Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  Carbon scoring. Something's burned this whole section.

  She steps through the hatch into what must have been someone's quarters, judging by the bunk-bed frame and the bedside table that occupies one modest wall. Frames, skeletal remnants of furniture, are all that's left. If there were ever mattresses or sheets or blankets here, they're gone now. Every surface is coated in dark greasy soot.

  From somewhere out in the hall, the creak of metal hinges.

  Clarke steps back into the corridor and tracks the sound. By the time it stops she's got a fix, and a beacon—light, bouncing dimly back down the passageway from around a corner just ahead. That way was dark and silent when she stepped into the cabin; now, she can even hear distant waves.

  She follows the light. Finally she comes to an open hatch at the base of a companionway, leading up. Ocean breeze sneaks past her into the rig, carrying the sound of seabirds and the wet rubbery scent of Ascophyllum. For a moment she's taken aback; the light pours down from the head of the stairs, easily bright enough to bring color back into the world, and yet the walls are still—

  Oh.

  The polymer around the lip of the hatch has bubbled and burned; all that remains are lumpy, flaking clots of carbon. Clarke pulls experimentally at the wheel; the hatch scarcely moves, screeching softly against the deposits caking its hinges.

  She rises into daylight, and devastation.

  It's a small rig, as such things were measured. Nowhere near the city-sized monstrosities that once crowded the ocean hereabouts. Perhaps, by the time it was built, oil was already falling out of fashion; or perhaps there simply wasn't enough left to warrant a bigger investment. For whatever reason, the main hull is only two stories thick along most of its length. Now Clarke rises onto the wide-open expanse of its roof.

  The rig's deck stretches over half the area of a city block. There's an elevated helipad at the far end, and a great crane whose tendons have been cut; it lies across the deck at a messy angle, struts and crossbeams slightly crumpled on impact. The derrick at the nearer end is relatively intact, thrusting into the sky like a wireframe phallus. Clarke rises in its shadow, into something that was once a control hut of some kind. Now it's a rectangular ruin; none of the four walls remain intact, and the roof itself has been thrown halfway across the deck. There were control panels and electronics here once—she recognizes the general outlines of half-melted instrumentation.

  This is how completely the hut has been destroyed: Lenie Clarke can simply step onto the main deck over what's left of the walls.

  All this space, this uninterrupted visibility, unsettles her. For five years she has hidden beneath the heavy, comforting darkness of the North Atlantic, but up here—up here, she can see all the way to the edge of the world. She feels naked, like a target: visible from infinite distance.

  Lubin is a small figure on the far side of the platform, his back turned, leaning on the western railing. Clarke walks towards him, skirting the wreckage, suddenly oblivious to the wheeling of the gulls. She nears the edge, fights momentary vertigo: Sable Archipelago spreads out before her, an insignificant chain of sandy dots in the middle of the ocean. The nearest looks big enough from here, though, its spine sheathed in brownish vegetation, its beach stretching almost out of sight to the south. Off in that distance, Clarke thinks she sees tiny specks in vague motion.

  Lubin's wearing a pair of binoculars, panning his head slowly from side to side. Scanning the island. He doesn't speak as Clarke joins him on the railing.

  "Did you know them?" she asks softly.

  "Perhaps. I don't know who was out here when it happened."

  I'm sorry, she almost says, but what's the point?

  "Maybe they saw it coming," she suggests. "Maybe they got away."

  He doesn't look away from the shoreline. The binocs extend from his eyes like tubular antennae.

  "Should we be out in the open like this?" Clarke asks.

  Lubin shrugs, startlingly, chillingly indifferent to security.

  She looks down along the shoreline. The moving specks are a bit larger now, some kind of animals from the look of it. They appear to be moving this way.

  "When do you suppose it happened?" Somehow, it seems important to keep him talking.

  "It's been almost a year since we got a signal from them," he says. "Could've been any time since then."

  "Could've been last week," Clarke remarks. There was once a time when their allies were much more faithful in their correspondence. Even so, extended silence doesn't always mean anything. You had to wait until no one was listening. You had to be careful not to give the game away. Both corpse and rifter contacts went dark now and then, back in the early days. Even now, after a year of silence, it's not unreasonable to keep hoping for news, someday. Any day.

  Except now, of course. Except from here.

  "Two months ago," Lubin says. "At least."

  She doesn't ask how he knows. She follows his magnified gaze back to shore.

  Oh my God.

  "They're horses," she whispers, amazed. "Wild horses. Holy shit."

  The animals are close enough now to be unmistakable. An image comes to her, unbidden: Alyx in her sea-floor prison, Alyx saying this is the best place I could possibly be. Clarke wonders what she'd say now, seeing these wild things.

  On second thought, it probably wouldn't impress her. She was a corpse kid, after all. She'd probably toured the world a dozen times before she was eight. Maybe even had a horse of her own.

  The herd stampedes along the beach. "What are they doing out here?" Clarke wonders. Sable wasn't a proper island even back before the rising seas partitioned it; it's never been more than a glorified sand dune, crawling around the outer edges of the Shelf's exhausted oil fields under the influence of wind and currents. She can't even see any trees or shrubs on this particular island, just a mane of reedy grass running along its backbone. It seems absurd that such an insignificant speck of land could support creatures so large.

  "Seals, too." Lubin points along the shore to the north, although whatever he sees is too distant for Clarke's unmagnified vision. "Birds. Vegetation."

  The dissonance of it sinks in. "Why the sudden interest in wildlife, Ken? I never took you for a nature lover."

  "It's all healthy," he says.

  "What?"

  "No carcasses, no skeletons. Nothing even looks sick." Lubin slips the binocs from his skull and slides them back into his fanny pack. "The grass is rather brown, but I suspect that's normal." He sounds almost disappointed for some—

  ßehemoth, she realizes. That's what he's looking for. Hoping for. Up here the world burns its hot zones—at least, it burns those small enough to carry any hope of containment in exchange for the lives and land lost to the flame. ßehemoth threatens the entire biosphere, after all; nobody gives a damn about collateral damage when the stakes are that high.

  But Sable is healthy. Sable is unburned. Which means the destruction around them has nothing to do with ecological containment.

  Someone is hunting them.

  Clarke can't really blame them, whoever they are. She'd have been dying up here with everyone else if the corpses had had their way. Atlantis was only built for the Movers and Shakers of the world; Clarke and her buddies were just another handful of the moved and the shaken as far as that elite was concerned. The only difference was that Achilles Desjardins had told them where the party was, so they could crash it before the lights went out.

  So if this is the anger of those left behind, she can hardly begrudge it. She can't even dismiss it as misplaced. After all, ßehemoth is her fault.

  She looks back at the aftermath. Whoever did this isn't nearly as good as Desjardins was. They're not bad, mind you; they were smart enough to deduce Atlantis's general whereabouts, anyway. The variant of ßehemoth they rejigged utterly defeats the retrofitted immunity that was supposed to protect its citizenry. The fact that they even got close enough to seed ß-Max in the right vicinity may have won them the game, ju
dging from the body count that was starting up as Phocoena went into the field.

  But they still haven't found the nest. They prowl the neighborhood, they've burned this lonely outpost on the frontier, but after all this time Atlantis itself continues to elude them. Now, Desjardins—it took him less than a week to winnow three hundred and sixty million square kilometers of seabed down to a single set of lats and longs. He not only painted the bullseye, he pulled the strings and erased the tracks and arranged the rides to get them there.

  Achilles, my friend, Clarke thinks. We could really use your help about now. But Achilles Desjardins is dead. He died during Rio. Even being CSIRA's best 'lawbreaker doesn't do you much good when a plane drops on your head.

  For all Clarke knows, he may have been killed by the same people who did this.

  Lubin is walking back along the platform. Clarke follows. Wind slices around her, frigid and biting; she could almost swear she feels its teeth through the diveskin, although that must be her imagination. Nearby, some accidental wind-tunnel of pipes and plating moans as if haunted.

  "What month is it?" she asks aloud.

  "June." Lubin's heading for the helipad.

  It seems a lot colder than it should be. Maybe this is what passes for balmy since the Gulf Stream shut down. Clarke's never been able to wrap her head around that paradox: that global warming should somehow have turned eastern Europe into Siberia...

  Metal stairs lead up to the pad. But Lubin, reaching them, doesn't climb; he steps behind them and drops to one knee, intent on the underside of the frame. Clarke bends down at his side. She sees nothing but scraped, painted metal.

  Lubin sighs. "You should go back," he says.

  "Not a chance."

  "Past this point I won't be able to return you. I can afford a forty-six hour delay more than I can afford someone slowing me down once we get to the mainland."

  "We've been over this, Ken. What makes you think I'm going to be any easier to convince now?"

  "Things are worse than I expected."

  "How, exactly? It's already the end of the world."

  He points at a spot under the stairs where the paint's been scraped off.

  Clarke shrugs. "I don't see anything."

  "Right." Lubin turns and starts back towards the scorched remains of the control hut.

  She sets out after him. "So?"

  "I left a backup recorder behind. Looked like a rivet." He brings his hand out, holds thumb and forefinger close together, almost touching, for scale. "Even painted it over. I would never have been able to find it." The forefinger extends; Lubin's pointing hand describes an imaginary line between hut and staircase. "Nice short line-of-sight to minimize power consumption. Omnidirectional broadcast; impossible to backtrack. Enough memory for a week's worth of routine chatter, plus anything they might have sent our way."

  "That's not much," Clarke remarks.

  "It wasn't a long-term record. When it ran out of new memory it overwrote the old."

  A black box, then. A moving record of the recent past. "So you were expecting something like this," she surmises.

  "I was expecting that if something happened, I'd at least be able to retrieve some kind of log. I wasn't expecting to lose the recorder. I was the only one who knew it was here."

  They've returned to the radio shack. The blackened door frame still stands, an absurd rectangle rising from the rubble. Lubin, perhaps out of some cryptic respect for standard procedure, passes through it. Clarke simply steps over the knee-high tatters of the nearest wall.

  Something snaps and cracks around her ankle. She looks down. Her foot is imprisoned in a blackened human ribcage, her leg emerging from a shattered hole where the sternum used to be. She can feel the knobs and projections of the spine underfoot, brittle and crumbling under the slightest weight.

  If there's a skull—or arms or legs—they must be buried in the surrounding rubble.

  Lubin watches while she pulls her foot from the remains. Something glitters behind his eyecaps.

  "Whoever's behind this," he says, "is smarter than me."

  His face isn't really expressionless. It just looks that way to the uninitiated. But Lenie Clarke has learned to read him, after a fashion, and Lubin doesn't look worried or upset to her. He looks excited.

  She nods, undeterred. "So you need all the help you can get."

  She follows him down.

  Nightingale

  It seemed as if they came out of the ground itself. Sometimes that was literally true: increasing numbers lived in the sewers and storm drains now, as if a few meters of concrete and earth could hold back what heaven and earth had failed to. Most of the time, though, it was only appearance. Taka Ouellette's mobile infirmary would pull up at some municipal crossroads, near some ramshackle collection of seemingly-abandoned houses and strip malls which nonetheless disgorged a listless trickle of haggard occupants, long past hope but willing to go through the motions in whatever time they had left. They were the unlucky unconnected who hadn't made it into a PMZ. They were the former skeptics who hadn't realized until too late that this was the real thing. They were the fatalists and the empiricists who looked back over the previous century and wondered why it had taken this long for the world to end.

  They were the people barely worth saving. Taka Ouellette did her best. She was the person barely competent to save them.

  Rossini wafted from the cab behind her. Ouellette’s next case staggered forward, oblivious to the music, a woman who might once have been described as middle-aged: loose-skinned, stiff-limbed, legs moving on some semifunctional autopilot. One of them nearly buckled as she approached, sent the whole sad body lurching to one side. Ouellette reached out but the woman caught herself at the last moment, kept upright more through accident than effort. Both cheeks were swollen bruised pillows: the rheumy eyes above them seemed fixed on some indeterminate point between zenith and horizon. Her right hand was an infected claw, curled around an oozing gash.

  Ouellette defocused on the gross ravages and zoomed down to the subtler ones: two melanomas visible on the left arm; tremors in the right; some dark tracery that looked like blood poisoning, creeping up the wrist from the injured palm. The usual symptoms of malnutrition. Half of the signs were consistent with ßehemoth; none were incontrovertible. Here was a woman suffering violence across several orders of magnitude.

  Ouellette tried on a professional smile, although the fit had never been a good one. "Let's see if we can't get you fixed up."

  "That's okay," said the woman, stargazing. Ouellette tried to guide her towards the van with one gloved hand (not that she needed the gloves, of course, but these days it wasn't wise to remind people of such things). The woman jerked away at her touch—

  "That's okay. That's okay—"

  —staggered against some invisible wall and stumbled off, locked on heaven, oblivious to earth.

  "That's okay…"

  Ouellette let her go.

  The next patient wasn't conscious and wouldn't have been able to move if he had been. He arrived on a makeshift stretcher, an oozing jigsaw of lesions and twitches, short-circuiting nerves and organs that hadn't bothered waiting for the heart to give out before starting to rot. The sickly-sweet smell of fermented urine and feces hung around him like a shroud. His kidneys and his liver were in a race to kill him first. She couldn't lay odds on the winner.

  A man and two children of indeterminate sex had dragged this breathing corpse before her. Their own faces and hands were uncovered, in oblivion or defiance of the half-assed protective measures promoted by endless public-service announcements.

  She shook her head. "I'm sorry. It's end-stage."

  They stared back at her, eyes filled with a pleading desperate hope that verged on insanity.

  "I can kill him for you," she whispered. "I can cremate him. That's all I can do."

  Still they didn't move.

  Oh, Dave. Thank God you died before it came to this...

  "Do you understand?"
she said. "I can't save him."

  That was nothing new. When it came to ßehemoth, she wasn't saving anybody.

  She could have, of course. If she were suicidal.

  Protection against ßehemoth came packaged in a painstaking and complex series of genetic retrofits, an assembly line that took days—but there was no technical reason why it couldn't be crammed into a portable rig and taken on the road. A few people had done that very thing, not so long ago. They'd been torn limb from limb by hordes too desperate to wait in line, who didn't trust that supply would exceed demand if they'd only be patient a little while longer.

  By now, those places that offered a real cure were all fortresses built to withstand the desperation of mobs, built to enforce the necessary patience. Further from those epicenters Taka Ouellette and her kind could walk among the sick without fear of sickness; but it would have been be a death sentence to offer a cure so far from back-up. The most she could do here was bestow quick-and-dirty retrovirals, half-assed tweaks that might allow some to survive the wait for a real cure. All she could risk was to slow the process of dying.

  She didn't complain. In more complacent times, she knew, she might not have been trusted to do even that much. That hardly made her unique: fifty percent of all medical personnel graduate in the bottom half of their class. It didn't matter nearly as much as it once had.

  Even now, though, there was a hierarchy. The ivy-leaguers, the Nobel laureates, the Meatzarts—those had long since ascended into heaven on CSIRA's wings. There they worked in remote luxury, every cutting-edge resource within easy reach, intent on saving what remained of the world.