by Peter Watts
"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...