by Peter Watts
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.
"May
be 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 pos
ition 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?"