by Peter Watts
Now Lubin had to do his.
Clarke was safe, surely. The lifters could scorch the sky and the earth and even the surface of the sea, but they wouldn’t be able to reach anything lurking on the bottom. Phocoena was invisible and untouchable. Afterwards, when the flames had died down, he would come back and check on her.
In the meantime he had a perimeter to patrol. He’d come in from the west, along Dyer Road; there’d been no outgoing traffic. Now he banked south, bypassing the firestorm on a vector that would intercept I-95. The lifters had approached from the north. Any refugees with wheeled transportation would most likely be fleeing in the opposite direction.
Maybe one of them would give him an excuse.
Thirteen kilometers down the track he got a hit on long-range motion. It was a heavy return, almost a truck, but it dropped off the scope just a few seconds after acquisition. He climbed and did a lateral sweep at one-fifty; that netted him two intermittent contacts in quick succession. Then nothing.
It was enough. The target had deked east off the highway and disappeared into ground clutter, but he had a fix on the last hit. With any luck those coordinates would lie on a side road without too many intersections. With any luck the target was down to a single degree of freedom.
For once, luck was with him. The road was a winding thing, obscured by the tangled overreaching arms of dying trees that would have hidden it completely in greener days. Those branches were still thick enough to scramble any clear view of a moving object, but they couldn’t hide it entirely. At its current speed the target would reach the coast in a few minutes.
The ocean sparkled in the distance, a flat blue expanse picketed by rows of ivory spires. From here those spires were the size of toothpicks; in fact, each stood a hundred meters tall. Trifoliate rotors spun lazily atop some, each slender blade as long as a ten-story building; on others the rotors were frozen in place, or missing a foil. A few had been entirely decapitated.
Some kind of industrial complex nestled amongst the staggered feet of the windmills, a floating sprawl of pipes and scaffolds and spherical reservoirs. Coarse details resolved as Lubin neared the coast: a hydrogen cracking station, probably feeding Portland a discreet fifteen or twenty klicks to the south. It was dwarfed by distance and the structures that powered it, although it was easily several stories tall.
Over the water now. Behind him the road broke free of the necrotic forest and curved smoothly along the coast. It ended at a little spill of asphalt that bled out and congealed into a parking lot overlooking the ocean. No way out except the way in; Lubin banked back and down into position as the target emerged from cover and passed beneath him.
It was Miri.
I might have known, he thought. I never could trust that woman to stay put.
He dropped down over the road and stalled a couple of meters up, letting the ground-effectors set him down near the entrance to the lot. The MI idled silently before him, windows dark, doors closed, weapons blister retracted. A sign on a nearby guard rail played sponsored animations of a view from better days. Across the water, the wind farm turned its tattered blades in the breeze.
It had to be Clarke at the wheel. Lubin had watched Ouellette recode the lock, and she’d only authorized the three of them to drive. On the other hand, they’d disabled the cab’s internal intruder defenses. It was possible, albeit unlikely, that Clarke was driving with a gun to her head.
He’d landed right beside the embankment that sloped to the shoreline. That was cover, if he needed it. He got out of the ultralight, ready to hit the dirt. He was at the far edge of Miri’s diagnostic emanations. Her virtual guts flickered disconcertingly in and out of view. He killed his inlays and the distraction.
The MI’s driver door swung open. Lenie Clarke climbed out. He met her halfway.
Her eyes were naked and brimming. “Oh God, Ken. Did you see?”
He nodded.
“I knew those people. I tried to help them, I know it was pointless, but I...”
He had only seen her like this once before. He wondered, absurdly, if he should put his arms around her, if that would provide some sort of comfort. It seemed to work with other people, sometimes. But Lenie Clarke and Ken Lubin had always been too close for that kind of display.
“You know it’s necessary,” he reminded her.
She shook her head. “No, Ken. It never was.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “Why do you say that?”
She glanced back at the MI. Instantly, Lubin’s guard snapped up.
“Who’s with you?” he asked in a low voice.
“Ricketts,” she told him.
“Rick—” He remembered. “No.”
She nodded.
“He came back? You didn’t call for containment?” He shook his head, appalled. “Len, do you know what you—”
“I know,” she said, with no trace of regret.
“Indeed. Then you realize that in all likelihood, Freeport was burned because you—”
“No,” she said.
“He’s a vector.” He stepped around her.
She blocked him. “You’re not touching him, Ken.”
“I’m surprised I even have to. He should have been dead days ag—”
I’m being an idiot, he realized.
“What do you know?” he asked.
“I know he’s got incipient Seppuku. Sweating, fever, flushed skin. Elevated metabolism.”
“Go on.”
“I know that a few days ago, he had advanced Seppuku.”
“Meaning—”
“So weak he could barely move. Had to feed on an IV. He had to use a saccadal keyboard to even talk.”
“He’s getting better,” Lubin said skeptically.
“Seppuku’s below ten to the second, and dropping by the hour. That’s why I brought him back to Miri in the first place, Phocoena doesn’t have the—”
“You kept him in Phocoena,” Lubin said in a dead monotone.
“You can spank me later, okay? Just shut up and listen: I took him back to Miri and I ran every test she knew how to recommend, and they all confirmed it. Three days ago he was absolutely on death’s door, and today I’ve seen worse head colds.”
“You have a cure?” He couldn’t believe it.
“It doesn’t need a cure. It cures itself. You just—get over it.”
“I’d like to see those data.”
“You can do more than that. You can help collect ’em. We were just about to run the latest sequence when the lifters showed up.”
Lubin shook his head. “Taka seemed to think—” But Taka Ouellette, by her own admission, had fouled up before. Taka Ouellette was nowhere near the top of her field. And Taka Ouellette had discovered Seppuku’s dark side only after Achilles Desjardins had led her on his own guided tour of the data...
“I’ve been trying to figure out why anyone would create a bug that builds to absolutely massive concentrations in the body, and then, just...dies off,” Clarke said. “And I can only come up with one reason.” She cocked her head at him. “How many vectors did you catch?”
“Eighteen.” Working night and day, tracking pink clouds and heat-traces, taking directions from anonymous voices on the radio, derms pasted on his skin to scrub the poisons from his blood, keep him going on half an hour’s sleep out of every twenty-four...
“Any of them die?” Clarke asked.
“I was told they died in quarantine.” He snorted at his own stupidity. What does it take to fool the master? Just five years out of the game and a voice on the airwaves...
“Taka was right, as far as she went,” Clarke said, “Seppuku would kill if nothing stopped it. She just didn’t realize that Seppuku stopped itself somehow. And she’s got some kind of—esteem issues...”
Imagine that, Lubin thought dryly.
“—she’s so used to being the fuck-up that she just—assumes she fucked up at the slightest excuse.” She stared at Lubin with a face holding equal parts hope and horr
or. “But she was right all along, Ken. We’re back at square one. Someone must have figured out how to beat ßehemoth, and someone else is trying to stop them.”
“Desjardins,” Lubin said.
Clarke hesitated. “Maybe...”
There was no maybe about it. Achilles Desjardins was too high in the ranks to not know of any campaign to rehabilitate the continent. Ergo, he couldn’t possibly have not known Seppuku’s true nature. He had simply lied about it.
And Clarke was wrong about something else, too. They weren’t back to square one at all. Back on square one, Lubin had not invested two weeks fighting for the wrong side.
Wrong. He didn’t like that word. It didn’t belong in his vocabulary, it evoked woolly-minded dichotomies like good and evil. Every clear-minded being knew that there was no such thing; there was only what worked, and what didn’t. More effective, and less. The disloyalty of a friend may be maladaptive, but it is not bad. The overtures of a potential ally may serve mutual interest, but that does not make them good. Even hating the mother who beats you as a child is to utterly miss the point: nobody chooses the wiring in their brain. Anyone else’s, wired the same, would spark as violently.
Ken Lubin could fight any enemy to the death without malice. He could switch sides the moment circumstances warranted. So it wasn’t that the creators of Seppuku were right and Achilles Desjardins was wrong, necessarily. It was simply that Ken Lubin had been misled as to which side he was on.
He’d spent his whole life being used. But to be used without his knowledge was not something he was willing to forgive.
Something ticked over in him then, a kind of toggle between pragmatism and dedication. The latter setting afforded him a certain focus, although it had undeniably led to some maladaptive choices in the past. He used it sparingly.
He used it now.
Desjardins. It had been him all along. Behind the fires, behind the antimissiles, behind the misdirection. Desjardins. Achilles Desjardins.
Playing him.
If that’s not an excuse, he reflected, nothing is.
Lubin’s ultralight had been a gift from Desjardins. It would be a good idea to continue the conversation at a further remove.
Lubin took Clarke by the arm and walked her to the MI. She didn’t resist. Maybe she’d seen him flip the switch. She got in the driver’s side. He got in the passenger’s.
Ricketts crouched in the back. His complexion was slightly flushed, his forehead damp, but he was sitting up, and he was munching a protein brick with obvious enthusiasm. “Hi again,” he said. “ ’member me?”
Lubin turned to Clarke. “He’s still a ’lawbreaker. His infrastructure isn’t what it used to be, but he’s still got plenty of resources and nobody further up appears to be reining him in.”
“I know,” Clarke said.
“He could have us under surveillance right now.”
“Hey, if you’re worried about the big guys listening in?” Ricketts said around a mouthful of chewy aminos, “I wouldn’t worry about it. They’re gonna have, like, other things on their minds any mome.”
Lubin gave him a cold look. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s right, actually,” Clarke said. “Someone’s about to lose control of their—”
A soft blatting sound cut her off, like the muffled explosion of distant artillery.
“—outer demons,” she finished, but Lubin was already back outside.
Off across the water, in the spindly shadows of a decrepit wind farm, the hydrogen-cracking station was burning.
It was as though, in that instant, they had changed places.
Clarke was suddenly advocating noninterference. “Ken, we’re two people.”
“One person. I’m doing this solo.”
“Doing what, exactly? If there’s a rogue in CSIRA, let CSIRA handle him. There has to be some way to get a message overseas.”
“I intend to, assuming we can access an overseas line. But I have doubts that it will do any good.”
“We can transmit from Phocoena.”
Lubin shook his head. “We know there’s at least one rogue at large. We don’t know how many others he might be working with. There’s no guarantee that any message routed through a WestHem node would even get through, even—” he glanced at the conflagration across the water— “before this.”
“So we move offshore. We could drive across the ocean and hand-deliver the memo ourselves if we—”
“And if it did,” he continued, “unsubstantiated claims that a CSIRA ’lawbreaker was even capable of going rogue will be treated with extreme skepticism in a world where the existence of Spartacus is not widely known.”
“Ken—”
“By the time we convinced them to take us seriously, and by the time that overseas forces had mustered a response, Desjardins would have escaped. The man is far from stupid.”
“So let him escape. As long as he isn’t blocking Seppuku any more, what harm can he do?”
She was dead wrong, of course. There was no end to the harm Desjardins could do in the course of abandoning the board. He might even cause Lubin to fail in his mission—and there was no way in hell he was going to permit that.
Ken Lubin had never been much for introspection. He had to wonder, though, if Clarke’s doubts might not have a grain of truth to them. It would be so much easier to simply make the call and stand back. And yet—the desire to inflict violence had grown almost irresistible, and The Rules were only as strong as the person who made them. So far Lubin had more or less remained true to his code, minor lapses like Phong notwithstanding. But in the face of this new outrage, he didn’t know how much civilization was left in him.
He was royally pissed, and he really needed to take it out on someone. Perhaps, at least, he could choose a target who actually had it coming.
Fleas
She could barely remember a time when she hadn’t bled.
It seemed as though she’d spent her whole life on her knees, trapped in a diabolical exoskeleton that bent and stretched in arbitrary excess of anything the human body could mimic. Her body didn’t have a choice, had never had a choice; the dancing cage took it along for the ride, posed her like some hyperextensible doll in a chorus line. Her joints popped apart and back together like the pieces of some ill-fitted cartilagenous puzzle. She’d lost her right breast an eternity ago; Achilles had looped some kind of freakwire noose around it and just pulled. It had plopped onto the Escher tiles like a dead fish. She remembered hoping at the time that maybe she’d bleed to death, but she’d never had the chance; He’d ground some flat-faced iron of searing metal against her chest, cauterizing the wound.
Back then she’d still had it in her to scream.
For some time now she’d inhabited a point halfway between her body and the ceiling, some interface between hell and anesthesia conjured up out of pure need. She could look down and observe the atrocities being inflicted on her flesh with something almost approaching dispassion. She could feel the pain, but it was becoming an abstract thing, like a reading on a gauge. Sometimes, when the torture stopped, she would slide back into her own flesh and take stock of the damage first-hand. Even then, agony was becoming more tiresome than painful.
And through it all wound the insane tutorials, the endless absurd questions about chiral catalysts and hydroxyl intermediates and cross-nucleotide duplexing. The punishments and amputations that followed wrong answers; the blesséd, merely intolerable rapes that followed right ones.
She realized that she no longer had anything left to lose.
Achilles took her chin in hand and lifted her head up to the light. “Good morning, Alice. Ready for today’s lesson?”
“Fuck you,” she croaked.
He kissed her on the mouth. “Only if you pass the daily quiz. Otherwise, I’m afraid—”
“I’m not taking—” a sudden wracking cough spoiled the impact of her defiance a bit, but she pressed on. “I’m not taking your fucking quiz. You mi
ght as well cut to the ch...the chase while you’ve still got the... chance...”
He stroked her cheek. “Bit of an adrenaline rush going on, have we?”
“They’ll find...find out about you eventually. And then they’ll—”
He actually laughed at that. “What makes you think they don’t already know?”
She swallowed and told herself: No.
Achilles straightened, letting her head drop. “How do you know I’m not already broadbanding this to every wristwatch in the hemisphere? Do you really think the world’s in any position to begrudge me your head on a stick with all the good I’m doing?”
“Good,” Taka whispered. She would have laughed.
“Do you know how many lives I save when I’m not in here trying to give you a decent education? Thousands. On a bad day. Whereas I go through a bit of ass-candy like you maybe once a month. Anyone who shut me down would have orders of mag more blood on their hands than I ever could on mine.”
She shook her head. “It’s not...like that.”
“Like what, ass-candy?”
“Don’t care...how many you save. Doesn’t give you the r—right to...”
“Oh, man. It’s not just biology, is it? Tell me, is there anything you’re not dumb as a sack of shit about?”
“I’m right. You know it...”
“Do I. You think we should go back to the Good Old Days when the corpses were running things? The smallest multicorp killed more people than all the sex killers who ever lived, for a fucking profit margin—and the WTO gave them awards for it.”
He spat: the spittle made a foamy little amoeba on the floor. “Nobody cares, sweetmeat. And if they did you’d be even worse off, because they’d realize that I’m an improvement.”
“You’re wrong...” she managed.
“Ooooh,” Achilles said. “Insubordination. Gets me hot. ’Scuse me.” He stepped back behind the stocks and swung the assembly around. Taka spun smoothly in her harness until she was facing him again. He was holding a pair of alligator clips; their wires draped down to an electrical outlet embedded in the eye of a sky-blue fish.