by Peter Watts
The passage through salvation’s bowels was an arduous one, eight days from ingestion to defecation. The line was long but not wide: economies of scale were hard to come by in the post-corporate landscape. Only a fraction of the afflicted would ever be immunized. But those lucky few owed their lives to the solid, unremarkable worker bees of the second tier.
And then there was Taka Ouellette, who could barely remember a time when she’d been a member of the hive. If it hadn’t been for that one piece of decontamination protocol, carelessly applied, she might still be working the line in Boston. If not for that small slip Dave and Crys might still be alive. There was really no way of knowing for sure. There was only doubt, and what-if. And the fading memory of life as an endocrinologist, and a wife, and a mother.
Now she was just a foot soldier, patrolling the outlands with her hand-me-down mobile clinic and her cut-rate, stale-dated miracles. She hadn’t been paid in months, but that was okay. The room and board was free, at least, and anyway she wouldn’t be welcome back in Boston any time soon: she might be immune to ßehemoth but she could still carry it. That was okay too. This was enough to keep her busy. It was enough to keep her alive.
Finally, silently, the breathing corpse had been withdrawn from competition. Subsequent contenders hadn’t rubbed her nose quite so deeply in her own ineffectuality. For the past few hours she’d been treating more tumors than plague victims. That was unusual, this far from a PMZ. Still, cancers could be excised. It was simple work, drone work. The kind of work she was good for.
So here she was, handing out raf-1 angiogenesis blockers and retrovirii in a blighted, wilting landscape where DNA itself was on the way out. There was some green out there, if you looked hard enough. It was springtime, after all. ßehemoth always died back a bit during the winter, gave the old tenants a chance to sprout and bloom each new year before coming back to throttle the competition. And Maine was about as far as you could get from the initial Pacific incursion without getting your feet wet. Go any further and you’d need a boat and a really good scrambler to keep the missiles off your back.
These days, of course, keeping to land was no longer any guarantee that the EurAfricans wouldn’t be shooting at you. There’d been a time when they’d only shot at targets trying to cross the pond; but given a half-dozen landside missile attacks since Easter they were obviously itching for more effective containment. It was a wonder that the whole seaboard hadn’t been slagged to glass by now. If the dispatches could be believed, N’Am’s defenses were still keeping the worst of it back. Still. The defenses wouldn’t hold forever.
Rossini surrendered to Handel. Ouellette’s line-up was growing. Perhaps three people accumulated for every two she processed. Nothing to worry about, yet; there was a critical mass, some threshold of personal responsibility below which crowds almost never got ugly. These ones didn’t look like they had the strength to go bad even if they’d been motivated to.
At least the pharms had stopped charging for the meds she dispensed. They hadn’t wanted to, of course: hey, did anyone think the R&D for all these magic potions had been free? In the end, though, there hadn’t been much choice. Even small crowds got really ugly when you demanded payment up front.
A forearm the size of a tree trunk, disfigured by the usual maladies: the leprous, silver tinge of stage-one ßehemoth, a smattering of melanomas, and—
Wait a second. That’s odd. The swelling and redness was consistent with an infected insect bite, but the puncture marks...
She looked up at the face above the arm. A leather-skinned man in his fifties looked back through eyes blotchy with burst capillaries. For a moment it seemed as though his very bulk was blotting out the light, but no—it was only dusk, creeping in overhead while she’d been otherwise occupied.
“What did this?” she asked.
“Bug.” He shook his head. “Last week sometime. Itches like a bugger.”
“But there’s four holes.” Two bites? Two sets of mandibles on a single bug?
“Had about ten legs, too. Weird little bugger. Seen ’em around once or twice. Never got bit before, though.” His red eyes squinted with sudden concern. “It poisonous?”
“Probably not.” Taka probed the swelling. Her patient grimaced, but whatever had bitten him didn’t seem to have left anything embedded. “Not seriously, not if it happened last week. I can give you something for the infection. It’s pretty minor, next to…”
“Yeah,” her patient said.
She smeared a bit of antibiotic onto the swelling. “I can give you a shot of antihistamines,” she said apologetically, “but the effects won’t last, I’m afraid. If the itching gets too bad afterward you could always piss on it.”
“Piss on it?”
“Topical urea’s good for itching,” Taka told him. She held up a loaded cuvette; he made the requisite blood offering. “Now if you just—”
“I know the drill.”
A tunnel, a slightly squashed cylinder big enough for a body, pierced the MI from one side to the other—a pair of opposed oval mouths, connected by a sensor-lined throat. A pallet extended from the floor of the nearer mouth like a padded rectangular tongue. Taka’s patient lay back on it; the van listed slightly under his weight. The pallet retracted with an electrical hum. Slowly, smoothly, the man disappeared into one mouth and extruded from the other. He was luckier than some. Some went in and never came out. The tunnel doubled as a crematorium.
Taka kept one eye on the NMR readouts, the other on the blood work. From time to time, both eyes flickered uneasily to the growing line of patients.
“Well?” came the man’s voice from the other side of the van.
He’d been here before, she saw. Her sideshow tweaks had already taken hold in his cells.
And his Stage-One was still advancing.
“Well, you know about your melanomas, obviously,” she remarked as he came around the corner. She drew a time-release raf-1 from the dispensary and loaded it up. “This’ll starve the tumors on your skin, and a few others cooking inside you probably didn’t know about. I take it you’ve been in a clave recently, or a PMZ?”
He grunted. “Came here a month back. Maybe two.”
“Uh huh.” The static-field generators installed in such places were a mixed blessing at best. Bathing in that kind of field for any length of time was guaranteed to set tumors blooming in the flesh like mushrooms in shit. Most people considered it the lesser evil, even though the fields didn’t so much repel ßehemoth as merely impede it.
Taka didn’t ask what had inspired this man to abandon that leaky protection for enemy territory. Such decisions were seldom voluntary.
He offered his arm: she shot the capsule sub-q, just over the bicep. “There are a couple of other tumors, I’m afraid. Not so vascularised. I can burn them out, but you’ll have to wait until I’m a little less busy. There’s no real hurry.”
“What about the witch?” he said.
Firewitch, he meant. ßehemoth.
“Um, according to your blood work you’ve already taken the cocktail,” Taka said, pretending to recheck the results.
“I know. Last fall.” He coughed. “I’m still getting sick.”
“Well if you were infected last fall, it’s doing its job. You’d have been dead by winter without it.”
“But I’m still getting sick.” He took a step towards her, a big, big man, his bloody eyes narrowed down to red slits. Behind him, others waited with limited patience.
“You should go to Bangor,” she began. “That’s the closest—”
“They won’t even tell you the wait at Bangor,” he spat.
“What I can do here, what I—it’s not a cure,” she explained carefully. “It’s only supposed to buy you some time.”
“It did. So buy me more.”
She took a cautious, placating step backwards. One step closer to the voice-command pickup for Miri’s defense systems. One step away from trouble.
Trouble stepped after he
r.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Taka said softly. “The resistance is already in your cells. Putting it in again won’t do anything. I guarantee it.”
For a moment, she thought he might back off. The words seemed to penetrate; the tension ebbed a bit from his posture. The lines around his eyes seemed to twist somehow, some less-volatile mix of confusion and hurt replacing the fear and anger that had been there before.
And then he removed all hope with the hardest smile she’d ever seen.
“You’re cured,” he said, and moved.
It was an occupational hazard. Out here, some believed that resistance could be transmitted through sexual contact. That made it easy to get laid, if you were into such things: there were those who held the Immunized in almost cultish esteem, begged sexual congress as a form of inoculation. It was something of a joke among Taka’s peers.
Somewhat less amusing were the tales of field medics held prisoner, raped repeatedly in the name of public health. Taka Ouellette had no intention of offering herself to the greater good.
Neither did the thing she unleashed.
The password was Bagheera. Taka had no idea what it meant; it had come with the van and she’d never bothered to change it.
The chain of events it was supposed to trigger stopped far short of total commitment. On hearing its master’s call, the MI’s defenses would snap to attention: all ports and orifices would slam shut and lock tight, with the exception of the cab door closest to the authorized operator. The weapons blister on Miri’s roof —a sunken, mirrored hemisphere when at rest— would extend from its silo like a gleaming chrome phallus, high enough for a clear shot at anyone not flattened defensively against the sides of the vehicle itself. (For any who might be, the chassis itself could come alive with high-voltage electricity.) Primary weaponry started with a tightbeam infrasonic squawkbox capable of voiding bowels and stomachs at ten meters. Escalation would call on twin gimbaled 8000-Watt direct-diode lasers which could be tuned to perforate or merely blind; nonprojectile weapons were always favored because of the ammunition issue. However, to guard against the risk of laser-defeating mirrors and aerosols, ancillary projectile weapons were usually made available to the savvy field doctor; Taka’s rig also fired darts primed with a conotoxin tweaked for ten-second respiratory paralysis.
None of this was supposed to fire automatically. Bagheera should only have brought those systems into full alert, countered one threat with a greater one, and given any aggressor the chance to back off before anyone got hurt. There should have been no escalation absent Taka’s explicit command.
“Bagheera,” she growled.
The lasers cut loose.
They didn’t fire at the red-eyed man. They started slicing through the lineup behind him. Half a dozen people fell bisected, cauterized, their troubles suddenly over. Others stared disbelieving at neat, smoking holes in their limbs and torsos. On the far side of a sudden barbequed jigsaw, brown grass burst into flame. Water Music played on in the background without missing a beat.
After a moment that seemed to go on forever, people remembered to scream.
The Red-eyed man, all threat and bluster gone from his body, stood dumbfounded and pincushioned by a dozen neurotoxic darts. He gaped soundlessly at Taka, teetering. He raised his hands, palms up, supplicating: goddamn woman, I never meant…!
He toppled, rigid with tetanus.
People ran, or twitched, or lay still. The lasers dipped and weaved, scrawling blackened gibberish onto the ground. Fire guttered here and there among the curlicues, bright staccatos against the failing light.
Taka pulled frantically at the passenger door; fortunately the renegade system hadn’t charged the hull. It had locked her out, though; this was the door that was supposed to stay unlocked, the route to refuge—
It’s online how in God’s name can it be online —
But she could see the telltale on her dashboard, flashing scarlet. The MI was somehow uplinked to the wide wireless world, to the networked monsters that lived and hunted in there, to—
A Madonna. A Lenie. It had to be.
Another telltale winked from a different part of the dashboard. Belatedly, Taka read the signs: the driver’s door was unlocked. She threw herself around the front of the vehicle. She kept her eyes on the ground, some religious impulse averting them from the wrath of God, if I don’t see it maybe it won’t see me but she could hear the turret just above her, tracking and firing, tracking and—
She piled into the cab, yanked the door behind her, locked it.
The cab’s eyephones lay on the floor beside the seat. A tiny aurora of light writhed across the deck from its oculars. She snatched up the phones and held them to her face.
The Madonna’s twisted face raged within an inset on the main display. There was no sound—Taka left the headset muted by default.
Shitsucker. It got in through GPS. She always kept GPS offline when she wasn’t traveling; somehow the invader must have spoofed the system.
She killed nav. The screaming thing in the window went out. Overhead, the lasers ceased fire with a downshifting whine.
Water Music had ended sometime during the massacre. Tchaikovsky had stepped into the gap. Iolanta.
It seemed like a very long while before she dared to move.
She killed the music. She hugged herself, shaking. She tried very hard not to cry like a frightened child. She told herself she’d done what she could.
She told herself it could have been worse.
Madonnas could do almost anything in their own environment. Cruising through the walls and the wires and the wavelengths of N’AmNet they could penetrate almost any system, subvert almost any safeguard, bring down almost any calamity upon the heads of people for whom disaster had long since become the status quo. Just the week before, one had breached the flood-control subroutines of some dam in the Rockies, emptied a whole reservoir onto an unsuspecting populace sleeping in the spillway’s shadow.
Forcing access into one lousy MI would have been simplicity itself to such a creature.
It hadn’t downloaded, at least. No room. Neither nav nor weapons-system chips were anywhere near big enough to support something so complex, and the medical systems—the only habitat in the van that could hold something that size—were kept manually disconnected from the net except for prearranged updates. The monsters could do a lot of things in virtual space, but they hadn’t yet figured out how to reach into the real world and physically flip a switch. So this one had simply extended long, vicious fingers from some faraway node, wreaking havoc from a distance until Taka had cut it off.
Her own dim image stared back, haunted and hollow-eyed, from the darkened dashboard. The perspex, subtly convex, stretched her reflection lengthwise, turned gaunt into downright attenuate. A fragile refugee from some low-gravity planet, civilized and genteel. Banished to a hellish world where even your own armor turned against you.
What if I— she thought, and stopped herself.
Wearily, she unlocked the door and climbed out onto the killing floor. There were still a fair number of patients in sight. None were standing, of course. Few moved.
What if I didn’t—
“Hello!” she called to the empty streets and dark façades. “It’s okay! It’s gone! I shut it out!”
Moans from the injured. Nothing else.
“Anybody! I could really use a hand here! We’ve got—we’ve got…”
What if I didn’t turn GPS off?
She shook her head. She always took it offline. She didn’t specifically remember doing it this particular time, but you never remembered rote stuff like that.
“Anybody?”
Maybe you fucked up. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Would it, Dave?
It seemed so dark all of a sudden. She raised her eyes from the carnage; twilight was bleeding away to the west.
That was when she noticed the contrails.
Condom
Phocoena’s bu
lkheads are luminous with intelligence. The periscope feed delivers crisp rich realtimes of the maritime nightscape: dark sparkling waves in the foreground, black fingers of dry land reaching into the view from either side. A jumble of bright buildings rises above the coastline in center screen, huddled together against the surrounding darkness. Boxy unlit silhouettes to the south belie the remains of a whole other city south of the Narrows, abandoned in the course of some recent retreat.
The city of Halifax. Or rather, the besieged city-state that Halifax has evidently become.
That naked-eye visual occupies the upper-left quarter of the main panel. Beside it, a false-color interpretation of the same view shows a fuzzy, indistinct cloud enveloping the lit buildings; Clarke thinks of the mantle of a jellyfish, enclosing vital organs. The shroud is largely invisible to human eyes, even rifter ones; to Phocoena’s spectrum-spanning senses, it looks like a blue haze of heat lightning. Static-field ionization, Lubin says. A dome of electricity to keep airborne particles at bay.
The seaward frontier is under guard. Not that Clarke ever expected to simply sneak into the harbor and pull up next to the local clam shack; she knew there’d be some kind of security in place. Lubin was expecting mines, so for the last fifty klicks Phocoena crawled towards the coast behind a couple of point drones zig-zagging ahead, luring any countermeasures out of concealment. Those flushed a single burrower lying in wait; awakened by the sound of approaching machinery, it shot from the mud and corkscrewed into the nearest drone with a harmless and anticlimactic clunk.
That lone dud was the only countermeasure they came across on the outer slope. Lubin figures that Halifax’s subsurface defenses must have been used up fending off previous incursions. The fact that they haven’t been replenished doesn’t bode well for the mass-production of industrial goods in the vicinity.
At any rate, against all expectations they’ve cruised unchallenged all the way here, just outside Halifax Harbor. Only to nearly run into this. Whatever this is.