by Peter Watts
She forced herself to look away. "Yeah." And then, surprised: "Can you?"
"The guts show up on my inlays. This whole hangar is a wireframe schematic." He looked around as if sighted. "That assembly's on autopilot. I think it handles refueling."
The clamshell doors met overhead with a dull, echoing boom. In the next instant the gantry jerked to life and began sliding towards them along its rail. A pair of waldos unfolded like the forelimbs of a mantis. They ended in clawed nozzles.
"I think you're right." Clarke said. "It's—"
"I see it."
"How do we get out of here?"
He turned his blind, pitted eyes on her. He pointed at the approaching arthropod.
"Climb," he said.
He guided her through rafters and crawlways as though born to them. He quizzed her on the color-coding of overhead pipes, or which side of a given service tunnel was more streaked with the stains of old condensation. They found their way into an uninhabited locker room, traversed a gauntlet of lockers and toilet stalls to an open shower.
They washed down. No longer flammable, they turned their attention to blending in. Lubin had brought dryback clothing wadded up in his backpack. Clarke had to make do with a pair of gray coveralls lifted from a row of a half-dozen hanging along one wall. A bank of lockers lined the wall opposite, locked with snapshots and thumb pads; Lubin made a mockery of their security while Clarke dressed. The weave tightened around her into a reasonable approximation of a good fit.
"What are you looking for?" she asked.
"Sunglasses. Visor, maybe."
Four jimmied lockers later, Lubin gave up. They returned to the echoing arena of the main hanger. They walked brazenly across open space in plain view of eight service techs. They passed beneath the swollen bellies of four lifters, and gaping bays that would have held another three. They wound along rows of clicking, articulated machinery, waving casually across the floor at people in blue coveralls, and—at Lubin's insistence—keeping a discrete distance from others wearing gray.
They found an exit.
Outside, the buildings were packed so closely that their upper floors seemed to lean together. Arches and skywalks spanned the narrow airspace above the street, connecting opposing facades like stretched arteries. In other places the buildings themselves had melded at the fifth floor or the fortieth, overhanging boles of plastic and biosteel fusing one structure to another. The sky was visible only in dark fragments, intermittently sparking with static electricity. The street was a spaghetti of rapitrans rails and narrow sidewalks doubling as loading platforms. Neither rails nor walkways carried much traffic. Colors were a muted wash to Clarke's eyes; drybacks would see intermittent pools of dim copper light, and many deep shadows between. Even in these relict nodes of civilization, energy seemed in short supply.
Ken Lubin would be seeing none of the surfaces. Perhaps he saw the wiring underneath.
She found them a market in the shadow of a third-story overhang. Half the machines were offline, but the menu on the Levi's dispenser twinkled invitingly. Lubin suggested that she trade up from the coveralls; he offered his wristwatch to enable the transaction but the machine sensed the long-forgotten currency chip embedded in Clarke's thigh, still packed with unspent pay from her gig at the Grid Authority. It lasered her for fit while Lubin got a pair of nightshades and a tube of skin cream from a Johnson & Johnson a few stalls down.
She pulled on her new clothing while Lubin whispered into his wristwatch; Clarke couldn't tell whether he was talking to software or flesh-and-blood. She gathered from his end of the conversation that that they were in the northern core of Toromilton.
Afterwards they had places to go. They climbed from the floor of the city into a mountainous range of skyscrapers: office buildings mostly, long-since converted to dormitories for those who'd been able to buy their way out of the 'burbs when the field generators went up. There weren't many people abroad up there, either. Perhaps the citizenry didn't come out at night.
She was a seeing-eye dog, helping her master hunt for Easter eggs. He directed her; she led him. Lubin muttered incessantly into his watch as they moved. His incantations catalyzed the appearance of strange objects in unlikely places: a seamless box barely bigger than a handpad, nestled in the plumbing of a public toilet; a brand-new wristwatch, still in the original packaging, on the floor of an elevator that rose past the mezzanine with no one on board. Lubin left his old watch in its place, along with a tiny ziplock of derms and plug-ins from his own inventory.
At a vending wall on the same level he ordered a roll of semipermeable adhesive tape and a cloned ham-and-cheese. The tape was served up without incident, but no sandwich appeared on its heels; instead a pair of hand-sized containers slid down the chute, flattened opalescent cylinders with rounded edges. He popped one of them open to reveal pince-nez with opaque jade lenses. He set them on his nose. His jaw twitched slightly as he reset some dental switch. A tiny green star winked on at the edge of the left lens.
"Better." He looked around. "Depth perception's not all it could be."
"Nice trick," Clarke said. "It talks to your inlays?"
"More or less. The image is a bit grainy."
Now Lubin took the lead.
"There's no easier way to do this?" she asked him, following. "You couldn't just call up the GA head office?"
"I doubt I'm still on their payroll." He turned left at a t-junction.
"Yeah, but don't you have—"
"They stopped replenishing the field caches some time ago," Lubin said. "I'm told any leftovers have long since been acquired by unilaterals. Everything has to be negotiated through contacts."
"You're buying them off?"
"It's not a question of money."
"What, then?"
"Barter," he said. "An old debt or two. In-kind services."
At 2200 they met a man who pulled a gossamer-fine thread of fiberop from his pocket and plugged it into Lubin's new wristwatch. Lubin stood there for over half an hour, motionless except for the occasional twitching of fingers: a statue leaning slightly into some virtual wind, as if poised to pounce on empty air. Afterwards the stranger reached up and touched the blisters on Lubin's face. Lubin laid one brief hand on the other man's shoulder. The interaction was subtly disquieting, for reasons Clarke couldn't quite put her finger on. She tried to remember the last time she'd seen Ken Lubin touch another person short of violence or duty, and failed.
"Who was that?" she asked afterwards.
"No one." And contradicting himself in the next second: "Someone to spread the word. Although there's no guarantee even he can raise the alarm in time."
At 2307 Lubin knocked at a door in a residential retrofit in the middle reaches of what had once been the Toronto Dominion Center. A brown-skinned, grim-faced ectomorph of a woman answered. Her eyes blazed a startling, almost luminous golden-orange—some kind of cultured xanthophyll in the irises—and she loomed over Lubin by a head or more. She spoke quietly in a strange language full of consonants, every syllable thick with anger. Lubin answered in the same tongue and held out a sealed ziplock. The woman snatched it, reached behind the half-open door, threw a bag at his feet —it landed with the muffled clank of gloved metal—and closed the door in his face.
He stowed the bag in his backpack. "What did she give you?" Clarke asked.
"Ordnance." He started back down the hall.
"What did you give her?"
He shrugged. "An antidote."
Just before midnight they entered a great vaulted space that might once have been the centerpiece of a mall. Now its distant ceiling was eclipsed by a warren on stilts, a great mass of prefab squats and storage cubes held together by a maze of improvised scaffolding. It was a more efficient use of space than the extravagant emptiness of the old days, if a whole lot uglier. The bottom of the retrofit stood maybe four meters off the original marbled floor; occasional ladders reached down through its underside to ground level. Dark seams cracked the str
ucture here and there, narrow gaps in a patchwork quilt of plastic and fiber paneling: a bounty of peepholes for hidden eyes. Clarke thought she heard the rustling of large animals in hiding, the occasional quiet murmur of muffled voices, but she and Lubin seemed to be the only ones here on the floor beneath.
Sudden motion to the left. A great fountain had once decorated the center of this place; these days its broad soapstone basin, spread out in the perpetual shadow of the squat, seemed to serve primarily as a community dumpster. Pieces of a woman were detaching themselves from that backdrop. The illusion was far from perfect, now that Clarke focused on it. The chromatophores on the woman's unitard mimicked her background in broad strokes at best, producing more of a blurry translucence than outright invisibility. Not that this particular K seemed to care about camouflage; the ambulatory hair wasn't exactly designed to blend with the background.
She approached them like a fuzzy cloud with body parts attached. "You must be Kenny," she said to Lubin. "I'm Laurel. Yuri said you had skin problems." She gave Clarke an appraising glance, blinking over pupils slit subtly vertical. "I like the eyes. Takes balls to go for rifter chic in these parts."
Clarke looked back expressionlessly. After a moment, Laurel turned back to Lubin. "Yuri's wait—"
Lubin snapped her neck Laurel sagged bonelessly into his arms, her head lolling.
"Fuck, Ken!" Clarke staggered back as if she'd been kicked in the stomach. "What are you..."
From the rustling cliff dwellings above them, sudden silence.
Lubin had Laurel laid out on her back, his pack at her side. Her cat eyes stared up at the belly of the squat, wide and astonished.
"Ken!"
"I told you in-kind services might be necessary." He fished a handgrip of some kind from his pack, pressed a stud on its hilt. A thin blade snicked into view. It hummed. One stroke and Laurel's unitard was split from crotch to throat. The elastic fabric pulled apart like slashed mesentery.
Chat. Snap. Sag. Just like that. It was impossible to banish the image.
Deep abdominal cut, right side. No blood. A wisp of blue smoke curled up from the incision. It carried the scent of cauterizing flesh.
Clarke looked around frantically. There was still no one else in sight, but it felt as though a thousand eyes were on them. It felt as though the whole teetering structure over their heads was holding its breath, as though it might collapse on them at any second.
Lubin plunged his hand into Laurel's side. There was no hesitation, no exploratory poke-and-prod. He knew exactly where he was going. Whatever he was after must be showing up on his inlays.
Laurel's eyes turned in her head. They stared at Lenie Clarke.
"Oh God, she's alive..."
"She can't feel it," Lubin said.
How could he do this? Clarke wondered, and an instant later: After all these years, how could I still be surprised?
Lubin's blood-soaked hand came back into sight. Something pea-sized glistened like a pearl in the clotting gore between thumb and forefinger. A child began crying somewhere in the warren overhead. Lubin lifted his face to the sound.
"Witnesses, Ken..."
He stood. Laurel lay bleeding out at his feet, her eyes still fixed on Lenie Clarke.
"They're used to it." He started walking. "Come on."
She backed away a few steps. Laurel stared steadily at the place where Lenie Clarke had been.
"No time," Lubin called over his shoulder.
Clarke turned and fled after him.
Island Airport pushed up against the southern reaches of the static dome. There was no island that Clarke could see, only a low broad building with helicopters and ultralights scattered across its roof. Either there was no security or Lubin's negotiations had seduced it; they walked unaccosted to a four-seater Sikorsky-Bell outfitted with passive cloaking. The pearl shucked from Laurel's guts proved to be the keys to its heart.
Toromilton dimmed in the distance behind them. They flew north beneath the sight of some hypothetical radar, threading between silver-gray treetops. Darkness and photocollagen hid a multitude of sins; for all Clarke knew every plant, every rock, every square meter of the landscape below was coated in ßehemoth. You couldn't tell through the photoamps, though. The terrain scrolling past was frosted and beautiful. Occasional lakes slid beneath them like great puddles of mercury, dimly radiant.
She didn't mention the view to Lubin. She didn't know if his prosthetic eyes came equipped with night vision, but he'd switched them off anyway—at least, the little green LED was dark. Nav must be talking directly to his inlays.
"She didn't know she was carrying it," Clarke said. They were the first words she'd spoken since Laurel's eyes had fixed and dilated.
"No. Yuri made her a home-cooked meal."
"He wanted her dead."
"Evidently."
Clarke shook her head. Laurel's eyes wouldn't leave her alone. "But why that way? Why put it inside her?"
"I suspect he didn't trust me to keep up my end of the deal." The corner of Lubin's mouth twitched slightly. "Rather elegant solution, actually."
So someone thought that Ken Lubin might be reluctant to commit murder. It should have been cause for hope.
"For the keys to a helicopter," Clarke said. "I mean, couldn't we just—"
"Just what, Lenie?" he snapped. "Fall back on all those high-level contacts that I used to have? Call the rental agency? Has it still not dawned on you that a continental hot zone and five years of martial law might have had some impact on intercity travel?" Lubin shook his head "Or perhaps you don't think we're giving Desjardins enough time to set up his defenses. Perhaps we should just walk the distance to give him a sporting chance."
She'd never heard him talk like this before. It was as if some chess grand-master, renowned for icy calm, had suddenly cursed and kicked over the board in the middle of a game.
They flew in silence for a while.
"I can't believe it's really him," she said at last.
"I don't see why not." Lubin was back in battle-computer mode. "We know he lied about Seppuku."
"Maybe he made an honest mistake. Taka's an actual MD and she even—"
"It's him," Lubin said.
She didn't push it.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Sudbury. Evidently he didn't want to give up home-field advantage."
"It wasn't destroyed during Rio?"
"Desjardins caused Rio."
"What? Who told you that?"
"I know the man. It makes sense."
"Not to me."
"Desjardins was the first to slip the leash. He had a brief window in which he was the only man on the planet with all the power of a 'lawbreaker and none of the constraints. He used it to eliminate the competition before Spartacus freed them."
"But it wasn't just Sudbury. Rio took out cities all over." She remembered words and images streaming across the Atlantic. An industrial lifter inexplicably crashing into the CSIRA tower in Salt Lake. A fast-neutron bomb in the unlikely hands of the Daughters of Lenie. Quantum shriekers falling from orbit onto Sacramento and Boise.
"Sudbury wouldn't have been the only franchise seeded," Lubin pointed out. "Desjardins must have obtained the list and gone to town."
"And blamed it on Rio," Clarke murmured.
"All the post-hoc evidence pointed there. Of course, the city was vaporized before anyone had a chance to ask questions. Very little forensic evidence survives ground zero." Lubin tapped a control icon. "As far as anyone knew at the time, Desjardins saved the day. He was the toast of the town. At least he was the toast of anyone with enough clearance to know who he was."
There was a subtext to the aridity in Lubin's voice. His clearance had been revoked by then.
"But he couldn't have got everyone," Clarke said.
"He didn't have to. Only those infected with Spartacus. That would have been a minority even in seeded franchises, assuming he hit them early enough."
"There'd still
be people off shift, people off sick—"
"Wipe out half a city, you get them too."
"Still—"
"You're right, to a point," Lubin allowed. "It's likely some escaped. But even that worked in Desjardins's favor. He can't very well blame Rio for his actions now. He can't blame everything on Madonnas, but as long as convenient scapegoats from Rio or Topeka are at large, nobody's likely to suspect him when some piece of high-level sabotage comes to light. He saved the world, after all."
She sighed. "So what now?"
"We go get him."
"Just like that, huh? Blind spy and his rookie sidekick are going to battle their way through sixty-five floors of CSIRA security?"
"Assuming we can get there. He's likely to have all approaches under continuous satellite surveillance. He must have planned for the word getting out eventually, which means he'll be equipped to handle large-scale retaliation up to and including missile attacks from overseas. Far more than we can muster."
"He thinks he can take on the rest of the world?"
"More likely he only expects to see the rest of the world coming in time to get away."
"So is that your plan? He's expecting an all-out assault so he won't notice one measly helicopter?"
"That would be nice," Lubin admitted with a grim smile. "I'm not counting on it. And even if he doesn't notice us on approach, he's had nearly four years to fill the building itself up with countermeasures. It would probably be impossible for us to guard against them all even if I knew what they were."
"So what do we do?"
"I'm still working on the details. I expect we'll end up walking through the front door."
Clarke looked at his fingernails. The dried blood beneath turned their edges brown.
"You've put all these pieces together," she said. "They make him a monster."
"Aren't we all."
"He wasn't. Do you even remember?"
Lubin didn't answer.
"You were going to kill me, remember? And I'd just killed everyone else. We were the monsters, Ken, and you remember what he did?"
"Yes."
"He tried to save me. From you. He'd never even met me face to face, and he knew exactly who I was and what I'd done, and he knew first-hand what you were capable of. And it didn't matter. He risked his life to save mine."