Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  He knew that Lenie Clarke's desire would drive her along the straightest line she could manage. He'd known it from the moment he'd seen the records of that anomalous little outbreak in the Cariboo woods. A patch of alpine forest even deader than the norm. Something that had once been a man, curled protectively around something else that had once been a little girl. The crews hadn't checked the lake at all, they'd simply burned the area the way they'd burned all the others. It was only when Lubin had insisted—driven by his belated review of the story so far—that they'd sent back an ROV and surveyed the bottom. It was only then that anyone noticed the cobble and deadwood kicked into violent disarray fifty meters down, in a place where the largest inhabitants had been insects. As if something had dropped to the bottom and found it hopelessly wanting, clawed and pounded against bedrock as though driven to tunnel to the core of the earth itself. When Lubin had seen that telemetry, he'd known.

  He'd known then, as he knew now, because he felt exactly the same way. Lenie Clarke had been a fish out of water for too long; nothing in Burton's arsenal would scare her off. She was coming.

  And if those towering black anvils advancing from the south were anything to go on, she was bringing the wrath of God along for the ride.

  * * *

  Maybe she planned it that way, he mused. Maybe she summoned the storm the same way she summoned the quake.

  It was easy to indulge in the legend, even tempting. But you didn't have to invoke sorcery to explain the thunderheads marching on Chicago; violent storms had been the spring norm for twenty years or more in these parts. Just another long-term surprise hatched from that chaotic package of cause-and-effect called climate change.

  It had actually proven beneficial to certain aspects of the economy. The market for shatterproof windows had never been stronger.

  If she hadn't conjured the elements, though, she'd at least been smart enough to use them. Perhaps she'd been holding back, digging her heels in against that relentless pull of dark water, until the weather was perfectly poised to cast a wrench into the machinery.

  All for the better, then. It would give her greater confidence in her own success.

  The cockpit intercom beeped in his ear: "Front's coming in too fast, sir. We'll have to either get above it or set down."

  "How long?" Lubin asked.

  "Half hour, tops." Outside, the sky flashed stark white. An avalanche rumbled faintly through the deck.

  "Okay." Lubin magged visual. Three hundred meters beneath him, Lake Michigan was a heaving gray cauldron of scrap metal. There were a dozen stealthed transports between the lifter and the lake, their Thayer nets set to obliterative countershade. Lubin could pick them out if he tried; the chromatophores lagged a bit when mimicking fast fractals. As far as any civilian would be able to tell, though, the lifter had local airspace all to itself.

  "The dolphins are down," Burton reported from across the compartment. "And we've got a bad storm-sewer monitor on South Aberd—"

  Lubin cut him off with a wave of the hand: a white diamond icon had just appeared on the tabletop. A second later his comlink beeped.

  "West Randolph," someone reported from the depths of Chicago. "Just past the river. Moving east."

  * * *

  They'd strung mist nets at strategic locations along the Chicago River, in addition to the usual anti-exotic electricals; Clarke had already ridden a river past one dragnet, and there was a chance she'd try it again. No such luck, though. This sighting was on the wrong side of those barricades. A botfly had snapped an aura completely inconsistent with the outside accessories of the woman who'd worn it. The doorway she'd entered led down into a half-empty commercial warren with a hundred access points.

  Lubin realigned his pieces on the way in. Two of the choppers dropped to within spitting distance of the waves, each giving birth to twins; minisubs like finback calves, spacing themselves in an arc two kilometers off the waterfront. Each sub, in turn, birthed a litter of snoops that arranged themselves into a diffuse grid from surface to substrate.

  The other choppers touched down from Meigs Field to the Grand Avenue docks, disgorged their cargo, and hunkered down against the oncoming storm. The command lifter came in behind them, pausing fifty meters above the seawall; Lubin slid down inside an extensible tube that uncoiled from the lifter's belly like an absurd proboscis. By the time the huge airship had wallowed away, a command hut had been set up at the foot of East Monroe.

  Lubin braced against the rising wind and looked over the edge of Chicago's new seawall. The streaked gray precipice rose smoothly to the railing. The grated mouths of storm sewers punctuated the revetment at regular intervals, drooling insignificant trickles of wastewater. Each opening was twice as high as a man. Lubin ballparked the scale and nodded to himself: the weave of the grillwork was easily tight enough to keep anyone from squeezing through.

  A low-flying helicopter flitted past, spraying the water: the waves in its wake swelled and congealed into a swath of gelatinous foam. Lubin had ordered the shoreline gelled from Lakeshore down to Meigs; the storm would probably smash the tanglefoam to lint after a while, but if Clarke hurled herself off a bridge before that point, she'd be stuck like an ant in honey. A floating pen bobbed at the offshore edge of the gelled zone, rimmed by an inflatable boom riding the waves like a boneless serpent. Lubin tapped a control on the side of his visor; the enclosure sprang into near focus.

  There.

  Just for a moment, a sleek gray back, metallic inlays glinting darkly along the leading edge of the dorsal fin. Another. Half a dozen there all told, although you'd never see more than one on the surface at any given time.

  The wind died.

  Lubin slipped off his headset and looked around with naked eyes. It was close to noon, as dark as a solar eclipse. Overhead the sky boiled in silent, ominous slow motion.

  A distant clattering roar began cascading through the city at his back: storm shutters, slamming shut along a thousand Euclidean canyons. It sounded as though the buildings themselves were applauding the rise of some long-awaited curtain. A single perfect raindrop, the size of his thumbnail, splatted on the asphalt at Lubin's feet.

  He turned and entered the command hut.

  * * *

  Another hallucinogenic tabletop dominated the single-room enclosure. Lubin studied the chessboard: two arms of security extended out from the waterfront, diverging northwest from Grand and southwest from Eisenhower. A funnel, to guide Lenie Clarke to a place of another's choosing. Two-point-five klicks west of the seawall, a band of botflies and exoskels formed a north-south line and began sealing off skyways and tunnels.

  Seven and a half square kilometers found itself excised from the world along these boundaries. Surface traffic moved within and without, but not across; the rapitrans grid went utterly dark across its breadth. The flow of information took a little longer to cut off—

  —wouldn't you know it another goddamned quarantine looks like I won't be able to make our eight-thirty after all, hello? Hello? Jesus fucking Christ…

  —but eventually even electrons respected the new borders. The target, after all, was well-known to receive assistance from such quarters.

  But it was not enough to simply cut this parallelogram out of the world. Lenie Clarke still moved there, among several hundred thousand sheep. Lubin let Burton off the leash for a while.

  A blond Peruvian was putting a telemetry panel through its paces in one corner of the hut. Lubin joined her while Burton feasted on the application of naked force. "Kinsman. How are they doing?"

  "Complaining about the noise. And they always hate freshwater ops. Makes them feel heavy."

  Her panel was a matrix of views from cams embedded in the leading edge of each dolphin's dorsal fin. A gray crescent marred the lower edge of each window, where the animals' melons intruded on the view. Ghostly shapes slipped past each other in the green darkness beyond.

  Endless motion. Those monsters never even slept; one cerebral hemisphere might, or
the other, but they were never both unconscious at the same time. Tweaked from raw Tursiops stock only four generations old, fins and flippers inlaid with reinforcements that gave new meaning to the term cutting edge, echolocation skills honed so fine over sixty million years that hard tech could still barely match it. Humanity had tried all sorts of liaisons with the Cetacea over the years. Big dumb pilot whales, eager to please. Orcas, too large for clandestine ops and a little too prone to psychosis in confined spaces. Lags and Spots and all those stiff-necked open-water pansies from the tropics. But Tursiops was the one, had always been the one. Not just smart; mean.

  If Clarke got that far, she'd never see them coming.

  "What about the noise?" Lubin asked.

  "Industrial waterfronts are loud at the best of times," Kinsman told him. "Like an echo chamber, all those flat reflective surfaces. You know how you feel when someone shines bright lights in your eyes? Same thing."

  "Are they just complaining, or will it interfere with the op?"

  "Both. It's not too bad now, but when the storm sewers start draining you're gonna have a dozen whitewater sources pounding into the lake all along this part of the seawall. Lots of noise, bubbles, stuff kicked off the bottom. Under ideal conditions my guys can track a ping-pong ball at a hundred meters, but the way it's going outside—I'd say ten, maybe twenty."

  "Still better than anything else we could deploy under the same conditions," Lubin said.

  "Oh, easily."

  Lubin left Kinsman to her charges and grabbed his pack off the floor. The storm assaulted him the moment he left the hut's soundproof interior. The downpour drenched on contact. The sky above was as black as the asphalt below; both flashed white whenever lightning ripped the space between. Lubin's people stood on conspicuous duty along the seawall, punctuating every vantage point. The rain turned them slick and black as rifters after a dive.

  Shoot to kill was a given. It might not be enough, though. If Clarke made it this far, there were too many places she could simply dive off an embankment. That was okay: in fact, Lubin rather expected it. That was what the subs and the snoops and the dolphins were for.

  Only the subs were useless close to shore, and now Kinsman was saying the dolphins might not be able to acquire a target more than a few meters away …

  He set his pack down and split it open.

  And if the dolphins can't catch her, what makes you think you can?

  The odd thing was, he actually had an answer.

  * * *

  Burton was waiting when Lubin got back inside. "We've rounded up a bunch of—oh, very nice. A salute to the enemy, maybe? In her final hour?"

  Lubin assayed a slight smile, and hoped that someday soon Burton would pose a threat to security. His eyecaps slid disconcertingly beneath lids not quite reacclimated to their presence. "What do you have?"

  "We have a bunch of people who look a lot like you do right now," Burton said. "None of them have actually seen Clarke—in fact, none of them even knew she was in town. Maybe the Anemone's losing its touch."

  "The anemone?"

  "Haven't you heard? That's what people are calling it now."

  "Why?"

  "Beats me."

  Lubin stepped over to the chess board; half a dozen cylindrical blue icons shone at points where civilians were being held to assist the ongoing investigation.

  "Of course, we're a long way from sampling the whole population yet," Burton continued. "And we're concentrating on the obvious groupies, the costumes. There'll be a lot more in civvies. Still, none of the people we've interrogated so far knows anything. Clarke could have an army if she wanted, but as far as we can tell she hasn't even begged a sandwich. It's completely off-the-wall."

  Lubin slipped his headset back on. "I'd say it's standing her in good stead now," he remarked mildly. "She seems to have you dead-ended, anyway."

  "There are other suspects," Burton said. "Lots of them. We'll turn her up."

  "Good luck." The tacticals in Lubin's visor were oddly drained of color—oh, right. The eyecaps. He eyed the blue cylinders glowing in the zone, tweaked his headset controls until they resaturated. Such clean, perfect shapes, each representing a grand violation of civil rights. He was often surprised at how little resistance civilians offered in the face of such measures. Innocent people, detained by the hundreds without charge. Cut off from friends and family and—at least for those who'd have been able to afford it—counsel. All in a good cause, of course. Civil rights should run a distant second to global survival in anyone's book. The usual suspects didn't know what was at stake, though. As far as they knew, this was just another case of officially-sanctioned thugs like Burton, throwing their weight around.

  Yet only a few had resisted. Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.

  Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.

  Not Lenie Clarke, though. Somehow, she'd gone the other way. A born victim, passive and yielding as seaweed, had suddenly grown thorns and hardened its stems to steel. Lenie Clarke was a mutant; the same environment that turned everyone else into bobbing corks had transformed her into barbed wire.

  A white diamond blossomed near Madison and La Salle. "Got her," the comlink crackled in a voice Lubin didn't recognize. "Probably her, anyway."

  He tapped into the channel. "Probably?"

  "Securicam snapshot down in a basement mall. No EM sensor down there, so we can't confirm. We got a three-quarter profile for a half-second, though. Bayesians say eighty-two percent likely."

  "Can you seal off that block?"

  "Not automatically. No master kill switches or anything."

  "Okay, do it manually."

  "Got it."

  Lubin switched channels. "Engineering?"

  "Here." They'd set up a dedicated line to City Planning. The people on that end were strictly need-to-know, of course; no hint of the stakes involved, no recognizable name to humanize the target. A dangerous fugitive in the core, yours is not to question why, full stop. Almost no chance for messy security breaches there.

  "Have you got the fix on La Salle?" Lubin asked, zooming the chessboard.

  "Sure do."

  "What's down there?"

  "These days, not much. Originally retail, but most of the merchants moved out with the spread. A lot of empty stalls."

  "No, I mean substructures. Crawlspaces, service tunnels, that sort of thing. Why aren't I seeing any of that on the map?"

  "Oh, shit, that stuff's ancient. TwenCen and older. A lot of it never even got into the database; by the time we updated our files nobody was using those areas except derelicts and wireheads, and with all the data-corruption problems we've been having—"

  "You don't know?" A soft beeping began in Lubin's head: someone else wanting to talk.

  "Someone might have scanned the old blueprints onto a crystal somewhere. I could check."

  "Do that." Lubin switched channels. "Lubin."

  It was his point man on the seawall. "We're losing the tanglefoam."

  "Already?" They should have had at least another hour.

  "It's not just the rainfall, it's the storm sewers. They're funneling precip from the whole city right out through the seawall. Have you seen the volume those drains are putting out?"

  "Not recently." Things just kept getting better.

  Burton, unrebukably occupied with his own duties, nonetheless seemed to have an ear cocked in Lubin's direction. "I'll be right out," Lubin said after a moment.

  "That's okay," Seawall said. "I can just feed you a—"

  Lubin killed the channel.

  * * *

  Whitewater roared from a mouth in th
e revetment, wide as a tanker truck. Lubin couldn't begin to guess at the force of that discharge; it extended at least four meters from the wall before gravity could even coax it off the horizontal. The tanglefoam had retreated on all sides; Lake Michigan heaved and thrashed in the opened space, reclaiming even more territory.

  Great.

  There were eleven drains just like this along the secured waterfront. Lubin redeployed two dozen inshore personnel to the seawall.

  City Planning beeped in his ear. "…nd some…"

  He cranked up the filters on his headset; the roar of the storm faded a bit. "Say again?"

  "Found something! Two-d and low-res, but it looks like there's nothing down there but a service crawlway running above the ceiling and a sewer main under the floor."

  "Can they be accessed?" Even with the filters, Lubin could barely hear his own voice.

  Engineering didn't seem to have any trouble, though. "Not from the concourse, of course. There's a physical plant under the next block."

  "And if she got into the main?"

  "She'd end up at the treatment plant on Burnham, most likely."

  They had Burnham covered. But—"What do you mean, most likely? Where else could she end up?"

  "Sewage and storm systems spill together when things get really swamped. Keeps the treatment facilities from flooding. It's not as bad as it sounds, though. By the time things get this crazy, the flow's great enough to dilute the sewage—"

  "Are you saying—" A bolt of lightning cut the sky into jagged fragments. Lubin forced himself to wait. The thunderclap in the ensuing darkness was deafening. "Are you saying she could be in the storm sewers?"

  "Well, theoretically, but it doesn't matter."

  "Why not?"