Undertow

by Elizabeth Bear

  Not even Jean Kroc.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to. Because the only thing he had to affect was this particular corner of it, this microcell. Just blunt the force, angle it around him—another hailstone rabbit-punched him, and he rocked forward, gagging. All it would take was a series of lucky coincidences and the wit to take advantage of them.

  He had the knack. He’d always had the knack. Jean Kroc wouldn’t have taken him if he didn’t have the knack—

  Sideways, swirling, eddies, angles, wind and rain, random chance. Not so random. You could feel it when it clicked, Jean said. Like a wave pushing, like a wind filling your sails. You grabbed it and you rode.

  Had it, had it, balanced, fine-line, the wind parting the rain before him, the hail bouncing harmlessly to either side, cold numbing his fingers, stinging his face. He got the paddle in the water and his weight behind it, shoving the skiff forward, the froggies slick shapes in the water, greeny-brown.

  One of the ranids popped up out of the water like a prank snake from a can. It hunkered, wincing, head sunk against its shoulders, short neck completely retracted. The hands paddled, wide-webbed, in an unmistakable beckoning gesture.

  Solid earth. Land. A little hillock rising between the reeds, a green bulge rising out of the channeled swamp, the reeds parting on either side. The ranid winced and meeped as falling ice struck it, kicked off with a powerful leap and splashed down five meters closer to the skiff. The shock of impact nearly sent André face-first into the water.

  Had it. Had it. Riding the edge—

  The hailstone that struck him roundly between the shoulder blades knocked even the thought of breath away. He held onto the paddle mostly because he was doubled over it, wheezing, failing, struck again, again.

  And then the skiff surged forward, propelled from behind, strong ranid kicks driving the prow onto the muddy bank. André spilled forward over the gunwales, rolled, pushed himself up with the paddle, gasping. Ooze dripped down his face as he grabbed the skiff and hauled, and then one of the ranids was beside him—Gourami, the smallest of the three—helping haul, flinching at the smack of ice. It pushed, and André heaved, and the skiff flipped over. As the froggie slithered down the bank, André dropped back into the mud and writhed under the edge of the skiff, a hailstone bloodying his mouth before he made it.

  He retreated into the shelter, the mud soaking through his shoulders, and listened to the hail smack against the hull of the skiff.

  It was not going to be a pleasant evening.

  8

  WHEN MORROW CALLED CLOSS, IT WAS A CAUSE FOR CONCERN. When she called him at home and didn’t waste time on pleasantries, it was very nearly a cause for panic.

  “Cricket Earl Murphy,” she said, as Closs toweled his close-cropped curls. He wore another towel wrapped around his waist, water still beaded in his chest hair. No matter where he was, Morrow’s calls rang through.

  “Who is she?”

  “Nobody,” Morrow said. She smiled that particular, mysterious smile. One of the things that Closs liked about her was that she wouldn’t milk it, though, or make him abase himself for the information. She’d enjoy the superiority of knowing she had his curious attention for a minute, and then she’d share.

  She didn’t let him down. “She’s an archinformist. With no past. Or possibly too much of one.”

  Closs nodded, running searches. Empty. Empty. Empty. “She doesn’t exist.”

  “But she does. She’s fucking André Deschênes. And she’s colluding with Jean Kroc.”

  “I’m not turning up any images. Any information at all.”

  Morrow’s smile transformed her face. She was at home as well, he guessed; tendrils of hair caressed her cheeks, and her face was scrubbed pink between the freckles. The focus was tight on her face, but he thought she was wearing a collarless white shirt. “You wouldn’t. It would take a better data miner than her to pull that, and there aren’t that many data miners better than Cricket. But I can tell you something about her. You’ll need to know it: Spivak managed to dump part of her information to Cricket before she died.”

  They had what Deschênes had brought back to them. But it was incomplete; Spivak had, they thought, been in the midst of deleting her hard memory when she died. And they hadn’t succeeded in cracking the encryption. Which was actually reassuring, because Jefferson’s man Kountché had procured copies of everything Security got off Spivak’s body and corrupted the originals.

  However, if the rest of the data were out there, and in the hands of a competent archinformist, they had problems. And an opportunity, because if this Cricket Murphy cracked the codes, and if Charter Trade could retrieve, collate, and access the files, it was possible that they could uncover the identity of whoever it was in Charter Trade that had given Spivak the information in the first place.

  Closs wasn’t about to forget that he also had a burrower to contend with. Greene would be starting a witch hunt any day now, if he hadn’t already. “We’ll need to retrieve her.”

  Morrow nodded. “There are rules.”

  Cricket Earl Murphy was Cricket, Closs noticed. Not Murphy. Morrow would no doubt eventually get around to explaining that, as well. He nodded, to let her know he was ready to hear her conditions.

  “Protect her,” Morrow said. “Keep her safe. She can be detained, but she’s not to be harmed.”

  “How do I find her?”

  Morrow’s smile was so irrepressible as to be infectious. It made her brown-flecked eyes seem to glow. “It’s easy,” she said. “She hasn’t changed her appearance. So, unless she’s skinned, she looks just like me.”

  Cricket liked that nobody cared how she looked while she did her job, and that she could work anywhere. Reclining on the second-story deck, for example, crosswise in a broad colorful hammock with her feet up on the railing so she didn’t swing on the wind.

  Or anyway, that’s where she would have been if it hadn’t been pelting down hail, chunks of ice big enough to dent the poly of the conservatory roof. Instead she sat inside, her hands folded around a steaming mug, her eyes half-lidded, and with the fraction of her attention that was not otherwise engaged, watched the ice fall.

  André was out in that somewhere. She wished him joy.

  The undersides of the clouds were gray and flat, smooth-textured. As good a backdrop as any for the images that waltzed across her retinas. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Sometimes that was all right, though; you knew it when you found it.

  Lucienne’s fragment-of-a-file also commanded a third of Cricket’s attention. It was tightcoded, bio-locked to Cricket’s neural pattern. Useless to anybody else unless she extracted it. And yet Lucienne—dying, murdered—had felt it was necessary to encrypt it as well. Which argued a high level of sensitivity.

  Enough to kill someone over. She’d tried every code key she could think of, every half-remembered joke and lame catchphrase a friendship developed over the years. She had nothing.

  She blinked itchy half-forgotten eyes and leaned against the chair-back, wishing her spine would release. If she didn’t go in for a massage soon, she’d regret it. André was useless for helping her relax…and she wasn’t about to let him put his hands around her neck again anytime soon.

  She paused the search and backgrounded the decryption session. As she rose, the thought struck her.

  What if it hadn’t been Lucienne who encoded the files? Then the code key would be something Lucienne knew, or had memorized, and probably saved to wet memory only, where nobody could hack it. She listened to Cricket, and Cricket had taught her everything she could think of that might help.

  There was no way Lucienne could expect Cricket to know such a code. Not unless Lucienne somehow passed it on to her.

  Which, of course, she might have. With the recording of her death.

  Cricket was going to need more than a cup of kesha to get through this.

  She didn’t keep any rec drugs at home, other than six different herbal stimulants—two kind
s of earth caffeine and four offworld brews—so she was stuck waiting until the hail slacked off. The trip through driving rain, down to the next barge to buy liquor, was long enough for her hands to have started shaking, cold at the center of the palms, when she let herself back into her apartment.

  She’d bought harsh, cheap vodka, something intended to numb her brain and her tongue. It came in a fragile disposable. She drained the last of the kesha, touched the heating element off, and popped two bubbles over the empty cup. Even the rough scent was steadying.

  She gulped, two mouthfuls, then gagged on the searing third but choked it down. The alcohol made her light-headed, as much from the fumes as from the scouring sensation.

  She should be sitting down, lest she wind up on the floor again. Not in the chair; that might tip. She settled cross-legged, leaning against the wall, and decided that was uncomfortable. She stretched out on the floor instead, her head pillowed on a repurposed chair cushion.

  And went inside.

  The first time, the pain had taken her whole attention—the pain and the awful knowledge, the migraine lights flashing before Lucienne’s vision, an aurora of green and violet and shocking pink. Now she tried to look through it, sort the surface thoughts, riffle the images and words and strings of thought flickering through Lucienne’s racing, failing mind. She pressed her palms to her closed lids, as if she could press the swelling agony back inside her skull. Her brain might have been herniating into her eye sockets; whoever told her a cerebral aneurysm was a painless killer had obviously never died from one.

  It was easier without the distraction of the massive, interrupted download and Jean clutching at her. She could focus; she could feel it, everything, the waves and the pitch of the flashboat, the coronas of color, the scent of the sea. A suprisingly rich environment. A surprisingly rich feed to waste bandwidth on, when you were dying.

  It had to be here. Lucienne had hidden it in here somewhere. There was no other reason for all this…detail.

  All the way to the end, she rode Lucienne’s death down. Again. And she didn’t find it.

  She opened her eyes and lay, flat-back, staring at the pinkness through her fingers. The vodka came up her throat, burning; she choked it down again. There was more on the counter if she needed the help.

  And if she was too drunk to notice what Lucienne had been trying to show her when she found it, that would be stupid. Cricket sighed, gritted her teeth, and went through it one more time.

  All those colors. She wondered if there was something fractal, concealed in the water, in the silhouette of the shoreline against moon-streaked indigo. If she subtracted the colors, the shattered light, might she see it then?

  Nothing. No help there. Nothing out of place—

  —nothing but the colors themselves. Those specific values. Green and violet and shocking pink.

  Wavelengths.

  Wavelengths were expressed in numbers.

  The colors were the key.

  She was just slotting them into the decryption protocol when her downstairs alarm starting ripping into the back of her head. That was a reflex. She was on her feet and moving, wishing the postmigraine tension headache pinching her upper face were a mask she could peel off and drop aside.

  And then she forgot its existence, as she kicked her flat monitors to manual override and found the place encircled by half a dozen men and women in Rim Security uniforms. They’d circumvented the perimeter—they might have managed it even if she hadn’t been distracted, though that was no excuse.

  A single flashboat was moored across the channel she could see from her window, two more uniformed officers climbing up to the street. Patrol officers routinely carried chemical accelerant weapons on Greene’s World for animal control and dealing with the smugglers and activists, who could be violent. The short arms and tasers strapped to their thighs gave her pause, nonetheless.

  She had Lucienne’s unlocked data in her head.

  There was no way she was going quietly.

  There were options. She could take a hostage, but Cricket didn’t want to shoot some cop who was just doing her job. And that would still leave her trapped in her house with no way out—they were trying to shut her connex down now, but her countermeasures were holding—and information she needed to get to Jean Kroc. She’d had no chance to look over the files, did not yet know how damaging, or how critical, they might be.

  The timing was almost too bad to be coincidental.

  That thought cascaded implications, bringing the stinging pinch of her headache back with a vengeance. At worst case, that was a very nasty suspicion indeed. It could be chance and luck and even a bit of conjuring. Or it could mean somebody had a bug in Cricket’s head.

  That wasn’t a chance she could take. She caught up a jacket off the back of the chair nearest the sliding door to the upper deck—it lived there, for just such reasons as this, and was waterproof, with sealed pockets—and let herself out under the conservatory roof, next to the open sundeck. She wasn’t wearing shoes: a lucky break. And as long as she stayed under cover, in the warm moist space, the officers across the channel would be unlikely to spot her. The greenhouse was cramped with plants, ornamentals and flowers rather than the practical vegetables she and Lucienne had grown.

  For a moment, she mourned the conservatory. A convenient, sharper ache to distract her as she took a breath and severed her connex. Her sight dimmed, the flicker of attention messages scrolled out of existence, her archive links and news feeds and the conversation boxes of a couple of black chats frequented by archinformists and freelancers vanishing like blown flower petals.

  It made her chest hurt when they went, as if her breath had been cut and not the flow of information.

  She did it at Jean Kroc’s, but this was different. Then, she knew when she’d be stepping back online.

  The shrilling alarm in her head vanished, but a real sound took its place. A voice, male, baritone. Calm. Counting backward from fifty.

  It was as much of a warning as she could offer. She really didn’t want to kill anybody. And she’d always thought a countdown was self-explanatory.

  There was an air supply in her escape coat, along with some other things. The water four meters below was gray and filthy, churned by the storm. She’d have to hit it straight, or she could break an arm, her back, her neck.

  She kicked the channel-side window out and dove through the reaching branches of an Earth-imported ficus. Not even the officers on the street below got a shot at her, or else they were holding their fire.

  It was nearly sunset and the afternoon storm had blown inland, trailing wreaths of mist, by the time Jefferson pushed his chair back and stood. He felt it, too, the pain in stiff muscles and joints provoking a groan as he twisted and stretched. The damn chairs his assistant had ordered were comfortable, but you forgot you were sitting still in them, and then you paid for it. He should set an alarm, something to ding or zap him every half an hour so he’d get up and move around.

  The office was quiet. If summer weren’t half here already, the sky outside the windows would be the blue-gray of a Rim Security uniform rather than streaky silver still. The storm had left a chill on the air; he bulked his sweater and grew it a high ribbed collar. He hated a cold throat.

  He glanced at the silvery coin on the edge of his desk blotter, an English fifty-pence piece from about 5 B.G., but didn’t pick it up. He’d tried a few; that was the best one for flipping.

  His support staff had received permission to go hours before, so when the light on his panel blinked pink-white, incoming, he activated his headset and took the call himself. His first job had been in his father’s office, taking calls. He’d worked his way up; he believed, as his father and grandfather had, that it made him a better boss. And that it built loyalty.

  This call was voice only, internal. From the lab. Someone calling from a headset rather than a desk or wall phone.

  “Jefferson Greene.”

  “Hello,” the caller said. A
woman, pleasant, efficient. Dr. McCarter, he thought. “May I speak to M~ Greene, please? Panel says he’s still in the office?”

  “This is Greene. Not the only one working late, I see.”

  She hesitated. “I’m sorry, Chairman. I didn’t expect you to answer your own phone.”

  “They all left me here,” he joked, trying to sound vexed. “I’ve been trying to find the door for the last half an hour.”

  She laughed, which didn’t mean anything. Everyone laughed at the boss’s jokes. “Chairman, I’ve been working on a research project, assisting Dr. Schaffner—”

  If Neil Schaffner had brought her in, Jefferson could probably trust her. Schaffner was old school, a college friend of Jefferson’s grandfather who had spent enough time relativistic that he’d already outlived the old man by fifty years. Family relationships got a little complicated when near-lightspeed travel got involved.

  “The ranid health issue,” he said.

  “Yes. And I’m a little unclear on what we’re going after here—”

  “We have intelligence that a rogue splinter group of ELF called GreenWorld has been in contact with illegal biolabs offplanet,” he said. “We’re concerned for the health of our ranid workers. We’re dependent on them for our undersea mining operations. And there are humanitarian reasons.”

  “Indeed,” she said. “How reliable is this…intelligence?”

  “Cross-confirmed by three sources. And we know what ELF provided the lab.”

  “GR-R seven twenty.”

  The ranid pathogen that Jefferson had arranged for Schaffner to have access to. “Yes.”

  “They’re a coolie-rights organization,” she protested, while he paced slowly back and forth, the index and middle fingers of his right hand pressed to the bone behind his ear as if they effected the slightest improvement in his hearing. “Do you believe they’d…introduce a weaponized pathogen to the native population simply to prevent them from working for Rim?”

  He cleared his throat. “We don’t know,” he said. “We can’t take the risk that they might. Which is why I need you to tell me first of all, if it can be weaponized. And if it can, to tell me how virulent they could make it.”