by Peter Watts
This fucker hadn't escaped from anybody's lab. ßehemoth had come from the ocean.
The California Current nosed down along N'AmPac's coast from the Gulf of Alaska. It mixed it up with the North Pacific and North Equatorial currents way off to the east of Mexico; those, in turn, bled into the Kuroshio off Japan, and the Eastern Counter and Southern Equatorial Currents in the South Pacific. Which ended up nuzzling the West Wind Drift, and the ankle bone's connected to the leg bone, the leg bone's connected to the knee bone, and before you know it the whole fucking planet is encircled.
He studied the data cloud and rubbed his eyes. How do you contain something that moves across seventy percent of the whole planet?
Evidently, you burned it.
He tapped his console. "Hey, Alice."
Her image flashed onto a window, upper-left. "Right here."
"Give me something."
"Can't yet," she said. "Not carved in stone."
"Balsa will do. Anything."
"It's small. Maybe two hundred, three hundred nanometers. Relies heavily on sulfur compounds, structurally at least. Very stripped-down genotype; I think it may use RNA for both catalysis and replication, which is a really neat trick. Built for a simple ecosystem, which makes sense if it's a construct. They never expected it to get out of culture."
"But what does it do?"
"Can't say. I'm working with a frog in a blender here, Killjoy. You should actually be kind of impressed that I've gotten as far as I have. You ask me, it's pretty obvious we're not supposed to figure out what it does."
"Could it be some kind of really nasty pathogen?" It has to be. It has to be. If we're burning people,—
"No." Her voice was flat and emphatic. "We are not. They are."
Desjardins blinked. I said that? "We're all on the same side, Alice."
"Uh-huh."
"Alice…" Sometimes she really pissed him off. There's a war going on, he wanted to shout. And it's not against corpses or bureaucrats or your imaginary Evil Empires; we're fighting against a whole indifferent universe that's coming down around our ears and you're shitting on me because sometimes we have to accept casualties?
But Alice Jovellanos had a blind spot the size of Antarctica. Sometimes you just couldn't reason with her. "Just answer the question, okay? Someone obviously thinks this thing is extremely dangerous. Could it be some kind of disease?"
"Biowar agent, you mean." Surprisingly, though, she shook her head. "Unlikely."
"How come?"
"Diseases are just little predators that eat you from the inside. If they're designed to feed on your molecules, their biochemistry should be compatible with yours. The D-aminos suggest they're not."
"Only suggest?"
Jovellanos shrugged. "Frog in a blender, remember? All I'm saying is if A is gonna eat B without throwing up, they should have similar biochemistries. ßehemoth just seems a little too far into the Oort to qualify. I could be wrong."
But the vectors—shipbuilders, divers—"Could it survive in a human host, at least?"
She pursed her lips. "Anything's possible. Look at A-51."
"What's that?"
"Metal-oxidizing microbe. Sediment-dweller from deep lakes, only there's a few million of them living in your mouth right now. Nobody knows how they got there exactly, but there you go."
Desjardins steepled his fingers. "She called it a soil microbe," he murmured, almost to himself.
"She'd call it corn on the cob if she thought it'd cover her corporate ass."
"Jeez, Alice." He shook his head. "Why do you even work here, if all we do is serve some evil overlord?"
"Everyone else is worse."
"Well, I don't think ßehemoth came out of a pharm. I think it came from the ocean."
"How so?"
"The fires correlate with people who spent a lot of time at sea."
"Ocean's a pretty big place, Killjoy. Seems to me if it was a natural bug it would have come ashore millions of years ago."
"Yeah." Desjardins linked to the personnel files for each of the relevant victims— sparing a moment of silent thanks for the devil's bargain that had traded free will for security clearance —and started narrowing the field.
"Although, now that you mention it," Jovellanos went on, "those superstiff enzymes would work better in a high-pressure environment."
A menu, a couple of tapped commands: a convex projection of the North Pacific extruded from the board.
"And if this little bastard isn't a construct, then it's older than old. Even before Martian Mike—hey, maybe it actually originated here, wouldn't that be something?"
Desjardins draped a GIS mesh across the map and poured data onto it. Luminous points spilled across the display like radioactive contrails in a cloud chamber: the cumulative Pacific assignments of the seagoing victims, sorted on location.
"Hey, Killjoy."
The points were piling up disproportionately at several key locations; seafarms, mining outposts, the trans-oceanic filaments of shipping routes. Nothing unusual there.
"Hellooo?" In her window, Jovellanos's head bobbed impatiently back and forth.
Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Any spots where all these people hung out at the same time over the past…say, two years…
At the edge of awareness, Alice Jovellanos grumbled about attention deficit disorder and disconnected.
Desjardins barely noticed. The Pacific Ocean had gone utterly dark, but for a single cluster of points. Southern tip of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Channer Vent, said the legend.
A geothermal generating station. Place called Beebe.
* * *
There'd been deaths there, too. But not by fire; according to the record, everyone at Beebe had been killed by the quake.
In fact—Desjardins pulled up a seismic overlay—Beebe Station had pretty much been at the exact epicenter of the quake that had triggered the Big One…
ßehemoth comes from the bottom of the ocean. It was down in the vents there, or trapped in the moho and then the quake let it out, and now they're running around like a bunch of adrenocorticoids trying to burn out anything that came in contact with—
No, wait a second—
More commands. The data cloud dispersed, re-formed into a column sorted against time; a luminous date appeared beside each point.
Almost all of the firestorm activity had taken place before the quake.
Desjardins called up a subset containing only fires at industrial sites, cross-linked with GA invoices. Quelle surprise: every site belonged to a company that had had a piece of Beebe's construction contact.
This thing got out before the Quake.
Which meant the Quake might not have been a natural disaster at all. It might have been mere side-effect. Collateral damage during containment.
Apparently, unsuccessful containment.
He called up every seismic database within Haven's walls. He stuffed a thousand messages into bottles and threw them out into Maelstrom, hoping some would wash ashore at a technical library or a satcam archive or an industrial surveillance site. He opened dedicated links to the seismic centers at UBC and Melbourne and CalTech. He watched reams of garbage accumulate—archives purged to reclaim memory, data dumped due to low demand, this address corrupted, do not attempt access. He passed the shouts and echoes and gibberish through a dozen filters, dropped signal and looked only at residuals, ran into gaps and interpolated bridges.
He looked at seismic data immediately preceding the Quake, and found nothing untoward: no subsidence, no preshocks, no changes in microgravity or ocean depth. None of the little telltales that usually portend a seismic event.
Odd.
He searched archives for satcam visuals. Nothing over the North Pacific seemed to have snapped any pictures at all that day.
Odder. In fact, virtually inconceivable.
He widened the scope, stretched it from the Eastern Tropical Convergence up to the Bering. One hit: an Earthsat in polar orbit had just been com
ing over the 451 horizon when the first shockwaves had registered. It had been taking pictures of the Bering on visible wavelengths; it hadn't even been looking at the Pacific. Just a lucky coincidence, then, the image it had caught from the corner of its eye: a smudged column of cloud on the horizon, rising from the ocean's surface against an otherwise cloudless background.
According to GPS, that column had risen from the ocean directly above Channer Vent.
Desjardins squeezed each pixel until it bled. The gray beanstalk wouldn't tell him anything farther: it was just a pillar of cloud, fuzzy and undistinguished and three thousand kilometers from the camera.
There was this amorphous dot, though, off to one side. At first Desjardins attributed the lack of detail to atmospheric haze, but no: motion blur, the computer said. All along one axis, and easy enough to correct for.
The dot clarified. Still no details beyond an outline, but it looked like some kind of vehicle. A vague sense of familiarity itched in the back of his mind. He ran the silhouette through the standard commercial catalog and came up blank.
Damn, he thought, I know what that is. I know.
What is it?
He stared at the image for ten minutes. The he brought the catalog online again.
"Reset pattern resolution," he told it. "Disable vehicle recognition. Scan for vehicle components, standard catalog."
It took longer this time. The whole was a lot smaller than the sum of the parts. Processing winked coyly from the main display for a good two minutes before something more substantive took its place:
Brander, Mi/ke/cheal,
Caraco, Jud/y/ith
Clarke, Len/ie
Lubin, Ken/neth
Nakata, Alice
The names floated above the grainy enhance, brazenly nonsensical.
Desjardins recognized them, of course; a crew roster had popped onto his board the moment he'd homed in on Beebe Station. But he'd closed that window—and the names shouldn't be wriggling across the main display anyway.
Software glitch, probably. Stray photons, tunneling through some flawed bit of quantum insulation. It happened—all the time in Maelstrom, but occasionally even in pristine Haven. He muttered an oath and tapped on his board to clear it. Obligingly, the rogue text vanished.
But for the merest instant, something else flickered across the screen in its place. No baseline civilian would have even seen it. Desjardins caught a bit more: text strings, in English. A few words— angel, sockeye, vampire —jumped out at him, but most of it disappeared too fast to decompile even with his tweaked neurocircuitry.
Beebe was in there, though.
And when the standard catalog lit the screen with its findings a second later, Beebe moved to the very front of Desjardins's mind.
Commercial lifters could be distinguished by their great bladders of hard vacuum, buoyant toruses that held them up against the sky. There was no such silhouette on Desjardins's contact, which was why the catalog hadn't recognized it at first. No lifting bladder—not unless you counted a few ragged strips streaming from the trailing end of the silhouette. All that remained on that image was a shuttle 'scaphe, locked tight against the belly of a lifter's command module. Falling.
Jailbreak
Each second, twelve thousand cubic meters of water smashed headlong through a bottleneck thirty-five meters wide. They hadn't called it Hell's Gate for nothing.
Generations had come to this place and gaped. Cable-cars had swung precariously across the canyon, fed raging whitewater vistas to thrillseeking tourists. Utilities had wept over all those wasted megawatts, billions of Joules pouring uselessly toward the ocean, unharnessable. So near and yet so far.
Then the world had begun wobbling. It had listed to one side, then another; the machinery that kept it upright seemed to get hungrier with each passing day. The Fraser was dammed a dozen times over to feed that appetite. Hell's Gate had held out the longest: untouchable at first, then merely prohibitive. Then almost economical.
Finally, imperative.
The Big One had slipped through the mountains like a guerilla, shattering here, merely tapping there in gentle reminder. It had crept past Hope and Yale without so much as a broken window. Hell's Gate was a good two hundred klicks upstream; there would have been reason to hope, if no time to.
A torrent of Precambrian rock had destroyed the dam and replaced it at the same time; the Fraser had exploded through the breach only to slam into an impromptu wall of collapsed granite half a kilometer downstream. The impoundment had not emptied but lengthened, north-south; the broken dam now cut across its midpoint, torn free at the western wall, still fastened at the east.
The TransCanada Highway was miraculously etched halfway up the east canyon wall, a four-lane discontinuity in a sheer ascent. At the point where dam met mountain, where highway met both, a barrier had been dropped from the sky to block the road. Botflies floated above it, and above the arched gray scar of the spillway.
Overnight, the Strip had moved east. This was its new border. Robert Boyczuk was supposed to keep it from moving any farther.
He contemplated Bridson across the chopper's interior. Bridson, her upper face cowled in her headset, didn't notice; she'd been lost in some virtual pastime for over an hour. Boyczuk couldn't blame her. They'd been here for almost two weeks and nobody'd tried to break quarantine except a couple of black bears. A number of vehicles had made it out this far in the few days following the Quake, but the barrier—plastered with quarantine directives and N'AmPac bylaws—had stopped most of them. A warning shot from the botflies had discouraged the others. There'd been no need to show off the pacification 'copter lurking behind the wall. Bridson had slept through most of it.
Boyczuk took his duties a bit more seriously. There was a definite need for segregation, nobody questioned that. Everything from Nipah to Hydrilla would sneak past the borders given half a chance, even at the best of times; now, with half the coast gone and the other half fighting off the usual gamut of rot-bugs, the last thing anyone needed was all that chaos spreading farther inland.
Inland had its own problems. There were more than enough borders to go around no matter which way you looked. Sometimes it seemed as if an invisible spiderweb was spreading across the world, some creeping fractured network carving the whole planet into splinters. Boyczuk's job was to sit on one of those edges and keep anything from crossing over until the state of emergency had passed. Assuming it did, of course; some places down in South America—even in N'Am, for that matter—had been under 'temporary quarantine' for eight or nine years.
Mostly people just put up with it. Boyczuk's job was an easy one.
"Hey," Bridson said. "Check this out."
She rerouted her headset feed to an inboard screen. Not a VR game after all. She'd been riding the botflies.
On the screen, a woman crouched on cracked asphalt. Boyczuk checked the location: a couple hundred of meters down the highway, hidden from the blockade behind the curve of the western precipice. One of the 'flies out over the dam had caught her around the corner.
Backpack. Loose-fitting clothes, hiker's clothes. Upper part of the face covered by an eyephone visor. Black gloves, short black hair—no, a black hood of some kind, maybe part of the visor. As a fashion statement, it didn't work. In Boyczuk's humble opinion, of course.
"What's she doing?" Boyczuk asked. "How'd she even get here?" No sign of a vehicle, although one could have been parked farther down the road.
"No," Bridson said. "She's not serious."
The woman had braced herself in a sprinter's crouch.
"That's really bad form," Bridson remarked. "She could sprain an ankle."
Like a stone from a slingshot, the intruder launched herself forward.
* * *
"Oh, right," Bridson said.
The intruder was running straight down the middle of the highway, eyes on the asphalt, dodging or leaping over cracks big enough to grab human feet. If nothing stopped her, she'd run smack into the
barrier in about a minute.
Of course, something was going to stop her.
Beeping from the botfly feeds; the intruder had just entered their defensive radius. Boyczuk panned one of the barrier cams skyward. The 'fly closest to the target was breaking ranks, moving to intercept. Programmed flocking behavior dragged the adjacent 'flies forward as well, as though all were strung on an invisible thread. A connect-the-dots pseudopod, reaching for prey.
The runner veered toward the edge of the road, glanced down. Ten meters beneath her, brown boiling water gnawed ravenously at the canyon wall.
"You are approaching a restricted area," the lead botfly scolded. "Please turn back." Red light began pulsing from its belly.
The intruder ran faster. Another glance down at the river.
"What the fuck?" Boyczuk said.
A little patch of pavement exploded in front of the runner: warning shot. She staggered, barely keeping her balance.
"We are authorized to use force," the lead botfly warned. "Please turn back." The two 'flies behind it began flashing.
The runner dodged and zig-zagged, keeping to the west side of the road. She kept looking down…
Boyczuk leaned forward. Wait a second…
Behind the runner, water raged against a brutal jumble of sharp-edged boulders large as houses. Anyone falling in there would be teeth and pulp in about two seconds. Closer to the barrier, though—in the lee of the dam's near, unbroken end—the water might almost be calm enough to—
"Shit." Boyczuk slapped the ignition. "She's gonna jump. She's gonna jump…"
Turbines behind, whining up to speed. "What are you talking about?" Bridson said.
"She's gonna—ah, shit…"
She stumbled, swerved. Her feet came down on loose gravel. Boyczuk pulled back on the stick. The chopper whup-whup-whupped slowly off the ground, ten measly seconds start-up to lift-off, the envy of fast-response vehicles everywhere and still just barely fast enough to clear the barrier as the woman with the backpack skidded, flailed, launched herself into space, not where she was aiming, not the way she wanted, but no other options left except brief, spectacular flight…