by Peter Watts
“—dogs?” His breath hissed fast and panicky through clenched teeth, the breath of a terrified little boy.
She looked at her escort. They looked back.
“Holding back, for now. Someone called them off.”
His hand steadied. His breathing slowed. Discipline reimposed itself from the top down, the old familiar Lubin rebooting himself through sheer force of will.
“Told you,” he coughed.
“Are you—”
“Functional...” He got slowly to his feet, tensing and grimacing a half-dozen times. “—barely.” His right thigh had been gored. A gash split the side of his face, running from jaw to hairline. It tore straight through the shattered socket of his right eye.
Clarke gasped. “Jesus, your eye…”
He reached up to touch his face. “Wasn’t doing me much good anyway.” The deformity of his hand, barely glimpsed before, was obvious now: two of the fingers were gone.
“And your hand—Ken, it—”
He flexed the remaining digits. Fresh membranous scabs tore open at the stumps; dark fluids seeped forth. “Not as bad as it looks,” he said hoarsely.
“You’ll bleed out, you’ll—”
He shook his head, staggered slightly. “Enhanced clotting factors. Standard issue. I’m good to go.”
The hell you are. But dogs crowded close on one side, fell back on the other. Staying put obviously wasn’t an option either.
“Okay then.” She took him by the elbow. “This way.”
“We’re not deviating.” It wasn’t a question.
“No. We don’t have much choice.”
He coughed again. Clotting fluid bubbled at the corner of his mouth. “They’re herding us.”
A great dark muzzle pushed her gently from behind.
“Think of it as an honor guard,” she said.
A row of glass doors beneath a concrete awning, the official logo of the Entropy Patrol set into stone overhead. The dogs formed a semicircle around the entrance, pushing them forward.
“What do you see?” Lubin asked.
“Same outer doors. Vestibule behind, three meters deep. There’s—there’s a door in the center of the barrier. Just an outline, no knob or keypad or anything.”
She could have sworn that hadn’t been there before.
Lubin spat blood. “Let’s go.”
She tried one of the doors. It swung open. They stepped across the threshold.
“We’re in the vestibule.”
“Dogs?”
“Still outside.” The pack was lined up against the glass now, staring in. “I guess they’re not—oh. The inner door just opened.”
“In or out?”
“Inwards. Dark inside. Can’t see anything.” She stepped forward; her eyecaps would adjust to that deeper darkness once they were in it.
If they got in it. Lubin had frozen at her side, the remaining fingers on his mauled hand clenched into an impoverished fist. The grenade pistol extended from his other hand, unwavering, pointing straight ahead. His ravaged face held an expression Clarke had never seen before, some smoldering picture of rage and humiliation that bordered on outright humanity.
“Ken. Door’s open.”
The thumbwheel clicked onto shipworm.
“It’s open, Ken. We can walk right in.” She touched his forearm, tried to bring it down but his whole body was gripped in a sudden furious tetanus. “We don’t have to—”
“I told you before,” he growled. “More sensible to go around.” His gun arm swung to three o’clock, pointing straight at the vestibule wall. His useless eye stared straight ahead.
“Ken—” She turned, half-expecting the monsters at their backs to crash through the panes and rip his arm off. But the dogs stayed where they were, seemingly content to let the drama play out without further intervention.
“He wants us to go forward,” Lubin said. “Always sets it up, always takes the initiative. All we ever do is fucking— react...”
“And blowing out a wall when the door’s standing open? That’s not a reaction?”
Lubin shook his head. “It’s an escape route.”
He fired. The shipworm plunged into the side wall, spinning fast enough to shatter an event horizon. The wall erupted like a tabletop Vesuvius; filthy grey cumulus billowed out and engulfed them in an instant. Stinging particles sandblasted Clarke’s face. She closed her eyes, choked on the sudden sandstorm. From somewhere deep in the maelstrom, she heard the tinkle of shattering glass.
Something grabbed her wrist and yanked sideways. She opened her eyes onto the swirling, soupy aftermath of the blast. Lubin drew her towards the ruptured wall; his ravaged face loomed close. “This way. Get us in.”
She steered. He lurched at her side. The air was filled with the hiss of fine sifting debris, the building sighed at its own desecration. An empty, twisted door frame leaned crazily out of the murk. Pebbles of crumbled safety glass crunched beneath their feet like a diamond snowfall.
There was no sign of the dogs, not that she’d be able to see them anyway unless they were on her. Maybe the explosion had scared them back. Maybe they’d been trained to stay outside no matter what. Or maybe, any second now, they’d find this broken doorway and pour through to finish the job...
A ragged hole resolved in the wall before them. Water ran from somewhere beyond. A ridge of torn concrete and rebar rose maybe five centimeters from the floor, the lip of a precipice; on the other side there was no floor, just a ruptured shaft a meter across, extending into darkness both above and below. Twisted veins of metal and plastic hung from precarious holdfasts, or lay wedged across the shaft at unforeseen angles. A stream of water plummeted through empty space, spilling from some ruptured pipe above, splattering against some unseen grate below.
The wall across the gap had been breached. There was darkness beyond.
“Watch this step,” she said.
They emerged into a dark, high-ceilinged space that Clarke half-remembered as the main reception area. Lubin turned and aimed back at the hole through which they’d come. Nothing jumped out at them. Nothing followed.
“Lobby,” Clarke reported. “Dark. Reception pedestals and kiosks over to the left. Nobody here.”
“Dogs?”
“Not yet.”
Lubin’s working fingers played along the edges of the breach. “What’s this?”
She leaned closer. In the boosted half-light, something glimmered from the torn cross-section like a thin vein of precious ore. Frayed bits protruded here and there from the shattered substrate.
“Mesh of some kind,” she told him. “Embedded in the wall. Metallic, very fine weave. Like thick cloth.”
He nodded grimly. “Faraday cage.”
“What?”
“Shielding. From the effects of the pulse.”
Like a handclap from God, the lights came on.
Empath
Instantly Clarke was snow-blind. She brought up the H&K, waved it wildly in no particular direction. “The lights—”
“I know.”
From somewhere deep in the building, the sudden hum of reawakened machinery.
“Jesus Priestpoking Christ,” said an omnipresent voice. “You always have to make things so damned difficult. The door was open, you know.”
“Achilles?” Her eyecaps were adjusting; objects and architecture resolved from the whitewash. But the fog wasn’t entirely in her caps. Dust from the explosion hung in the air, bleeding contrast from their surroundings. Scree fanned out across the floor from their makeshift entrance. Polished stone paneling on the opposite wall, a good ten meters from the breach, had cracked and fallen in a jagged heap.
“Or you could’ve just landed on the roof,” the voice continued. “But no. You had to storm the battlements, and look at you now. Look at you now.
“You can barely stand.”
Ventilators whirred in the distance, tugged wisps and streamers of suspended dust into grilles in the ceiling. The air began to
clear. Lubin swayed by the wall, favoring his injured leg. The lights had returned color to Clarke’s sight; the gore on Lubin’s body glistened shocking rust and crimson. He looked flayed alive.
“We could really use some help here,” Clarke said.
A sigh from somewhere, from everywhere. “Like the last time you came to town. Some things never change, eh?”
“This is your fault, you fucker. Your dogs—”
“Standard-issue post-pulse security, and did I tell you to go up against them blind? Ken, what got into you? You’re damn lucky I noticed in time.”
“Look at him! Help him!”
“Leave it,” Lubin insisted, barely above a whisper. “I’m all right.”
The building heard him anyway. “You’re far from all right, Ken. But you’re not exactly incapacitated either, and I’m not stupid enough to let down my guard to someone who’s just broken into my home by force. So let’s work this out, and then maybe we can get you fixed up before you bleed to death. What are you doing here?”
Lubin started to speak, coughed, started again: “I think you know already.”
“Assume I don’t.”
“We had a deal. You were supposed to find out who was hunting us on the ridge.”
Clarke closed her eyes, remembering: The rest of the plan doesn’t change.
“In case it hasn’t sunk in yet, I’m dealing with quite a few demands on my time these days,” the room pointed out. “But I assure you, I have been working on it.”
“I think you’ve done more than that. I think you solved it, even before you lost so much of your resource base. We can tell you how to get that back, by the way. If that factors into your analysis.”
“Uh huh. And you couldn’t have just phoned me up from Podunk, Maine or wherever you were?”
“We tried. Either you were busy dealing with all those other demands on your time, or the channels are down.”
The building hummed quietly for a moment, as if in thought. Deeper into the lobby, past dormant information pedestals and brochure dispensers and an abandoned reception counter, ruby LEDs twinkled from a row of security gates. The leftmost set turned green as Clarke watched.
“Through there,” Desjardins said.
She took Lubin’s elbow. He limped at her side, maintaining a subtle distance; close enough to use her as a guide, far enough to spurn her as a crutch. An asymmetrical trail of dark sticky footprints marked his passage.
Each gatepost was a brushed-aluminum cylinder half a meter across, extending from floor to ceiling like the bars of a cage. The only way in was between them. A black band the height of Clarke’s forearm girdled each post at eye level, twinkling with color-coded constellations—but the whole band flushed red before they were halfway across the room.
“Oh, right,” Desjardins remarked. “Security will cut you into little cubes if you try to sneak anything past.” A curved panel beneath the display slid back at their approach. “Just throw everything in there.”
Lubin felt out the chamber, set his pistol and belt down inside it. Clarke followed suit with her own weapon while Lubin struggled to remove his pack. He shrugged off Clarke’s attempted assistance; the pack clanked on top of the pile. The panel slid shut.
The wraparound display bloomed into a riot of images and acronyms. Clarke recognized some of them from Lubin’s tutorial on the way up: taser and microwave gun; mechanical springlift; aerosol flypaper. Other things she’d never seen before. For all she knew Lubin had brought them from his stash at the bottom of the Atlantic.
“Is that an electron stripper?” Desjardins asked. “And a pulse bomb! You brought your own tiny pulse bomb! Isn’t that cute!”
Lubin, his jaw set, said nothing.
“That’s everything, then? No nasty biosols or hidden freakwire? Because I’m telling you, those gates are very unforgiving. You walk through with any—”
“Our implants,” Clarke said.
“Those will pass.”
Lubin felt his way between the gateposts. No klaxons sounded, no lasers lanced down from overhead. Clarke stepped after him.
“The elevators are just around the corner,” Desjardins said.
Completely disarmed, they stepped into Desjardins’s parlor. Clarke led Lubin with soft words and an occasional touch. She didn’t dare speak her mind, even in a whisper. But she gave his arm the slightest squeeze, and knew after all their long years together that he’d know what she meant: He didn’t buy it for a second.
Lubin replied with a blind glance and the twitch of a bloody lip: Of course he didn’t.
All according to plan. Such as it was.
She had to take the physics on faith.
She could buy everything else that Lubin had laid out on the way up. It didn’t matter whether Desjardins believed their story, so long as he thought they might be useful. He wouldn’t try to kill them outright until convinced otherwise.
Which didn’t mean that he wouldn’t still try to disable them. He wasn’t about to let anyone into his secret lair without taking precautions—disarming them, confining them, cutting their strings.
Nothing lethal, Lubin had predicted, and nothing that will damage the structure. That limits his options. We can handle it.
Fine, as far as it went. It was how they were going to handle it that she couldn’t quite get behind.
A good half-liter of water sloshed through the plumbing in Clarke’s chest, unable to drain because of the tape on her electrolysis intake. Five hundred milliliters didn’t sound like much. When she swam through the deeps a steady current of seawater flowed through her implants, endlessly replenished. It hardly seemed possible that the stagnant dregs trapped there now would last more than a moment.
Four hundred fifty grams of molecular oxygen, Lubin had said. That’s almost what you’d get in two thousand liters of air.
Her head couldn’t argue with the numbers. But her gut was no mathematician.
A rank of elevators stood before them. One set of doors was open; soft light spilled from the compartment behind.
He’ll confine us first.
They entered. The doors slid shut. The cage began to move.
Down.
This is insane, she thought. This can’t work. But already, she imagined she could hear the soft hiss of gas from hidden nozzles...
She coughed and tripped her implants, praying to some indeterminate deity that Lubin hadn’t fucked up his calculations.
He hadn’t. A familiar, subtle vibration started somewhere in her chest. Her guts writhed and flooded with their own private stock of isotonic saline. The liquid rose in her throat and filled her mouth. Brief nausea accompanied the flooding of her middle ears. A salty trickle ran down her chin before she remembered to clamp her lips together. The world muted, all sounds suddenly faint and distant except for the beating of her own heart.
Just like that, she lost the urge to breathe.
The descent continued. Lubin leaned against the wall of the elevator, his face a bloody cyclops mask. Clarke felt warm wetness on her upper lip: her nose was running. She reached up and gave it a scratch, inconspicuously jamming the plug in her left nostril tight against the leak.
Suddenly her body thrummed, deep inside, an almost subsonic quaking that vibrated her bones as though they were the parts of some great bass instrument. Faint nausea struck her in the throat. Her bowels quavered.
The two most likely options, Lubin had mused, are gas and infrasound.
She didn’t know if gas was in Desjardins’s arsenal—for all she knew the air around them was already saturated. But this was obviously some kind of squawkbox. The sound dish must stretch across the whole ceiling of the elevator, or maybe beneath the floor. The walls focused its vibrations, built resonances within the cage. The sound would be tuned to build intolerable harmonics in the lungs and middle ears, in the sinuses and trachea.
It made her sick even with her airways and hard cavities flooded; she could scarcely imagine the impact on unbuttressed f
lesh. The implants didn’t deal with gastrointestinal gases—deep-sea pressure collapsed those soft pockets down with no ill effect—and acoustic attacks were generally tuned to harder, more predictable air spaces anyway. Desjardins’s squawkbox was doing something down there, though. It was all she could do to keep from vomiting saline all over the compartment, from shitting in her diveskin. Any dryback would be on the floor by now, soiled and retching or unconscious. Clarke clenched at both ends and hung on.
The elevator stopped. The lights went out.
He knows, she thought. He figured it out, of course he figured it out. How could we think he wouldn’t? How could he not notice?
Any second the elevator would lurched back into motion, drag them up through this ruined, booby-trapped derelict where sixty-five floors of countermeasures would turn them into—
Her head cleared. Her bones stopped tingling. Her bowels returned to the fold.
“Okay, guys.” Desjardins’s voice was tinny and distant in Clarke’s flooded ears. “End of the line.”
The doors slid open.
An oasis of bright machinery on a vast dark plain. That’s what naked eyes would have seen: the Second Coming perhaps, a Christ-figure bathed in light and technology while all around was an infinite void.
To Lenie Clarke there was no darkness. The void was a converted parking garage, an empty gray cavern stretching half a city block on a side. Evenly-spaced rows of support pylons held the ceiling from the floor. Plumbing and fiberop emerged from the walls, crawled along their surfaces like a webbing of sparse vines. Cables converged into a loosely-bound trunk, winding along the floor to a horseshoe of workstations lit by chemical lightstrips.
Christ was someone Lenie Clarke had met before. She’d first encountered him in darkness much deeper than this, a prisoner of Ken Lubin. Back then, Achilles Desjardins had been a man convinced he was about to die.
It had been so much easier to read him, then.
Clotting blood cracked around Lubin’s lips. His chest rose. Clarke shut down her own implants, yanking the plugs from her nose before the tide had fully receded within her. In the center of the room, in the heart of a high-tech horseshoe, Desjardins watched them approach.