by Peter Watts
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 gap
s. 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, tr
aces 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—"