Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Both sides were behaving really well, all things considered. Which made sense, kind of, since neither side was mainly there for the other. Vive figured things would heat up pretty quick once the star attraction showed up.

  Her watch beeped. That was a surprise: the opposition always jammed the local frequencies way in advance, before anything even broke out. It kept people from organizing on the fly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, we got through!” Lindsey’s voice.

  “Yeah,” Vive said. “Forces of darkness slow on the draw today.”

  “I forgot to say I want mustard. Oh, and Jen wants a samosa.”

  “As well as a dog, or instead?”

  “Instead.”

  “’Kay.” Lindsey and jen were at the perimeter, keeping an eye on enemy movements while Vive went for supplies. They were all veterans now, pros with two or three actions under their belts. All of them had been gassed or shocked at least once. Jen had even spent a night in a pacifier, from which they’d all learned a timely lesson in the importance of pregame nourishment: POWs didn’t get fed for at least the first twelve hours—bad enough in any case, but worse when you’d gotten yourself all ’dorphed up for the party. Cranking your BMR really brought on the munchies.

  There was a row of vending machines lined up on the far wall of the concourse: medbooths, fashion dispensers, arrays of prepackaged foods. Vive shouldered her way through the crowd, homing in on a holographic Donair turning in space like some edible Holy Grail.

  Someone grabbed her from behind.

  Before she could react she was inside one of the medbooths, pushed up against the sensor panel. A woman with shoulder-length blond hair pinned her there, one hand splayed against Vive’s sternum. She wasn’t on the team; she had a visor across her eyes, and a backpack, and the rest of her wasn’t rifter either. A pissed-off pedestrian maybe, caught in the swarm.

  The medbooth door hissed shut behind her, blocking the deciblage from outside. The woman leaned back, opening a bit of a space in the crowded enclosure.

  “What is this?” the woman said.

  “This is really rude,” Vive snapped back. “Also kidnapping or something probably. Not that those—”

  “Why are you—” The woman paused. “Why the costume? What’s going on?”

  “It’s a street party. I guess you never got invit—”

  The woman leaned fractionally closer. Vive shut up. There was something about this situation that was starting to give her serious pause.

  “Answer me,” the crazy woman said.

  “We’re—we’re rifters,” Vive told her.

  “Right.”

  “Lenie Clarke’s in town. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Lenie Clarke.” The crazy woman took her hand off Vive’s chest. “No shit.”

  “None at all.”

  A sudden dim sound, like distant surf, filtered in, from outside. The crazy woman didn’t seem to notice.

  “This is insane.” She shook her head. “What are you going to do, exactly, when Lenie Clarke shows up?”

  “Look, we’re just here to see what happens. I don’t make up the threads, all right?”

  “Get an autograph, maybe. Get a gram of flesh or two, if there’s enough to go around.”

  Suddenly, that voice had turned very flat and very scary.

  She could kill me, Vive thought.

  She kept her own voice sweet and reasonable. Meek, even: “We’re not hurting you. We’re not hurting anyone.”

  “Really.” The crazy woman leaned in close. “You sure about that? Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even is?”

  Vive broke.

  It wasn’t a plan. At least it wasn’t a very good one. The medbooth barely held both of them, and the door was behind the crazy woman: there was no room around. Vive just sprang forward like a cornered dog, tried desperately to squirm past. Both fell back into the door; the door, obligingly, slid open.

  Even in that split second, Vive took it in: a botfly nearby, spewing canned warnings about orderly dispersal. The movement of the crowd, no longer vague and diffuse but concentrated, pushed together like a school of krill in a purse seine. Conversation fading; shouts starting up.

  The herding was under way.

  Vive’s momentum carried the crazy woman less than a meter before the edge of the crowd pushed back. The rebound put both of them inside the booth again. Vive launched herself low, under the other woman’s arm—sudden, tearing pain over one eye—

  “Ow!”

  —and a hand closed around her throat, pushed her back, her legs shooting out from under her, her feet briefly trampled by some nameless crowd-particle until she pulled them back with a cry and the door slid shut again, cutting the outside world down to a faint roar.

  Oh, felch …

  Aviva Lu sat on the floor of the medbooth, her legs pulled up in front of her, and forced her eyes to track upward. Crazy Woman’s legs. Crazy Woman’s crotch. It seemed like it would take forever to get to the eyes, and Vive was terrified of what she’d find when she got—

  Wait a second-

  There, just to the left of Crazy Woman’s sternum—a tear in her clothing, a hard crescent glint of metal.

  That’s what cut me. Something metal on her chest. Sticking out of her chest …

  Crazy Woman’s hand. Holding her visor, broken in the scuffle, one earpiece gone. Crazy Woman’s throat; a turtleneck sweatshirt covering any disfigurement there.

  Crazy Woman’s eyes.

  What had she said? That’s right: Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even is?

  “Oh, wow,” said Aviva Lu.

  “You’re kidding,” said Lenie Clarke. They stood facing each other, breathing each other’s air in the medbooth.

  “One thread said you were infected with nanobots that could reproduce outside your body and start fires when they had a big enough population. They said you were fucking your way across the world to infect everyone else, so we’d all have the power someday.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Clarke said. “It’s all bullshit. I don’t know how it got started.”

  “All of it?” Vive didn’t know what to make of all this. For the Meltdown Madonna, Lenie Clarke didn’t seem to have a clue. “You’re not on some kind of crusade, you’re not—”

  “Oh, I’m on a crusade all right.” Lenie flashed a smile that Vive couldn’t decompile. “I just don’t think any of you want to see it succeed.”

  “Well, you were down in the ocean,” Vive said. “For the Big One. What happened down there?” It couldn’t all be detritus, could it? “And on the Strip? And—”

  “What’s happening right here?” Lenie said.

  Vive gulped. “Right.”

  “How did they even know about me? How did you know?”

  “Well, like I said, someone spread the word.”

  Lenie shook her head. “I guess I’d be caught right now if it wasn’t for …”—faint crowd sounds filtered through from outside—“that …”

  “Well, they’ll never tag you on visual,” Vive said. “There’s like a few sagan Lenie Clarkes out there, and you don’t look like any of ’em.”

  “Yeah. And how many of them have a chestful of machinery to go with the eyecaps?”

  Vive shrugged. “Probably none. But—oh. The botflies.”

  “The botflies.” The Meltdown Madonna took a deep breath. “If they haven’t tagged me already, I’m going to be a big bright EM rainbow the second I step outside.”

  “I wondered why they weren’t jamming our watches,” Vive said. “They don’t want to scramble your sig.”

  “What if I just wait in here until everybody goes away?”

  “Won’t work. I’ve run this before; half hour, tops, before they gas the whole place and just walk in.”

  “Shit. Shit.” Lenie looked around the booth like some kind of caged alien.

  “Wait a sec,” Vive said. “Are they looking for your exact signature, or jus
t any old EM?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, how do your implants shine?”

  “A lot of myoelectrics. Boosted source for the electrolysis assembly and the reservoir dumps, of course. And the vocoder.” The rifter smiled, a tiny challenge. “That mean anything to you?”

  “Like a prosthetic heart, only stronger.”

  “Got any friends with a fake heart? Maybe I could use them as a decoy.”

  “Les beus might just around up everyone with implants and sort ’em out later.” Vive thought. “You don’t need a decoy, though. You just need to jam your own signal. You shouldn’t be putting out more than two milligausse, tops. Standard wall line would mask that, but then you wouldn’t be able to move away from the wall. And watches and visors don’t have the field strength.”

  Lenie cocked her head. “You some kind of expert?”

  Vive smiled back. “Lady, this is Yankton! We’ve been doing electronics since before the Dust Belt. Linse says they even invented botflies here, but Lins slings a lot of slaw. We’re supposed to be cramming for our practicums even as we speak, actually, but this sounded like more fun.”

  “Fun.” Those cold blank eyes—more translucent, Vive realized, than the paste the rest of them wore—stared down at her. “That’s the word I would’ve used.”

  A light came on in Vive’s head.

  “Hey,” she said. “There is something that puts out a bit of a field. Portable, too. It’d be touchy—we’d have to play with its insides or it’d attract all kinds of the wrong attention—but you wouldn’t have to be around for that part anyway.”

  “Yeah?” Lenie asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Vive told her. “No problem.”

  Les beus had the crowd cordoned off and were pushing them back across the concourse. The rifters on the edge were getting shocked, of course, but at least nobody’d dropped any gas bombs yet. The crowd moved like an ocean, great sweeping waves emerging miraculously from the constrained jostling of a million trapped particles. The comparison went further than that, Vive knew: human oceans had backwash, undertow. People could get sucked underneath and trampled.

  She let the currents carry her along. Jen and Lindsey bobbed behind her to either side. Vive had told two friends; they’d told two friends; so on; so on. All around them fission was taking place, just below the surface. You could barely see it at first; people worked their way through the crowd from all sides, tacking against the current until they were just an arm or two away from Vive et al. Glances, nods were exchanged. The local turbulence subsided just a tiny bit as friends and allies anchored each other against the push and pull.

  Within minutes Aviva Lu was the bull’s-eye in a crowded circle of calm.

  Three botflies approached in formation a couple of meters above the crowd, reciting the usual riot-act platitudes. Vive glanced at Jen; Jen shook her visored head. The machines cruised past, recessed muzzles dimpling their bellies.

  Jen tugged at her sleeve, gestured: another ’fly coming up the concourse. Vive slipped her own visor over her eyes and magged on the target. No obvious gunports or arc electrodes. Purely surveillance, this one. Glorified note-taker. Vive looked back at Jen, at Linse.

  Both nodded.

  Vive doffed the visor and hooked it over her belt; some things you still needed your own eyes for. Her arms went around Jen’s and Lindsey’s shoulders, just three ol’ girlfriends out for a good time, nothing to see here. The crowd blocked any view of Vive pulling up her legs, now all her weight on the shoulders of her friends, now most of it weighing on the stirrups Jen and Lindsey had improvised by interlocking their hands. The ’fly cruised closer, scanning the crowd. Maybe it was interested in this curious little knot of stability in the Brownian storm. Maybe it was on its way somewhere else entirely.

  If so, it never got there.

  The botfly was out of reach to anyone jumping unassisted from the floor; it was an easy mark for someone boosted by ’dorphderms and a two-stage launch. Jen and Lindsey bounced into a quick squat and heaved, throwing Vive into the air. At the same time, Vive pushed off against their hands. She embraced her inner überchick, endorphins singing throughout her body. The botfly floated into her embrace like a big beautiful Easter egg. She wrapped her arms around it and hugged.

  The ’fly never had a chance. Built entirely of featherweight polymers and vacuum bladders, its ground-effect lift couldn’t have been more than a kilo or two. Aviva Lu shackled it like ball with no chain, brought it down into the arms of the welcoming crowd.

  A roar went up on all sides. Vive knew that wordless sound, and she knew what it meant: First Blood.

  Not the last, though. Not by a long shot.

  They smashed the botfly against the floor, shielded by a swaying forest of human bodies. They went after the lens clusters and antennae first; they’d all be sockeye if they didn’t get the ’fly off-line real fast. It wasn’t easy. Modern tech had long since figured out how to combine light with strong, and evolution hadn’t come up with the egg shape for no reason either. Jen and Linse had their tool kits out.

  On all sides, the sounds of escalation.

  Shouts turned to screams, rising briefly then lost in the ambient roar. Something exploded nearby. An electronic buzzer honked in the distance like a quarantine siren; official notification that the pigs were on the warpath.

  Pregame show over. First period under way.

  Something went

  BANG!

  right in Vive’s ear; she jumped, stumbled against a pair of legs. Jen, a little too eager to cut through the carapace, had ruptured one of the vacuum bladders. A high, pure tone trumped the sound of the riot. Vive shook her head.

  A hand on her shoulder; Linse in her face, mouthing got it over the dial tone in Vive’s head. Jen held up a necklace of optical chips and a battery, strung along a mist of fine fiberop. Behind her, their buffer guard staggered against some conducted impact. The space began to collapse around them.

  Go.

  Vive grabbed the necklace and stood. A human storm surged and collided on all sides; she could barely see over it. Fifteen meters away a phalanx of botflies was bearing down like the Four Horsemen. Some joker in springsoles trampolined into the air and tagged the one in the lead. A tiny lightning bolt arced between jumper and jumped; Springsole Boy grand mal’d in midair and dropped back into the melee.

  The botflies, undeterred, were heading right for Vive.

  Oh shit. Surge pushed her backward. Her feet tangled in the carcass of the dismembered floater. The opening in the crowd had completely collapsed; bodies pressed close on all sides, kept her from falling. Vive lifted her feet off the ground. The crowd carried her as though she were levitating. The wreckage passed beneath.

  Still the botflies came at her. We weren’t fast enough. It got off a signal, it sent a picture—

  She could see their electrodes. She could see their gunports. She could even see their eyes, staring coldly down at her behind their darkened shields …

  Right overhead.

  Past.

  They’re after Jen and Linse. Vive twisted around, following the flies in their pursuit. Shit, they just left, they don’t have enough of a lead, they’re gonna—

  Right out of left field, another botfly charged into view and rammed the leader.

  What—

  The head of the phalanx skidded sideways, out of control. The attacking botfly spun and charged the next in line. It came down from above, hitting its quarry and knocking it down a meter or so.

  Far enough. The crowd surged up and engulfed it in a hungry, roaring wave.

  Bad move, that. A surveillance ’fly was one thing; but those other ones were armed.

  Yelps. Screams. Smoke rising. The submerged botfly ascended triumphant from the crowd. The crowd tried to pull back from that epicenter, ran into its own seething resistance; a wave propagated out across the riot, the panic spreading even if the panic-stricken couldn’t.

  The rogue botfly was charging
again. Its targets were starting to regroup.

  What the hell is going on? Vive wondered. Then: Lucky break. Don’t waste it.

  Ten or fifteen meters to the medbooths. Solid chaos in the way. Vive started pushing. There were still people nearby who were in on the plan; they moved back as much as they could, trying to part the Red Sea for her passage. It was still start-stop all the way—too many out of the loop, too many simply gone rabid on the battlefield. Even half the people who had grabbed the bone had dropped it again.

  “I saw her.”

  A K voice, calm but amped loud enough to hear over ambient. Vive threw a glance back over her shoulder.

  The rogue botfly was talking. “I saw her come out of the ocean. I saw what—”

  One of the assault ’flies fired. The rogue staggered in midair, wobbled dangerously.

  “—I saw what they did on the Strip.”

  The medbooth slid open. Clarke stood framed in the doorway.

  Vive leaned close, handed over the necklace. “Keep this up near your chest!” she shouted. “It’ll mask the signal!”

  The rifter nodded. Someone spilled between them, shouting and swinging indiscriminate fists. Lenie hammered back at that panicky face until it disappeared beneath the surface.

  “They sent a tidal wave to kill her. They sent an earthquake. They missed.”

  Lenie Clarke turned to the voice. Her eyes narrowed to white featureless slits. Her mouth moved, framing words drowned in the roar:

  Oh, shit …

  “We gotta go!” Vive shouted. Someone pushed her right up against Lenie’s tits. “This way!”

  “They’re burning the whole world to catch her. She’s that important. You can’t—”

  Squeal. Feedback. The sound of sparking circuitry. Suddenly the botfly seemed rooted in midair.

  “—You can’t let them have her—”

  The Four Horsemen cut loose. The rogue spun down into the crowd, gushing flame. Fresh screams. The Horsemen regrouped and resumed their original course.