Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Seven and a half square kilometers found itself excised from the world along these boundaries. Surface traffic moved within and without, but not across; the rapitrans grid went utterly dark across its breadth. The flow of information took a little longer to cut off—

  —wouldn’t you know it another goddamned quarantine looks like I won’t be able to make our eight-thirty after all, hello? Hello? Jesus fucking Christ …

  —but eventually even electrons respected the new borders. The target, after all, was well-known to receive assistance from such quarters.

  But it was not enough to simply cut this parallelogram out of the world. Lenie Clarke still moved there, among several hundred thousand sheep. Lubin let Burton off the leash for a while.

  A blond Peruvian was putting a telemetry panel through its paces in one corner of the hut. Lubin joined her while Burton feasted on the application of naked force. “Kinsman. How are they doing?”

  “Complaining about the noise. And they always hate freshwater ops. Makes them feel heavy.”

  Her panel was a matrix of views from cams embedded in the leading edge of each dolphin’s dorsal fin. A gray crescent marred the lower edge of each window, where the animals’ melons intruded on the view. Ghostly shapes slipped past each other in the green darkness beyond.

  Endless motion. Those monsters never even slept; one cerebral hemisphere might, or the other, but they were never both unconscious at the same time. Tweaked from raw Tursiops stock only four generations old, fins and flippers inlaid with reinforcements that gave new meaning to the term cutting-edge, echolocation skills honed so fine over sixty million years that hard tech could still barely match it. Humanity had tried all sorts of liaisons with the Cetacea over the years. Big dumb pilot whales, eager to please. Orcas, too large for clandestine ops and a little too prone to psychosis in confined spaces. Lags and Spots and all those stiff-necked open-water pansies from the tropics. But Tursiops was the one, had always been the one. Not just smart; mean.

  If Clarke got that far, she’d never see them coming.

  “What about the noise?” Lubin asked.

  “Industrial waterfronts are loud at the best of times,” Kinsman told him. “Like an echo chamber, all those flat reflective surfaces. You know how you feel when someone shines bright lights in your eyes? Same thing.”

  “Are they just complaining, or will it interfere with the op?”

  “Both. It’s not too bad now, but when the storm sewers start draining you’re gonna have a dozen white-water sources pounding into the lake all along this part of the seawall. Lots of noise, bubbles, stuff kicked off the bottom. Under ideal conditions my guys can track a Ping-Pong ball at a hundred meters, but the way it’s going outside—I’d say ten, maybe twenty.”

  “Still better than anything else we could deploy under the same conditions,” Lubin said.

  “Oh, easily.”

  Lubin left Kinsman to her charges and grabbed his pack off the floor. The storm assaulted him the moment he left the hut’s soundproof interior. The downpour drenched on contact. The sky above was as black as the asphalt below; both flashed white whenever lightning ripped the space between. Lubin’s people stood on conspicuous duty along the seawall, punctuating every vantage point. The rain turned them slick and black as rifters after a dive.

  Shoot to kill was a given. It might not be enough, though. If Clarke made it this far, there were too many places she could simply dive off an embankment. That was okay: in fact, Lubin rather expected it. That was what the subs and the snoops and the dolphins were for.

  Only the subs were useless close to shore, and now Kinsman was saying the dolphins might not be able to acquire a target more than a few meters away …

  He set his pack down and split it open.

  And if the dolphins can’t catch her, what makes you think you can?

  The odd thing was, he actually had an answer.

  Burton was waiting when Lubin got back inside. “We’ve rounded up a bunch of—oh, very nice. A salute to the enemy, maybe? In her final hour?”

  Lubin assayed a slight smile, and hoped that someday soon Burton would pose a threat to security. His eyecaps slid disconcertingly beneath lids not quite reacclimated to their presence. “What do you have?”

  “We have a bunch of people who look a lot like you do right now,” Burton said. “None of them have actually seen Clarke—in fact, none of them even knew she was in town. Maybe the anemone’s losing its touch.”

  “The anemone?”

  “Haven’t you heard? That’s what people are calling it now.”

  “Why?”

  “Beats me.”

  Lubin stepped over to the chessboard; half a dozen cylindrical blue icons shone at points where civilians were being held to assist the ongoing investigation.

  “Of course, we’re a long way from sampling the whole population yet,” Burton continued. “And we’re concentrating on the obvious groupies, the costumes. There’ll be a lot more in civvies. Still, none of the people we’ve interrogated so far knows anything. Clarke could have an army if she wanted, but as far as we can tell she hasn’t even begged a sandwich. It’s completely off-the-wall.”

  Lubin slipped his headset back on. “I’d say it’s standing her in good stead now,” he remarked mildly. “She seems to have you dead-ended, anyway.”

  “There are other suspects,” Burton said. “Lots of them. We’ll turn her up.”

  “Good luck.” The tacticals in Lubin’s visor were oddly drained of color—oh, right. The eyecaps. He eyed the blue cylinders glowing in the zone, tweaked his headset controls until they resaturated. Such clean, perfect shapes, each representing a grand violation of civil rights. He was often surprised at how little resistance civilians offered in the face of such measures. Innocent people, detained by the hundreds without charge. Cut off from friends and family and—at least for those who’d have been able to afford it—counsel. All in a good cause, of course. Civil rights should run a distant second to global survival in anyone’s book. The usual suspects didn’t know what was at stake, though. As far as they knew, this was just another case of officially sanctioned thugs like Burton, throwing their weight around.

  Yet only a few had resisted. Perhaps they’d been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment’s notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn’t fight something like that, you couldn’t fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.

  Or maybe just accepting that that’s what they’d always been.

  Not Lenie Clarke, though. Somehow, she’d gone the other way. A born victim, passive and yielding as seaweed, had suddenly grown thorns and hardened its stems to steel. Lenie Clarke was a mutant; the same environment that turned everyone else into bobbing corks had transformed her into barbed wire.

  A white diamond blossomed near Madison and La Salle. “Got her,” the comlink crackled in a voice Lubin didn’t recognize. “Probably her, anyway.”

  He tapped into the channel. “Probably?”

  “Securicam snapshot down in a basement mall. No EM sensor down there, so we can’t confirm. We got a threequarter profile for a half second, though. Bayesians say 82 percent likely.”

  “Can you seal off that block?”

  “Not automatically. No master kill switches or anything.”

  “Okay, do it manually.”

  “Got it.”

  Lubin switched channels. “Engineering?”

  “Here.” They’d set up a dedicated line to City Planning. The people on that end were strictly need-to-know, of course; no hint of the stakes involved, no recognizable name to humanize the target. A dangerous fugitive in the core, yours is not to question why, full stop. Almost no chance for messy security breaches there.

  “Have you got the fix on La Salle?” Lubin asked, zooming t
he chessboard.

  “Sure do.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “These days, not much. Originally retail, but most of the merchants moved out with the spread. A lot of empty stalls.”

  “No, I mean substructures. Crawl spaces, service tunnels, that sort of thing. Why aren’t I seeing any of that on the map?”

  “Oh, shit, that stuffs ancient. TwenCen and older. A lot of it never even got into the database; by the time we updated our files nobody was using those areas except derelicts and wireheads, and with all the data-corruption problems we’ve been having—”

  “You don’t know?” A soft beeping began in Lubin’s head: someone else wanting to talk.

  “Someone might have scanned the old blueprints onto a crystal somewhere. I could check.”

  “Do that.” Lubin switched channels. “Lubin.”

  It was his point man on the seawall. “We’re losing the tanglefoam.”

  “Already?” They should have had at least another hour.

  “It’s not just the rainfall, it’s the storm sewers. They’re funneling precip from the whole city right out through the seawall. Have you seen the volume those drains are putting out?”

  “Not recently.” Things just kept getting better.

  Burton, unrebukably occupied with his own duties, nonetheless seemed to have an ear cocked in Lubin’s direction. “I’ll be right out,” Lubin said after a moment.

  “That’s okay,” Seawall said. “I can just feed you a—”

  Lubin killed the channel.

  White water roared from a mouth in the revetment, wide as a tanker truck. Lubin couldn’t begin to guess at the force of that discharge; it extended at least four meters from the wall before gravity could even coax it off the horizontal. The tanglefoam had retreated on all sides; Lake Michigan heaved and thrashed in the opened space, reclaiming even more territory.

  Great.

  There were eleven drains just like this along the secured waterfront. Lubin redeployed two dozen inshore personnel to the seawall.

  City Planning beeped in his ear. “ … nd some …”

  He cranked up the filters on his headset; the roar of the storm faded a bit. “Say again?”

  “Found something! Two-D and low-res, but it looks like there’s nothing down there but a service crawlway running above the ceiling and a sewer main under the floor.”

  “Can they be accessed?” Even with the filters, Lubin could barely hear his own voice.

  Engineering didn’t seem to have any trouble, though. “Not from the concourse, of course. There’s a physical plant under the next block.”

  “And if she got into the main?”

  “She’d end up at the treatment plant on Burnham, most likely.”

  They had Burnham covered. But—“What do you mean, most likely? Where else could she end up?”

  “Sewage and storm systems spill together when things get really swamped. Keeps the treatment facilities from flooding. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though. By the time things get this crazy, the flow’s great enough to dilute the sewage—”

  “Are you saying—” A bolt of lightning cut the sky into jagged fragments. Lubin forced himself to wait. The thunderclap in the ensuing darkness was deafening. “Are you saying she could be in the storm sewers?”

  “Well, theoretically, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’d have to be an awful lot of water going through before the systems would mix. The moment your fugitive crossed over she’d be sucked down and drowned. No way she could fight the current, and there wouldn’t be any airspace left in the pi—”

  “Everything’s going through the storm system now?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Will the grates hold?”

  “I don’t understand,” Engineering said.

  “The grates! The grilles covering the outfalls! Are they rated to withstand this kind of flow?”

  “The grates are down,” Engineering said.

  “What!”

  “They fold down automatically when cubic meters-persec gets too high. Otherwise they’d impede flow and the whole system would back up.”

  Heavy metal strikes again.

  Lubin opened an op-wide channel. “She’s not coming overland. She’s—”

  Kinsman, the dolphin woman, cut in: “Gandhi’s got something. Channel twelve.”

  He switched channels, found himself underwater. Half the image was a wash of static, interference even the Bayesians couldn’t clear in realtime. The other half wasn’t much better: a foamy gray wash of bubbles and turbulence.

  A split-second glimpse, off to the left: a flicker of darker motion. Gandhi caught it too, twisted effortlessly into the new heading. The camera rotated smoothly around its own center of focus as the dolphin rolled over on its back. The murk darkened.

  He’s going deep, Lubin realized. Coming up from underneath. Good boy.

  Now the image centered on a patch of diffuse radial brightness, fading to black on all sides: the optics of ascent toward a brighter surface. Suddenly the target was there, dead to rights: silhouetted arms, a head, flashing stage left and disappearing.

  “Hit,” Kinsman reported. “She never saw it coming.”

  “Remember, we don’t want her bleeding out there,” Lubin cautioned.

  “Gandhi knows the drill. He’s not using his pecs, he’s just ram—”

  Again: a piecemeal human shadow, found and lost in an instant. The image jarred slightly.

  “Huh,” Kinsman said. “She saw that coming somehow. Almost got out of the way in time.”

  The implants. For an instant Lubin was back on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, comfortably suspended under three kilometers of black ice water. Feeling Beebe’s sonar tick-tick-ticking against the machinery in his chest …

  “She can feel the click trains,” he said. “Tell Gandhi to lay—”

  Another pass. This time the target faced her attacker head-on, eyes bright smudges in a dark jigsaw, one arm coming up in a vain attempt to ward off two hundred kilograms of bone and muscle wait a second she’s holding something she’s—

  The image skidded to the left. Suddenly the water was spinning again, no smooth controlled rotation this time, just a wild slewing corkscrew, purely ballistic, slowing against ambient drag. The darkness of deep water swelled ahead. A different darkness spilled in from the side, a gory black cloud spreading into brief cumulus before the currents tore it apart.

  “Shit,” Kinsman said. Lubin’s headset amped the whisper loud enough to drown thunder.

  She kept her billy. All the way from Beebe, hitching and walking and riding across the whole damn continent.

  Good for her …

  The vision imploded to darkness and a final flurry of static. Lubin was back on the waterfront, sheets of rain beating the world into a blur scarcely brighter than the one he’d just left.

  “Gandhi’s down,” Kinsman reported.

  Kinsman tag-teamed two more dolphins to the site of Gandhi’s last stand; Lubin pulled abreast on the seawall a few moments after they arrived. Burton was waiting there with a charged squid, water cascading from his rainskin.

  “Fan them out,” Lubin told Kinsman over the link. “Hyperbolic focus on the carcass, offshore spread.” He grabbed his fins off the scooter and stepped to the edge of the seawall, Burton at his side. “What about Gandhi?”

  “Gandhi’s sockeye,” Kinsman said.

  “No, I mean what about emotional ties? What impact will his loss have on the efficiency of the others?”

  “For Singer and Caldicott, none. They never liked him all that much. That’s why I sent them.”

  “Okay. Line up the rest on a converging perimeter, but keep. them away from the outfalls.”

  “No problem,” Kinsman acknowledged. “They wouldn’t be much good in there anyway, with those acoustics.”

  “I’m switching to vocoder in thirty seconds. Channel five.”

  “Got it.” />
  Burton watched neutrally as Lubin bent over to pull on his fins. “Bad break!” he shouted over the storm. “About the sewers, I mean!”

  Lubin snugged his heel straps, reached out for the squid. Burton handed it over. Lubin sealed his face flap. The diveskin reached across his eyelids and bonded to the caps beneath, blocked nose and mouth like liquid rubber. He stood, isolated from the downpour, calmly suffocating.

  Good luck, Burton mouthed through the rain.

  Lubin hugged the squid to his chest and stepped into space.

  Michigan closed over his head, roaring.

  Fifteen meters to the north, one of Chicago’s outfalls spewed an endless vomit of wastewater into the lake; the whirlpools and eddies from that discharge reached Lubin with scarcely diminished strength. A fog of microscopic bubbles swirled on all sides, smeared muddy light throughout the water. Bits of detritus looped through eccentric orbits, fading to white just past the reach of his fingers. Water sucked and slurped. Overhead, barely visible, the rain-pelted surface writhed like mercury under rapid-fire assault—and all around, omnipresent in the heavy surge, the deep deafening roar of waterfalls.

  Lubin spun in the current, insides flooding, and reveled.

  He didn’t think that Lenie Clarke was headed for deep water just yet. She might not have anticipated the minisubs lurking deep offshore; she knew about the dolphins, though, and she knew about sonar. She knew all about the effects of turbulence on sensory systems both electronic and biological. She’d stay close to shore, hiding in the cacophony of the outfalls. Soon, perhaps, she’d edge north or south in furtive stages, creeping along a murky jungle of wreckage and detritus left over from three centuries of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. Even in calm weather there’d be no shortage of hiding places.

  Now, though, she was injured, probably fighting shock. Gandhi had hit her twice before Clarke had rallied; it was amazing that she’d even stayed conscious through that pounding, let alone fought back. For the time being she was holed up somewhere, just hanging on.