Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  "There'd have to be an awful lot of water going through before the systems would mix. The moment your fugitive crossed over she'd be sucked down and drowned. No way she could fight the current, and there wouldn't be any airspace left in the pi—"

  "Everything's going through the storm system now?"

  "Most of it."

  "Will the grates hold?"

  "I don't understand," Engineering said.

  "The grates! The grills covering the outfalls! Are they rated to withstand this kind of flow?"

  "The grates are down," Engineering said.

  "What!"

  "They fold down automatically when tonnes-per-sec gets too high. Otherwise they'd impede flow and the whole system would back up."

  Heavy metal strikes again.

  Lubin opened an op-wide channel. "She's not coming overland. She's—"

  Kinsman, the dolphin woman, cut in: "Gandhi's got something. Channel twelve."

  He switched channels, found himself underwater. Half the image was a wash of static, interference even the Bayesians couldn't clear in realtime. The other half wasn't much better: a foamy gray wash of bubbles and turbulence.

  A split-second glimpse, off to the left: a flicker of darker motion. Gandhi caught it too, twisted effortlessly into the new heading. The camera rotated smoothly around its own center of focus as the dolphin rolled over on its back. The murk darkened.

  He's going deep, Lubin realized. Coming up from underneath. Good boy.

  Now the image centered on a patch of diffuse radial brightness, fading to black on all sides: the optics of ascent toward a brighter surface. Suddenly the target was there, dead to rights: silhouetted arms, a head, flashing stage left and disappearing.

  "Hit," Kinsman reported. "She never saw it coming."

  "Remember, we don't want her bleeding out there," Lubin cautioned.

  "Gandhi knows the drill. He's not using his pecs, he's just ram—"

  Again: a piecemeal human shadow, found and lost in an instant. The image jarred slightly.

  "Huh," Kinsman said. "She saw that coming somehow. Almost got out of the way in time."

  The implants. For an instant Lubin was back on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, comfortably suspended under three kilometers of black icewater. Feeling Beebe's sonar tick-tick-ticking against the machinery in his chest…

  "She can feel the click trains," he said. "Tell Gandhi to lay—"

  Another pass. This time the target faced her attacker head-on, eyes bright smudges in a dark jigsaw, one arm coming up in a vain attempt to ward off two hundred kilograms of bone and muscle wait a second she's holding something she's—

  The image skidded to the left. Suddenly the water was spinning again, no smooth controlled rotation this time, just a wild slewing corkscrew, purely ballistic, slowing against ambient drag. The darkness of deep water swelled ahead. A different darkness spilled in from the side, a black gory cloud spreading into brief cumulus before the currents tore it apart.

  "Shit," Kinsman said. Lubin's headset amped the whisper loud enough to drown thunder.

  She kept her billy. All the way from Beebe, hitching and walking and riding across the whole damn continent.

  Good for her…

  The vision imploded to darkness and a final flurry of static. Lubin was back on the waterfront, sheets of rain beating the world into a blur scarcely brighter than the one he'd just left.

  "Gandhi's down," Kinsman reported.

  * * *

  Kinsman tag-teamed two more dolphins to the site of Gandhi's last stand; Lubin pulled abreast on the seawall a few moments after they arrived. Burton was waiting there with a charged squid, water cascading from his rainskin.

  "Fan them out," Lubin told Kinsman over the link. "Hyperbolic focus on the carcass, offshore spread." He grabbed his fins off the scooter and stepped to the edge of the seawall, Burton at his side. "What about Gandhi?"

  "Gandhi's sockeye," Kinsman said.

  "No, I mean what about emotional ties? What impact will his loss have on the efficiency of the others?"

  "For Singer and Caldicott, none. They never liked him all that much. That's why I sent them."

  "Okay. Line up the rest on a converging perimeter, but keep them away from the outfalls."

  "No problem," Kinsman acknowledged. "They wouldn't be much good in there anyway, with those acoustics."

  "I'm switching to vocoder in thirty seconds. Channel five."

  "Got it."

  Burton watched neutrally as Lubin bent over to pull on his fins. "Bad break!" he shouted over the storm. "About the sewers, I mean!"

  Lubin snugged his heel straps, reached out for the squid. Burton handed it over. Lubin sealed his face flap. The diveskin reached across his eyelids and bonded to the caps beneath, blocked nose and mouth like liquid rubber. He stood, isolated from the downpour, calmly suffocating.

  Good luck, Burton mouthed through the rain.

  Lubin hugged the squid to his chest and stepped into space.

  * * *

  Michigan closed over his head, roaring.

  Fifteen meters to the north, one of Chicago's outfalls spewed an endless vomit of wastewater into the lake; the whirlpools and eddies from that discharge reached Lubin with scarcely-diminished strength. A fog of microscopic bubbles swirled on all sides, smeared muddy light throughout the water. Bits of detritus looped through eccentric orbits, fading to white just past the reach of his fingers. Water sucked and slurped on all sides. Overhead, barely visible, the rain-pelted surface writhed like mercury under rapid-fire assault—and all around, omnipresent in the heavy surge, the deep deafening roar of waterfalls.

  Lubin spun in the current, insides flooding, and reveled.

  He didn't think that Lenie Clarke was headed for deep water just yet. She might not have anticipated the minisubs lurking deep offshore; she knew about the dolphins, though, and she knew about sonar. She knew all about the effects of turbulence on sensory systems both electronic and biological. She'd stay close to shore, hiding in the cacophony of the outfalls. Soon, perhaps, she'd edge north or south in furtive stages, creeping along a murky jungle of wreckage and detritus left over from three centuries of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. Even in calm weather there'd be no shortage of hiding places.

  Now, though, she was injured, probably fighting shock. Gandhi had hit her twice before Clarke had rallied; it was amazing that she'd even stayed conscious through that pounding, let alone fought back. For the time being she was holed up somewhere, just hanging on.

  Lubin glanced at the nav console on his wrist. A tiny two-d representation of local space sparkled there—starring, as Ken Lubin, a convergence of sharp green lines at center stage. Occasional yellow pinpoints drifted in and out of range: Kinsman's dolphins, patrolling the perimeter. Another pinpoint, much closer, wasn't moving at all. Lubin aimed his squid and squeezed the throttle.

  Gandhi was a mess. Clarke's billy had discharged against the right side of his head; the front of the animal had been blown apart in an instant. Behind the dorsal fin, the carcass was pretty much intact. Farther forward a fleshy wreckage of ribs and skull remained on the left side, that maniacal idiot dolphin grin persisting even past death. The right side was gone entirely.

  Gandhi was impaled on a sunken tangle of rebar. The current here moved offshore; the dolphin must have met his fate closer to the seawall. Lubin swung the squid around and started upstream.

  "…eive…Lu…ical?"

  The word fragments buzzed along his lower jaw, all but lost in the ambient thunder. Lubin, struck by sudden realization, cranked up the gain on his vocoder: "Keep this channel clear. Cl—"

  His words, transmuted by the vocoder into a harsh metallic buzz, caught him offguard. It had been months since the implants had mutilated his voice that way. The sound almost invoked a kind of nostalgia.

  "No contact," he continued. "Clarke's got L-FAM implants. She could be listening in."

  "…ain?…"

  In fact, even if Clarke was tuned to the righ
t channel, it was doubtful that she'd make any more sense of the signal than Lubin had. Acoustic modems had not been built with whitewater in mind.

  And why would she be listening anyway? How would she know I'm even here?

  It wasn't a chance he was willing to take. He kept as silent as his quarry, wherever she was. The lake raged around them both.

  Intuition is not clairvoyance. It's not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that ninety percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously—but no less rigorously—than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person. Lubin glided through murk so thick he could barely see the squid that drew him forward; he set the machine to heel and crawled through dead twisted warrens of wreckage and dereliction, spikes and jagged edges rampant under layers of slime that softened only their appearance. He let the current push him offshore, then grab him and hurl him against the base of the seawall itself. He clambered sideways like a crab on gray scoured surfaces, pressed himself flat while the water tried to peel him off and flick him away like an old decal. He let those intuitive subroutines guide him; weighing scenarios, sifting memories, remembering happier times when Lenie Clarke had revealed this motive, that preference. He explored some potential refugia, ignored others, and would not have been able to say exactly why. But all parts of Ken Lubin had been well and thoroughly trained: the brain stem and the analytical subroutines and the little homunculus that sat self-consciously behind his eyes. Each knew what to do, and what to leave to the others.

  And so it was not entirely unexpected that he should come upon Lenie Clarke, hiding in the shadow of one of Chicago's absurd waterfalls, wedged in a canyon of wreckage from the previous century.

  She was in bad shape. Her body was twisted in a way that suggested Gandhi's blows had done their job. Her diveskin had been torn along the ribcage, either from the dolphin's attack or from the jagged geometry of the lakebed. She favored her left arm. But she'd chosen her refuge well; too much noise for sonar, too much metal for EM signatures, too much shit in the water for anyone without the eyes and the instincts of a rifter to ever track her down. Burton would have passed within a meter and not picked up the scent.

  Good girl, he thought.

  She looked up from her hiding place, her featureless white eyes meeting his through two meters of milky chaos, and he knew instantly that she recognized him.

  He had hoped, against all reason, that she wouldn't.

  I'm sorry, he thought. I really don't have any choice.

  Of course she still had the billy. Of course she kept it concealed until the last moment, then yanked it into play with desperate swiftness. Of course she tried to use it on herself; doomed anyway, what better act of final revenge than to set ßehemoth free in one final, suicidal catharsis?

  Lubin saw all of it coming, and disarmed her with barely a thought. But the billy, when he checked, was empty. Gandhi had taken its final charge. Lubin dropped it onto the muddy junkscape.

  I'm sorry. The sexual anticipation of imminent murder began stirring in him. I liked you. You were the only—you really deserved to win...

  She stared back. She didn't trip her vocoder. She didn't try to speak.

  Any second now Guilt Trip would kick in. Once again, Lubin felt almost sick with gratitude: that an engineered neurochemical could so easily shoulder all responsibility for his acts. That he was about to kill his only friend, and remain blameless of any wrongdoing. That—

  It was impossible to close one's eyes while wearing a diveskin. The material bonded to the eyecaps, pinned the lids back in an unblinking stare. Lenie Clarke looked at Ken Lubin. Ken Lubin looked away.

  Guilt Trip had never taken this long before.

  It's not working. Something's wrong.

  He waited for his gut to force him into action. He waited for orders and absolution. He went down into himself as deep as he dared, looking for some master to take the blame.

  No. No. Something's wrong.

  Do I have to kill her myself?

  By the time he realized he wasn't going to get an answer, it was too late. He looked back into Lenie Clarke's final refuge, steeling himself for damnation.

  And saw that it was empty.

  Terrarium

  An icon flashed at the corner of Desjardins's board. He ignored it.

  The new feed had just gone online: a thread of fiberop snaking in all its messy physicality under the door and down the hallway. There hadn't been any other way; CSIRA was far too security-conscious to allow civilian nodes inside its perimeter, and The General—or Anemone, or whatever it was called today—hadn't talked to any other kind since before Yankton. If Desjardins wanted to go into combat, he'd have to do it on enemy turf.

  That meant a hardline. Outside wireless was jammed as a matter of course; even wristwatches couldn't get online in CSIRA without going through the local hub. Desjardins had envisioned a cable running through the lobby into the street, hanging a left and tripping up pedestrians all the way to the nearest public library. Fortunately, there'd been a municipal junction box in the basement.

  His board upped the lumens on the icon, a visual voice-raising: Alice Jovellanos still wants to talk. Please respond.

  Forget it, Alice. Your face is the last thing I want to see right now. You're lucky I haven't turned you in already.

  If Guilt Trip had been doing his—its job, he would have turned her in. God only knew how badly he could screw up now, thanks to that little saboteur's handiwork. God only knew how many other 'lawbreakers she was putting at risk the same way, how many catastrophes would result from sheer glandular indecision at a critical moment. Alice Jovellanos had potentially put millions of lives in jeopardy.

  Not that that amounted to a fart in a hurricane next to what ßehemoth was gearing up for, of course. N'AmWire had just made it public: a big chunk of the west coast was now officially under quarantine. Even the official death toll had left the starting gate at four digits.

  The splice fed into a new panel that crowded him on the right. It was stand-alone and self-contained, unconnected and unconnectable to any CSIRA sockets. Vast walled spaces waited within—spaces that could swallow the contents of a node and walls that could mimic its architecture at a moment's notice. A habitat replicator, in effect. A terrarium.

  The icon began beeping. He muted it.

  Take a hint, Alice.

  She'd really fucked him up the ass. The problem—and the fact that it was a problem only emphasized how thoroughly she'd messed things up—was that she obviously didn't see it that way. She thought of herself as some sort of liberator. She'd acted out of some kind of twisted concern for his welfare. She'd actually put his interests above the Greater Good.

  Desjardins booted the terrarium. Start-up diagnostics momentarily cluttered the display. He wouldn't be using his inlays this time around; they were part of the CSIRA network, after all. It was going to be raw visual and touchpads all the way.

  The Greater Good. Right.

  That had always been a faceless, abstract thing to human sensibilities. It was easier to feel for the one person you knew than for the far-off suffering millions you didn't. When the Big One had hit the Left Coast, Desjardins had watched the threads and spun his filters and breathed a silent sigh of relief that it hadn't been him under all that rubble—but on the day that Mandelbrot died, he knew, his heart would break.

  It was that illogical fact that made Guilt Trip necessary in the first place. It was that illogical fact that kept him from betraying Alice Jovellanos. He sure as shit wasn't ready to sit down and have a friendly chat with her, but he couldn't bring himself to sell her out either.

  Besides. If he really had figured out this whole Anemone thing, it was Alice who'd given him the idea.

  He tapped the board. A window opened. Maelstrom howled on the other side.

  Either way, he'd know within the hour.

  * * *

  It was everywhere.

  Even where it wasn't, it was. Where it wasn't
talking, it was being talked about. Where it wasn't being talked about it was being sown, tales and myths of Lenie Clarke left inert until some unsuspecting vector opened a mailbox to hatch a whole new generation.

  "She's everywhere. That's why they can't catch her."

  "You're shitting static. How can she be everywhere?"

  "Imposters. Clones. Who says there's only one Lenie Clarke?"

  "She can, you know, beam herself. Quantum teleportation. It's the blood nanos she's carrying."

  "That's impossible."

  "Remember the Strip?"

  "What about it?"

  "Lenie started it, haploid. She just strolled onto the beach and everyone she touched just threw off the drugs and woke up. Just like that. Sounds nano to me."

  "That wasn't nano. That's just, you know, that firewitch bug from NoCal, the one that makes your joints fall apart? It got into the cyclers and fucked up some molecule in the valium. You want to know what Lenie started, she started that fucking plague …"

  It had gotten smarter, too. Subtler. Hundreds of 'lawbreakers were on the watch now, prowling civilian channels for the inexplicable clarity that had alerted Desjardins the day before. That slip hadn't been repeated, as far as anyone could tell.

  And when Desjardins finally did acquire a target, it wasn't baud rate or drop-out that clued him in, but content:

  "I know where Lenie Clarke is." It spoke with the sexless, neutral voice of inflated ascii set to default; its handle was Tesseract. "Les-beus are on her ass, but they've lost the trail for now."

  "How do you know?" asked someone claiming to be Poseidon-23.

  "I'm Anemone," Tesseract said.

  "Sure. And I'm Ken Lubin."

  "Then your days are numbered, litcrit-o'-mine. Ken Lubin's been turned. He's working for the corpses now."

  A lot smarter, to have known that. Not so smart to admit it in mixed company. Desjardins began sketching lines on his board.

  "We need to back her up," Tesseract was saying. "Any of you in central N'Am, say around the Great Lakes?"

  No queries to the local traffic log, no surreptitious trawl for Turing apps, no trace on the channel. No moves on anything that Tesseract might be keeping an eye on. Achilles Desjardins had gotten smarter, too.