Undertow

by Elizabeth Bear

  They even made it through the seaquake; disaster response had protocols in place to handle those, and Novo Haven did not suffer a tsunami. But Closs knew by then that things were going to hell, and he didn’t think this failure would be the last one.

  When the first drilling platform went—it could have been terrorism, or coincidence run riot, or both—he knew it was time. He told his executary to wake everybody up, to call them in. He didn’t bother sending a message to Jefferson Greene. Either his own people would do it, he was already working on a problem and hadn’t bothered to inform Closs, or he would find out in the morning. In any case, Closs was not in the mood for a fight, and it was still easier to get forgiveness.

  He had already given the order to break the city up when the alert came in warning of a freak storm brewing in the gulf. The first IM from Amanda Delarossa was only half a minute behind, marked critical.

  Can’t reach Greene. Taking the Slide offline, it read. Executive decision. Major probability correction under way. Hang on to your ass.

  He called her. It went through on a heartbeat; whether she’d been waiting for the call, hoping for Greene, or whether she was just sitting in her ready room staring at the cup of coffee in front of her, waiting for the storm to blow over so there was something for her to do, he wasn’t sure. “Offline?”

  “The whole oyster,” she said. “It’s powering down now. We’ll have in-system communications, but you should expect a slight lightspeed lag.”

  Her eyes were slightly unfocused, as if she were watching a countdown; she was, because she popped it up on his display, too.

  “Starting about—” The image flickered. Hiccuped. Came back midword. “—ow.”

  It lasted less than a second. A flutter. The lag was so slight that it could seem like a thoughtful hesitation in speech. It was only what it signified that made Closs feel as if he’d plunged his hands in ice-water to the elbows.

  They were cut off. Cut off from Earth, cut off from Core, alone in the measureless cosmologic sea. “There’s a theory,” Amanda said, “that if they’d done this on Patience when things went squirrelly, they might have saved the station.”

  “If they’d jettisoned the antimatter, they might have saved the station, too,” Closs said. “So I take it you can’t give me any help with this storm?” He popped up a weather map, in case she’d missed the warning. A vast swirl of angry clouds confronted them, the twisted meeting of three low-pressure fronts—two warm, one unseasonably cold—feeding into one another.

  “Damn,” Amanda said. “Is that an eye?”

  Closs nodded. “An extratropical cyclone. We’ve got maybe fifty, sixty quarters before it hits.” Normally, Novo Haven had two or three days to respond to cyclone threat. The usual recourse was to disperse the city, run before the winds, rely on the god-botherers to send the storms on as harmless a path as possible, and return when the threat had passed. Sometimes, years went by without a drill. Some years, they fled two or three times.

  They’d been having a run of good luck, Closs thought bitterly.

  “No,” Amanda said. “I can’t do anything for you. I’m sorry, Major.” She looked up, then, startled from her chair fast enough that the coffee wobbled on her table. “Shit, I think I have a more immediate problem—”

  “Amanda—”

  “Oh, shit!”

  Closs remembered hearing somewhere that those were the most common last words spoken by those who died in accidents. He had no idea from whence the data came. It didn’t comfort him; there was no merciful fuzz of static and wipe of black this time.

  Amanda’s words were followed by a thump that would have deafened Closs if he’d been hearing it with his ears instead of his brain. A whoosh, and then nothing: absolute silence. There was a split-second of blackness as the power failed, before emergency lights kicked in.

  Amanda had been using an external mote rather than a headset projection, sending him her real-time image. So he glimpsed the empty, shattered ready room, the twisted remains of the bulkheads and ceiling, plumes of escaping, frozen air in the weak green glow of what emergency lighting remained unbroken.

  And through the torn-open floor, the silverfish flash of a spaceship whose design he did not recognize, turning as it looped away.

  “Shit,” Closs said. It was thirty seconds before he could bring himself to break the connection, though there wasn’t a chance in hell that anybody was alive in there. Finally, he blinked it away, though, and started composing another emergency alert message in his head. If anybody had made it off the station—if anybody did make it off the station—they would need to keep the landing lanes open and lit for the lighters as long as possible, and volunteers in cutters would need to stay behind to evacuate the crews.

  This time, he did send an instant message to Greene, highest priority. And wasn’t surprised by the unavailable tag that popped back. He spun on the ball of his foot and began to pace, fielding the requests for clarification and direction as they flooded in.

  Outside, the cyclone alarm climbed the night.

  Jefferson passed over the Y-15 omelite rig and landed on the Richardson Explorer only a few quarters after midnight. The sky was already louring, the moon-glow only permeating a few threadbare places in the overcast.

  On the rig, work continued under floods despite the hour. They had to meet rising quotas. From his vantage overhead, he got a good view of the workers, as purposeful and mindless as colony insects. The Explorer, however, was still and dark. She rocked gently in the chop; Greene checked his weather eye before beginning his descent. There was one hell of a storm blowing up to the south; he’d have to finish here quickly and beat feet back to Novo Haven, unless he wanted to spend the next day tossed on the ship.

  This time, the only people waiting for his chopper were the crew members who secured it—a much more efficient use of manpower. Jefferson thanked the nearest one and headed below, refusing an escort. By now, he thought he’d better be able to find his own way down to the labs.

  They opened to his ident, and he stepped inside after overriding the interior monitors—with McCarter’s code, not his own. The lights were out; he heard only soft chirping. The surviving research subjects: the controls.

  They would have to be sacrificed as well.

  Jefferson had kept himself well apprised of the layout of the lab and its contents over the course of the previous few weeks. There was a time, he understood, when his desperate plan would have had no hope of success. A time before exigency engineering; a time before a thorough understanding of bio-manufacturing.

  But Schaffner had called him that afternoon, and told him that stage one of the project was partially successful. A single pathogen had been engineered. Whether it bore sufficient similarity to the rumored one, he couldn’t assure the chairman without a sample, of course. But it was a start, and others would follow.

  Jefferson knew where the vials were kept. The inside pocket of his flight jacket was lined with therm. From it, he pulled a padded titanium box thirty centimeters long. Six vials fit into it, nested side by side. He closed it and sealed it, and took one last look around the lab.

  A fire would not be obvious, given the ongoing festival of sabotage. But it would be inhumane to leave the animals to burn. Jefferson crossed to their cages—half of them empty now—and felt the thrill of their noises up his spine. They went subsonic as he approached, the sneaking creatures, and crowded the glass, as if trying to see what he was doing.

  The emergency purge button was under several layers of glass and fail-safes. He used McCarter’s code again, and lifted the bubble with his sleeve wrapped over his fingertips. He pushed it down. There was a hiss of gas.

  One of the frogs was still signing weakly against the glass when he turned away. He didn’t look back; it would be with its friends soon enough.

  15

  THE CYCLONE SIRENS BEGAN TO WAIL IN THE SWELTERING dark hours of morning; Cricket almost overturned the chair she had been sitting curled in, her
knees cupped in her hands. She stumbled but caught herself. “Crap. Just the siren.”

  André nudged her thigh with his elbow from his spot on the sofa. She glared, then shook herself and settled. He meant to be comforting. She could tell by his eyebrows. He was trying.

  “We’ll have to speed up our schedule,” Nouel said, leaving Cricket grateful that he’d filled the silence. “Inside of two hours, we’ll have to resort to a commando raid at sea, and I don’t think—”

  “Right,” André said. “I’m on my way.” Cricket helped him up; his palm was cool and sweating. She wanted to pull away from the contact. It nauseated her to see him nervous. Human.

  “I won’t be able to help you,” Jean said, and André waved it aside with the back of his hand. “The probability storm.”

  “Careful—” Lucienne’s icon said, as wide-eyed as if blind to any irony.

  Cricket wondered. Lucienne had been her best friend. Lucienne would have slipped Cricket a sideways glance as she said it, and Cricket would have been meant to understand that the comment had its barbs.

  This Lucienne was not her friend. Nothing had changed; André had still killed the Lucienne Cricket cared for.

  Why would you choose to die—really die—even if your motherself survived? It didn’t mean that you were any less dead.

  Cricket couldn’t imagine dying for Moon Morrow. But then, maybe she was just the sort of person who couldn’t imagine dying for anyone. Or the sort nobody should be dying for.

  André shifted his cane to the other side and wiped his hand on his trousers. Cricket stepped back. By the time he summoned up his bulletproof smile, she couldn’t look at it. “I’ll come back. I promise.”

  Don’t come back for me. But she nodded, dry-mouthed, and touched the back of his hand. “Try not to get killed.”

  And there was no more irony in it when she said it than when Lucienne had.

  Less than sixty seconds later, he was out in his scoot, pulling away from the dock. He’d paused to put the top up. Cricket didn’t watch him from the window, other than one quick glance when the headlamp flashed on.

  She was definitely way too jumpy.

  Nouel cleared his throat and said, “Message from Maurice.” Cricket, despite her promise to herself to calm the hell down, shied from a sudden flash of memory: if everyone here except the impeccable Nouel had been better dressed before they started looking shopworn, this could be any UE situation room.

  Nouel gave her a curious look and kept talking, once he had Jean’s attention. “He’s not quite at the office. Says they expect to be clear for breakup within two hours; the outermost barges on Bayside are already moving out. He says to tell André that he’s not going to be able to transmit once he’s in. They’ll notice the bandwidth if they’re locked down, and protocol is to lock down.”

  Cricket flinched. “I’ll call him.”

  “Also, he wants me to pass a message to you, Jean.”

  “Go for it,” Jean said.

  Half a second later, just as Lucienne was looking as if she was about to interject a comment, her image flicked off like a closed fan. And half—no, most of Cricket’s network dropped out of connection. Routes she used daily were truncated, chats—she’d had to find new ones, in the person of her reincarnation, and start working her way up again—were empty, and archives she’d been mining for fifteen years were nonexistent. Most of the data holds were gone.

  “Jean—” she said, and then bit the rest of the sentence back as Maurice’s icon resolved in the center of the room. But Jean turned to her, and she had the answer ready. “Earth’s down. No, wait. We’re down. We’re off the fucking Slide.”

  “No connex,” Jean said. And Maurice interjected, “Not quite none. I’m here. They shut down the station.”

  “There’s a massive probability correction under way,” Jean said. “A storm of coincidence.”

  “There’s more than that,” Maurice said. “I think the planet is forking.”

  “Forking?” Everybody was looking at Cricket, which was how she knew she must have said it.

  There was no way she could have felt Nouel’s house rocking on the swells yet, even if a storm was coming, but still she groped backward, sat down where André had been sitting. The dark red cloth of Nouel’s sofa was soft against her palms, though the nap caught her skin. “The fucking planet is cloning itself? Planets—” She bounced up again. She stalked toward him, and she thought if he were present in the flesh, she might have hit him. “—don’t just fucking mitose.”

  She heard herself, and stopped abruptly. “Maurice. Sorry.”

  He blinked at her. She saw him shudder, the kind of bone-deep flex your body makes when a chill grabs you by the nape. “Okay. You’re Moon Morrow’s clone daughter.”

  “Touché. You were saying when I went orbital?”

  “There’s not time to explain,” he said. “Some of our scientists”—Cricket tried not to think about how easily he referred to Charter Trade as we—“think that the source of the omelite is a prehistoric explosion. Caused by the ranids’ attempts to build a Slide on-world.”

  “So they had a fairly high-tech civilization,” Jean said, but not as if he understood the tiny, shuddering epiphany that hovered at the edge of Cricket’s mind. “You mentioned that before. And they lost it in the disaster?”

  “The planet…forked,” Maurice said. “Split. Incompletely. Got stuck halfway. I dunno, I’m not a physicist and I’m not a conjure. If we had six-dimensional eyes maybe we could see the other half of it. And on this side…”

  “They took the technology apart,” Cricket said. “Right? They didn’t lose it. They decided not to use it. And Rim is covering it up?”

  Maurice nodded.

  “Wow,” Cricket said. “And we haven’t got any way at all to get that information to Lucienne?”

  A stupid question; she knew it when she asked it. But sometimes, you still had to ask. “I’ll call André,” she said.

  He picked up immediately. “Deschênes.” And listened impassively as she outlined the situation. She felt him looking at her, as if he were across the table, and not out in the prestorm calm.

  “Right,” he said, after a moment’s consideration. “Tell Maurice I’ll meet him inside.”

  If André had had the engine power to manage it, he would have been seeing a redshift. The scoot was full throttle as he zipped under folding sidewalks and between water taxis, threading the needle over and over without so much as a hard rub. He was in his element, and for a moment he could forget. Enough concentration, enough adrenaline, and the thick feel of water full of churned mud and blood dropped off his skin, the noises of the wounded and the grieving fell away from his ears.

  If only he could spend the rest of his life running, he thought he’d be just fine.

  At this hour, the streets should have been empty, but the claxons had ended that. People and devices scurried about, making ready; sidewalks were scrolled up, rolled up, and stowed, lines cast off, the city made ready to scatter under floodlights and the occasional arcing searchlight of an observing helicopter. The Bayside barges were already peeling away, their white and yellow and sea-green hulls turned shadowy in moonlight, the water curling phosphorescent from their bows. It was an eerie sight—a hundred outbound barges with their running lights red to port and green to starboard, moving in a purposeful ballet.

  All channels led from Novo Haven.

  In addition to the shipping lanes, three of the inbound lighter channels blinked red-blue-orange rather than their usual green, cleared for outbound surface traffic, though lighters were still coming in on the remaining two, trailing their cargo pods behind them. Tenders hurried to them; enough of the city had broken up that André got clear glimpses of the action through the moving lines of outbound cruisers, which stopped being “barges” as soon as they were no longer moored. His was not the only one-or two-man craft skittering through the larger vessels: escort boats, last-minute errands, and people playing the
odds that they could make it home or to a loved one’s residence rather than sheltering in place.

  He caught up with the Charter Trade flagship before she was unmoored, just as black water rippled with carnelian and ivory moon-paths and the broken green and red streaks of reflected running lights was opening up beyond her. Her sidewalks were stowed, her engines warming, the anchors rising at her bow and stern. It was a magic moment, if he’d been in the mood to appreciate it; the instant when an office building became a ship of the open seas once more, when an it became a her.

  He hailed a crew member, and got a winch sent down to haul the scoot on deck. It weighed under a hundred kilos empty; they’d just lash it along the rail and forget it. Climbing the Jacob’s ladder in a cast wasn’t something he’d want to do twice, and he tried not to think about what the way down would be like.

  He’d have to get this done before the wind picked up.

  I hope Maurice is ready for me, he thought, and swung himself onto the deck with some assistance from the woman running the winch.

  Jean sat down kitty-corner to Cricket and leaned his elbow on his knees. “Do you really think hacking into Greene’s system is going to make much difference?”

  Her eyes were closed, her head leaned against the sofa back and propped on cushions. “Maybe yes,” she said, her lips barely shaping the words. “Maybe no. It all depends on the luck of the draw. But I’ve been running clumsy, unsuccessful incursions at them for the past two weeks. They should think of me as a part of the scenery by now.”

  “Oh.” He sat back, feeling useless. She must have heard him shift, because he looked up and saw the shining crescents of half-open eyes through veiling lashes. She regarded him for a moment, and he was struck by how her displayed slender throat, her open slightly moving hands, should have seemed vulnerable but instead gave the impression of a lean, dozing predator.