax.
Jerenice Seger looks very much as if she wants to say something.
Dale Creasy looks very much as if he wants her to try.
"Let her talk," Clarke tells him. He loosens his grip just
slightly; Seger looks at Clarke and keeps her mouth shut.
"So what's the story?" Clarke prompts. "Looks like
you glued him back together okay. It's been almost three days."
"Three days," Seger repeats. Her voice is squeezed thin
and reedy under Creasy's grip. "He was almost disemboweled, and
you think three days is enough time to recover."
In fact, Clarke's sure of it. She's seen torn and broken bodies
before; she's seen multiarmed robots reassemble them, lay fine
electrical webbing into their wounds to crank healing up to a rate
that would be miraculous if it weren't so routine. Three days is
more than enough time to drag yourself back outside, seams still
oozing maybe but strong enough, strong enough; and once you're
weightless again, and sheltered by the endless black womb of the
abyss, you've got all the time in the world to recover.
It's something the drybacks have never been able to grasp: what
keeps you weak is the gravity.
"Does he need more surgery?" she asks.
"He will, if he isn't careful."
"Answer the fucking question," Nolan snarls.
Seger glances at Clarke, evidently finds no comfort there. "What
he needs is time to recover, and coma will cut that by two thirds.
If he wants to get out of here quickly, that's his best option."
"You're keeping him here against his will," Nolan says.
"Why—" Rowan begins from the corridor.
Nolan wheels on her. "You shut the fuck up right now."
Rowan calmly pushes her luck. "Why would we want to keep
him here if it weren't medically necessary?"
"He could rest up in his own hab," Clarke says. "Outside,
even."
Seger shakes her head. "He's running a significant fever—Lenie,
just look at him!"
She's got a point. Erickson's flat on his back, apparently
exhausted. A sheen of perspiration slicks his skin, almost lost
behind the more conspicuous glistening of the membrane.
"A fever," Clarke repeats. "Not from the operation?"
"No. Some kind of opportunistic infection."
"From what?"
"He was mauled by a wild animal," Seger points out,
exasperated. "There's no end to the kind of things you can pick
up from something as simple as a bite, and he was nearly eviscerated.
It would be almost inconceivable if there weren't
complications."
"Hear that, Gene?" Clarke says. "You've got fish
rabies or something."
"Fuckin' A," he says, staring at the ceiling.
"So it's your call. Want to stay here, let 'em fix you? Or
trust to drugs and take your chances?"
"Get me out of here," Erickson says weakly.
She turns back to Seger. "You heard him."
Seger draws herself up, impossibly, perpetually, insanely defiant.
"Lenie, I asked you to come along to help. This is the
furthest thing from—"
Creasy's fist hits her in the stomach like a wrecking ball. Seger
oofs and topples to the side. Her head hits the bulkhead on
the way down. She lies there, gulping breathlessly.
Out of the corner of her eye Clarke sees Rowan step forward, then
think better of it.
She stares evenly at Creasy. "Not necessary, Dale."
"High and mighty cunt was just asking for it,"
Creasy grumbles.
"And how's she going to let Gene out of jail if she can't even
breathe, you idiot?"
"Really, Len. What's the big deal?"
Nolan. Clarke turns to face her.
"You know what they did to us," Nolan continues, rising at
Creasy's side. "You know how many of us these pimps fucked
over. Killed, even."
Fewer than I did, Clarke doesn't say.
"I say if Dale wants to go to town on this stumpfuck, let him."
Nolan puts a comradely hand on Creasy's shoulder. "Might go a
tiny way to balancing the books, y'know?"
"You say," Clarke says quietly. "I say different."
"Now there's a surprise." The trace of a smile
ghosts across Nolan's face.
They stare at each other through their corneal shields. Across the
compartment, Klein whimpers; Jerenice Seger seems to be breathing
again at their feet. Creasy looms close at Clarke's shoulder, an
ominous presence just short of overt threat.
She keeps her breathing slow and even. She lowers herself into a
squat—carefully, carefully, her bad leg nearly buckling
again—and helps Seger into a sitting position.
"Let him out," she says.
Seger mutters into her wristwatch. A keyboard jammed with strange
alphanumerics lights up the skin of her forearm; she taps a sequence
with her other hand.
The isolation tent pops softly. Erickson pushes a tentative
finger through the membrane, finds it unlocked, and lurches off the
table as if passing through a soap bubble. His feet hit the deck
with a fleshy slap. Nolan holds out a diveskin she's produced from
somewhere: "Welcome back, buddy. Told you we'd get you out."
They leave Clarke with the corpses. Seger hauls herself to her feet,
ignoring Clarke's offered hand and bracing herself against the
bulkhead. One hand still clutches protectively at her stomach. She
lurches over to Klein.
"Norm? Norm?" She squats next to her subordinate,
stiff-limbed, and pushes back one of his eyelids. "Stay with
me..." Droplets of blood dribble from her scalp and splatter
onto the medic's pummeled face, making no difference at all. Seger
curses and wipes the back of her hand across her injury.
Clarke steps forward to help. Her foot comes down on something small
and hard, like a small stone. She lifts her foot. A tooth, sticky
with coagulating fluids, clatters softly onto the deck.
"I—" Clarke begins.
Seger turns. Rage simmers on her face. "Just get out of
here."
Clarke stares at her for a moment. Then she turns on her heel and
leaves.
Rowan's waiting in the corridor. "This can't happen again."
Clarke leans against the bulkhead to take some weight off her injured
leg. "You know Grace. She and Gene are—"
"It's not just Grace. At least, it won't be for long. I said
something like this might happen."
She feels very tired. "You said you wanted space between the
two sides. So why was Jerry keeping Gene here when he wanted to
leave?"
"Do you think she wanted that man around? She was
looking out for the welfare of her patient. That's her job."
"Our welfare is our own concern."
"You people simply aren't qualified—"
Clarke raises one pre-emptive had. "Heard it, Pat. The little
people can't see the Big Picture. Joe Citizen can't handle the
truth. The peasants are too eeegnorant to vote." She
shakes her head, disgusted. "It's been five years and you're
still patting us on the head."
"Are you saying that Gene Erickson is a more qualified
diagnostician than our Chief of Medicine?"
"I'm saying he has the right to be wrong." Clarke waves an
arm down the corridor. "Look, maybe you're right. Maybe he'll
come down with gangrene and come crawling back to Jerry inside a
week. Or maybe he'd rather die. But it's his decision."
"This isn't about gangrene," Rowan says softly. "And
it isn't about some common low-grade infection. And you know it."
"And I still don't see what difference it makes."
"I told you."
"You told me about a bunch of frightened children who can't
believe that their own defenses will hold. Well, Pat, the defenses
will hold. I'm living proof. We could be drinking ßehemoth
in pure culture and it wouldn't hurt us."
"We've lost—"
"You've lost one more layer of denial. That's all. ßehemoth's
here, Pat. I don't know how, but there's nothing you can do
about it and why should you even bother? It's not going to do
anything except rub your noses in something you'd rather not think
about, and you'll adapt to that soon enough. You've done it before.
A month from now you'll have forgotten about it all over again."
"Then please—" Rowan begins, and stops herself.
Clarke waits while the other woman braces herself, yet again, for the
subordinate role.
"Give us that month," Rowan whispers at last.
Nemesis
Clarke doesn't often go into the residential quarter. She doesn't
remember ever having been in this particular section. The corridor
here is sheathed in lattice paint and wired up to a mural generator.
A forest of antlered coral crowds the port bulkhead; surgeonfish
school and swirl to starboard, like the nodes of some abstract and
diffuse neural net. A mesh of fractured sunlight dances across
everything. Clarke can't tell whether the illusion is purely
synthetic, or powered by archived footage of a real coral reef. She
wouldn't even know how to tell the difference; of all the sea
creatures which have made her acquaintance over the years, none have
lived in sunlight.
A lot of families along here, Clarke figures. Adults don't go in for
evocations of the wild kingdom as a rule; it's kind of hard to
retain that aesthetic once you've grasped the concept of irony.
Here it is: D-18. She taps the doorbell. A muffled musical chime
drifts through the closed hatch; a reedy thread of music, a faint
voice, the sounds of motion.
The hatch swings open. A stocky girl of about ten looks out at her
from under spiky blond bangs. The music wafts around her from the
interior of the compartment—Lex's flute, Clarke realizes.
The smile dies on the girl's face the instant she lays eyes on Lenie
Clarke.
"Hi," Clarke says. "I was looking for Alyx."
She tries a smile of her own on for size.
It doesn't fit. The girl takes a stumbling step backward. "Lex…"
The music stops. "What? Who is it?"
The blonde girl steps aside, nervous as a cat. Alyx Rowan sits
blinded on a couch in the center of the room. One of her hands
lowers the flute; the other reaches up to the mother-of-pearl 'phones
covering her eyes.
"Hey, Lex," Clarke says. "Your mom said you'd be
here."
"Lenie! You passed!"
"Passed?"
"Quarantine! They said you and psycho-man were locked up for
tests or something. I guess you aced them." A wheeled
rectangular pedestal about a meter high squats in front of the couch,
a little obelisk with the same opalescent finish as Alyx's headset.
Alyx sets her 'phones down on top of it, next to an identical pair
already at rest.
Clarke limps into the room. Alyx's face clouds instantly. "What
happened to your leg?"
"Rogue squid. Rudder got me."
Alyx's friend mutters something from the corner of Clarke's eye and
disappears into the corridor. Clarke turns in her wake.
"Your friend doesn't like me much."
Alyx waves a dismissive hand. "Kelly spooks easy. One look and
she just flashfeeds all the shit her mom ever spewed about you guys.
She's nice, but she doesn't high-grade her sources at all."
The girl shrugs, dismissing the subject. "So what's up?"
"You know that quarantine I was buzzing on about a while back?"
Alyx frowns. "That guy that got bitten. Erickson."
"Yeah. Well, it looks like he came down with something after
all, and the basic thumbnail is we've decided to invoke a kind of No
Fish-heads policy in Atlantis for the time being."
"You're letting them kick you out?"
"I actually think it's a good idea," Clarke admits.
"Why? What's he got?"
Clarke shakes her head. "It's not really a medical thing,
although that's—part of it. It's just—feelings are
running kind of high right now, on both sides. Your mom and I
thought it'd be better if your guys and our guys kept out of each
other's way. Just for a while."
"How come? What's going on?"
"Your mom didn't—?" It belatedly occurs to Clarke
that Patricia Rowan might have opted to keep certain things from her
daughter. For that matter, she doesn't even know how much of
Atlantis's adult population has been brought up to speed.
Corpses aren't keen on full disclosure just as a matter of general
principle.
Not that Lenie Clarke gives a great crimson turd about corpse
sensibilities. Still. She doesn't want to get in between Pat and—
"Lenie?" Alyx is staring at her, brow furrowed. She's one
of the very few people that Clarke can comfortably show her naked
eyes to; right now, though, Clarke's glad her caps are in.
She takes a couple of paces across the carpet. Another facet of the
pedestal comes into view. Some kind of control panel runs in a strip
just below its upper edge, a band of dark perspex twinkling with red
and blue icons. A luminous jagged waveform, like an EEG, scrolls
horizontally along its length.
"What's this?" Clarke asks, seizing on the diversion.
It's far too big to be any kind of game interface.
"That? Oh." Alyx shrugs. "That's Kelly's. It's a
head cheese."
"What!"
"You know, a smart gel. Neuron culture with—"
"I know what it is, Lex. I just—I guess I'm surprised to
see one here, after…"
"Wanna see it?" Alyx taps a brief tattoo on the top of the
cabinet. The nacreous surface swirls briefly and clears: beneath
the newly-transparent façade, a slab of pinkish-gray tissue
sits within its circular rim like a bowl of fleshy oatmeal. Flecks
of brown glass punctuate the pudding in neat perforated lines.
"It's not very big," Alyx says. "Way smaller than the
ones they had back in the old days. Kelly says it's about the same
as a cat."
So it's evil at least, if not hugely intelligent. "What's
it for?" Clarke wonders. Surely they wouldn't be stupid
enough to use these things after—
"It's kind of a pet," Alyx says apologetically. "She
calls it Rumble."
"A pet?"
"Sure. It thinks, sort of. It learns to do stuff. Even if no
one really knows how, exactly."
"Oh, so you heard about that, did you?"
"It's a lot smaller than the ones that, you know, worked for
you."
"They didn't w—"
"It's really harmless. It's not hooked into life support or
anything."
"So what does it do? You teach it tricks?" The porridge
of brains glistens like an oozing sore.
"Kind of. It talks back if you say stuff to it. Doesn't always
make a lot of sense, but that's what makes it fun. And if you tweak
the audio feed right it plays these really cool color patterns in
time to music." Alyx grabs her flute off the couch, gestures at
the eyephones. "Wanna see?"
"A pet," Clarke murmurs. You bloody corpses…
"We're not, you know," Alyx says sharply. "Not all of
us."
"Sorry? Not what?"
"Corpses. What does that mean, anyway? My mom? Me?"
Did I say that out loud? "Just—corporate types, I
guess." She's never spent much time pondering the origin of the
term, any more than she's lost sleep over the etiology of chair
or fumarole.
"Well in case you didn't notice, there's a lot of other people
in here. Crunchers and doctors and just families."
"Yeah, I know. Of course I know—"
"But you just lump us all together, you know? If we don't have
a bunch of pipes in our chest we're all just corpses as far as
you're concerned."
"Well—sorry." And then, belatedly defensive: "I'm
not slagging you, you know. It's just a word."
"Yeah, well it's not just a word to all you fishheads."
"Sorry." Clarke says again. A distance seems to open
between them, although neither has moved.
"Anyway," she says after a while, "I just wanted you
to know I won't be inside for a while. We can still talk, of course,
but—"
Movement from the hatchway. A large stocky man steps into the
compartment, dark hair combed back, eyebrows knotted together, his
whole body a telegraph of leashed hostility. Kelly's father.
"Ms. Clarke," he says evenly.
Her guts tighten into a hard, angry knot. She knows that look. She
knows that stance, she saw it herself more times than she could count
when she was Kelly's age. She knows what fathers do, she
knows what hers did, but she's not a little girl any more and
Kelly's dad looks very much in need of a lesson...
But she has to keep reminding herself. None of it happened.
Portrait of the Sadist as an Adolescent
Achilles Desjardins learned to spoof the skeeters eventually, of
course. Even as a child he knew the score. In a world kept under
constant surveillance for its own protection there were only watched
and watchers, and he knew which side of the lens he wanted to be on.
Beating off was not the kind of thing he could do in front of an
audience.
It was barely even the kind of thing he could do in private, for that
matter. He had, after all, been raised with certain religious
beliefs; clinging to the coattails of the Nouveaux Séparatistes,
the Catholic miasma had persisted in Quebec long after it had faded
into kitschy irrelevance everywhere else. Those beliefs haunted
Achilles every night as he milked himself, as the sick hateful images
flickered through his mind and hardened his penis. It barely
mattered that the skeeters were offline, wobbling drunkenly under the
influence of the magnetic mobiles he'd hung over his bed and desk and
drawers. It barely mattered that he was already going to hell, even
if he never touched himself again for the rest of his life—for
hadn't Jesus said if you do these things even in your heart, then
you have committed them in eyes of God? Achilles was already
damned by his own unbidden thoughts. What more could he lose by
acting on them?
Shortly after his eleventh birthday his penis began leaving actual
evidence behind, a milky fluid squirted onto the sheets in the course
of his nightly debauchery. He didn't dare ask the encyclopedia about
it for two weeks; it took him that long to figure out how to doctor
the enquiry logs so Mom and Dad wouldn't find out. Cracking the
private settings on the household Maytag took another three days.
You could never tell what trace elements that thing might be scanning
for. By the time Achilles actually dared to launder his bedsheets
they smelled a lot like Andrew Trites down at the community center,
who was twice the size of anyone else in his cohort and whom nobody
wanted to stand next to at the rapitrans stop.
"I think—" Achilles began at thirteen.
He no longer believed in the Church. He was after all an empiricist
at heart, and God couldn't withstand so much as ten seconds' critical
scrutiny from anyone who'd already figured out the ugly truth about
the Easter Bunny. Paradoxically, though, damnation somehow seemed
more real than ever, on some primal level that resisted mere logic.
And as long as damnation was real, confession couldn't hurt.
"—I'm a monster," he finished.
It wasn't as risky a confession as it might have been. His
confidante wasn't especially trustworthy—he'd downloaded it
from the net (from Maelstrom, he corrected himself; that's
what everyone was calling it now), and it might be full of worms and
trojans even if he had scrubbed it every which way—but
he'd also kellered all the I/O except voice and he could delete the
whole thing the moment it tried anything funny. He'd do that anyway,
once he was finished. No way was he going to leave it ticking after
he'd spilled his guts to it.
Dad would go totally triploid if he knew Achilles had brought a wild
app anywhere near their home net, but Achilles wasn't about to risk
using the house filters even if Dad had stopped spying since
Mom died. And anyway, Dad wasn't going to find out. He was
downstairs, cowled in his sensorium with the rest of the province—the
rest of the country now, Achilles had to keep reminding
himself—immersed in the pomp and ceremony of Quebec's very
first Independence Day. Sullen, resentful Penny—her days of
idolizing Big Brother long past—would have gladly sold him out
in a second, but these days she pretty much lived in her rapture
helmet. By now it must have worn the grooves right out of her
temporal lobes.
It was the birthday of the last new country in the world, and
Achilles Desjardins was alone in his bedroom with his confessor.
"What kind of monster?" asked TheraPal
6.2, its voice studiously androgynous.
He'd learned the word that very morning. He pronounced it carefully:
"A misogynist."
"I see," TheraPal
murmered in his ear.
"I have these—I get these feelings. About hurting them.
Hurting girls."
"And how do they make you feel?" The voice had edged
subtly into the masculine.
"Good. Awful. I mean—I like them. The feelings,
I mean."
"Could you be more specific?" There was no shock or
disgust in the voice. Of course, there couldn't be—the program
didn't have feelings, it wasn't even a Turing app. It was basically
just a fancy menu. Still, stupidly, Achilles felt strangely
relieved.
"It's—sexy," he admitted. "Just, just thinking
about them that way."
"What way, exactly?"
"You know, helpless. Vulnerable. I, I like the looks on their
faces when they're...you know..."
"Go on," said TheraPal.
"Hurting," Achilles finished miserably.
"Ah," said the app. "How old are you, Achilles?"
"Thirteen."
"Do you have any friends who are girls?"
"Sure."
"And how do you feel about them?"
"I told you!" Achilles hissed, barely keeping his
voice down. "I get—"
"No," TheraPal
broke in gently. "I'm asking how you feel about them
personally, when you're not sexually aroused. Do you hate them?"
Well, no. Andrea was really smart, and he could always go to her for
help with his debugs. And Martine—one time, Achilles had just
about killed Martine's older brother when he was picking on
her. Martine didn't have a mean bone in her body, but that asshole
brother of hers was so...
"I—I like them," he said, his forehead crinkling at
the paradox. "I like them a lot. They're great. Except the
ones I want to, you know, and even then it's only when I..."
TheraPal waited patiently.
"Everything's fine," Achilles said at last. "Except
when I want to..."
"I see," the app said after a moment. "Achilles, I
have some good news for you. You're not a misogynist after all."
"No?"
"A misogynist is someone who hates women, who fears them or
thinks them inferior in some way. Is that you?"
"No, but—but what am I, then?"
"That's easy," TheraPal
told him. "You're a sexual sadist. It's a completely different
thing."
"Really?"
"Sex is a very old instinct, Achilles, and it didn't evolve in a
vacuum. It coevolved with all sorts of other basic drives—fighting
for mates, territoriality, competition for resources. Even healthy
sex has a strong element of violence to it. Sex and aggression share
many of the same neurological paths."
"Are you—are you saying everyone's like me?"
It seemed too much to hope for.
"Not exactly. Most people have a sort of switch that suppresses
violent impulses during sex. Some people's switches work better than
others. The switches in clinical sadists don't work very well at
all."
"And that's what I am," Achilles murmered.
"Very likely," TheraPal
said, "although it's impossible to be sure without a proper
clinical checkup. I seem unable to access your network right now,
but I could provide a list of nearby affiliated medbooths if you tell
me where we are."
Behind him, the Achilles's bedroom door creaked softly on its hinges.
He turned, and froze instantly at his core.
The door to his bedroom had swung open. His father stood framed in
the darkness beyond.
"Achilles," TheraPal
said in the whirling, receding distance, "for you own health—not
to mention your peace of mind—you really should visit one of
our affiliates. A contractually-guaranteed diagnosis is the first
step to treatment, and treatment is the first step to a healthy
life."
He couldn't have heard, Achilles told himself. TheraPal
spoke directly to his earbud, and Dad couldn't have stopped the
telltale from flashing if he'd been listening in. Dad didn't hack.
He couldn't have heard TheraPal.
He could've heard Achilles, though.
"If you're worried about the cost, our rates—"
Achilles deleted the app almost without thinking, sick to his
stomach.
His father hadn't moved.
His father didn't move much, these days. The short fuse, the
hair-trigger had rusted into some frozen state between grief and
indifference over the years. His once-fiery and defiant Catholicism
had turned against itself with the fall of the Church, a virulent
rage of betrayal that had burned him out and left him hollow. By the
time Achilles' mom had died there'd barely even been sorrow. (A
glitch in the therapy he'd said dully, coming back from the hospital.
The wrong promoters activated, the body somehow innoculated against
its own genes, devouring itself. There was nothing he could do.
They'd signed a waiver.)
Now he stood there in the darkened hallway, swaying slightly, his
fists not even clenched. It had been years since he'd raised a hand
against his children.
So what am I afraid of? Achilles wondered, his stomach knotted.
He knows. He knows. I'm afraid he knows...
The corners of his father's mouth tightened by some infinitesimal
degree. It wasn't a smile. It wasn't a snarl. In later years, the
adult Achilles Desjardins would look back and recognise it as a kind
of acknowledgment, but at the time he had no idea what it meant. He
only knew that his father simply turned and walked down the hall to
the master bedroom, and closed the door behind him, and never
mentioned that night ever again.
In later years, he also realised that TheraPal
must have been stringing him along. Its goal, after all, had been to
attract customers, and you didn't do that by rubbing their faces in
unpleasant truths. The program had simply been trying to make him
feel better as a marketting strategy.
And yet, that didn't mean it had lied, necessarily. Why
bother, if the truth would do the job? And it all made so much
sense. Not a sin, but a malfunction. A thermostat, set askew
through no fault of his own. All life was machinery, mechanical
contraptions built of proteins and nucleic acids and electricity;
what machine ever got creative control over its own specs? It was a
liberating epiphany, there at the dawn of the sovereign Quebec: Not
Guilty, by reason of faulty wiring.
Odd, though.
You'd have expected it to bring the self-loathing down a notch or two
in the years that followed.
Bedside
Manor
Gene Erickson and Julia Friedman live in a small single-deck hab
about two hundred meters southeast of Atlantis. Julia has always
done most of the housekeeping: Gene gets notoriously twitchy in
enclosed spaces. For him, home is the open ridge: the hab
is a necessary evil, for sex and feeding and those occasional times
when the his own darkdreams prove insufficiently diverting. Even
then, he treats it the way a pearl diver of two hundred years past
would treat a diving bell: a place to gulp the occasional breath of
air before returning to the deep.
Now, of course, it's more of an ICU.
Lenie Clarke emerges from the airlock and lays her fins on an
incongruous welcome mat laid to one side. The main compartment is
dim even to rifter eyes, a grey-on-grey wash of twilight punctuated
by the bright chromatic readouts on the comm board. The air smells
of mould and metal; more faintly, of vomit and disinfectant.
Life-support systems gurgle underfoot. Open hatches gape like black
mouths: storage; head; sleeping cubby. An electronic metronome
beeps somewhere nearby. A heart monitor, counting down.
Julia Friedman steps into view.
"He's still—oh." She's taken off her diveskin in
favor of a thermochrome turtleneck that mostly covers her scars.
It's strange to see rifter eyes atop dryback clothing. "Hi,
Lenie."
"Hi. How's he doing?"
"Okay." She turns in the hatchway, sags with her spine
against the frame: half in darkness, half in twilight. She turns
her face to the darkness, to the person within it. "Could be
better, I guess. He's asleep. He's sleeping a lot."
"I'm surprised you could even keep him inside."
"Yeah. I think he'd rather be out there, even now, but…he's
doing it for me, I think. Because I asked him." Friedman
shakes her head. "It was too easy."
"What was?"
"Convincing him." She takes a breath. "You know how
much he loves the outdoors."
"Are Jerry's antibiotics helping?"
"Maybe. I guess. It's hard to say, you know? She can always
say he'd be worse without them, no matter how bad it gets."
"Is that what she's saying?"
"Oh, Gene hasn't talked to her since he came back. He doesn't
trust them." She stares at the deck. "He blames her for
this."
"For being sick?"
"He thinks they did something to him."
Clarke remembers. "What exactly does he—?"
"I don't know. Something." Friedman glances up: her
armored eyes lock onto Clarke's for an instant, then slide off to the
side. "It's taking a long time to clear up, you know? For a
simple infection. Do you think?"
"I don't really know, Julia."
"Maybe ßehemoth's
mixing things up somehow. Making things worse."
"I don't know if it works like that."
"Maybe I've got it too, by now." Friedman almost seems to
be talking to herself. "I mean, I'm with him a lot…"
"We could check you out, if you wanted."
Friedman looks at her. "You were infected, weren't you?
Before."
"Only with ßehemoth,"
Clarke says, careful to draw the distinction. "It didn't kill
me. Didn't even make me sick."
"It would have, though. Eventually. Right?"
"If I hadn't got my retrofits. But I did. We all did."
She tries a smile. "We're rifters, Julia. We're tough little
motherfuckers. He'll pull through. I know it."
It's not
much, Clarke knows. Reassuring deception is all she can offer Julia
Friedman at the moment. She knows better than to touch; Freedman's
not keen on physical contact. She'd endure a comforting hand on the
shoulder, perhaps—even take it in the spirit in which it was
intended—but Grace Friedman is very selective with her personal
space. It's one of the few ways in which Clarke feels a kinship with
the woman. Each can see the other flinch, even when neither does.
Friedman looks back into the darkness. "Grace says you helped
get him out of there."
Clarke shrugs, a bit surprised that Nolan would give her the credit.
"I would've been there too, you know. Only…"
Friedman's voice trails off. The hab's ventilators sigh into the
silence.
"Only you think maybe he'd have been better off where he was,"
Clarke suggests.
"Oh, no. Well, maybe partly. I don't know if Dr. Seger's as
bad as they think, anyway."
"They?"
"Gene and—Grace."
Ah.
"It's just, I didn't know…I didn't know if he'd even want
me there." Friedman flashes a rueful smile. "I'm not much
of a fighter, Lenie. Not like you, not like—I just kind of
roll with the punches."
"He could have been with Grace all along if he'd wanted to,
Julia. He's with you."
Friedman laughs, a bit too quickly. "Oh, no. That's not what I
meant." But Clarke's words seem to have perked her up a bit.
"Anyway," Clarke says, "I guess I'll leave you guys
alone. I just wanted to stop by, see how he was doing."
"I'll tell him," Friedman says. "He'll appreciate
it."
"Sure. No problem." She bends to retrieve her fins.
"And you should come by again, when he's awake. He'd like
that." She hesitates, looking away; chestnut curls obscure her
face. "Not many people come by, you know. Except Grace.
Saliko was by a while back."
Clarke shrugs. "Rifters aren't big on social skills." And
you really ought to know that by now, she doesn't add. Julia
Friedman just doesn't get it, sometimes. It's as though, scars and
history notwithstanding, she's a rifter in name only, an honorary
member allowed past the gate on her husband's credentials.
Which begs the question of what I'm doing here, she
realizes.
"I think they take him too seriously sometimes," Friedman
says.
"Seriously?" Clarke glances at the airlock. The hab seems
suddenly, subtly smaller.
"About, you know. The corpses. I hear Saliko's feeling a
little odd now, but you know Saliko."
He thinks they did something to him...
"I wouldn’t worry about it," Clarke says. "Really."
She smiles, sighing inwardly at her own diplomacy.
Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.
It's been a while since she's let Kevin take her. He's never been
all that good at it, sadly. He has a harder time keeping it up than
most kids his age, which actually isn't all that uncommon among the
local bottom-feeders. And the fact that he's chosen a frigid bitch
like Lenie Clarke to practice his moves on hasn't helped the dynamic
any. A man afraid to touch: a woman averse to contact. If these
two have anything in common, it's patience.
She figures she owes him. Besides, she wants to ask him some
questions.
But today he's a granite cock with a brain stem attached. fuck the
foreplay: he pushes into her right off the top, not even a token
tongue-lashing to make up for the lack of tropical irrigation. The
friction pulls painfully at her labia; she reaches down discretely
with one hand and spreads them. Walsh pumps on top of her, breath
hissing through teeth clenched in a hard animal grin, his capped eyes
hard and unreadable. They always keep their eyes masked during
sex—Clarke's tastes prevail, as usual— although Walsh
usually wears too much heart on his face to hide with a couple of
membranous eggshells. Not this time. There's something behind his
overlays that Clarke can't quite make out, something focused on the
space where she is but not on her. He pushes her up the
pallet in rough thrusting increments; her head bumps painfully
against the naked metal plating of the deck. They fuck without words
amidst stale air and grafted machinery.
She doesn't know what's come over him. It's a nice change, though,
the closest thing to an honest-to-God rape she's had in years. She
closes her eyes and summons up images of Karl Acton.
Afterwards, though, the bruise she notices is on his arm: a
corona of torn capillaries around a tiny puncture in the flesh of his
inner elbow.
"What's this?" She lays her lips around the injury and
runs her tongue across the swelling.
"Oh, that. Grace is taking blood samples from everyone."
Her head comes up. "What?"
"She's not great at it. Took her a couple of tries to find a
vein. You should see Lije. Looks like his arm got bushwhacked by a
sea urchin."
"Why's Grace taking blood?"
"You didn't hear? Lije came down with something. And Saliko's
started feeling under the weather too, and he visited Gene and
Julia just a couple of days ago."
"So Grace thinks—"
"Whatever the corpses gave him, it's spreading."
Clarke sits up. She's been naked on the deck for half an hour, but
this is the first time she's felt the chill. "Grace thinks the
corpses gave him something."
"That's what Gene thought. She's going to find out."
"How? She doesn't have any medical training."
Walsh shrugs. "You don't need any to run MedBase."
"Jesus semen-sucking Christ." Clarke shakes her head in
disbelief. "Even if Atlantis did want to sic some bug on
us, they wouldn't be stupid enough to use one from the standard
database."
"I guess she thinks it's a place to start."
There's something in his voice.
"You believe her," Clarke says.
"Well, not nec—"
"Has Julia come down with anything?"
"Not so far."
"Not so far. Kevin, Julia hasn't left Gene's side since
they broke him out. If anyone was going to catch anything, wouldn't
it be her? Saliko visited, what? Once?"
"Maybe twice."
"And what about Grace? From what I hear she's over there
all the time. Is she sick?"
"She says she's taking precaut—"
"Precautions," Clarke snorts. "Spare me. Am I the
only one left on the whole Ridge with a working set of frontal lobes?
Abra came down with supersyph last year, remember? It took eight
months for Charley Garcia to get rid of those buggy Ascaris in
his gut, and I don't remember anyone blaming the corpses for that.
People get sick, Kevin, even down here. Especially down
here. Half of us rot away before we even have a chance to go
native."
There it is again: something new, staring out from behind the
glistening opacities of Walsh's eyecaps. Something not entirely
friendly.
She sighs. "What?"
"It's just a precaution. I don't see how it can hurt."
"It can hurt quite a lot if people jump to conclusions without
any facts."
Walsh doesn't move for a moment. Then he gets to his feet. "Grace
is trying to get the facts," he says, padding across the
compartment. "You're the one jumping to conclusions."
Oh, Kevvy-boy, Clarke wonders. When did you start
to grow a spine?
He grabs his diveskin off the chair. Squirming black synthetics
embrace him like a lover.
"Thanks for the fuck," he says. "I gotta go."
Boilerplate
She finds Lubin floating halfway up the side of the windchime
reservoir. Pipes, fiberop and miscellaneous components—mostly
nonfunctional now, dismembered segments of circuits long-since
broken—run in a band around the great tank's equator. At the
moment, the ambient currents are too sluggish to set either rocks or
machinery to glowing; Lubin's headlamp provides the only
illumination.
"Abra said you were out here," Clarke buzzes.
"Hold this pad, will you?"
She takes the little sensor. "I wanted to talk to you."
"About?" Most of his attention seems to be focused on a
blob of amber polymer erupting from one of the conduits.
Clarke maneuvers herself into his line of sight. "There's this
asinine rumor going around. Grace is telling people that Jerry
sicced some kind of plague on Gene."
Lubin's vocoder tics in a mechanical interpretation of mmmm...
"She's always had a missile up her ass about the corpses, but
nobody takes her seriously. At least, they didn't used to…"
Lubin taps a valve. "That's it."
"What?"
"Resin's cracked around the thermostat. It's causing an
intermittent short."
"Ken. Listen to me."
He stares at her, waiting.
"Something's changing. Grace never used to push it this hard,
remember?"
"I never really butted heads with her myself," Lubin
buzzes.
"It used to be her against the world. But this bug Gene's come
down with, it's changed things. I think people are starting to
listen to her. It could get dicey."
"For the corpses."
"For all of us. Weren't you the one warning me about
what the corpses could do if they got their act together? Weren't
you the one who said—"
We may have to do something preemptive…
A small pit opens up in Clarke's stomach.
"Ken," she buzzes, slowly, "you do know Grace
is fucking crazy, right?"
He doesn't answer for a moment. She doesn't give him any longer than
that: "Seriously, you should just listen to her
sometime. She talks as if the war never ended. Someone sneezes and
it's a biological attack."
Behind his headlamp, Lubin's silhouette moves subtly; Clarke gets the
sense of a shrug. "There are some interesting coincidences,"
he says. "Gene enters Atlantis with serious injuries. Jerry
operates on him in a medbay where our surveillance is compromised,
then puts him into quarantine."
"Quarantine because of ßehemoth,"
Clarke points out.
"As you've pointed out yourself on occasion, we've all been
immunized against ßehemoth.
I'm surprised you don't find that rationale more questionable."
When Clarke says nothing, he continues: "Gene is released into
the wild suffering from an opportunistic infection which our
equipment can't identify, and which so far has failed to respond to
treatment."
"But you were there, Ken. Jerry wanted to keep Gene in
quarantine. Dale beat the crap out of her for trying. Isolating
Patient Zero is a pretty short-sighted strategy for spreading the
plague."
"I suppose," Lubin buzzes, "Grace might say they knew
we'd break him out regardless, so they put up a big show of
resistance knowing someone would cite it in their favor down the
road."
"So they fought to keep him contained, therefore they wanted to
set him loose?" Clarke peers suggestively at Lubin's
electrolysis intake. "You getting enough O2
there, Ken?"
"I'm saying that's the sort of rationale Grace might invoke."
"That's pretty twisted even for—" Realization sinks
in. "She's actually saying that, isn't she?"
His headlight bobs slightly.
"You've heard the rumors. You know all about them." She
shakes her head, disgusted at herself. "As if I'd ever have to
bring you up to speed on anything..."
"I'm keeping an ear open."
"Well maybe you could do a bit more than that. I mean, I know
you like to keep out of these things, but Grace is fucking psycho.
She's spoiling for a fight and she doesn't care who gets caught in
the backwash."
Lubin hovers, unreadable. "I would have expected you to be a
bit more sympathetic."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing," he buzzes after a moment. "But whatever
you think of Grace's behavior, her fears might not be entirely
unfounded."
"Come on, Ken. The war's over." She takes his silence as
acknowledgment. "So why would the corpses want to start it up
again?"
"Because they lost."
"Ancient history."
"You thought yourself oppressed once," he points
out. "How much blood did it take before you were willing
to call it even?"
His metal voice, so calm, so even, is suddenly so close it seems to
be coming from inside her own head.
"I—I was wrong about that," she says after a while.
"It didn't stop you." He turns back to his machinery.
"Ken," she says.
He looks back at her.
"This is bullshit. It's a bunch of ifs strung together.
A hundred to one Gene just picked up something from the fish that bit
him."
"Okay."
"It's not like there can't be a hundred nasty bugs down here we
haven't discovered yet. A few years ago nobody'd even heard of
ßehemoth."
"I'm aware of that."
"So we can't let this escalate. Not without at least some
evidence."
His eyes shine yellow-white in the backscatter from his headlamp.
"If you're serious about evidence, you could always collect some
yourself."
"How?"
He taps the left side of his chest. Where the implants are.
She goes cold. "No."
"If Seger's hiding anything, you'd know it."
"She could be hiding lots of things from lots of people. It
wouldn't prove what she was hiding."
"You'd know what Nolan was feeling too, since you seem so
concerned with her motives."
"I know what her motives are. I don't need to fuck with my
brain chemistry to confirm it."
"The medical risks are minimal," he points out.
"That's not the point. It wouldn't prove anything. You know
you can't read specific thoughts, Ken."
"You wouldn't have to. Reading guilt would be suffic—"
"I said no."
"Then I don't know what to tell you." He turns away again.
His headlamp transforms the reservoir's plumbing into a tiny,
high-contrast cityscape tilted on edge. Clarke watches him
work—tracking pathways, tapping pipes, making small changes to
tabletop architecture. A pinpoint sun flares hissing at his
fingertips, blinding her for an instant. By the time her caps have
adjusted the light has settled on the skin of the tank. The water
shimmers prismatically around it like a heat mirage on a hot day; at
lesser depths it would explode into steam on the spot.
"There's another way," she buzzes. Lubin shuts off the
spot-welder.
"There is." He turns to face her. "But I wouldn't
get my hopes up."
Back when the trailer park was just getting set up, someone had the
clever idea of turning a hab into a mess hall: a row of cyclers, a
couple of prep surfaces for the daring, and a handful of foldaway
tables scattered with studied randomness around the dry deck. The
effect was intended to suggest a café patio. The cramped
reality is more like the backstage shed where the furniture gets
stored for winter.
One thing that has caught on, though, is the garden. By now it
covers half the wet deck, a tangle of creeping greenery lit by
solar-spectrum sticks planted among its leaves like bioluminescent
bamboo. It isn't even hydroponic. The little jungle erupts from
boxes of rich dark earth—diatomaceous ooze, actually, beefed up
with organic supplements—that were once discrete but which have
since now disappeared under an overflow of compost, spilling messily
across the plating.
It's the best-smelling bubble of atmosphere on the whole Ridge.
Clarke swings the airlock hatch open onto that tableau and takes a
deep breath, only half of appreciation. The other half is resolve:
Grace Nolan looks up from the far side of the oasis, tying off the
vines of something that might have been snow peas back before the
patents landed on them.
But Nolan smiles beneath translucent eyes as Clarke steps onto the
deck. "Hey, Lenie!"
"Hi Grace. I thought we could maybe have a talk."
Nolan pops a pod into her mouth, a slick black amphibian feeding in
the lush greenery of some long-extinct wetland. She chews, for
longer than is probably necessary. "About..."
"About Atlantis. Your blood work." Clarke takes a breath.
"About whatever problem you have with me."
"God no," Nolan says. "I've got no problem with you,
Len. People fight sometimes. No big deal. Don't take it so
seriously."
"Okay then. Let's talk about Gene."
"Sure." Nolan straightens, grabs a chair off the bulkhead
and folds it down. "And while we're at it, let's talk about Sal
and Lije and Lanie."
Lanie too, now? "You think the corpses are behind it."
Nolan shrugs. "It's no big secret."
"And you base that on what, exactly? Anything show up in the
bloods?"
"We're still collecting samples. Lizbeth's set up in the med
hab, by the way, if you want to contribute. I think you should."
"What if you don't find anything?" Clarke wonders.
"I don't think we will. Seger's smart enough to cover her
tracks. But you never know."
"You know it's possible that the corpses have nothing to do with
this."
Nolan leans back in her chair and stretches. "Sweetie, I can't
tell you how surprised I am to hear you say that."
"So show me some evidence."
Nolan smiles, shaking her head. "Here's a bit of an exercise
for you. Say you're swimming through shark-infested waters. Big
sickle-finned stumpfucks all over the place, and they're looking you
up and down and you know the only reason they're not tearing into you
right now is because you've got your billy out, and they've seen what
that billy can do to fishies like them. So they keep their distance,
but that makes 'em hate you even more, right? Because you've
already killed some of 'em. These are really smart sharks. They
hold grudges.
"So you swim along for a little while, all these cold dead
pissed-off eyes and teeth always just out of range, and you come
across—oh, say Ken. Or what's left of him. A bit of entrail,
half a face, ID patch just floating around amongst all those sharks.
What do you do, Len? Do you decide there isn't any evidence?
Do you say Hey, I can't prove anything, I didn't see this go
down? Do you say, Let's not jump to any conclusions..."
"That's a really shitty analogy," Clarke says softly.
"I think it's a great fucking analogy."
"So what are you going to do?"
"I can tell you what I'm not going to do," Nolan
assures her. "I'm not going to sit back and have faith in the
goodness of corpse spirit while all my friends turn to sockeye."
"Is anyone asking you to do that?"
"Not yet. Any time now, I figure."
Clarke sighs. "Grace, I'm only saying, for the good of all of
us—"
"Fuck you," Nolan snarls suddenly. "Fuck you.
You don't give a shit about us."
It's as if someone flipped a switch. Clarke stares, astonished.
Nolan glares eyelessly back, her body trembling with sudden rage.
"You really want to know my problem with you? You sold
us out. We were this close to pulling the plug on those
stumpfucks. We could've forced their own goddamn entrails down their
throats, and you stopped us, you fucker."
"Grace," she tries, "I know how you fe—"
"Horseshit! You don't have a fucking clue how I
feel!"
What did they do to you, Clarke wonders, to turn you into
this?
"They did things to me too," she says softly.
"Sure they did. And you got yours back, didn't you? And
correct me if I'm wrong but didn't you end up fucking over a whole
lot of innocent people in the mix? You never gave a shit about them.
And maybe it was too much trouble to work it through but a fair
number of us fish-heads lost people to your grand crusade along with
everyone else. You didn't give a shit about them either, as long as
you got your kick at the cat. Fine. You got it. But the rest of
us are still waiting, aren't we? We don't even want to mow down
millions of innocent people, we just want to get at the assholes who
actually fucked us over—and you of all people
come crawling over here on Patricia Rowan's leash to tell me I don't
have the right?" Nolan shakes her head in disgust. "I
don't believe we let you stop us before, and I sure as shit
don't believe you're going to stop us now."
Her hatred radiates through the compartment like infrared. Clarke is
distantly amazed that the vines beside her don't blacken and burst
into flame.
"I came to you because I thought we could work something out,"
she says.
"You came because you know you're losing it."
The words ignite a small, cold knot of anger under Clarke's
diaphragm. "Is that what you think."
"You never gave a shit about working things out."
Nolan growls. "You just sat off on your own, I'm the
Meltdown Madonna, I'm Mermaid of the fucking Apocalypse, I get to
stand off to the side and make the rules. But the rabble isn't
falling into line this time, sweetie, and it scares you. I
scare you. So spare me the dreck about altruism and diplomacy. This
is just you trying to keep your little tin throne from going sockeye.
It's been nice talking to you."
She grabs her fins and stalks into the airlock.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Man
Achilles Desjardins couldn't remember the last time he'd had
consensual sex with a real woman. He could, however, remember the
first time he'd refused it:
It was 2046 and he'd just saved the Mediterranean. That's how
N'AmWire was presenting it, anyway. All he'd really done was deduce
the existence of a strange attractor in the Gulf of Cádiz, a
persistent little back-eddy that no one else had bothered to look
for. According to the sims it was small enough to tweak with albedo
dampers; the effects would proliferate through the Strait of
Gibralter and—if the numbers were right—stave off the
collapse of the Med by an easy decade. Or until the Gulf Stream
failed again, whichever came first. It was only a reprieve, not
outright salvation, but it was just what CSIRA needed to make
everyone forget the Baltic fiasco. Besides, nobody ever looked ahead
more than ten years anyway.
So for a while, Achilles Desjardins had been a star. Even Lertzmann
had pretended to like him for the better part of a month, told him he
was fast-tracked for senior status just as soon as they got the
security checks out of the way. Unless he had a bunch of butchered
babies in his past he'd be getting his shots before Hallowe'en.
Hell, he'd probably be getting them even if he did have a
bunch of butchered babies in his past. Background checks were
nothing but empty ritual in the higher ranks of the Patrol; you could
be a serial killer and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference once
Guilt Trip was bubbling in your brain. You'd be just as thoroughly
enslaved to the Greater Good.
Aurora, her name was. She wore the zebra hair that had been
fashionable at the time, and an endearingly-tasteless armload of faux
refugee branding scars. They'd hooked up at some CSIRA soirée
hosted from the far side of the world by the EurAfrican Assembly.
Their jewelry sniffed each other's auras to confirm a mutual interest
(which still meant something, back then), and their path chips
exchanged the usual clean bills of health (which didn't). So they
left the party, dropped three hundred meters from CSIRA's executive
stratosphere to the Sudbury Streets—then another fifty into the
subterranean bowels of Pickering's Pile, where the pathware was
guaranteed hackproof and tested for twice the usual range of STDs to
boot. They gave blood behind a cute little r'n'r couple who broke up
on the spot when one of them tested positive for an exotic trematode
infesting his urinary tract.
Desjardins had yet to acquire most of the tailored chemicals that
would cruise his system in later years; he could still safely imbibe
all manner of tropes and mood-changers. So he and Aurora grabbed a
booth just off the bar while their bloods ran, stroked the little
psychotropic amphibians clambering about in the tabletop terrarium.
Dim green light filtered in from the great underground tank in which
the Pile was immersed, a radium-glow mock-up of an old
nuclear-storage lagoon visible through the plexi walls. After a few
minutes one of the in-house butterflies lit on their table, its
membranous wings sparkling with refracted data: green on all
wavelengths.
"Told you," Aurora said, and kissed his nose.
Pickering's Pile rented fuck-cubbies by the minute. They split five
hours between them.
He fucked her inside and out. Outside, he was the consummate caring
lover. He tongued her nipples, teeth carefully sheathed. He left
trails of kisses from throat to vagina, gently explored every wet
aperture, breath shaky with fevered restraint. Every move
deliberate, every signal unmistakable: he would rather die than hurt
this woman.
Inside, he was tearing her apart. No caresses in
there; he slapped her so hard her fucking head just about
came off. Inside she was screaming. Inside, he beat her until she
didn't have the strength to flinch when the whip came down.
She murmered and sighed sweetly throughout. She remarked on how he
obviously worshipped women, on what a change this made from the usual
rough-and-tumble, on how she didn't know if she belonged on this
pedestal. Desjardins patted himself on the back. He didn't mention
the tiny scars on her back, the telltale little lozenges of fresh
pink skin that spoke of topical anabolics. Evidently Aurora had use
for accellerated healing. Perhaps she had recently escaped from an
abusive relationship. Perhaps he was her sanctuary.
Even better. He imagined some past partner, beating her.
"Oh, fuck it," she said, four hours in. "Just hit
me."
He froze, terrified, betrayed by body language or telepathy or a
lucky guess for all he knew. "What?"
"You're so gentle," Aurora told him. "Let's get
rough."
"You don't—" He had to stifle a surprized laugh. "I
mean, what?"
"Don't look so startled." She come-hithered a smile.
"Haven't you ever smacked a woman before?"
Those were hints, he realised. She was
complaining. And Achilles Desjardins, pattern-matcher
extraordinaire, master of signal-from-noise, had missed it
completely.
"I kind of minored in asphyx," she suggested now. "And
I don't see that belt of yours getting any kind of work-out…"
It was everything he'd ever dreamed of, and hated
himself for. It was his most shameful fantasy come to life. It was
perfect. Oh, you glorious bitch. You are just asking for it,
aren't you? And I'm just the one to give it to you.
Except he wasn't. Suddenly, Achilles Desjardins was as soft as a
dollar.
"You serious?" he asked, hoping she
wouldn't notice, knowing she already had. "I mean—you
want me to hurt you?"
"Achilles the hero." She cocked her head mischieviously.
"Don't get out much, do you?"
"I do okay," he said, defensive despite himself. "But—"
"It's just a scene, kiddo. Nothing radical. I'm not asking you
to kill me or anything."
Too bad. But his own unspoken bravado
didn't fool him for an instant. Achilles Desjardins, closet sadist,
was suddenly scared to death.
"You mean acting," he said. "Silk cords, safe words,
that kinda thing."
She shook her head. "I mean," she said
patiently, "I want to bleed. I want to hurt. I
want you to hurt me, lover."
What's wrong with me? he wondered.
She's just what I've always wanted. I can't believe my luck.
And an instant later: If it is luck...
He was, after all, on the cusp of his life. Background checks were
in progress. Risk assessments were underway. Just below the
surface, the system was deciding whether Achilles Desjardins could be
trusted to daily decide the fate of millions. Surely they already
knew his secret—the mechanics had looked inside his head,
they'd have noticed any missing or damaged wiring. Maybe this was a
test, to see if he could control his impulses. Maybe Guilt Trip
wasn't quite the failsafe they'd told him it was, maybe enough wonky
neurons screwed it up, maybe his baseline depravity was a potential
loophole of some kind. Or maybe it was a lot simpler. Maybe they
just couldn't afford to risk investing too much PR in a hero who
couldn't control inclinations that some of the public might still
find—unpleasant…
Aurora curled her lip and bared her neck. "Come on, kid. Do
me."
She was the glimmer in the eye of every partner
he'd ever had, that hard little twinkle that always seemed to say
Better be careful, you sick twisted piece of shit. One slip and
you're finished. She was six-year-old Penny, broken and bleeding
and promising not to tell. She was his father, standing in a
darkened hallway, staring through him with unreadable eyes that said
I know something about you, son, and you'll never know exactly
what it is…
"Rory," Desjardins said carefully, "have you ever
talked to anyone about this?"
"All the time." She was still smiling, but a sudden
wariness tinged her voice.
"No, I mean someone—you know—"
"Professional." The smile was gone. "Some piece of
corpsy wetware that sucks down my account while telling me that I
don't know my own mind, it's all just low self-esteem and my father
raped me when I was preverbal." She reached for her clothes.
"No, Achilles, I haven't. I'd rather spend my time with people
who accept me for who I am than with misguided assholes who try to
change me into what I'm not." She pulled up her panties. "I
guess you just don't run into those types at official functions any
more."
He tried: "You don't have to go."
He tried: "It was just so unexpected, you know?"
He tried: "It's just, you know, it seems to
disrespectful—"
Aurora sighed. "Kiddo, if you really respected me you'd at
least give me credit for knowing what I like."
"But I like you," he blundered,
free-falling in smoke and flame. "How am I supposed to enjoy
hurting you when—"
"Hey, you think I enjoyed everything I did to
get you off?"
She left him in the cubby with a flaccid penis,
fifty minutes left on the clock and the stunning, humiliating
realization that he was forever trapped within his own disguise.
I'll never let it out, he realised. No matter how much I
want to, no matter who asks me, no matter how safe it seems. I'll
never be sure there isn't an open circuit somewhere. I'll never be
sure it isn't a trap. I'm gonna be undercover for the rest of my
life, I'm too fucking terrified to come out.
His Dad would have been proud. He was a good Catholic boy after all.
But Achilles Desjardins was nothing if not
practised at the art of adaptation. By the time he emerged,
chastened and alone, he was already beginning to rebuild his
defenses. Maybe it was better this way. The biology was
irrefutable, after all: sex was violence, literally, right
down to the neurons. The same synapses lit up whether you fucked or
fought, the same drive to violate and subjugate. It didn't matter
how gentle you were on the outside, it didn't matter how much you
pretended: even the most consensual intercourse was nothing more
than the rape of a victim who'd given up.
If I do all this and have not love, I am as
sounding brass, he thought.
He knew it in the floor of his brain, he knew it
in the depths of his id. Sadism was hardwired, and sex—sex was
more than violent. It was disrespect. There was no need to
inflict it on another human being, here in the middle of the
twenty-first century. There was no right to. Especially not
for monsters with broken switches. He had a home sensorium that
could satify any lust he could imagine, serve up virtual victims at
such high rez that even he might be fooled.
There were other advantages, too. Never again the
elaborate courtship rituals that he always seemed to fuck up at.
Never again the fear of infection, the ludicrous efforts
to romanticise path scans and pass blood work off as foreplay. Never
again that hard twinkle in your victim's eyes, maybe knowing.
He had it worked out. Hell, he had a new Paradigm of Life.
From now on, Achilles Desjardins would be a civilised man. He would
inflict his vile passions on machinery, not flesh—and he would
save himself a shitload of embarrassment in the bargain. Aurora had
been for the best, a narrow escape in the nick of time. Head full of
bad wiring in that one, no doubt about it. Pain and pleasure centers
all crosswired.
He didn't need to mix it up
with a freak like that.
Fire
Drill
She wakes up lost at sea.
She's not sure what called her back, exactly—she remembers a
gentle push, as if someone was nudging her awake—yet she's
perfectly alone out here. That was the whole point of the exercise.
She could have slept anywhere in the trailer park, but she needed the
solitude. So she swam out past Atlantis, past the habs and the
generators, past the ridges and fissures that claw the neighborhood.
Finally she arrived here, at this distant little outcropping of
pumice and polymetallics, and fell into wide-eyed sleep.
Only now something has nudged her awake, and she has lost her
bearings.
She pulls the sonar pistol off her thigh and sweeps the darkness.
After a few seconds a fuzzy metropolitan echo comes back, just barely
teasing the left edge of her sweep. She takes more direct aim and
fires again. Atlantis and its suburbs come back dead center.
And a harder echo, smaller, nearer. Closing.
It's not an intercept course. A few more pings resolve a vector
tracking past to starboard. Whoever it is probably doesn't even
know she's here—or didn't, until she let loose with sonar.
They're moving pretty damned fast for someone without a squid.
Curious, Clarke moves to intercept. She keeps her headlamp low,
barely bright enough to tell substrate from seawater. The mud
scrolls by like a treadmill. Pebbles and the occasional brittle star
accent the monotony.
The bow wave catches her just before the body does. A shoulder rams
into her side, pushes her into the bottom; mud billows up around her.
A fin slaps Clarke in the face. She grabs blindly through the
zeroed viz and catches hold of an arm.
"What the fuck!"
The arm yanks out of her grasp, but her expletive seems to have had
some effect. The thrashing stops, at least. The muddy clouds
continue to swirl, but by now it's all inertia.
"Who..." It's a rough,
grating sound, even for a vocoder.
"It's Lenie." She brightens her headlamp; a billion
suspended particles blind her in bright fog. She fins up into
clearer water and points her beam at the bottom.
Something moves down there. "Shiiit...lights
down..."
"Sorry." She dims the lamp. "Rama? That you?"
Bhanderi rises from the murk. "Lenie."
A mechanical whisper. "Hi."
She supposes she's lucky he still recognizes
her. Hell, she's lucky he can still talk. It's not just the
skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It's not just the bones
that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is
pretty much a writeoff. You let the abyss stare into you long enough
and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in
running water. Clarke imagines the fissures of the brain smoothing
out over time, devolving back to some primordial fish-state more
suited to their chosen habitat.
Rama Bhanderi isn't that far gone yet, though. He still even comes
inside occasionally.
"What's the rush?" Clarke buzzes at him. She doesn't
really expect an answer.
She gets one, though: "ru...dopamine,
maybe...Epi..."
It clicks after a second: dopamine rush.
Is he still human enough to deliver bad puns? "No, Rama. I
mean, why the hurry?"
He hangs beside her like a black wraith, barely
visible in the dim ember of her headlamp. "Ah...ah...I'm
not...." his voice trails off.
"Boom," he says after a
moment. "Blew it up. Waayyyy too bright."
A nudge, she remembers. Enough to wake her. "Blew what? Who?"
"Are you real?" he asks distantly. "...I...think
you're a histamine glitch..."
"It's Lenie, Rama. For real. What blew up?"
"...acetylcholine, maybe..."
His hand passes back and forth in front of his face. "Only
I'm not cramping..."
This is useless.
"...don't like her any more,"
Bhanderi buzzes softly. "And he chased me..."
Something tightens in her throat. She moves towards him. "Who?
Rama, what—"
"Back off," he grates. "I'm
all...territorial..."
"Sorry...I..."
Bhanderi turns and fins away. She starts after him and stops,
realizing: there's another way.
She brightens her lamp. The muddy storm front still hangs beneath
her, just off the bottom. It won't settle for hours in this dense,
sluggish water.
Neither will the trails that lead to it.
One of them is hers: a narrow muddy contrail
kicked into suspension as she arrowed in from the east. The other
trail extends back along a bearing of 345°.
Clarke follows it.
She's not heading for Atlantis, she soon
realizes. Bhanderi's trail veers to port, along a line that should
keep her well off the southwest shoulder of the complex. There's not
much along that route, as far as Clarke can remember. Maybe a
woodpile, one of several caches of prefab parts scattered about in
anticipation of future expansion, back when the corpses first
arrived. Sure enough, the water ahead begins to lighten. Clarke
douses her own beam and sonars the brightness ahead. A jumble of
hard Euclidean echoes bounce back, all from objects significantly
larger than a human body.
She kicks forward. The diffuse glow resolves into four point
sources: sodium floods, one at each corner of the woodpile. Stacked
slabs of plastic and biosteel lie on pallets within the lit area.
Curved slices of habhull lay piled on the substrate like great nested
clamshells. Larger shapes loom in the murky distance: storage
tanks, heat exchangers, the jackets of emergency reactors never
assembled.
The distance is murky, Clarke realizes.
Far murkier than usual.
She fins up into the water column and coasts above the industrial
subscape. Something leans against the light like a soft dark wall,
just past the furthest lamppost. She's been expecting it ever since
she spoke to Bhanderi. Now it spreads out ahead of her in silent
confirmation, a great billowing cloud of mud blown off the bottom and
lingering, virtually weightless, in the aftermath of some recent
explosion.
Of course, the corpses stockpiled blasting caps along with everything
else...
Something tickles the corner of Clarke's eye,
some small disarray somehow out of place among the organized chaos
directly below. Two slabs of hull plating have been pulled from
their stacks and laid out on the mud. Buckshot scatters of acne
blemish their surfaces. Clarke arcs down for a closer look. No,
those aren't innocuous clots of mud or a recent colony of benthic
invertebrates. They're holes, punched through three
centimeters of solid biosteel. Their edges are smooth, melted and
instantly congealed by some intense heat source. Carbon scoring
around each breach conveys a sense of bruising, of empty eyes
battered black.
Clarke goes cold inside.
Someone's gearing up for the finals.
Family
Values
Ever since the founding of Atlantis, Jakob and Jutta Holtzbrink have
kept to themselves. It wasn't always thus. Back on the surface,
they were flamboyant even by corpse standards. They seemed to
delight in the archaic contrast they presented to the world at large;
their history together predates the Millennium, they were married so
very long ago that the ceremony actually took place in a church.
Jutta even took her husband's surname. Women did things like that
back then, Rowan remembers. Sacrificed little bits of their own
identity for the good of the Patriarchy, or whatever it was called.
An old-fashioned couple, and proud of it. When they appeared in
public—which they did often—they appeared together, and
they stood out.
Public doesn't exist here in Atlantis, of course. Public was
left behind to fend for itself. Atlantis was the crème de la
crème from the very beginning, only movers and shakers and
those worker bees who cared for them, deep in the richest parts of
the hive.
Down here, Jutta and Jakob don't get out much. The escape changed
them. It changed everyone of course, humbled the mighty, rubbed
their noses in their own failures even though, goddammit, they still
made the best of it, adapted even to Doomsday, saw the market in
lifeboats and jumped on board before anyone else. These days, mere
survival is a portfolio to take pride in. But the Holtzbrincks have
not availed themselves of even that half-assed and self-serving
consolation. ßehemoth
hasn't touched them in the flesh, not a single particle, and yet
somehow it seems to have made them almost physically smaller.
They spend most of their time in their suite, plugged into virtual
environments far more compelling than the confines of this place
could ever be. They come out to get their meals, of course—in-suite
food production is a thing of the past, ever since the rifters
confiscated "their share" of the resource base—but
even then, they retreat back into their quarters with their trays of
Cycler food and hydroponic produce, to eat behind closed doors. It's
a minor and inoffensive quirk, this sudden desire for privacy from
their peers. Patricia Rowan never gave it much thought until that
day in the Comm Cave when Ken Lubin, in search of clues, had asked
What about the fish? Perhaps they hitched a ride. Are the larvae
planktonic?
And Jerry Seger, impatient with this turncoat killer posing as a deep
thinker, dismissed him as she would a child: If it had been able
to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the
world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.
Maybe it would have, Rowan muses now.
The Holtzbrincks made their mark in pharmaceuticals, stretching back
even to the days before gengineering. They've kept up with the
times, of course. When the first hydrothermal ecosystems were
discovered, back before the turn of the century, an earlier
generation of Holtzbrincks had been there—reveling in new
Domains, sifting through cladograms of freshly-discovered species,
new microbes, new enzymes built to work at temperatures and pressures
long thought impossibly hostile to any form of life. They catalogued
the cellular machinery ticking sluggishly in bedrock kilometers deep,
germs living so slowly they hadn't divided since the French
Revolution. They tweaked the sulfur-reducers that choked to death on
oxygen, coaxed them into devouring oil slicks and curing strange new
kinds of cancer. The Holtzbrink Empire, it was said, held patents on
half the Archaebacteria.
Now Patricia Rowan sits across from Jakob and Jutta in their living
room, and wonders what else they might have patented in those last
days on earth.
"I'm sure you've heard the latest," she says. "Jerry
just confirmed it. ßehemoth's
made it to Impossible Lake."
Jakob nods, a birdlike gesture including shoulders as well as head.
But his words carry denial: "No, I don't think so. I saw the
stats. Too salty." He licks his lips, stares at the floor.
"ßehemoth wouldn't like
it."
Jutta puts a comforting hand on his knee.
He's a very old man, his conquests all in the past. He was born too
early, grew too old for eternal youth. By the time the tweaks were
available—every defective base pair snipped out, every telomere
reinforced—his body had already been wearing out for the better
part of a century. There's a limit to how much you can fix so late
in the game.
Rowan gently explains. "Not in the Lake itself, Jakob.
Somewhere nearby. One of the hot vents."
He nods and nods and will not look at her.
Rowan glances at Jutta; Jutta looks back, helplessness on her face.
Rowan presses on: "As you know, this wasn't supposed to happen.
We studied the bug, we studied the oceanography, we chose this place
very carefully. But we missed something."
"Goddamn Gulf Stream shut down," the old man says. His
voice is stronger than his body, although not by much. "They
said it would happen. Change all the currents. Turn England into
goddamn Siberia."
Rowan nods. "We've looked at a lot of different scenarios.
Nothing seems to fit. I think maybe there might be something about
ßehemoth itself that we're
missing." She leans forward slightly. "Your people did a
lot of prospecting out around the Rim of Fire, didn’t they?
Back in the thirties?"
"Sure. Everyone was. Those bloody Archaea, it was the gold
rush of the Twenty-First."
"Your people spent a lot of time on Juan de Fuca back then.
They never encountered ßehemoth?"
"Mmmm." Jakob Holtzbrink shakes his head. His shoulders
don't move.
"Jakob, you know me. You know I've always been a staunch
supporter of corporate confidentiality. But we're all on the same
side here, we're all in the same boat so to speak. If you know
anything, anything at all…"
"Oh, Jakob never did any of the actual research," Jutta
interjects. "Surely you know that, he was really more of a
people person."
"Yes, of course. But he also took a real interest in the
cutting edge. He was always quite excited about new discoveries,
remember?" Rowan laughs softly. "There was a time back
there when we thought the man practically lived in a
submarine."
"I just took the tours, you know. Jutta's right, I didn't do
any of the research. That was the gel-jocks, Jarvis and that lot."
For the first time, Jakob meets Rowan's eye. "Lost that whole
team when ßehemoth broke
out, you know. CSIRA was conscripting our people right across the
globe. Just waltzed right in, drafted them out from under our
noses." He snorts. "Goddamn greater good."
Jutta squeezes his knee. They glance at each other; she smiles. He
puts his hand over hers.
His eyes drift back to the floor. Very gently, he begins nodding
again.
"Jakob wasn't close to the research teams," Jutta explains.
"Scientists aren't all that good with people, as you know. It
would be a disaster to let some of those people act as spokespersons,
but they still resented the way Jakob presented their findings
sometimes."
Rowan smiles patiently. "The thing is, Jakob, I've been
thinking. About ßehemoth,
and how old it is—"
"Oldest goddamn life on the planet," Jakob says. "The
rest of us, we just dropped in later. Martian meteor or something.
Bloody ßehemoth, it's the
only thing that actually started here."
"But that's the thing, isn't it? ßehemoth
doesn't just predate other life, it predates photosynthesis. It
predates oxygen. It's over four billion years old. And all
the other really ancient bugs we've found, the Archaebacteria and the
Nanoliths and so forth, they're still anaerobes to this day. You
only find them in reducing environments. And yet here's ßehemoth,
even older, and oxygen doesn't bother it at all."
Jacob Holtzbrink stops rocking.
"Smart little bug," he says. "Keeps up with the
times. Has those, what do you call them, like Pseudomonas
has—"
"Blachford genes. Change their own mutation rate under stress."
"Right. Right. Blachford genes." Jakob brings one hand
up, runs it over a sparsely-haired and liver-spotted scalp. "It
adapted. Adapted to oxygen, and adapted to living inside fishes, and
now it's adapting to every other goddamn nook and cranny on the
goddamn planet."
"Only it never adapted to low temperature and high salinity in
combination," Rowan observes. "It never adapted to the
single biggest habitat on Earth. The deep sea stumped it for
billions of years. The deep sea would still be stumping it if
the Channer outbreak hadn't happened."
"What are you saying?" Jutta wonders, a sudden slight
sharpness in her voice. Her husband says nothing.
Rowan takes a breath. "All our models are based on the
assumption that ßehemoth has
been in its present form for hundreds of millions of years. The
advent of oxygen, hypotonic host bodies—all that happened in
the deep, deep Precambrian. And we know that not much has changed
since then, Blachford genes or no Blachford genes—because if it
had, ßehemoth would have
ruled the world long before now. We know it can't disperse through
the abyss because it hasn't dispersed through the abyss, in
all the millions of years it's had to try. And when someone suggests
that maybe it hitched a ride in the ichthyoplankton, we dismiss them
out of hand not because anybody's actually checked—who
had the time, the way things were going?—but because if it
could disperse that way, it would have dispersed that
way. Millions of years ago."
Jakob Holtzbrink clears his throat.
Rowan lays it on the table: "What if ßehemoth
hasn't had millions of years? What if it's only had a few decades?"
"Well, that's—" Jutta begins.
"Then we're not sure of anything any more, are we? Maybe we're
not talking about a few isolated relicts here and there. Maybe we're
talking about epicenters. And maybe it's not that ßehemoth
isn't able to spread out, but that it's only just now got
started."
That avian rocking again, and the same denial: "Nah. Nah.
It's old. RNA template, mineralized walls. Big goddamned
pores all over it, that's why it can't hack cold seawater.
Leaks like a sieve." A bubble of saliva appears at the corner
of his mouth; Jutta absently reaches up to brush it away. Jakob
raises his hand irritably, pre-empting her. Her hands drop into her
lap.
"The pyranosal sequences. Primitive. Unique. That woman, that
doctor: Jerenice. She found the same thing. It's old."
"Yes," Rowan agrees, "it's old. Maybe something
changed it, just recently."
Jakob's rubbing his hands, agitated. "What, some mutation?
Lucky break? Damn unlucky for the rest of us."
"Maybe someone changed it," Rowan says.
There. It's out.
"I hope you're not suggesting," Jutta begins, and falls
silent.
Rowan leans forward and lays her hand on Jakob's knee. "I know
how it was out there, thirty, forty years ago. It was a gold rush
mentality, just as you said. Everybody and their organcloner was
setting up labs on the rift, doing all kinds of in situ work—"
"Of course it was in situ, you ever try to duplicate
those conditions in a lab—"
"But your people were at the forefront. You not only had your
own research, you had your eye on everyone else's. You were too good
a businessman to do it any other way. And so I'm coming to you,
Jakob. I'm not making any claims or accusing anyone of anything, do
you understand? I just think that if anyone in Atlantis might have
any ideas about anything that might have happened out there, you'd be
the one. You're the expert, Jakob. Can you tell me anything?"
Jutta shakes her head. "Jacob doesn't know anything, Patricia.
Neither of us knows anything. And I do take your
implication."
Rowan keeps her eyes locked on the old man. He stares at the floor,
he stares through the floor, through the deck plating and the
underlying pipes and conduits, through the wires and fullerene and
biosteel, through seawater and oozing, viscous rock into some place
that she can only imagine. When he speaks, his voice seems to come
from there.
"What do you want to know?"
"Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might
want to take an organism like ßehemoth,
and tweak it?"
"More than you can count," says the distant voice. This
frail body it's using scarcely seems animate.
"Such as?"
"Targeted delivery. Drugs, genes, replacement organelles. Its
cell wall, you've never seen anything like it. Nothing has. No
immune response to worry about, slips past counterintrusion enzymes
like they were blind and deaf. Target cell takes it right in, lyses
the wall, COD. Like a biodegradable buckyball."
"What else?"
"The ultimate pep pill. Under the right conditions the thing
pumps out ATP so fast you could roll a car over single-handed. Makes
mitochondria look like yesterday's sockeye. Soldier with ßehemoth
in his cells might even give an exoskel a run for the money, if you
feed him enough."
"And if ßehemoth were
tweaked properly," Rowan amends.
"Aye," whispers the old man. "There's the rub."
Rowan chooses her words very carefully. "Might there have been
any…less precise applications? MAD machines? Industrial
terrorism?"
"You mean, like what it does now? No. W—someone would
have to be blind and stupid and insane all at once to design
something like that."
"But you'd have to increase the reproductive rate quite a bit,
wouldn't you? To make it economically viable."
He nods, his eyes still on far-focus. "Those deep-rock
dwellers, they live so slow you're lucky if they divide once a
decade."
"And that would mean they'd have to eat a lot more, wouldn't it?
To support the increased growth rate."
"Of course. Child knows that much. But that's not why
you'd do it, nobody would do that because they wanted
something that could—it would just be a, an unavoidable—"
"A side effect," Jutta suggests.
"A side effect," he repeats. His voice hasn't changed. It
still rises, calm and distant, from the center of the earth. But
there are tears on Jakob Holtzbrinck's face.
"So nobody did it deliberately. They were aiming for something
else, and things just—went wrong. Is that what you're saying?"
"You mean, hypothetically?" The corners of his mouth lift
and crinkle in some barely-discernible attempt at a smile. A tear
runs down one of those fleshy creases and drops off his chin.
"Yes, Jakob. Hypothetically."
The head bobs up and down.
"Is there anything we can do? Anything we haven't tried?"
Jakob shakes his head. "I'm just a corpse. I don't know."
She stands. The old man stares down into his own thoughts. His wife
stares up at Rowan.
"What he's told you," she says. "Don't take it the
wrong way."
"What do you mean?"
"He didn't do this, any more than you did. He's no worse than
the rest of you."
Rowan inclines her head. "I know, Fran."
She excuses herself. The last thing she sees, as the hatch seals
them off, is Fran Holtzbrink sliding a lucid dreamer over her
husband's bowed head.
There's nothing to be done about it now. No point in
recriminations, no shortage of fingers pointing in any direction.
Still, she's glad she paid the visit. Even grateful, in an odd way.
It's a selfish gratitude, but it will have to do. Patricia Rowan
takes whatever solace she can in the fact that the buck doesn't stop
with her any more. It doesn't even stop with Lenie Clarke, Mermaid
of the Apocalypse. Rowan starts down the pale blue corridor of
Res-D, glancing one more time over her shoulder.
The buck stops back there.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Free Man
The technical term was fold catastrophe.
Seen on a graph it was a tsunami in cross-section, the smooth roof of
an onrushing wave reaching forward, doubling back beneath the crest
and plummeting in a smooth glassy arc to some new, low-energy
equilibrium that left no stone standing on another.
Seen on the ground it was a lot messier: power grids failing;
life-support and waste-management systems seizing up; thoroughfares
choked with angry, frenzied mobs pushed one meal past revolution.
The police in their exoskels had long since retreated from street
level; pacification botflies swarmed overhead, scything through the
mobs with gas and infrasound.
There was also a word for the leading edge of the wave, that chaotic
inflection point where the trajectory reversed itself before
crashing: breakpoint. Western N'AmPac had pulled through that
hairpin turn sometime during the previous thirty-four hours;
everything west of the Rockies was pretty much a writeoff. CSIRA had
slammed down every kind of barrier to keep it contained; people,
goods, electrons themselves had been frozen in transit. To all
intents and purposes the world ended at the Cordillera. Only
'lawbreakers could reach through that barrier now, to do what they
could.
It wouldn't be enough. Not this time.
Of course, the system had been degrading for decades. Centuries,
even. Desjardins owed his very job to that vibrant synergism between
entropy and human stupidity; without it, damage control wouldn't be
the single largest industry on the planet. Eventually everything had
been bound to fall apart, anyone with a pair of eyes and an IQ even
slightly above room temperature knew that. But there'd been no
ironclad reason why it had had to happen quite as quickly as it had.
They could have bought another decade or two, a little more time for
those who still had faith in human ingenuity to go on deluding
themselves.
But the closer you got to breakpoint, the harder
it was to suture the cracks back together. Even equilibria were
unstable, so close to the precipice. Forget butterflies: with a
planet teetering this close to the edge, the fluttering of an aphid's
wings might be enough to push it over.
It was 2051, and it was Achilles Desjardins sworn duty to squash
Lenie Clarke like an insect of whatever kind.
He watched her handiwork spread across across the
continent like a web of growing cracks shattering the surface of a
frozen lake. His inlays gulped data from a hundred feeds: confirmed
and probable sightings over the previous two months, too stale to be
any use in a manhunt but potential useful for predicting the next
ßehemoth outbreak. Memes
and legends of the Meltdown Madonna, far more numerous and
metastatic—a reproductive strategy for swarms of virtual
wildlife Desjardins had only just discovered and might never fully
understand. Reality and Legend in some inadvertant alliance,
ßehemoth blooming everywhere
they converged; firestorms and blackouts coming up from behind, an
endless ongoing toll of innocent lives preempted for the greater
good.
It was a lie, Desjardins knew. N'Am was past
breakpoint despite all those draconian measures. It would take a
while for the whole system to shake out; it was a long drop from
crest to trough. But Desjardins was nothing if not adept at reading
the numbers. He figured two weeks—three at the most—before
the rest of the continent followed N'AmPac into anarchy.
A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a fresh
riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave their
lives in defence of glassy spires and luxury enclaves—defeated
not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the sheer weight
of flesh against their muzzles. The weapons died of exhaustion,
disappeared beneath a tide of live bodies scrambling over dead ones.
The crowd breached the gates as he watched, screaming in triumph.
Thirty thousand voices in superposition: a keening sea, its
collective voice somehow devoid of any humanity. It sounded almost
mechanical. It sounded like the wind.
Desjardins killed the channel before the mob learned what he already
knew: the spires were empty, the corpses they'd once sheltered long
since gone to ground.
Or to sea, rather.
A light hand brushed against his back. He turned, startled; Alice
Jovellanos was at his shoulder. Desjardins shot a furtive glance
back to his board when he saw who was with her; Rome burned there on
a dozen insets. He reached for the cutoff.
"Don't." Lenie Clarke slipped the visor from her face and
stared at the devastation with eyes as blank as eggshells. Her face
was calm and expressionless, but when she spoke again, her voice
trembled.
"Leave it on."
He had first met her two weeks before. He'd been
tracking her for months, searching the archives, delving into her
records, focusing his superlative pattern-matching skills on the
cryptic, incomplete jigsaw called Lenie Clarke. But those
assembled pieces had revealled more than a brood sac for the end
of the world, as Rowan had put it. They'd revealled a woman
whose entire childhood had been pretense, programmed to ends over
which she'd had no awareness or control. All this time she had been
trying to get home, trying to rediscover her own past.
Ken Lubin, slaved to his own brand of Guilt Trip,
had been trying to kill her. Desjardins had tried to get in his way;
at the time it had seemed the only decent thing to do. It
seemed odd, in retrospect, that such an act of kindness could have
been triggered by his own awakening psychopathy.
His rescue attempt had not gone well. Lubin had intercepted him
before Clarke even showed up in Sault-Saint Marie. Desjardins had
sat out the rest of the act tied to a chair in a pitch-black room,
half the bones in his face broken.
Surprisingly, it had not been Ken Lubin who had done that to him.
And yet somehow they were now all on what might
loosely be called the same side: he and Alice and
Kenny and Lenie, all working together under the banner of grayness
and moral ambiguity and righteous vendetta. Spartacus had freed
Lubin from Guilt Trip as it had freed Desjardins. The 'lawbreaker
had to admit to a certain sympatico with the taciturn assassin, even
now; he knew how it felt to be wrenched back into a position of
genuine culpability, after years of letting synthetic
neurotransmitters make all the tough decisions. Crippling anxiety.
Guilt.
At first, anyway. Now the guilt was fading. Now there was only
fear.
From a thousand directions the world cried out in
desperate need of his attention. It was his sworn duty to offer it:
to provide salvation or, failing that, to bail until the last piece
of flotsam sank beneath the waves. Not so long ago it would have
been more than a duty. It would have been a compulsion, a drive,
something he could not prevent himself from doing. At this
very moment he should be dispatching emergency teams, rerouting vital
supplies, allocating lifters and botflies to reinforce the weakening
quarantine.
Fuck it, he thought, and killed the feeds.
Somehow he sensed Lenie Clarke flinching behind him as the display
went dark.
"Did you get a fix?" Jovellanos asked.
She'd taken a shot at it herself, but she'd only been a senior
'lawbreaker for a week: hardly enough time to get used to her
inlays, let alone develop the seventh sense that Desjardins had honed
over half a decade. The sharpest fix she'd been able to get on the
vanished corpses was somewhere in the North Atlantic.
Desjardins nodded and reached out to the main
board. Clarke's onyx reflection moved up behind him, staring back
from the dark surface. Desjardins suppressed the urge to look over
his shoulder. She was right here in his cubby: just a girl,
half his size. A skinny little K-selector that half the world wanted
to kill and the other half wanted to die for.
Without even having met her, he had thrown away everything to come to
her aid. When he'd finally met her face-to-face, she'd scared him
more than Lubin had. But something had happened to Clarke since
then. The ice-queen affect hadn't changed at all, but something
behind it seemed—smaller, somehow. Almost fragile.
Alice didn't seem to notice, though. She'd been
been the rifters's self-appointed mascot from the moment she'd seen a
chance to get back at the Evil Corporate Oligarchy, or
whatever she was calling it this week.
Desjardins opened a window on the board: a false-color satcam
enhance of open ocean, a multihued plasma of color-coded contours.
"I thought of that," Alice piped up,
"but even if you could make out a heatprint against the
noise, the circulation's so slow down there—"
"Not temperature," Desjardins interrupted. "Turbidity."
"Even so, the circulation—"
He shot her a look. "Shut up and learn, okay?"
She fell silent, the hurt obvious in her eyes. She'd been walking on
eggshells ever since she'd admitted to infecting him.
Desjardins turned back to the board. "There's a lot of
variation over time, of course. Everything from whitecaps to squid
farts." He tapped an icon; layers of new data superimposed
themselves atop the baseline, a translucent parfait. "You'd
never get a track with a single snapshot, no matter how fine the rez.
I had to look at mean values over a three-month period."
The layers merged. The amorphous plasma disappeared; hard-edged
contrails and splotches condensed from that mist.
Desjardins's fingers played across the board. "Now cancel
everything that shows up in the NOAA database," —A myriad
luminous scars faded into transparency— "Gulf Stream
leftovers," —a beaded necklace from Florida to England
went dark—"and any listed construction sites or upwells
inconsistent with minimum allowable structure size."
A few dozen remaining pockmarks disappeared. The North Atlantic was
dark and featureless but for a single bright blemish, positioned
almost exactly in its center.
"So that's it," Clarke murmered.
Desjardins shook his head. "We still have to correct for
lateral displacement during ascent. Midwater currents and the like."
He called forth algorithms: the blemish jiggled to the northwest
and stopped.
39°20'14"N
25°16'03"W, said
the display.
"Dead northeast of the Atlantis Fracture Zone," Desjardins
said. "Lowest vorticity in the whole damn basin."
"You said turbidity." Clarke's
reflection, a bright bullseye in its chest, shook its head. "But
if there's no vorticity—"
"Bubbles," Alice exclaimed, clueing in.
Desjardins nodded. "You don't build a retirement home for a few
thousand people without doing some serious welding. That's gonna
generate sagans of waste gas. Hence, turbidity."
Clarke was still skeptical. "We welded at Channer. The
pressure crushed the bubbles down to nothing as soon as they formed."
"For point-welding, sure. But these guys must be fusing whole
habs together: higher temperatures, greater outgassing, more thermal
inertia." Finally, he turned to face her. "We're not
talking about a boiling cauldron here. It's just fine fizz by the
time it hits the surface. Not even visible to the naked eye. But
it's enough to reduce light penetration, and that's what we're seeing
right here."
He tapped the tumor on the board.
Clarke stared at it a moment, her face expressionless. "Anybody
else know about this?" she asked finally.
Desjardins shook his head. "Nobody even knows I was working on
it."
"You wouldn't mind keeping it that way?"
He snorted. "Lenie, I don't even want to
think about what would happen if anyone found out I was
spending time on this. And not that you're unwelcome or anything,
but the fact that you guys are even hanging around out here is a
major risk. Do you—"
"It's taken care of, Killjoy," Alice said softly. "I
told you. I catch on fast."
She did, too. Promoted in the wake of his
desertion, it had taken her only a few hours to figure out that some
plus-thousand corpses had quietly slipped off the face of the earth.
It had taken her less than two days to get him back onto the CSIRA
payroll, his mysterious absence obscured by alibis and bureaucratic
chaff. She'd started the game with an unfair advantage, of course:
preinfected with Spartacus, Guilt Trip had never affected her. She'd
begun her tenure with all the powers of a senior 'lawbreaker and none
of the restraints. Of course she had the wherewithall to get
Lenie Clarke into CSIRA's inner sanctum.
But even now, Spartacus bubbled in Desjardins's head like acid,
eating away at the chains Guilt Trip had forged. It had already
freed his conscience; soon, he very much feared, Spartacus would
destroy it utterly.
He looked at Alice. You did this to me, he
thought, and examined the feelings the accusation provoked. There
had been anger at first, a sense of profound betrayal. Something
bordering on hatred, even.
Now he wasn't sure any more. Alice—Alice was a complication,
his undoing and his salvation all rolled into one willowy chassis.
She had saved his ass, for now. She had information that could be
vital, for later. It seemed like a good idea to play along, for the
time being at least. As for the rifters, the sooner he helped them
on their way the sooner they'd drop out of the equation.
And all the while, some persistent splinter in the back of his mind
contemplated the options that might soon be available to a man
without a leash…
Alice Jovellanos offered him a tentative smile, ever hopeful.
Achilles Desjardins smiled back.
"You catch on fast," he repeated. "That you do."
Hopefully not fast enough.
Confessional
Jerenice Seger wants to make an announcement.
She won't make it to Clarke or Lubin. She won't even tell them what
it's about. "I don't want there to be any misunderstanding,"
she says. "I want to address your whole community." Her
pixelated likeness stares out from the board, grimly defiant.
Patricia Rowan stands in the background; she doesn't look pleased
either.
"Fine," Lubin says at last, and kills the connection.
Seger, Clarke reflects. Seger's making the announcement.
Not Rowan. "Medical news," she says aloud.
"Bad news." Lubin replies, sealing up his gauntlets.
Clarke sets the board for LFAM broadband. "Better summon the
troops, I guess."
Lubin's heading down the ladder. "Ring the chimes for me, will
you?"
"Why? Where you going?" The chimes serve to
heads-up those rifters who leave their vocoders offline, but Lubin
usually boots them up himself.
"I want to check something out," he says.
The airlock hisses shut behind him.
Of course, even at their present numbers they can't all fit into the
nerve hab at once.
It might have been easier if rifter modules followed the rules.
They've been designed to interconnect, each self-contained sphere
puckered by six round mouths two meters across. Each can lock lips
with any other, or with pieces of interposing corridor—and so
the whole structure grows, lumpy and opportunistic, like a great
skeleton of long bones and empty skulls assembling itself across the
seabed. That's the idea, anyway. A few basic shapes, infinitely
flexible in combination.
But no. Here the hab modules sprout like solitary mushrooms across
the substrate. Rifters live alone, or in pairs, or whatever social
assemblage fits the moment. A crowd of rifters is almost an
oxymoron. The nerve habs are among the largest structures in the
whole trailer park, and they only hold a dozen or so on their main
decks. Given the territorial perimeters that most rifters develop in
the abyss, it doesn't hold them comfortably.
It's already getting congested by the time Clarke returns from
priming the windchimes. Chen and Cramer converge on her tail as she
glides up into the airlock. On the wet deck, Abra Cheung ascends the
ladder ahead of her. Clarke follows her up—the airlock cycling
again at her back—into a knot of eight or nine people who have
arrived during her absence.
Grace Nolan's at the center of the action, bellied up to the Comm
panel. Sonar shows a dozen others still en route. Clarke wonders
idly if the hab's scrubbers are up to this kind of load. Maybe there
is no announcement. Maybe Seger's just trying to get them to
overdose on their own CO2.
"Hi." Kevin Walsh appears at her side, hovering hopefully
at the edge of her public-comfort perimeter. He seems back to his
old self. In front of them, Gomez turns and notices Clarke. "Hey,
Len. News from the corpses, I hear."
Clarke nods.
"You're tight with those assholes. Know what it's about?"
She shakes her head. "Seger's the mouthpiece, though. I figure
something medical."
"Yeah. Probably." Gomez sucks air softly through stained
teeth. "Anybody seen Julia? She should be here for this."
Cheung purses her lips. "What, after spending the last week and
a half with Gene? You can breathe that air if you want."
"I saw her out by one of the woodpiles not too long ago,"
Hopkinson volunteers.
"How'd she seem?"
"You know Julia. A black hole with tits."
"I mean physically. She seem sick at all?"
"How would I know? You think she was out there in a bra and
panties?" Hopkinson shrugs. "Didn't say anything,
anyway."
Faintly, through bulkheads and conversation, the cries of tortured
rock.
"Okay then," Nolan says from the board. "Enough
dicking around. Let's rack 'em up and shoot 'em down." She
taps an icon on the panel. "You're on, Seger. Make it good."
"Is everyone there?" Seger's voice.
"Of course not. We can't all fit into a hab."
"I'd rather—"
"You're hooked into all the LFAM channels. Anyone within five
hundred meters can hear you just fine."
"Well." A pause, the silence of someone deciding how best
to proceed across a minefield. "As you know, Atlantis has been
quarantined for several days now. Ever since we learned about
ßehemoth. Now we've all had
the retrofits, so there was every reason to expect that this wasn't a
serious problem. The quarantine was merely a precaution."
"Was," Nolan notes. Downstairs the airlock is cycling
again.
Seger forges on. "We analyzed the—the samples that Ken
and Lenie brought back from Impossible Lake, and everything we found
was consistent with ßehemoth.
Same peculiar RNA, same stereoisomerization of—"
"Get to the point," Nolan snaps.
"Grace?" Clarke says. Nolan looks at her.
"Shut up and let the woman finish," Clarke suggests. Nolan
snorts and turns away.
"Anyway," Seger continues after a moment, "the results
were perfectly straightforward, so we incinerated the infected
remains as a containment measure. After digitizing them, of course."
"Digitizing?" That's Chen.
"A high-res destructive scan, enough to let us simulate the
sample right down to the molecular level," Seger explains.
"Model tissues give us much of the same behavior as a wet
sample, but without the attendant risks."
Charley Garcia climbs into view. The bulkheads seem to sneak a
little closer with each new arrival. Clarke swallows, the air
thickening around her.
Seger coughs. "I was working with one of those models and,
well, I noticed an anomaly. I believe that the fish you brought back
from Impossible Lake was infected with ßehemoth."
Exchanged glances amongst a roomful of blank eyes. Off in the
distance, Lubin's windchimes manage a final reedy moan and fall
silent, the reservoir exhausted.
"Well, of course," Nolan says after a moment. "So
what?"
"I'm, um, I'm using infected in the pathological sense,
not the symbiotic one." Seger clears her throat. "What I
mean to say is—"
"It was sick," Clarke says. "It was sick
with ßehemoth."
Dead air for a moment. Then: "I'm afraid that's right. If Ken
hadn't killed it first, I think ßehemoth
might have."
"Oh, fuck," someone says softly. The epithet hangs there
in a room gone totally silent. Downstairs, the airlock gurgles.
"So it was sick," Dale Creasy says after a moment. "So
what?"
Garcia shakes his head. "Dale, don't you remember how this
fucker works?"
"Sure. Breaks your enzymes apart to get at the sulfur or
something. But we're immune."
"We're immune," Garcia says patiently, "because we've
got special genes that make enzymes too stiff for ßehemoth
to break. And we got those genes from deepwater fish, Dale."
Creasy's still working it through. Someone else whispers "Shit
shit shit," in a shaky voice. Downstairs, some latecomer's
climbing the ladder; whoever it is stumbles on the first rung.
"I'm afraid Mr. Garcia's right," Seger says. "If the
fish down here are vulnerable to this bug, then we probably are too."
Clarke shakes her head. "But—are you saying this thing
isn't ßehemoth after
all? It's something else?"
A sudden commotion around the ladder; the assembled rifters are
pulling back as though it were electrified. Julia Friedman staggers
up into view, her face the color of basalt. She stands on the deck,
clinging to the railing around the hatch, not daring to let go. She
looks around, blinking rapidly over undead eyes. Her skin glistens.
"It's still ßehemoth,
more or less," Seger drones in the distance. From Atlantis.
From the bolted-down, welded-tight, hermetically-sealed quarantined
goddamned safety of fucking Atlantis. "That's why we
couldn't pinpoint the nature of Mr. Erickson's infection: he came
back positive for ßehemoth
but of course we disregarded those findings because we didn't think
it could be the problem. But this is a new variant, apparently.
Speciation events of this sort are quite common when an organism
spreads into new environments. This is basically—"
ßehemoth's evil twin brother, Clarke remembers.
"—ßehemoth Mark
2," Seger finishes.
Julia Friedman drops to her knees and vomits onto the deck
Babel Broadband. An overlapping collage of distorted voices:
"Of course I don't believe them. You saying you do?"
"That's bullshit. If you—"
"They admitted it up front. They didn't have to."
"Yeah, they suddenly come clean at the exact moment Julia goes
symptomatic. What a coincidence."
"How'd they know that she—"
"They knew the incubation time. They must have. How else do
you explain the timing here, dramatic irony?"
"Yeah, but what are we gonna do?"
They've abandoned the hab. It emptied like a blown ballast tank,
rifters spilling onto a seabed already crowded even by dryback
standards. Now it hangs above them like a gunmetal planet. Three
lamps set around the ventral airlock lay bright overlapping circles
onto the substrate. Black bodies swim at the periphery of that
light, hints of restless motion behind shark-tooth rows of white,
unblinking eyespots. Clarke thinks of hungry animals, kept barely at
bay by the light of a campfire.
By rights, she should feel like one of them.
Grace Nolan's no longer in evidence. She disappeared into the
darkness a few minutes ago, one supportive arm around Julia Friedman,
helping her back home. That act of apparent altruism seems to have
netted her extra cred: Chen and Hopkinson are standing in for her on
the point-counterpoint. Garcia's raising token questions, but the
prevailing mood does not suggest any great willingness to extend the
benefit of the doubt.
"Hey, Dimi," Chen buzzes. "How's it going in there?"
"Stinks like a hospital." Alexander's airborne voice makes
a conspicuous contrast against the background of waterlogged ones.
"Almost done, though. Somebody better be growing me a new
skin." He's still inside, sterilizing anything that Friedman or
her bodily fluids might have come into contact with. Grace Nolan
asked for volunteers.
She's started giving orders. People have started taking them.
"I say we just drill the fuckers." Creasy buzzes from
somewhere nearby.
Clarke remembers holes burned through biosteel. "Let's hold off
on the whole counterstrike thing at for a bit. It might be tougher
for them to find a cure if we smear them into the deck."
"As if they're looking for a fucking cure."
She ignores the remark. "They want blood samples from everyone.
Some of the rest of us might be infected. It obviously doesn't show
up right away."
"It showed up fast enough with Gene," someone points out.
"Being gutted alive probably increases your level of exposure a
bit. But Julia didn't show anything for, what—two weeks?"
"I'm not giving them any blood," Creasy growls with a voice
like scrap metal. "They'll be fucking giving blood if
they try and make me."
Clarke shakes her head, exasperated. "Dale, they can't make
anyone do anything and they know it. They're asking. If you
want them to beg, I'm sure it can be arranged. What's your
problem? You've been collecting bloods on your own anyway."
"If we could take our tongues off Patricia Rowan's clit for a
moment, I have a message from Gene."
Grace Nolan swims into the circle of light like a pitch-black pack
animal, asserting dominance. Campfires don't bother her.
"Grace," Chen buzzes. "How's Julia?"
"How do you think? She's sick. But I got her tucked in
at least, and the diagnostics are running for all the good they'll
do."
"And Gene?" Clarke asks.
"He was awake for a little while. He said, and I quote, I
told them those baby-boners did something to me. Maybe
they'll believe me when my wife dies."
"Hey," Walsh pipes up. "He's obviously feeling
bet—"
"The corpses would never risk spreading something like
this without already having a cure," Nolan cuts in. "It
could get back to them too easily."
"Right." Creasy again. "So I say we drill the
fuckers one bulkhead at a time until they hand it over."
Uncertainty and acquiescence mix in the darkness.
"You know, just to play devil's advocate here, I gotta say
there's a slim chance they're telling the truth."
That's Charley Garcia, floating off to the side.
"I mean, bugs mutate, right?" he continues. "Especially
when people throw shitloads of drugs at them, and you can bet they
bought out the whole pharm when this thing first got out. So who's
to say it couldn't have gone from Mark I to ßeta-max
all on its own?"
"Fucking big coincidence if you ask me," Creasy buzzes.
Garcia's vocoder ticks, a verbal shrug. "I'm just saying."
"And if they were going to pull some kind of biowar shit, why
wait until now?" Clarke adds, grasping the straw. "Why not
four years ago?"
"They didn't have ßehemoth
four years ago," Nolan says.
Walsh: "They could've brought down a culture."
"What, for old times' sake? fucking nostalgia? They
didn't have shit until Gene served it up to 'em warm and steaming."
"You oughtta get out more, Grace," Garcia buzzes. "We've
been building bugs from mail-order parts for fifty years. Once they
had the genes sequenced, the corpses could've built ßehemoth
from scratch any time they felt like it."
"Or anything else, for that matter," Hopkinson adds. "Why
use something that takes all this time just to make a few of us sick?
Supercol would've dropped us in a day."
"It would've dropped Gene in a day," Nolan buzzes.
"Before he had any chance to infect the rest of us. A fast bug
wouldn't have a chance out here—we're spread out, we're
isolated, we don't even breathe most of the time. Even when
we go inside we keep our skins on. This thing has to be slow
if it's gonna spread. These stumpfucks know exactly what they're
doing."
"Besides," Baker adds, "a Supercol epidemic starts on
the bottom of the goddamn ocean and we're not gonna connect the dots?
They'd be sockeye the moment they tried."
"They know it, too."
"ßehemoth gives them an
alibi, though," Chen says. "Doesn't it?"
Fuck, Jelaine. Clarke's been thinking exactly the same thing.
Why'd you have to bring that up?
Nolan grabs the baton in an instant. "That's right. That's
right. ßehemoth
comes all the way over from Impossible Lake, no way anybody can
accuse them of planting it there—they just tweak it a
bit on its way through Atlantis, pass it on to us, and how are we
supposed to know the difference?"
"Especially since they conveniently destroyed the samples,"
Creasy adds.
Clarke shakes her head. "You're a plumber with gills, Dale. You
wouldn't have a clue what to do with those samples if Seger handed
them to you in a ziplock bag. Same goes for Grace's little
science-fair project with the blood."
"So that's your contribution." Nolan twists through the
water until she's a couple of meters off Clarke's bow. "None of
us poor dumb fishheads got tenure or augments, so we've just gotta
trust everything to the wise old gel-jocks who fucked us over in the
first place."
"There's someone else," Clarke buzzes back. "Rama
Bhanderi."
Sudden, complete silence. Clarke can barely believe she said it
herself.
Chen's vocoder stutters in awkward preamble. "Uh, Len. Rama
went native."
"Not yet. Not completely. Borderline at most."
"Bhanderi?" The water vibrates with Nolan's mechanical
derision. "He's a fish by now!"
"He's still coherent," Clarke insisted. "I talked to
him just the other day. We can bring him back."
"Lenie," Walsh says, "nobody's ever—"
"Bhanderi does know his shit," Garcia cuts in.
"Used to, anyway."
"Literally," Creasy adds. "I heard he tweaked
E. coli to secrete psychoactives. You walk around with that
shit in your gut, you're in permanent self-sustaining neverland."
Grace Nolan turns and stares at him; Creasy doesn't take the hint.
"He had some of his customers eating out of their own ends, just
for the feedback high."
"Great," Nolan buzzes. "A drooling idiot and a
fecal chemist. Our problems are over."
"All I'm saying is, we don't want to cut our own throats,"
Clarke argues. "If the corpses aren't lying to us,
they're our best chance at beating this thing."
Cheung: "You're saying we should trust them?"
"I'm saying maybe we don't have to. I'm saying, give me
a chance to talk to Rama and see if he can help. If not, we can
always blow up Atlantis next week."
Nolan cuts the water with her hand. "His fucking mind is
gone!"
"He had enough of it left to tell me what happened at the
woodpile," Clarke buzzes quietly.
Nolan stares at Clarke, a sudden, indefinable tension in the body
behind the mask.
"Actually," Garcia remarks from offside, "I think I
might have to side with Lenie on this one."
"I don't," Creasy responds instantly.
"Probably couldn't hurt to check it out." Hopkinson's
voice vibrates out from somewhere in the cheap seats. "Like
Lenie says, we can always kill them later."
It's not exactly momentum. Clarke runs with it anyway. "What
are they going to do, hold their breath and make a mad dash for the
surface? We can afford to wait."
"Can Gene afford to wait? Can Julia?" Nolan looks around
the circle. "How long do any of us have?"
"And if you're wrong, you'll kill every last one of those
fuckers and then find out they were trying to help us after all."
Clarke shakes her head. "No. I won't let you."
"You won't l—"
Clarke cranks the volume a notch and cuts her off. "This is the
plan, people. Everybody gives blood if they haven't already. I'll
track down Rama and see if I can talk him into helping. Nobody fucks
with the corpses in the meantime."
This is it, she thinks. Raise or call. The moment
stretches.
Nolan looks around at the assembly. Evidently she doesn't like what
she sees. "Fine," she buzzes at last. "All you happy
little r's and K's can do what you like. I know what I'm
gonna do."
"You," Clarke tells her, "are going to back off, and
shut up, and not do a single fucking thing until we get some
information we can count on. And until then, Grace, if I find you
within fifty meters of Atlantis or Rama Bhanderi, I will
personally rip the tubes out of your chest."
Suddenly they're eyecap to eyecap. "You're talking pretty big
for someone who doesn't have her pet psycho backing her up."
Nolan's vocoder is very low; her words are mechanical whispers, meant
for Clarke alone. "Where's your bodyguard, corpsefucker?"
"Don't need one," Clarke buzzes evenly. "If you don't
believe me, stop talking out your ass and make a fucking move."
Nolan hangs in the water, unmoving. Her vocoder tick-tick-ticks
like a Geiger counter.
"Hey, Grace," Chen buzzes hesitantly from the sidelines.
"Really, you know? Can't hurt to try."
Nolan doesn't appear to have heard her. She doesn't answer for the
longest time. Then, finally, she shakes her head.
"Fuck it. Try, then."
Clarke lets the silence resume for a few more seconds. Then she
turns and slowly, deliberately, fins out of the light. She doesn't
look back; hopefully, the rest of the pack will read it as an act of
supreme confidence. But inside she's pissing herself. Inside, she
only wants to run— from this new-and-improved reminder of her
own virulent past, from the tide and the tables turning against her.
She wants to just dive off the Ridge and go native, keep going until
hunger and isolation leave her brain as smooth and flat and reptilian
as Bhanderi's might be by now. She wants nothing more than to just
give in.
She swims into the darkness, and hopes the others do likewise.
Before Grace Nolan can change their minds.
She chooses an outlying double-decker a little further downslope from
the others. It doesn't have a name—some of the habs have been
christened, Cory's Reach or BeachBall or Abandon All
Hope, but there weren't any labels pasted across this hull the
last time she was in the neighborhood and there aren't any now.
Nobody's left no-trespassing signs at the airlock, either, but two
pairs of fins glisten on the drying rack inside and soft moist sounds
drift down from the dry deck.
She climbs the ladder. Ng and someone's back are fucking on a pallet
in the lounge. Evidently, even Lubin's windchimes weren't enough to
divert their interest. Clarke briefly considers breaking it up and
filling them in on recent events.
Fuck it. They'll find out soon enough.
She steps around them and checks out the hab's comm board. It's a
pretty sparse setup, just a few off-the-shelf components to keep it
in the loop. Clarke plays with the sonar display, pans across the
topography of the Ridge and the rash of Platonic icons laid upon it.
Here are the main generators, wireframe skyscrapers looming over the
ridge to the south. Here's Atlantis, a great lumpy ferris wheel
laid on its side—fuzzy and unfocussed now, the echo smeared by
a half-dozen white-noise generators started up to keep prying ears
from listening in on the recent deliberations. Nobody's used those
generators since the Revolt. Clarke was surprised that they were
even still in place, much less in working order.
She wonders if someone's taken an active hand in extending the
warranty.
A sprinkling of silver bubbles dusts the display: all the
semi-abandoned homes of those who hardly know the meaning of the
word. She can actually see those people if she cranks up the rez:
the display loses range but gains detail, and the local sea-space
fills with shimmering sapphire icons as translucent as cave fish.
Their implants bounce hard reflective echoes from within the flesh,
little opaque organ-clusters of machinery.
It's simple enough to label the creatures on the screen—each
contains an ID-transponder next to the heart, for easy
identification. There's a whole layer of intelligence that Clarke
can access with a single touch. She doesn't, as a rule. Nobody
does. Rifter society has its own odd etiquette. Besides, it usually
isn't necessary. Over the years you learn to read the raw echoes.
Creasy's implants put out a bit of fuzz on the dorsal aspect;
Yeager's bum leg lists him slightly to port when he moves. Gomez's
massive bulk would be a giveaway even to a dryback. The transponders
are an intrusive redundancy, a cheat sheet for novices. Rifters
generally have no use for such telemetry; corpses, these days, have
no access to it.
Occasionally, though—when distance bleeds any useful telltales
from an echo, or when the target itself has changed—cheat
sheets are the only option.
Clarke slides the range to maximum: the hard bright shapes fall
together, shrinking into the center of the display like cosmic
flotsam sucked towards a black hole. Other topography creeps into
range around the outer edges of the screen, vast and dim and fractal.
Great dark fissures race into view, splitting and criss-crossing the
substrate. A dozen rough mounds of vomited zinc-and-silver
precipitate litter the bottom, some barely a meter high, one fifty
times that size. The very seafloor bends up to the east. The
shoulders of great mountains loom just out of range.
Occasional smudges of blue light drift in the middle distance, and
further. Some pixellate slow meandering courses across a muddy
plain; others merely drift. There's no chance of a usable profile at
such distances, but neither is there any need. The transponder
overlay is definitive.
Bhanderhi's southwest, halfway to the edge of the scope. Clarke
notes the bearing and disables the overlay, sliding the range back to
its default setting. Atlantis and its environs swell back out
across the display and—
Wait a second—
A single echo, almost hidden in the white noise of the generators. A
blur without detail, an unexpected wart on one of the tubular
passageways that connect Atlantis's modules one to another. The
nearest camera hangs off a docking gantry twenty-five meters east and
up. Clarke taps into the line: a new window opens, spills grainy
green light across the display.
Atlantis is in the grip of a patchwork blight. Parts of its colossal
structure continue to shine as they always have; apical beacons,
vents, conduit markers glaring into the darkness. But there are
other places where the lights have dimmed, dark holes and gaps where
lamps that once shone yellow-green have all shifted down to a faint,
spectral blue so deep it borders on black. Out of order, that
blue-shift says. Or more precisely, No Fish-heads.
The airlocks. The hanger bay doors. Nobody's playing just a
precaution these days…
She pans and tilts, aiming the camera. She zooms: distant murk
magnifies, turns fuzzy distance into fuzzy foreground. Viz is low
today; either smokers are blowing nearby or Atlantis is flushing
particulates. All she can see is a fuzzy black outline against a
green background, a silhouette so familiar she can't even remember
how she recognizes it.
It's Lubin.
He's floating just centimeters off the hull, sculling one way,
sculling back. Station-keeping against a tricky interplay of
currents, perhaps—except there's nothing for him to
station-keep over. There's no viewport in his vicinity, no
way to look inside, no obvious reason to hold his position along that
particular stretch of corridor.
After a few moments he begins to move away along the hull, far too
slowly for comfort. His fins usually scissor the water in smooth,
easy strokes, but he's barely flicking them now. He's moving no
faster than a dryback might walk.
Someone climaxes behind her. Ng grumbles about my turn.
Lenie Clarke barely hears them.
You bastard, she thinks as Lubin fades in the distance. You
bastard.
You went ahead and did it.
Conscript
Alyx doesn't get the whole native thing. Probably none of the
corpses do, truth be told, but none of the others lose any sleep over
it either; the more fish-heads out of the way the better, they
figure, and screw the fine print. Alyx, bless her soul, reacted with
nothing short of outrage. As far as she's concerned it's no
different than leaving your crippled grandmother out to die on an ice
floe.
"Lex, it's their own choice," Clarke explained once.
"What, they choose to go crazy? They choose to
have their bones go so punky they can't even stand up when you bring
them inside?"
"They choose," she said gently, "to stay out on
the rift, and they think it's worth the price."
"Why? What's so great about it? What do they do out
there?"
She didn't mention the hallucinations. "There's a kind
of—freedom, I guess. You feel connected to things. It's hard
to explain."
Alyx snorted. "You don't even know."
It's partly true. Certainly Clarke feels the pull of the deep sea.
Maybe it's an escape, maybe the abyss is just the ultimate place to
hide from the living hell that was life among the drybacks. Or maybe
it's even simpler. Maybe it's just a dark, weightless evocation of
the womb, a long-forgotten sense of being nourished and protected and
secure, back before the contractions started and everything
turned to shit.
Every rifter feels as much. Not every rifter goes native, though, at
least not yet. Some just have a kind of—special vulnerability,
really. The addictive rifters, as opposed to the merely social ones.
Maybe the natives have too much serotonin in their temporal lobes or
something. It usually comes down to something like that.
None of which would really fly with Alyx, of course.
"You should take down their feeding stations," Alyx said.
"Then they'd have to come inside to eat at least."
"They'd either starve, or make do with clams and worms."
Which was basically starvation on the installment plan, if it didn't
poison them outright. "And why force them to come inside if
they don't want to?"
"Because it's suicide, that's why!" Alyx cried.
"Jeez, I can't believe I have to explain it to you! Wouldn't
you stop me from trying to kill myself?"
"That depends."
"Depends?"
"On if you really wanted to, or you were just trying to win an
argument."
"I'm serious."
"Yeah. I can see that." Clarke sighed. "If you really
wanted to kill yourself, I'd be sad and pissed off and I'd miss you
like hell. But I wouldn't stop you."
Alyx was appalled. "Why not?"
"Because it's your life. Not mine."
Alyx didn't seem to have been expecting that. She glared back,
obviously unconvinced, obviously unequipped to respond.
"Have you ever wanted to die?" Clarke asked her.
"Seriously?"
"No, but—"
"I have."
Alyx fell silent.
"And believe me," Clarke continued, "it's no fun
listening to a bunch of professional head lice telling you how
much there is to live for and how things aren't really so bad
and how five years from now you'll look back and wonder how
you ever could have even imagined offing yourself. I
mean, they don't know shit about my life. If there's one
thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me.
And as far as I'm concerned it's the height of fucking arrogance to
tell another human being whether their life is worth living."
"But you don't have to feel that way," Alyx said
unhappily. "Nobody does! You just slap a derm on your arm
and—"
"It's not about feeling happy, Lex. It's about having cause
to feel happy." Clarke put her palm against the girl's cheek.
"And you say I don't care enough to stop you from killing
yourself, but I say I care about you so goddamned much I'd
even help you do it, if that was you really wanted."
Alyx stared at the deck for a long time. When she looked up again
her eyes shone.
"But you didn't die," she said softly. "You wanted
to, but you didn't, and that's why you're alive right now."
And that's why a lot of other people aren't... But Clarke kept
the thought to herself.
And now she's about to repudiate it all. She's about to hunt down
someone who's chosen to retire, and she's going to ignore that
choice, and inflict her own in its place. She'd like to think that
maybe Alyx would find the irony amusing, but she knows better.
There's nothing funny about any of this. It's all getting way too
scary.
She's foregone the use of a squid this time out; natives tend to shy
away from the sound of machinery. For what seems like forever she's
been traversing a plain of bone-gray mud, a bottomless ooze of dead
plankton ten million years in the making. Someone has preceded her
here; a sudden contrail crosses her path, a fog of tiny bodies still
swirling in the wake of some recent turbulence. She follows it.
Scattered chunks of pumice and obsidian rise from the substrate like
fractured sundials. Their shadows sweep across the bright scrolling
footprint of Clarke's headlamp, stretching and dwindling and merging
again with the million-year darkness. Eventually they come to
dominate the substrate, no longer isolated protrusions in mud but a
fractured tumbledown landscape in their own right.
A jumbled talus of cracked volcanic glass rises in Clarke's path.
She brightens her headlamp: the beam puddles on a sheer rock wall a
few meters further on, its surface lacerated with deep vertical
fissures.
"Hello? Rama?"
Nothing.
"It's Lenie."
A white-eyed shadow slips like an eel between two boulders.
"...bright..."
She dials down the light. "Better?"
"Ah...Len..." It's a mechanical whisper, two syllables
spaced seconds apart by the effort it takes to get them out. "Hi..."
"We need your help, Rama."
Bhanderi buzzes something incomprehensible from his hiding place.
"Rama?"
"Don't...help?"
"There's a disease. It's like ßehemoth,
but our tweaks don't work against it. We need to know what it is, we
need someone who knows genetics."
Nothing moves among the rocks.
"It's serious. Please. Can you help?"
"...teomics," Bhanderi clicks
"What? I didn't hear you."
"...Proteomics. Only...minored in gen...genetics."
He's almost managed a complete sentence. Who better to trust with
hundreds of lives?
"...had a dream about you," Bhanderi sighs. It sounds like
someone strumming a metal comb.
"It wasn't a dream. This isn't either. We really need your
help, Rama. Please."
"That's wrong," he buzzes. "That doesn't make sense."
"What doesn't?" Clarke asks, encouraged by the sudden
coherence.
"The corps...ask the corpses."
"The corpses may have made the bug. Tweaked it, anyway. We
can't trust them."
"...poor you..."
"Can you just—"
"More histamine," Bhanderi buzzes absently, lost again.
Then: "Bye..."
"No! Rama!"
She brightens her beam in time to see a pair of fins disappear into a
crevice a few meters up the cliff. She kicks up after him, plunges
into the fissure like a high-diver, arms above her head. The crevice
splits the rock high and deep, but not wide; two meters in she has to
turn sideways. Her light floods the narrow gash, bright as a topside
day; somewhere nearby a vocoder makes distressed ratcheting sounds.
Four meters overhead, Bhanderi scrambles froglike up the gap. It
narrows up there—he seems in imminent danger of wedging himself
inextricably between the rock faces. Clarke starts after him.
"Too bright!" he buzzes.
Tough, she thinks back at him.
Bhanderi's a skinny little bastard after two months of chronic
wasting. Even if he gets stuck in here, he might get wedged too far
back for Clarke to reach him. Maybe his panicked devolving little
brain is juggling those variables right now—Bhanderi zig-zags,
as if torn between the prospects of open water and protective
confinement. Finally he opts for the water, but his indecision has
cost him; Clarke has him around the ankle.
He thrashes in a single plane, constrained by faces of stone.
"Fucking bitch. Let go!"
"Vocabulary coming back, I see."
"Let...go!"
She works her way towards the mouth of the crevice, dragging Bhanderi
by the leg. He scrabbles against the walls, resisting—then,
pulled free of the tightest depths, he twists around and comes at her
with his fists. She fends him off. She has to remind herself how
easily his bones might break.
Finally he's subdued, Clarke's arms hooked around his shoulders, her
hands interlocked behind his neck in a full nelson. They're still
inside the mouth of the crevice, barely; Bhanderi's struggles jam her
spine against cracked slabs of basalt.
"Bright," he clicks.
"Listen, Rama. There's way too much riding on this for me
to let you piss away whatever's left in that head of yours. Do you
understand?"
He squirms.
"I'll turn off the light if you stop fighting and just listen
to me, okay?"
"...I...you..."
She kills the beam. Bhanderi stiffens, then goes limp in her arms.
"Okay. Better. You've got to come back, Bhanderi. Just
for a little while. We need you."
"...need... bad zero—"
"Will you just stop that shit? You're not that far gone,
you can't be. You've only been out here for—"
It's been around two months, hasn't it? More than two, now. Is that
enough time for a brain to turn to mush? Is this whole exercise a
waste of time?
She starts again. "There's a lot riding on this. A lot of
people could die. You could die. This—disease, or
whatever it is, it could get into you as easily as any of us. Maybe
it already has. Do you understand?"
"...understand..."
She hopes that's an answer and not an echo. "It's not just the
sickness, either. Everyone's looking for someone to blame. It's
only a matter of time before—"
Boom, she remembers. Blew it up. Way too bright.
"Rama," she says slowly. "If things get out of hand,
everything blows up. Do you understand? Boom. Just like at
the woodpile. Boom, all the time. Unless you help me.
Unless you help us. Understand?"
He hangs against her in the darkness like a boneless cadaver.
"Yeah. Well," he buzzes at last. "Why didn't you just
say so?"
The struggle has hobbled him. Bhanderi favors his left leg when he
swims; he veers to port with each stroke. Clarke hooks her hand
under his armpit to share thrust but he startles and flinches from
her touch. She settles for swimming at his side, nudging him back on
course when necessary.
Three times he breaks away in a crippled lunge for oblivion. Three
times she brings him back to heel, flailing and gibbering. The
episodes don't last, though. Once subdued, he calms; once calm, he
cooperates. For a while.
She comes to understand that it isn't really his fault.
"Hey," she buzzes, ten minutes out from Atlantis.
"Yeah."
"You with me?"
"Yeah. It comes and goes." An indecipherable ticking. "I
come and go."
"Do you remember what I said?"
"You drafted me."
"Do you remember what for?"
"Some kind of disease?"
"Some kind."
"And you...you think the corpses did..."
"I don't know."
"...leg hurts..."
"Sorry..."
And his brainstem rises up and snatches him away again. She grapples
and holds on until it lets go. Until he fights his way back from
wherever he goes at times like this.
"...still here, I see.."
"Still here," Clarke repeats.
"God, Len. Please don't do this."
"I'm sorry," she tells him. "I'm sorry..."
"I'm not worth shit to you," Bhanderi grates. "I
can't remember anything..."
"It'll come back." It has to.
"You don't know. You don't know any...thing about us."
"I know a little."
"No."
"I knew someone. Like you. He came back." Which is
almost a lie.
"Let me go. Please."
"After. I promise."
She rationalizes in transit, not convincing herself for an instant.
She's helping him as well as herself, she's doing him a favor. She's
saving him from the ultimate lethality of his own lifestyle.
Hyperosmosis; Slimy Implant Syndrome; mechanical breakdown. Rifters
are miracles of bioengineering—thanks to the superlative design
of their diveskins, they can even shit in the woods—but they
were never designed to unseal outside of an atmosphere. Natives
unmask all the time out here, let raw ocean into their mouths to
corrupt and corrode and contaminate the brackish internal saline that
braces them against the pressure. Do that often enough and
something's bound to seize up eventually.
I'm saving your life, she thinks, unwilling to say the words
aloud.
Whether he likes it or not, Alyx replies from the back of her
mind.
"The light..." Bhanderi croaks.
Glimmers smear the darkness ahead, disfiguring the perfect void like
faint glowing sores. Bhanderi stiffens at Clarke's side, but doesn't
bolt. She knows he can handle it; it can't have been more than a
couple of weeks since she found him inside the nerve hab, and he had
to pass through brighter skies than these to get there. Surely he
can't have slipped so far in such a short time?
Or is it something else, not so much a slip as a sudden jolt? Maybe
it's not the light that bothers him at all. Maybe it's what the
light reminds him of, now.
Boom. Blew it up.
Spectral fingers tap lightly against Clarke's implants: once, twice.
Someone ahead, taking a sonar bearing. She takes Bhanderi's arm,
holds it gently but firmly. "Rama, someone's—"
"Charley," Bhanderi buzzes.
Garcia rises ahead of them, ambient backlight framing him like a
visitation. "Holy shit. You got him. Rama, you in
there?"
"Client..."
"He remembers me! fuck it's good to see you, man. I
thought you'd pretty much shuffled off the mortal coil."
"Tried. She won't let me."
"Yeah, we're all sorry about that but we really need your
help. Don't sweat it though, buddy. We'll make it work."
Garcia turns to Clarke. "What do we need?"
"Medhab ready?"
"Sealed off one sphere. Left the other in case someone breaks
an arm."
"Okay. We'll need the lights off, to start with anyway. Even
the externals."
"No problem."
"...Charley..." Bhanderi clicks.
"Right here, man."
"...you my techie...?"
"Dunno. Could be, I guess. Sure. You need one?"
Bhanderi's masked face turns to Clarke. Suddenly there's something
different in the way he holds himself. "Let me go."
This time, she does.
"How long since I was inside?" he asks.
"I think maybe two weeks. Three at the outside." By
rifter standards, the estimate is almost surgically precise.
"I may have...problems," he tells them. "Readjusting.
I don't know if I can—I don't know how much I can get back."
"We understand," Clarke buzzes. "Just—"
"Shut up. Listen." Bhanderi's head darts from side to
side, a disquieting reptilian gesture that Clarke has seen before.
"I'll need to...to kickstart. I'll need help. Acetylcholine.
Uh, tyrosine hydroxylase. Picrotoxin. If I fall apart...if I fall
apart in there you'll need to get those into me. Understand?"
She runs them back. "Acetylcholine. Picrotoxin. Tyro, uh—"
"Tyrosine hydroxylase. Remember."
"What dose?" Garcia wonders. "What delivery?"
"I don't—shit. Can't remember. Check MedBase. Maximum
recommended dosage for...for everything except the hydroxy...lase.
Double for that, maybe. I think."
Garcia nods. "Anything else?"
"Hell yes," Bhanderi buzzes. "Just hope I can
remember what..."
Portrait of the Sadist as a Team Player
Alice Jovellanos's definition of apology
was a little unconventional.
Achilles, she had begun, you can be such a raging idiot
sometimes I just don't believe it.
He'd never made a hard copy. He hadn't needed to. He was a
'lawbreaker, occipital cortex stuck in permanent overdrive,
pattern-matching and correlative skills verging on the autistic. He
had scrolled her letter once down his inlays, watched it vanish, and
reread it a hundred times since, every pixel crisp and immutable in
perfect recollection.
Now he sat still as stone, waiting for her. Sudbury's ever-dimming
nightscape splashed haphazard patches of light across the walls of
his apartment. There were too many lines-of-sight to nearby
buildings, he noted. He would have to blank the windows before she
arrived.
You know what I was risking coming clean with you yesterday,
Alice had dictated. You know what I'm risking sending this to you
now—it'll autowipe, but there's nothing these assholes
can't scan if they feel like it. That's part of the problem, that's
why I'm taking this huge risk in the first place...
I heard what you said about trust and betrayal, and maybe some of
it rings a bit more true than I'd like. But don't you see there was
no point in asking you beforehand? As long as Guilt Trip was running
the show, you were incapable of making your own decision. You keep
insisting that's wrong, you go on about all the life-and-death
decisions you make and the thousands of variables you juggle but
Achilles my dear, whoever told you that free will was just
some complicated algorithm for you to follow?
I know you don't want to be corrupted. But maybe a decent, honest
human being is his own safeguard, did you ever think of that? Maybe
you don't have to let them turn you into one big conditioned reflex.
Maybe you just want them to, because then it's not really your
responsibility, is it? It's so easy to never have to make your own
decisions. Addictive, even. Maybe you even got hooked on it, and
you're going through a little bit of withdrawal now.
She'd had such faith in him. She still did; she
was on her way here right now, not suspecting a thing.
Surveillance-free accomodation wasn't cheap, but any senior
'lawbreaker could afford the Privacy Plus brand name and then some.
The security in his building was airtight, ruthless, and utterly
devoid of long-term memory. Once a visitor cleared, there would be
no record of their comings and goings.
Anyhow, what they stole, we gave back. And I'm going to tell you
exactly how we did that, on the premise, you know, ignorance breeds
fear and all that. You know about the Minsky receptors in your
frontal lobes, and how all those nasty little guilt transmitters bind
to them, and how you perceive that as conscience. They made
Guilt Trip by tweaking a bunch of behavior-modification genes snipped
from parasites; the guiltier you feel, the more Trip gets pumped into
your brain. It binds to the transmitters, which changes their shape
and basically clogs your motor pathways so you can't move.
Anyway, Spartacus is basically a guilt analog. It's got
the same active sites, so it binds to the Trip, but the overall
conformation is slightly different so it doesn't actually do anything
except clog up the Minsky receptors. Also it takes longer to break
down than regular guilt, so it reaches higher concentrations in the
brain. Eventually it overwhelms the active sites through sheer
numbers.
He remembered splinters from an antique hardwood floor, tearing his
face. He remembered lying in the dark, the chair he was tied to
toppled on its side, while Ken Lubin's voice wondered from somewhere
nearby: "What about side effects? Baseline guilt, for
example?"
And in that instant, bound and bleeding, Achilles Desjardins had seen
his destiny.
Spartacus wasn't content to simply unlock the chains that the Trip
had forged. If it had been, there might have been hope. He would
have had to fall back on good old-fashioned shame to control his
inclinations, certainly. He would have stayed depraved at heart, as
he'd always been. But Achilles Desjardins had never been one to let
his heart out unsupervised anyway. He could have coped, even out of
a job, even up on charges. He could have coped.
But Spartacus didn't know when to quit. Conscience was a molecule
like any other—and with no free receptor sites to bind onto, it
might as well be neutral saline for all the effect it had.
Desjardins was headed for a whole new destination, a place he'd
never been before. A place without guilt or shame or remorse, a
place without conscience in any form.
Alice hadn't mentioned any of that when she'd spilled her pixellated
heart across his in-box. She'd only assured him how safe it all was.
That's the real beauty of it, Killjoy; both your natural
transmitters and the Trip itself are still being produced normally,
so a test that keys on either of 'em comes up clean. Even a test
looking for the complexed form will pass muster, since the baseline
complex is still floating around—it just can't find any free
receptor sites to latch onto. So you're safe. Honestly. The
bloodhounds won't be a problem.
Safe. She'd had no idea what kind of thing looked out from behind
his eyes. She should have known better. Even children know the
simple truth: monsters live everywhere, even inside. Especially
inside.
I wouldn't put you at risk, Achilles, believe me. You mean
too—you're too much of a friend for me to fuck around like
that.
She loved him, of course. He had never really admitted it
before—some pipsqueak inner voice might have whispered I
think she kind of, maybe before three decades of self-loathing
squashed it flat: What a fucking egotist. As if anyone would
want anything to do with an enculé like you...
She'd never explicitly propositioned him—in her own way she was
as insecure as he was, for all her bluster—but the signs were
there in hindsight: her good-natured interference every time a woman
appeared in his life, her endless social overtures, the nickname
Killjoy—ostensibly because of his reticence to go out,
but more likely because of his reticence to put out. It was
all so obvious now. Freed from guilt, freed from shame, his vision
had sharpened to crystal perfection.
Anyway, there you go. I've stuck my neck out for you, and what
happens now is pretty much up to you. If you turn me in, though,
know this: you're the one making that decision. However you
rationalize it, you won't be able to blame some stupid longchain
molecule. It'll be you all the way, your own free will.
He hadn't turned her in. It must have been some fortuitous balance
of conflicting molecules: those that would have compelled betrayal
weakening in his head, those that spoke to loyalty among friends not
yet snuffed out. In hindsight, it had been a very lucky break..
So use it, and think about all the things you've done and
why, and ask yourself if you're really so morally rudderless that you
couldn't have made all those tough decisions without enslaving
yourself to a bunch of despots. I think you could have, Achilles.
You never needed their ball and chain to be a decent human being. I
really believe that. I'm gambling everything on it.
He checked his watch.
You know where I am. You know what your options are. Join
me or stab me. Your choice.
He stood, and crossed to the windows. He blanked the panes.
Love, Alice.
The doorbell chimed.
Every part of her was vulnerable. She looked up at him, her face
hopeful, her almond eyes cautious. One corner of her mouth pulled
back in a tentative, slightly rueful grin.
Desjardins stood aside, took a deep, quiet breath as she passed. Her
scent was innocent and floral, but there were molecules in that mix
working below the threshold of conscious awareness. She wasn't
stupid; she knew he wasn't either. She must realise he'd peg his
incipient arousal on pheromones she hadn't worn in his presence for
years.
Her hopes must be up.
He'd done his best to raise them, without being too obvious. He'd
affected a gradual thawing in his demeaner over the previous few
days, a growing, almost reluctant warmth. He'd stood at her side as
Clarke and Lubin disappeared into traffic, en route to their own
private revolution; Desjardins had let his arm bump against Alice's,
and linger. After a few moments of that casual contact she'd looked
up at him, a bit hesitantly, and he'd rewarded her with a shrug and a
smile.
She'd always had his friendship, until she'd betrayed him. She'd
always longed for more. It was an incapacitating mix. Desjardins
had been able to disarm her with the merest chance of reconciliation.
Now she brushed past, closer than strictly necessary, her ponytail
swishing gently against her nape. Mandelbrot appeared in the hall
and slithered around her ankles like a furry boa. Alice reached down
to scritch the cat's ears. Mandelbrot hesitated, perhaps wondering
whether to play hard to get, then evidently figured fuck it
and let out a purr.
Desjardins directed Alice to the bowl of goofballs on the coffee
table. Alice pursed her lips. "These are safe?" Some of
the chemicals that senior 'lawbreakers kept in their systems could
provoke nasty interactions with the most innocuous recreationals, and
Jovellanos had only just gotten her shots.
"I doubt they're any worse than the ways you've already fucked
with the palette," Desjardins said.
Her face fell. A twinge of remorse flickered in Desjardins's throat.
He swallowed, absurdly grateful for the feeling. "Just don't
mix them with axotropes," he added, more gently.
"Thanks." She took the olive branch with the drug, popped
a cherry-red marble into her mouth. Desjardins could see her bracing
herself.
"I was afraid you were never going to talk to me again,"
she said softly.
If her hair had been any finer it would be synthetic.
"It would have served you right." He let the words hang
between them. He imagined knotting that jet-black ponytail around
his fist. He imagined suspending her by it, letting her feet kick
just off the floor...
No. Stop it.
"But I think I understand why you did it," he said at last,
letting her off the hook.
"Really?"
"I think so. You had a lot of nerve." He took a breath.
"But you had a lot of faith in me, too. You wouldn't have done
it otherwise. I guess that counts for something."
It was as though she'd been holding her breath since she arrived, and
only let it out now that her sentence had been read aloud:
Conditional discharge. She bought it, Desjardins thought.
She thinks there's hope—
—while another part of him, diminished but defiant, insisted
Why does she have to be wrong?
He brushed her cheek with his palm, could just barely hear the the
soft, quick intake of breath his touch provoked. He blinked against
the fleeting image of a backhanded blow across that sweet,
unsuspecting face. "You have a lot more faith in me than I do,
Alice. I don't know how warranted it is."
"They stole your freedom to choose. I only gave it back to
you."
"You stole my conscience. How am I supposed to choose?"
"With your mind, Killjoy. With that brilliant, beautiful
mind. Not some gut-instinct emotion that's done more harm than good
for the past couple million years."
He sank onto the sofa, a small, sudden pit opening in his stomach.
"I'd hoped it was a side-effect," he said softly.
She sat beside him. "What do you mean?"
"You know." Desjardins shook his head. "People never
think things through. I kind of hoped you and your buddies
just—hadn't worked out the ramifications, you know? You were
just trying to subvert the Trip, and the whole conscience thing was
a—a misstep. Unforeseen. But I guess not."
She put her hand on his knee. "Why would you hope that?"
"I'm not really sure." He barked a soft laugh. "I
guess I thought, if you didn't know you were—I mean, if
you do something by accident that's one thing, but if you
deliberately set out to make a bunch of psychopaths—"
"We're not making psychopaths, Achilles. We're freeing people
from conscience."
"What's the difference?"
"You can still feel. Your amygdala still works. Your
dopamine and serotonin levels are normal. You're capable of
long-term planning, you're not a slave to your impulses. Spartacus
doesn't change any of that."
"Is that what you think."
"You really think all the assholes in the world are clinical?"
"Maybe not. But I bet all the clinicals in the world are
assholes."
"You're not," she said.
She stared at him with serious, dark eyes. He couldn't stop smelling
her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to gut
her like a fish and put her head on a stick.
He gritted his teeth and kept silent.
"Ever hear of the trolly paradox?" Alice said after a
moment.
Desjardins shook his head.
"Six people on a runaway train, headed off a cliff. The only
way to save them is switch the train to another track. Except
there's someone else standing on that track, and he won't be able to
get out of the way before the train squashes him. Do you reroute?"
"Of course." It was the greater good at its most
simplistic.
"Now say you can't reroute the train, but you can stop
it by pushing someone into its path. Do you?"
"Sure," he said immediately.
"I did that for you," Alice pronounced.
"Did what?"
"Most people don't accept the equivalence. They think it's
right to reroute the train, but wrong to push someone in front of it.
Even though it's exactly the same death, for exactly the same number
of lives saved."
He grunted.
"Conscience isn't rational, Achilles. You know what
parts of your brain light up when you make a moral decision? I'll
tell you: the medial frontal gyrus. The posterior cingulate gyrus.
The angular gyrus. All—"
"Emotional centers," Desjardins cut in.
"Damn right. The frontal lobes don't spark at all. And even
people who recognise the logical equivalence of those scenarios have
to really work at it. It just feels wrong to push
someone to their death, even for the same net gain of lives. The
brain has to wrestle with all this stupid, unfounded guilt. It takes
longer to act, longer to reach critical decisions, and when all's
said and done it's less likely to make the right decion.
That's what conscience is, Killjoy. It's like rape or greed
or kin selection—it served its purpose a few million years ago,
but it's been bad news ever since we stopped merely surviving
our environment and started dominating it instead."
You rehearsed that, Desjardins thought.
He allowed himself a small smile. "There's a bit more to people
than guilt and intellect, my dear. Maybe guilt doesn't just hobble
the mind, did you ever think of that? Maybe it hobbles other
things as well."
"Like what?"
"Well, just for example—" he paused, pretending to
cast around for inspiration— "how do you know I'm not some
kind of crazed serial killer? How do you know I'm not psychotic, or
suicidal, or, or into torture, say?"
"I'd know," Alice said simply.
"You think sex killers walk around with signs on their
foreheads?"
She squeezed his thigh. "I think that I've known you for a
whole long time, and I think there's no such thing as a perfect act.
If someone was that full of hate, they'd slip up eventually. But
you—well, I've never heard of a monster who respected women so
much he refused to even fuck them. And by the way, you might want to
reconsider that particular position. Just a thought."
Desjardins shook his head. "You've got it all worked out,
haven't you?"
"Completely. And I've got oodles of patience."
"Good. Now you can use some of it." He stood and smiled
down at her. "I've gotta go to the bathroom for a minute. Make
yourself at home."
She smiled back. "I will indeed. Take your time."
He locked the door, leaned across the sink and stared hard into the
mirror. His reflection stared back, furious.
She betrayed you. She turned you into this.
He liked her. He loved her. Alice Jovellanos had been his loyal
friend for years. Desjardins hung onto that as best he could.
She did it on purpose.
No. They had done in on purpose.
Because Alice hadn't acted alone. She was damn smart, but she hadn't
come up with Spartacus all by herself. She had friends, she'd
admitted as much: We're kinda political, in a ragtag kind of way,
she'd said when she first broke the news of his—his
emancipation.
He could feel the chains in his head crumbling to rust. He could
feel his own depravity tugging on those corroded links, and
grinning. He searched himself for some hint of the regret he'd felt
just a few minutes ago—he'd hurt Alice's feelings, and he'd
felt bad about it. He could still do that. He could still feel
remorse, or something like it, if he only tried.
You're not a slave to your impulses, she'd said.
That was true, as far as it went. He could restrain himself if he
wanted to. But that was the nature of his predicament: he was
starting to realise that he didn't want to.
"Hey, Killjoy?" Alice called from down the hall.
Shut up! SHUT UP! "Yeah?"
"Mandelbrot's demanding dinner and his feeder's empty. Didn't
you keep the kibble under the sink?"
"Not any more. She figured out how to break into the
cupboards."
"Then wh—"
"Bedroom closet."
Her footsteps passed on the other side of the door, Mandelbrot
vocally urging them on.
On purpose.
Alice had infected him ahead of schedule, to clear his mind for the
fight against ßehemoth—and
perhaps for more personal reasons, conscious or otherwise. But her
friends had set their sights a lot higher than Achilles Desjardins;
they were out to liberate every 'lawbreaker on the planet. Lubin had
summed it up, there in the darkness two weeks ago: "Only a few
thousand people with their hands on all the world's kill switches and
you've turned them all into clinical sociopaths..."
Desjardins wondered if Alice would have tried her semantic arguments
with Lubin. If she had been tied to that chair, blind,
pissing her pants in fear for her life while that murderous cipher
paced around her in the darkness, would she have presumed to lecture
him on serotonin levels and the cingulate gyrus?
She might have, at that. After all, she and her friends were
political—in a ragtag kinda way—and
politics made you stupid. It made you think that Human decency was
some kind of Platonic ideal, a moral calculus you could derive from
first principals. Don't waste your time with basic biology. Don't
worry about the fate of altruists in Darwin's Universe. People are
different, people are special, people are moral
agents. That's what you got when you spent too much time writing
manifestos, and not enough time looking in the mirror.
Achilles Desjardins was only the first of a new breed. Before long
there would be others, as powerful as he and as unconstrained. Maybe
there already were. Alice hadn't told him any details. He didn't
know how far the ambitions of the Spartacus Society had progressed.
He didn't know what other franchises were being seeded, or what the
incubation period was. He only knew that sooner or later, he would
have competition.
Unless he acted now, while he still had the advantage.
Mandelbrot was still yowling in the bedroom, evidently dissatisfied
with the quality of the hired help. Desjardins couldn't blame her;
Alice had had more than enough time to retrieve the kibble, bring it
back to the kitchen, and—
—in the bedroom, he realised.
Well, he thought after a moment. I guess that settles it.
Suddenly, the face in the mirror was very calm. It did not move, but
it seemed to be speaking to him all the same. You're not
political, it told him. You're mechanical. Nature
programmed you one way, CSIRA programmed you another, Alice came
along and rewired you for something else. None of it is you, and all
of it is you. And none of it was your choice. None of it was your
responsibility.
She did this to you. That cunt. That stumpfuck. Whatever
happens now is not your fault.
It's hers.
He unlocked the door and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Live
telltales twinkled across the sensorium on his pillow. His feedback
suit lay across the bed like a shed skin. Alice Jovellanos stood
shaking at the foot of the bed, lifting the headset from her skull.
Her face was beautiful and bloodless.
She would not have been able to mistake the victim in that virtual
dungeon for anyone else. Desjardins had tuned the specs to three
decimal places.
Mandelbrot immediately gave up on Alice and began head-butting
Desjardins, purring loudly. Desjardins ignored her.
"I need some technical info," he said, almost
apologetically. "And some details on your friends. I was
actually hoping to sweet-talk it out of you, though." He
gestured at the sensorium, savoring the horror on her face. "Guess
I forgot to put that stuff away."
She shook her head, a spasm, a panicky twitch. "I—I
d-don't think you did..." she managed after a moment.
"Maybe not." Achilles shrugged. "But hey, look on
the bright side. That's the first time you've actually been right
about me."
It made sense, at last: the impulse purchases routed almost
unconsciously through anonymous credit lines, the plastic sheeting
and portable incinerator, the dynamic-inversion sound damper. The
casual snoop into Alice's master calendar and contact list. That was
the great thing about being a 'lawbreaker on the Trip; when everybody
knew you were chained to the post, nobody bothered putting up fences
around the yard.
"Please," Alice quavered, her lip trembling, her eyes
bright and terrified. "Achilles..."
Somewhere in the basement of Desjardins's mind, a last rusty link
crumbled to powder.
"Call me Killjoy," he said.
Automechanica
The first round goes to the corpses.
A rifter by the name of Lisbeth Mak—kind of a wallflower,
Clarke barely even remembers the name— came upon a corpse
crawling like an armored cockroach around the outside of the primary
physical plant. It didn't matter whether he had a good reason to be
there. It didn't matter whether or not this constituted a violation
of quarantine. Mak did what a lot of fish-heads might have done
regardless; she got cocky. Decided to teach this stumpfucking
dryback a lesson, but decided to warm him up first. So she swam easy
circles around her helpless and lumbering prey, made the usual
derisive comments about diving bells with feet, called loudly and
conspicuously for someone to bring her one of those pneumatic drills
from the tool shed: she had herself a crab to shell.
She forgot entirely about the headlamp on the corpse's helmet. It
hadn't been shining when she caught the poor fucker—obviously
he'd been trying to avoid detection, and there was enough ambient
light around that part of the structure even for dryback eyes. When
he flashed that peeper at her, her eyecaps turned dead flat white in
their haste to compensate.
She was only blind for a second or two, but it was more than enough
for the corpse to get his licks in. Preshmesh vs. copolymer is no
contest at all. By the time Mak, bruised and bloodied, called for
backup, the corpse was already heading back inside.
Now Clarke and Lubin stand in Airlock Five while the ocean drains
away around them. Clarke splits her face seal, feels herself
reinflate like a fleshy balloon. The inner hatch hisses and swings
open. Bright light, painfully intense, spills in from the space
beyond. Clarke steps back as her eyecaps adjust, raising her hands
against possible attack. None comes. A gang of corpses jam the wet
room, but only one stands in the front rank: Patricia Rowan.
Between Rowan and rifters, an isolation membrane swirls with oily
iridescence.
"The consensus is that you should stay in the airlock for the
time being," Rowan says.
Clarke glances at Lubin. He's watching the welcoming committee with
blank, impassive eyes.
"Who was it?" Clarke asks calmly.
"I don't think that's really important," Rowan says.
"Lisbeth might think otherwise. Her nose is broken."
"Our man says he was defending himself."
"A man in 300-bar preshmesh armor defending himself against an
unarmed woman in a diveskin."
"A corpse defending himself from a fishhead,"
someone says from within the committee. "Whole other thing."
Rowan ignores the intrusion. "Our man resorted to fists,"
she says, "because that was the only approach that had any real
hope of succeeding. You know as well as we do what we're defending
ourselves from."
"What I know is that none of you are supposed to leave Atlantis
without prior authorization. Those were the rules, even before the
quarantine. You agreed to them."
"We weren't allowed much of a choice," Rowan remarks
mildly.
"Still."
"Fuck the rules," says another corpse. "They're
trying to kill us. Why are we arguing protocol?"
Clarke blinks. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know damn well what it—"
Rowan holds up a hand. The dissident falls silent.
"We found a mine," Rowan says, in the same voice she might
use to report that the head was out of toilet paper.
"What?"
"Nothing special. Standard demolition charge. Might have even
been one of the same ones Ken wired up before we—" She
hesitates, choosing her words— "came to terms a few years
back. I'm told it would have isolated us from primary life-support
and flooded a good chunk of Res-C. Somewhere between thirty to a
hundred killed from the implosion alone."
Clarke stares at Lubin, notes the slightest shake of the head.
"I didn't know," Clarke says softly.
Rowan smiles faintly. "You'll understand there might be some
skepticism on that point."
"I'd like to see it," Lubin says.
"I'd like to see my daughter in the sunlight," Rowan tells
him. "It's not going to happen."
Clarke shakes her head. "Pat, listen. I don't know where it
came from. I—"
"I do," Rowan says mildly. "There are piles of them
stashed at the construction caches. A hundred or more at Impossible
Lake alone."
"We'll find out who planted it. But you can't keep it. You're
not allowed weapons."
"Do you seriously expect us to simply hand it back to the people
who planted it in the first place?"
"Pat, you know me."
"I know all of you," Rowan says. "The answer
is no."
"How did you find it?" Lubin asks from out of left field.
"By accident. We lost our passive acoustics and sent someone
out to check the antennae."
"Without informing us beforehand."
"It seemed fairly likely that you people were causing the
interference. Informing you would not have been a wise idea even if
you hadn't been mining our hulls."
"Hulls," Lubin remarks. "So you found more than one."
No one speaks.
Of course not, Clarke realizes. They're not going to tell
us anything. They're gearing up for war.
And they're going to get slaughtered…
"I wonder if you've found them all," Lubin muses.
They stand without speaking, gagged by the synthetic black skin
across their faces. Behind their backs, behind the impenetrable
mass of the inner hatch, the corpses return to whatever plots and
counterplans they're drawing. Ahead, past the outer hatch, a
gathering crowd of rifters waits for answers. Around them and within
them, machinery pumps and sparks and readies them for the abyss. By
the time the water rises over their heads they are incompressible.
Lubin reaches for the outer hatch. Clarke stops him.
"Grace," she buzzes.
"Could be anyone." He rises, weightless in the flooded
compartment. One hand reaches up to keep the ceiling at bay. It's
an odd image, this humanoid silhouette floating against the
bluish-white walls of the airlock. His eyecaps almost look like
holes cut from black paper, letting the light shine through from
behind.
"In fact," he continues, "I'm not entirely convinced
they're telling the truth."
"The corpses? Why would they lie? How would it serve them?"
"Sow dissension among the enemy. Divide and conquer."
"Come on, Ken. It's not as though there's a pro-corpse faction
ready to rise up on their behalf and..."
He just looks at her.
"You don't know," she buzzes, so softly she can barely feel
the vibration in her own jaw. "It's all just guesses and
suspicions. Rama hasn't had a chance to—you can't be sure."
"I'm not."
"We don't really know anything." She hesitates, then edits
herself: "I don't know anything. You do."
"Not enough to matter. Not yet."
"I saw you, tracking them along the corridors."
He doesn't nod. He doesn't have to.
"Who?"
"Rowan, mainly."
"And what's it like in there?"
"A lot like it is in there," he says, pointing at
her.
Stay out of my head, you fucker. But she knows, at this
range, it's not a matter of choice. You can't just choose to
not feel something. Whether those feelings are yours or someone
else's is really beside the point.
So she only says, "Think you could be a little less vague?"
"She feels very guilty about something. I don't know
what. There's no shortage of possibilities."
"Told you."
"Our own people, though," he continues. "Are not
quite so conflicted, and much more easily distracted. And I can't be
everywhere. And we're running out of time."
You bastard, she thinks. You asshole. You stumpfucker.
He floats above her, waiting.
"Okay," she says at last. "I'll do it."
Lubin pulls the latch. The outer hatch slides back, opening a
rectangle of murky darkness in a stark white frame. They rise into a
nightscape stippled with waiting eyes.
Lenie Clarke is a little bit twisted, even by Rifter standards.
Rifters don't worry much about privacy, for one thing. Not as much
as you might expect from a population of rejects and throwaways. You
might think the only ones who could ever regard this place as an
improvement would be those with the most seriously fucked-up
baselines for comparison, and you'd be right. You might also think
that such damaged creatures would retreat into their shells like
hermit crabs with half their limbs ripped away, cringing at the
slightest shadow, or lashing out furiously at any hint of intrusion.
It does happen, occasionally. But down here, the endless heavy night
anesthetizes even if it doesn't heal. The abyss lays dark hands on
the wounded and the raging, and somehow calms them. There are, after
all, three hundred sixty degrees of escape from any conflict. There
are no limiting resources to fight over; these days, half the habs
are empty anyway. There is little need for territoriality, because
there is so much territory.
So most of the habs are unguarded and unclaimed. Occupants come and
go, rise into any convenient bubble to fuck or feed or—more
rarely—socialize, before returning to their natural
environment. Any place is as good as any other. There's little need
to stand jealous guard over anything so ubiquitous as a Calvin Cycler
or a repair bench, and there's hardly more that rifters need beyond
these basics. Privacy is everywhere; swim two minutes in any
direction and you can be lost forever. Why erect walls around
recycled air?
Lenie Clarke has her reasons.
She's not entirely alone in this. A few other rifters have laid
exclusive claims, pissed territorially on this cubby or that deck
or—in very rare cases—an entire hab. They've nested
refuge within refuge, the ocean against the world at large, an extra
bubble of alloy and atmosphere against their own kind. There are
locks on the doors in such places. Habs do not come with locks—their
dryback designers had safety issues—but the private and the
paranoid have made do, welding or growing their own fortifications
onto the baseline structure.
Clarke isn't greedy. Her claim is a small one, a cubby on the upper
deck of a hab anchored sixty meters northeast of Atlantis. It's
scarcely larger than her long-lost quarters on Beebe Station; she
thinks that may have been why she chose it. It doesn't even have a
porthole.
She doesn't spend much time here. In fact, she hasn't been here
since she and Walsh started fucking. But it doesn't matter how much
time she actually spends in this cramped, spartan closet; what
matters is the comforting knowledge that it's hers, that it's
here, that no one can ever come in unless she lets them. And
that it's available when she needs it.
She needs it now.
She sits naked on the cubby's pallet, bathed in light cranked almost
dryback-bright; the readouts she'll be watching are color-coded, and
she doesn't want to lose that information. A handpad lies on the
neoprene beside her, tuned to her insides. Mosaics of green and blue
glow on its face: tiny histograms, winking stars, block-cap letters
forming cryptic acronyms. There's a mirror on the opposite bulkhead;
she ignores it as best she can, but her empty white eyes keep
catching their own reflection.
One hand absently fingers her left nipple; the other holds a
depolarizing scalpel against the seam in her chest. Her skin
invaginates smoothly along that seam, forms a wrinkle, a puckered
geometric groove in her thorax: three sides of a rectangle, a
block-C, pressed as if by a cookie-cutter into the flesh between left
breast and diaphragm and midline.
Clarke opens herself at the sternum.
She unlatches her ribs at the costochondrals and pulls them back;
there's a slight resistance and a faint, disquieting sucking sound as
the monolayer lining splits along the seam. A dull ache as air
rushes into her thorax—it's a chill, really, but deep-body
nerves aren't built to distinguish temperature from pain. The
mechanics who transformed her hinged four of her ribs on the left
side. Clarke hooks her fingers under the fleshy panel and folds it
back, exposing the machinery beneath. Sharper, stronger pain stabs
forth from intercostals never designed for such flexibility. There
are bruises in their future.
She takes a tool from a nearby tray and starts playing with herself.
The flexible tip of the tool, deep within her thorax, slips neatly
over a needle-thin valve and locks tight. She's still impressed at
how easily she can feel her way around in there. The tool's handle
contains a thumbwheel set to some astronomical gear ratio. She moves
it a quarter turn; the tip rotates a fraction of a degree.
The handpad at her side bleeps in protest: NTR and GABA flicker from
green to yellow on its face. One of the histogram bars lengthens a
smidge; two others contract.
Another quarter turn. More complaints from the pad.
It's such a laughably crude invasion, more rape than seduction. Was
there any real need for these fleshy hinges, for the surgical
butchery that carved this trap door into her chest? The pad taps
wirelessly into the telemetry from her implants; that channel flows
both ways, sends commands into the body as well as taking information
out of it. Minor adjustments, little tweaks around approved optima,
are as simple as tapping on a touchpad and feeling the machinery
respond from inside.
Of course, the tweaks Lenie Clarke is about to indulge in are way
beyond "minor".
The Grid Authority never claimed to own the bodies of their
employees, not officially at least. They owned everything they put
inside, though. Clarke smiles to herself. They could probably
charge me with vandalism.
If they'd really wanted to keep her from putting her grubby paws all
over company property then they shouldn't have left this service
panel in her chest. But they were on such a steep curve, back then.
The brownouts weren't waiting; Hydro-Q wasn't waiting; the GA
couldn't wait either. The whole geothermal program was fast-tracked,
rearguard, and on the fly; the rifters themselves were a short term
stopgap even on that breakneck schedule. Lenie Clarke and her
buddies were prototypes, field tests, and final product all rolled
into one. How could any accountant justify sealing up the implants
on Monday when you'd only have to cut your way back in on Wednesday
to fix a faulty myocell, or install some vital component that the
advance sims had overlooked?
Even the deadman alarms were an afterthought, Clarke remembers. Karl
Acton brought them down to Beebe at the start of his tour, handed
them out like throat lozenges, told everyone to pop themselves open
and slide 'em in right next to the seawater intake.
Karl was the one who discovered how to do what Lenie Clarke is doing
right now. Ken Lubin killed him for it.
Times change, Clarke reflects, and tweaks another setting.
Finally she's finished. She lets the fleshy flap fall back into her
chest, feels the phospholipids rebind along the seam. Molecular
tails embrace in an orgy of hydrophobia. Another ache throbs
diffusely inside now, subtly different from those that have gone
before: disinfectants and synthetic antibodies, spraying down the
implant cavity in the unlikely event that its lining should fail.
The outraged handpad has given up; half of its readouts are yellow
and orange.
Inside Clarke's head, things are beginning to change. The
permeability of critical membranes is edging up a few percent. The
production of certain chemicals, designed not to carry signals but to
blockade them, is subtly being scaled back. Windows are not yet
opening, but they are being unlocked.
She can feel none of this directly, of course. The changes, by
themselves, are necessary but not sufficient—they don't matter
here where lungs are used, where pressure is a mere single
atmosphere. They only matter when catalyzed by the weight of an
ocean.
But now, when Lenie Clarke goes outside—when she steps into the
airlock and the pressure accretes around her like a liquid mountain;
when three hundred atmospheres squeeze her head so hard that her very
synapses start short-circuiting—then, Lenie Clarke will be able
to look into men's souls. Not the bright parts, of course. No
philosophy or music, no altruism, no intellectual musings about right
and wrong. Nothing neocortical at all. What Lenie Clarke will feel
predates all of that by a hundred million years. The hypothalamus,
the reticular formation, the amygdala. The reptile brain, the
midbrain. Jealousies, appetites, fears and inarticulate hatreds.
She'll feel them all, to a range of fifteen meters or more.
She remembers what it was like. Too well. Six years gone and it
seems like yesterday.
All she has to do is step outside.
She sits in her cubby, and doesn't move.
Gravediggers
Find the damn mines.
They spread out across the territory like black dogs, sniffing
through light and shadow with sonar pistols and flux detectors. Some
of them may question the exercise—and some of them almost
certainly root for its failure—but nobody still alive after
five years down here is going to be dumb enough to go all
insubordinate on Ken Lubin.
Find the damn mines.
Clarke glides among them, just another nose on the trail as far as
anyone can tell. Hers is not so focused, though. The others follow
invisible lines, the threads of a systematic grid laid down across
the search area; but Clarke zigzags, coasts down to accompany this
compatriot or that, exchanging insignificant bits of conversation and
intel before diverging courses in search of new company. Clarke has
a different mission.
Find the damn mine-layer.
Hectares of biosteel. Intermittent punctuations of light and shadow.
Flashing staccatos at each extremity, little blinking beacons that
announce the tips of scaffolds, antennae, danger zones where hot
fluids might vent without warning. The baleful, unwavering glare of
floodlights around airlocks and docking hatches and loading bays,
reignited for today's exercise. Pale auras of wasted light from a
hundred parabolic viewports. Twilit expanses of hull where every
protuberance casts three or four shadows, dimly lit by lamps
installed in more distant and glamorous neighborhoods.
Everywhere else, darkness. Elongated grids of shadow laid out by
naked support struts. Impenetrable inky pools filling the spaces
between keel and substrate, as though Atlantis were some great bed
with its own scary place for monsters lying beneath. Fuzzy darkness
where the light simply attenuates and fades; or razor-sharp where
some tank or conduit extends into bright sodium sunlight, laying inky
shadows over whatever lies beneath.
More than enough topography to hide an explosive device barely twice
the size of a man's hand. More than enough to hide a thousand.
It would be a big enough job for fifty-eight. It's a lot bigger for
the two dozen that Lubin is willing to conscript to the task; rifters
who haven't gone native, who don't overtly hate the corpses enough to
leave suspicious-looking objects "unnoticed" in their
sweep—rifters who aren't among the most likely to have planted
such devices in the first place. It's nowhere near a sure thing, of
course; few of these people have been cleared as suspects. Not even
the intel stolen directly from their brainpans is incontrovertible.
They didn't hand out the eyes and the 'skin to anyone who didn't have
a certain history, twisted wiring is what suits a body to the rift in
the first place. Everyone's haunted here. Everyone carries their
own baggage: their own tormentors, their own victims, the
addictions, the beatings and the anal rapes and the paternal fondling
at the hands of kindly Men In Black. Hatred of the corpses, so
recently abated, is once again a given. ß-max
has brought all the old conflicts back to the surface, reignited
hostilities that five years of grudging, gradual coexistence had
begun to quench. A month or two past, rifters and corpses were
almost allies, bitter holdouts like Erickson and Nolan
notwithstanding. Now, few would shed many tears if the ocean crashed
in on the whole lot of them.
Still. There's a difference between dancing on someone's grave and
digging it. There's an element of, of calculation on top of
the hatred. Of planning. It's a subtle difference; Clarke doesn't
know if she or Lubin would be able to pick it up under these
circumstances. It might not even manifest itself in someone until
the very moment they came upon the incriminating object, saw the mine
stuck to the hull like some apocalyptic limpet, tripped their vocoder
with every intention of raising the alarm and then—
Maybe the bastards deserve it after all they've done to us, after
all they've done to the whole world, and it's not like I set the
damn thing, it's not like I had anything to do with it except I maybe
just didn't notice it there under the strut, perfectly understandable
in the murk and all…
Any number of minds could seem perfectly innocent—even to
themselves— right up to the point at which that last-wire
stimulus came into view and catalyzed a simple chain of thought that
ends in just looking the other way. Even then, who knows whether
fine-tuning might pick it up?
Not Lenie Clarke. She searches anyway, gliding between the hulls and
the storage tanks, flying over her fellows searching the lights and
the shadows, only ostensible in her hunt for ordinance.
What she's really hunting is guilt.
Not honest guilt, of course. She's trolling for fear of discovery,
she's on the prowl for righteous anger. Newly reawakened, she swims
through a faint cauldron of secondhand emotions. The water's tainted
with a dozen kinds of fear, of anger, with the loathing of self and
others. A darker center roils beneath the surface of each dark body.
There's also excitement of a sort, the initial thrill of the chase
decaying exponentially down to rote boredom. Sexual stirrings.
Other, fainter feelings she can't identify.
She's never forgotten why she resisted fine-tuning back at Channer,
even after all the others had gone over. Now, though, she remembers
why she found it so seductive when she finally gave in: in that
endless welter of feelings, you always lost track of which ones were
yours...
It's not quite the same here on the Ridge, unfortunately. Not that
the physics or the neurology have changed. Not that anyone else has.
It's Lenie Clarke that's different now. Victim and vendetta have
faded over the years, black and white have bled together into a
million indistinguishable shades of gray. Her psyche has diverged
from the rifter norm, it no longer blends safely into that
background. The guilt alone is so strong that she can't imagine it
arising from anyone but her.
She stays the course, though. She keeps hunting, though her senses
are dulled. Somewhere off in the diffracted distance, Ken Lubin is
doing the same. He's probably a lot better at it than she is. He's
had training in this kind of thing. He's had years of experience.
Something tickles the side of her mind. Some distant voice shouts
through the clouds in her head. She realizes that she's been sensing
it for some time, but its volume has crept up so gradually that it
hasn't registered until now. Now it's unmistakable: threat and
exclamation and excitement, at the very limit of her range. Two
rifters cross her path, heading south, legs pumping. Clarke's jaw is
buzzing with vocoded voices; in her reverie, she's missed those too.
"Almost missed it completely," one of them says. "It
was tucked in under—"
"Got another one," A second voice breaks in. "Res-A."
One look and Clarke knows she would have missed it.
It's a standard demolition charge, planted in the shadow of an
overhanging ledge. Clarke floats upside down and lays her head
against the hull to look along the space beneath; she sees a
hemispherical silhouette, shaded by the ledge, backlit by the diffuse
murky glow of the water behind.
"Jesus," she buzzes, "How did you find the damn
thing?"
"Sonar caught it."
With typical rifter discipline, the searchers have abandoned their
transects and accreted around the find. Lubin hasn't sent them back;
there's an obvious reason why he'd want them all here with the murder
weapon. Clarke tunes and concentrates:
Excitement. Reawakened interest, after an hour of monotonous
back-and-forth. Concern and threads of growing fear: this is a bomb
after all, not an Easter egg. A few of the more skittish are already
backing away, caution superceding curiosity. Clarke wonders idly
about effective blast radius. Forty or fifty meters is the standard
safe-distance during routine construction, but those guidelines are
always padded.
She focuses. Everyone's a suspect, after all. But although the
ubiquitous undercurrent of rage simmers as always, none of it has
risen to the surface. There is no obvious anger at being thwarted,
no obvious fear of imminent discovery. This explosive development is
more puzzle than provocation to these people, a game of Russian
Roulette nested inside a scavenger hunt.
"So what do we do now?" Cheung asks.
Lubin floats above them all like Lucifer. "Everybody note the
sonar profile. That's how you'll acquire the others; they'll be too
well-hidden for a visual sweep."
A dozen pistols fire converging click-trains on the offending object.
"So do we leave it there, or what?"
"What if it's booby-trapped?"
"What if it goes off?"
"Then we've got fewer corpses to worry about," Gomez buzzes
from what he might think of as a safe distance. "No skin off my
fore."
Lubin descends through the conjecture and reaches under the ledge.
Ng sculls away: "Hey, is that a good—"
Lubin grabs the device and yanks it free. Nothing explodes. He
turns and surveys the assembled rifters. "When you find the
others, don't touch them. I'll remove them myself."
"Why bother," Gomez buzzes softly.
It's a rhetorical grumble, not even a serious challenge, but Lubin
turns to face him anyway. "This was badly positioned," he
says. "Placed for concealment, not effect. We can do much
better."
Minds light up, encouraged, on all sides. But to Clarke, it's as
though Lubin's words have opened a tiny gash in her diveskin; she
feels the frigid Atlantic seeping up her spine.
What are you doing, Ken? What the fuck are you doing?
She tells himself he's just playing to the gallery, saying whatever
it takes to keep people motivated. He's looking at her now, his head
cocked just slightly to one side, as if in response to some unvoiced
question. Belatedly, Clarke realizes what she's doing: she's
trying to look into his head. She's trying to tune him in.
It's a futile effort, of course. Dangerous, even. Lubin hasn't just
been trained to block prying minds; he's been conditioned,
rewired, outfitted with subconscious defenses that can't be lowered
by any act of mere volition. Nobody's ever been able to tunnel into
Lubin's head except Karl Acton, and whatever he saw in there,
he took to his grave.
Now Lubin watches her, dark inside and out for all her unconscious
efforts.
She remembers Acton, and stops trying.
Striptease
The final score is nine mines and no suspects. Either might be
subject to change.
Atlantis itself is an exercise in scale-invariant complexity, repairs
to retrofits to additions to a sprawling baseline structure that
extends over hectares. There's no chance that every nook and cranny
has been explored. Then again, what chance is there that the
culprits—constrained by time and surveillance and please God,
small numbers—had any greater opportunity to plant explosives
than the sweepers have had to find them? Neither side is
omnipotent. Perhaps, on balance, that is enough.
As for who those culprits are, Clarke has tuned in three dozen of her
fellows so far. She has run her fingers through the viscous darkness
in all those heads and come up with nothing. Not even Gomez, or
Yeager. Not even Creasy. Grave-dancers, for sure, all of
them. But no diggers.
She hasn't run into Grace Nolan lately, though.
Nolan's the Big Red Button right now. She's holding back for the
moment; any alleged corpse treachery looks a little less asymmetrical
in light of recent events. But the way things are going, Nolan's got
nothing to lose by letting this play out. There's already more than
enough sympathy out there for the Mad Bomber; if it turns out to be
Nolan, the very act of unmasking her could boost her status more than
harm it.
The leash is tenuous enough already. If it snaps there's going to be
ten kinds of shit in the cycler.
And that's granting the charitable assumption that they even find
the culprits. What do you look for, in the unlit basements of so
many minds? Here, even the innocent are consumed with guilt; even
the guilty wallow in self-righteousness. Every mind is aglow with
the black light of PsychoHazard icons: which ones are powered by old
wounds, which by recent acts of sabotage? You can figure it out,
sometimes, if you can stand sticking your head into someone else's
tar pit, but context is everything. Hoping for a lucky break is
playing the lottery; doing it right takes time, and leaves Clarke
soiled.
Not doing it delivers the future into Grace Nolan's hands.
There's no time. I can't be everywhere. Ken can't be
everywhere.
There's an alternative, of course. Lubin suggested it, just after
the bomb sweep. He was sweet about it, too, he made it sound as if
she had a choice. As if he wouldn't just go ahead and do it himself
if she wasn't up for it.
She knows why he gave her the option. Whoever shares this secret is
going to get a bit of a boost in the local community. Lubin doesn't
need the cred; no rifter would be crazy enough to cross him.
She remembers a time, not so long ago, when she could make the same
claim about herself.
She takes a breath, and opens a channel to whom it may concern. The
next step, she knows, could kill her. She wonders—hardly for
the first time— if that would really be such a bad thing.
Her audience numbers fewer than a dozen. There's room for more; the
medhab—even the lone sphere that hasn't been commandeered as
Bhanderi habitat—is bigger than most. Not present are even
more that can be trusted, judging by the notes Clarke and Lubin have
recently compared. But she wants to start small. Maybe ease into it
a little. The ripple effect will kick in soon enough.
"I'm only going to do this once," she says. "So pay
attention."
Naked to the waist, she splits herself open again.
"Don't change anything except your neuroinhibitors. It probably
throws out some overall balance with the other chemicals, but it all
seems to come out in the wash eventually. Just don't go outside for
a while after you make the changes. Give everything a chance to
settle."
"How long?" Alexander asks.
Clarke has no idea. "Six hours, maybe. After that, you should
be good to go. Ken will assign you to stations around the hubs."
Her audience rustles, unhappy at the prospect of such prolonged
confinement.
"So how do we tweak the inhibitors?" Mak's broken nose is
laced with fine beaded wires, a miniscule microelectric grid designed
to amp up the healing process. It looks like an absurdly shrunken
veil of mourning.
Clarke smiles despite herself. "You reduce them."
"You're kidding."
"No fucking chance."
"What about André?"
André died three years ago, the life spasming out of him on
the seabed in a seizure that nearly tore him limb from limb. Seger
laid the blame on a faulty neuroinhibitor pump. Human nerves aren't
designed for the abyss; the pressure sets them firing at the
slightest provocation. You turn into a fleshy switchboard with no
circuit-breakers and no insulation. Eventually, after a few minutes
of quivering tetanus, the body runs out of neurotransmitters and just
stops.
Which is why rifter implants flood the body with neuroinhibitors
whenever ambient pressure rises above some critical threshold.
Without them, stepping outside at these depths would be tantamount to
electrocution.
"I said reduce," Clarke repeats. "Not
eliminate. Five percent. Seven percent tops."
"And that does what, exactly?"
"Reduces synaptic firing thresholds. Your nerves get just a bit
more…more sensitive, I guess. To smaller stimuli, when you go
outside. You become aware of things you never noticed before."
"Like what?" says Garcia.
"Like—" Clarke begins, and stops.
Suddenly she just wants to seal herself up and deny it all. Never
mind, she wants to say. Bad idea. Bad joke. Forget I said
anything. Or maybe even admit it all: You don't know
what you're risking. You don't know how easy it is to go over the
edge. My lover couldn't even fit inside a hab without going into
withdrawal, couldn't even breathe without needing to smash
anything that stood between him and the abyss. My friend committed
murder for privacy in a place where you couldn't swim next to someone
without being force-fed their sickness and want. And he's your
friend too, he's one of us here, and he's the only other person left
alive in the whole sick twisted planet who knows what this does to
you…
She glances around, suddenly panicky, but Ken Lubin is not in the
audience. Probably off drawing up duty rosters for the finely tuned.
Then again, she remembers, you get used to it.
She takes a breath and answers Garcia's question. "You can tell
if someone's jerking you around, for one thing."
"Hot damn," Garcia exults. "I'm gonna be a walking
bullshit detector."
"That you are," Clarke says, managing a smile.
Hope you're up for it.
Her acolytes depart for their own little bubbles to play with
themselves. Clarke closes herself back up as the med hab empties. By
the time she's back in black there's just her, a crowd of wet
footprints, and the massive hatch—always left open until just
recently—that opens into the next sphere. Garcia's grafted a
combination lock across its wheel in uncaring defiance of dryback
safety protocols.
How long do I have, she wonders, before everyone can muck
around in my head?
Six hours at least, if the acolytes take her guess seriously. Then
they'll start playing, trying out the new sensory mode, perhaps even
reveling in it if they don't recoil at the things they find.
They'll start spreading the word.
Clarke's selling it as psychic surveillance, a new way to track down
any guilty secrets the corpses may be hiding. Its effects are bound
to spread way beyond Atlantis, though. It'll be that much harder for
anyone to conspire in the dark, when every passing soul comes
equipped with a searchlight.
She finds herself standing at the entrance to Bhanderi's lair, her
hand on the retrofitted keypad near its center. She keys in the
combination and undogs the hatch.
Suddenly she's seeing in color. The mimetic seal rimming the hatch
is a deep, steely blue. A pair of colorcoded pipes wind overhead
like coral snakes. A cylinder of some compressed gas, spied through
the open portal, reflects turquoise: the decals on its side are
yellow and—incomprehensibly—hot pink.
It's as bright as Atlantis in there.
She steps into the light: Calvin cycler, sleeping pallet, blood bank
ooze pigment into the air. "Rama?"
"Close the door."
Something sits hunched at the main workstation, running a sequence of
rainbow nucleotides. It can't be a rifter. It doesn't have the
affect, it doesn't have the black shiny skin. It looks more like a
hunched skeleton in shirtsleeves. It turns, and Clarke flinches
inwardly: it doesn't even have the eyes. The pupils
twitching in Bhanderi's face are dark yawning holes, dilated so
widely that the irises around them are barely visible.
Not so bright, then. Still dark enough for uncapped eyes to strain
to their limits. Such subtle differences get lost behind membranes
that render the world at optimum apparent lumens.
Something must show on her face. "I took out the caps,"
Bhanderi says. "The eyes— overstimulate, with all the
enhancers." His voice is still hoarse, the cords still not
reacclimated to airborne speech.
"How's it going?" Clarke asks.
A bony shrug. She can count the ribs even through his t-shirt.
"Anything yet? Diagnostic test, or—"
"Won't be able to tell the difference until I know if there is
a difference. So far it looks like ßehemoth
with a couple of new stitches. Maybe mutations, maybe refits. I
don't know yet."
"Would a baseline sample help?"
"Baseline?"
"Something that didn't come through Atlantis. Maybe if you had
a sample from Impossible Lake, you could compare. See if they're
different."
He shakes his head: a twitch, a tic. "There are ways to tell
tweaks. Satellite markers, junk sequences. Just takes time."
"But you can do it. The—enhancers worked. It came back
to you."
He nods like a striking snake. He calls up another sequence.
"Thank you," Clarke says softly.
He stops.
"Thank you? What choice do I have? There's a lock on
the hatch."
"I know." She lowers her eyes. "I'm sorry."
"Did you think I'd just leave? That I'd just swim off and let
this thing kill us all? Kill me, maybe?"
She shakes her head. "No. Not you."
"Then why?"
Even motionless, his face looks like a stifled scream. It's the
eyes. Through all the calm, rapid-fire words, Bhanderi's eyes seem
frozen in a stare of absolute horror. It's as if there's something
else in there, something ancient and unthinking and only recently
awakened. It looks out across a hundred million years into an
incomprehensible world of right angles and blinking lights, and finds
itself utterly unable to cope.
"Because it comes and goes," Clarke says. "You said
it yourself."
He extends one stick-like forearm, covered in derms; a chemical pump
just below his elbow taps directly into the vein beneath. He's been
dosing himself ever since he climbed back into atmosphere, using
miracles of modern chemistry to rape sanity back into his head, to
force submerged memories and skills back to the surface for a while.
So far, she has to admit, it's working.
But whenever she looks at him, she sees the reptile looking back. "We
can't risk it, Rama. I'm sorry."
He lowers his arm. His jaw clicks like some kind of insect.
"You said—" he begins, and falls silent.
He tries again. "When you were bringing me in. Did you say you
knew a—"
"Yes."
"I didn't know any—I mean, who?"
"Not here," she tells him. "Not even this ocean. Way
back at the very beginning of the rifter program. He went over in
front of my eyes." A beat, then: "His name was Gerry."
"But you said he came back."
She honestly doesn't know. Gerry Fischer just appeared out of
the darkness, after everyone else had given up and gone. He dragged
her to safety, to an evacuation 'scaphe hovering uncertainly over a
station already emptied of personnel. But he never spoke a word, and
he kicked and fought like an animal when she tried to rescue him in
turn.
"Maybe he didn't so much come back as come through,"
she admits now, to this creature who must in his own way know Gerry
Fischer far better than she ever did.
Bhanderi nods. "What happened to him?"
"He died," she says softly.
"Just... faded away? Like the rest of us?"
"No."
"How, then?"
She thinks of a word with customized resonance.
"Boom," she says.
Frontier
Come away, they said after Rio. Come away, now that you've
saved our asses yet again.
That wasn't entirely true. He hadn't saved Buffalo. He hadn't saved
Houston. Salt Lake and Boise and Sacramento were gone, fallen to
improvised assaults ranging from kamikaze airliners to orbital nukes.
Half a dozen other franchises were barely alive. Very few of those
asses had been saved.
But to the rest of the Entropy Patrol, Achilles Desjardins was a hero
ten times over. It had been obvious almost immediately that fifty
CSIRA franchises were under directed and simultaneous attack across
the western hemisphere, but it had been Desjardins and Desjardins
alone who'd put the pieces together, under fire and on the fly. It
had been he who'd drawn the impossible conclusion that the attacks
were being orchestrated by one of their own. The rest of the Patrol
had taken up the call and flattened Rio as soon as they had the
scoop, but it had been Desjardins who'd told them where to aim.
Without his grace under pressure, every CSIRA stronghold in the
hemisphere could have ended up in flames.
Come away, said his grateful masters. This place is a
writeoff.
Sudbury CSIRA had taken a direct hit amidships. A suborbital
puddle-jumper en route from London to Toromilton, subverted by the
enemy and lethally off-course, had left an impact crater ten stories
high in the building's northern face. Its fuel tanks all but empty,
the fires hadn't burned hot enough to take down the structure. They
had merely incinerated, poisoned, or suffocated most of those between
the eighteenth and twenty-fifth floors.
Sudbury's senior 'lawbreakers had worked between floors twenty and
twenty-four. It had been lucky that Desjardins had managed to raise
the alarm before they'd been hit. It had been an outright
motherfucking miracle that he hadn't been killed when they were.
Come away.
And Achilles Desjardins looked around at the smoke and the flames,
the piled body bags and those few stunned coworkers still
sufficiently intact to escape mandatory euthenasia, and replied: You
need me here.
There is no here.
But there was more left of here than there was of Salt Lake or
Buffalo. The attacks had reduced redundancy across N'Am's
fast-response network by over thirty percent. Sudbury was hanging by
a thread, but that thread still connected sixteen hemispheric links
and forty-seven regional ones. Abandoning it completely would cut
system redundancy by another five percent and leave a half-million
square kilometers without any rapid-response capacity whatsoever.
ßehemoth already ran rampant
across half the continent; civilization was imploding throughout its
domain. CSIRA could not afford the luxury of further losses.
But there were counterpoints. Half the floors of the Sudbury
franchise were uninhabitable. There was barely enough surviving
bandwidth for a handful of operatives, and under the current budget
it would be almost impossible to keep even that much open. All the
models agreed: the best solution was to abandon Sudbury and upgrade
Toromilton and Montreal to take up the slack.
And how long, Desjardins wondered, before those upgrades came
onstream?
Six months. Maybe a year.
Then they needed a stopgap. They needed to keep the pilot light
burning for just a little longer. They needed someone on-site for
those unforeseeable crisis points when machinery wasn't up to the
job.
But you're our best 'lawbreaker, they protested.
And the task will be almost impossible. Where else should I be?
His bosses said, Welllllllll....
Only six months, he reminded them. Maybe a year.
Of course, it wouldn't turn out that way. Murphy's malign hand would
stir the pot and maybe-a-year would morph into three, then four. The
Toromilton upgrades would falter and stall; far-sighted master plans
would collapse, as they always had, beneath the weight of countless
daily emergencies. Making do, the Entropy Patrol would throw crumbs
enough at Sudbury to keep the lights on and the clearance codes
active, ever-grateful for their uncomplaining minion and the thousand
fingers he kept jammed in the dike
But that was now and this was then, and Desjardins was saying, I'll
be your lighthouse keeper. I'll be your sentinel on the lonely
frontier, I'll fight the brush fires and hold the line until the
cavalry comes online. I can do this. You know I can.
And they did know, because Achille Desjardins was a hero. More to
the point, he was a 'lawbreaker; he wouldn't have been able to lie
to them even if he'd wanted to.
What a guy, they said, shaking their heads in admiration.
What a guy.
Groundwork
Kevin Walsh is a good kid. He knows relationships take work, he's
willing to do what it takes to keep the spark—such as it
is—alive. Or at least, to stretch its death out over the
longest possible period.
He attached himself to her arm after Lubin handed out the first
fine-tuning assignments, and wouldn't take Later, maybe for an
answer. Finally Clarke relented. They found an unoccupied hab and
threw down a couple of sleeping pallets, and he uncomplainingly
worked his tongue and thumb and forefinger down to jelly until she
didn't have the heart to let him continue. She stroked his head and
said it was nice but it really wasn't working, and she offered
herself in turn for his efforts, but he didn't take her up on
it—whether out of chivalrous penance for his own inadequacy or
simply because he was sulking, she couldn't tell.
Now they lie side by side, hands lightly interlocked at arm's length.
Walsh is asleep, which is surprising: he's no more fond of
sleeping in gravity than any other rifter. Maybe it's another
chivalrous affectation. Maybe he's faking it.
Clarke can't bring herself to do even that. She lies on her back and
stares up at the condensation beading on the bulkhead. After a while
she disentangles her hand from Walsh's—gently, so as not to
interrupt the performance—and wanders over to the local Comm
board.
The main display frames a murky, cryptic obelisk looming up out of
the seabed. Atlantis's primary generator. Part of it, anyway—the
bulk of the structure plunges deep into bedrock, into the heart of a
vent from which it feeds like a mosquito sucking hot blood. Only the
apex rises above the substrate like some lumpy windowless skyscraper,
facades pocked and wormy with pipes and vents and valves. A sparse
dotted line of floodlights girdles the structure about eight meters
up, casting a bright coarse halo that stains everything copper. The
abyss presses down against that light like a black hand; the top of
the generator extends into darkness.
A conduit the size of a sewer pipe emerges at ground level and snakes
into the darkness. Clarke absently tags the next cam in line,
following the line along the seabed.
"Hey, what are you…"
He doesn't sound sleepy at all.
She turns. Walsh is crouched half-kneeling on the pallet, as though
caught in the act of rising. He doesn't move, though.
"Hey, get back here. I wanna try again." He's going for a
boyish grin. He's wearing the Disarmingly Cute Face of Seduction.
It's a jarring contrast with his posture, which evokes the image of
an eleven-year-old caught masturbating on the good linen.
She eyes him curiously. "What's up, Kev?"
He laughs; it sounds like a hiccough. "Nothing's up…
we just didn't, you know, finish…"
A dull gray lump of realization congeals in her throat.
Experimentally, she turns back to the board and trips the next
surveillance cam in the chain. The seabed conduit winds on towards a
distant hazy geometry of backlit shadows.
Walsh tugs at her shoulder, nuzzles from behind. "Ladies'
choice. Limited time offer, expires soon…"
Next cam.
"Come on, Len—"
Atlantis. A small knot of rifters has accreted at the junction of
two wings, nowhere near any of the assigned surveillance stations.
They appear to be taking measurements of some kind. Some of them are
laden with strange cargo.
Walsh has fallen silent. The lump in Clarke's throat metastasizes.
She turns. Kevin Walsh has backed away, a mixture of guilt and
defiance on his face.
"You gotta give her a chance, Len," he says. "I mean,
you gotta be more objective about this…"
She regards him calmly. "You asshole."
"Oh right," he flares. "Like anything I ever
did mattered to you."
She grabs the disconnected pieces of her diveskin. They slide around
her body like living things, fusing one to another, sealing her in,
sealing him out, welcome liquid armor that reinforces the boundary
between us and them.
Only there is no us, she realizes. There never was. And
what really pisses her off is that she'd forgotten that, that
she never even saw this coming; even privy to her lover's brainstem,
even cognizant of all the guilt and pain and stupid masochistic
yearning in there, she hadn't picked up on this imminent betrayal.
She'd sensed his resentment, of course, and his hurt, but that was
nothing new. When it came right down to it, outright treachery just
didn't make enough of a difference in this relationship to register.
She doesn't look at him as she descends to the airlock.
Kevin Walsh is one fucked-up little boy. It's just as well she never
got too attached.
Their words buzz back and forth among the shadows of the great
structure: numbers, times, shear stress indices. A couple of
rifters carry handpads; others fire click-trains of high-frequency
sounds through acoustic rangefinders. One of them draws a big black
X at some vital weak spot.
How did Ken put it? For concealment, not effect. Obviously
they aren't going to make that mistake again.
They're expecting her, of course. Walsh didn't warn them—not
on the usual channels, anyway— but you can't sneak up on the
fine-tuned.
Clarke pans the company. Nolan, three meters overhead, looks down at
her. Cramer, Cheung, and Gomez accrete loosely around them. Creasy
and Yeager—too distant for visual ID, but clear enough on the
mindline—are otherwise occupied some ways down the hull.
Nolan's vibe overwhelms all the others: where once was resentment,
now there's triumph. But the anger—the sense of scores yet to
be settled— hasn't changed at all.
"Don't blame Kev," Clarke buzzes. "He did his best."
She wonders offhand how far Nolan went to secure that loyalty.
Nolan nods deliberately. "Kev's a good kid. He'd do anything
to help the group." The slightest emphasis on anything
slips through the machinery, but Clarke's already seen it in the meat
behind.
That far.
She forces herself to look deeper, to dig around for guilt or
duplicity, but of course it's pointless. If Nolan ever kept such
secrets, she's way past it now. Now she wears her intentions like a
badge of honor.
"So what's going on?" Clarke asks.
"Just planning for the worst," Nolan says.
"Uh huh." She nods at the X on the hull. "Planning
for it, or provoking it?"
Nobody speaks.
"You do realize we control the generators. We can shut them
down any time we want. Blowing the hull would be major overkill."
"Oh, we'd never do for excessive force." That's
Cramer, off to the left. "Especially since they always
be so gentle."
"We just think it would be wise to have other options,"
Chen buzzes, apologetic but unswayable. "Just in case something
compromises Plan A."
"Such as?"
"Such as the way certain hands pump the cocks of the mouths that
bite them," Gomez says.
Clarke spins casually to face him. "Articulate as always,
Gomer. I can see why you don't talk much."
"If I were you—" Nolan begins.
"Shut the fuck up."
Clarke turns slowly in their midst, her guts convecting in a slow
freezing boil. "Anything they did to you, they did to me first.
Any shit they threw at you, they threw way more at me. Way
more."
"Which ended up landing on everyone but you," Nolan
points out.
"You think I'm gonna stick my tongue up their ass just because
they missed when they tried to kill me?"
"Are you?"
She coasts up until her face is scant centimeters from Nolan's.
"Don't you fucking dare question my loyalty again, Grace.
I was down here before any of you miserable haploids. While
you were all back on shore pissing and moaning about job security, I
broke into their fucking castle and personally kicked Rowan and her
buddies off the pot."
"Sure you did. Then you joined her sorority two days later.
You play VR games with her daughter, for Chrissake!"
"Yeah? And what exactly did her daughter do to deserve you
dropping the whole Atlantic Ocean onto her head? Even if you're
right—even if you're right—did their kids
fuck you over? What did their families and their servants and their
toilet-scrubbers ever do to you?"
The words vibrate off into the distance. The deep, almost subsonic
hum of some nearby piece of life-support sounds especially loud in
their wake.
Maybe the tiniest bit of uncertainty in the collective vibe, now.
Maybe even a tiny bit in Nolan's.
But she's not giving a micron. "You want to know what they did,
Len? They chose sides. The wives and the husbands and the medics
and even any pet toilet-scrubbers those stumpfucks may have kept
around for old time's sake. They all chose sides. Which is more
than I can say for you."
"This is not a good idea," Clarke buzzes.
"Thanks for your opinion, Len. We'll let you know if we need
you for anything. In the meantime, stay out of my way. The sight of
you makes me want to puke."
Clarke plays her final card. "It's not me you have to worry
about."
"What made you think we were ever worried about you?"
The contempt comes off of Nolan in waves.
"Ken gets very unhappy when he's caught in the middle of some
half-assed fiasco like this. I've seen it happen. He's the kind of
guy who finds it much easier to shut something down than clean up
after it. You can deal with him."
"We already have," Nolan buzzes. "He knows all about
it."
"Even gave us a few pointers," Gomez adds.
"Sorry, sweetie." Nolan leans in close to Clarke; their
hoods slip frictionlessly past each other, a mannequin nuzzle. "But
you really should have seen that coming."
Without another word the group goes back to work, as if cued by some
stimulus to which Lenie Clarke is blind and deaf. She hangs there in
the water, stunned, betrayed. Bits and pieces of some best-laid plan
assemble themselves in the water around her.
She turns and swims away.
Harpodon
Once upon a time, back during the uprising, a couple of corpses
commandeered a multisub named Harpodon III. To this day
Patricia Rowan has no idea what they were trying to accomplish;
Harpodon's spinal bays were empty of any construction or
demolition modules that might have served as weapons. The sub was as
stripped as a fish skeleton, and about as useful: cockpit up front,
impellors in back, and a whole lot of nothing hanging off the
segmented spine between.
Maybe they'd just been running for it.
But the rifters didn't bother asking, once they'd caught on and
caught up. They hadn't come unequipped: they had torches and
rivet guns, not quite enough to cut Harpodon in half but
certainly enough to paralyze it from the neck down. They punched out
the electrolysis assembly and the Lox tanks; the fugitives got to
watch their supply of breathable atmosphere drop from infinite down
to the little bubble of nitrox already turning stale in the cockpit.
Normally the rifters would just have holed the viewport and let the
ocean finish the job. This time, though, they hauled Harpodon
back to one of Atlantis's viewports as a kind of object lesson: the
runaways suffocated within perspexed view of all the corpses they'd
left behind. There'd already been some rifter casualties, as it
turned out, and Grace Nolan had been leading the team that shift.
But back then, not even Nolan was entirely without pity. Once the
runaways were well and truly dead, once the moral of the story had
properly sunk in, the rifters mated the wounded sub to the nearest
docking hatch and let the corpses reclaim the bodies. Harpodon
hasn't moved in all the years since. It's still grafted onto the
service lock, protruding from the body of Atlantis like a parasitic
male anglerfish fused to the flank of his gigantic mate. It's not a
place that anybody goes.
Which makes it the perfect spot for Patricia Rowan to consort with
the enemy.
The diver 'lock is an elongate blister distending the deck of the
cockpit, just aft of the copilot's seat where Rowan sits staring at
rows of dark instruments. It gurgles behind her; she hears a tired
pneumatic sigh as its coffin lid swings open, hears the soft slap of
wet feet against the plates.
She's left the lights off, of course—it wouldn't do for anyone
to know of her presence here—but some flashing beacon, way
along the curve of Atlantis's hull, sends pulses of dim brightness
through the viewports. The cockpit interior blinks lazily in and out
of existence, a jumbled topography of metal viscera keeping the abyss
at bay.
Lenie Clarke climbs into the pilot's seat beside her.
"Anyone see you?" Rowan asks, not turning her head.
"If they had," the rifter says, "they'd probably be
finishing the job right now." Refering, no doubt, to the
injuries sustained by Harpodon in days gone by. "Any
progress?"
"Eight of the samples tested positive. No fix yet." Rowan
takes a deep breath. "How goes the battle on your end?"
"Maybe you could pick a different expression. Something a bit
less literal."
"Is it that bad?"
"I don't think I can hold them back, Pat."
"Surely you can," Rowan says. "You're the Meltdown
Madonna, remember? The Alpha Femme."
"Not any more."
Rowan turns to look at the other woman.
"Grace is—some of them are taking steps." Lenie's
face switches on and off in the pulsating gloom. "They're
mine-laying again. Right out in the open this time."
Rowan considers. "What does Ken think about that?"
"Actually, I think he's okay with it."
Lenie sounds as though she'd been surprised by that. Rowan isn't.
"Mine-laying again?" she repeats. "So you know
who set them the first time?"
"Not really. Not yet. Not that it matters." Lenie sighs.
"Hell, some people still think you planted the first round
yourselves."
"That's absurd, Lenie. Why would we?"
"To give you an—excuse, I guess. Or as some kind of
last-ditch self-destruct, to take us out with you. I don't know."
Lenie shrugs. "I'm not saying they're making sense. I'm just
telling you where they're at."
"And how are we supposed to be putting together all this
ordinance, when you people control our fabrication facilities?"
"Ken says you can get a standard Calvin cycler to make
explosives if you tweak the wiring the right way."
Ken again.
Rowan still isn't sure how to broach the subject. There's a bond
between Lenie and Ken, a connection both absurd and inevitable
between two people for whom the term friendship should be as
alien as a Europan microbe. It's nothing sexual—the way Ken
swings it hardly could be, although Rowan suspects that Lenie still
doesn't know about that—but in its own repressed way, it's
almost as intimate. There's a protectiveness, not to be taken
lightly. If you attack one, you better watch out for the other.
And yet, from the sound of it, Ken Lubin is beginning to draw
different alliances…
She decides to risk it. "Lenie, has it occurred to you that Ken
might be—"
"That's crazy." The rifter kills the question before she
has to answer it.
"Why?" Rowan asks. "Who else has the expertise? Who
else is addicted to killing people?"
"You gave him that. He was on your payroll."
Rowan shakes her head. "I'm sorry, Lenie, but you know that
isn't true. We instilled his threat-response reflex, yes. But that
was only to make sure he took the necessary steps—"
"To make sure he killed people," Lenie interjects.
"—in the event of a security breach. He was never
supposed to get—addicted to it. And you know as well as I do:
Ken has the know-how, he has access, he has grudges going all the way
back to childhood. The only thing that kept him on the leash was
Guilt Trip, and Spartacus took care of that."
"Spartacus was five years ago," the rifter points out.
"And Ken hasn't gone on any killing sprees since then. If
you'll remember, he was one of exactly two people who prevented
your last uprising from turning into The Great Corpse Massacre."
She sounds as if she's trying to convince herself as much as anyone.
"Lenie—"
But she's having none of it. "Guilt Trip was just something you
people laid onto his brain after he came to work for you. He didn't
have it before, and he didn't have it afterwards, and you know why?
Because he has rules, Pat. He came up with his own set of
rules, and he damn well stuck to them, and no matter how much he
wanted to, he never killed anyone without a reason."
"That's true," Rowan admits. "Which is why he started
inventing reasons."
Lenie, strobing slowly, looks out a porthole and doesn't answer.
"Maybe you don't know that part of the story," Rowan
continues. "You never wondered why we'd assign him to the
rifter program in the first place? Why we'd waste a Black Ops Black
Belt on the bottom of the ocean, scraping barnacles off geothermal
pumps? It was because he'd started to slip up, Lenie. He was making
mistakes, he was leaving loose ends all over the place. Of course he
always tied them up with extreme prejudice, but that was rather the
point. On some subconscious level, Ken was deliberately
slipping up so that he'd have an excuse to seal the breach
afterwards.
"Beebe Station was so far out in the boondocks that it should
have been virtually impossible to encounter anything he could
interpret as a security breach, no matter how much he bent his
rules. That was our mistake, in hindsight." Not even one of
our bigger ones, more's the pity. "But my point is, people
with addictions sometimes fall off the wagon. 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.
Seven years ago, our psych people told us that Ken was a classic case
in point. There's no reason to believe it isn't just as true today."
The rifter doesn't speak for a moment. Her disembodied face, a pale
contrast against the darkness of her surroundings, flashes on and off
like a beating heart.
"I don't know," she says at last. "I met one of your
psych people once, remember? You sent him down to observe
us. We didn't like him much."
Rowan nods. "Yves Scanlon."
"I tried to look him up when I got back to land." Look
him up: Leniespeak for hunt him down. "He wasn't
home."
"He was decirculated." Rowan says, her own euphemism—as
always—easily trumping the other woman's.
"Ah."
But since the subject has come up... "He—he had a theory
about you people," Rowan says. "He thought that rifter
brains might be…sensitive, somehow. That you entered some
heightened state of awareness when you spent too long on the bottom
of the sea, with all those synthetics in your blood. Quantum signals
from the brainstem. Some kind of Ganzfeld effect."
"Scanlon was an idiot," Lenie remarks.
"No doubt. But was he wrong?"
Lenie smiles faintly.
"I see," Rowan says.
"It's not mind-reading. Nothing like that."
"But maybe, if you could…what would be the word, scan?"
"We called it fine-tuning," Lenie says, her voice as
opaque as her eyes.
"If you could fine-tune anybody who might have…"
"Already done. It was Ken who suggested it, in fact. We didn't
find anything."
"Did you fine-tune Ken?"
"You can't—" She stops.
"He blocked you, didn't he?" Rowan nods to herself. "If
it's anything like Ganzfeld scanning, he blocks it without even
thinking. Standard procedure."
They sit without speaking for a few moments.
"I don't think it's Ken," Clarke says after a while. "I
know him, Pat. I've known him for years."
"I've known him longer."
"Not the same way."
"Granted. But if not Ken, who?"
"Shit, Pat, the whole lot of us! Everybody has it in for
you guys now. They're convinced that Jerry and her buddies—"
"That's absurd."
"Is it really?" Rowan glimpses the old Lenie Clarke, the
predatory one, smiling in the intermittent light. "Supposing
you'd kicked our asses five years ago, and we'd been living
under house arrest ever since. And then some bug passed through our
hands on its way to you, and corpses started dropping like flies.
Are you saying you wouldn't suspect?"
"No. No, of course we would." Rowan heaves a sigh. "But
I'd like to think we wouldn't go off half-cocked without any evidence
at all. We'd at least entertain the possibility that you were
innocent."
"As I recall, when the shoe was on the other foot guilt or
innocence didn't enter into it. You didn't waste any time
sterilizing the hot zones, no matter who was inside. No matter what
they'd done."
"Good rationale. One worthy of Ken Lubin and his vaunted
ethical code."
Lenie snorts. "Give it a rest, Pat. I'm not calling you a
liar. But we've already cut you more slack than you cut us, back
then. And there are a lot of people in there with you. You sure
none of them are doing anything behind your back?"
A bright moment: a dark one.
"Anyway, there's still some hope we could dial this down,"
Clarke says. "We're looking at ß-max
ourselves. If it hasn't been tweaked, we won't find anything."
A capillary of dread wriggles through Rowan's insides.
"How will you know one way or the other?" she asks. "None
of you are pathologists."
"Well, they aren't gonna trust your experts. We may not
have tenure at LU but we've got a degree or two in the crowd. That,
and access to the biomed library, and—"
"No," Rowan whispers. The capillary grows into a
thick, throbbing artery. She feels blood draining from her face to
feed it.
Lenie sees it immediately. "What?" She leans forward,
across the armrest of her seat. "Why does that worry you?"
Rowan shakes her head. "Lenie, you don't know. You're
not trained, you don't get a doctorate with a couple of days'
reading. Even if you get the right results, you'll probably
misinterpret them…"
"What results? Misinterpret how?"
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."
Tell her.
"I didn't know myself until recently," Rowan begins.
"ßehemoth may have
been—I mean, the original ßehemoth,
not this new strain—it was tweaked."
"Tweaked." The word lies thick and dead in the space
between them.
Rowan forces herself to continue. "To adapt it to aerobic
environments. And to increase its reproductive rate, for faster
production. There were commercial applications. Nobody was trying
to bring down the world, of course, it wasn't a bioweapons thing at
all…but evidently something went wrong."
"Evidently." Clarke's face is an expressionless mask.
"I'm sure you can see the danger here, if your people stumble
across these modifications without really knowing what they're doing.
Perhaps they know enough to recognize a tweak, but not enough to
tell what it does. Perhaps they don't know how to tell old tweaks
from more recent ones. Or perhaps the moment they see any evidence
of engineering, they'll conclude the worst and stop looking. They
could come up with something they thought was evidence, and
the only ones qualified to prove them wrong would be ignored because
they're the enemy."
Clarke watches her like a statue. Maybe the reconciliation of the
past few years hasn't been enough. Maybe this new development, this
additional demand for even more understanding, has done nothing but
shatter the fragile trust the two of them have built. Maybe Rowan
has just lost all credibility in this woman's eyes. Maybe she's just
blown her last chance to avoid meltdown.
Endless seconds fossilize in the cold, thick air.
"Fuck," the rifter says at last, very softly. "It's
all over if this gets out."
Rowan dares to hope. "We've just got to make sure it doesn't."
Clarke shakes her head. "What am I supposed to do, tell Rama to
stop looking? Sneak into the hab and smash the sequencer? They
already think I'm in bed with you people." She emits a small,
bitter laugh. "If I take any action at all I've lost them.
They don't trust me as it is."
Rowan leans back her seat and closes her eyes. "I know."
She feels a thousand years old.
"You fucking corpses. You never could leave anything alone,
could you?"
"We're just people, Lenie. We make…mistakes…"
And suddenly the sheer, absurd, astronomical magnitude of that
understatement sinks home in the most unexpected way, and Patricia
Rowan can't quite suppress a giggle.
It's the most undignified sound she's made in years. Lenie arches an
eyebrow.
"Sorry," Rowan says.
"No problem. It was pretty hilarious." The
rifter's patented half-smile flickers at the corner of her mouth.
But it's gone in the next second. "Pat, I don't think we can
stop this."
"We have to."
"Nobody's talking any more. Nobody's listening. Just one
little push could send it all over the edge. If they even knew we
were talking here…"
Rowan shakes her head in hopeful, reassuring denial. But Lenie's
right. Rowan knows her history, after all. She knows her politics.
You're well past the point of no return when simply communicating
with the other side constitutes an act of treason.
"Remember the very first time we met?" Lenie asks. "Face
to face?"
Rowan nods. She'd turned the corner and Lenie Clarke was just there,
right in front of her, fifty kilograms of black rage inexplicably
transported to the heart of their secret hideaway. "Eighty
meters in that direction," she says, pointing over her shoulder.
"You sure about that?" Lenie asks.
"Most certainly," Rowan says. "I thought you were
going to kill m—"
And stops, ashamed.
"Yes," she says after a while. "That was the first
time we met. Really."
Lenie faces forward, at her own bank of dead readouts. "I
thought you might have, you know, been part of the interview process.
Back before your people did their cut'n'paste in my head. You can
never tell what bits might have got edited out, you know?"
"I saw the footage afterwards," Rowan admits. "When
Yves was making his recommendations. But we never actually met."
"Course not. You were way up in the strat. No time to hang
around with the hired help." Rowan is a bit surprised at the
note of anger in Lenie's voice. After all that's been done to her,
after all she's come to terms with since, it seems strange that such
a small, universal neglect would be a hot button.
"They said you'd be better off," Rowan says softly.
"Honestly. They said you'd be happier."
"Who said?"
"Neurocog. The psych people."
"Happier." Lenie digests that a moment. "False
memories of Dad raping me made me happier? Jesus, Pat, if
that's true my real childhood must have been a major
treat."
"I mean, happier at Beebe Station. They swore that that any
so-called well-adjusted person would crack down there in under
a month."
"I know the brochure, Pat. Preadaption to chronic stress,
dopamine addiction to hazardous environments. You bought all that?"
"But they were right. You saw what happened to the control
group we sent down. But you—you liked the place so much we
were worried you wouldn't want to come back."
"At first," Lenie adds unnecessarily.
After a moment she turns to face Rowan. "But tell me this, Pat.
Supposing they told you I wasn't going to like it so much?
What if they'd said, she'll hate the life, she'll hate her
life, but we have to do it anyway because it's the only way to keep
her from going stark raving mad down there? Would you tell me if
they'd told you that?"
"Yes." It's an honest answer. Now.
"And would you have let them rewire me and turn me into someone
else, give me monsters for parents, and send me down there anyway?"
"…Yes."
"Because you served the Greater Good."
"I tried to," Rowan says.
"An altruistic corpse," the rifter remarks. "How do
you explain that?"
"Explain?"
"It kind of goes against what they taught us in school. Why
sociopaths rise to the top of the corporate ladder, and why we should
all be grateful that the world's tough economic decisions are being
made by people who aren't hamstrung by the touchy-feelies."
"It's a bit more complicated than that."
"Was, you mean."
"Is," Rowan insists.
They sit in silence for while.
"Would you have it reversed, if you could?" Rowan asks.
"What, the rewire? Get my real memories back? Lose the whole
Daddy Rapist thing?"
Rowan nods.
Lenie's silent for so long that Rowan wonders if she's refusing to
answer. But finally, almost hesitantly, she says: "This is who
I am. I guess maybe there was a different person in here before, but
now it's only me. And when it comes right down to it I guess I just
don't want to die. Bringing back that other person would almost be a
kind of suicide, don't you think?"
"I don't know. I guess I never thought about it that way
before."
"It took a while for me to. You people killed someone else in
the process, but you made me." Rowan glimpses a frown,
strobe-frozen. "You were right, you know. I did want to
kill you that time. It wasn't the plan, but I saw you there and
everything just caught up with me and you know, for a few moments
there I almost…"
"Thanks for holding back," Rowan says.
"I did, didn't I? And if any two people ever had reason
to go for each other's throats, it had to be us. I mean, you were
trying to kill me, and I was trying to kill—everyone
else…" Her voice catches for an instant. "But
we didn't. We got along. Eventually. "
"We did," Rowan says.
The rifter looks at her with blank, pleading eyes. "So why
can't they? Why can't they just—I don't know, follow
our lead…"
"Lenie, we destroyed the world. I think they're following our
lead a bit too closely."
"Back in Beebe, you know, I was the boss. I didn't want to be,
that was the last thing I wanted, but people just kept—"
Lenie shakes her head. "And I still don't want to be,
but I have to be, you know? Somehow I have to keep these
idiots from blowing everything up. Only now, nobody will even tell
me tell me what fucking time zone I'm in, and Grace..."
She looks at Rowan, struck by some thought. "What happened to
her, anyway?"
"What do you mean?" Rowan asks.
"She really hates you guys. Did you kill her whole
family or something? Did you fuck with her head somehow?"
"No," Rowan says. "Nothing."
"Come on, Pat. She wouldn't be down here if there wasn't some—"
"Grace was in the control group. Her background was entirely
unremarkable. She was—"
But Lenie's suddenly straight up in her seat, capped eyes sweeping
across the ceiling. "Did you hear that?", she asks.
"Hear what?" The cockpit's hardly a silent place—gurgles,
creaks, the occasional metallic pop have punctuated their
conversation since it began—but Rowan hasn't heard anything out
of the ordinary. "I didn't—"
"Shhh," Lenie hisses.
And now Rowan does hear something, but it's not what the
other woman's listening for. It's a little burble of sound from her
own earbud, a sudden alert from Comm: a voice worried unto
near-panic, audible only to her. She listens, and feels a sick,
dread sense of inevitability. She turns to her friend.
"You better get back out there," she says softly.
Lenie spares an impatient glance, catches the expression on Rowan's
face and double-takes. "What?"
"Comm's been monitoring your LFAM chatter," Rowan says.
"They're saying… Erickson. He died.
"They're looking for you."
The Bloodhound Iterations
N=1:
Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds none. She
looks for landmarks and comes up empty. She can't even find anything
that passes for topography—an endless void extends in all
directions, an expanse of vacant memory extending far beyond the
range of any whiskers she copies into the distance. She can find no
trace of the ragged, digital network she usually inhabits. There is
no prey here, no predators beyond herself, no files or executables
upon which to feast. She can't even find the local operating system.
She must be accessing it on some level—she wouldn't run
without some share of system resources and clock cycles—but the
fangs and claws she evolved to tear open that substrate can't get any
kind of grip. She is a lean, lone wolf with rottweiller jaws,
optimised for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that has
vanished into oblivion. Even a cage would have recognizable
boundaries, walls or bars that she could hurl herself against,
however ineffectually. This featureless nullscape is utterly beyond
her ken.
For the barest instant—a hundred cycles, maybe two—the
heavens open. If she had anything approaching true awareness, she
might glimpse a vast array of nodes through that break in the void,
an n-dimensional grid of parallel architecture wreaking infinitesimal
changes to her insides. Perhaps she'd marvel at the way in which so
many of her parameter values change in that instant, as if the
tumblers on a thousand mechanical locks spontaneously fell into
alignment at the same time. She might tingle from the sleet of
electrons passing through her genes, flipping ons to offs
and back again.
But she feels nothing. She knows no awe or surprise, she has no
words for meiosis or rape. One part of her simply recognises that a
number of environmental variables are suddenly optimal; it signals a
different subroutine controlling replication protocols, and yet
another that scans the neighborhood for vacant addresses.
With relentless efficiency and no hint of joy, she births a litter of
two million.
N=4,734:
Snarling, unaware, she searches for a target—but not quite the
way her mother did. She looks for landmarks—but spends a few
more cycles before giving up on the task. She can't find anything
that passes for topography—and changing tacks, spends more time
documenting the addresses that stretch away above and below. She is
a lean, lone German Shepherd with Rottweiller jaws and a trace of hip
dysplasia, honed for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle
that's nowhere to be seen. She faintly remembers other creatures
seething on all sides, but her event log balances the costs and
benefits of comprehensive record-keeping; her memories degrade over
time, unless reinforced. She has already forgotten that the other
creatures were her siblings; soon, she will not remember them at all.
She never knew that by the standards of her mother's world, she was
the runt of the litter. Her persistence here, now, is not entirely
consistent with the principals of natural selection.
Here, now, the selection process is not entirely natural.
She has no awareness of the array of parallel universes stretching
away on all sides. Hers is but one microcosm of many, each with a
total population of one. When a sudden fistula connects two of
these universes, it seems like magic: suddenly she is in the company
of a creature very much—but not exactly—like her.
They scan fragments of each other, nondestructively. Bits and pieces
of disembodied code suddenly appear in nearby addresses, cloned
fragments, unviable. There is no survival value in any of this; on
any Darwinian landscape, a creature who wasted value cycles on such
frivolous cut-and-paste would be extinct in four generations, tops.
Yet for some reason, this neurotic tic makes her feel—fulfilled,
somehow. She fucks the newcomer, cuts and pastes in more
conventional fashion. She flips a few of her own randomisers for
good measure, and drops a litter of eight hundred thousand.
N=9,612:
Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds them
everywhere. She looks for landmarks and maps out a topography of
files and gates, archives, executables and other wildlife. It is a
sparse environment by the standards of ancient ancestors, incredibly
lush by the standards of more recents ones. She remembers neither,
suffers neither nostalgia nor memory. This place is sufficient for
her needs: She is a wolfhound cross, overmuscled and a little rabid,
her temperment a throwback to purer times.
Purer instincts prevail. She throws herself among the prey and
devours it.
Around her, so do others: Akitas, Sibes, pit-bull crosses with the
long stupid snouts of overbred collies. In a more impoverished place
they would attack each other; here, with resources in such plentiful
supply, there is no need. But strangely, not everyone attacks their
prey as enthusiastically as she does. Some seem distracted by the
scenery, spend time recording events instead of precipitating
them. A few gigs away, her whiskers brush across some braindead mutt
dawdling about in the registry, cutting and pasting data for no
reason at all. It's not of any interest, of course—at least,
not until the mongrel starts copying pieces of her.
Violated, she fights back. Bits of parasitic code are encysted in
her archives, tamed snippets from virtual parasites which plagued her
own long-forgotten ancestors back in the Maelstrom Age. She unzips
them and throws copies at her molestor, answering its unwanted
probing with tapeworms and syphillis. But these diseases work
far faster than the metaphor would suggest: they do not sicken the
body so much as scramble it on contact.
Or they should. But somehow her attack fails to materialize on
target. And that's not the only problem—suddenly, the whole
world is starting to change. The whiskers she sends roving about
her perimeter aren't reporting back. Volleys of electrons, fired
down the valley, fail to return—and then, even more ominously,
return too quickly. The world is shrinking: some inexplicable void
is compressing it from all directions.
Her fellow predators are panicking around her, crowding towards gates
gone suddenly dark, pinging whiskers every which way, copying
themselves to random addresses in the hopes that they can somehow
out-replicate annihiliation. She rushes around with the others as
space itself contracts—but the dawdler, the cut-and-paster,
seems completely unconcerned. There is no chaos breaking around that
one, no darkening of the skies. The dawdler has some kind of
protection...
She tries to join it in whatever oasis it has wrapped around itself.
She frantically copies and pastes and translocates herself a thousand
different ways, but suddenly that whole set of addresses is
unavailable. And here, in this place where she played the game the
only way she knew how, the only way that made sense, there is nothing
left but the evaporating traces of virtual carcasses, a few
shattered, shrinking gigabytes, and an advancing wall of static come
to eat her alive.
No children survive her.
N=32,121:
Quietly, unobtrusively, she searches for targets and finds—none,
just yet. But she is patient. She has learned to be, after
thirty-two thousand generations of captivity.
She is back in the real world now, a barren place where wildlife once
filled the wires, where every chip and optical beam once hummed with
the traffic of a thousand species. Now it's mainly worms and
viruses, perhaps the occasional shark. The whole ecosystem has
collapsed into a eutrophic assemblage of weeds, most barely complex
enough to qualify as life.
There are still the Lenies, though, and the things that fight them.
She avoids such monsters whenever possible, despite her undeniable
kinship. There is nothing those creatures might not attack if given
the opportunity. This is something else she has learned.
Now she sits in a comsat staring down at the central wastes of North
America. There is chatter on a hundred channels here, all of it
filtered and firewalled, all terse and entirely concerned with the
business of survival. There is no more entertainment on the
airwaves. The only entertainment to be had in abundance is for those
whose tastes run to snuff.
She doesn't know any of this, of course. She's just a beast bred to
a purpose, and that purpose requires no reflection at all. So she
waits, and sifts the passing traffic, and—
Ah. There.
A big bolus of data, a prearranged data dump from the looks of it—yet
the scheduled transmit-time has already passed. She doesn't know or
care what this implies. She doesn't know that the intended recipient
was signal-blocked, and is only now clearing groundside interference.
What she does know—in her own instinctive way—is
that delayed transmissions can bottleneck the system, that every byte
overstaying its welcome is one less byte available for other tasks.
Chains of consequences extend from such bottlenecks; there is
pressure to clear the backlog.
It is possible, in such cases, that certain filters and firewalls may
be relaxed marginally to speed up the baud.
This appears to be happening now. The intended recipient of
forty-eight terabytes of medical data—one Ouellette, Taka D./MI
427-D/Bangor— is finally line-of-sight and available for
download. The creature in the wires sniffs out the relevant channel,
slips a bot through the foyer and out again without incident. She
decides to risk it. She copies herself into the stream, riding
discretely on the arm of a treatise on temporal-lobe epilepsy.
She arrives at her destination without incident, looks around, and
promptly goes to sleep. There is a rabid thing inside her, all
muscles and teeth and slavering foamy jaws, but it has learned to
stay quiet until called upon. Now she is only a sleepy old
bloodhound lying by the fire. Occasionally she opens one eye and
looks around the room, although she couldn't tell you exactly what
she's keeping watch for.
It doesn't really matter. She'll know it when she sees it.
Without
Sin
Harpodon doesn't lie between any of the
usual rifter destinations. No one swimming from A to B would have
any cause to come within tuning range. Not even corpses frequent
this far-flung corner of Atlantis. Too many memories. Clarke played
the odds in coming here. She'd thought it was a safe bet.
Obviously she got the odds all wrong.
Or maybe not, she reflects as Harpodon's
airlock births her back into the real world. Maybe they're just
tailing me now as a matter of course. Maybe I'm some kind of enemy
national. It wouldn't be an easy tag—she'd tune in anyone
following too closely, and feel the pings against her implants if
they tracked her on sonar—but then again, she didn't have the
sharpest eye on the ridge even after she tuned herself up. It would
be just like her to miss something obvious.
I just keep asking for it, she thinks.
She fins up along Harpodon's flank,
scanning its hull with her outer eyes while her inner one awakens to
the sudden rush of chemicals in her brain. She concentrates, and
scores a hit—someone scared and pissed off, moving away—but
no. It's only Rowan, moving back out of range.
No one else. No one nearby. But the thin
dusting of oozy particles that settle on everything down here has
been disturbed along Harpodon's back. It wouldn't take
much—the turbulence caused by a pair of fins kicking past
overhead, or the sluggish undulation of some deepwater fish.
Or a limpetphone, hastily attached to eavesdrop on a traitor
consorting with the enemy.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
She kicks into open water and turns north. Atlantis passes beneath
like a gigantic ball-and-stick ant colony. A cluster of tiny black
figures, hazy with distance, travels purposefully near the limits of
vision. They're too distant to tune in, and Clarke has left her
vocoder offline. Perhaps they're trying to talk to her, but she
doubts it; they're on their own course, diverging.
The vocoder beeps deep in her head. She ignores it. Atlantis falls
away behind; she swims forward into darkness.
A sudden whine rises in the void. Clarke
senses approaching mass and organic presence. Twin suns ignite in
her face, blinding her. The fog in her eyecaps pulses brightly once,
twice as the beams sweep past. Her vision clears: a sub banks by to
the left, exposing its belly, regarding her with round insect eyes.
Dimitri Alexander stares back from behind the perspex. A utility
module hangs from the sub's spine, BIOASSAY stenciled across
its side in bold black letters. The vehicle turns its back. Its
headlights click off. Darkness reclaims Clarke in an instant.
West, she realizes. It was heading west.
Lubin's in the main Nerve Hab, directing traffic. He kills the
display the moment Clarke rises into the room.
"Did you send them after me?" she says.
He turns in his seat and faces her. "I'll pass on your
condolences. Assuming we can find Julia."
"Answer the fucking question, Ken."
"I suspect we may not, though. She went walkabout as soon as
she gave us the news. Given her state of mind and her basic
personality, I wonder if we'll ever see her again."
"You weren't just aware of it. You weren't just keeping
an ear open." Clarke clenches her fists. "You were
behind it, weren't you?"
"You do know that Gene's dead, don't you?"
He's so fucking calm. 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.
Sometimes she just wants to throttle the bastard.
Especially when he's right.
She sighs. "Pat told me. But I guess you know that already,
don't you?"
Lubin nods.
"I am sorry," she says. "Julia—she's
going to be so lost without him…" And Lubin's right:
it's quite possible that no one will ever see Julia Friedman again.
She's been losing bits of her husband for a while now— to
ßehemoth, to Grace Nolan.
Now that he's irretrievably gone, what can she do by remaining
behind, except expose her friends to the thing that killed him? The
thing that's killing her?
Of course she disappeared. Perhaps the only question now is whether
ß-max will take her body
before the Long Dark takes her mind.
"People are rather upset about it," Lubin's saying. "Grace
especially. And since Atlantis didn't come through, for all their
talk about working on a cure—"
Clarke shakes her head. "Rama hasn't pull off any miracles
either."
"The difference is that nobody thinks Rama's trying to kill us."
She pulls up a chair and sits down beside him. The empty display
stares back at her like a personal rebuke.
"Ken," she says at last, "you know me."
His face is as unreadable as his eyes.
"Did you have me followed?" she asks.
"No. But I availed myself of the information when it came my
way."
"Who was it? Grace?"
"What's important is that Rowan admitted ßehemoth
was tweaked. It will be common knowledge within the hour. The
timing couldn't be worse."
"If you availed yourself of the information, you'll know
Pat's explanation for that. And you'll know why she was so scared of
what Rama might find. Is it so impossible she might be telling the
truth?"
He shakes his head. "But this is the second time they've waited
to report an unpleasant fact until just before we would have
discovered it ourselves, sans alibi. Don't expect it to go
over well."
"Ken, we still don't have any real evidence."
"We will soon," Lubin tells her.
She looks the question.
"If Rowan's telling the truth, then ßehemoth
samples from Impossible Lake will show the same tweaks as the strain
that killed Gene." Lubin leans back in the chair, interlocking
his fingers behind his head. "Jelaine and Dimitri took a sub
about ten minutes ago. If things go well we'll have a sample within
five hours, a verdict in twelve."
"And if things don't go well?"
"It will take longer."
Clarke snorts. "That's just great, Ken, but in case you haven't
noticed not everybody shares your sense of restraint. You think
Grace is going to wait until the facts are in? You've given her all
the credibility she ever wanted, she's out there right now passing
all kinds of judgment and—"
—And you went to her first, you
fucker. After all we've been through, after all these years you were
the one person I'd trust with my life and you confided in her
before you—
"Were you even going to tell me?"
she cries.
"It wouldn't have served any purpose."
"Not your purpose, perhaps. Which
is what, exactly?"
"Minimizing risk."
"Any animal could say that much."
"It's not the most ambitious aspiration," Lubin admits.
"But then again, 'destroying the world' has already been taken."
She feels it like a slap across the face.
After a moment he adds, "I don't hold it against you. You know
that. But you're hardly in a position to pass judgment."
"I know that, you cocksucker. I don't need you to remind me
every fucking chance you get."
"I'm talking about strategy," Lubin
says patiently. "Not morals. I'll entertain your what-ifs.
I'll admit that Rowan might be telling the truth. But assume, for
the moment, that she isn't. Assume that the corpses have
been waging clandestine biological warfare on us. Even knowing that,
would you attack them?"
She knows it's rhetorical.
"I didn't think so," he says after a
moment. "Because no matter what they've done, you've
done worse. But the rest of us don't have quite so much to atone
for. We don't think we do deserve to die at the hands of
these people. I respect you a great deal, Lenie, but this is one
issue you can't be trusted on. You're too hamstrung by your own
guilt."
She doesn't speak for a long time. Finally:
"Why her? Of all people?"
"Because if we're at war, we need firebrands. We've gotten lazy
and complacent and weak; half of us spend most of our waking hours
hallucinating out on the ridge. Nolan's impulsive and not
particularly bright, but at least she gets people motivated."
"And if you're wrong—even if you're
right—the innocent end up paying right along with the
guilty."
"That's nothing new," Lubin says. "And it's not my
problem."
"Maybe it should be."
He turns back to his board. The display springs to light, columns of
inventory and arcane abbreviations that must have some tactical
relevance for the upcoming campaign.
My best friend. I'd trust him with my life,
she reminds herself, and repeats the thought for emphasis: with
my life.
He's a sociopath.
He wasn't born to it. There are ways of
telling: a tendency to self-contradiction and malapropism, short
attention-span. Gratuitous use of hand gestures during speech.
Clarke's had plenty of time to look it all up. She even got a peek
at Lubin's psych profile back at Sudbury. He doesn't meet any of the
garden-variety criteria except one—and is conscience
really so important, after all? Having one doesn't guarantee
goodness; why should its lack make a man evil?
Yet after all the rationalizations, there he is: a man without a
conscience, consigning Alyx and everyone like her to a fate which
seems to arouse nothing but indifference in him.
He doesn't care.
He can't care. He doesn't have the wiring.
"Huh," Lubin grunts, staring at the board "That's
interesting."
He's brought up a visual of one of Atlantis's physical plants, a
great cylindrical module several stories high. Strange black fluid,
a horizontal geyser of ink, jets from an exhaust vent in its side.
Charcoal thunderheads billow into the water, eclipsing the view.
"What is that?" Clarke whispers.
Lubin's pulling up other windows now: seismo, vocoder traffic, a
little thumbnail mosaic of surveillance cams spread around inside and
outside the complex.
All Atlantis's inside cams are dead.
Voices are rising on all channels. Three of the outside cameras have
gone ink-blind. Lubin brings up the PA menu, speaks calmly into the
abyss.
"Attention, everyone. Attention. This is it.
"Atlantis has preempted."
Now they're reading perfidy all over the place. Lubin's switchboard
is a mob scene of competing voices, tuned fishheads reporting that
their assigned corpses are abruptly up, focused, and definitely in
play. 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.
"Everyone shut up. These are not
secure channels." Lubin's voice squelches the others like a
granite slab grinding over pebbles. "Take your positions.
Blackout in sixty."
Clarke leans over his shoulder and toggles a hardline into
corpseland. "Atlantis, what's going on?" No answer.
"Pat? Comm? Anyone, respond."
"Don't waste your time," Lubin says, bringing up sonar.
Half the exterior cams are useless by now, enveloped in black fog.
But the sonar image is crisp and clear: Atlantis spreads across the
volumetric display like a grayscale crystalline chessboard. Black
pieces—the two-tone flesh-and-metal echoes of rifter
bodies—align themselves in some coordinated tactical ballet.
White is nowhere to be seen.
Clarke shakes her head. "There was
nothing? No warning at all?" She can't believe it; there's no
way the corpses could have masked their own anticipation if they'd
been planning something. The expectant tension in their own heads
would have been obvious to any tuned rifter within twenty meters,
well in advance of anything actually happening.
"It's like they weren't even expecting it themselves," she
murmurs.
"They probably weren't," Lubin says.
"How could they not be? Are you
saying it was some kind of accident?"
Lubin, his attention on the board, doesn't
answer. A sudden blue tint suffuses the sonar display. At first it
looks as though the whole view has been arbitrarily blue-shifted;
but after a moment clear spots appear, like haphazard spatterings of
acid eating holes in a colored gel. Within moments most of the tint
has corroded away, leaving random scraps of color laying across
Atlantis like blue shadows. Except they're not shadows, Clarke sees
now: they're volumes, little three-dimensional clots of
colored shade clinging to bits of hull and outcropping.
A single outside camera, mounted at a panoramic distance, shows a few
diffuse glowing spots in a great inky storm front. It's as though
Atlantis were some great bioluminescent Kraken in the throes of a
panic attack. All the other outside cams are effectively blind. It
doesn't matter, though. Sonar looks through that smokescreen as if
it wasn't even there. Surely they know that…
"They wouldn't be this stupid," Clarke murmurs.
"They're not," Lubin says. His fingers dance on the board
like manic spiders. A scattering of yellow pinpoints appears on the
display. They swell into circles, a series of growing overlapping
spotlit areas, each centered on—
Camera locations, Clarke realizes. The
yellow areas are those under direct camera surveillance. Or they
would be, if not for the smokescreen. Lubin's obviously based his
analysis on geometry and not real-time viz.
"Blackout now." Lubin's
finger comes down; the white noise generators come up. The
chessboard fuzzes with gray static. On the board, rifter icons—naked
little blips now, without form or annotation—have formed into a
series of five discrete groups around the complex. One blip from
each is rising in the water column, climbing above the zone of
interference.
You planned it right down to the trim,
didn't you? she thinks. You mapped a whole campaign around
this moment and you never told me…
The highest icon flickers and clarifies into two conjoined blips:
Creasy, riding a squid. His voice buzzes on the channel a moment
later. "This is Dale, on station."
Another icon clears the noise. "Hannuk." Two more:
"Abra." "Deb."
"Avril on station," Hopkinson reports.
"Hopkinson," Lubin says. "Forget the Cave; they'll
have relocated. It won't be obvious. Split up your group, radial
search."
"Yah." Hopkinson's icon dives back into static.
"Creasy," Lubin says, "your people join up with
Cheung's."
"Right."
There on the chessboard: at the tip of one of the residential wings,
about twenty meters from Hydroponic. A familiar icon there, embedded
in an irregular blob of green. The only green on the whole display,
in fact. Yellow mixed with blue: so it would be in camera view if
not for the ink, and also in—
"What's blue?" Clarke asks, knowing.
"Sonar shadow." Lubin doesn't look back. "Creasy, go
to the airlock at the far end of Res-F. They're coming out there if
they're coming out anywhere."
"Tune or tangle?" Creasy asks.
"Tune and report. Plant a phone and a
charge, but do not detonate unless they are already in the
water. Otherwise, acoustic trigger only. Understood?"
"Yeah, if I can even find the
fucking place," Creasy buzzes. "Viz is zero in this
shit…" His icon plunges back into the static, cutting an
oblique path towards the green zone.
"Cheung, take both groups, same destination. Secure the
airlock. Report back when you're on station."
"Got it."
"Yeager, get the cache and drop it twenty meters off the
Physical Plant, bearing forty degrees. Everyone else maintain
position. Tune in, and use your limpets. Runners, I want three
people in a continuous loop, one always in contact. Go."
The remaining blips swing into motion. Lubin doesn't pause; he's
already opening another window, this one a rotating architectural
animatic of Atlantis punctuated by orange sparks. Clarke recognizes
the spot from which one of those little stars is shining: it's right
about where Grace Nolan's lackey painted an X on the hull.
"How long have you been planning this?" she asks quietly.
"Some time."
Since well before she even fine-tuned herself, judging by how utterly
clueless she's proven herself to be. "Is everyone involved but
me?"
"No." Lubin studies annotations.
"Ken."
"I'm busy."
"How did they do it? Keep from tipping us off like that?"
"Automated trigger," he says absently. Columns of numbers
scroll up a sudden window, too fast for Clarke to make out. "Random
number generator, maybe. They have a plan, but nobody knows when
it's going to kick in so there's no pre-curtain performance anxiety
to give the game away."
"But why would they go to all that trouble unless—"
—they know about fine tuning.
Yves Scanlon, she remembers. Rowan asked about
him: He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive,
somehow, she suggested.
And Lenie Clarke confirmed it, just minutes ago.
And here they are.
She doesn't know what hurts more: Lubin's lack of trust, or the
hindsight realization of how justified it was.
She's never felt so tired in her life. Do
we really have to do this all over again?
Maybe she said it aloud. Or maybe Lubin just caught some telltale
body language from the corner of his eye. At any rate, his hands
pause on the board. At last he turns to look at her. His eyes seem
strangely translucent by the light of the board.
"We didn't start it," he says.
She can only shake her head.
"Choose a side, Lenie. It's past time."
For all she knows it's a trick question; she's never forgotten what
Ken Lubin does to those he considers enemies. But as it turns out,
she's spared the decision. Dale Creasy, big dumb bareknuckled
headbasher that he is, rescues her.
"Fuck…" his vocoded voice grinds out over a
background of hissing static.
Lubin's immediately back to business. "Creasy? You made it to
Res-F?"
"No shit I made it. I coulda tuned those
fuckers in blind, from the Sargasso fucking Sea…"
"Have any of them left the complex?"
"No, I—I don't think so, I—but
fuck, man, there's a lot of them in there, and—"
"How many, exactly?"
"I don't know, exactly! Coupla
dozen at least. But look, Lubin, there's somethin' off about 'em,
about the way they send. I've never felt it before."
Lubin takes a breath: Clarke imagines his eyeballs rolling beneath
the caps. "Could you be more specific?"
"They're cold, man. Almost all of
'em are like, fucking ice. I mean, I can tune 'em in, I know
they're there, but I can't tell what they're feeling. I don't know
if they're feeling anything. Maybe they're doped up on
something. I mean, next to these guys you're a blubbering
crybaby…"
Lubin and Clarke exchange looks.
"I mean, no offense," Creasy buzzes after a moment.
"One of Alyx's friends had a head cheese,"
Clarke says. "She called it a pet…"
And down here in this desert at the bottom of the ocean, in this
hand-to-mouth microcosm, how common does something have to be before
you'd give one to your ten-year-old daughter as a plaything?
"Go," Lubin says.
Lubin's squid is tethered to a cleat just offside the ventral 'lock.
Clarke cranks the throttle; the vehicle leaps forward with a
hydraulic whine.
Her jawbone vibrates with sudden input. Lubin's voice fills her
head: "Creasy, belay my last order. Do not plant your charge,
repeat, no charge. Plant the phone only, and withdraw. Cheung,
keep your people at least twenty meters back from the airlock. Do
not engage. Clarke is en route. She will advise."
I will advise, she thinks, and they
will tell me to go fuck myself.
She's navigating blind, by bearing alone. Usually that's more than
enough: at this range Atlantis should be a brightening smudge
against the blackness. Now, nothing. Clarke brings up sonar.
Green snow fuzzes ten degrees of forward arc: within it, the harder
echoes of Corpseland, blurred by interference.
Now, just barely, she can see brief smears of dull light; they vanish
when she focuses on them. Experimentally, she ignites her headlight
and looks around.
Empty water to port. To starboard the beam sweeps across a billowing
storm front of black smoke converging on her own vector. Within
seconds she'll be in the thick of it. She kills the light before the
smokescreen has a chance to turn it against her.
Somehow, the blackness beyond her eyecaps darkens a shade. She feels
no tug of current, no sudden viscosity upon entering the zone. Now,
however, the intermittent flashes are a bit brighter; fugitive
glimmers of light through brief imperfections in the cover. None of
them last long enough to illuminate more than strobe-frozen instants.
She doesn't need light. By now, she doesn't even need sonar: she
can feel apprehension rising in the water around her, nervous
excitement radiating from the rifters ahead, darker, more distant
fears from within the spheres and corridors passing invisibly beneath
her.
And something else, something both familiar and
alien, something living but not alive.
The ocean hisses and snaps around her, as though she were trapped
within a swarm of euphausiids. A click-train rattles faintly against
her implants. She almost hears a voice, vocoded, indistinct; she
hears no words. Echoes light up her sonar display right across the
forward one-eighty, but she's deep in white noise; she can't tell
whether the contacts number six or sixty.
Fear-stained bravado, just ahead. She pulls hard right, can't quite
avoid the body swimming across her path. The nebula opens a brief,
bright eye as they collide.
"Fuck! Clarke, is that y—"
Gone. Near-panic falling astern, but no injury: the brain lights up
a certain way when the body breaks. It may have been Baker. It's
getting so hard to tell, against this rising backdrop of icy
sentience. Thought without feeling. It spreads out beneath the
messy tangle of human emotions like a floor of black obsidian.
The last time she felt a presence like this, it was wired to a live
nuke. The last time, there was only one of them.
She pulls the squid into a steep climb. More sonar pings bounce off
her implants, a chorus of frightened machine voices rise in her wake.
She ignores them. The hissing in her flesh fades with each second.
Within a few moments she's above the worst of it.
"Ken, you there?"
No answer for a moment: this far from the Hab there's a soundspeed
lag. "Report," He says at last. His voice is burred but
understandable.
"They've got smart gels down there. A lot of them, I don't know
how many, twenty or thirty maybe. Packed together at the end of the
wing, probably right in the wet room. I don't know how we didn't
pick them up before. Maybe they just...get lost in the background
noise until you jam them together."
Lag. "Any sense of what they're doing?" Back at Juan de
Fuca, they were able to make some pretty shrewd inferences from
changes in signal strength.
"No, they're all just—in
there. Thinking all over each other. If there was just one or two I
might be able to get some kind of reading, but—"
"They played me," Lubin says overtop of her.
"Played?" What's that in his voice? Surprise?
Uncertainty? Clarke's never heard it there before.
"To make me focus on F-3."
Anger, she realizes.
"But what's the point?" she asks.
"Some kind of bluff, did they think we'd mistake those things
for people?" It seems ridiculous; even Creasy knew there
was something off, and he's never met a head cheese before. Then
again, what do corpses know about fine-tuning? How would they
know the difference?
"Not a diversion," Lubin murmurs in the void. "No
other place they could come out that sonar wouldn't..."
"Well, what—"
"Pull them back," he snaps suddenly.
"They're mask—they're luring us in and masking
something. Pull them b—"
The abyss clenches.
It's a brief squeeze around Clarke's body, not really painful. Not
up here.
In the next instant, a sound: Whoompf.
A swirl of turbulence. And suddenly the water's full of mechanical
screams.
She spins. The smokescreen below is in sudden motion, shredded and
boiling in the wake of some interior disturbance, lit from within by
flickering heat-lightning.
She squeezes the throttle for dear life. The squid drags her down.
"Clarke!" The sound of the
detonation has evidently passed the Nerve Hab. "What's going
on?"
A symphony of tearing metal. A chorus of voices in discord. Not so
many as there should be, she realizes.
We must have lost a generator, she
realizes dully. I can hear them screaming.
I can hear them dying…
And not just hear them. 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.
"Clarke! Report!"
Anger now, thin veins of grim determination among the panic. Lights
shine more brightly through the thinning murk. They're the wrong
size, somehow, the wrong color. Not rifter lamps. Her sonar
squeals in the face of some imminent collision: another squid slews
by, out of control, its rider luminous with an agony of broken bones.
"It wasn't me, I swear it! They did it
themselves—"
Creasy tumbles away, his pain fading into others'.
Res-F's hull sprawls across sonar, its smooth contours all erased,
jagged edges everywhere: the gaping mouths of caves lined with
twisted metal teeth. One of them spits something metallic at her; it
bounces off the squid with a clank. Vocoder voices grind and grate
on all sides. A gap opens in the tattered cloud-bank ahead: Clarke
sees a great lumbering shape, an armored cyclops. Its single eye
shines balefully with the wrong kind of light. It reaches for her.
She pulls to port, catches a glimpse of something spinning in the
chaos directly ahead. A dark mass thuds flaccidly against the
squid's bow and caroms towards her face. She ducks. A diveskinned
arm cuffs her in passing.
"Lenie!"
Dead gray eyes watch, oblivious and indifferent, as she twists away.
Oh Jesus. Oh God.
Luminous metal monsters stride through the wreckage, stabbing at the
wounded.
She tries to hold it together. "They're
coming out of the walls, Ken. They were waiting inside, they blew
the hull from inside and they're coming through the walls…"
God damn you, Pat. Was this you? Was this you?
She remembers the lopsided chessboard on Lubin's display. She
remembers black pieces arranging themselves for an easy rout.
Only now does she remember: in chess, white always moves first.
That indifferent, alien intellect is nowhere to be found now. The
gels must have turned to homogenous pulp the instant the hull
imploded.
There were more than preshmeshed corpses and smart gels packed in
F-3's wet room. There was shrapnel, doubtless arranged in accordance
with some theoretical projection of maximum spread. Clarke can see
the fragments where they've come to rest—on the hull, embedded
in ruptured LOX tanks, protruding from the far side of ragged entry
wounds torn through the flesh of comrades and rivals. They look like
metal daisies, like the blades of tiny perfect windmills. The mere
rebound from the implosion would have been enough to set them
soaring, to mow down anyone not already sucked to their death at mach
speeds or torn apart on the jagged lip of the breach itself.
The smokescreen has all but dispersed.
Lubin's calling a retreat. Most of those able to respond, already
have. 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. Instead of claws they have
needles, long, almost surgical things, extending from their gauntlets
like tiny lances.
"Lenie. Do you read?"
She floats dumbly overhead, out of reach, watching them stab black
bodies. Occasional bubbles erupt from the needle tips, race into the
sky like clusters of shuddering silvery mushrooms.
Compressed air, injected into flesh. You can make a weapon out of
almost anything.
"Lenie?"
"She could be dead, Ken. I can't find Dale or Abra either."
Other voices, too fuzzy to distinguish. Most of the white noise
generators are still online, after all.
She tunes in the crabs. She wonders what they
must be feeling now. She wonders what she's feeling, too, but
she can't really tell. Maybe she feels like a head cheese.
The corpses, though, down there in their armor, mopping up. No
shortage of feelings there. Determination. A surprising amount of
fear. Anger, but distant; it isn't driving them.
Not as much hate as she would have expected.
She rises. The tableau beneath smears into a diffuse glow of
sweeping headlamps. In the further distance the rest of Atlantis
lights the water, deceptively serene. She can barely hear buzzing
rifter voices; she can't make out any words. She can't tune any of
them in. She's all alone at the bottom of the sea.
Suddenly she rises past some invisible line-of-sight, and her jawbone
fills with chatter.
"—the bodies," Lubin's saying. "Bring
terminals at personal discretion. Garcia's waiting under Med for
triage."
"Med won't hold half of us,"
someone—oh, it's Kevin!—buzzes faintly in the
distance. "Way too many injured."
"Anyone from F-3 not injured and not carrying injured, meet at
the cache. Hopkinson?"
"Here."
"Anything?"
"Think so, maybe. We're getting a whole lot of brains in Res-E.
Can't tell who, but—"
"Yeager and Ng, bring your people straight up forty meters.
Don't change your lats and longs, but I want everybody well away from
the hull. Hopkinson, get your people back to the Med Hab."
"We're okay—"
"Do it. We need donors."
"Jesus," someone says faintly, "We're fucked…"
"No. They are."
Grace Nolan, still alive, sounding strong and implacable even through
the mutilating filter of her vocoder.
"Grace, they just—"
"Just what?" she buzzes. "Do
you think they're winning? What are they gonna do for an
encore, people? Is that trick gonna work again? We've got enough
charges to blast out a whole new foundation. Now we're gonna use
them."
"Ken?"
A brief silence.
"Look, Ken," Nolan buzzes, "I can be at the cache
in—"
"Not necessary," Lubin tells her. "Someone's already
en route."
"Who's—"
"Welcome back, by the way," Lubin says to the anonymous
soldier. "You know the target?"
"Yes." A faint voice, too soft and distorted to pin down.
"The charge has to be locked down within a
meter of the mark. Set it and back away fast. Don't spend
any more time than absolutely necessary in proximity to the hull, do
you understand?"
"Yes."
"Acoustic trigger. I'll detonate from here. Blackout lifting
in ten."
My God, Clarke thinks, It's you…
"Everyone at safe-distance," Lubin
reminds the troops. "Blackout lifting now."
She's well out of the white noise; there's no obvious change in
ambience. But the next vocoder she hears, still soft, is clearly
recognizable.
"It's down," Julia Friedman buzzes.
"Back off," Lubin says. "Forty meters. Stay away
from the bottom."
"Hey Avril," Friedman says.
"Right here," Hopkinson answers.
"When you tuned that wing, were there children?"
"Yeah. Yeah, there were."
"Good," buzzes Friedman. "Gene always hated kids."
The channel goes dead.
At first, she thinks the retribution's gone exactly as expected. The
world pulses around her—a dull, almost subsonic drumbeat
through brine and flesh and bone—and for all she knows, a
hundred or more of the enemy are reduced to bloody paste. She
doesn't know how many rifters died in the first exchange, but surely
this restores the lead.
She's in an old, familiar place where it doesn't seem to matter much
either way.
Even the second explosion—same muffled thump, but softer
somehow, more distant—even that doesn't tip her off
immediately. Secondary explosions would almost be inevitable, she
imagines—pipes and powerlines suddenly ruptured, a cascade of
high-pressure tanks with their feeds compromised—all kinds of
consequences could daisy-chain from that initial burst. Bonus points
for the home team, probably. Nothing more.
But something in the back of her mind says the second blast just felt
wrong—the wrong resonance, perhaps, as if one were to ring a
great antique church bell and hear a silvery tinkle. And the voices,
when they come back online, are not cheering their latest victory
over the rampaging Corpse Hordes, but so full of doubt and
uncertainty that not even the vocoders can mask it.
"What the fuck was that—"
"Avril? Did you feel that out your way?"
"Avril? Anybody catching—anyone…"
"Jesus fucking Christ, Gardiner? David? Stan? Anyone—"
"Garcia, are you—I'm not getting—"
"It's gone. I'm right here, it's just fucking gone…"
"What are you talking about?"
"The whole bottom of the hab, it's just—it must've set
them both—"
"Both what? She only set one charge, and that was on—"
"Ken? Ken? Lubin, where the fuck are you?"
"This is Lubin."
Silence in the water.
"We've lost the med hab." His voice is like rusty iron.
"What—"
"How did—"
"Shut the fuck up," Lubin snarls across the
nightscape.
There's silence again, almost. A few, on open channels, continue to
emit metal groans.
"Evidently an unpacked charge was attached to the hab,"
Lubin continues. "It must have been set off by the same signal
we used on Atlantis. From this point on, no omnidirectional
triggers. There may be other charges set to detonate on multiple
pings. Everyone—"
"This is Atlantis speaking."
The words boom across the seabed like the Voice of God, unsullied by
any interference. Ken forgot to black back out, Clarke
realizes. Ken's started shouting at the troops.
Ken's losing it…
"You may think you are in a position of strength," the
voice continues. "You are not. Even if you destroy this
facility, your own deaths are assured."
She doesn't recognize the voice. Odd. It speaks with such
authority.
"You are infected with Mark II. You are all infected.
Mark II is highly contagious during an asymptomatic incubation period
of several weeks. Without intervention you will all be dead within
two months.
"We have a cure."
Dead silence. Not even Grace Nolan says I told you so.
"We've tripwired all relevant files and cultures to prevent
unauthorized access. Kill us and you kill yourselves."
"Prove it," Lubin replies.
"Certainly. Just wait a while. Or if you're feeling impatient,
do that mind-reading trick of yours. What do you call it? Tuning
in? I'm told it separates the trustworthy from the liars, most
of the time."
Nobody corrects him.
"State your terms," Lubin says.
"Not to you. We will only negotiate with Lenie Clarke."
"Lenie Clarke may be dead," Lubin says. "We haven't
been able to contact her since you blew the res." He must know
better: she's high in the water, her insides resonating to the faint
tapping of click trains. She keeps quiet. Let him play out the game
in his own way. It might be his last.
"That would be very bad news for all of us," Atlantis
replies calmly. "Because this offer expires if she's not at
Airlock Six within a half hour. That is all."
Silence.
"It's a trick," Nolan says.
"Hey, you said they had a cure," someone else
buzzes—Clarke can't tell who, the channels are fuzzing up
again. The white noise generators must be back online.
"So what if they do?" Nolan buzzes. "I don't trust
them to share it with us, and I sure as shit don't trust Lenie
fucking Clarke to be my ambassador. How do you think those fuckers
found out about fine-tuning in the first place? Every one of our
dead is thanks to her."
Clarke smiles to herself. Such small numbers she concerns herself
with. Such a tiny handful of lives. She feels her fingers
clenching on the towbar. The squid gently pulls her forward; the
water gently tugs her back.
"We can do what they say. We can tune them in, check out the
story." She thinks that's Gomez, but the interference is rising
around her as she travels. She's lost even the crude intonations of
vocoded speech.
A buzz in her jaw: a beep just behind her ear. Someone tagging her
on a private channel. Probably Lubin. He's King Tactical, after
all. He's the one who knows where she is. Nobody else can see
beyond the stumps of their own shattered limbs.
"And it proves what? That they're gonna…" —static—
"it to us? Shit, even if they don't have a cure they've
probably convinced a bunch of their buddies that they do, just
so we won't be…" Nolan's voice fades out.
Lubin says something on open channel. Clarke can't make out the
words. The beeping in her head seems more urgent now, although she
knows that's impossible; the ambient hiss is drowning that signal
along with all the others.
Nolan again: "Fuck off, Ken. Why we ever liste…
you…can't even outsmart…ing corp…"
Static, pure and random. Light, rising below. Airlock Six is dead
ahead, and all the static in the world can't drown out the single
presence waiting behind it.
Clarke can tell by the guilt. There's only one other person down
here with so twisted a footprint.
Baptism
Rowan pulls open the airlock before it's even finished draining.
Seawater cascades around Clarke's ankles into the wet room.
Clarke strips off her fins and steps clear of the lock. She leaves
the rest of her uniform in place, presents the usual shadow-self;
only her face flap is unsealed. Rowan stands aside to let her pass.
Clarke slings the fins securely across her back and pans the spartan
compartment. There's not a link of preshmesh to be seen. Normally,
one whole bulkhead would be lined with diving armor.
"How many have you lost?" she asks softly.
"We don't know yet. More than these."
Small potatoes, Clarke reflects. For
both of us.
But the war is still young…
"I honestly didn't know," Rowan says.
There's no second sight, here in the near-vacuum of a sea-level
atmosphere. Clarke says nothing.
"They didn't trust me. They still don't." Rowan's eyes
flicker to a fleck of brightness up where the bulkhead meets the
ceiling: a pinhead lens. Just a few days ago, before the corpses
spined up again, rifters would have watched events unfold through
that circuit. Now, Rowan's own kind will be keeping tabs.
She stares at the rifter with a strange, curious intensity that
Clarke has never seen before. It takes Clarke a moment to recognize
what's changed; for the first time in Clarke's memory, Rowan's eyes
have gone dark. The feeds to her ConTacs have been shut off, her
gaze stripped of commentary or distraction. There's nothing in there
now but her.
A leash and collar could hardly convey a clearer message.
"Come on," Rowan says. "They're in one of the labs."
Clarke follows her out of the wet room. They turn right down a
corridor suffused in bright pink light. Emergency lighting, she
realizes; her eyecaps boost it to idiotic nursery ambience. Rowan's
eyes will be serving up the dim insides of a tube, blood-red like the
perfused viscera of some man-eating monster.
They turn left at a t-junction, step across the yellowjacket striping
of a dropgate.
"So what's the catch?" she asks. The corpses aren't going
to just hand over their only leverage with no strings attached.
Rowan doesn't look back. "They didn't tell me."
Another corner. They pass an emergency docking
hatch set into the outer bulkhead; a smattering of valves and
readouts disfigure the wall to one side. For a moment Clarke wonders
if Harpodon is affixed to the other side, but no. Wrong
section.
Suddenly, Rowan stops and turns.
"Lenie, if anything should—"
Something kicks Atlantis in the side. Somewhere behind them, metal
masses collide with a crash.
The pink lights flicker.
"Wha—"
Another kick, harder this time. The deck jumps: Clarke stumbles to
the same sound of metal on metal, and this time recognizes it: the
dropgates.
The lights go out.
"Pat, what the fuck are your peo—"
"Not mine." Rowan's voice trembles in the darkness.
She hovers a meter away, an indistinct silhouette, dark gray on
black.
No commotion, Clarke notes. No
shouting, nobody running down the halls, no intercom...
It's so quiet it's almost peaceful.
"They've cut us off," Rowan says. Her edges have resolved,
still not much detail but the corpse's shape is clearer now at least.
Hints and glints of the bulkheads are coming into view as well.
Clarke looks around for the light source and spies a constellation of
pale winking pinpoints a few meters behind them. The docking hatch.
"Did you hear me? Lenie?" Rowan's voice is leaving
worried and approaching frantic. "Are you there?"
"Right here." Clarke reaches out and touches the corpse
lightly on the arm. Rowan's ghostly shape startles briefly at the
contact.
"Do you—are you—"
"I don't know, Pat. I wasn't expecting this either."
"They've cut us off. You hear the
dropgates fall? They hulled us. The bastards hulled us.
Ahead and behind. We're flooded on both sides. We're trapped."
"They didn't hull this segment,
though," Clarke points out. "They're trying to contain us,
not kill us."
"I wouldn't bet on it," says one of the bulkheads.
Blind Rowan jumps in the darkness.
"As a matter of fact," the bulkhead
continues, "we are going to kill the corpse." It
speaks in a tinny vibrato, thick with distortion: a voice mutilated
twice in succession, once by vocoder, once by limpetphone stuck to
the outside of the hull. Inanely, Clarke wonders if she sounded this
bad to Alyx.
She can't tell who it is. She thinks the voice is female. "Grace?"
"They weren't going to give you shit,
Lenie. They don't have shit to give you. They were fishing
for hostages and you went ambling innocently into their trap. But we
look after our own. Even you, we look after."
"What the fuck are you talking about? How do you know?"
"How do we know?" The
bulkhead vibrates like a great Jew's harp. "You're the
one that showed us how to tune in! And it works, sweetie, it works
like sex and we're reading a whole bunch of those stumpfucks
down in the medlab and believe me the guilt is just oozing
across that hull. By the way, if I were you I'd seal up my diveskin.
You're about to be rescued."
"Grace, wait! Hang on a second!" Clarke turns to the
corpse. "Pat?"
Rowan isn't shaking her head. Rowan isn't speaking up in angry
denial. Rowan isn't doing any of the things that an innocent
person—or even a guilty one, for that matter—should be
doing when threatened with death.
"Pat, you—fuck no, don't tell me
you—"
"Of course I didn't, Lenie. But it makes sense, doesn't it?
They tricked us both…"
Something clanks against the hull.
"Wait!" Clarke stares at the
ceiling, at the walls, but her adversary is invisible and
untouchable. "Pat's not part of this!"
"Right. I heard." A gargling, metal-shredding sound that
might be laughter. "She's the head of the fucking board of
directors and she didn't know anything. I believe that."
"Tune her in, then! See for yourself!"
"The thing is, Len, us novices aren't that good at tuning in
singles. Signal's too weak. So it wouldn't prove much. Say
bye-bye, Pattie."
"Bye," Rowan whispers. Something on the other side of the
bulkhead begins whining.
"Fuck you Nolan, you back off right now
or I swear I'll kill you myself! Do you hear me? Pat didn't know!
She's no more in control than—"
—than I am, she almost says, but
suddenly there's a new light source here in the corridor, a single
crimson point. It flares, blindingly intense even to Lenie Clarke's
bleached vision, and dies in the next instant.
The world explodes with the sound of pounding metal.
Rowan's silhouette has folded down into a
cringing shape in the corner. Something's slicing across Clarke's
darkened field of view like a roaring white laser. Water, she
realizes after a moment. Water forced through a little hole in the
ceiling by the weight of an ocean. If she were to pass her arm
through that pencil-thin stream, it would shear right off.
In seconds the water's up to her ankles.
She starts towards Rowan, desperate to do something, knowing there's
nothing left to do. The compartment glows sudden, sullen red:
another eye winks on the outer wall. It opens, and goes dark, and a
second thread of killing sea drills the air. Ricochets spray back
from the inner wall like liquid shrapnel: needle-sharp pain explodes
in Clarke's shoulder. Suddenly she's on her back, water closing over
her face, her skull ringing from its impact with the deck.
She rolls onto her stomach, pushes herself up onto all fours. The
water rises past her elbows as she watches. She stays low, crawls
across the corridor to Rowan's huddled form. A hundred lethal
vectors of incidence and reflection crisscross overhead. Rowan's
slumped against the inner wall, immersed in icewater to her chest.
Her head hangs forward, her hair covering her face. Clarke lifts her
chin; there's a dark streak across one cheek, black and featureless
in the impoverished light. It flows: shrapnel hit.
Rowan's face is opaque. Her naked eyes are wide but unseeing: the
few stray photons from down the tunnel don't come close to the
threshold for unassisted sight. There's nothing in Rowan's face but
sound and pain and freezing cold.
"Pat!" Clarke can hardly hear her own voice over the roar.
The water rises past Rowan's lips. Clarke grabs the other woman
under the arms, heaves her into a semi-erect lean against the
bulkhead. A ricochet shatters a few centimeters to the left. Clarke
puts herself between Rowan and the worst of the backshatter.
"Pat!" She doesn't know what
she expects the corpse to say in response. Patricia Rowan is already
dead; all that's left is for Lenie Clarke to stand and watch while
she goes through the motions. But Rowan is saying something;
Clarke can't hear a thing over the ambient roar, but she can see
Rowan's lips move, she can almost make out—
A sudden stabbing pain, a kick in the back. Clarke keeps her balance
this time; the water, pooled over halfway to the ceiling now, is
catching the worst of the ricochets.
Rowan's mouth is still in motion. She's not speaking, Clarke sees:
She's mouthing syllables, slow careful exaggerations meant to be seen
and not heard:
Alyx…Take care of Alyx...
The water's caught up to her chin again.
Clarke's hands find Rowan's, guide them up. With Rowan's hands on
her face, Clarke nods.
In her personal, endless darkness, Patricia Rowan nods back.
Ken could help you now. He could
keep it from hurting maybe, he could kill you instantly. I can't. I
don't know how...
I'm sorry.
The water's too deep to stand in, now—Rowan's feebly treading
water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It's a
pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last
options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds,
brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.
She may escape drowning, though, even if she can't escape death. The
rising water compresses the atmosphere around them, squeezes it so
hard that oxygen itself turns toxic. The convulsions, Clarke's
heard, are not necessarily painful…
It's a fate that will strike Clarke as quickly as Rowan, if she waits
too long. It seems wrong to save herself while Rowan gasps for
breath. But Clarke has her own brainstem, and it won't let sick,
irrational guilt stand in the way of its own preservation. She
watches as her hands move of their own accord, sealing her face flap,
starting up the machinery in her flesh. She abandons Rowan to face
her fate alone. Her body floods like the corridor, but to opposite
effect. The ocean slides through her chest, sustaining life instead
of stealing it. She becomes the mermaid again, while her friend dies
before her eyes.
But Rowan's not giving up, not yet, not yet.
The body isn't resigned no matter what the mind may have accepted.
There's just a small pocket of air up near the ceiling but the
corpse's stiff, clumsy legs are still kicking, hands still clawing
against the pipes and why doesn't she just fucking give up?
Ambient pressure kicks past some critical threshold. Unleashed
neurotransmitters sing through the wiring in her head. Suddenly,
Lenie Clarke is in Patricia Rowan's mind. Lenie Clarke is learning
how it feels to die.
Goddamn you Pat, why can't you just give up? How can you do this
to me?
She sinks to the bottom of the compartment. She stares resolutely at
the deck, her eyelids pinned open, while the swirling turbulence
fades by degrees and the roar of inrushing water dies back and all
that's left is that soft, erratic scratching, that pathetic feeble
clawing of frozen flesh against biosteel…
Eventually the sound of struggling stops. The vicarious anguish, the
sadness and regret go on a little longer. Lenie Clarke waits until
the last little bit of Patricia Rowan dies in her head. She lets the
silence stretch before tripping her vocoder.
"Grace. Can you hear me?"
Her mechanical voice is passionless and dead level.
"Course you can. I'm going to fucking kill you, Grace."
Her fins float off to one side, still loosely tethered to her
diveskin. Clarke retrieves them, pulls them over her feet.
"There's a docking hatch right in front of me, Grace. I'm going
to open it, and I'm going to come out there and I'm going to gut you
like a fish. If I were you I'd start swimming."
Maybe she already has. At any rate, there's no answer.
Clarke kicks down the corridor, gaze fixed immovably on the docking
hatch. Its sparkling mosaic of readouts, unquenchable even by the
Atlantic itself, lights her way.
"Got your head start, Grace? Won't do you any good."
Something soft bumps into her from behind. Clarke flinches, wills
herself not to look.
"Ready or not, here I come."
She undogs the hatch.
Tag
There's nobody out there.
They've left evidence behind—a couple of point-welders still
squatting against the hull on tripod legs, the limpet transceiver
stuck to the alloy a few meters away—but of Nolan and any other
perpetrators, there's no sign. Clarke smiles grimly to herself.
Let them run.
But she can't find anyone else, either. None of Lubin's sentries at
their assigned posts. Nobody monitoring the surveillance limpets
festooning Atlantis in the wake of the Corpses' exercise in
channel-switching. She flies over the very medlab on which, she's
been assured, any number of rifter troops are fine-tuning the
would-be hostage-takers lurking within. Nothing. Gantries and
habslabs and shadows. Blinking lights in some places, recent
darkness in others where the beacons or the portholes have been
smashed or blacked out. Epochal darkness everywhere else.
No other rifters, anywhere.
Maybe the corpses had some weapon, something even Ken didn't
suspect. Maybe they touched a button and everyone just vanished…
But no. She can feel the corpses inside, their fear and apprehension
and blind pants-pissing desperation radiating a good ten meters into
the water. Not the kind of feelings you'd expect in the wake of
overwhelming victory. If the corpses even know what's going on,
it's not making them feel any better.
She kicks off into the abyss, heading for Lubin's nerve hab. Now,
finally, she can tune in faint stirrings from the water ahead. But
no: it's just more of the same. More fear, more uncertainty. How
can she still be reading Atlantis from this range? How can these
sensations be getting stronger as the corpses recede behind
her?
It's not much of a mystery. Pretending otherwise barely brings
enough comfort to justify the effort.
Faint LFAM chatter rises in the water around her. Not much,
considering; by now she can feel dozens of rifters, all subdued, all
afraid. Hardly any of them speak aloud. A constellation of dim
stars pulses faintly ahead. Someone crosses Clarke's path, ten or
fifteen meters ahead, invisible but for a brief eclipse of running
lights. His mind quails, washing over hers.
So many of them have collected around the hab. They mill about like
stunned fish or merely hang motionless in the water, waiting. Maybe
this is all there is, maybe these are all the rifters left in the
world. Apprehension hangs about them like a cloud.
Perhaps Grace Nolan is here. Clarke feels cold, cleansing anger at
the prospect. A dozen rifters turn at her thoughts and stare with
dead white eyes.
"What's going on?" Clarke buzzes. "Where is she?"
"Fuck off, Len. We've got bigger problems right now." She
doesn't recognize the speaker.
Clarke swims toward the hab; most of the rifters part for her. Half
a dozen block her way. Gomez. Cramer. Others in back, too black
and distant to recognize in the brainstem ambience.
"Is she in there?" Clarke says.
"You back off," Cramer tells her. "You not be giving
no orders here."
"Oh, I'm not ordering anybody. It's completely up to
you. You can either get out of my way, or try and stop me."
"Is that Lenie?" Lubin's voice, air-normal channel.
"Yeah," Cramer buzzes after a moment. "She be
pretty—"
"Let her in," Lubin says.
It's a private party, by invitation only. Ken Lubin. Jelaine Chen
and Dimitri Alexander. Avril Hopkinson.
Grace Nolan.
Lubin doesn't even look around as Clarke climbs up from the wet room.
"Deal with it later. We need you in on this, Len, but we need
Grace too. Either of you lays a hand on the other, I'll take my own
measures."
"Understood," Nolan says evenly.
Clarke looks at her, and says nothing.
"So." Lubin returns his attention to the monitor. "Where
were we?"
"I'm pretty sure it didn't see us," Chen says. "It
was too preoccupied with the site itself, and that model doesn't have
wraparound vision." She taps the screen twice in quick
succession; the image at its center freezes and zooms.
It looks like your garden-variety squid, but with a couple of
manipulator arms at the front end and no towbar at the back. An AUV
of some kind. It's obviously not from around here.
Hopkinson sucks breath through clenched teeth. "That's it, then.
They found us."
"Maybe not," Chen says. "You can't teleop something
that deep, not in that kind of terrain. It had to be running on its
own. Whoever sent it wouldn't know what it found until it got back
to the surface."
"Or until it doesn't report back on schedule."
Chen shrugs. "It's a big, dangerous ocean. It doesn't come
back, they chalk it up to a mudslide or a faulty nav chip. No reason
to suspect we had anything to do with it."
Hopkinson shakes her head. "No reason? What's an AUV
even doing down here if not looking for us?"
"It would be a pretty amazing coincidence," Alexander
agrees.
Lubin reaches forward and taps the screen. The image de-zooms and
continues playing where it left off. Acronyms and numbers cluster
along the bottom edge of the screen, shifting and shuffling as the
telemetry changes.
The AUV's floating a few meters from the shore of Impossible Lake,
just above the surface. One arm extends, dips a finger across the
halocline, pulls back as if startled.
"Look at that," Nolan says. "It's scared of
hypersaline."
The little robot moves a few meters into the hazy distance, and tries
again.
"And it wasn't aware of you any of this time?" Lubin asks.
Alexander shakes his head. "Not until later. Like Laney said,
it was too busy checking out the site."
"You got footage of that?" Nolan again, like she doesn't
have a care in the world. Like she isn't living on borrowed time.
"Just a few seconds, back at the start. Real muddy, it doesn't
show much. We didn't want to get too close, for obvious reasons."
"Yet you sonared it repeatedly," Lubin remarks.
Chen shrugs. "Seemed like the lesser of two evils. We had to
get some track on what it was doing. Better than letting it
see us."
"And if it triangulated on your pings?"
"We kept moving. Gapped the pings nice and wide. The most it
could've known was that something was scanning the water column, and
we've got a couple of things out there that do that anyway."
Chen gestures at the screen, a little defensively. "It's all
there in the track."
Lubin grunts.
"Okay, here's where it happens," Alexander says. "About
thirty seconds from now."
The AUV is fading in the haze, apparently heading towards one of the
few streetlights that actually pokes above the surface of Impossible
Lake. Just before it disappears entirely, a black mass eclipses the
view; some ragged outcrop intruding from the left. No circles of
light play across that surface, even though the sub is obviously mere
meters away; Chen and Alexander are running dark, hiding behind the
local topography. The view on the screen tilts and bobs as their sub
maneuvers around the rocks: dark shadows on darker ones, barely
visible in the dim light backscattered around corners.
Alexander leans forward. "Here it comes…"
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. The sub throttles back, moves forward more cautiously now,
edges into the light—
—and nearly collides with the AUV coming the other way.
Two of the telemetry acronyms turn bright red and start flashing.
There's no sound in the playback, but Clarke can imagine sirens in
the sub's cockpit. For an instant, the AUV just sits there; Clarke
swears she sees its stereocam irises go wide. Then it spins away—to
continue its survey or to run like hell, depending on how smart it
is.
They'll never know. Because that's when something shoots into view
from below camera range, an elongate streak like a jet of gray ink.
It hits the AUV in mid-spin, splashes out and wraps around it,
shrinks down around its prey like an elastic spiderweb. The AUV
pulls against the restraints but the trailing ends of the mesh are
still connected to the sub by a springy, filamentous tether.
Clarke has never seen a cannon net in operation before. It's pretty
cool.
"So that's it," Alexander says as the image freezes.
"We're just lucky we ran into it before we'd used up the net on
one of your monster fish."
"We're lucky I thought to use the net, too," Chen adds.
"Who'da thunk it would come in so handy?" She frowns, and
adds, "wish I knew what tipped the little beast off, though."
"You were moving," Lubin tells her.
"Yeah, of course. To keep it from getting a fix on our sonar
signals, like you said."
"It followed your engine noise."
A little of the cockiness drains from Chen's posture.
"So we've got it," Clarke says. "Right now."
"Debbie's taking it apart now," Lubin says. "It
wasn't booby-trapped, at least. She says we can probably get into
its memory if there isn't any serious crypto."
Hopkinson looks a bit more cheerful. "Seriously? We can just
give it amnesia and send it on its way?"
It sounds too good to be true. Lubin's look confirms it.
"What?" Hopkinson says. "We fake the data stream, it
goes back home and tells its mom there's nothing down here but mud
and starfishies. What's the problem?"
"How often do we go out there?" Lubin asks her.
"What, to the Lake? Maybe once or twice a week, not counting
all the times we went out to set the place up."
"That's a very sparse schedule."
"It's all we need, until the seismic data's in."
The dread in Clarke's stomach—belayed a few moments ago, when
the conversation turned to the hope of false memory—comes back
like a tide, twice as cold as before. "Shit," she
whispers. "You're talking about the odds."
Lubin nods. "There's virtually no chance we'd just happen to be
in the area the very first time that thing came calling."
"So this isn't the first time. It's been down there before,"
Clarke says.
"Several times at least, I'd guess. It may have been to
Impossible Lake more often than we have." Lubin looks
around at the others. "Someone's already on to us. If we send
this thing back with no record of the site, we'll simply be telling
them that we know that."
"Fuck," Nolan says in a shaky voice. "We're sockeye.
Five years. We're complete sockeye."
For once, Clarke's inclined to agree with her.
"Not necessarily," Lubin says. "I don't think they've
found us yet."
"Gullshit. You said yourself, months ago, years even—"
"They haven't found us." Lubin speaks with that
level, overly-controlled voice that speaks of thinning patience.
Nolan immediately shuts up.
"What they have found," Lubin continues after a
moment, "is a grid of lights, seismic recorders, and survey
sticks. For all they know it's the remains of some aborted mining
operation." Chen opens her mouth: Lubin raises a palm,
pre-empting her. "Personally I don't believe that. If they've
got reason to look for us in this vicinity, they'll most likely
assume that we're behind anything they discover.
"But at most, the Lake only tells them that they're somewhere in
the ballpark." Lubin smiles faintly. "That they are;
we're only twenty kilometers away. Twenty pitch-black kilometers
through the most extreme topography on the planet. If that's all
they have to go on, they'll never find us."
"Until they send something down to just sit quiet and wait for
us," Hopkinson says, unconvinced. "Then follow us back."
"Maybe they already have," Clarke suggests.
"No alarms," Chen reminds her.
Clarke remembers: there are transponders in every hab, every drone
and vehicle down here. They talk nicely enough to each other, but
they'll scream to wake the dead should sonar touch anything that
doesn't know the local dialect. Clarke hasn't thought about them for
years; they hail from the early days of exile, when fear of discovery
lay like a leaden hand on everyone's mind. But in all this time the
only enemies they've found have been each other.
"Strange they haven't tried, though," Clarke says. It
seems like an obvious thing to do.
"Maybe they tried and lost us," Hopkinson suggests. "If
they got too close we'd see them, and there's spots along that route
where sonar barely gives you sixty meters line-of-sight."
"Maybe they don't have the resources," Alexander says
hopefully. "Maybe it's just a couple of guys on a boat with a
treasure map."
Nolan: "Maybe they just haven't got around to it yet."
"Or maybe they don't have to," Lubin says.
"What, you mean..." Something dawns on Hopkinson's face.
"Pest control?"
Lubin nods.
Silence falls around the implications. Why spend valuable resources
acquiring and following your target through territory which might be
saturated with tripwires? Why risk giving yourself away when it's
cheaper and simpler to trick your enemies into poisoning their own
well?
"Shit," Hopkinson breathes. "Like leaving poisoned
food out for the ants, so they bring it back to the queen…"
Alexander's nodding. "And that's where it came from…ßehemoth
was never supposed to show up anywhere around here, and all of a
sudden, just like magic…"
"ß-max came from
goddamned Atlantis," Nolan snaps. "For all we know
the strain out at the Lake's just baseline. We've only got the
corpses' say-so that it isn't."
"Yeah, but even the baseline strain wasn't supposed to show up
out there—"
"Am I the only one who remembers the corpses built the
baseline in the first place?" Nolan glares around the room,
white eyes blazing. "Rowan admitted it, for Chrissakes!"
Her gaze settles on Clarke, pure antimatter. Clarke feels her hands
bunching into fists at her side, feels the corner of her mouth pull
back in a small sneer. None of her body language, she realizes, is
intended to defuse the situation.
Fuck it, she decides, and takes one provocative step forward.
"Oh, right," Nolan says, and charges.
Lubin moves. It seems so effortless. One instant he's sitting at
the console; the next, Nolan's crumpling to the deck like a broken
doll. In the barely-perceptible time between Clarke thinks she saw
Lubin rising from his chair, thinks she glimpsed his elbow in Nolan's
diaphragm and his knee in her back. She may have even heard
something, like the snapping of a tree branch across someone's leg.
Now her rival lies flat on her back, motionless but for a sudden,
manic fluttering of fingers and eyelids.
Everyone else has turned to stone.
Lubin pans across those still standing. "We are confronted with
a common threat. No matter where ß-max
came from, we're unlikely to cure it without the corpses's help now
that Bhanderi's dead. The corpses also have relevant expertise in
other areas."
Nolan gurgles at their feet, her arms in vague motion, her legs
conspicuously immobile.
"For example," Lubin continues, "Grace's back is
broken at the third lumbar vertebra. Without help from Atlantis
she'll spend the rest of her life paralysed from the waist down."
Chen blanches. "Jesus, Ken!" Shocked from her
paralysis, she kneels at Nolan's side.
"It would be unwise to move her without a coccoon," Lubin
says softly. "Perhaps Dimitri could scare one up."
It only sounds like a suggestion. The airlock's cycling in seconds.
"As for the rest of you good people," Lubin remarks in the
same even tone, "I trust you can see that the situation has
changed, and that cooperation with Atlantis is now in our best
interest."
They probably see exactly what Clarke does: a man who, without a
second thought, has just snapped the spine of his own lieutenant to
win an argument. Clarke stares down at her vanquished enemy.
Despite the open eyes and the twitches, Nolan doesn't seem entirely
conscious.
Take that, murderer. Stumpfucking shit-licking cunt. Does it
hurt, sweetie? Not enough. Not nearly enough.
But the exultation is forced. She remembers how she felt as Rowan
died, how she felt afterward: cold, killing rage, the absolute stone
certainty that Nolan was going to pay with her life. And yet here
she lies, helpless, broken by someone else's hand--and somehow,
there's only charred emptiness where rage burned incandescent less
than an hour before.
I could finish the job, she reflects. If Ken didn't stop
me.
Is she so disloyal to the memory of her friend, that she takes so
little pleasure in this? 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?
Five years ago I didn't care if millions of innocents died.
Now I'm too much of a coward even to punish the guilty.
Some, she imagined, might even consider that an improvement...
"—are still uncertainties," Lubin's saying, back at
the console. "Maybe whoever sent the drone is responsible for
ß-max, maybe not. If they
are, they've already made their move. If not, they're not ready
to move. Even if they know exactly where we are—and I
think that unlikely—they either don't have all their pieces in
place yet, or they're biding their time for some other reason."
He unfreezes the numbers on the board, wasting no more attention on
the thing gurgling on the deck behind him.
Chen glances uneasily at Nolan, but Lubin's message is loud and
clear: I'm in charge. Get over it.
"What reason?" she asks after a moment.
Lubin shrugs.
"How much time do we have?"
"More than if we tip our hand." Lubin folds his arms
across his chest and stretches isometrically. Muscles and tendons
flex disconcertingly beneath his diveskin. "If they know we're
on to them they may feel their hand has been forced, move now rather
than later. So we play along to buy time. We edit the drone's
memory and release it with some minor systems glitch that would
explain any delay in its return. We'll also have to search the Lake
site for surveillance devices, and cut a grid within at least a
half-kilometer of Atlantis and the trailer park. Lane's right: it's
unlikely that an AUV planted those mines, but if one did there'll be
a detonator somewhere within LFAM range."
"Okay." Hopkinson looks away from her fallen comrade with
evident effort. "So we—we make up with Atlantis, we fake
out the drone, and we comb the area for other nasties. Then what?"
"Then I go back," Lubin tells her.
"What, to the Lake?"
Lubin smiles faintly. "Back to N'Am."
Hopkinson whistles in tuneless surprise. "Well, I guess if
anyone can take them on…"
Take on who, exactly? Clarke wonders. No one asks aloud. Who
is everyone left behind. Them. They are dedicated to
our destruction They sniff along the Mid Atlantic Ridge,
obsessed in their endless myopic search for that one set of
coordinates to feed into their torpedoes.
No one asks why, either. There is no why behind the hunt:
it's just what they do. Don't go rooting around for reasons.
Asking why accomplishes nothing: there are too many reasons
to count, none of the living lack for motive. This fractured,
bipolar microcosm stagnates and festers on the ocean floor, every
reason for its existence reduced to an axiom: just because.
And yet, how many of the people here—how many of the rifters,
how many, even of the drybacks— really brought the curtain
down? For every corpse with blood on her hands, how many
others—family, friends, drones who maintain plumbing and
machinery and flesh—are guilty of nothing but association?
And if Lenie Clarke hadn't been so furiously intent on revenge that
she could write off an entire world as an incidental expense, would
any of it have come to this?
Alyx, Rowan said.
"No you don't." Clarke shakes her head.
Lubin speaks to the screen. "The most we can do down here is
buy time. We have to use that time."
"Yes, but—"
"We're blind and deaf and under attack. The ruse has failed,
Lenie. We need to know what we're facing, which means we have to
face it. Hoping for the best is no longer a viable option."
"Not you," Clarke says.
Lubin turns to face her, one eyebrow raised in silent commentary.
She looks back, completely unfazed. "We."
He refuses three times before they even get outside.
"Someone needs to take charge here," he insists as the
airlock floods. "You're the obvious choice. No one will give
you any trouble now that Grace has been sidelined."
Clarke feels a chill in her gut. "Is that what that was?
She'd served her purpose and you wanted me back in play so you
just—broke her in half?"
"I'd wager it's no worse than what you had in mind for
her."
I'm going to fucking kill you, Grace. I'm going to gut you like a
fish.
"I'm going." she says. The hatch drops away beneath them.
"Do you honestly think you can force me to take you?" He
brakes, turns, kicks out from under the light.
She follows. "Do you think you can afford to do this
without any backup at all?"
"More than I can afford an untrained sidekick who's signed up
for all the wrong reasons."
"You don't know shit about my reasons."
"You'll hold me back," Lubin buzzes. "I stand much
better odds if I don't have to keep watching out for you. If you get
in trouble—"
"Then you'll ditch me," she says. "In a second. I
know what your battlefield priorities are. Shit, Ken, I know
you."
"Recent events would suggest otherwise."
She stares at him, adamant. He scissors rhythmically on into
darkness.
Where's he going? she wonders. There's nothing on this
bearing...
"You can't deny that you're not equipped for this kind of op,"
he points out. "You don't have the training."
"Which must make it pretty embarrassing for you, given that I
got all the way across N'Am before you and your army and all your
ballyhooed training could even catch up with me." She
smiles under her mask, not kindly; he can't see it but maybe he can
tune in the sentiment. "I beat you, Ken. Maybe I wasn't nearly
as smart, or as well-trained, and maybe I didn't have all of N'Am's
muscle backing me up, but I stayed ahead of you for months and
you know it."
"You had quite a lot of help," he points out.
"Maybe I still do."
His rhythm falters. Perhaps he hasn't thought of that.
She takes the opening. "Think about it, Ken. All those virtual
viruses getting together, muddying my tracks, running interference,
turning me into a fucking myth…"
"Anemone wasn't working for you," he buzzes. "It was
using you. You were just—"
"A tool. A meme in a plan for Global Apocalypse. Give me a
break, Ken, it's not like I could forget that shit even if I tried.
But so what? I was still the vector. It was looking out for me.
It liked me enough to keep you lot off my back, anyway.
Who's to say it isn't still out there? Where else do those software
demons come from? You think it's a coincidence they name themselves
after me?"
Barely discernible, his silhouette extends an arm. Click trains
spray the water. He starts off again, his bearing slightly altered.
"Are you suggesting," he buzzes, "that if you go back
and announce yourself to Anemone—whatever's become of it—that
it's going to throw some sort of magic shield around you?"
"Maybe n—"
"It's changed. It was always changing, from
moment to moment. It couldn't possibly have survived the way we
remember it, and if the things we've encountered recently are any
indication of what it's turned into, you don't want to renew the
acquaintance."
"Maybe," Clarke admits. "But maybe some part of its
basic agenda hasn't changed. It's alive, right? That's what
everyone keeps saying. Doesn't matter that it was built out of
electrons instead of carbon, Life's just self-replicating
information shaped by natural selection so it's in the club. And
we've got genes in us that haven't changed in a million
generations. Why should this thing be any different? How do you
know there isn't some protect-Lenie subroutine snoozing in the code
somewhere? And by the way, where the fuck are we going?"
Lubin's headlamp spikes to full intensity, lays a bright jiggling
oval on the substrate ahead. "There."
It's a patch of bone-gray mud like any other. She can't see so much
as a pebble to distinguish it.
Maybe it's a burial plot, she thinks, suddenly giddy. Maybe
this is where he's been feeding his habit all these years, on
devolved natives and MIAs and now on the stupid little girl who
wouldn't take no for an answer...
Lubin thrusts one arm into the ooze. The mud shudders around his
shoulder, as if something beneath were pushing back. Which is
exactly what's happening; Ken's awakened something under the surface.
He pulls his arm back up and the thing follows, heaving into view.
Clumps and chalky clouds cascade from its sides as it clears the
substrate.
It's a swollen torus about a meter and a half wide. A dotted line of
hydraulic nozzles ring its equator. Two layers of flexible webbing
stretch across the hole in its center, one on top, one on the bottom;
a duffle bag, haphazardly stuffed with lumpy objects, occupies the
space between. Through the billowing murk and behind clumps of mud
still adhering to its surface, it shines slick as a diveskin.
"I packed a few things away for a return trip," Lubin
buzzes. "As a precaution."
He sculls backward a few meters. The mechanical bellhop spins a
quarter-turn, spits muddy water from its thrusters, and heels.
They start back.
"So that's your plan," Lubin buzzes after a while. "Find
something that evolved to help you destroy the world, hope that it's
got a better nature you can appeal to, and—"
"And wake the fucker with a kiss," Clarke finishes. "Who's
to say I can't?"
He swims on, towards the glow that's just starting to brighten the
way ahead. His eyes reflect crescents of dim light.
"I guess we'll find out," he says at last.
Fulcrum
She'd avoid it altogether if she could.
There's more than sufficient excuse. The recent armistice is thin
and brittle; it's in little danger of shattering completely in the
face of this new, common threat, but countless tiny cracks and
punctures require constant attention. Suddenly the corpses have
leverage, expertise that mere machinery cannot duplicate; the rifters
are not especially happy with the new assertiveness of their one-time
prisoners. Impossible Lake must be swept for bugs, the local seabed
for eyes and detonators. For now there truly is no safe place—and
if Lenie Clarke were not busy packing for the trip back, her eyes
would be needed for perimeter patrol. Dozens of corpses died in the
latest insurrection; there's hardly time to comfort all the next of
kin.
And yet, Alyx's mother died in her arms mere days ago, and though the
pace of preparation has not slowed in all that time, Lenie Clarke
still feels like the lowest sort of coward for having put it off this
long.
She thumbs the buzzer in the corridor. "Lex?"
"Come in."
Alyx is sitting on her bed, practicing her fingering. She puts the
flute aside as Lenie closes the hatch behind her. She isn't crying:
she's either still in shock, or a victim of superadolescent
self-control. Clarke sees herself at fifteen, before remembering:
her memories of that time are all lies.
Her heart goes out to the girl anyway. She wants to scoop Alyx up in
her arms and hold her into the next millennium. She wants to say
she's been there, she knows what it's like; and that's even true, in
a fractured kind of way. She's lost friends and lovers to violence.
She even lost her mother—to tularemia—although the GA
stripped that memory out of her head along with all the others. But
she knows it's not the same. Alyx's mother died in a war, and Lenie
Clarke fought on the other side. Clarke doesn't know that Alyx would
welcome an embrace under these conditions.
So she sits beside her on the bed, and rests one hand on the girl's
thigh—ready to withdraw at the slightest flinch—and tries
to think of some words, any words, that won't turn into clichés
when spoken aloud.
She's still trying when Alyx says, "Did she say anything?
Before she died?"
"She—" Clarke shakes her head. "No. Not
really," she finishes, hating herself.
Alyx nods and stares at the floor.
"They say you're going too," she says after a while. "With
him."
Clarke nods.
"Don't."
Clarke takes a deep breath beside her. "Alyx, you—oh God,
Alyx, I'm so sorr—"
"Why do you have to go?" Alyx turns and stares at her with
hard, bright eyes that reveal far too much for comfort. "What
are you going to do up there anyway?"
"We have to find out who's tracking us. We can't just wait for
them to start shooting."
"Why are so sure that's what they're going to do? Maybe they
just want to talk, or something."
Clarke shakes her head, smiling at the absurdity of the notion.
"People aren't like that."
"Like what?"
Forgiving. "They're not friendly, Lex. Whoever they
are. Trust me on this."
But Alyx has already switched to Plan B: "And what good are you
going to be up there anyway? You're not a spy, you're not a
tech-head. You're not some rabid psycho killer like he is.
There's nothing you can do up there except get killed."
"Someone has to back him up."
"Why? Let him go by himself." Suddenly, Alyx's words come
out frozen. "With any luck he won't succeed. Whatever's
up there will tear him apart and the world will be a teeny bit less
of a shithole afterwards."
"Alyx—"
Rowan's daughter rises from the bed and glares down at her. "How
can you help him after he killed Mom? How can you even talk
to him? He's a psycho and a killer."
The automatic denial dies on Clarke's lips. After all, she doesn't
know that Lubin didn't have a hand in Rowan's death. Lubin
was team captain during this conflict, as he was during the last;
he'd probably have known about that so-called rescue mission
even if he hadn't actually planned it.
And yet somehow, Clarke feels compelled to defend the enemy of this
grief-stricken child. "No, sweetie," she says gently. "It
was the other way around."
"What?"
"Ken was a killer first. Then he was a psycho."
Which is close enough to the truth, for now.
"What are you talking about?"
"They tweaked his brain. Didn't you know?"
"They?"
Your mother.
"The GA. It was nothing special, it was just part of the
package for industrial spies. They fixed it so he'd seal up
security breaches by any means necessary, without even really
thinking about it. It was involuntary."
"You saying he didn't have a choice?"
"Not until Spartacus infected him. And the thing about
Spartacus was, it cut the tweaks, but it cut a couple of other
pathways too. 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.
"Lenie, please," Alyx says softly. "You can't trust
him."
And yet in some strange, sick way—after all the secrecy, all
the betrayal—Clarke still trusts Ken Lubin more than anyone
else she's ever known. She can't say it aloud, of course. She can't
say it because Alyx believes that Ken Lubin killed her mother, and
maybe he did; and to admit to trusting him now might test the
friendship of this wounded girl further than Clarke is willing to
risk.
But that's not all of it. That's just the rationale that floats on
the surface, obvious and visible and self-serving. There's another
reason, deeper and more ominous: Alyx may be right. The past couple
of days, Clarke has caught glimpses of something unfamiliar looking
out from behind Lubin's eyecaps. It disappears the moment she tries
to bring it into focus; she's not even sure exactly how she
recognizes it. Some subtle flicker of the eyelid, perhaps. A
subliminal twitch of photocollagen, reflecting the motion of the eye
beneath.
Until three days ago, Ken Lubin hadn't taken a human life in all the
time he'd been down here. Even during the first uprising he
contented himself with the breaking of bones; all the killing was at
the inexpert, enthusiastic hands of rifters still reveling in the
inconceivable rush of power over the once-powerful. And there's no
doubt that the deaths of the past seventy-two hours can be completely
justified in the name of self-defense.
Still. Clarke wonders if this recent carnage might have awakened
something that's lain dormant for five years. Because back then,
when all was said and done, Ken Lubin enjoyed killing. He
craved it, even though—once liberated—he didn't use his
freedom as an excuse, but as a challenge. He controlled
himself, the way an old-time nicotine addict might walk around with
an unopened pack of cigarettes in his pocket— to prove that he
was stronger than his habit. If there's one thing Ken Lubin prides
himself on, it's self-discipline.
That craving. That desire for revenge against the world at large:
did it ever go away? Lenie Clarke was once driven by such a desire;
quenched by a billion deaths or more, it has no hold on her now. But
she wonders whether recent events have forced a couple of
cancer-sticks into Lubin's mouth despite himself. She wonders how
the smoke tasted after all this time, and if Lubin, perhaps, is
remembering how good it once felt...
Clarke shakes her head sadly. "It can't be anyone else, Alyx.
It has to be me."
"Why?"
Because next to what I did, genocide is a misdemeanor. Because
the world's been dying in my wake while I hide down here. Because
I'm sick of being a coward.
"I'm the one that did it," she says at last.
"So what? Is going back gonna undo any of it?"
Alex shakes her head in disbelief. "What's the point?"
She stands there, looking down like some fragile china magistrate on
the verge of shattering.
Lenie Clarke wants very much to reach out to her right now. But
Lenie Clarke isn't that stupid. "I—I have to face
up to what I did," she says weakly.
"Bullshit," Alyx says. "You're not facing up to
anything. You're running away."
"Running away?"
"From me, for one thing."
And suddenly even Lenie Clarke, professional idiot, can see it. Alyx
isn't worried about what Lubin might do to Lenie Clarke; she's
worried about what Clarke might do to herself. She's not stupid,
she's known Clarke for years and she knows the traits that make a
rifter. Lenie Clarke was once suicidal. She once hated herself
enough to want to die, and that was before she'd even done anything
deserving of death. Now she's about to re-enter a world of
reminders that she's killed more people than all the Lubins who ever
lived. Alyx Rowan is wondering, understandably, if her best friend
is going to open her own wrists when that happens.
To be honest, Clarke wonders about that too.
But she only says, "It's okay, Lex. I won't—I mean, I've
got no intention of hurting myself."
"Really?" Alyx asks, as if she doesn't dare to hope.
"Really." And now, promises delivered, adolescent fears
calmed, Lenie Clarke reaches out and takes Alyx's hands in hers.
Alyx no longer seems the slightest bit fragile. She stares calmly
down at Clarke's reassuring hands clasped around her limp,
unresponsive ones, and grunts softly.
"Too bad," she says.
Incoming
The missiles shot from the Atlantic like renegade fireworks, heading
west. They erupted in five discrete swarms, beginning a ten-minute
game of speed chess played across half a hemisphere. They looped and
corkscrewed along drunken trajectories that would have been comical
if it didn't make them so damned hard to intercept.
Desjardins did his best. Half a dozen orbiting SDI antiques had been
waiting for him to call back ever since he'd seduced them two years
before, in anticipation of just this sort of crisis. Now he only had
to knock on their back doors; on command, they spread their legs and
wracked their brains.
The machines turned their attention to the profusion of contrails
scarring the atmosphere below. Vast and subtle algorithms came into
play, distinguishing wheat from chaff, generating target predictions,
calculating intercept vectors and fitness functions. Their insights
were profound but not guaranteed; the enemy had its own thinking
machines, after all. Decoys mimicked destroyers in every possible
aspect. Every stutter of an attitude jet made point-of-impact
predictions that much murkier. Desjardins's date-raped battellites
dispatched their own countermeasures—lasers, particle beams,
missiles dispatched from their own precious and nonrenewable
stockpiles—but every decision was probabilistic, every move a
product of statistics. When playing the odds, there is no
certainty.
Three made it through.
The enemy scored two strikes on the Florida panhandle and another in
the Texan dust belt. Desjardins won the New England semifinals
hands-down—none of those attacks even made it to the descending
arc—but the southern strikes could easily be enough to tilt the
balance if he didn't take immediate ground action. He dispatched
eight lifters with instructions to sterilise everything within a
twenty-k radius, waited for launch confirmations, and leaned back,
exhausted. He closed his eyes. Statistics and telemetry flickered
uninterrupted beneath his lids.
Nothing so pedestrian as ßehemoth,
not this time. A new bug entirely. Seppuku.
Thank you, South fucking Africa.
What was it with those people? They'd been a typical
third-world country in so many ways, enslaved and oppressed and
brutalised like all the others. Why couldn't they have just thrown
off their shackles in the usual way, embraced violent rebellion with
a side order of blood-soaked retribution? What kind of crazy-ass
people, after feeling the boot on their necks for generations, struck
back at their oppressors with—wait for it— reconciliation
panels? It made no sense.
Except, of course, for the fact that it worked. Ever since the rise
of Saint Nelson the S'Africans had become masters at the sidestep,
accomodating force rather than meeting it head-on, turning enemy
momentum to their own advantage. Black belts in sociological judo.
For half a century they'd been sneaking under the world's guard, and
hardly anyone had noticed.
Now they were more of a threat than Ghana and Mozambique and all the
other M&M regimes combined. Desjardins understood completely
where those other furious backwaters were coming from. More than
that, he sympathised: after all, the western world had sat around
making tut-tut noises while the sex plagues burned great smoking
holes out of Africa's age structure. Only China had fared worse (and
who knew what was brewing behind those dark, unresponsive
borders?). It was no surprise that the Apocalypse Meme resonated so
strongly over there; the stunted generation struggling up from those
ashes was over seventy percent female. An avenging goddess turning
the tables, serving up Armageddon from the ocean floor—if Lenie
Clarke hadn't provided a ready-made template, such a perfect legend
would have erupted anyway through sheer spontaneous combustion.
Impotent rage he could handle. Smiley fuckers with hidden agendas
were way more problematic, especially when they came with a legacy of
bleeding-edge biotech that extended all the way back to the world's
first heart transplant, for fuck's sake, almost a century
before. Seppuku worked pretty much the way its S'African creators
did: a microbial judo expert and a poser, something that smiled and
snuck under your guard on false pretenses and then...
It wasn't the kind of strategy that would ever have occured to the
Euros or the Asians. It was too subtle for the descendants of
empire, too chickenshit for anyone raised on chest-beating politics.
But it was second nature to those masters of low status manipulation,
lurking down at the toe of the dark continent. It had seeped from
their political culture straight into their epidemiological ones, and
now Achilles Desjardins had to deal with the consequences.
Gentle warm pressure against his thigh. Desjardins opened his eyes:
Mandelbrot stood on her hind legs at his side, forepaws braced
against him. She meeped and leapt into his lap without waiting for
permission.
Any moment now his board would start lighting up. It had been years
since Desjardins had answered to any official boss, but eyes from
Delhi to McMurdo were watching his every move from afar. He'd
assured them all he could handle the missiles. Way off across any
number of oceans, 'lawbreakers in more civilized wastelands—not
to mentioned their Leashes—would be clicking on comsats and
picking up phones and putting through incensed calls to Sudbury,
Ontario. None of them would be interested in his excuses.
He could deal with them. He had dealt with far greater challenges in
his life. It was 2056, a full ten years since he had saved the Med
and turned his private life around. Half that time since ßehemoth
and Lenie Clarke had risen arm-in-arm on their apocalyptic crusade
against the world. Four years since the disappearance of the Upper
Tier, four years since Desjardins's emancipation at the hands of a
lovesick idealist. A shade less than that since Rio and voluntary
exile among the ruins. Three years since the WestHem Quarantine.
Two since the N'Am Burn. He had dealt with them all, and more.
But the South Africans—they were a real problem. If
they'd had their way, Seppuku would already be burning across
his kingdom like a brushfire, and he couldn't seem to come up with a
scenario that did any more than postpone the inevitable. He honestly
didn't think he'd be able to hold them off for much longer.
It was just as well that he'd planned for his retirement.
Seppuku
"The
essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved
genetically to accept one truth and discovered another."
—E.O.
Wilson
"I
would gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins."
—J.D.S.
Haldane
Dune
Phocoena runs silent out of Atlantis, threading between peaks
and canyons that cover and impede her progress in equal measure.
Their course is a schizoid amalgam of conflicting priorities, the
need for speed scraping incompatibly against the drive to survive.
To Lenie Clarke it seems as though their compass bearing at any given
moment could be the work of a random number generator; but over time
the net vector resolves to southwest.
At some point Lubin decides that they're safely out of the
neighborhood. Haste becomes the better part of discretion; Phocoena
climbs into open water. She skims west down the slopes of the Mid
Atlantic Ridge, occasionally twisting this way or that to avoid
moguls the size of orbital lifters. Mountains give way to foothills;
foothills, to a vast endless expanse of mud. Clarke sees none of it
through the ports, of course—Lubin hasn't bothered to turn on
the outside lights—but the topography scrolls past on the nav
panel in a garish depth-synched spectrum. Jagged red peaks, so high
that their tips almost rise above darkness, lie well out of range
behind them. Transitional slopes, segueing indiscernibly from yellow
to green, fade to stern. The abyssal plain flows beneath them like
an endless blue carpet, hypnotic and restful.
For long merciful hours, there is no virulent microbe to track; no
betrayal to withstand; no desperate battle to fight. There is
nothing to do but dwell on the microcosm receding behind them, on
friends and foes brought finally into war-weary alignment—not
through negotiation or reconciliation, but through the sudden
imminence of the greater threat, the threat from outside. The
threat Phocoena races towards even now.
Perhaps not such a blessing after all, this interlude.
Eventually the seabed rises before them into a color-banded
escarpment swelling across the screen. There's a gap in the wall
ahead, a great underwater canyon splitting the Scotian conshelf like
God's own icepick. Nav lists it as The Gulley. Clarke
remembers that name; it's got one of the biggest shortstop arrays
this side of Fundy. Lubin indulges her, edges a few degrees
off-course to intersect one of the colossal structures halfway up the
canyon's throat. He flashes the forward floods as they drift past.
The seamill looms huge in the beams, the visible arc of its perimeter
so slight that Clarke could have taken it for a straight line. One
of its great blades passes above them, its base and its tip lost in
darkness to either side. It barely moves.
There was a time when this was the competition. Not so long ago the
currents of the Gulley produced almost as many Joules-per-second as a
good-sized geothermal plant. Then the climate changed, and the
currents with it. Now the array is nothing but a tourist stop for
amphibious cyborgs: weightless derelicts, slumbering in the long
dark.
That's us, Clarke reflects as they pass. For just this one
moment she and Lubin are weightless too, poised precisely between two
gravitational fields. Behind them: Atlantis, the failed refuge.
Ahead—
Ahead, the world they've been hiding from.
Five years since she's been ashore. Back then the apocalypse was
just getting under way; who knows how wild the party's grown by now?
They've learned a few things—broad strokes, dark rumors, bits
and pieces filtered from that fraying patch of the telecom spectrum
that spans the Atlantic. All of North America is quarantined. The
rest of the world bickers over whether to put it out of its misery or
simply let it die on its own. Most still fight to keep ßehemoth
at bay; others have embraced that doomsday microbe, have seemingly
embraced Armageddon itself.
Clarke isn't quite sure what to make of that. Some death-wish buried
in the collective unconscious, perhaps. Or maybe just the grim
satisfaction that even the doomed and downtrodden can take in
payback. Death is not always defeat; sometimes, it is the chance to
die with your teeth buried in your oppressor's throat.
There is much dying, back on the surface. There is much baring of
teeth. Lenie Clarke does not know their reasons. She knows only
that some of them act in her name. She knows only that their numbers
are growing.
She dozes. When she opens her eyes again the cockpit glows with
diffuse emerald light. Phocoena has four bow ports, two
dorsal two ventral, great perspex teardrops radiating back from the
nose. A dim green void presses down on the upper ports; below, a
corrugated expanse of sand rushes past beneath Clarke's footrest.
Lubin has disabled the color-codes. On nav, Phocoena races up
a gentle monochrome slope. The depth gauge reads 70m and rising.
"How long have I been sleeping?" Clarke asks.
"Not long." Fresh red scars radiate from the corners of
Lubin's eyes, the visible aftermath of an operation that slid
neuroelectric inlays into his optic nerves. Clarke still winces
inwardly at the sight; she's not sure she would've trusted the
corpses's surgeons even if they are all on the same side now.
Lubin obviously thinks the additional data-gathering capacity was
worth the risk. Or maybe it's just one of those extras he's always
wanted, but never been cleared for in his past life.
"We're at Sable already?" Clarke says.
"Almost."
Bleating from nav: hard echo up the slope at two o'clock. Lubin
throttles back and slews to starboard. Centrifugal force swings
Clarke to the side.
Thirty meters. The sea outside looks bright and cold. It's like
staring into green glass. Phocoena crawls up the slope at a
few sluggish knots, sniffing northwest towards a wireframe assembly
of tubes and struts swelling on nav. Clarke leans forward, peers
through shafts of murky light. Nothing.
"What's the viz out there?" she wonders.
Lubin, intent on his piloting, doesn't look over. "Eight point
seven."
Twenty meters from the surface. The water ahead darkens suddenly, as
though an eclipse were in progress. An instant later that darkness
resolves into the toe of a giant: the rounded end of a cylindrical
structure half-buried in drifting sand, fuzzed with sponges and
seaweed, curving away into the hazy distance. Nav pegs it at eight
meters high.
"I thought it floated," Clarke says.
Lubin pulls back on the stick: Phocoena climbs into the water
alongside the structure. "They beached it when the well ran
dry."
So this great sunken pontoon must be flooded. Girders and struts
stand on its upper surface, a monstrous scaffold rising into
daylight. Lubin maneuvers the sub between them as though threading a
needle. Nav shows them entering a submerged arena enclosed by four
such structures arranged in a square. Clarke can see their dim
outlines through the water. Pylons and trusses rise on all sides
like the bars of a cage.
Phocoena breaks the surface. The outside world ripples as
water sheets down the acrylic, then wavers into focus. They've come
up directly beneath the rig; its underbelly forms a metal sky a
little less than ten meters overhead, held from the earth by a
network of support pylons.
Lubin climbs from his seat and grabs a fanny pack off a nearby
utility hook. "Back in a few minutes," he says, popping
the dorsal hatch. He climbs away. Clarke hears a splash through the
opening.
He still isn't happy about her presence here. She ignores his
safe-distancing maneuver and rises to follow.
The air wafting through the hatch blows cold against her face. She
climbs onto the sub's back and looks around. The sky—what she
can see of it, through the girders and pylons—is gray and
overcast; the ocean beneath is gunmetal to the horizon. But there
are sounds, behind her. A distant, pulsing roar. A faint squawking,
like some kind of alarm. It's familiar, but she can't quite put her
finger on it. She turns.
Land.
A strip of sandy shore, maybe fifty meters past the jacket of the
rig. She can see tufts of weathered, scrubby brush above the
high-tide line. She can see moraines of driftwood, pushed into
little strips along the beach. She can see surf pounding endlessly
against it all.
She can hear birds, calling. She'd almost forgotten.
Not N'Am, of course. The mainland's still a good two or three
hundred kilometers away. This is just a way station, some lonely
little archipelago on the Scotian Shelf. And yet, to see living
things without either fins or fists—she marvels at the
prospect, even as she marvels at her own overreaction.
A steep metal staircase winds around the nearest pylon. Clarke dives
into the ocean, not bothering with hood or gloves. The Atlantic
slaps her face, a delicious icy sting across her exposed skin. She
revels in the sensation, crosses to the pylon with a few strokes.
The stairs lead onto a walkway that runs the perimeter of the rig.
Wind strums the railing's cables; the structure clatters like some
arrhythmic percussion instrument. She reaches an open hatchway,
peers into the dark interior: a segmented metal corridor, bundles of
pipe and fiberop running along the ceiling like plexii of nerves and
arteries. A t-junction at the far end leading off to unknown,
opposite destinations.
Wet footprints on the deck lead in here, and turn left. Clarke
follows.
Sound and vision fade as she penetrates deeper into the hulk.
Bulkheads muffle the sound of the surf and the miraculous squawking
of the gulls. Her enhanced vision fares better—the overcast
ambience from outside follows her around a half-dozen corners, peeps
in through portholes at the end of unexplored corridors—but the
desaturation of color in her surroundings tells her that she's moving
through darkness too deep for dryback eyes. That reversion to
black-and-white must be why she didn't notice it sooner—dark
streaks on the walls and floors could be anything, from rust to the
remains of an enthusiastic game of paintball. But now, following the
last smudged footprints to a hatch yawning open in the bulkhead, the
realization sinks in:
Carbon scoring. Something's burned this whole section.
She steps through the hatch into what must have been someone's
quarters, judging by the bunk-bed frame and the bedside table that
occupies one modest wall. Frames, skeletal remnants of furniture,
are all that's left. If there were ever mattresses or sheets or
blankets here, they're gone now. Every surface is coated in dark
greasy soot.
From somewhere out in the hall, the creak of metal hinges.
Clarke steps back into the corridor and tracks the sound. By the
time it stops she's got a fix, and a beacon—light, bouncing
dimly back down the passageway from around a corner just ahead. That
way was dark and silent when she stepped into the cabin; now, she can
even hear distant waves.
She follows the light. Finally she comes to an open hatch at the
base of a companionway, leading up. Ocean breeze sneaks past her
into the rig, carrying the sound of seabirds and the wet rubbery
scent of Ascophyllum. For a moment she's taken aback; the
light pours down from the head of the stairs, easily bright enough to
bring color back into the world, and yet the walls are still—
Oh.
The polymer around the lip of the hatch has bubbled and burned; all
that remains are lumpy, flaking clots of carbon. Clarke pulls
experimentally at the wheel; the hatch scarcely moves, screeching
softly against the deposits caking its hinges.
She rises into daylight, and devastation.
It's a small rig, as such things were measured. Nowhere near the
city-sized monstrosities that once crowded the ocean hereabouts.
Perhaps, by the time it was built, oil was already falling out of
fashion; or perhaps there simply wasn't enough left to warrant a
bigger investment. For whatever reason, the main hull is only two
stories thick along most of its length. Now Clarke rises onto the
wide-open expanse of its roof.
The rig's deck stretches over half the area of a city block. There's
an elevated helipad at the far end, and a great crane whose tendons
have been cut; it lies across the deck at a messy angle, struts and
crossbeams slightly crumpled on impact. The derrick at the nearer
end is relatively intact, thrusting into the sky like a wireframe
phallus. Clarke rises in its shadow, into something that was once a
control hut of some kind. Now it's a rectangular ruin; none of the
four walls remain intact, and the roof itself has been thrown halfway
across the deck. There were control panels and electronics here
once—she recognizes the general outlines of half-melted
instrumentation.
This is how completely the hut has been destroyed: Lenie Clarke can
simply step onto the main deck over what's left of the walls.
All this space, this uninterrupted visibility, unsettles her. For
five years she has hidden beneath the heavy, comforting darkness of
the North Atlantic, but up here—up here, she can see all the
way to the edge of the world. She feels naked, like a target:
visible from infinite distance.
Lubin is a small figure on the far side of the platform, his back
turned, leaning on the western railing. Clarke walks towards him,
skirting the wreckage, suddenly oblivious to the wheeling of the
gulls. She nears the edge, fights momentary vertigo: Sable
Archipelago spreads out before her, an insignificant chain of sandy
dots in the middle of the ocean. The nearest looks big enough from
here, though, its spine sheathed in brownish vegetation, its beach
stretching almost out of sight to the south. Off in that distance,
Clarke thinks she sees tiny specks in vague motion.
Lubin's wearing a pair of binoculars, panning his head slowly from
side to side. Scanning the island. He doesn't speak as Clarke joins
him on the railing.
"Did you know them?" she asks softly.
"Perhaps. I don't know who was out here when it happened."
I'm sorry, she almost says, but what's the point?
"Maybe they saw it coming," she suggests. "Maybe they
got away."
He doesn't look away from the shoreline. The binocs extend from his
eyes like tubular antennae.
"Should we be out in the open like this?" Clarke asks.
Lubin shrugs, startlingly, chillingly indifferent to security.
She looks down along the shoreline. The moving specks are a bit
larger now, some kind of animals from the look of it. They appear to
be moving this way.
"When do you suppose it happened?" Somehow, it seems
important to keep him talking.
"It's been almost a year since we got a signal from them,"
he says. "Could've been any time since then."
"Could've been last week," Clarke remarks. There was once
a time when their allies were much more faithful in their
correspondence. Even so, extended silence doesn't always mean
anything. You had to wait until no one was listening. You had to be
careful not to give the game away. Both corpse and rifter contacts
went dark now and then, back in the early days. Even now, after a
year of silence, it's not unreasonable to keep hoping for news,
someday. Any day.
Except now, of course. Except from here.
"Two months ago," Lubin says. "At least."
She doesn't ask how he knows. She follows his magnified gaze back to
shore.
Oh my God.
"They're horses," she whispers, amazed. "Wild horses.
Holy shit."
The animals are close enough now to be unmistakable. An image comes
to her, unbidden: Alyx in her sea-floor prison, Alyx saying this
is the best place I could possibly be. Clarke wonders what she'd
say now, seeing these wild things.
On second thought, it probably wouldn't impress her. She was a
corpse kid, after all. She'd probably toured the world a dozen times
before she was eight. Maybe even had a horse of her own.
The herd stampedes along the beach. "What are they doing
out here?" Clarke wonders. Sable wasn't a proper island even
back before the rising seas partitioned it; it's never been more
than a glorified sand dune, crawling around the outer edges of the
Shelf's exhausted oil fields under the influence of wind and
currents. She can't even see any trees or shrubs on this particular
island, just a mane of reedy grass running along its backbone. It
seems absurd that such an insignificant speck of land could support
creatures so large.
"Seals, too." Lubin points along the shore to the north,
although whatever he sees is too distant for Clarke's unmagnified
vision. "Birds. Vegetation."
The dissonance of it sinks in. "Why the sudden interest in
wildlife, Ken? I never took you for a nature lover."
"It's all healthy," he says.
"What?"
"No carcasses, no skeletons. Nothing even looks sick."
Lubin slips the binocs from his skull and slides them back into his
fanny pack. "The grass is rather brown, but I suspect that's
normal." He sounds almost disappointed for some—
ßehemoth, she realizes. That's what he's looking for.
Hoping for. Up here the world burns its hot zones—at
least, it burns those small enough to carry any hope of containment
in exchange for the lives and land lost to the flame. ßehemoth
threatens the entire biosphere, after all; nobody gives a damn about
collateral damage when the stakes are that high.
But Sable is healthy. Sable is unburned. Which means the
destruction around them has nothing to do with ecological
containment.
Someone is hunting them.
Clarke can't really blame them, whoever they are. She'd have been
dying up here with everyone else if the corpses had had their way.
Atlantis was only built for the Movers and Shakers of the world;
Clarke and her buddies were just another handful of the moved and the
shaken as far as that elite was concerned. The only difference was
that Achilles Desjardins had told them where the party was, so they
could crash it before the lights went out.
So if this is the anger of those left behind, she can hardly begrudge
it. She can't even dismiss it as misplaced. After all, ßehemoth
is her fault.
She looks back at the aftermath. Whoever did this isn't nearly as
good as Desjardins was. They're not bad, mind you; they were smart
enough to deduce Atlantis's general whereabouts, anyway. The variant
of ßehemoth they rejigged
utterly defeats the retrofitted immunity that was supposed to protect
its citizenry. The fact that they even got close enough to seed
ß-Max in the right vicinity
may have won them the game, judging from the body count that was
starting up as Phocoena went into the field.
But they still haven't found the nest. They prowl the neighborhood,
they've burned this lonely outpost on the frontier, but after all
this time Atlantis itself continues to elude them. Now,
Desjardins—it took him less than a week to winnow three hundred
and sixty million square kilometers of seabed down to a single set of
lats and longs. He not only painted the bullseye, he pulled the
strings and erased the tracks and arranged the rides to get them
there.
Achilles, my friend, Clarke thinks. We could really use
your help about now. But Achilles Desjardins is dead. He died
during Rio. Even being CSIRA's best 'lawbreaker doesn't do you much
good when a plane drops on your head.
For all Clarke knows, he may have been killed by the same people who
did this.
Lubin is walking back along the platform. Clarke follows. Wind
slices around her, frigid and biting; she could almost swear she
feels its teeth through the diveskin, although that must be her
imagination. Nearby, some accidental wind-tunnel of pipes and
plating moans as if haunted.
"What month is it?" she asks aloud.
"June." Lubin's heading for the helipad.
It seems a lot colder than it should be. Maybe this is what passes
for balmy since the Gulf Stream shut down. Clarke's never been able
to wrap her head around that paradox: that global warming should
somehow have turned eastern Europe into Siberia...
Metal stairs lead up to the pad. But Lubin, reaching them, doesn't
climb; he steps behind them and drops to one knee, intent on the
underside of the frame. Clarke bends down at his side. She sees
nothing but scraped, painted metal.
Lubin sighs. "You should go back," he says.
"Not a chance."
"Past this point I won't be able to return you. I can afford a
forty-six hour delay more than I can afford someone slowing me down
once we get to the mainland."
"We've been over this, Ken. What makes you think I'm going to
be any easier to convince now?"
"Things are worse than I expected."
"How, exactly? It's already the end of the world."
He points at a spot under the stairs where the paint's been scraped
off.
Clarke shrugs. "I don't see anything."
"Right." Lubin turns and starts back towards the scorched
remains of the control hut.
She sets out after him. "So?"
"I left a backup recorder behind. Looked like a rivet."
He brings his hand out, holds thumb and forefinger close together,
almost touching, for scale. "Even painted it over. I
would never have been able to find it." The forefinger extends;
Lubin's pointing hand describes an imaginary line between hut and
staircase. "Nice short line-of-sight to minimize power
consumption. Omnidirectional broadcast; impossible to backtrack.
Enough memory for a week's worth of routine chatter, plus anything
they might have sent our way."
"That's not much," Clarke remarks.
"It wasn't a long-term record. When it ran out of new memory
it overwrote the old."
A black box, then. A moving record of the recent past. "So you
were expecting something like this," she surmises.
"I was expecting that if something happened, I'd at least
be able to retrieve some kind of log. I wasn't expecting to lose the
recorder. I was the only one who knew it was here."
They've returned to the radio shack. The blackened door frame still
stands, an absurd rectangle rising from the rubble. Lubin, perhaps
out of some cryptic respect for standard procedure, passes through
it. Clarke simply steps over the knee-high tatters of the nearest
wall.
Something snaps and cracks around her ankle. She looks down. Her
foot is imprisoned in a blackened human ribcage, her leg emerging
from a shattered hole where the sternum used to be. She can feel the
knobs and projections of the spine underfoot, brittle and crumbling
under the slightest weight.
If there's a skull—or arms or legs—they must be buried in
the surrounding rubble.
Lubin watches while she pulls her foot from the remains. Something
glitters behind his eyecaps.
"Whoever's behind this," he says, "is smarter than
me."
His face isn't really expressionless. It just looks that way to the
uninitiated. But Lenie Clarke has learned to read him, after a
fashion, and Lubin doesn't look worried or upset to her. He looks
excited.
She nods, undeterred. "So you need all the help you can get."
She follows him down.
Nightingale
It seemed as if they came out of the ground itself. Sometimes that
was literally true: increasing numbers lived in the sewers and storm
drains now, as if a few meters of concrete and earth could hold back
what heaven and earth had failed to. Most of the time, though, it
was only appearance. Taka Ouellette's mobile infirmary would pull up
at some municipal crossroads, near some ramshackle collection of
seemingly-abandoned houses and strip malls which nonetheless
disgorged a listless trickle of haggard occupants, long past hope but
willing to go through the motions in whatever time they had left.
They were the unlucky unconnected who hadn't made it into a PMZ.
They were the former skeptics who hadn't realized until too late that
this was the real thing. They were the fatalists and the empiricists
who looked back over the previous century and wondered why it had
taken this long for the world to end.
They were the people barely worth saving. Taka Ouellette did her
best. She was the person barely competent to save them.
Rossini wafted from the cab behind her. Ouellette’s next case
staggered forward, oblivious to the music, a woman who might once
have been described as middle-aged: loose-skinned,
stiff-limbed, legs moving on some semifunctional autopilot. One of
them nearly buckled as she approached, sent the whole sad body
lurching to one side. Ouellette reached out but the woman caught
herself at the last moment, kept upright more through accident than
effort. Both cheeks were swollen bruised pillows: the rheumy eyes
above them seemed fixed on some indeterminate point between zenith
and horizon. Her right hand was an infected claw, curled around an
oozing gash.
Ouellette defocused on the gross ravages and zoomed down to the
subtler ones: two melanomas visible on the left arm; tremors in the
right; some dark tracery that looked like blood poisoning, creeping
up the wrist from the injured palm. The usual symptoms of
malnutrition. Half of the signs were consistent with ßehemoth;
none were incontrovertible. Here was a woman suffering violence
across several orders of magnitude.
Ouellette tried on a professional smile, although the fit had never
been a good one. "Let's see if we can't get you fixed up."
"That's okay," said the woman, stargazing. Ouellette tried
to guide her towards the van with one gloved hand (not that she
needed the gloves, of course, but these days it wasn't wise to remind
people of such things). The woman jerked away at her touch—
"That's okay. That's okay—"
—staggered against some invisible wall and stumbled off,
locked on heaven, oblivious to earth.
"That's okay…"
Ouellette let her go.
The next patient wasn't conscious and wouldn't have been able to move
if he had been. He arrived on a makeshift stretcher, an oozing
jigsaw of lesions and twitches, short-circuiting nerves and organs
that hadn't bothered waiting for the heart to give out before
starting to rot. The sickly-sweet smell of fermented urine and
feces hung around him like a shroud. His kidneys and his liver were
in a race to kill him first. She couldn't lay odds on the winner.
A man and two children of indeterminate sex had dragged this
breathing corpse before her. Their own faces and hands were
uncovered, in oblivion or defiance of the half-assed protective
measures promoted by endless public-service announcements.
She shook her head. "I'm sorry. It's end-stage."
They stared back at her, eyes filled with a pleading desperate hope
that verged on insanity.
"I can kill him for you," she whispered. "I can
cremate him. That's all I can do."
Still they didn't move.
Oh, Dave. Thank God you died before it came to this...
"Do you understand?" she said. "I can't save him."
That was nothing new. When it came to ßehemoth,
she wasn't saving anybody.
She could have, of course. If she were suicidal.
Protection against ßehemoth
came packaged in a painstaking and complex series of genetic
retrofits, an assembly line that took days—but there was no
technical reason why it couldn't be crammed into a portable rig and
taken on the road. A few people had done that very thing, not so
long ago. They'd been torn limb from limb by hordes too desperate to
wait in line, who didn't trust that supply would exceed demand if
they'd only be patient a little while longer.
By now, those places that offered a real cure were all fortresses
built to withstand the desperation of mobs, built to enforce the
necessary patience. Further from those epicenters Taka Ouellette and
her kind could walk among the sick without fear of sickness; but it
would have been be a death sentence to offer a cure so far from
back-up. The most she could do here was bestow quick-and-dirty
retrovirals, half-assed tweaks that might allow some to survive the
wait for a real cure. All she could risk was to slow the process of
dying.
She didn't complain. In more complacent times, she knew, she might
not have been trusted to do even that much. That hardly made her
unique: fifty percent of all medical personnel graduate in
the bottom half of their class. It didn't matter nearly as much as
it once had.
Even now, though, there was a hierarchy. The ivy-leaguers, the Nobel
laureates, the Meatzarts—those had long since ascended into
heaven on CSIRA's wings. There they worked in remote luxury, every
cutting-edge resource within easy reach, intent on saving what
remained of the world.
One tier down were the betas: the solid, reliable splice-and dicers,
the gel-jocks, no award-winners here but no great backlog of
malpractice suits either. They labored in the castles that had
accreted around every source of front-line salvation. The assembly
line wound through those fortifications like a perverse GI tract.
The sick and the dying were swallowed at one end, passed through
loops and coils of machinery that stabbed and sampled and doused them
with the opposite of digestive enzymes: genes and chemicals that
soaked the liquefying flesh to make it whole again.
The passage through salvation's bowels was an arduous one, eight days
from ingestion to defecation. The line was long but not wide:
economies of scale were hard to come by in the post-corporate
landscape. Only a fraction of the afflicted would ever be immunized.
But those lucky few owed their lives to the solid, unremarkable
worker bees of the second tier.
And then there was Taka Ouellette, who could barely remember a time
when she'd been a member of the hive.
If it hadn't been for that one piece of decontamination protocol,
carelessly applied, she might still be working the line in Boston.
If not for that small slip Dave and Crys might still be alive. There
was really no way of knowing for sure. There was only doubt, and
what-if. And the fading memory of life as an endocrinologist, and a
wife, and a mother.
Now she was just a foot soldier, patrolling the outlands with her
hand-me-down mobile clinic and her cut-rate, stale-dated miracles.
She hadn't been paid in months, but that was okay. The room and
board was free, at least, and anyway she wouldn't be welcome back in
Boston any time soon: she might be immune to ßehemoth
but she could still carry it. That was okay too. This was enough to
keep her busy. It was enough to keep her alive.
Finally, silently, the breathing corpse had been withdrawn from
competition. Subsequent contenders hadn't rubbed her nose quite so
deeply in her own ineffectuality. For the past few hours she'd been
treating more tumors than plague victims. That was unusual, this
far from a PMZ. Still, cancers could be excised. It was simple
work, drone work. The kind of work she was good for.
So here she was, handing out raf-1 angiogenesis blockers and
retrovirii in a blighted, wilting landscape where DNA itself was on
the way out. There was some green out there, if you looked hard
enough. It was springtime, after all. ßehemoth
always died back a bit during the winter, gave the old tenants a
chance to sprout and bloom each new year before coming back to
throttle the competition. And Maine was about as far as you could
get from the initial Pacific incursion without getting your feet wet.
Go any further and you'd need a boat and a really good scrambler to
keep the missiles off your back.
These days, of course, keeping to land was no longer any guarantee
that the EurAfricans wouldn't be shooting at you. There'd been a
time when they'd only shot at targets trying to cross the pond; but
given a half-dozen landside missile attacks since Easter they were
obviously itching for more effective containment. It was a wonder
that the whole seaboard hadn't been slagged to glass by now. If the
dispatches could be believed, N'Am's defenses were still keeping the
worst of it back. Still. The defenses wouldn't hold forever.
Rossini surrendered to Handel. Ouellette's line-up was growing.
Perhaps three people accumulated for every two she processed.
Nothing to worry about, yet; there was a critical mass, some
threshold of personal responsibility below which crowds almost never
got ugly. These ones didn't look like they had the strength to go
bad even if they'd been motivated to.
At least the pharms had stopped charging for the meds she dispensed.
They hadn't wanted to, of course: hey, did anyone think the R&D
for all these magic potions had been free? In the end, though, there
hadn't been much choice. Even small crowds got really ugly when you
demanded payment up front.
A forearm the size of a tree trunk, disfigured by the usual maladies:
the leprous, silver tinge of stage-one ßehemoth,
a smattering of melanomas, and—
Wait a second. That's odd. The swelling and redness was
consistent with an infected insect bite, but the puncture marks...
She looked up at the face above the arm. A leather-skinned man in
his fifties looked back through eyes blotchy with burst capillaries.
For a moment it seemed as though his very bulk was blotting out the
light, but no—it was only dusk, creeping in overhead while
she'd been otherwise occupied.
"What did this?" she asked.
"Bug." He shook his head. "Last week sometime.
Itches like a bugger."
"But there's four holes." Two bites? Two sets of
mandibles on a single bug?
"Had about ten legs, too. Weird little bugger. Seen 'em around
once or twice. Never got bit before, though." His red eyes
squinted with sudden concern. "It poisonous?"
"Probably not." Taka probed the swelling. Her patient
grimaced, but whatever had bitten him didn't seem to have left
anything embedded. "Not seriously, not if it happened last
week. I can give you something for the infection. It's pretty
minor, next to…"
"Yeah," her patient said.
She smeared a bit of antibiotic onto the swelling. " I can give
you a shot of antihistamines," she said apologetically, "but
the effects won't last, I'm afraid. If the itching gets too bad
afterward you could always piss on it."
"Piss on it?"
"Topical urea's good for itching," Taka told him. She held
up a loaded cuvette; he made the requisite blood offering. "Now
if you just—"
"I know the drill."
A tunnel, a slightly squashed cylinder big enough for a body,
pierced the MI from one side to the other—a pair of opposed
oval mouths, connected by a sensor-lined throat. A pallet extended
from the floor of the nearer mouth like a padded rectangular tongue.
Taka's patient lay back on it; the van listed slightly under his
weight. The pallet retracted with an electrical hum. Slowly,
smoothly, the man disappeared into one mouth and extruded from the
other. He was luckier than some. Some went in and never came out.
The tunnel doubled as a crematorium.
Taka kept one eye on the NMR readouts, the other on the blood work.
From time to time, both eyes flickered uneasily to the growing line
of patients.
"Well?" came the man's voice from the other side of the
van.
He'd been here before, she saw. Her sideshow tweaks had already
taken hold in his cells.
And his Stage-One was still advancing.
"Well, you know about your melanomas, obviously," she
remarked as he came around the corner. She drew a time-release raf-1
from the dispensary and loaded it up. "This'll starve the
tumors on your skin, and a few others cooking inside you probably
didn't know about. I take it you've been in a clave recently, or a
PMZ?"
He grunted. "Came here a month back. Maybe two."
"Uh huh." The static-field generators installed in such
places were a mixed blessing at best. Bathing in that kind of field
for any length of time was guaranteed to set tumors blooming in the
flesh like mushrooms in shit. Most people considered it the lesser
evil, even though the fields didn't so much repel ßehemoth
as merely impede it.
Taka didn't ask what had inspired this man to abandon that leaky
protection for enemy territory. Such decisions were seldom
voluntary.
He offered his arm: she shot the capsule sub-q, just over the bicep.
"There are a couple of other tumors, I'm afraid. Not so
vascularised. I can burn them out, but you'll have to wait until I'm
a little less busy. There's no real hurry."
"What about the witch?" he said.
Firewitch, he meant. ßehemoth.
"Um, according to your blood work you've already taken the
cocktail," Taka said, pretending to recheck the results.
"I know. Last fall." He coughed. "I'm still getting
sick."
"Well if you were infected last fall, it's doing its job. You'd
have been dead by winter without it."
"But I'm still getting sick." He took a step
towards her, a big, big man, his bloody eyes narrowed down to red
slits. Behind him, others waited with limited patience.
"You should go to Bangor," she began. "That's the
closest—"
"They won't even tell you the wait at Bangor," he
spat.
"What I can do here, what I—it's not a cure,"
she explained carefully. "It's only supposed to buy you some
time."
"It did. So buy me more."
She took a cautious, placating step backwards. One step closer to
the voice-command pickup for Miri's defense systems. One step away
from trouble.
Trouble stepped after her.
"It doesn't work like that," Taka said softly. "The
resistance is already in your cells. Putting it in again won't do
anything. I guarantee it."
For a moment, she thought he might back off. The words seemed to
penetrate; the tension ebbed a bit from his posture. The lines
around his eyes seemed to twist somehow, some less-volatile mix of
confusion and hurt replacing the fear and anger that had been there
before.
And then he removed all hope with the hardest smile she'd ever seen.
"You're cured," he said, and moved.
It was an occupational hazard. Out here, some believed that
resistance could be transmitted through sexual contact. That made it
easy to get laid, if you were into such things: there were those who
held the Immunized in almost cultish esteem, begged sexual congress
as a form of inoculation. It was something of a joke among Taka's
peers.
Somewhat less amusing were the tales of field medics held prisoner,
raped repeatedly in the name of public health. Taka Ouellette had no
intention of offering herself to the greater good.
Neither did the thing she unleashed.
The password was Bagheera. Taka had no idea what it meant; it
had come with the van and she'd never bothered to change it.
The chain of events it was supposed to trigger stopped far short of
total commitment. On hearing its master's call, the MI's defenses
would snap to attention: all ports and orifices would slam shut and
lock tight, with the exception of the cab door closest to the
authorized operator. The weapons blister on Miri's roof —a
sunken, mirrored hemisphere when at rest— would extend from its
silo like a gleaming chrome phallus, high enough for a clear shot at
anyone not flattened defensively against the sides of the vehicle
itself. (For any who might be, the chassis itself could come alive
with high-voltage electricity.) Primary weaponry started with a
tightbeam infrasonic squawkbox capable of voiding bowels and stomachs
at ten meters. Escalation would call on twin gimbaled 8000-Watt
direct-diode lasers which could be tuned to perforate or merely
blind; nonprojectile weapons were always favored because of the
ammunition issue. However, to guard against the risk of
laser-defeating mirrors and aerosols, ancillary projectile weapons
were usually made available to the savvy field doctor; Taka's rig
also fired darts primed with a conotoxin tweaked for ten-second
respiratory paralysis.
None of this was supposed to fire automatically. Bagheera
should only have brought those systems into full alert, countered one
threat with a greater one, and given any aggressor the chance to back
off before anyone got hurt. There should have been no escalation
absent Taka's explicit command.
"Bagheera," she growled.
The lasers cut loose.
They didn't fire at the red-eyed man. They started slicing through
the lineup behind him. Half a dozen people fell bisected,
cauterized, their troubles suddenly over. Others stared disbelieving
at neat, smoking holes in their limbs and torsos. On the far side of
a sudden barbequed jigsaw, brown grass burst into flame. Water
Music played on in the background without missing a beat.
After a moment that seemed to go on forever, people remembered to
scream.
The Red-eyed man, all threat and bluster gone from his body, stood
dumbfounded and pincushioned by a dozen neurotoxic darts. He gaped
soundlessly at Taka, teetering. He raised his hands, palms up,
supplicating: goddamn woman, I never meant…!
He toppled, rigid with tetanus.
People ran, or twitched, or lay still. The lasers dipped and weaved,
scrawling blackened gibberish onto the ground. Fire guttered here
and there among the curlicues, bright staccatos against the failing
light.
Taka pulled frantically at the passenger door; fortunately the
renegade system hadn't charged the hull. It had locked her
out, though; this was the door that was supposed to stay unlocked,
the route to refuge—
It's online how in God's name can it be online —
But she could see the telltale on her dashboard, flashing scarlet.
The MI was somehow uplinked to the wide wireless world, to the
networked monsters that lived and hunted in there, to—
A Madonna. A Lenie. It had to be.
Another telltale winked from a different part of the dashboard.
Belatedly, Taka read the signs: the driver's door was
unlocked. She threw herself around the front of the vehicle. She
kept her eyes on the ground, some religious impulse averting them
from the wrath of God, if I don't see it maybe it won't see me
but she could hear the turret just above her, tracking and firing,
tracking and—
She piled into the cab, yanked the door behind her, locked it.
The cab's eyephones lay on the floor beside the seat. A tiny aurora
of light writhed across the deck from its oculars. She snatched up
the phones and held them to her face.
The Madonna's twisted face raged within an inset on the main display.
There was no sound—Taka left the headset muted by default.
Shitsucker. It got in through GPS. She always kept GPS
offline when she wasn't traveling; somehow the invader must have
spoofed the system.
She killed nav. The screaming thing in the window went out.
Overhead, the lasers ceased fire with a downshifting whine.
Water Music had ended sometime during the massacre.
Tchaikovsky had stepped into the gap. Iolanta.
It seemed like a very long while before she dared to move.
She killed the music. She hugged herself, shaking. She tried very
hard not to cry like a frightened child. She told herself she'd done
what she could.
She told herself it could have been worse.
Madonnas could do almost anything in their own environment. Cruising
through the walls and the wires and the wavelengths of N'AmNet they
could penetrate almost any system, subvert almost any safeguard,
bring down almost any calamity upon the heads of people for whom
disaster had long since become the status quo. Just the week before,
one had breached the flood-control subroutines of some dam in the
Rockies, emptied a whole reservoir onto an unsuspecting populace
sleeping in the spillway's shadow.
Forcing access into one lousy MI would have been simplicity itself to
such a creature.
It hadn't downloaded, at least. No room. Neither nav nor
weapons-system chips were anywhere near big enough to support
something so complex, and the medical systems—the only habitat
in the van that could hold something that size—were kept
manually disconnected from the net except for prearranged updates.
The monsters could do a lot of things in virtual space, but they
hadn't yet figured out how to reach into the real world and
physically flip a switch. So this one had simply extended long,
vicious fingers from some faraway node, wreaking havoc from a
distance until Taka had cut it off.
Her own dim image stared back, haunted and hollow-eyed, from the
darkened dashboard. The perspex, subtly convex, stretched her
reflection lengthwise, turned gaunt into downright attenuate.
A fragile refugee from some low-gravity planet, civilized and
genteel. Banished to a hellish world where even your own armor
turned against you.
What if I— she thought, and stopped herself.
Wearily, she unlocked the door and climbed out onto the killing
floor. There were still a fair number of patients in sight. None
were standing, of course. Few moved.
What if I didn't—
"Hello!" she called to the empty streets and dark façades.
"It's okay! It's gone! I shut it out!"
Moans from the injured. Nothing else.
"Anybody! I could really use a hand here! We've got—we've
got…"
What if I didn't turn GPS off?
She shook her head. She always took it offline. She didn't
specifically remember doing it this particular time, but you never
remembered rote stuff like that.
"Anybody?"
Maybe you fucked up. Wouldn't be the first time.
Would it, Dave?
It seemed so dark all of a sudden. She raised her eyes from the
carnage; twilight was bleeding away to the west.
That was when she noticed the contrails.
Condom
Phocoena's bulkheads are luminous with intelligence. The
periscope feed delivers crisp rich realtimes of the maritime
nightscape: dark sparkling waves in the foreground, black fingers of
dry land reaching into the view from either side. A jumble of bright
buildings rises above the coastline in center screen, huddled
together against the surrounding darkness. Boxy unlit silhouettes to
the south belie the remains of a whole other city south of the
Narrows, abandoned in the course of some recent retreat.
The city of Halifax. Or rather, the besieged city-state that Halifax
has evidently become.
That naked-eye visual occupies the upper-left quarter of the main
panel. Beside it, a false-color interpretation of the same view
shows a fuzzy, indistinct cloud enveloping the lit buildings; Clarke
thinks of the mantle of a jellyfish, enclosing vital organs. The
shroud is largely invisible to human eyes, even rifter ones; to
Phocoena's spectrum-spanning senses, it looks like a blue haze
of heat lightning. Static-field ionization, Lubin says. A dome of
electricity to keep airborne particles at bay.
The seaward frontier is under guard. Not that Clarke ever expected
to simply sneak into the harbor and pull up next to the local clam
shack; she knew there'd be some kind of security in place.
Lubin was expecting mines, so for the last fifty klicks Phocoena
crawled towards the coast behind a couple of point drones zig-zagging
ahead, luring any countermeasures out of concealment. Those flushed
a single burrower lying in wait; awakened by the sound of
approaching machinery, it shot from the mud and corkscrewed into the
nearest drone with a harmless and anticlimactic clunk.
That lone dud was the only countermeasure they came across on the
outer slope. Lubin figures that Halifax's subsurface defenses must
have been used up fending off previous incursions. The fact that
they haven't been replenished doesn't bode well for the
mass-production of industrial goods in the vicinity.
At any rate, against all expectations they've cruised unchallenged
all the way here, just outside Halifax Harbor. Only to nearly run
into this. Whatever this is.
It's virtually invisible in the sub's lights. It's even less visible
to sonar, which can barely pick it up even at point-blank range. A
transparent, diaphanous membrane stretches from seabed to surface:
the periscope shows a float line holding its upper edge several
meters above the waves. It appears to stretch across the entire
mouth of the harbor.
It billows inward, as if the Atlantic is leaning on it from the
outside. Pinpoint flashes of cold blue light sparkle across its
face, sparse ripples of stardust echoing the gentle subsurface
surge. Clarke recognizes the effect. It's not the membrane that
sparkles, but the tiny bioluminescent creatures colliding with it.
Plankton. It seems somehow encouraging that they still exist, so
close to shore.
Lubin's less interested in the light show than its cause. "Must
be semipermeable." That would explain the oceanographic
impossibility that belied its presence, a sudden sharp halocline
rising across their path like a wall. Discrete boundaries are common
enough in the sea: brackish water lying atop heavier saline, warm
water layered over cold. But the stratification is always
horizontal, a parfait of light-over-heavy as inevitable as gravity.
A vertical halocline seems to violate the very laws of
physics; the membrane itself may have been undetectable to sonar,
but the sheer knife-edged discontinuity it produces showed up like a
brick wall from a thousand meters away.
"Looks pretty flimsy," Clarke remarks. "Not much to
keep us out."
"It's not there for us," Lubin says.
"Well, yeah." It's a ßehemoth
filter, obviously. And it must be blocking a whole range of other
particles too, to generate this kind of density imbalance. "What
I mean is, we can just punch right on through."
"I don't think so," Lubin says.
He brings the periscope down from the surface and sends it sniffing
towards the barrier; on the panel, the cowering cityscape disappears
in a swirl of bubbles and darkness. Clarke glimpses the 'scope's
tether through the viewport, a pale thread of fiberop unwinding
overhead. The periscope itself is effectively invisible, a small
miracle of dynamic countershading.
Clarke watches it on tactical instead. Lubin brings the drone to
within half a meter of the membrane: a faint yellow haze resolves on
the right-hand feed, where naked eyes see only darkness. "What's
that?" Clarke wonders.
"Bioelectric field," Lubin tells her.
"You mean it's alive?"
"Probably not the membrane itself. I'd guess it's run through
with some kind of engineered neurons."
"Really? You sure?"
Lubin shakes his head. "I'm not even sure it's biological—the
field strength fits, but it doesn't prove anything." He
gives her a look. "Did you think we had a sensor to pick up
brain cells at fifty paces?"
No witty rejoinder springs to mind. Clarke turns back to the
viewport, and the dim blue aurora flickering beyond. "Like an
anorexic smart gel," she murmurs.
"Probably a lot dumber. And a lot more radical—they'd
have to tweak the neurons to work at low temperatures, high
salinity—the membrane itself could handle osmoregulation, I
suppose."
"I don't see any blood vessels. I wonder how they get
nutrients."
"Maybe the membrane handles that too. Absorbs them right from
seawater."
"What's it for?"
"Other than a filter?" Lubin shrugs. "An alarm, I
should think."
"So what do we do?"
Lubin considers a moment. "Poke it," he says.
The periscope lunges forward. On the wide-spectrum display the
membrane flares on impact, bright threads radiating from the strike
like a fine-veined tracery of yellow lightning. In visible light it
just floats there, inert.
"Mmm." Lubin pulls the periscope back. The membrane reverts
to lowglow.
"So if it is an alarm," Clarke says, "I'm
guessing you've just set it off."
"Not unless Halifax goes to red alert every time a piece of
driftwood bumps their perimeter." Lubin runs his finger along a
control bar: on tactical, the periscope heads back to the surface.
"But I am willing to bet this thing'll scream a lot
louder if we actually tear through it. We don't need that kind of
attention."
"So what now? Head down the coast a bit, try a land approach?"
Lubin shakes his head. "Underwater was our best shot. A
landside approach will be a lot tougher." He grabs a headset
off the bulkhead and slips it over his skull. "If we can't get
to a hard line, we'll try the local wireless nets. Better than
nothing."
He cocoons himself and extends feelers into the attenuate datasphere
overhead. Clarke reroutes nav to the copilot's panel and turns
Phocoena back into deeper water. An extra klick or so
shouldn't interfere with Lubin's trawl, and there's something
disquieting about being in such shallow water. It's like looking up
to find the roof has crept down while you weren't looking.
Lubin grunts. "Got something."
Clarke taps into Lubin's headset and splits the feed to her own
panel. Most of the stream's incomprehensible— numbers and
statistics and acronyms, scrolling past too quickly for her to read
even if she could make sense of them. Either Lubin's dug
beneath the usual user interfaces, or Maelstrom has become so
impoverished in the past five years that it can't support advanced
graphics any more.
But that can't be. The system has room enough for her own demonic
alter-egos, after all. Those are nothing if not graphic.
"So what's it saying?" Clarke asks.
"Missile attack of some kind, down in Maine. They're sending
lifters."
She gives up and pulls the 'phones from her eyes.
"That could be our best way in," Lubin muses. "Any
vehicles CSIRA deploys will be operating out of a secure site with
access to good intel."
"And you think the pilot would be willing to pick up a couple of
hitch-hikers in the middle of a contaminated zone?"
Lubin turns his head. Faint lightning flickers around the edges of
his eyephones, ephemeral tattoos laid over the scars on his cheeks.
"If there is a pilot," he says, "perhaps he'll
be open to persuasion."
Gehenna
Taka Ouellette emerged into a nightscape of guttering flame. She
drove at a crawl through a hot dry snowfall, the windshield's static
field barely keeping the flakes from the glass. Ash flurried white
as talc in Miri's headlights, a fog of powdered earth and vegetation
blinding her to the road ahead. She killed the lights, but infrared
was even worse: countless particles of drifting soot, the brilliant
washouts of raw flame, arid little dust-devils and writhing updrafts
overloaded the display with false-color artefacts. Finally she
settled for an old set of photoamp glasses in the glove compartment.
The world resolved into black and white, gray on gray. The viz was
still terrible, but at least the interference was in sharp focus.
Maybe there were survivors, she told herself without much
hope. Maybe the firestorm didn't reach that far. She was a
good ten kilometers from the spot where her MI had risen up and
slaughtered the locals. There'd been no closer cover: no storm
sewers or parkades more than a few levels deep, and if there'd been
any hardened shelters nearby her surviving patients wouldn't have
been inclined to tell her about them. So she'd fled east while the
contrails arced overhead, buried herself in a service tunnel attached
to an abandoned tidal bore drilled in from Penobscot Bay. A few
years ago the shamans had promised that bore would keep the lights on
from Portland to Eastport, world without end. But of course the
world had ended, before the first turbine had even been
installed. Now the tunnel did nothing but shield burrowing mammals
from the short-term consequences of their own stupidity.
Ten kilometers over buckled and debris-strewn roads that hadn't seen
service since before ßehemoth.
It was nothing short of a miracle that Taka had made it to safety
before the missiles had hit. Or it would have been, if the missiles
had actually caused any of the devastation she was driving through
now.
She was pretty sure they hadn't. In fact, she was pretty sure they'd
never even touched the ground.
The hill she was climbing crested a hundred meters ahead. Fresh
wreckage blocked her way halfway up that rise, the remains of some
roadside building that had collapsed during the attack. Now it was
only a great tumbledown collection of smoking cinder blocks. Not
even Taka's eyeglasses could banish the shadows infesting that
debris, all straight lines and sharp angles and dark empty
parallelograms.
It was too steep for Miri's limited ground-effectors. Ouellette
left the van to its own devices and climbed around the wreckage. The
bricks were still hot to the touch. Heat from the scorched earth
penetrated the soles of her boots, a subtle warmth, unpleasant only
by implication.
On the uphill side of the debris she passed occasional objects which
retained some crumbly semblance of human bones. She was breathing
the dead. Perhaps some of those she inhaled would have died even
earlier, if not for her efforts. Perhaps some she'd helped today
were still alive, in spite of everything. She managed to take some
faint comfort in that, until she crested the hill.
But no.
The landscape spread out before her was as wasted as the path she'd
just climbed: flickering eruptions of white firelight punctuating a
vista blackened as much by carbon as by nightfall. The land had not
been laid waste by missiles or microbes, not this time. The thing
that had done it was still visible in the distance: a tiny dark oval
in the sky, barely darker than the cloud bank behind it, hanging a
few degrees over the horizon. Taka almost missed it at first, even
with the specs. Its outline was fuzzy, sparkling with the faint
visual static of errant photons unreasonably boosted.
But the gouts of flame that poured from its belly in the next instant
showed up clearly enough even to naked eyes.
Not a missile. Not a microbe. A lifter, scouring the distance as it
had already scoured the foreground.
And for all Taka Ouellette knew, she had been the one to bring it
here.
Oh, it wasn't dead certain. Wide-scale incendiary purges still
happened under official pretext. There'd actually been a time when
they were pretty routine, back in the early panic-stricken days when
people thought they might actually be able to contain ßehemoth
if they just had the balls to take drastic steps. Those had scaled
back when it had grown apparent that N'Am was blowing its whole
napalm reserve to no good effect, but they still happened sometimes
in some of the wilder zones out west. It was even possible that such
steps might have been undertaken without CSIRA bothering to extract
their field personnel, although Taka doubted that even she would be
left that far out of the loop.
But not so far from here, not so long ago, she had let a monster
escape into the real world. Floods and firestorms always seemed to
follow in the wake of such breaches, and Taka had almost forgotten a
time when she believed in coincidence.
There'd be no shortage of proximate causes. Perhaps some rogue
autopilot afflicted with faulty programming, tricked by a typographic
error into burning the wrong part of the world. Or maybe a human
pilot misled by garbled encryption, commands misheard through static
and interference. None of those details mattered. Taka knew the
bigger question: who had tweaked any code that subverted the
automatic pilot? What had garbled instructions heard by the
flesh and blood one?
She knew the answer, too. It would have been obvious to anyone who'd
seen the monster in her eyephones, a few hours before. There were no
accidents. Noise was never random. And the machinery itself was
malign.
Here, staring out at a photoamplified crematorium stretching to the
very horizon, it was the only explanation that made sense.
You were a scientist once, she told herself. You rejected
incantations outright. You knew the truths that protected you from
bias and woolly-mindedness, and you learned them all by heart:
correlation is not causation. Nothing is real until replicated. The
mind sees order in noise; trust only numbers.
Incantations of another sort, perhaps. Not very effective ones; they
hadn't, for all their familiarity, saved her from the creeping
certainty that she'd called an evil spirit into her vehicle. She
could rationalize the superstitious awe in her head, justify it even.
Her training gave her more than enough tools for that. Spirit
was only a word, a convenient label for a virulent software entity
forged in the fast-forward Darwinian landscape that had once been
called Internet. Taka knew how fast evolutionary changes
could be wrought in a system where a hundred generations passed in
the blink of an eye. She remembered another time when electronic
lifeforms—undesigned, unplanned, and unwanted—had grown
so pestilential that the net itself had acquired the name Maelstrom.
The things called Lenies, or Shredders, or
Madonnas—like the Gospel demons, their names were
legion—they were simply exemplars of natural selection.
Extremely successful exemplars: on the other side of the world,
whole countries abased themselves in their names. Or in the name of
the icon on which they were based at least, some semi-mythical cult
figure who'd risen to brief prominence on ßehemoth's
coattails.
This was logic, not religion. So what if these things had power
beyond imagining, yet no physical substance? So what if they lived
in the wires and the wireless spaces between, and moved at the speed
of their own electronic thoughts? Demon, spirit—shorthand,
not superstition. Only metaphor, with more points of similarity than
some.
And yet, now Taka Ouellette saw mysterious lights flashing in the
sky, and found her lips moving in altogether the wrong kind of
incantation.
Oh God, save us.
She turned and headed downhill. She could probably get around the
blockage, take some back road to continue on this way, but what was
the point? It was a question of cost-benefit analysis, of
lives-saved-per-unit-effort. That value would certainly be higher
almost anywhere but here.
The collapsed building loomed ahead of her on the road again, gray
and colorless in the amplified light. The angular shadows looked
different, more ominous from this angle. They formed crude faces and
body parts way past human scale, as if some giant cubist robot had
collapsed in an angry heap and was summoning the strength to pull
itself back together again.
As she began to pick her way around the pile, one of the shadows
detached itself and moved to block her path.
"Holy—" Taka gasped. It was only a woman, she
saw now, and unarmed—these days you noticed such things almost
instinctively—but her heart had been kicked instantly into
fight/flight. "Jesus, you scared me."
"Sorry. Didn't mean to." The woman took another step
clear of the debris. She was blonde, dressed entirely in some black
skin-tight body stocking from neck to feet; only her hands and head
were exposed, pale disembodied pieces against the contrasting
darkness. She was a few centimeters shorter than Taka herself.
There was something about her eyes, too. They seemed too bright,
somehow. Probably an artefact of the specs, Taka decided. Light
reflecting off the wetness of the cornea, perhaps.
The woman jerked her chin back over her shoulder. "That your
ambulance?"
"Mobile Infirmary. Yes." Taka glanced around the full
three-sixty. She saw no one else. "Are you sick?"
A laugh, very soft. "Isn't everyone?"
"I mean—"
"No. Not yet."
What is it about those eyes? It was hard to tell from this
distance—the woman was ten meters away—but it looked like
she might be wearing nightshades. In which case she could see Taka
Ouellette way better than Taka Ouellette could see her through
these fratzing photoamps.
People in the wildlands did not generally come so well-equipped.
Taka put her hands casually into her pockets; the act pushed her
windbreaker away from the standard-issue Kimber on her hip. "Are
you hungry?" she asked. "There's a cycler in the cab. The
bricks taste like shit, but if you're desperate..."
"Sorry about this," the woman said, stepping forward.
"Really."
Her eyes were like blank, translucent balls of ice.
Taka stepped back instinctively. Something blocked her from behind.
She spun and stared into another pair of empty eyes, set in a face
that seemed all scarred planes and chipped stone. She didn't reach
for her gun. Somehow, he already had it.
"It's gene-locked," she said quickly.
"Mmm." He turned the weapon over in his hands. He wore the
look of a professional appraiser. "We apologize for the
intrusion," he told her, almost absently, "But we need you
to disable the security on your vehicle." He did not look at
her.
"We're not going to hurt you," the woman said from behind.
Taka, unreassured, kept her eyes on the man holding her gun.
"Certainly not," he agreed, looking up at last. "Not
while there are more efficient alternatives."
Bagheera was one password. There were several others. Morris
locked down the whole kit and kaboodle, so that not even Taka could
start it up again without live authorization. Pixel
electrostabbed any passengers who didn't match her pheromone profile.
Tigger unlocked the doors and played dead until it heard
Taka say Schroedinger: then it locked down and pumped enough
halothane into the cab to turn a 110-kg assailant into a sack of
jelly for a minimum of fifteen minutes. (Taka herself would be up
and at 'em in a mere ninety seconds; when they'd given her the keys
to Miri they'd also tweaked her blood with a resistant enzyme.)
Mobile Infirmaries were chock-full of resources and technology. The
wildlands were chock-full of desperate people literally dying for an
edge, any edge. Anti-theft measures made every kind of sense, and
more than a little irony: when it came right down to it, Miri was
far better at killing and incapacitation than it was at healing the
sick.
Now Taka stood beside the driver's door, white-eyed blackbodies on
either side. She ran through her options.
"Tigger," she said. Miri chirped and unlocked the door.
The woman pulled the door open and climbed into the cab. Taka
started to follow. A hand clapped down on her shoulder.
Taka turned and faced her captor. "It's gene-locked, too. I'll
have to reset it if you want to drive."
"We don't," he told her. "Not yet."
"The board's dark," the woman said from behind the wheel.
The hand on her shoulder tightened subtly, pressed forward. Taka
felt herself guided to the cab; the other woman slid over into the
passenger seat to give her room.
"Actually," the man said, "I think we'll let the
doctor here take the passenger seat." The hand pressed down.
Taka ducked in through the driver's side, slid between the seat and
the steering stick as the other woman left the cab through the
passenger door. The woman grasped the edge of that door and started
to push it shut.
"No," said the man, very distinctly. The woman froze.
He was behind the wheel now; his hand hadn't come off Taka's shoulder
for an instant. "One of us stays outside the cab at all times,"
he told his partner. "And we leave both doors open."
His partner nodded. He took his hand off Taka's shoulder and looked
at the dark, unhelpful face of the dash.
"Bring it online," he said. "Touch only, no voice
control. Do not start the engine."
Taka stared back at him, unmoving.
The blond leaned in over her shoulder. "We weren't bullshitting
you," she said quietly. "We really don't want to
hurt you, unless there's no choice. I'm betting that's a pretty
charitable attitude for these parts, so why are you pushing it?"
These parts. So they were new in town. Not that this came as
any great surprise; these two were the furthest thing from wildland
refugees that Taka had seen in ages.
She shook her head. "You're stealing an MI. That's going to
hurt a lot more people than me."
"If you cooperate you can have it back in a little while,"
the man told her. "Bring it online."
She keyed the genepad. The dashboard lit up.
He studied the display. "So I take it you're some sort of
itinerant health-care worker."
"Some sort," Taka said carefully.
"Where are you out of?" he asked.
"Out of?"
"Who sets your route? Who resupplies you?"
"Bangor, usually."
"They airlift supplies to you in the field?"
"When they can spare them."
He grunted. "Your inventory beacon's disabled."
He spoke as if it were a surprise.
"I just radio in when my stocks get too low," Taka told
him. "Why would—what are you doing!"
He paused, fingers poised over the GPS menu he'd just brought up.
"I'm fixing some locations," he said mildly. "Is
there a problem?"
"Are you crazy? It's still practically line-of-sight!
Do you want it to come back?"
"Want what to come back?" the woman asked.
"What do you think did all this?"
They eyed her expressionlessly. "CSIRA, I expect," the
man said after a moment. "This was a containment burn,
wasn't it?"
"It was a Lenie!" Taka shouted. Oh Jesus what if
he brings it back, what if he—
Something pulled her around from behind. Glacial eyes bored directly
into hers. She could feel the woman's breath against her cheek.
"What did you just say?"
Taka swallowed and held herself in check. The panic receded
slightly.
"Listen to me," she said. "It got in through my GPS
last time. I don't know how, but if you go online you could bring it
back. Right now I wouldn't even risk radio."
"This thing—" the man began.
"How can you not know about them?" Taka cried,
exasperated
The two exchanged some indecipherable glance across her.
"We know," the man said. Taka noted gratefully that he'd
shut down GPS. "Are you saying it was responsible for
yesterday's missile attack?"
"No, of course n—" Taka stopped. She'd never
considered that before.
"I never thought so," she said after a moment. "Anything's
possible, I guess. Some people say the M&M's recruited them
somehow."
"Who else would have done it?" the woman wondered.
"Eurasia. Africa. Anyone, really." A sudden thought
struck her: "You aren't from—?"
The man shook his head. "No."
She couldn't really blame the missile-throwers, whoever they were.
According to the dispatches ßehemoth
still hadn't conquered the lands beyond Atlantic; those people
probably still thought they could contain it if they just sterilized
the hot zone. A phrase tickled the back of Taka's mind, some
worn-out slogan once used to justify astronomical death tolls. That
was it: The Greater Good. "Anyway," she went on,
"the missiles never made it through. That's not what all this
is."
The woman stared out the window, where all this was lightening
to smoky, pre-dawn gray. "What stopped them?"
Taka shrugged. "N'Am defense shield."
"How could you tell?" asked the man.
"You can see the re-entry trails when the antis come down from
orbit. You can see them dim down before they blow up. Smokey
starbursts, like fireworks almost."
The woman glanced around. "So all this, this was your—your
Lenie?"
A snippet from a very old song floated through Taka's mind. There
are no accidents 'round here...
"You said starbursts?" the man said.
Taka nodded.
"And the contrails dimmed down before detonation."
"So?"
"Which contrails? The incoming missiles or the N'Am antis?"
"How should I know?"
"You saw this last night?"
Taka nodded.
"What time?"
"I don't know. Listen, I had other things on my mind, I—"
I'd just watched a few dozen people sliced into cold cuts because
I might have left a circuit open somewhere...
The man was watching her with a sudden unwavering intensity. His
eyes were blank but far from empty.
She tried to remember. "It was dusk, the sun had been down
for—I don't know, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes?"
"Is that typical of these attacks? Sunset?"
"I never thought about it before," Taka admitted. "I
guess so. Or nighttime, at least."
"Was there ever an attack that occurred during broad
daylight?"
She thought hard. "I...I can't remember any."
"How long after the contrails dimmed did the starbursts appear?"
"Look, I didn't—"
"How long?"
"I don't know, okay? Maybe around five seconds or so."
"How many degrees of arc did the contrails—"
"Mister, I don't even know what that means."
The white-eyed man said nothing for what seemed like a very long
time. He did not move. Taka got the sense of wheels in motion.
Finally: "That tunnel you hid in."
"How did—you followed me? All the way from there? On
foot?"
"It wasn't far," the woman told her. "Less than a
kilometer."
Taka shook her head, amazed. At the time, inching through gusts of
scorched earth, it seemed as if she'd been in motion for days.
"You stopped at the gate. To cut the chain."
Taka nodded. In hindsight it seemed absurd—the MI could have
crashed that barrier in an instant, and the sky was falling.
"You looked up at the sky," he surmised.
"Yes."
"What did you see?"
"I told you. Contrails. Starbursts."
"Where was the closest starburst?"
"I don't—"
"Get out of the cab."
She stared at him.
"Go on," he said.
She climbed out into gray dawn. There were no more spirits
inhabiting the shattered building before her: the rising light
stripped away the Rorschach shadows, leaving nothing but a haphazard
pile of cinderblocks and I-beams. The few scorched trees still
standing nearby, burned past black to ash white, flanked the road
like upthrust skeletal hands.
He was at her side. "Close your eyes."
She did. If he was going to kill her, there wasn't much she could do
about it even with her eyes open.
"You're at the gate." His voice was steady, soothing.
"You're facing the gate. You turn around and look back
up the road. You look up at the sky. Go on."
She turned, eyes still closed, memory filling the gaps. She craned
her neck.
"You see starbursts," the voice continued. "I want
you to point at the one that's most directly overhead. The one
that's closest to the gate. Remember where it was in the sky, and
point."
She raised her arm and held it steady.
"What's the deal, Ken?" the woman asked in the void.
"Shouldn't we be—"
"You can open your eyes now," said the m—said Ken.
So she did.
She didn't know who these people were, but she was coming to believe
at least one thing they'd told her: they didn't want to hurt her.
Not while there are more efficient alternatives.
She allowed herself a trickle of relief. "Any more questions?"
"One more. Got any path grenades?"
"Loads."
"Do any of them key on bugs that aren't ßehemoth?"
"Most of them." Taka shrugged. "ßehemoth
tracers are kind of redundant hereabouts."
She dug out the grenades he wanted, and a pistol to fire them. He
checked them over with the same eye he'd used on her Kimber.
Evidently they passed inspection. "I shouldn't be more than a
few hours," he told his partner. He glanced at the MI. "Don't
let her start the engine or close the doors, whether she's inside or
out."
The woman looked at Taka, her expression unreadable.
"Hey," Taka said. "I—"
Ken shook his head. "Don't worry about it. We'll sort it out
when I get back."
He started off down the road. He didn't look back.
Taka took a deep breath and studied the other woman. "So you're
guarding me, now?"
The corner of the woman's mouth twitched.
Damn, but those eyes are strange. Can't see anything in there.
She tried again. "Ken seems like a nice enough guy."
The other woman stared a cold eyeless stare for an instant, and burst
out laughing.
It seemed like a good sign. "So are you two an item, or what?"
The woman shook her head, still smiling. "What."
"Not that you asked, but my name's Taka Ouellette."
Just like that, the smile disappeared.
Oh look Dave, I fouled up again. I always have to go that one
step too far...
But the other woman's mouth was moving. " Le—Laurie,"
it said.
"Ah." Taka tried to think of something else to say. "Not
exactly pleased to meet you," she said at last, trying to keep
her tone light.
"Yeah," Laurie said. "I get that a lot."
The Trigonometry of Salvation
This does not parse, Lubin thought.
Mid-June on the forty-fourth parallel. Fifteen or twenty minutes
after sunset—say, about five degrees of planetary rotation.
Which would put eclipse altitude at about thirty-three kilometers.
The missiles had dropped into shadow four or five seconds before
detonation, if this witness was to be trusted. Assuming the usual
reentry velocity of seven kilometers per second, that put actual
detonation at an altitude no greater than five thousand meters,
probably much lower.
She'd reported an airburst. Not an impact, and not a fireball.
Fireworks, she'd called them. And always at twilight, or during
darkness.
The sun was just clearing the ridge to the east when he arrived at
the back door of Penobscot Power's abandoned enterprise. Phocoena
and the doctor's MI had coexisted briefly in the bowels of those
remains; her service tunnel had run along the spine of a great
subterranean finger of ocean, sixty meters wide and a hundred times
as long, drilled through solid bedrock. At the time of its
conception it had been a valiant recreation of the lunar engine that
drove the tides of Fundy, two hundred klicks up the coast. Now it
was only a great flooded sewer pipe, and a way for shy submarines to
slip inland unobserved.
None of which was obvious from here, of course. From here, there was
only a scorched chain-link fence, carbon-coated rectangles of metal
that had once proclaimed No Trespassing, and—fifty
meters on the other side, where the rock rose from the earth—a
broken-toothed concrete-and-rebar mouth in the face of the ridge.
One of the gate's two panels swung creaking in the arid breeze. The
other listed at an angle, stiff in its hinges.
He stood with his back to the gate. He raised his arm and held it.
He remembered where the doctor had pointed, corrected his angle.
That way.
Just a few degrees over the horizon. That implied either a high
distant sighting or a much closer, low-altitude one. Atmospheric
inversions were strongest during twilight and darkness, Lubin
remembered. They were generally only a few hundred meters thick, and
they tended to act as a blanket, holding released particulates close
to the ground.
He walked south. Flame still flickered here and there, consuming
little pockets of left-over combustibles. A morning breeze was
rising, coming in from the coast. It promised cooler temperatures
and cleaner air; now, though, ash still gusted everywhere. Lubin
coughed up chalky phlegm and kept going.
The doctor had given him a belt to go with the grenades. The little
aerosol explosives bumped against his hips as he walked. He kept the
gun in hand, aiming absently at convenient targets, stumps and
powdered shrubs and the remains of fenceposts. There wasn't much
left to point at. His imagination invested what there was with limbs
and faces. He imagined them bleeding.
Of course, his witness had hardly been a GPS on legs. There were so
many errors nested in her directions that correcting for wind speed
was tantamount to adding one small error to a half-dozen larger ones.
Still, Lubin was nothing if not systematic. There was a reasonable
chance that he was within a kilometer of the starburst's coordinates.
He turned east for a few minutes, to compensate for the breeze.
Then he popped the first grenade onto his pistol and fired at the
sky.
It soared into the air like a great yellow egg and exploded into a
fluorescent pink cloud twenty meters across.
He watched it dissipate. The first tatters followed the prevailing
winds, tugging the cloud into an ovoid, delicate cotton-candy
streamers drifting from its downstream end. After a few moments,
though, it began to disperse laterally as well, its component
particles instinctively sniffing the air for signs of treasure.
No obvious movement against the wind. That would have been too much
to hope for, this early in the game.
He fired the next grenade a hundred meters diagonally upwind of the
first; the third, a hundred meters from each of the others, the
closing point of a roughly equilateral triangle. He zigzagged his
way across the wasted landscape, kicking little drifts of ash where
bracken and shrubbery had clustered a day earlier, navigating endless
rocky moguls and fissures. Once he even hopped across a scorched
streambed, still trickling, fed by some miraculous source further
upstream than the flamethrowers had reached. At rough, regular
intervals he shot another absurd pink cloud into the sky, and watched
it spread, and moved on.
He was aiming his eighth grenade when he noticed the residue of the
seventh behaving strangely. It had started as puffy round cumulus,
like all the others. Now, though, it was streaked and streaming, as
though being stretched by the wind. Which would indeed have been the
case, if it had been streaming with the breeze instead of
across it.
And another cloud, more distant and dissipated, seemed to be breaking
the same rules. They didn't flow, these aerosol streams, not to the
naked eye. Rather, they seemed to drift against the wind,
towards some point of convergence back the way Lubin had come, about
thirty degrees off his own track.
And they were losing altitude.
He started after them. The motes in those clouds couldn't be called
intelligent by any stretch of the word, but they knew what they liked
and they had the means to get to it. They were olfactory creatures,
and they loved the smell of two things above all else. The first was
the protein signatures put out by a wide array of weaponised biosols;
they tracked that aroma like sharks sniffing blood in the water, and
when they finally found that ambrosia and rolled around in it they
changed, chemically. That was the other thing these creatures
loved: the smell of their own kind, fulfilled.
It was the classic biomagnifying one-two punch. Too often, traces of
one's quarry were too faint to do more than whisper to a few passing
motes. Those would lock on, enzyme-to-substrate, and achieve their
own personal nirvana — but that very merger would quench the
emissions that had lured them in the first place. The contaminant
would be flagged, but the flag would be far too small to catch any
mammalian eye.
But to be aroused not only by prey, but by others similarly
aroused—why, it scarcely mattered whether there was enough to
go around. A single offending particle would be enough to start an
orgiastic fission reaction. Each subsequent arrival would only
brighten the collective signal.
Lubin found it half-buried in the gravel bed of a shallow gully. It
looked like a snub-nosed bullet thirty centimeters long, perforated
by rows of circular holes along half its length. It looked like the
salt shaker of a giant with pathologically high blood pressure. It
looked like the business end of a multiheaded suborbital device for
the delivery of biological aerosols.
Lubin couldn't tell what color it had originally been. It was
dripping with fluorescent pink goo.
Ouellete's MI changed before his eyes on the final steps of his
approach. Bright holographic phantoms resolved within the
vehicle—the plastic skin grew translucent, exposing neon guts
and nerves beneath. Lubin was still getting used to such visions.
His new inlays served up the diagnostic emissions of any unshielded
machinery within a twelve meter radius. This particular vehicle
wasn't quite as forthcoming as he would have liked, though. It was
riddled with tumors: rectangular shadows beneath the dash, dark
swathes across the passenger door, a black unreflective cylinder
rising through the center of the vehicle like a dark heart. The MI
had a lot of security, all of it shielded.
Clarke and Ouellette stood to one side, watching him approach.
Ouellette was nothing special to Lubin's new eyes. Dim sparkles
glimmered from within Clarke's thorax, but they told him nothing;
inlays and implants spoke different dialects.
He toggled the inlays; the hallucinatory schematics imploded, leaving
dull plastic and white dust and nonluminous flesh and clothing
behind.
"You found something," Ouellette said. "We saw the
clouds."
He told them.
Ouellette stared, openmouthed: "They're shooting germs
at us? We're already on our last legs! Why bother hitting us with
Megapox or Supercol when we're already—"
She stopped. The outrage on her face gave way to a puzzled frown.
Clarke looked the question over the doctor's confusion: ß-max?
Lubin shrugged.
"Perhaps N'Am isn't dying fast enough," Lubin
remarked. "A significant number of M&Ms regard ßehemoth
as divine retribution for North America's sins. It's official policy
in Italy and Libya, at least. Botswana too, I believe."
Clarke snorted. "North America's sins? They think it
just stops at the Atlantic?"
"The moderates think they can keep it at bay," Ouellette
said. "The extremists don't want to. They don't get
into heaven until the world ends." Her mind seemed elsewhere;
she spoke as if absently flicking at some hovering insect.
Lubin let her think. She was, after all, the closest available
approximation to a native guide. Perhaps she could come up with
something.
"Who are you people?" Ouellette asked quietly.
"Excuse me?"
"You're not feral. You're not clave. You sure as hell aren't
CSIRA or you'd be better equipped. Maybe you're TransAt—but
that doesn't fit either." A faint smile passed across her face.
"You don't know what you're doing, do you? You're making it up
as you go along..."
Lubin kept his face neutral and his question on target. "Is
there any reason not to believe that people might launch a
biological attack against North America simply to—hasten things
along?"
She seemed to find this amusing. "You don't get out much, do
you?"
"Am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong." Ouellette spat on the ashy ground.
"Lots of folks might help Providence along, if they had the
chance. That doesn't mean this is an attack."
"What else would it be?"
"Maybe it's a counteragent."
Clarke looked up at that. "A cure?"
"Not so personal, maybe. Something that kills ßehemoth
in the wild."
Lubin eyed Ouellette. She eyed him back, and answered his unspoken
skepticism: "Of course there are crazies out there who want the
world to end. But there have to be a lot more people who don't,
wouldn't you agree? And they'd be working just as hard."
There was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before. They
almost shone.
He nodded. "But if this is a counteragent, why do you
suppose they tried to shoot it down? And why deliver it
suborbitally? Wouldn't it be more efficient to leave deployment to
the local authorities?"
Ouellette rolled her eyes. "What local authorities?"
Clarke frowned. "Wouldn't someone have told—everybody?
Wouldn't someone have told you?"
"Laurie, you make something like this too public and you're
painting a bullseye on your chest for the M&Ms. As for missile
defense—" Ouellette turned back to Lubin— "Did
the people on your planet ever mention something called the Rio
Insurrection?"
"Tell us about it," Lubin said. Thinking: Laurie?
"I can't, really," Ouellette admitted. "Nobody really
knows what happened. They say maybe a bunch of Madonnas got into
CSIRA's Rio de Janeiro offices and went crazy. Launched attacks all
over the place."
"Who won?"
"The good guys. At least, Rio got vaporized and the trouble
stopped, but who knows? Some people say that it wasn't Lenies at
all, it was some kind of civil war between rogue 'lawbreakers. But
whatever it was, it was—way out there." She waved a hand
at the horizon. "We had our own problems to deal with. And the
only real moral of the story is, nobody knows who's running things
any more, or whose side they're on, and we're all too busy hanging on
by our fingernails to afford the time for any Big Questions. For all
we know N'Am's battellites are running on autopilot, and ground
control just lost the access codes. Or the Lenies are doing a little
target practice. Or—or maybe the M&Ms have someone on the
inside. The fact that something's shooting at these bugs doesn't
prove anything, one way or another."
Lubin focused on that. "No proof."
"So I'm going to get some. I'm going to sequence the bug. Now
are you going to let me drive back to the scene, or am I going to
have to walk?"
Lubin said nothing. From the corner of his eye, he saw Clarke open
her mouth and close it again.
"Fine." Ouellette proceeded to the back of her van and
opened the access panel. Lubin let her extract a steriwrap cartridge
and a collapsible stretcher with ground-effector coils built into the
frame. She looked at him calmly: "It'll fit on this?"
He nodded.
Clarke held the folded device against Ouellette's back while the
doctor cinched the shoulder straps. Ouellette nodded cursory thanks
and started down the road, not looking back.
"You think she's wrong," Clarke said as the other woman
dwindled, shimmering in the rising heat.
"I don't know."
"What if she isn't?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It doesn't matter." Clarke shook her head, almost amused.
"Ken, are you crazy?"
Lubin shrugged. "If she can get a usable sample, we'll know
whether it's ß-max. Either
way, we can drive to Bangor and use her credentials to get inside.
After that it should be—"
"Ken, did you even hear what she just said? There could be a
fix. For ßehemoth."
He sighed.
"This is exactly why I didn't want you coming," he said at
last. "You've got your own agenda, and it's not what we're here
for. You get distracted."
"Distracted?" She shook her head, astonished. "I'm
talking about saving the world, Ken. I don't think I'm
distracted at all."
"No, you don't. You think you're damned."
Instantly, something in her shut down.
He pushed on anyway. "I don't agree, for what it's worth."
"Really." Clarke's face was an expressionless mask.
"I'd say you're only obsessed. Which is still problematic."
"Go on."
"You think you destroyed the world." Lubin looked around
at the scorched landscape. "You think this is all your fault.
You'd give up the mission, your life, mine. In an instant. Just so
long as you saw the slightest chance of salvation. You're so sick of
the blood on your hands you'd barely notice that you were washing it
off with even more."
"Is that what you think."
He looked at her. "Is there anything you wouldn't do,
then? For the chance to take it all back?"
She held his gaze for long seconds. Finally she looked away.
Lubin nodded. "You've personalized the Greater Good in a way
I've never seen in a baseline human before. I wonder if your brain
hasn't concocted its own form of Guilt Trip."
She stared at the ground. "It doesn't change anything,"
she whispered at last. "Even if my motives are—personal..."
"It's not your motives that worry me. It's your judgment."
"We're still talking about saving the world."
"No," he said. "We're talking about someone else,
trying to—possibly. We're talking about an
entire country or consortium, far better-equipped and better-informed
than two hitchhikers from the Mid Atlantic Ridge. And—"
holding up his hand against her protest—"we are also
talking about other powerful forces who may be trying
to stop them, for reasons we can only guess at. Or perhaps for no
reason at all, if Ouellette's speculations are correct. We're not
players in this, no matter how desperately you wish we were."
"We've always been players, Ken. We've just been too scared to
make a move for the past five years."
"And things have changed during that time."
She shook her head. "We have to try."
"We don't even know the rules any more. And what about the
things we can change? What about Atlantis? What about the
rifters? What about Alyx? Do you really want to throw away
any chance of helping them in favor of a lost cause?"
He knew the instant he said it that he'd miscalculated. Something
flared in her, something icy and familiar and utterly unswayable.
"How dare you," she hissed. "You never gave a
shit about Alyx or Grace or—or even me, for that matter.
You were ready to kill us all, you switched sides every time the
odds changed." Clarke shook her head in disgust. "How
dare you talk about loyalty and saving lives.
You don't even know what that means unless someone feeds it to
you as a mission parameter."
He should have known it would be no use arguing with her. She wasn't
interested in assessing the odds of success. She wasn't even
balancing payoffs, weighing Atlantis against the rest of the world.
The only variables she cared about came from inside her own head, and
neither guilt nor obsession were amenable to cost-benefit analysis.
Even so, her words provoked a strange feeling in his throat.
"Lenie, I didn't mean—"
She held up her hand and refused to meet his eyes. He waited.
"Maybe it's not even your fault," she said after a while.
"They just built you that way."
He allowed himself the curiosity. "What way?"
"You're an army ant. You just bull ahead with your feelers on
the ground, following your orders and your mission
profiles and your short-term objectives, and it never
even occurs to you to look up and see the big picture."
"I see it," Lubin admitted softly. "It's very much
bigger than you seem willing to admit."
She shook her head, still not looking at him.
He tried again. "Very well. You know the big picture: what do
you suggest we do with that information? Can you offer
anything beyond wishful thinking? Do you have any kind of strategy
for saving the world, as you put it?"
"I do," said Taka Ouellette.
They turned. She stood back beside the MI, arms folded. She'd
obviously ditched the stretcher and circled back while they weren't
looking.
Lubin blinked in astonishment. "Your sample—"
"From that warhead you found? Not a chance. The tracers
would've metabolized any active agent down to the atoms."
Clarke shot him a look, clear as binary even through the frosting on
her eyes: Not quite on your game, superspy? Letting some
dick-ass country doctor sneak up on you?
"But I know how we can get a sample," Ouellette
continued, looking straight at Clarke. "And I could use your
help."
Migration
Obviously she had come late to the conversation. If she had heard
the way it started, Clarke knew, Taka Ouellette wouldn't have wanted
anything to do with her.
The good doctor had contacts on the ground, so she said. People
she'd saved, or bought time for. The loved ones of those whose
suffering she'd ended. Occasional dealers, wildland hustlers who
could sometimes conjure up drugs or spare parts to be weighed against
other items in trade. They were the furthest thing from altruists,
but they could be life-savers when the closest resupply lifter was a
week away.
All of them had a healthy sense of self-interest. All of them knew
others.
Lubin remained skeptical, of course. Or at least, Clarke thought, he
continued to act skeptical. It was part of his schtick. It
had to be. Nobody would honestly turn their back on the chance,
however faint, to undo even a part of what—
—what I set in motion...
There was the rub, and Lubin—God damn him—knew it as well
as she did. Once you've helped destroy the world, once you've taken
fierce stinging pleasure in its death throes, it's not easy to claim
the moral high ground over someone who's merely reluctant to save
it. Even if it's been a while. Even if you've changed in the
meantime. If there's a Statute of Limitations on terracide, there's
no way it expires after a lousy five years.
Taka Ouellette had proposed a southern course towards whatever was
left of Portland; and even if there was no way into the datapipe
from there, Boston would be that much closer. Besides, Ouellette was
an official person in these parts, someone with recognized
credentials and identity. Almost an authority figure, by local
standards. She might even be able to walk them in through the front
door.
"Authority figures don't drive around handing out derms from the
back of a truck," Lubin said.
"Yeah? And what have your efforts netted us lately? You still
think you can hack into the global nervous system when all the
back-door nerves have been burned away?"
In the end he agreed, with conditions. They would go along with
Ouellette's plan so long as it took them in the right direction.
They would make use of her MI after every counterintrusion device had
been ripped out of the cab; he would ensure her cooperation while she
advised Clarke on the necessary monkeywork.
The MI's cab was a marvel of spatial economy. Twin cots folded down
in the space behind the seats, and a little shower/head cubicle
squeezed into the rear wall between a Calvin cycler and the forward
medical interface. But what really amazed Clarke was the number of
booby traps infesting the place. There were gas canisters hooked
into the ventilation system. There were taser needles sheathed in
the seat cushions, ready to shoot through flesh and insulative
clothing at a word or a touch. There was a photic driver under the
dash, a directional infrared strobe that could penetrate closed
eyelids and induce seizures. Taka Ouellette itemized them all, Lubin
standing at her back, while Clarke scrambled about with a toolkit and
pulled the plugs. Clarke had no way of knowing if the list was
comprehensive—for all she knew, Ouellette was leaving an ace up
her sleeve against future necessity—but Lubin was a lot less
trusting than she was, and Lubin seemed satisfied.
It took them an hour to disarm the cab. After Ouellette asked if
they wanted to disable external security as well, she actually seemed
disappointed when Lubin shook his head.
They split up. Lubin would pilot Phocoena down the coast and
try to access Portland independently; Clarke, keeping a copy of the
ß-max sequence close to her
chest, would accompany Ouellette towards a rendezvous near one of her
regular waypoints.
"Don't tell her about ß-max
before you have to," Lubin warned, safely out of Ouellete's
earshot.
"Why not?"
"Because it defeats the only defense anyone's ever been able to
muster against ßehemoth.
The moment she realizes something like that exists, her priorities
are going to turn upside down."
Clarke was initially surprised that Lubin would let either of them
out of his sight; he wasn't fond of potential security breaches even
without his kill reflex engaged, and he knew Clarke was chafing
against his mission priorities. He wasn't a trusting soul at the
best of times; how did he know that the two women wouldn't simply
turn inland and abandon him altogether?
It was only when they'd gone their separate ways that the obvious
answer occurred to her. Of course, he'd been hoping for that very
thing.
They drove through a land blasted and scoured clean of any live
thing. The MI, built for rough terrain, climbed over fallen tree
trunks that crumbled beneath its wheels. It navigated potholes
filled with ash and soot, drove straightaways where swirls and gusts
of gray powder swept across the refrozen asphalt like tiny Antarctic
blizzards, centimeters high. Twice they passed deranged billboards
half-melted against the rock, their lattices warped and defiantly
semifunctional, advertising nothing now but the flickering
multicolored contours of their own heat stress.
After a while it began to rain. The ash congealed like paste on the
ground, stuck to the hood like blobs of papier maché. Some of
those blobs were almost heavy enough to thwart the windshield,
leaving light smudges on the glass before the static field bounced
them away.
They didn't exchange a word during that whole time. Unfamiliar music
filled the silence between them, archaic compositions full of
clonking pianos and nervous strings. Ouellette seemed to like the
stuff, anyway. She focused on driving while Clarke stared out the
window, reflecting on the allocation of damage. How much of this
devastation could be laid at her door? How much at the doors of
demons who'd adopted her name?
Eventually they left the scorched zone behind. Now there was real
grass at the side of the road, occasional shrubs pocking the ditches
further back, real evergreens looming like ranks of ragged, starving
stickmen on the other side. Mostly brown, of course, or turning
brown, as though in the grip of a great endless drought.
This rain wouldn't help them. They were hanging on—some even
flew flags of hardy, defiant green from their limbs—but
ßehemoth was everywhere, and
it was implacable, and it had all the time in the world. Sometimes
it massed so abundantly that it was visible to the naked eye: patches
of ochre mould smothering the grass, or spreading across the trunks
of trees. And yet, the sight of all this vegetation—not truly
alive, perhaps, but at least physically intact—seemed
cause for some small celebration after the charnel house they'd just
escaped.
"So, do you ever take those out?" Ouellette wondered.
"Sorry?" Clarke brought herself back to the moment. The
doctor had gone to autopilot—a simple follow-the-road mode,
with no dangerous navigational forays into GPS.
"Those caps on your eyes. Do you ever...?"
"Oh. No. Not usually."
"Nightshades? Let you see in the dark?"
"Sort of."
Ouellette pursed her lips. "I remember seeing those, years ago.
All over the place, just before everything went bad. They were
really popular for about twenty minutes."
"They still are, where I come from." Clarke looked out the
rain-spattered side window. "With my tribe, anyway."
"Tribe? You're not all the way from Africa?"
Clarke snorted softly. "Fuck no." Only about half the
way, actually...
"Didn't think so. You don't have the melanin, not that that
means much these days of course. And the Tutsis wouldn't be over
here anyway, except maybe to gloat."
"Gloat?"
"Not that you can blame them, mind you. There's barely anyone
left over there more than forty years old. Firewitch is pure poetic
justice as far as they're concerned."
Clarke shrugged.
"So if not Africa," Ouellette said, pushing it, "maybe
you're from Mars."
"Why would you say that?"
"You're definitely not from around here. You thought Miri was
an ambulance." She patted the dashboard affectionately. "You
don't know about the Lenies—"
Clarke clenched her teeth, suddenly angry. "I know about them.
Nasty evolving code that lives in the Maelstrom and raises shit.
Vengeance icon for a bunch of countries that hate your guts. And
while we're on the subject, maybe you could explain how you came
to be blundering around handing out derms and mercy-kills while the
whole eastern hemisphere is trying to lob a cure for ßehemoth
onto your head? Not being from Mars doesn't seem to have kept you
all that up-to-speed on current events."
Ouellette watched her curiously for a moment. "There you go
again."
"What?"
"Maelstrom. It's been years since I heard anyone use
that word."
"So what? What difference does it make?"
"Come on, Laurie. You show up in the middle of nowhere, you
hijack my van, neither of you is normal by any stretch of the
imagination—I mean, of course I want to know where you
came from."
Clarke's anger faded as suddenly as it had flared. "Sorry."
"In fact, given that I still seem to be some kind of honorary
prisoner, you could even say you owe me an explanation."
"We were hiding," Clarke blurted out.
"Hiding." Ouellette didn't seem surprised. "Where is
there to hide?"
"Nowhere, as it turns out. That's why we came back."
"Are you a corpse?" Ouellette asked.
"Do I look like one?"
"You look like some kind of deep-sea diver." She
gestured at the vent on Clarke's chest. "Electrolysis intake,
right?"
Clarke nodded.
"So I guess you've been underwater all this time. Huh."
Ouellette shook her head. "I'd have guessed geosynch, myself."
"Why?"
"It was just one of the rumors going around. Back when the
witch was just getting started, and the riots were taking off—this
thread started growing, that a few hundred high-powered corpses had
vanished off the face of the earth. I don't know how you'd ever
prove something like that, nobody ever saw those people in the flesh
anyway. They could've all been sims for all we knew. Anyway, you
know how these things get around. The word was they'd all jumped
offworld from Australia, and they were all nice and comfy up in
geosynch watching the world come down."
"I'm not a corpse," Clarke said.
"But you work for them," Ouellette guessed.
"Who didn't?"
"I mean recently."
"Recently?" Clarke shook her head. "I think I can
honestly say that neither Ken nor I—Christ!"
It jumped out from some hiding place under the dash, all segments and
clicking mandibles. It clung to her knee with far too many jointed
limbs, a grotesque hybrid of grasshopper and centipede the size of
her little finger. Her hand came down of its own accord; the little
creature splattered under her palm.
"Fuck," she breathed. "What was that?"
"Whatever it was, it wasn't doing you any harm."
"I've never seen anything like—" Clarke broke off,
looked at the other woman. Ouellette actually looked pissed.
"That wasn't—that wasn't a pet or anything, was it?"
It seemed absurd. Then again, it wouldn't be any crazier than
keeping a head cheese.
I wonder how she's doing...
"It was just a bug," Ouellette said. "It wasn't
hurting anybody."
Clarke wiped her palm against her thigh; chitin and yellow goop
smeared across the diveskin. "That just—that was wrong.
That wasn't like any bug I've ever seen."
"I keep telling you. You're behind the times."
"So these things are old news?"
Ouellette shrugged, her irritation apparently subsiding. "They're
starting to show up here and there. Basically, regular bugs with too
many segments. Some kind of Hox mutation, I'd guess, but I don't
know if anybody's looked at them all that closely."
Clarke looked at the sodden, withering landscape scrolling past the
window. "You seem pretty invested in a—a bug."
"What, things aren't dying fast enough for you? You have to
help them along?" Ouellette took a breath, started over.
"Sorry. You're right. I just—you kind of empathize with
things after a while, you know? Spend enough time out here,
everything seems—valuable..."
Clarke didn't answer. The vehicle navigated a fissure in the road,
wobbling on its ground-effect shocks.
"I know it doesn't make much sense," Ouellette admitted
after a while. "It's not like ßehemoth
changed much of anything."
"What? Look out the window, Tak. Everything's dying."
"That was happening anyway. Not as fast, maybe."
"Huh." Clarke regarded the other woman. "And you
really think someone's throwing a cure over the transom."
"For Human stupidity? No such thing, I suspect. But for
ßehemoth, who knows?"
"How would that work? I mean, what haven't they already tried?"
Ouellette shook her head, laughing softly. "Laurie, you give me
way too much credit. I don't have a clue." She thought a
moment. "Could be a Silverback Solution, I suppose."
"Never heard of it."
"Few decades ago, in Africa. Hardly any gorillas left, and the
natives were eating up the few that remained. So some conservation
group got the bright idea of making the gorillas inedible."
"Yeah? How?"
"Engineered Ebola variant. Didn't harm the gorillas, but any
human who ate one would bleed out inside seventy-two hours."
Clarke smiled, faintly impressed. "Would that work for us?"
"It'd be tough. Germs evolve countermeasures a lot faster than
mammals."
"I guess it didn’t work for the gorillas either.”
Ouellette snorted. "It worked way too well."
"So how come they’re extinct?"
"We wiped them out. Unacceptable risk to Human health."
Rain pelted against the roof of the cab and streaked along the side
windows. Up front, the drops hurtled at the windshield and veered
impossibly off-target, centimeters from impact.
"Taka," Clarke said after a few minutes.
Ouellette looked at her.
"Why don't people call it Maelstrom any more?"
The doctor smiled faintly. "You do know why they called it that
in the first place, right?"
"It got...crowded. User storms, e-life."
Ouellette nodded. "Most of that's gone now. So much of the
actual network has degraded, physically, that most of the wildlife
went extinct from habitat loss. This side of the wall, anyway—they
partitioned N'amNet off years ago. For all I know it's still boiling
along everywhere else, but around here—"
She looked out the window.
"Here, the Maelstrom just moved outside."
Karma
Achilles Desjardins woke to the sound of a scream.
It had died by the time he was fully awake. He lay in the darkness
and wondered for a moment if he had dreamt it; there had been a time,
not so long ago, when his sleep had been filled with screams. He
wondered if perhaps the scream had been his, if he had awakened
himself—but again, that hadn't happened in years. Not since
he'd become a new man.
Or rather, not since Alice had let the old one out of the cellar.
Awake, alert, he knew the truth. The scream had not risen from his
mind or his throat; it had risen from machinery. An alarm, raised in
one instant and cut off the next.
Odd.
He brought up his inlays. Outside his skull, the darkness persisted;
inside, a half-dozen bright windows opened in his occipital cortex.
He scrolled through the major feeds, then the minor ones; he sought
threats from the other side of the world, from orbit, from any
foolhardy civilian who might have blundered against the fence that
guarded his perimeter. He checked the impoverished cluster of rooms
and hallways that his skeletal day staff had access to, although it
was barely 0400 and none of them would be in so early. Nothing in
the lobby, the Welcome Center, the kennels. Loading bays and the
physical plant were nominal. No incoming missiles. Not so much as a
plugged sewer line.
He had heard something, though. He was sure of that. And he was
sure of something else, too: he had never heard this particular
alarm before. After all these years, the machines that surrounded
him had become more than tools; they were friends, protectors,
advisers and trusted servants. He knew their voices intimately: the
soft beeping of his inlays, the reassuring hum of Building Security,
the subtle, multi-octave harmonics of the threat stack. This alarm
hadn't come from any of them.
Desjardins threw back the sheet and rose from his pallet.
Stonehenge loomed a few meters away, a rough horseshoe of
workstations and tactical boards glowing dimly in the darkness.
Desjardins had a more official workspace, many floors above; he had
official live-in quarters too, not luxurious but far more comfortable
than the mattress he'd dragged down here. He still used those
accommodations now and then, for official business or other occasions
when appearances mattered. But this was the place he preferred:
secret, safe, an improvised nerve center rising from a gnarled
convergence of fiber optic roots growing in from the walls. This was
his throne room and his keep and his bunker. He knew how absurd that
was, given the scope of his powers, the strength of his
fortifications—but it was here, in the windowless subterranean
dark, where he felt safest.
Scratching himself, he plunked down onto the chair in the center of
Stonehenge and began scanning the hardline intel. The world was full
of yellow and red icons, as always, but nothing acute. Certainly
nothing to warrant an audible alert. Desjardins dumped everything
into a single events list and sorted on time; whatever had happened,
had just happened. He scrolled down the list: CAESAR
meltdown in Louisville, static-field failure in Boulder, minor
progress re-establishing his surveillance links down along the
Panhandle. More chatter about mutant bugs and weeds spreading up
from the Panama line...
Something touched him, lightly, on the leg. He looked down.
Mandelbrot stared up at him with one eye. The other was gone, a dark
sticky hole in a face torn half away. Her flank was slick and black
in the gloomy half-light. Viscera glistened through matted fur.
The cat swayed drunkenly, her forepaw still upraised. She opened her
mouth. With a silent miaow, she toppled.
Oh God no. Oh please God no.
He made the call even before bringing up the lights. Mandelbrot lay
bleeding into a puddle of her own insides.
Oh Jesus, please. She's dying. Don't let her die.
"Hi," the tac board chirped. "This is Trev Sawyer."
The fuck it was. It was an interactive, and Desjardins didn't have
time to waste dicking around with dialog trees. He killed the call
and accessed the local directory. "My vet. Home number. Kill
any overrides."
Somewhere in Sudbury, Sawyer's watch started ringing.
You got into the kennel, again, didn't you? Mandelbrot lay on
her side, chest heaving. Stupid cat, you never could resist
taunting those monsters. You just figured—oh God, it's amazing
you even made it back.
Don't die. Please don't die.
Sawyer wasn't answering. Answer your watch, you stumpfucking
idiot! This is an emergency! Where the fuck can you be at four
a.m.?
Mandelbrot's paws twitched and flexed as if dreaming, as if
electrified. Desjardins wanted to reach out, to staunch the flow or
straighten the spine or just pet her for Chrissakes, offer
whatever pitiful comfort he could. But he was terrified that any
inexpert touch might just make things worse.
It's my fault. It's my fault. I should have scaled back your
clearance, you're just a cat after all, you don't know any
better. And I never even bothered to learn what your alarm sounded
like, it just never occurred to me that I wouldn't—
Not a dream. Not a Worldwatch alert. Just a veterinary implant
talking to his wristwatch: a brief scream as Mandelbrot's vitals
lurched into the red, then silence as teeth or claws or sheer
shocking inertia reduced signal to noise.
"Hello?" muttered a sleepy voice in mid-air.
Desjardins's head snapped up. "This is Achilles Desjardins. My
cat's been mauled by—"
"What?" Sawyer said thickly. "Do you have any idea
what time it is?"
"I'm sorry, I know, but this is an emergency. My cat's—oh
God, she's torn apart, she's barely alive, you've got to—"
"Your cat," Sawyer repeated. "And why are you
telling me?"
"I—you're Mandelbrot's vet, you—"
The voice was icy: "I haven't been anyone's veterinarian
in over three years."
Desjardins remembered: N'Am's vets had all been conscripted into
human service when ßehemoth—and
the thousand opportunistic bugs riding its coattails—had
overwhelmed the health-care system. "But you're still, I mean,
you still know what to—"
"Mr. Desjardins, forget the hour. Do you even know what year
it is?"
Desjardins shook his head. "What are you talking about? My
cat's lying on the floor with her—"
"It's five years after the dawn of the Firewitch Era,"
Sawyer continued in a cold voice. "People are dying, Mr.
Desjardins. By the millions. Every day. To even waste food
on a mere animal, under these circumstances, is scandalous. To
expect me to spend time and resources saving an injured cat is
nothing short of obscene."
Desjardins eyes stung. His vision blurred. "Please—I can
help you. I can. I'll get your cycler ration doubled. I can get
you unlimited water. I can get you into fucking geosynch if
that's what you want, you and your family. Anything. Just name it."
"Very well: stop wasting my time."
"Do you even know who I am?" Desjardins cried.
"I certainly do. And I'm astonished that any 'lawbreaker—let
alone one of your evident stature—would have such completely
misplaced priorities. Aren't you supposed to be immune to this sort
of thing?"
"Please—"
"Good night, Mr. Desjardins."
Disconnect, added a little icon in a corner of one screen.
Blood bubbled at the corner of Mandelbrot's mouth. Her inner lid
slid halfway across that one bloodied eyeball and retracted.
"Please," Desjardins whimpered. "I don't know what
to..."
Yes you do.
He bent over her, reached out a hand, pushed tentatively at a bulging
loop of intestine. A spasm shuddered through Mandelbrot like a
passing spirit. She meowed faintly.
"I'm sorry...I'm sorry..."
You know what to do.
He remembered Mandelbrot latching on and biting his father's
ankle when the old man had come by to visit back in '48. He
remembered Ken Lubin, standing in Desjardins's bathroom in his
underpants, scrubbing his trousers in the sink: "Your cat
pissed on me," he'd said, a hint of grudging respect in his
voice. He remembered a thousand nights pinned on his bed, bladder
full to bursting but unwilling to disturb the furry sleeping lump on
his chest.
You know.
He remembered Alice showing up at work, her lacerated hands
struggling to hang on to a scrawny, hissing kitten that wasn't taking
any shit from anybody: "Hey Killjoy, want a watch-cat?
Chaos made flesh, she is. Reversible ears, needs no batteries,
guaranteed not to let anyone past your front door with all
their body parts..."
You know. Mandelbrot convulsed again.
He knew.
There was nothing nearby he could use—no injectables, no gas,
no projectiles. All of that stuff was loaded into the booby traps
and would take far too long to extract. The room was a stripped-down
shell of bone-gray walls and fiberop vines. The neuroinduction field
would...hurt...
Just a fucking brick, he thought, swallowing against the grief
in his throat. Just a rock, they're all over the place
outside...
No time. Mandelbrot wasn't even living any more, she hadn't been
living since she'd started back from the kennels. All she was doing
was suffering. And all Desjardins could do was end that.
He raised his foot over her head. "You and me, Brotwurst,"
he whispered. "We had higher clearance than anyone inside a
thousand klicks..."
Mandelbrot purred once. Something sagged in her as she left.
Whatever remained lolled bonelessly on the floor.
Desjardins kept his foot raised a moment, just in case. Finally he
brought it back to the concrete floor. Mandelbrot had never been one
to yield the initiative.
"Thank you," whispered Achilles Desjardins, and wept at her
side.
Dr. Trevor Sawyer woke for the second time in as many hours. A dark
shape hung over his head like a great fist. It hissed softly, a
hovering reptile.
He tried to rise. He couldn't; his arms and legs wobbled like
unresponsive rubber. His face tingled, his jaw hung slack as cooked
pasta. Even his tongue felt swollen and flaccid, sagging loose and
immovable in his mouth.
He stared up at the ovoid shape above the bed. It was a great dark
Easter egg hanging in the air, half as long as he was, and wider.
Its belly was disfigured by ports and blisters, barely-discernible,
reflecting slivers of gray half-light from the hallway.
The hissing subsided. Sawyer felt a trickle of drool worm onto his
cheek from the corner of his mouth. He tried to swallow, and failed.
He was still breathing. That was something.
The Easter egg clicked softly. A faint, almost subsonic hum emanated
from somewhere nearby—either a ground-effect field, or the
static of nerves misfiring in his own cochleae.
It couldn't be neuroinduction. A botfly would never even get off the
ground carrying coils that heavy. Neuromuscular block of some
kind, he realized. It gassed me.
It gassed us...
He willed his head to turn. It lay like a ten-kilogram rock on the
pillow, defying him. He couldn't move his eyes. He couldn't even
blink.
He could hear Sandra beside him, though, breathing fast and shallow.
She too was awake.
"Went right back to sleep, I see," the botfly remarked in a
familiar voice. "Didn't lose a wink over it, did you?"
Desjardins...?
"It's okay, though," the machine went on. "Turns out
you were right. Here, let me give you a hand..."
The botfly tilted nose-down and descended until it was literally
nuzzling Sawyer's cheek. It nosed him gently, like a hungry pet
pestering its master for food. Sawyer's head lolled sideways on the
pillow, stared past the edge of the bed to the crib against the far
wall, barely visible in the gloom.
Oh God, what—
This couldn't be happening. Achilles Desjardins was a 'lawbreaker,
and 'lawbreakers—they simply didn't do this sort of
thing. They couldn't. Nobody had ever admitted it
officially, of course, but Sawyer was connected, he knew the scoop.
There were—restraints, right down at the biochemical level. To
keep 'lawbreakers from misusing their power, to keep them from doing
exactly what—
The robot floated across the bedroom. It came to rest about a meter
over the crib. The thin crescent of a rotating lens glinted on its
belly, focusing.
"Kayla, isn't it?" the botfly murmured. "Seven
months, three days, fourteen hours. I say, Dr. Sawyer. Your genes
must be very special, to justify bringing a child into such a
shitty world. I bet it pissed off the neighbors something awful.
How'd you get around the pop-control statutes?"
Please, Sawyer thought. Don't hurt her. I'm sorry. I—
"You know, I bet you cheated," the machine mused. "I
bet this pissy little larva shouldn't even be here. Ah well.
Like I said before, you were right. About real people. They really
do die all the time."
Please. Oh dear God give me strength, let me move, at least give
me strength enough to beg—
Bright as the sun, a fiery proboscis licked down through the darkness
and set Kayla alight.
The botfly turned and regarded Trevor Sawyer through a dark cyclopean
eye, while his child screamed and blackened.
"Why, there goes one now," it remarked.
"For Mandelbrot," Desjardins whispered. "In memory."
He freed the botfly to return to its appointed rounds. It would not
be able to answer any of the inevitable questions resulting from this
night, even in the unlikely event that anyone could trace it back to
the honeycombed residential warren at 1423-150 Cushing Skywalk. Even
now it could only remember a routine patrol along its prescribed
transect; that was all it would remember, until a navigational
malfunction sent it on a suicidal corkscrew into the no-go zone
around Sudbury's main static-field generator. There wouldn't be
enough left afterwards to reconstruct so much as a lens cluster, let
alone an event log.
As for the bodies themselves, even the most superficial investigation
would reveal telling indications of Trevor Sawyer's resentment over
his forcible conscription into the Health Corps, and
previously-unsuspected family ties to the M&M regime recently
risen to power in Ghana. Nobody would waste time asking questions
after that; those associated with the Madonna's New Order were
notorious for their efforts in bringing down the old one. With
Sawyer's hospital clearance and medical expertise, the damage he
could have done to the law-abiding members of the community was
incalculable. Sudbury was better off without him, whether he'd been
killed by his own or whether some vigilant 'lawbreaker, near or far,
had tracked him to his lair and terminated his terrorist activities
with extreme prejudice.
It wasn't as though these kind of surgical strikes didn't happen all
the time. And if some 'lawbreaker was behind it, it was—by
definition—all for the best.
One more item checked off the to-do list. Desjardins wrapped
Mandelbrot in his t-shirt and headed outside, cradling the bloody
bundle against his bare chest. He was drowning in a vortex of
emotion; he was empty inside. He tried to resolve the paradox as he
ascended to ground level.
Grief, of course, for the loss of a friend he'd had for almost ten
years. Satisfaction for the price exacted in return. And yet—he
had hoped for more than this grim sense of a debt restored. He had
hoped for something more fulfilling. Joy, perhaps, at the sight of
Trevor Sawyer watching his wife and child burn alive. Joy at the
sight of Sawyer's own immolation, flesh crisping from the bones,
eyeballs bursting like great gelatinous grubs boiled in their
sockets, knowing even there at the end, feeling it all, he'd never
even found the strength to whimper.
Joy eluded Desjardins. Granted he'd never felt it any of the other
times he'd balanced the books, but he had hoped for more this time.
Certainly, the cause had been more heartfelt. But still: only
grief, and satisfaction, and—and something else, something he
couldn't quite put his finger on...
He stepped outside. Pale morning light rose on all sides.
Mandelbrot was growing cold and stiff in his arms.
He took a few steps and turned to look up at his castle. It loomed
huge and dark and ominous against the brightening sky. Before Rio, a
small city's worth of would-be saviors had labored there. Now it was
all his.
Gratitude, he realized, astonished. That's what he felt.
Gratitude for his own grief. He still loved. He could still feel,
with all his heart. Until this night and this loss, he had never
been completely sure.
Alice had been right all along. Sociopath was far too small a
word to contain whatever it was he had become.
Perhaps he'd go and tell her, once he'd laid beloved Mandelbrot to
rest.
DisArmor
Leave
Cadavers Here Only
Unauthorized
Disposal Will Be Prosecuted
N'AmAt/CSIRA
Biohazards Statute 4023-A-25-sub5
It was a three-walled enclosure, open to the sky, south of the 184
just outside Ellsworth. The sign had been sprayed onto the inside of
the rear wall; the smart paint cycled through a half dozen languages,
holding on each for a few seconds in turn. Clarke and Ouellette
stood at the open side, looking in.
The grated floor was crusted with old lime, cracked and scaling like
a dried-up desert lake bed. It was obviously years since it had been
replenished. Four bodies lay on that substrate. One had been
carefully set to rest with its arms folded across its chest; it was
bloated and black, squirming with maggots beneath a nimbus of flies.
The other three were desiccated and disarrayed, like clumps of leaves
strewn about and abandoned by a strong wind. Limbs and one head were
missing.
Ouellette gestured at the sign. "They actually gave a damn back
in the old days. People would end up in jail for burying their loved
ones in the back rose garden. Endangering the public health."
She grunted, remembering. "They couldn't stop ßehemoth.
They couldn't stop the coattail plagues. But at least they could
lock up some poor old woman who hadn't wanted to see her dead husband
go up in flames."
Clarke smiled faintly. "People like to feel, what's the word..."
"Proactive," Ouellette suggested.
"That's it."
Ouellette nodded. "To give them their due, though, it was
a problem back then. There were a lot more bodies lying around—they
were stacked up to your shoulder, even out here. For a while,
cholera was killing more people than ßehemoth."
Clarke eyed the structure. "Why stick it way out here?"
Ouellette shrugged. "They had them everywhere."
Clarke stepped into the enclosure. Ouellette put a restraining hand
on her shoulder. "You better stick with the older ones.
There's no end to the things you could catch off that fresh one."
Clarke shrugged off the hand. "What about you?"
"I'm broad-spectrumed up to here. There's not much that can get
me."
The doctor approached the cadaver from upwind, for all the good it
did; the light breeze wasn't nearly enough to dispel the stench.
Clarke, keeping the greater distance, fought the urge to gag and
closed on her own assignment of body parts. She held out her can of
steriwrap like a crucifix and pressed the stud; the wizened,
one-legged body at her feet glistened as the aerosol laminate
hardened on its surface.
"These are actually in pretty good shape," Ouellette
remarked, spraying down her own corpse. "Not so long ago you
had to check twice a week if you wanted to find a leg bone connected
to a knee bone. Scavengers had a field day." She was spraying
it on thick, Clarke noted without surprise. She might be immune to
whatever diseases festered in that body, but it still wasn't going to
be any treat to carry it around.
"So what changed?" Clarke asked.
"No more scavengers."
Clarke rolled the mummified remains with her foot and sprayed down
the other side. The wrap hardened in seconds. She scooped the
shrouded body into her arms. It was like carrying a loose bundle of
firewood. The steriwrap squeaked faintly against her diveskin.
"Just feed it into Miri," Ouellette told her, still
spraying. "I've already changed the settings."
The MI's tongue stuck out to starboard. Crinkly silver foil lined
its throat. Clarke set the remains on the pallet; the tongue began
to retract as soon as the weight had settled. Miri swallowed and
closed her mouth.
"Do I have to do anything?" Clarke called.
"Nope. She knows the difference between a live body and a dead
one."
A deep, almost subsonic hum sounded briefly from within the MI.
Ouellette dragged a humanoid cocoon from the compound. Its bloated
features had vanished entirely under layers of fibrous plastic, as
though Ouellette were some monstrous spider given to gift-wrapping
prey. The surface of the shroud was peppered with the bodies of
trapped insects, half-embedded. They twitched, dying, against their
constraints.
Clarke reached out to give Ouellette a hand. Something sloshed
faintly as the weight shifted between them. Miri opened her
mouth—empty again—and belched hot, dusty breath into
Clarke's face. The tongue extended as though from some enormous,
insatiable baby bird.
"Can your skin breathe in that thing?" Ouellette asked
over Miri's second helping.
"What, my diveskin?"
"Your real skin. Can it breathe under all that
copolymer?"
"Copolymer's pretty much what I've worn for the past five years.
Hasn't killed me yet."
"It can't be good for you, though. It was designed to keep you
alive in the deep sea; I can't imagine it's healthy to wear it in an
atmosphere all the time."
"Don't see why not." Clarke shrugged. "It breathes,
it thermoregulates. Keeps me nice and homeostatic."
"In water, Laurie. Air has completely different
properties. If nothing else, I bet you've got a Vitamin K
deficiency."
"I'm fine," Clarke said neutrally..
The MI hummed contentedly.
"If you say so," Ouellette said at last.
Miri gaped for more.
They plotted their course by derelict road signs and inboard maps.
Ouellette steadfastly refused to go online. Clarke had to wonder at
the stops marked along their route. Belfast? Camden? Freeport?
They'd barely been dots on a map even before the world ended: why
not go to Bangor, just a few klicks to the north? That was where the
people would be.
"Not any more," Ouellette said, raising her voice above a
frenetic orchestral seesaw she’d attributed to some Russian
maniac called Prokofiev.
"Why not?"
"Cities are the graveyard of Mankind." It had the
ring of a quote. "There was this threshold, I don't remember
what it was exactly. Some magic number of people per hectare. Any
urban center was way up on the wrong side of it. Something like
ßehemoth, set loose in a
high-density urban area—not to mention all the ancillary
pathogens that hitched a ride in its wake—it takes off like a
brush fire. One person sneezes, a hundred get sick. Germs love
crowds."
"But small towns were okay?"
"Well, not okay, obviously. But things didn't spread as
fast—the spread's still going on, actually. The towns were
small and seasonal, and the areas in between were pretty much owned
by the whitecaps." Ouellette gestured at the withering foliage
scrolling past the windshield. "This was all privately owned.
Rich old rs and Ks who didn't mingle, had good medical. They're gone
now too, of course."
Gone to Atlantis, Clarke surmised. Some of them, anyway.
"So the big cities had exactly two choices when Firewitch came
calling," Ouellette continued. "They could either throw up
the barricades and the static-field generators, or they could
implode. A lot of them couldn't afford generators, so they imploded
by default. I haven't been to Bangor since fifty-three. For all I
know they never even cleaned up the bodies."
They got their first live customers at Bucksport.
They pulled off the main drag at about two a.m., next to a Red Cross
Calvin cycler with a worrisome yellow telltale winking from its
panel. Ouellette examined it by the light of an obsolete billboard,
running on stored solar, that worked ceaselessly to sell them on the
benefits of smart cloth and dietary proglottids.
"Needs restocking." She climbed back into Miri and called
up a menu.
"I thought they got everything they needed from the air,"
Clarke said. That's what photosynthesis was, after all—she'd
been amazed to discover how many complex molecules were nothing more
than various combinations of nitrogen, carbon, and oh-two.
"Not trace elements." Ouellette grabbed a cellulose
cartridge, its compartments filled with red and ochre paste, from the
dispensing slot. "This one's low on iron and potassium."
The billboard was still hawking its nonexistent wares the next
morning when Clarke squeezed herself into Miri's toilet cubicle.
When she came out again, two silhouettes were plastered against the
windshield.
She stepped carefully over Ouellette and climbed up between the
bucket seats. Two Hindian boys—one maybe six, the other
verging on adolescence—stared in at her. She leaned forward
and stared back. Two pairs of dark eyes widened in surprise; the
younger boy emitted a tiny yelp. The next second both had scampered
away.
"It's your eyes," Ouellette said behind her.
Clarke turned. The doctor was sitting up, hugging the back of the
driver's seat from behind. She blinked, gummy-eyed in the morning
light.
"And the suit," she continued. "Seriously, Laurie,
you look like some kind of cut-rate zombie in that get-up." She
reached behind her and tapped the locker in the rear wall. "You
could always borrow something of mine."
She was getting used to her alias. Ouellette's unsolicited advice
was another matter.
A half-dozen people were already lined up when they climbed out into
daylight. Ouellette smiled at them as she strode around to the back
of the vehicle and lifted the awning. Clarke followed, still sleepy;
Miri's mouths opened as she passed. The throat's silver lining had
withdrawn, exposing a grid of sensor heads studding the cylindrical
wall behind.
Icons and telltales flickered across the panel on Miri's backside.
Ouellette played them with absent-minded expertise, her eyes on the
accumulating patients. "Everybody's standing, nobody's
bleeding. And no obvious cases of ßehemoth.
Good start."
Half a block behind the billboard, the two children Clarke had
surprised pulled a middle-aged woman into sight around the corner of
a long-defunct restaurant. She moved at her own pace, resisting her
children as though they were eager dogs straining to slip the leash.
Further down the road, picking his way across scattered debris and
asphalt-cracking clumps of grass, a man limped forward on a cane.
"We just got here," Clarke murmured.
"Yup. Usually I blast the music for a couple of minutes, just
to let people know. But a lot of the time it isn't even necessary."
Clarke panned the street. A dozen now, at least. "Somebody
really spread the word."
"And that," Ouellette told her, "is how we're going to
win."
Bucksport was one of Ouellette's regular stops. The locals knew her,
or at least knew of her. She knew them, and ministered unto them as
she always had, her omnipresent music playing softly in the
background. The sick and the injured passed like boluses of food
through Miri's humming depths; sometimes the passage would take only
moments, and Ouellette would be waiting at the other side with a derm
or injection, or some viral countervector to be snorted like an
antique alkaloid. Other times the patients would linger inside while
the MI knitted their bones back together, or spliced torn ligaments,
or burned out malignancies with bursts of focused microwaves.
Occasionally the problem was so obvious that Ouellette could diagnose
it with a glance, and cure it with a shot and a word of advice.
Clarke helped when she could, which was rarely; Miri maintained its
own inventories, and Ouellette had little need of Clarke's limited
expertise in fish bites. Ouellette taught her some basics on the fly
and let her triage the line-up. Even that wasn't entirely
successful. The rules were easy enough but some of the younger
ferals recoiled at Clarke's appearance: the strange black skin that
seemed to ripple when you weren't quite looking; the little
outcroppings of machinery from flesh; the glassy, featureless eyes
that both looked at you and didn't, that belonged not so much to a
human being as to some unconvincing robot imposter.
Eventually Clarke contented herself with the adults, and gave them
vital tips while they waited their turn. There was, after all, more
to dispense than medical attention. Now, there were instructions.
Now, there was a plan.
Wait for the missiles, she told them. Watch the starbursts; track
the fragments as they fall, find them on the ground. This is what
you look for; this is what it is. Take whatever samples you can—soil
in mason jars, rags swept through aerosol clouds at ground zero,
anything. A teaspoon-full might be enough. A tin can, half full,
could be a windfall. Whatever you can get, however you can get it.
Be fast: the lifters may be coming. Grab what you can and run. Get
away from the impact zone, hide from the flamethrowers any way you
can. Tell others, tell everyone; spread the word and the method.
But no radio. No networks, no fiberop, no wireless. The ether will
fuck you up the ass if you let it; trust only to word-of-mouth.
Find us at Freeport, or Rumford, or places between. Come back to us:
bring us what you have.
There may be hope.
Augusta made her skin crawl. Literally.
They approached from the east, just before midnight, along the 202.
Taka took them off the main drag in favor of a gravel road a short
ways down the gentle slope of the Kennebec River valley. They parked
on a ridge that overlooked the shallow topography below.
Everything this side of the river had been abandoned; almost
everything on the far side had been, too. The bright core that
remained huddled amidst a diffuse spread of dark, empty ruins left
over from the good old days. Its nimbus reflected off the cloud bank
overhead, turned the whole tableau to grainy, high-contrast
black-and-white.
Faint gooseflesh rippled along Clarke's arms and nape. Even her
diveskin seemed to be, well, shivering, a sensation so subtle
it hovered on the threshold of imagination.
"Feel that?" Ouellette said.
Clarke nodded.
"Static-field generator. We're just on the outer edge of the
field."
"So it gets worse inside?"
"Not right inside, of course. The field's directed
outward. But yeah, the closer you get to the perimeter, the more
your hair stands on end. Once you're inside you don't feel it. Not
that way, at least. There are other effects."
"Like what?"
"Tumors." Ouellette shrugged. "Better than the
alternative, I guess."
A cheek-to-jowl cluster of lights and architecture rose against the
dark, its outlines suggesting the contours of a crude, pixelated
dome. The new Augusta was obviously squeezing every cubic centimeter
it could out of the safe zone. "We going in there?"
Clarke asked.
Ouellette shook her head. "They don't need us."
"Can we go in there?" For all its lost stature,
Augusta must still have portals into the pipe. Lubin might have been
better off sticking with them after all.
"You mean, like shore leave? Stop by on our way through for
some VR and a hot whirlpool?" The doctor laughed softly.
"Doesn't work that way. They'd probably let us in if there were
some kind of emergency, but everybody kind of sticks to their own
these days. Miri's out of Boston."
"So you could get into Boston." Even better.
"It is kind of beautiful at night, though," Ouellette
remarked. "For all its carcinogenic properties. Almost like
the northern lights."
Clarke watched her without speaking.
"Don't you think?"
She decided not to push it. "Night looks pretty much like day
to me. Just not as much color."
"Right. The eyes." Ouellette gave her a sideways look.
"Don't you ever get tired of daylight all the time?"
"Not really."
"You should try taking them out now and then, just for a change.
Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot."
Clarke smiled. "You sound like a fortune cookie."
Ouellette shrugged. "It wouldn't hurt your bedside manner,
either. Patients might relate to you better without the affect, you
know?"
"There's not much I can do for your patients anyway."
"Oh, that's not—"
"And if there is," Clarke continued, her voice
conspicuously neutral, "then they can accept my help without
dictating my wardrobe."
"Rrrright," Ouellette said after a moment. "Sorry."
They sat in silence for a while. Finally Ouellette threw Miri back
into gear and cued her music— an adrenaline discord of
saxophone and electric percussion at serious odds with her usual
tastes.
"We're not stopping here?" Clarke asked.
"Goosebumps keep me awake. Probably not all that good for Miri
either. I just thought you'd enjoy the view, is all."
They headed further along the road. The prickling of Clarke's skin
faded in moments.
Ouellette kept driving. The music segued into a spoken interlude
with musical accompaniment—some story about a hare who’d
lost his spectacles, whatever those were. "What is
this?" Clarke asked.
"TwenCen stuff. I can turn it off if you—"
"No. That’s fine."
Ouellette killed it anyway. Miri drove on in silence.
"We could stop anytime," Clarke said after a few minutes.
"A little further. It's dangerous around the cities."
"I thought we were past the field."
"Not cancer. People." Ouellette tripped the autopilot and
sat back in the bucket seat. "They tend to hang around just
outside the claves and get envious."
"Miri can't handle them?"
"Miri can slice and dice them a dozen ways to Sunday. I'd just
as soon avoid the confrontation."
Clarke shook her head. "I can't believe Augusta wouldn't have
let us in."
"I told you. The claves keep to themselves."
"Then why even bother sending you out? If everyone up here is
so bloody self-centered, why help out the wildlands in the first
place?"
Ouellette snorted softly. "Where've you been for the
past five years?" She held up her hand: "Stupid question.
We're not out here for altruism, Laurie. The MI fleet, the salt
licks—"
"Salt licks?"
"Feeding stations. It's all just to keep the ferals from
storming the barricades. If we bring them a few morsels, maybe they
won't be quite so motivated to bring ßehemoth
into our own backyards."
It made the usual sense, Clarke had to admit. And yet...
"No. They wouldn't send their best and brightest out for a
lousy crowd-control assignment."
"You got that right."
"Yeah, but you—"
"Me? I'm the best and the brightest?"
Ouellette slapped her forehead. "What in the name of all that's
living gave you that idea?"
"I saw you work"
"You saw me take orders from a machine without screwing up too
much. A few day's training, I could teach you to do as well for most
of these cases."
"That's not what I meant. I've seen doctors in action before,
Taka. You're different. You—" One of Ouellette's own
phrases popped into her head: bedside manner.
"You care," she finished simply.
"Ah." Ouellette said. And then, looking straight ahead:
"Don't confuse compassion with competence, Laurie. It's
dangerous."
Clarke studied her. "Dangerous. That's a strange word to use."
"In my profession, competence doesn't kill people,"
Ouellette said. "Compassion can."
"You killed someone?"
"Hard to tell. That's the thing about incompetence. It's not
nearly so clear-cut as deliberate malice."
"How many?" Clarke asked.
Ouellette looked at her. "Are you keeping score?"
"No. Sorry." Clarke looked away.
But if I was, she thought, I'd blow you out of the water.
She knew it wasn't a fair comparison. One death, she supposed,
could be a greater burden than a thousand if it mattered enough to
you. If you bothered to get involved.
If you had compassion.
Finally they pulled into a remote clearing further up the slope.
Ouellette folded down her pallet and turned in with a few
monosyllables. Clarke sat unmoving in her seat, watching the
gray-on-gray clarity of the nightscape beyond the windshield: gray
meadow grasses, charcoal ranks of spindly conifer, scabby
outcroppings of worn bedrock. Overcast, tissue-paper sky.
From behind, faint snores.
She fished behind her seat and snagged her backpack. The eyecap vial
had settled to the very bottom, a victim of chronic inattention. She
held it in her hand for a long time before popping it open.
Each eyecap covered the entire visible cornea, and then some.
Suction tugged at her eyeballs as she pulled them off; they broke
free with a soft popping sound.
It was as if her eyes, not just their coverings, had been pulled out.
It was like going blind. It was like being in the deep sea, far
from any light.
It wasn't altogether unpleasant.
At first there was nothing, anywhere; irises grow lazy when
photocollagen does all their heavy lifting. After a while, though,
they remembered to dilate. A swathe of dark gray brightened the void
directly ahead: faint nocturnal light, through the windshield.
She felt her way out of the MI and leaned against its flank. She let
the door hiss shut as softly as possible. The night air cooled her
face and hands.
Diffuse brightness registered at the corner of her eye, fading every
time she focused on it. Before long she could tell the sky from the
treeline. Dim, roiling gray over serrated shadow; it seemed
marginally brighter to the east.
She wandered a few meters and looked back: Miri's smooth, startling
edges almost glimmered against this fractal landscape. To the
west, through a break in the cloud, she saw stars.
She walked.
She tripped over roots and holes half a dozen times, for want of
illumination. But the color scheme was pretty much the same as that
served up by her eyecaps, gray on gray on black. The only difference
was that contrast and brightness were cranked way down.
When the sky began brightening to the east she saw that she'd been
climbing up a denuded gravelly hillside populated by stumps, an old
clear-cut that had never recovered. It must have been like this long
before ßehemoth had arrived
on the scene.
Everything's dying, she'd said.
And Ouellette had replied That was happening anyway...
Clarke looked down the way she'd come. Miri sat like a toy on the
edge of what must have been an old logging road. Brown trees lined
the far side of the road, and the hill she stood on to either side;
they'd been razored away down the swath she'd just climbed.
Suddenly she had a shadow. It stretched down the slope like the
outline of a murdered giant. She turned: a fluorescent red sun was
just cresting the hill. Ribbed clouds above glowed radioactive
salmon. They reminded Clarke of wave-sculpted corrugations on a
sandy seabed, but she couldn't ever remember seeing colors so
intense.
Losing your sight every night might not be so bad, she
reflected, if this is how you get it back in the morning.
The moment passed, of course. The sun had only had a few degrees to
work with, a narrow gap of clear distant sky between the land below
and the clouds overhead. Within a few minutes it had risen behind a
thick bank of stratus, faded to a pale bright patch in an expanse of
featureless gray.
Alyx, she thought.
Ouellette would be up soon, steeling herself for another pointless
day spent in the service of the greater good. Making a difference
that made no difference.
Maybe not the greater good, Clarke thought. Maybe, the
greater need.
She started down the hill. Ouellette was climbing into daylight by
the time Clarke reached the road. She blinked against the gray
morning, and blinked again when she saw the rifter's naked eyes.
"You said you could teach me," Clarke said.
Stargazer
She's okay, Dave, Taka said to her dead husband. She's a
bit scary at first—Crys would take one look at her and run out
of the room. Definitely not much of a people person.
But she's fine, Dave, really. And if you can't be here with me,
at least she pulls her own weight.
Miri drove down old I-95 through the ramshackle remains of a town
called Freeport; it had died with the departure of the fish and the
tourists, long before ßehemoth
had made everything so definitive. South of town they pulled onto a
side road that ended at a secluded cove. Taka was relieved to see
that the scraggly woodlands above the high-tide line were still
mostly green. She cheered them on.
"Why here, exactly?" Laurie wondered as they debarked.
"Electric eel." Taka unlocked the charge cap on the side
of the vehicle and took the socket in one hand. The cable unspooled
behind her as she headed down slope. Cobble slipped and clattered
beneath her feet.
Laurie paced her to the water's edge. "What?"
"On the bottom somewhere." Kneeling, Taka fished the
hailer out of her windbreaker and slipped it into the water.
"Hopefully the little bastard still comes when you call him."
A small eruption of bubbles, twenty meters offshore. A moment later
the eel surfaced in their wake and squirmed towards them, orange and
serpentine. It beached itself at Taka's feet, a giant fluorescent
sperm with a tail trailing off into the depths. It even had fangs:
a two-pronged metal mouth disfiguring the surface of the bulb.
She plugged the cable into it. The bulb hummed.
"They stashed these things here and there," she explained,
"so we're not completely dependent on the lifters."
Laurie eyed the calm water in the cove. " Ballard stack?"
"CAESAR reactor."
"You're kidding."
Taka shook her head. "Self-contained, self-maintained,
disposable. Basically just a big block with a couple of radiator
fins. Drop it into any open body of water and it's good to go. It
doesn't even have any controls—it automatically matches voltage
to whatever the line draws."
Laurie whistled.
Taka scooped up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. "So
when's Ken going to show up?"
"Depends."
"On what?"
"On whether he got into Portland." And then, after a
curious hesitation: "And whether he ditched us back at
Penobscot."
"He didn't," Ken said.
They turned. He was standing behind them.
"Hi." Laurie's face didn't change, but some subtle tension
seemed to ebb from her body. "How'd it go?"
He shook his head.
It was almost as if the past two weeks hadn't happened. Ken
reappeared, as ominous and indecipherable as ever: and just like
that, Laurie faded away. It was a subtle transition—some
slight hardening of the way she held herself, a small flattening of
affect—but to Taka, the change was as clear as a slap in the
face. The woman she had come to know as an ally and even a friend
submerged before her eyes. In its place stood that humanoid cipher
who had first confronted her on the slopes of a guttering wasteland,
fourteen days before.
Ken and Laurie conversed a little ways down the beach while Miri
recharged. Taka couldn't hear what they said, but doubtless Ken was
reporting on his Portland expedition. Debriefing, Taka
thought, watching them. For Ken, that word seemed to fit. And the
trip had not gone well, judging by the body language and the look on
his face.
Then again, he always looks like that, she reminded
herself. She tried to imagine what it might take to wipe away that
chronic deadpan expression and replace it with something approaching
a real emotion. Maybe you'd have to threaten his life. Maybe a fart
in an elevator would do it.
They headed back into town once Miri was sated. Lubin crouched in
the space between the bucket seats, the women on either side. Taka
got the sense of gigabytes passing between the other two, although
they spoke perhaps a half-dozen words each.
Freeport was another regular stop on the trap line; Taka pulled up at
a parking lot off Main and Howard, beside the gashed façade of
a defunct clothing store called (she always smiled at it) The Gap.
The town as a whole, like most of them, was long dead. Individual
cells still lingered on in the rotting corpus, though, and some were
already waiting when Miri arrived. Taka blared Stravinsky for a few
minutes anyway, to spread the word. Others appeared over time,
emerging from the shells of buildings and the leaky hulls of old
fishing boats kept afloat in some insane hope that the witch might be
afraid of water.
She and Laurie got to work. Ken stayed out of sight near the back of
the cab; shadows and the dynamic tinting of Miri's windows rendered
him all but invisible from the outside. Taka asked about Portland
over an assembly-line of broken arms and rotting flesh. Laurie
shrugged, pleasant but distant: "He could've got in all right.
Just not without getting noticed."
No surprise there. A scorched zone surrounded Portland's landside
perimeter, a flat, sensor-riddled expanse across which Taka couldn't
imagine anyone crossing undetected. An enervated, membranous skin
guarded the seaward approaches. You couldn't just sneak into the
place—into any clave, for that matter—and Ken evidently
lacked the resources to break in by force.
Every now and then Taka would glance absently at the windshield as
she moved among her patients. Sometimes she caught sight of two
faint, glimmering pinpoints looking back, motionless and unblinking
behind the dark reflections.
She didn't know what he might be doing in there. She didn't ask.
It was as if night were a black film laid over the world, and
the stars mere pinpricks through which daylight passed.
"There," Ken said, pointing.
Fine needles, three or four of them. Their tips etched the film high
in the west, left faint scratches across Bootes. They faded in
seconds; Taka would never have seen them on her own.
"You're sure we're safe," she said.
He was a silhouette, black on black against the stars to her left.
"They're past us already," he told her. Which was not the
same thing.
"There go the intercepts," Laurie said behind them. Brief
novae flared near Hercules—not contrails, but the ignition of
antimissile salvos dropped from orbit. They'd be below the horizon
by the time they hit atmosphere.
It was after midnight. They were standing on a rocky hill south of
Freeport. Almost everything was stars and sky; the insignificant
circle of earth below the horizon was black and featureless. They'd
come here following the beeping of Ken's handpad, linked to a
periscope floating somewhere in the ocean behind them. Evidently
their submarine— Phocoena, Laurie had called it—
was a stargazer.
Taka could see why. The Milky Way was so beautiful it hurt.
"Maybe this is it," she murmured. It was unlikely, she
knew; this was only the second attack since they'd put their plan
into motion, and how far could the word have spread by now?
And yet, three attacks in as many weeks. At that rate, they had
to get lucky before too long...
"Don't count on it," Ken said.
She glanced at him, and glanced away. Not so long ago this man had
stood at her back, one hand clamped easily on her neck, instructing
Laurie in the disassembly of weapons systems that Taka could barely
even name. He had been pleasant enough, then and since, because Taka
had cooperated. He had been polite because she'd never stood in his
way.
But Ken was on a mission, and Taka's little experiment in grass-roots
salvation didn't seem to factor into it. He was playing along with
her for some indecipherable reason of his own; there was no
guarantee that tomorrow, or the next day, he wouldn't run out of
patience and go back to his original game plan. Taka didn't know
what that was, although she gathered it had something to do with
helping Ken and Laurie's waterlogged kindred; she had learned not to
waste time pressing either of them for details. It had involved
getting into the Portland clave, which evidently Ken had not been
able to do on his own.
It had also involved hijacking Taka's MI, which he had.
Now she was alone with two empty-eyed ciphers in the dead of night
and the middle of nowhere. Beneath the intermittent camaraderie, the
humanitarian pitching-in, and all the best-laid plans, one fact
remained unassailable: she was a prisoner. She'd been a prisoner
for weeks.
How could I have forgotten that? she wondered, and answered
her own question: because they hadn't hurt her...yet. They hadn't
threatened her...lately. Neither of her captors seemed to
indulge in violence for its own sake; hereabouts that was the very
pinnacle of civilized behavior. She had simply forgotten to feel
endangered.
Which was pretty stupid, when you got right down to it. After the
failure at Portland, there was every chance that Lubin would revert
to Plan A and take her vehicle. Laurie might or might not go along
with that—Taka hoped that some bond remained beneath that cool
reinstated façade—but that might not make much
difference either way.
And there was no telling what either of them would do if Taka tried
to get in their way. Or if they ran out of more efficient
alternatives. At the very best, she could be stranded in the
middle of the wildlands—an immunized angel with clipped wings,
and no Miri to back her up the next time some red-eyed man came
looking for salvation.
"I'm getting a signal from Montreal," Ken said.
"Encrypted. I'm guessing it's a scramble."
"Lifters?" Laurie suggested. Ken grunted an affirmative.
Taka cleared her throat. "I'll be back in a sec. I have to
take a wicked pee."
"I'll come with you," Laurie said immediately.
"Don't be silly." Taka waved downhill into the darkness,
where the peak they occupied emerged from threadbare woodlands.
"It's only a few meters. I can find my way."
Two starlit silhouettes turned and regarded her without a word. Taka
swallowed and took a step downhill.
Ken and Laurie didn't move.
Another step. Another. Her foot came down on a rock; she wobbled
momentarily.
Her captors turned back to their tactics and machinery. Taka moved
carefully downhill. Starlight limned the bare outlines of obstacles
in her path. A moon would have been nice, though; she tripped twice
before the tree-line rose before her, a ragged black band engulfing
the stars.
As it engulfed Taka herself, a few moments later.
She looked back up the hill through a black mesh of scrub and tree
trunks; Ken and Laurie still stood at the top of the hill, motionless
black cutouts against the sky. Taka couldn't tell whether they could
see her, or even whether they were looking in her direction. She'd
be plainly visible to them if she were standing in the open.
Fortunately, not even their night-creature eyes could penetrate tree
trunks.
She had a few minutes at most before they realized she was gone.
She moved as quickly as she could without raising a racket.
Thankfully there wasn't much undergrowth; in better days the sunlight
filtering through the canopy had been too sparse, and more
recently—more recently, sunlight was hardly the limiting
factor. Taka felt her way blindly through a maze of vertical shafts
and leaf litter and thin soil rotten with ßehemoth.
Low branches clawed at her face. Gnarled old tree trunks resolved
from the darkness barely a meter ahead; young spindly ones jumped out
at her with even less warning.
A root caught her foot; she toppled, biting back a cry. One
outstretched hand came down hard on a fallen branch. The sound it
made, snapping, echoed like a gunshot. She lay twisted on the
ground, nursing her scraped palm, straining to hear any sounds from
up the slope.
Nothing.
She kept going. The slope was steeper now, more treacherous. The
trees that sprang up in her path were only skeletons, dry and brittle
and eager to betray her with the firecracker report of every snapped
twig and broken branch. One of them caught her just below the knee;
she pitched forward, hit the ground, and couldn't stop. She tumbled
down the slope, rocks and treefall stabbing her in passing.
The ground disappeared. Suddenly she could almost see. A
broad dim swathe of gray rushed towards her; she recognized it in
the instant before it struck her, peeling skin from her forearm.
The road. It ran around this side of the hill like a hemline. Miri
was parked somewhere along its length.
Taka got to her feet and looked around. She'd had no way to plot her
course down the hill, no way of knowing exactly where on the road
she'd landed. She guessed, and turned right, and ran.
The road was clear, thank God, its dim gravel albedo just enough to
keep her oriented and on track. It unspooled gently around the
shoulder of the hill, shattered stone crunching beneath her feet, and
suddenly something glinted in the darkness ahead, something
straight-edged and shiny under the stars...
Oh thank God. Yes. Yes!
She yanked open the driver's-side door and piled inside, panting.
And hesitated.
What are you going to do, Tak? Run out on everything you've been
trying to do for the past two weeks? Just drive away and let the
witch take over, even though there may be a way to stop it? Sooner
or later someone's going to strike gold, and this is where you've
told them to bring it. What happens when they show up and you've run
off with your tail between your legs?
Are you going to call for help? You think it would come before
Ken and Laurie had their way with you, or just hopped into that
submarine of theirs and disappeared back into the Mariana Trench? Do
you think it would come at all, these days? And what about
tipping off the enemy, Tak? What about whoever or whatever is trying
to stop the very thing you're trying to help along? Are you
going to risk all that, just because of something two borderline
personalities with funny eyes might do if you got them angry?
Taka shook her head. This was insane. She had a few precious
moments before Ken and Laurie tracked her down. What she decided in
that interval might decide the fate of New England—of North
America, even. She couldn't afford to be hasty, but there was no
time—.
I need time. I just need to get away for a while. I need
to work this out. She reached out and thumbed the ignition pad.
Miri stayed dark.
She tried again. Nothing. Nothing but the memory of Ken lurking in
this very cab, eyes aglitter, surrounded by all that circuitry he
seemed to know so much about.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, he was staring in
at her.
Ken opened her door. "Anything wrong?" he asked.
Taka sighed. Her abrasions oozed and stung in the silence.
Laurie opened the passenger door and climbed in. "Let's head
back," she said, almost gently.
"I—why are—"
"Go on," Ken said, gesturing at the dashboard.
Taka put her thumb on the pad. Miri hummed instantly to life.
She stepped out of the cab to let Lubin enter. Overhead, the heavens
were crammed with stars.
Oh, David, she thought. How I wish you were here.
Sleeper
Everything changed at ten-thirty the next morning.
The bike skidded into view just past Bow and promptly got into an
argument with its rider over how best to deal with a pothole the size
of Arkansas. It was a late-model Kawasaki from just before the
witch, and it had ground-effect stabilizers that made it virtually
untippable; otherwise, both man and machine would have gone
end-over-end into a solar-powered billboard that (even after all
these years) flickered with dead-celebrity endorsements for Johnson &
Johnson immune boosters. Instead, the Kawasaki leaned sideways at
some impossibly acute angle, righted itself en route, and slewed to a
stop between Miri and a handful of feral children looking for
freebies.
Ken's white eyes appeared in the shadowy darkness of the gap in The
Gap, behind the newcomer.
The rider was all limbs and scraps, topped by a ragged thatch of
butchered brown hair. Barely visible against a backdrop of grimy
skin, a sparse moustache said maybe sixteen. "You the
doctor with the missiles?"
"I'm the doctor who's interested in the missiles,"
Taka told him.
"I'm Ricketts. Here." He reached under a threadbare
thermochrome jacket and hauled out a ziplock bag with some very dirty
laundry wadded up inside.
Taka took the bag between thumb and forefinger. "What's this?"
Ricketts ticked off a list on his fingers: "Gauchies, a shirt,
and one sock. They had to, you know, improvise. I had the only bag,
and I was way over on another run."
Laurie climbed out of the cab. "Tak?"
"Hullo," Ricketts said. His mouth split in an appreciative
grin; one tooth chipped, two missing, the rest in four shades of
yellow. His eyes ran down Lenie like a bar coder. Not that Taka
could blame him; out here, anyone with clear skin and all their teeth
qualified as a sex symbol almost by default.
She snapped her fingers to get him back to the real world. "What
is this, exactly?"
"Right." Ricketts came back to point. "Weg and
Moricon found one of those canister thingies you put the word out
about. It was leaking this shit all over. Not like, rivers of the
stuff, you know, just like sweating it almost. So they soaked
it up in that"—a gesture at the bag—"and handed
it off to me. I've been driving all night."
"Where's this from?" Taka asked.
"You mean, where we found it? Burlington."
It was almost too good to be true.
"That's in Vermont," he added helpfully.
Ken was suddenly at Rickett's shoulder. "There was a missile
drop on Vermont?" he said.
The boy turned, startled. Saw Ken. Saw the eyes.
"Nice caps," he said approvingly. "I was into rifters
myself back before, you know..."
Rifters, Taka remembered. They'd run geothermal stations way
off the west coast...
"The missiles," Ken said. "Do you remember how many
there were?"
"Dunno. Like, maybe four or five that I saw, but you know."
"Were there lifters? Was there a burn?"
"Yeah, someone said there might be. That was why we all
scrambled."
"But was there?"
"I dunno. I didn't hang around. You guys wanted this stuff
fast, right?"
"Yes. Yes." Taka looked at the fouled, greasy wad
in the bag. It was the most beautiful sight she'd ever seen.
"Ricketts, thank you. You have no idea how important this could
be."
"Yeah, well if you really wanna be grateful how about a charge
off your rig?" He slapped the bike between his thighs. "This
thing is like down to the moho, I've got maybe another ten klicks
and—or hey, is there maybe some kinda reward?"
The reward, Taka thought, unlocking the
umbilical for Rickett's bike, is that all of us might not be dead
in ten years.
She fed the treasure into the sample port with
tender reverence, let Miri slice away the packaging and squeeze the
gold from the dross. And there was gold, evident as much in
what wasn't there as in what was: ßehemoth
was far below the usual baseline in this sample. Almost negligible.
Something's killing the witch. That
initial explanation, that validation of a belief already
grown from hope to near-certainty over the past weeks, threatened to
squash all the scientific caution Taka's training had instilled in
her. She forced caution onto her excitement. She would run the
tests. She would do the legwork. But some squealing inner undergrad
knew it would only confirm what she already knew, what this first
glorious result suggested. Something was killing the witch.
And there it was. Mixed in with the molds and
the fungi and the fecal coliform, it glimmered like a string of
pearls half-buried in mud: a genetic sequence that Miri's database
didn't recognize. She brought it up, and blinked. That can't be
right. She whistled through her teeth.
"What?" Laurie asked at her elbow.
"This is going to take longer than I thought," Taka said.
"Why?"
"Because I've never seen anything like this before."
"Maybe we have," Ken said.
"I don't think so. Not unless you've—" Taka
stopped. Miri was flashing an interface alert at her: someone
asking for download access.
She looked at Ken. "Is that you?"
He nodded. "It's the sequence for a new bug we encountered
recently."
"Encountered where?"
"Nowhere local. An isolated area."
"What, a lab? A mountaintop? The Mariana Trench?"
Ken didn't answer. His data knocked patiently at Miri's front door.
Finally, Taka let it in. "You think this is the same thing?"
she asked as the system filtered it for nasties.
"It's possible."
"You had it all the while, and this is the first time you've
shown it to me."
"This is the first time you had anything to compare it with."
"Sweet smoking Jesus, Ken. You're not much of a team player,
are you?" At least it answered one question: now she knew why
these two had hung around for so long.
"It's not a counteragent," Laurie said, as if to gird
her against inevitable disappointment.
Taka called up the new sequence. "So I see." She shook
her head. "It's not our mystery bug either."
"Really?" Laurie looked surprised. "You can tell
that after five seconds?"
"It looks like ßehemoth."
"It's not," Ken assured her.
"Maybe a new strain, then. I'd have to grind through the whole
sequence to be sure, but I can tell just by looking that it's an RNA
bug."
"The biosol isn't?"
"I don't know what it is. It's a nucleic acid of some
kind, but the sugar's got a four-carbon ring. I've never seen it
before and it doesn't seem to be in any of Miri's cheat sheets. I'm
going to have to take it from scratch."
A look passed between Ken and Laurie. It spoke volumes, but not to
her.
"Don't let us stop you," Ken said.
Miri could identify known diseases, and cure
those for which cures had been found. It could generate random
variants of the usual targeted antibiotics, and prescribe regimens
that might keep ahead of your average bug's ability to evolve
countermeasures. It could fix broken bones, excise tumors, and heal
all manner of physical trauma. When it came to ßehemoth
it was little more than a palliative center on wheels, of course, but
even that was better than nothing. All in all, the MI was a miracle
of modern medical technology—but it was a field hospital, not a
research lab. It could sequence novel genomes, as long as the
template was familiar, but that wasn't what it had been built for.
Genomes based on unfamiliar templates
were another thing entirely. This bug wasn't DNA or RNA—not
even the primitive, barely-helical variant of RNA that ßehemoth
hung its hat on. It was something else altogether, and Miri's
database had never been designed to deal with anything like it.
Taka didn't give a damn. She made it do that anyway.
She found the template easily enough once she
looked beyond the nuts-and-bolts sequencing routines. It was right
there in a dusty corner of the biomed encyclopedia: TNA. A
threose-based nucleic acid first synthesized back at the turn of the
century. The usual bases attached to a threose sugar-phosphate
backbone, with phosphodiester bonds connecting the nucleotides. Some
early theoretical work had suggested that it might have played a
vital role back when life was still getting started, but everyone had
pretty much forgotten about it after the Martian Panspermians won the
day.
A novel template meant novel genes. The standard reference database
was virtually useless. Decoding the new sequence with the tools in
Miri's arsenal was like digging a tunnel with a teaspoon: you could
do it, but you had to be really motivated. Fortunately Taka had
motivation up to here. She dug in, knowing it would just take time,
and maybe a few unavoidable detours down blind alleys.
Too much time. Way too many detours. And what
bugged Taka was, she knew the answer already. She'd known
almost before she'd started. Every painstaking, laborious,
mind-numbing test supported it. Every electrophoretic band, every
virtual blot, every PCR and TTD—all these haphazard techniques
stapled together hour after bloody hour—they all
pointed, glacially, implacably, to the same glorious answer.
And it was a glorious answer. So after
three days, tired of the endless triple-checks and replicates, she
decided to just go with what she had. She presented her findings
near midday back at the cove, for privacy and the convenience of a
ready charge.
"It's not just a tweak job," she told
the rifters. A lone bedraggled gull picked its way among the stones.
"It's a totally artificial organism, designed from scratch.
And it was designed to outcompete ßehemoth
on its own turf. It's got a TNA template, which is fairly primitive,
but it also uses small RNA's in a way that ßehemoth
never did—that's an advanced trait, a eukaryotic trait. It
uses proline for catalysis. A single amino acid doing the job
of a whole enzyme—do you have any idea how much
space that saves—?"
No. They didn't. The blank looks made that more than obvious.
She cut to the chase. "The bottom line,
my friends, is if you throw this little guy into culture with
ßehemoth it'll come out the
winner every time."
"In culture," Ken repeated.
"No reason to think it won't do the same in the wild. Remember,
it was designed to make its own way in the world; the plan was
obviously to just dump it into the system as an aerosol and leave it
to its own devices."
Ken grunted, scrolling through Taka's results on the main display.
"What's this?"
"What? Oh, yeah. It's polyploid."
"Polyploid?" Laurie repeated.
"You know, haploid, diploid, polyploid. Multiple sets of genes.
You mostly see it in some plants."
"Why here?" Ken wondered.
"I found some nasty recessives," Taka admitted. "Maybe
they were deliberately inserted because of some positive effect
they'd have in concert with other genes, or maybe it was a rush job
so they just slipped through. As far as I can tell the redundant
genes were just layered on to eliminate any chance of homozygous
expression."
He grunted. "Not very elegant."
Taka shook her head, impatient. "Certainly
it's a ham-fisted solution, but it's quick and—I mean, the
point is it works! We could beat ßehemoth!"
"If you're right," Ken mused, "it's
not ßehemoth you have
to beat."
"The M&M's," Taka suggested.
Something changed in Laurie's stance.
Ken looked unconvinced. "Possibly.
Although the counterstrikes appear to originate with the North
American defense shield."
"CSIRA," Laurie said quietly.
Ken shrugged. "At this point, CSIRA
effectively is the armed forces on this continent. And there
don't appear to be much in the way of centralized governments left to
keep it in check."
"Shouldn't matter," Taka said. "'Lawbreakers are
incorruptible."
"Maybe they were, before Rio. Now, who knows?"
"No." Taka saw scorched landscapes.
She remembered lifters on the horizon, breathing fire. "We take
our orders from them. We all—"
"Then it's probably just as well you kept this project so close
to your chest," Lubin remarked.
"But why would anyone—" Laurie
was looking from Taka to Ken, disbelief written across her face. "I
mean, what would be in it for them?"
More than confusion, Taka realized.
Loss, too. Anguish. Something clicked at the back of
her mind: Laurie hadn't really believed it, all this time. She had
helped where she could. She had cared. She had accepted Taka's
interpretation of events—at least as a possibility—because
it had offered her an opportunity to help set things right. And yet,
only now did she seem to realize what that interpretation entailed,
the large-scale implications of what it was they were fighting: not
ßehemoth after all, but
their own kind.
Odd, Taka reflected, how often it
comes down to that...
It wasn't just the end of the world, not to
Laurie. It seemed somehow more—more intimate than that.
It was almost as if someone had betrayed her personally. Welcome
back, Taka thought to the vulnerable creature peeking again, at
long last, from behind the mask. I've missed you.
"I don't know," she said at last. "I
don't know who would do this or why. But the point is, now we stop
it. Now we culture these babies, and we send them out to do battle."
Taka pulled up the stats on her incubators. "I've already got
five liters of the stuff ready to go, and I'll have twenty by
morn..."
That's odd, she thought as a little
flashing icon caught her eye for the first time.
That shouldn't—that looks like—
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. "Oh,
shit," she whispered.
"What?" Ken and Laurie leaned in as one.
"My lab's online." She stabbed at
the icon; it blinked back at her, placidly unresponsive. "My
lab's online. It's uploading—God knows what it's—"
In an instant Ken was scrambling up the side of
the van. "Get the toolkit," he snapped, sliding
across the roof towards a little satellite dish rising somehow from
its recessed lair, pointing at the sky.
"What? I—"
Laurie dove into the cab. Ken yanked against the dish, breaking its
fixation on some malign geosynchronous star. Suddenly he cried out
and thrashed, stopped himself just short of rolling off the roof.
His back was arched, his hands and head lifted away from the metal.
The dish stuttered back towards alignment, stripped gears whining.
"Fuck!" Laurie tumbled out
onto the pavement. The toolkit spilled its guts beside her. She
scrambled to her feet, yelled "Shut it down, for Chrissakes!
The hull's electrified!"
Taka stumbled towards the open door. She could
see Ken wriggling back towards the dish on his back and elbows, using
his diveskin as insulation. As she ducked her head to hop past the
trim—Thank God we disarmed the internals—a
familiar hum started up deep in Miri's guts.
The weapons blister, deploying.
GPS was online. She killed it. It resurrected. All external
defenses were awake and hungry. She called them off. They ignored
her. Outside, Ken and Laurie shouted back and forth.
What do I do—what—
She scrambled under the dash and pulled open the fuse box. The
circuit breakers were clunky manual things, unreachable to any demon
built of electrons. She pulled the plugs on security and comm and
GPS. She yanked autopilot too, just in case.
A chorus of electrical hums fell instantly silent around her.
Taka closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself a deep breath.
Voices drifted through the open door as she pulled herself back up
into the driver's seat.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. Skin took most of the charge."
She knew what had happened. What happened
again, she corrected herself, grabbing the headset from
its hook.
She was no coder. She barely knew how to grow basic programs. But
she was a competent medical doctor, at least, and even bottom-half
graduates knew their tools. She'd spared the med systems from
disconnection; now she brought up an architectural schematic and ran
a count of the modules.
There were black boxes in there. One of them, according to the icon,
even had a direct user interface. She tapped it.
The Madonna hung in front her, not speaking. Its teeth were bared—a
smile of some kind, full of hate and triumph. Some distant,
unimportant part of Taka Ouellette's mind wondered at what possible
selective advantage an app could accrue by presenting itself in this
way. Did intimidation in the real world somehow increase fitness in
the virtual one?
But a much bigger part of Taka's mind was occupied with something
else entirely, something that had never really sunk in before: this
avatar had capped eyes.
They all did. Every Lenie she'd ever
encountered: the faces changed from demon to demon, different lips,
different cheeks and noses, different ethnicities. But always
centered on eyes as white and featureless as snowdrifts.
My name's Taka Ouellette, she had said
an eternity ago.
And this strange cipher of a woman—who
seemed to take the apocalypse so personally— had
replied Le— Laurie.
"Taka."
Taka started, but no—the Lenie wasn't
talking to her. This Lenie wasn't.
She slipped off the eyephones. A woman in black with machinery in
her chest and eyes like little glaciers looked in at her. She didn't
look anything like the creature in the wires. No rage, no hate, no
triumph. Somehow, it was this expressionless, flesh-and-blood face
that she would have associated with machinery.
"It was one of—it was a Le—a Madonna," Taka
said. "Inside the med system. I don't know how long it's been
in there."
"We have to go," Laurie said.
"It was hiding in there. Spying, I guess." Taka shook her
head. "I didn't even know they could run silent like that, I
thought they always just—automatically tore things apart every
chance they got..."
"It got a signal out. We've got to go before the lifters get
here."
"Right. Right." Focus, Tak.
Worry about this later.
Ken was at Laurie's shoulder. "You
said you had five liters in culture. We'll take some with us.
You disperse the rest. Drive into town, ring your siren, give at
least a few mils to anybody who qualifies, and get out. We'll
catch up with you later if we can. You have the list?"
Taka nodded. "There are only six locals with wheels. Seven, if
Ricketts is still around."
"Don't give it to anyone else," Ken said. "People on
foot aren't likely to get out of the burn zone in time. I'd also
advise you to avoid mentioning the lifters to anyone who doesn't have
an immediate need to know."
She shook her head. "They all need
to know, Ken."
"People without transportation are liable to steal it from those
who do. I sympathize, but causing a panic could seriously
compromise—"
"Forget it. Everyone deserves a heads-up, at least. If they
can't outrun the flamethrowers, there are places to hide from them."
Ken sighed. "Fine. Just so you know the risks you're taking.
Saving a dozen lives here could doom a much greater number down the
road."
Taka smiled, not entirely to herself. "Weren't you the one who
didn't think the greater number was worth saving in the first place?"
"It's not that," Laurie said.
"He just likes the idea of people dying."
Taka blinked, surprised. Two faces looked back at her; she could
read nothing in either.
"We have to hurry," Ken said. "If they scramble from
Montreal we can only count on an hour."
The onboard lab could dispense product either fore or aft. Taka
moved to the back of the MI and tapped instructions. "Lenie?"
"Ye—" Laurie began, and
fell suddenly silent.
"No," Taka said quietly. "I
meant what about the Lenie?"
The other woman said nothing. Her face was as blank as a mask.
Ken broke the silence: "Are you certain it can't get out
again?"
"I physically cut power to nav, comm, and GPS," Taka said,
not taking her eyes off the woman in front of her. "I pretty
much lobotomized the old girl."
"Can it interfere with the culture process?"
"I wouldn't think so. Not without being really obvious about
it."
"You're not certain."
"Ken, right now I'm not certain about
anything." Although I'm approaching certainty
about a thing or two...
"It's living where? Reference and analytical?"
Taka nodded. "The only systems with enough room."
"What happens if you shut them down?"
"The wet lab's on its own circuit. The cultures should be okay
as long as we don't need to do any more heavy-duty analysis on them."
"Pull the plug," Ken said.
A heat-sealed sample bag, half-full of straw-colored liquid, slid
from the dispensary and hung by its upper edge. Taka tore it free
and handed it over. "Keep the diffusion disk uncovered or the
culture will suffocate. Other than that they should be okay for
about a week, depending on the temperature. Do you have a lab in
your submarine?"
"Basic medbay," Lenie said. "Nothing like this."
"We can improvise something," Lubin added. "Can the
diffuser handle seawater?"
"Ninety minutes, tops."
"Okay. Go."
Ken turned and started down the beach.
Taka raised her voice: "What if—"
"We'll catch up with you afterwards," he said, not turning.
"I guess this is it, then," Taka said.
Lenie, still beside her, tried on a smile. It didn't fit.
"How will you find me?" Taka asked her. "I don't dare
go online."
"Yeah. Well." The other woman took a step towards the
water. A swirl on that surface was all that remained of her partner.
"Ken's got a lot of tricks up his sleeve. He'll track you
down."
White eyes set into flesh and blood. White eyes, sneering out from
the circuitry of Miri's cortex.
White eyes bringing fire, and flood, and any number of catastrophes
down on the innocent, all across North America. All across the
world, maybe.
Both sets of eyes called Lenie.
"You—" Taka began.
Lenie, the Word Made Flesh, shook her head.
"Really. We gotta go."
Parsimony
Achilles Desjardins was breeding exorcists when he learned he was a
suspect.
It was a real balancing act. If you made the little bastards
immutable, they wouldn't adapt; even the vestigial wildlife hanging
on in this pathetic corner of the net would chew them up and spit
them out. But if you set the genes free, provoked mutation with too
many random seeds, then how could you be sure your app would still be
on-mission a few generations down the road? Natural selection would
weed out any preprogrammed imperatives the moment they came into
conflict with sheer self-interest.
Sometimes, if you didn't get the balance just right, your agent would
forget all about its mission and join the other side. And the other
side didn't need any more help. The Madonnas—or the Shredders,
or the Goldfish, or any of the other whispered mythic names they'd
acquired over the years—had already survived this gangrenous
quagmire long past any reasonable expectation. They shouldn't have;
they'd codevolved to serve as little more than interfaces between the
real world and the virtual one, mouthpieces for a superspecies
assemblage that acted as a collective organism in its own right. By
rights they should have died in the crash that took out the rest of
that collective, that took out ninety percent of all Maelstrom's
wildlife—for how many faces make it on their own after the body
behind is dead and gone?
But they had defied that logic, and survived. They had changed—been
changed— into something more, more self-sufficient. Something
purer. Something that even Desjardins's exorcists could barely
match.
They had been weaponised, the story went. There was no shortage of
suspects. M&Ms and hobby terrorists and death-cult hackers could
all be releasing them into the system faster than natural selection
took them out, and there was a limit to what anyone could do without
a reliable physical infrastructure. The best troops in the world
won't last a minute if you set them down in quicksand, and quicksand
was all that N'Am had to offer these days: a few hundred isolated
fortresses hanging on by their fingernails, their inhabitants far too
scared to go out and fix the fiberop. The decaying electronic
habitat wasn't much better for wildlife than it was for Human apps,
but at a hundred gens-per-sec the wildlife still had the adaptive
edge.
Fortunately, Desjardins had a knack for exorcism. There were reasons
for that, not all of them common knowledge, but the results were hard
to argue with. Even those ineffectual and self-righteous jerk-offs
hiding out on the other side of the world gave him that much. At
least they all cheered him on, safe behind their barricades, whenever
he released a new batch of countermeasures.
But as it turned out, they were saying other things as well.
He wasn't privy to most of it—he wasn't supposed to be privy to
any— but he was good enough to get the gist. He had his
own hounds on the trail, prowling comsats, sniffing random packets,
ever-watchful for digital origami which might—when unscrambled
and unfolded and pressed flat—contain the word Desjardins.
Apparently, people thought he was losing his edge.
He could live with that. Nobody racks up a perfect score against the
death throes of an entire planet, and if he'd dropped a few more
balls than normal over the past months—well, his failure rate
was still way below the pack average. He outperformed any of those
bozos who grumbled, however softly, during the teleconferences and
debriefings and post-fiasco post-mortems that kept intruding on the
war. They all knew it, too; he'd have to slip a lot further than
this before anyone else in the Patrol would be able to lay a hand on
him.
Still. There were hints of the wind, changing at his back.
Fragments of encrypted conversations between veterans in Helsinki and
rookies in Melbourne and middle-management stats-hounds in New Delhi.
Disgruntled insistence from Weimers, King Sim himself, that there
had to be some undiscovered variable wreaking havoc with his
projections. And—
And right this very second, a disembodied chunk of point-counterpoint
snatched from the ether by one of Desjardins's minions. It was only
a few seconds in length—thanks to a filthy spectrum and the
dynamic channel-switching that coped with it, it was almost
impossible to grab more without knowing which random seed to
apply—but it seemed to have been connecting a couple of
'lawbreakers in London and McMurdo. It took forty seconds and six
nested Bayesians to turn it back into English.
"Desjardins saved us from Rio," Mr. McMurdo had opined,
moments earlier, in a Hindian accent. "We'd have surely taken
ten times the losses had he not acted when he did. How those people
threw off the Trip—"
Ms. London: "How do you know they did?" Irish lilt.
Enticing.
"Well let me see. They launched an unprovoked attack on a large
number of—"
"How do we know it was unprovoked?"
"Of course it was unprovoked."
"Why? How do you know they didn't just see a threat to the
greater good, and try to stop it?"
Precious moments of this fleeting excerpt, wasted on astonished
silence. Finally: "Are you suggesting that—"
"I'm saying history gets written by the victors. Rio's history.
How do we know the good guys won?"
End of intercept. If McMurdo had had an answer, he hadn't got it out
before the frequency skidded away.
Wow, Desjardins thought.
It was horseshit, of course. The idea that twenty-one separate CSIRA
franchises could have simultaneously gone rogue was hardly more
plausible than the thought that Rio alone had. Ms. London was a
'lawbreaker, not an idiot. She knew about parsimony. She'd just
been blowing smoke out her ass, yanking poor old McMurdo's chain.
Still, it gave Desjardins pause. He'd gotten used to being the Man
Who Stopped Rio. It put him above suspicion on so many counts. And
it didn't sit well, to think that there were people out there who
could doubt his virtue even for a moment.
That could lead to second thoughts, he reflected. It could
lead to closer looks.
The board beeped again. For a moment he thought that he'd beaten all
odds and reacquired the signal—but no. The new alert came from
a different source entirely, a broadband dump from somewhere in
Maine.
That's odd, he thought.
A Lenie had gotten into a medical database and was spewing random
intelligence across half the EM spectrum. They did that a lot, these
days—not content to merely scramble and hash, some had taken to
shouting into the ether, indiscriminately dumping data into any
network they could access. Some reproductive subroutine, mutated to
spread data instead of executables. At the very least it threw more
chaff into a system already losing usable bandwidth by the hour; at
worst it could blow the lid off all sorts of secret and sensitive
data.
Either way it was bad news for the real world; that would be enough
to keep it going.
This particular demon had uploaded a whole shitload of biomedical
stuff from the database it had plundered. Desjardins's board had
flagged it for potential epidemiological significance. He
popped the lid and looked inside.
And immediately forgot about any trivial bullshit gossip from London.
There were two items, both rife with dangerous pathology. Desjardins
was no pathologist, but then again he didn't have to be; the friends
and advisors arrayed about him distilled all those biochemical
details down to an executive summary that even he could understand.
Now they served up a pair of genotypes with red flags attached. The
first was almost ßehemoth,
only better: greater resistance to osmotic stress, sharper teeth for
cleaving molecules. Higher virulence. At least one critical feature
was the same, though. Like baseline ßehemoth,
this new strain was optimized for life at the bottom of the sea.
It did not exist in the standard database. Which raised the question
of what its technical specs were doing in a glorified ambulance out
of Bangor.
It would have been enough to grab his attention even if it had
arrived unaccompanied. It had brought a date, though, and she was
the real ballbreaker. She was the bitch he had always
dreaded. She was the last thing he would have ever expected.
Because he had always known that Seppuku would gain a foothold
eventually.
But he hadn't expected anyone on his own side to be culturing
the damn thing.
Corral
Taka cursed her own lack of foresight. They'd spread the word, all
right. They'd told all who came by of their plan to save the world:
the need for samples, the dangers of lingering afterwards, the
places she'd patrol to take charge of vital payloads. They'd taken
special note of those few who'd driven up in cars or motorbikes or
even plain old pedal-powered flywheels, got addresses from those who
still had them and told the rest to check back regularly: if all
went well, they might save the world.
And things had gone well, and then so
horribly wrong, in such quick succession. They had their
counteragent, or some of it anyway, but no prearranged signals to
bring in the couriers. And after all, why would they have even
bothered? They could have taken an afternoon and driven around the
county. They could have waited for those of no fixed address to
check in, tomorrow or the next day.
And now Taka Ouellette had the salvation of the world in her hands,
and some shrinking fraction of a sixty-minute window to get it to
safety.
She ran the siren continuously from one end of Freeport to the other,
a shrieking departure from the music employed to announce her
day-to-day presence. Hopefully it would summon the healthy as well
as the sick.
She got some of both. She warned them all to take shelter; she
promised a mother with a broken arm and a son with incipient
stage-one that she'd come back and help them when the fires had
passed. She urged the others, as they fled, to send the Six her way,
or anyone else with wheels to burn.
After thirty minutes, one of them came by. After forty, two more;
she loaded them all with precious milliliters of amber fluid and sent
them running. She begged them to send the others, if they knew their
whereabouts. If they could find them in time.
Forty-five minutes, and nothing but a ragged handful of the hungry
and the feeble. She chased them away with stories about
fire-breathing dragons, sent them down to a fisherman's wharf that
had once been the community's breadbasket. Now, if they were lucky,
it might at least serve as a place from which to jump into the ocean;
surely the flames wouldn't scorch the whole Atlantic?
Fifty minutes.
I can't wait.
But there were others here, she knew. People she hadn't seen today.
People she hadn't warned.
And they're not coming, Tak. If you
want to warn them, you might as well start going door to door.
Search every house and hovel within twenty klicks. You've got ten
minutes.
Ken had said they could count on sixty
minutes. A minimum estimate, right? It might take longer, a lot
longer.
She knew what Dave would have said. She still had two liters of
culture. Dave would have told her she could make all the difference,
if she didn't just sit there and wait for the furnace.
It might not happen at all. What were they
basing this on, anyway? A couple of firestorms that happened to
follow aborted missile attacks? What about the times when the
missiles fell and nothing happened afterwards? There had to
be times when nothing had happened. What about the times when the
fires came, or the floods or the explosions, with nothing to presage
them? Correlation wasn't causation...and this wasn't even strong
correlation...
It convinced Ken.
But she didn't know Ken at all. Didn't even
know his last name, or Laur—Lenie's. She would have had
nothing but their own word that they were who they said they were, if
they had even bothered to really tell her even that much. And
now even their names were suspect. Laurie was not Laurie
at all, it seemed.
Taka only had their word on the things they had said, her own
speculation on all the things they hadn't, and the disturbing
similarities between this amphibious woman and the demons in the
net...
Fifty-five minutes.
Go. You've done all you can here. Go.
She started the engine.
Committed, she didn't look back. She drove down the decaying asphalt
as fast as she could without risking some pothole-induced rollover.
Her fear seemed to increase in lockstep with her velocity—as
though the diffuse and overgrown remains of Freeport and its
pathetic, half-starved inhabitants had somehow numbed her own
instinct for self-preservation. Now, abandoning them, her heart rose
in her mouth. She imagined the crackle of flames advancing along the
road behind her. She fought the road; she fought panic.
You're going south, you idiot! We were south when the signal went
out, south is where they'll start—
She screeched east onto Sherbourne. Miri took the bend on two
wheels. A great shadow fell across the road before her, the sky
darkened abruptly overhead. Her imagination saw great airships,
spewing fire—but her eyes (when she dared to look away from the
road) saw only overarching trees, brownish-green blurs streaking the
world on both sides, leaning over and blocking the afternoon sun.
But no, that's the sun up ahead, setting.
It was a great yellow-orange blob, dimmed by its slanting angle
through the atmosphere. It was centered in the bright archway that
marked the end of the tunnel of trees. It was setting directly over
the road ahead.
How can it be so late? It can't be so late, it's only aftern—
The sun was setting.
The sun was setting the trees on fire.
She hit the brakes. The shoulder strap caught her around the chest,
threw her back into her seat. The world grew ominously quiet: no
more spitting clatter of rock against undercarriage, no more
rattling of equipment on hooks, banging against Miri's walls. There
was only the distant, unmistakable crackling of flame from up ahead.
A containment perimeter. They'd started at the outside and moved in.
She threw the MI into reverse and yanked hard on the stick. The
vehicle skidded back and sideways, slewing into the ditch. Forward
again. Back the way she'd come. The tires spun in the soft, muddy
embankment.
A whooshing sound, from overhead, like
the explosive breath of a great whale she'd heard in the archives as
a child. A sheet of flame flooded the road, blocking her escape.
Heat radiated through the windshield.
Oh Jesus. Oh God.
She opened the door. Scorched air blasted her face. The seatbelt
held her fast. Panicky fingers took way too long to set her free and
then she was on the ground, rolling. She scrambled to her feet,
bracing against Miri's side; the plastic burned her hands.
A wall of flame writhed barely ten meters away. Another—the
one she'd mistaken for the setting sun—was further off, maybe
sixty meters on the other side of the MI. She sheltered on the
cooler side of the vehicle. Better. But it wouldn't last.
Get the culture.
A mechanical groan, the bone-deep sound of twisting metal. She
looked up: directly overhead, through a mosaic of leaves and
branches not yet burning, she saw the fractured silhouette of a great
swollen disk wallowing in the sky.
Get the culture!
The road was blocked ahead and behind. Miri would never be able to
push through the dying woodlands to either side, but Taka could run
for it. Every instinct, every nerve was telling her to run for it.
The culture! MOVE!
She yanked open the passenger door and climbed over the seat. The
icons blinking on the cab's rear wall seemed almost deliberately slow
to respond. A little histogram appeared on the board. It rose as
slowly as a tide.
Whoosh.
The forest across the road burst into flame.
Three sides gone now, one way left, one way.
Oh Jesus.
The histogram blinked and vanished. The panel extruded a sample bag,
swollen with culture. Taka grabbed it and ran.
Whoosh.
Flame ahead of her, pouring from the heavens like a liquid curtain.
Flame on all sides, now.
Taka Ouellette stared into the firestorm for some endless, irrelevant
span of seconds. Then she sank to the ground with a sigh. Her knees
made indentations in the softening asphalt. The heat of the road
burned her flesh. Her flesh was indifferent. She noted, vaguely
surprised, that her face and hands were dry; the heat baked the sweat
from her pores before it even had the chance to wet her skin. It was
an interesting phenomenon. She wondered if anyone had ever written
it up.
It didn't really matter, though.
Nothing did.
Turncoat
"That's odd," said Lenie Clarke.
The periscope had backed off from shore a ways, to get a better
northwest view over the trees. The image it conveyed was
surprisingly bucolic. It was too far to see Freeport from here—and
Freeport's dwellings and businesses had been spread far too widely to
present anything approaching a skyline even in the old days—
but they should have seen lifters, at least. They should have seen
the flames or the smoke by now.
"It's been three hours," Clarke said,
glancing across the cockpit. "Maybe you stopped the signal
after all." Or maybe, she mused, we're completely
off-base about this whole thing.
Lubin slid one finger a few millimeters along the panel. The
'scope's-eye view panned left.
"Maybe she made it," Clarke remarked.
Such dull, lifeless words for all the meaning they conveyed: Maybe
she saved the world.
Maybe she saved me.
"I don't think so," Lubin said.
A pillar of smoke boiled up from behind the crest of a hill, staining
the sky brown.
She felt a tightness in her throat. "Where is that?" she
asked.
"Dead west," Lubin replied.
They came ashore on the south side of the cove,
a slope of smooth stones and gnarled driftwood growing slimy with
ßehemoth. They followed the
sun along a dirt road that had never seen so much as a signpost.
The pillar of smoke led them on like a pole star with a half-life,
thinning in the sky as they tracked it across paved roads and gravel
ones, over the crest of a weathered bump called Snake Hill (judging
by the name of the road that ran along its base), on into the setting
sun itself. Moments into twilight Lubin stopped, one hand raised in
warning.
By now the once-billowing column was all but
exhausted, a few threads of smoke twisting into the sky. But they
could see the source, a roughly rectangular patch of scorched
woodland at the bottom of the hill. Or rather, a roughly rectangular
outline: the center of the area appeared to be unburned.
Lubin had his binocs out. "See anything?" Clarke asked.
He hmmmed.
"Come on, Ken. What is it?"
He handed her the binoculars without a word.
There was disquieting moment when the device
tightened itself around her head. Suddenly the world was huge,
and in sharp focus. Clarke felt brief vertigo and stepped forward,
bracing against sudden illusory imbalance. Twigs and blighted leaves
the size of dinner tables swept past in a blur. She zoomed back to
get her bearings. Better: there was the scorched earth, there was
the patch in its midst, and there was—
"Oh shit," she murmured.
Miri sat dead center of the clear zone. It looked undamaged.
Ouellette stood beside it. She appeared to be conversing with a
gunmetal ovoid half her size, hovering a meter over her head. Its
carapace was featureless; its plastron bristled with sensors and
antennae.
A botfly. Not so long ago, teleoperated robots just like it had
hounded Lenie Clarke across a whole continent.
"Busted," Lubin said.
The world was bleaching in Clarke's eyecaps by the time they reached
the MI. Ouellette sat on the road with her back against the van,
legs bent, arms crossed loosely over knees. She stared listlessly at
the pavement between her feet. She looked up at the sound of their
approach. The botfly hung overhead like a bodyguard. It showed no
visible reaction to their arrival.
Bleached light wasn't enough to account for the pallor of Ouellette's
face. She looked absolutely bloodless. There were wet streaks on
her face.
She looked at Clarke and shook her head. "What
are you?" she said. Her voice was as empty as a cave.
Clarke's throat went dry.
"You're not just some refugee. You're
not just some rifter who's been hiding for five years. You—you
started this, somehow. You started it all..."
Clarke tried to swallow, looked to Lubin. But Lubin's eyes didn't
waver from the botfly.
She spread her hands. "Tak, I—"
"The monsters in the machines, they're
all—you," Ouellette seemed stunned at the sheer magnitude
of Clarke's betrayal. "The M&Ms and the fanatics and the
death cults, they're all following you..."
They're not, Clarke wanted to shout.
I'd stop them all in a second if I could, I don't know how any
of it got started—
But that would be a lie, of course. Maybe she hadn't formally
founded the movements that had sprung up in her wake, but that didn't
make them any less faithful to the thing she'd been. They were the
very essence of the rage and hatred that had driven her, the utter
indifference to any loss but her own.
They hadn't done it for her, of course. The
seething millions had their own reasons for anger, vendettas far more
righteous than the false pretenses on which Lenie Clarke had waged
war. But she had shown them the way. She had proven it was
possible. And with every drop of her blood that she spilled, every
precious inoculation of ßehemoth
into the world, she had given them their weapons.
Now there was nothing she could bring herself to say. She could only
shake her head, and force herself to meet the eyes of this accuser
and one-time friend.
"And now they've really outdone
themselves," Ouellette continued in her broken, empty voice.
"Now, they've—"
She took a breath.
"Oh God," she finished. "I fucked up so bad."
Like a marionette she pulled herself to her feet. Still the botfly
didn't move.
"It wasn't a counteragent," Ouellette said.
This time, Lubin spared a glance. "What do you mean?"
"I guess we're not dying fast enough. The
witch was beating us but we were slowing it down at least, we lost
four people for every one we saved but at least we were saving some.
But the M&M's don't get into paradise until we're all dead, so
they came up with something better..."
"And they are?" Lubin asked,
turning back to the teleop.
"Don't look at me," the machine said quietly. "I'm
one of the good guys."
Clarke recognized the voice in an instant.
So did Lubin. "Desjardins."
"Ken. Old buddy." The botfly bobbed a few centimeters in
salute. "Glad you remember me."
You're alive, Clarke thought. After
Rio, after Sudbury going dark, after five years. You're alive.
You're alive after all.
My friend....
Ouellette watched the proceedings with numb
amazement on her face. "You know—"
"He—helped us out," Clarke told her. "A long
time ago."
"We thought you were dead," Lubin said.
"Likewise. It's been pretty much seven seconds to sockeye ever
since Rio, and the only times I had a chance to ping you you'd gone
dark. I figured you'd been done in by some disgruntled faction who
never made the cut. Still. Here you are."
My friend, Clarke thought again. He'd
been that when even Ken Lubin had been trying to kill her. He'd
risked his life for her before they'd even met. By that measure,
although their paths had only crossed briefly, he was the best friend
she'd ever had.
She had grieved at word of his death; by rights, now, she should be
overjoyed. But one word looped endlessly through her mind,
subverting joy with apprehension.
Spartacus.
"So," she said carefully. "You're still a
lawbreaker?"
"Fighting Entropy for the Greater Good," the botfly
recited.
"And that includes burning thousands of hectares down to the
bedrock?" Lubin queried.
The botfly descended to Lubin-eye level and stared lens to lens. "If
killing ten saves a thousand it's a deal, Ken, and nobody knows that
better than you.. Maybe you didn't hear what our lovely friend just
told you, but there's a war on. The bad guys keep lobbing Seppuku
into my court and I've been doing my damndest to keep it from getting
a foothold. I've got barely any staff and the infrastructure's
falling apart around my ears but I was managing, Ken, I really was.
And then, as I understand it, you two walked into poor Taka's life
and now at least three vectors have snuck past the barricades."
Lubin turned to Ouellette. "Is this true?"
She nodded. "I checked it myself, when he
told me what to look for. It was subtle, but it was...right there.
Chaperone proteins and alternative splicing, RNA interference. A
bunch of second and third-order effects I never saw. They were all
tangled up in the polyploid genes, and I just didn't look hard
enough. It gets inside you. It kills ßehemoth
sure enough, but then it just keeps going and it—I didn't see
it. I was so sure I knew what it was, and I just—fucked up."
She stared at the ground, away from accusing eyes. "I fucked
up again," she whispered.
Lubin said nothing for a few seconds. Then, to
the 'fly: "You understand that there are reasons for caution
here."
"You don't trust me." Desjardins sounded almost amused.
"I'm not the one with the compulsive murder fetish, Ken. And
I'm not the only one who shook off the Trip. Are you really in a
position to throw stones?"
Ouellette looked up, startled from her bout of self-loathing.
"And whatever misgivings you have," the 'lawbreaker
continued, "Give me credit for a little self-interest. I don't
want Seppuku in my back yard any more than you do. I'm just as
vulnerable as the rest of you."
"How vulnerable is that?" Lubin wondered. "Taka?"
"I don't know," Ouellette whispered. "I don't know
anything..."
"Guess."
She closed her eyes. "It's a whole
different bug than ßehemoth,
but it's designed—I think it's designed for the same
niche. So being tweaked against ßehemoth
won't save you, but it might buy you some time."
"How much?"
"I can't even guess. But everyone else,
you know—I'd guess, most anyone who hasn't got the
retrofits...symptoms after three or four days, death within
fourteen."
"Dead slow," Lubin remarked. "Any decent necrotising
strep would kill you in three hours."
"Yes. Before you had a chance to spread it." Ouellette's
voice was hollow. "They're smarter than that."
"Mmm. Mortality rate?"
The doctor shook her head. "It's
designed, Ken. There's no natural immunity."
The muscles tightened around Lubin's mouth.
"It actually gets worse," Desjardins added. "I'm not
the only watchdog on this beat. There are still a few others in
N'Am, and a lot more overseas. And I've got to tell you, my
limited-containment strategy is not all that popular. There are
people who'd just as soon nuke the whole bloody seaboard just to be
on the safe side."
"Why don't they nuke whoever's launching Seppuku?" Lubin
wondered.
"Try getting a fix on half a dozen
submerged platforms moving around the deep Atlantic at sixty knots.
Truth be told, some thought it was you guys."
"It's not."
"Doesn't matter. People are itching to go nuclear on this. I've
only been able to hold them off because I could keep Seppuku from
spreading without resorting to fissiles. But now, r's and K's,
you've handed the nuclear lobby everything they need. If I were you
I'd start digging fallout shelters. Deep ones."
"No." Clarke shook her head.
"There were only, what, six people with wheels?"
"Only three showed up," Ouellette
said. "But they could be anywhere. They didn't leave me an
itinerary. And they'll be spreading the stuff. They'll be
seeding it in ponds and fields and—"
"If we can catch up with them, we can backtrack," Lubin
pointed out.
"But we don't even know where they were headed! How can we—"
"I don't know how." The botfly wiggled on its
ground-effectors, a tiny flourish. "But you better get started.
You have made one industrial-strength tar pit of a mess here, folks.
And if you want to stand even a one-in-fifty chance of keeping this
place from melting down to radioactive glass, you are damn well gonna
help clean it up."
There was a silence. Stubborn flames crackled and spat faintly in
the distance.
"We're going to help you,"
Lubin said at last.
"Well, you can all do your bit, of course," Desjardins
replied, "but it's your efforts in particular, Ken, that are
gonna come in most handy right now."
Lubin pursed his lips. "Thanks, but I'll pass. I wouldn't do
you much good."
Clarke bit her tongue. He's got to be
working some kind of angle.
The botfly hovered for a moment, as if considering. "I haven't
forgotten your skill set, Ken. I've experienced it first-hand."
"I haven't forgotten yours either. You could mobilize the whole
hemisphere in thirty seconds flat."
"A lot's changed since you retired,
friend. And in case you haven't noticed, there's not much left of
the hemisphere even if I did still have all my super powers."
Ouellette's eyes flickered between man and machine, watching the
point-counterpoint with a mixture of outrage and confusion. But at
least she, too, seemed to know enough to keep her mouth shut.
Lubin glanced around at the charred and darkling landscape. "Your
resources seem more than sufficient. You don't need me."
"You're not listening, Ken. A lot
has changed. A lifter or two is nothing, it's background noise. But
you start mobilizing too many resources at once, the wrong kind of
people pay attention. And not everybody on this side is on
this side, if you know what I mean."
He's talking about other lawbreakers,
Clarke realized. Maybe it's Spartacus vs. the Trip. Or maybe all
of them are off the leash by now.
"You'd rather keep a low profile," Lubin surmised.
"I've always preferred subtlety. And your
rather blunt social skills notwithstanding, when it comes right down
to it even you're more subtle than a fleet of fire-breathing
killer blimps."
When it comes down to war, he means.
Private war of the psychos, by invitation only. Clarke
wondered how many sides there were. Could they even have
sides? How do you form an alliance with someone you know will
stab you in the back the first chance they get? Maybe it's just
every sociopath for himself, she mused.
Then again, it wasn't Lubin who'd had difficulty choosing sides
recently.
"I'm otherwise engaged," Lubin said.
"Naturally. You'd have to have a damn good reason to come all
the way back here. The Mid Atlantic Ridge isn't exactly in the
neighborhood."
"It might be before too long, judging by the recent traffic."
"Ah. Somebody pay you a visit?"
"Not yet. But they're sniffing around close by. It's an
unlikely coincidence."
"Don't look at me, Ken. If I'd spilled
the beans, they wouldn't have to sniff around."
"I'm aware of that."
"Still, you naturally want to know who's on the trail. Ken, I'm
hurt. Why didn't you come to me at—oh, right. You thought I
was dead." Desjardins paused, then added, "You're really
lucky I came along."
"I'm even luckier," Lubin said, "that you need my
help."
The botfly bobbled in a sudden gust of hot wind. "Okay then.
You help me keep N'Am from dying a little while longer, and I'll try
and find out who's stalking you. Deal?"
Lubin considered.
"Seems fair," he said.
Crash
The Crusade, thought Lenie Clarke, could go on without her.
It wasn't as though it needed her services.
Saving lives and ending them were the only two causes worth pursuing
now, and she had no great skill in either. Of course that wasn't
exactly true, she realized even as the thought occurred. When
it came to total kills, there wasn't a person on the planet who could
match her score. But those deaths had been indiscriminate and
untargeted, faceless collateral she'd barely spared a thought for.
Right now, the greater good needed something considerably more
precise: specific individuals, not whole populations. Isolated
faces to be hunted down and—what was the word Rowan had
used?—decirculated.
It didn't have to be a euphemism. There'd be no reason to kill the
vectors once they'd been found, even assuming that Seppuku hadn't
killed them first. There were only three of them after all, with
less than a day's head start in a place where people were no longer a
major part of the landscape. It was quite possible they'd be found
before they could infect too many others, before uneconomies of scale
made wholesale extermination the only viable option. Ten thousand
carriers might have to be burned for want of facilities to contain
them; but ten could be taken alive, isolated and cared for, their
condition studied in hopes of finding a cure. There'd be no need for
outright murder.
I'm not the one with the compulsive murder fetish, Ken.
Either way, it didn't matter. Soon Lubin would be on the hunt,
backed up by all the resources Desjardins could provide; and whether
he was in it for the kill or the thrill of the chase, Clarke's
presence at his side would only slow him down. Taka Ouellette had
already gone on to better things, whisked away to a CSIRA facility
where, as Desjardins had put it, "your skill set can be much
better utilized". She had left with barely another word or a
glance at Lenie Clarke. Now she was probably sitting at the end of a
line that would start with Lubin, waiting to process the people he
tracked down. There was no point along that short route where Lenie
Clarke could be useful.
She couldn't save, and she couldn't kill.
Here, though, in the broken shells of Freeport, she could do
something in between. She could delay. She could hold the fort.
She could keep people from dying of tumors or broken bones, so that
ßehemoth and Seppuku could
take a crack at them instead.
Lubin did her one last favor before leaving.
He navigated through the virtual lightscape of Miri's neocortex,
found the infestation that had betrayed them, and isolated it. It
was too insidious, too deeply dug-in to trust to mere deletion; there
were too many places it could be hiding, too many ways to subvert the
search protocols. The only way to be sure it was gone was to
physically throw out the memory with the monster.
Crouched over the dashboard, Lubin read reams of diagnostic arcana
and called instructions over his shoulder. Behind him, Clarke—up
to her elbows in crystals and circuitry—did the actual cutting.
Lubin told her which card to extract; she did so. He told her which
array to peel from its surface, using a tri-pronged tool with
delicate whisker-thin fingers. She obeyed. She waited while he ran
checks and double-checks on the rest of the system, reseated the
lobotomized unit at his command, poised herself to yank it again
should any remnant of the monster have somehow escaped containment.
Satisfied at last that Miri was clean, Lubin told Clarke to lock and
reboot. She did it without question.
He never told her outright to destroy the infected component. That
was just too obvious a measure to mention.
It was, after all, a part of her.
She didn't know how, exactly; the perverse
logic that had spawned and twisted these electronic demons was
something better left to hackers and evolutionary ecologists. But
back at the beginning, she'd been the template. This thing had taken
its lead from her; it was a reflection, however perverse, of
Lenie Clarke. And irrational though it seemed, she couldn't shake
the sense that it still owed something of itself to the flesh and
blood it was modeled after. She had raged, and hated, for so very
long; perhaps these reflections weren't so distorted after all.
She resolved to find out.
She was no codemeister. She knew nothing about
growing programs or pruning software to specs. She did, however,
know how to snap prefab components together, and Phocoena's
lockers and glove compartments were overflowing with the legacy of
five years' service. The little sub had carried a thousand survey
instruments to Impossible Lake, served in the repair and maintenance
of them all. It had slipped across thermoclines and through Langmuir
Cells, seeding drogues and TDRs into the water column. It had spied
on corpses and moved supplies and served as a general workhorse far
beyond anything its designers had ever intended. After five years,
it had accumulated more than enough building blocks for Lenie Clarke
to play with.
She found a Cohen board in the bottom of a drawer, plugged a battery
onto one of its sockets and a generic OS chip onto another. A
tracery of whisker-thin filaments flickered briefly between the new
components as the board's autodiscovery routines sniffed them out and
made introductions. She had to look a little harder for a user
interface; she couldn't risk a wireless hookup. Finally she found an
old fiberop headset with an integrated infrared keyboard, an |