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Dune

Phocoena runs silent out of Atlantis, threading between peaks and canyons that cover and impede her progress in equal measure. Their course is a schizoid amalgam of conflicting priorities, the need for speed scraping incompatibly against the drive to survive. To Lenie Clarke it seems as though their compass bearing at any given moment could be the work of a random number generator; but over time the net vector resolves to southwest.

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At some point Lubin decides that they're safely out of the neighborhood. Haste becomes the better part of discretion; Phocoena climbs into open water. She skims west down the slopes of the Mid Atlantic Ridge, occasionally twisting this way or that to avoid moguls the size of orbital lifters. Mountains give way to foothills; foothills, to a vast endless expanse of mud. Clarke sees none of it through the ports, of course—Lubin hasn't bothered to turn on the outside lights—but the topography scrolls past on the nav panel in a garish depth-synched spectrum. Jagged red peaks, so high that their tips almost rise above darkness, lie well out of range behind them. Transitional slopes, segueing indiscernibly from yellow to green, fade to stern. The abyssal plain flows beneath them like an endless blue carpet, hypnotic and restful.

For long merciful hours, there is no virulent microbe to track; no betrayal to withstand; no desperate battle to fight. There is nothing to do but dwell on the microcosm receding behind them, on friends and foes brought finally into war-weary alignment—not through negotiation or reconciliation, but through the sudden imminence of the greater threat, the threat from outside. The threat Phocoena races towards even now.

Perhaps not such a blessing after all, this interlude.

Eventually the seabed rises before them into a color-banded escarpment swelling across the screen. There's a gap in the wall ahead, a great underwater canyon splitting the Scotian conshelf like God's own icepick. Nav lists it as The Gulley. Clarke remembers that name; it's got one of the biggest shortstop arrays this side of Fundy. Lubin indulges her, edges a few degrees off-course to intersect one of the colossal structures halfway up the canyon's throat. He flashes the forward floods as they drift past. The seamill looms huge in the beams, the visible arc of its perimeter so slight that Clarke could have taken it for a straight line. One of its great blades passes above them, its base and its tip lost in darkness to either side. It barely moves.

There was a time when this was the competition. Not so long ago the currents of the Gulley produced almost as many Joules-per-second as a good-sized geothermal plant. Then the climate changed, and the currents with it. Now the array is nothing but a tourist stop for amphibious cyborgs: weightless derelicts, slumbering in the long dark.

That's us, Clarke reflects as they pass. For just this one moment she and Lubin are weightless too, poised precisely between two gravitational fields. Behind them: Atlantis, the failed refuge. Ahead—

Ahead, the world they've been hiding from.

Five years since she's been ashore. Back then the apocalypse was just getting under way; who knows how wild the party's grown by now? They've learned a few things—broad strokes, dark rumors, bits and pieces filtered from that fraying patch of the telecom spectrum that spans the Atlantic. All of North America is quarantined. The rest of the world bickers over whether to put it out of its misery or simply let it die on its own. Most still fight to keep ßehemoth at bay; others have embraced that doomsday microbe, have seemingly embraced Armageddon itself.

Clarke isn't quite sure what to make of that. Some death-wish buried in the collective unconscious, perhaps. Or maybe just the grim satisfaction that even the doomed and downtrodden can take in payback. Death is not always defeat; sometimes, it is the chance to die with your teeth buried in your oppressor's throat.

There is much dying, back on the surface. There is much baring of teeth. Lenie Clarke does not know their reasons. She knows only that some of them act in her name. She knows only that their numbers are growing.

She dozes. When she opens her eyes again the cockpit glows with diffuse emerald light. Phocoena has four bow ports, two dorsal two ventral, great perspex teardrops radiating back from the nose. A dim green void presses down on the upper ports; below, a corrugated expanse of sand rushes past beneath Clarke's footrest.

Lubin has disabled the color-codes. On nav, Phocoena races up a gentle monochrome slope. The depth gauge reads 70m and rising.

"How long have I been sleeping?" Clarke asks.

"Not long." Fresh red scars radiate from the corners of Lubin's eyes, the visible aftermath of an operation that slid neuroelectric inlays into his optic nerves. Clarke still winces inwardly at the sight; she's not sure she would've trusted the corpses's surgeons even if they are all on the same side now. Lubin obviously thinks the additional data-gathering capacity was worth the risk. Or maybe it's just one of those extras he's always wanted, but never been cleared for in his past life.

"We're at Sable already?" Clarke says.

"Almost."

Bleating from nav: hard echo up the slope at two o'clock. Lubin throttles back and slews to starboard. Centrifugal force swings Clarke to the side.

Thirty meters. The sea outside looks bright and cold. It's like staring into green glass. Phocoena crawls up the slope at a few sluggish knots, sniffing northwest towards a wireframe assembly of tubes and struts swelling on nav. Clarke leans forward, peers through shafts of murky light. Nothing.

"What's the viz out there?" she wonders.

Lubin, intent on his piloting, doesn't look over. "Eight point seven."

Twenty meters from the surface. The water ahead darkens suddenly, as though an eclipse were in progress. An instant later that darkness resolves into the toe of a giant: the rounded end of a cylindrical structure half-buried in drifting sand, fuzzed with sponges and seaweed, curving away into the hazy distance. Nav pegs it at eight meters high.

"I thought it floated," Clarke says.

Lubin pulls back on the stick: Phocoena climbs into the water alongside the structure. "They beached it when the well ran dry."

So this great sunken pontoon must be flooded. Girders and struts stand on its upper surface, a monstrous scaffold rising into daylight. Lubin maneuvers the sub between them as though threading a needle. Nav shows them entering a submerged arena enclosed by four such structures arranged in a square. Clarke can see their dim outlines through the water. Pylons and trusses rise on all sides like the bars of a cage.

Phocoena breaks the surface. The outside world ripples as water sheets down the acrylic, then wavers into focus. They've come up directly beneath the rig; its underbelly forms a metal sky a little less than ten meters overhead, held from the earth by a network of support pylons.

Lubin climbs from his seat and grabs a fanny pack off a nearby utility hook. "Back in a few minutes," he says, popping the dorsal hatch. He climbs away. Clarke hears a splash through the opening.

He still isn't happy about her presence here. She ignores his safe-distancing maneuver and rises to follow.

The air wafting through the hatch blows cold against her face. She climbs onto the sub's back and looks around. The sky—what she can see of it, through the girders and pylons—is gray and overcast; the ocean beneath is gunmetal to the horizon. But there are sounds, behind her. A distant, pulsing roar. A faint squawking, like some kind of alarm. It's familiar, but she can't quite put her finger on it. She turns.

Land.

A strip of sandy shore, maybe fifty meters past the jacket of the rig. She can see tufts of weathered, scrubby brush above the high-tide line. She can see moraines of driftwood, pushed into little strips along the beach. She can see surf pounding endlessly against it all.

She can hear birds, calling. She'd almost forgotten.

Not N'Am, of course. The mainland's still a good two or three hundred kilometers away. This is just a way station, some lonely little archipelago on the Scotian Shelf. And yet, to see living things without either fins or fists—she marvels at the prospect, even as she marvels at her own overreaction.

A steep metal staircase winds around the nearest pylon. Clarke dives into the ocean, not bothering with hood or gloves. The Atlantic slaps her face, a delicious icy sting across her exposed skin. She revels in the sensation, crosses to the pylon with a few strokes.

The stairs lead onto a walkway that runs the perimeter of the rig. Wind strums the railing's cables; the structure clatters like some arrhythmic percussion instrument. She reaches an open hatchway, peers into the dark interior: a segmented metal corridor, bundles of pipe and fiberop running along the ceiling like plexii of nerves and arteries. A t-junction at the far end leading off to unknown, opposite destinations.

Wet footprints on the deck lead in here, and turn left. Clarke follows.

Sound and vision fade as she penetrates deeper into the hulk. Bulkheads muffle the sound of the surf and the miraculous squawking of the gulls. Her enhanced vision fares better—the overcast ambience from outside follows her around a half-dozen corners, peeps in through portholes at the end of unexplored corridors—but the desaturation of color in her surroundings tells her that she's moving through darkness too deep for dryback eyes. That reversion to black-and-white must be why she didn't notice it sooner—dark streaks on the walls and floors could be anything, from rust to the remains of an enthusiastic game of paintball. But now, following the last smudged footprints to a hatch yawning open in the bulkhead, the realization sinks in:

Carbon scoring. Something's burned this whole section.

She steps through the hatch into what must have been someone's quarters, judging by the bunk-bed frame and the bedside table that occupies one modest wall. Frames, skeletal remnants of furniture, are all that's left. If there were ever mattresses or sheets or blankets here, they're gone now. Every surface is coated in dark greasy soot.

From somewhere out in the hall, the creak of metal hinges.

Clarke steps back into the corridor and tracks the sound. By the time it stops she's got a fix, and a beacon—light, bouncing dimly back down the passageway from around a corner just ahead. That way was dark and silent when she stepped into the cabin; now, she can even hear distant waves.

She follows the light. Finally she comes to an open hatch at the base of a companionway, leading up. Ocean breeze sneaks past her into the rig, carrying the sound of seabirds and the wet rubbery scent of Ascophyllum. For a moment she's taken aback; the light pours down from the head of the stairs, easily bright enough to bring color back into the world, and yet the walls are still—

Oh.

The polymer around the lip of the hatch has bubbled and burned; all that remains are lumpy, flaking clots of carbon. Clarke pulls experimentally at the wheel; the hatch scarcely moves, screeching softly against the deposits caking its hinges.

She rises into daylight, and devastation.

It's a small rig, as such things were measured. Nowhere near the city-sized monstrosities that once crowded the ocean hereabouts. Perhaps, by the time it was built, oil was already falling out of fashion; or perhaps there simply wasn't enough left to warrant a bigger investment. For whatever reason, the main hull is only two stories thick along most of its length. Now Clarke rises onto the wide-open expanse of its roof.

The rig's deck stretches over half the area of a city block. There's an elevated helipad at the far end, and a great crane whose tendons have been cut; it lies across the deck at a messy angle, struts and crossbeams slightly crumpled on impact. The derrick at the nearer end is relatively intact, thrusting into the sky like a wireframe phallus. Clarke rises in its shadow, into something that was once a control hut of some kind. Now it's a rectangular ruin; none of the four walls remain intact, and the roof itself has been thrown halfway across the deck. There were control panels and electronics here once—she recognizes the general outlines of half-melted instrumentation.

This is how completely the hut has been destroyed: Lenie Clarke can simply step onto the main deck over what's left of the walls.

All this space, this uninterrupted visibility, unsettles her. For five years she has hidden beneath the heavy, comforting darkness of the North Atlantic, but up here—up here, she can see all the way to the edge of the world. She feels naked, like a target: visible from infinite distance.

Lubin is a small figure on the far side of the platform, his back turned, leaning on the western railing. Clarke walks towards him, skirting the wreckage, suddenly oblivious to the wheeling of the gulls. She nears the edge, fights momentary vertigo: Sable Archipelago spreads out before her, an insignificant chain of sandy dots in the middle of the ocean. The nearest looks big enough from here, though, its spine sheathed in brownish vegetation, its beach stretching almost out of sight to the south. Off in that distance, Clarke thinks she sees tiny specks in vague motion.

Lubin's wearing a pair of binoculars, panning his head slowly from side to side. Scanning the island. He doesn't speak as Clarke joins him on the railing.

"Did you know them?" she asks softly.

"Perhaps. I don't know who was out here when it happened."

I'm sorry, she almost says, but what's the point?

"Maybe they saw it coming," she suggests. "Maybe they got away."

He doesn't look away from the shoreline. The binocs extend from his eyes like tubular antennae.

"Should we be out in the open like this?" Clarke asks.

Lubin shrugs, startlingly, chillingly indifferent to security.

She looks down along the shoreline. The moving specks are a bit larger now, some kind of animals from the look of it. They appear to be moving this way.

"When do you suppose it happened?" Somehow, it seems important to keep him talking.

"It's been almost a year since we got a signal from them," he says. "Could've been any time since then."

"Could've been last week," Clarke remarks. There was once a time when their allies were much more faithful in their correspondence. Even so, extended silence doesn't always mean anything. You had to wait until no one was listening. You had to be careful not to give the game away. Both corpse and rifter contacts went dark now and then, back in the early days. Even now, after a year of silence, it's not unreasonable to keep hoping for news, someday. Any day.

Except now, of course. Except from here.

"Two months ago," Lubin says. "At least."

She doesn't ask how he knows. She follows his magnified gaze back to shore.

Oh my God.

"They're horses," she whispers, amazed. "Wild horses. Holy shit."

The animals are close enough now to be unmistakable. An image comes to her, unbidden: Alyx in her sea-floor prison, Alyx saying this is the best place I could possibly be. Clarke wonders what she'd say now, seeing these wild things.

On second thought, it probably wouldn't impress her. She was a corpse kid, after all. She'd probably toured the world a dozen times before she was eight. Maybe even had a horse of her own.

The herd stampedes along the beach. "What are they doing out here?" Clarke wonders. Sable wasn't a proper island even back before the rising seas partitioned it; it's never been more than a glorified sand dune, crawling around the outer edges of the Shelf's exhausted oil fields under the influence of wind and currents. She can't even see any trees or shrubs on this particular island, just a mane of reedy grass running along its backbone. It seems absurd that such an insignificant speck of land could support creatures so large.

"Seals, too." Lubin points along the shore to the north, although whatever he sees is too distant for Clarke's unmagnified vision. "Birds. Vegetation."

The dissonance of it sinks in. "Why the sudden interest in wildlife, Ken? I never took you for a nature lover."

"It's all healthy," he says.

"What?"

"No carcasses, no skeletons. Nothing even looks sick." Lubin slips the binocs from his skull and slides them back into his fanny pack. "The grass is rather brown, but I suspect that's normal." He sounds almost disappointed for some—

ßehemoth, she realizes. That's what he's looking for. Hoping for. Up here the world burns its hot zones—at least, it burns those small enough to carry any hope of containment in exchange for the lives and land lost to the flame. ßehemoth threatens the entire biosphere, after all; nobody gives a damn about collateral damage when the stakes are that high.

But Sable is healthy. Sable is unburned. Which means the destruction around them has nothing to do with ecological containment.

Someone is hunting them.

Clarke can't really blame them, whoever they are. She'd have been dying up here with everyone else if the corpses had had their way. Atlantis was only built for the Movers and Shakers of the world; Clarke and her buddies were just another handful of the moved and the shaken as far as that elite was concerned. The only difference was that Achilles Desjardins had told them where the party was, so they could crash it before the lights went out.

So if this is the anger of those left behind, she can hardly begrudge it. She can't even dismiss it as misplaced. After all, ßehemoth is her fault.

She looks back at the aftermath. Whoever did this isn't nearly as good as Desjardins was. They're not bad, mind you; they were smart enough to deduce Atlantis's general whereabouts, anyway. The variant of ßehemoth they rejigged utterly defeats the retrofitted immunity that was supposed to protect its citizenry. The fact that they even got close enough to seed ß-Max in the right vicinity may have won them the game, judging from the body count that was starting up as Phocoena went into the field.

But they still haven't found the nest. They prowl the neighborhood, they've burned this lonely outpost on the frontier, but after all this time Atlantis itself continues to elude them. Now, Desjardins—it took him less than a week to winnow three hundred and sixty million square kilometers of seabed down to a single set of lats and longs. He not only painted the bullseye, he pulled the strings and erased the tracks and arranged the rides to get them there.

Achilles, my friend, Clarke thinks. We could really use your help about now. But Achilles Desjardins is dead. He died during Rio. Even being CSIRA's best 'lawbreaker doesn't do you much good when a plane drops on your head.

For all Clarke knows, he may have been killed by the same people who did this.

Lubin is walking back along the platform. Clarke follows. Wind slices around her, frigid and biting; she could almost swear she feels its teeth through the diveskin, although that must be her imagination. Nearby, some accidental wind-tunnel of pipes and plating moans as if haunted.

"What month is it?" she asks aloud.

"June." Lubin's heading for the helipad.

It seems a lot colder than it should be. Maybe this is what passes for balmy since the Gulf Stream shut down. Clarke's never been able to wrap her head around that paradox: that global warming should somehow have turned eastern Europe into Siberia...

Metal stairs lead up to the pad. But Lubin, reaching them, doesn't climb; he steps behind them and drops to one knee, intent on the underside of the frame. Clarke bends down at his side. She sees nothing but scraped, painted metal.

Lubin sighs. "You should go back," he says.

"Not a chance."

"Past this point I won't be able to return you. I can afford a forty-six hour delay more than I can afford someone slowing me down once we get to the mainland."

"We've been over this, Ken. What makes you think I'm going to be any easier to convince now?"

"Things are worse than I expected."

"How, exactly? It's already the end of the world."

He points at a spot under the stairs where the paint's been scraped off.

Clarke shrugs. "I don't see anything."

"Right." Lubin turns and starts back towards the scorched remains of the control hut.

She sets out after him. "So?"

"I left a backup recorder behind. Looked like a rivet." He brings his hand out, holds thumb and forefinger close together, almost touching, for scale. "Even painted it over. I would never have been able to find it." The forefinger extends; Lubin's pointing hand describes an imaginary line between hut and staircase. "Nice short line-of-sight to minimize power consumption. Omnidirectional broadcast; impossible to backtrack. Enough memory for a week's worth of routine chatter, plus anything they might have sent our way."

"That's not much," Clarke remarks.

"It wasn't a long-term record. When it ran out of new memory it overwrote the old."

A black box, then. A moving record of the recent past. "So you were expecting something like this," she surmises.

"I was expecting that if something happened, I'd at least be able to retrieve some kind of log. I wasn't expecting to lose the recorder. I was the only one who knew it was here."

They've returned to the radio shack. The blackened door frame still stands, an absurd rectangle rising from the rubble. Lubin, perhaps out of some cryptic respect for standard procedure, passes through it. Clarke simply steps over the knee-high tatters of the nearest wall.

Something snaps and cracks around her ankle. She looks down. Her foot is imprisoned in a blackened human ribcage, her leg emerging from a shattered hole where the sternum used to be. She can feel the knobs and projections of the spine underfoot, brittle and crumbling under the slightest weight.

If there's a skull—or arms or legs—they must be buried in the surrounding rubble.

Lubin watches while she pulls her foot from the remains. Something glitters behind his eyecaps.

"Whoever's behind this," he says, "is smarter than me."

His face isn't really expressionless. It just looks that way to the uninitiated. But Lenie Clarke has learned to read him, after a fashion, and Lubin doesn't look worried or upset to her. He looks excited.

She nods, undeterred. "So you need all the help you can get."

She follows him down.

Nightingale

It seemed as if they came out of the ground itself. Sometimes that was literally true: increasing numbers lived in the sewers and storm drains now, as if a few meters of concrete and earth could hold back what heaven and earth had failed to. Most of the time, though, it was only appearance. Taka Ouellette's mobile infirmary would pull up at some municipal crossroads, near some ramshackle collection of seemingly-abandoned houses and strip malls which nonetheless disgorged a listless trickle of haggard occupants, long past hope but willing to go through the motions in whatever time they had left. They were the unlucky unconnected who hadn't made it into a PMZ. They were the former skeptics who hadn't realized until too late that this was the real thing. They were the fatalists and the empiricists who looked back over the previous century and wondered why it had taken this long for the world to end.

They were the people barely worth saving. Taka Ouellette did her best. She was the person barely competent to save them.

Rossini wafted from the cab behind her. Ouellette’s next case staggered forward, oblivious to the music, a woman who might once have been described as middle-aged: loose-skinned, stiff-limbed, legs moving on some semifunctional autopilot. One of them nearly buckled as she approached, sent the whole sad body lurching to one side. Ouellette reached out but the woman caught herself at the last moment, kept upright more through accident than effort. Both cheeks were swollen bruised pillows: the rheumy eyes above them seemed fixed on some indeterminate point between zenith and horizon. Her right hand was an infected claw, curled around an oozing gash.

Ouellette defocused on the gross ravages and zoomed down to the subtler ones: two melanomas visible on the left arm; tremors in the right; some dark tracery that looked like blood poisoning, creeping up the wrist from the injured palm. The usual symptoms of malnutrition. Half of the signs were consistent with ßehemoth; none were incontrovertible. Here was a woman suffering violence across several orders of magnitude.

Ouellette tried on a professional smile, although the fit had never been a good one. "Let's see if we can't get you fixed up."

"That's okay," said the woman, stargazing. Ouellette tried to guide her towards the van with one gloved hand (not that she needed the gloves, of course, but these days it wasn't wise to remind people of such things). The woman jerked away at her touch—

"That's okay. That's okay—"

—staggered against some invisible wall and stumbled off, locked on heaven, oblivious to earth.

"That's okay…"

Ouellette let her go.

The next patient wasn't conscious and wouldn't have been able to move if he had been. He arrived on a makeshift stretcher, an oozing jigsaw of lesions and twitches, short-circuiting nerves and organs that hadn't bothered waiting for the heart to give out before starting to rot. The sickly-sweet smell of fermented urine and feces hung around him like a shroud. His kidneys and his liver were in a race to kill him first. She couldn't lay odds on the winner.

A man and two children of indeterminate sex had dragged this breathing corpse before her. Their own faces and hands were uncovered, in oblivion or defiance of the half-assed protective measures promoted by endless public-service announcements.

She shook her head. "I'm sorry. It's end-stage."

They stared back at her, eyes filled with a pleading desperate hope that verged on insanity.

"I can kill him for you," she whispered. "I can cremate him. That's all I can do."

Still they didn't move.

Oh, Dave. Thank God you died before it came to this...

"Do you understand?" she said. "I can't save him."

That was nothing new. When it came to ßehemoth, she wasn't saving anybody.

She could have, of course. If she were suicidal.

Protection against ßehemoth came packaged in a painstaking and complex series of genetic retrofits, an assembly line that took days—but there was no technical reason why it couldn't be crammed into a portable rig and taken on the road. A few people had done that very thing, not so long ago. They'd been torn limb from limb by hordes too desperate to wait in line, who didn't trust that supply would exceed demand if they'd only be patient a little while longer.

By now, those places that offered a real cure were all fortresses built to withstand the desperation of mobs, built to enforce the necessary patience. Further from those epicenters Taka Ouellette and her kind could walk among the sick without fear of sickness; but it would have been be a death sentence to offer a cure so far from back-up. The most she could do here was bestow quick-and-dirty retrovirals, half-assed tweaks that might allow some to survive the wait for a real cure. All she could risk was to slow the process of dying.

She didn't complain. In more complacent times, she knew, she might not have been trusted to do even that much. That hardly made her unique: fifty percent of all medical personnel graduate in the bottom half of their class. It didn't matter nearly as much as it once had.

Even now, though, there was a hierarchy. The ivy-leaguers, the Nobel laureates, the Meatzarts—those had long since ascended into heaven on CSIRA's wings. There they worked in remote luxury, every cutting-edge resource within easy reach, intent on saving what remained of the world.

One tier down were the betas: the solid, reliable splice-and dicers, the gel-jocks, no award-winners here but no great backlog of malpractice suits either. They labored in the castles that had accreted around every source of front-line salvation. The assembly line wound through those fortifications like a perverse GI tract. The sick and the dying were swallowed at one end, passed through loops and coils of machinery that stabbed and sampled and doused them with the opposite of digestive enzymes: genes and chemicals that soaked the liquefying flesh to make it whole again.

The passage through salvation's bowels was an arduous one, eight days from ingestion to defecation. The line was long but not wide: economies of scale were hard to come by in the post-corporate landscape. Only a fraction of the afflicted would ever be immunized. But those lucky few owed their lives to the solid, unremarkable worker bees of the second tier.

And then there was Taka Ouellette, who could barely remember a time when she'd been a member of the hive. If it hadn't been for that one piece of decontamination protocol, carelessly applied, she might still be working the line in Boston. If not for that small slip Dave and Crys might still be alive. There was really no way of knowing for sure. There was only doubt, and what-if. And the fading memory of life as an endocrinologist, and a wife, and a mother.

Now she was just a foot soldier, patrolling the outlands with her hand-me-down mobile clinic and her cut-rate, stale-dated miracles. She hadn't been paid in months, but that was okay. The room and board was free, at least, and anyway she wouldn't be welcome back in Boston any time soon: she might be immune to ßehemoth but she could still carry it. That was okay too. This was enough to keep her busy. It was enough to keep her alive.

Finally, silently, the breathing corpse had been withdrawn from competition. Subsequent contenders hadn't rubbed her nose quite so deeply in her own ineffectuality. For the past few hours she'd been treating more tumors than plague victims. That was unusual, this far from a PMZ. Still, cancers could be excised. It was simple work, drone work. The kind of work she was good for.

So here she was, handing out raf-1 angiogenesis blockers and retrovirii in a blighted, wilting landscape where DNA itself was on the way out. There was some green out there, if you looked hard enough. It was springtime, after all. ßehemoth always died back a bit during the winter, gave the old tenants a chance to sprout and bloom each new year before coming back to throttle the competition. And Maine was about as far as you could get from the initial Pacific incursion without getting your feet wet. Go any further and you'd need a boat and a really good scrambler to keep the missiles off your back.

These days, of course, keeping to land was no longer any guarantee that the EurAfricans wouldn't be shooting at you. There'd been a time when they'd only shot at targets trying to cross the pond; but given a half-dozen landside missile attacks since Easter they were obviously itching for more effective containment. It was a wonder that the whole seaboard hadn't been slagged to glass by now. If the dispatches could be believed, N'Am's defenses were still keeping the worst of it back. Still. The defenses wouldn't hold forever.

Rossini surrendered to Handel. Ouellette's line-up was growing. Perhaps three people accumulated for every two she processed. Nothing to worry about, yet; there was a critical mass, some threshold of personal responsibility below which crowds almost never got ugly. These ones didn't look like they had the strength to go bad even if they'd been motivated to.

At least the pharms had stopped charging for the meds she dispensed. They hadn't wanted to, of course: hey, did anyone think the R&D for all these magic potions had been free? In the end, though, there hadn't been much choice. Even small crowds got really ugly when you demanded payment up front.

A forearm the size of a tree trunk, disfigured by the usual maladies: the leprous, silver tinge of stage-one ßehemoth, a smattering of melanomas, and—

Wait a second. That's odd. The swelling and redness was consistent with an infected insect bite, but the puncture marks...

She looked up at the face above the arm. A leather-skinned man in his fifties looked back through eyes blotchy with burst capillaries. For a moment it seemed as though his very bulk was blotting out the light, but no—it was only dusk, creeping in overhead while she'd been otherwise occupied.

"What did this?" she asked.

"Bug." He shook his head. "Last week sometime. Itches like a bugger."

"But there's four holes." Two bites? Two sets of mandibles on a single bug?

"Had about ten legs, too. Weird little bugger. Seen 'em around once or twice. Never got bit before, though." His red eyes squinted with sudden concern. "It poisonous?"

"Probably not." Taka probed the swelling. Her patient grimaced, but whatever had bitten him didn't seem to have left anything embedded. "Not seriously, not if it happened last week. I can give you something for the infection. It's pretty minor, next to…"

"Yeah," her patient said.

She smeared a bit of antibiotic onto the swelling. " I can give you a shot of antihistamines," she said apologetically, "but the effects won't last, I'm afraid. If the itching gets too bad afterward you could always piss on it."

"Piss on it?"

"Topical urea's good for itching," Taka told him. She held up a loaded cuvette; he made the requisite blood offering. "Now if you just—"

"I know the drill."

A tunnel, a slightly squashed cylinder big enough for a body, pierced the MI from one side to the other—a pair of opposed oval mouths, connected by a sensor-lined throat. A pallet extended from the floor of the nearer mouth like a padded rectangular tongue. Taka's patient lay back on it; the van listed slightly under his weight. The pallet retracted with an electrical hum. Slowly, smoothly, the man disappeared into one mouth and extruded from the other. He was luckier than some. Some went in and never came out. The tunnel doubled as a crematorium.

Taka kept one eye on the NMR readouts, the other on the blood work. From time to time, both eyes flickered uneasily to the growing line of patients.

"Well?" came the man's voice from the other side of the van.

He'd been here before, she saw. Her sideshow tweaks had already taken hold in his cells.

And his Stage-One was still advancing.

"Well, you know about your melanomas, obviously," she remarked as he came around the corner. She drew a time-release raf-1 from the dispensary and loaded it up. "This'll starve the tumors on your skin, and a few others cooking inside you probably didn't know about. I take it you've been in a clave recently, or a PMZ?"

He grunted. "Came here a month back. Maybe two."

"Uh huh." The static-field generators installed in such places were a mixed blessing at best. Bathing in that kind of field for any length of time was guaranteed to set tumors blooming in the flesh like mushrooms in shit. Most people considered it the lesser evil, even though the fields didn't so much repel ßehemoth as merely impede it.

Taka didn't ask what had inspired this man to abandon that leaky protection for enemy territory. Such decisions were seldom voluntary.

He offered his arm: she shot the capsule sub-q, just over the bicep. "There are a couple of other tumors, I'm afraid. Not so vascularised. I can burn them out, but you'll have to wait until I'm a little less busy. There's no real hurry."

"What about the witch?" he said.

Firewitch, he meant. ßehemoth.

"Um, according to your blood work you've already taken the cocktail," Taka said, pretending to recheck the results.

"I know. Last fall." He coughed. "I'm still getting sick."

"Well if you were infected last fall, it's doing its job. You'd have been dead by winter without it."

"But I'm still getting sick." He took a step towards her, a big, big man, his bloody eyes narrowed down to red slits. Behind him, others waited with limited patience.

"You should go to Bangor," she began. "That's the closest—"

"They won't even tell you the wait at Bangor," he spat.

"What I can do here, what I—it's not a cure," she explained carefully. "It's only supposed to buy you some time."

"It did. So buy me more."

She took a cautious, placating step backwards. One step closer to the voice-command pickup for Miri's defense systems. One step away from trouble.

Trouble stepped after her.

"It doesn't work like that," Taka said softly. "The resistance is already in your cells. Putting it in again won't do anything. I guarantee it."

For a moment, she thought he might back off. The words seemed to penetrate; the tension ebbed a bit from his posture. The lines around his eyes seemed to twist somehow, some less-volatile mix of confusion and hurt replacing the fear and anger that had been there before.

And then he removed all hope with the hardest smile she'd ever seen.

"You're cured," he said, and moved.

It was an occupational hazard. Out here, some believed that resistance could be transmitted through sexual contact. That made it easy to get laid, if you were into such things: there were those who held the Immunized in almost cultish esteem, begged sexual congress as a form of inoculation. It was something of a joke among Taka's peers.

Somewhat less amusing were the tales of field medics held prisoner, raped repeatedly in the name of public health. Taka Ouellette had no intention of offering herself to the greater good.

Neither did the thing she unleashed.

The password was Bagheera. Taka had no idea what it meant; it had come with the van and she'd never bothered to change it.

The chain of events it was supposed to trigger stopped far short of total commitment. On hearing its master's call, the MI's defenses would snap to attention: all ports and orifices would slam shut and lock tight, with the exception of the cab door closest to the authorized operator. The weapons blister on Miri's roof —a sunken, mirrored hemisphere when at rest— would extend from its silo like a gleaming chrome phallus, high enough for a clear shot at anyone not flattened defensively against the sides of the vehicle itself. (For any who might be, the chassis itself could come alive with high-voltage electricity.) Primary weaponry started with a tightbeam infrasonic squawkbox capable of voiding bowels and stomachs at ten meters. Escalation would call on twin gimbaled 8000-Watt direct-diode lasers which could be tuned to perforate or merely blind; nonprojectile weapons were always favored because of the ammunition issue. However, to guard against the risk of laser-defeating mirrors and aerosols, ancillary projectile weapons were usually made available to the savvy field doctor; Taka's rig also fired darts primed with a conotoxin tweaked for ten-second respiratory paralysis.

None of this was supposed to fire automatically. Bagheera should only have brought those systems into full alert, countered one threat with a greater one, and given any aggressor the chance to back off before anyone got hurt. There should have been no escalation absent Taka's explicit command.

"Bagheera," she growled.

The lasers cut loose.

They didn't fire at the red-eyed man. They started slicing through the lineup behind him. Half a dozen people fell bisected, cauterized, their troubles suddenly over. Others stared disbelieving at neat, smoking holes in their limbs and torsos. On the far side of a sudden barbequed jigsaw, brown grass burst into flame. Water Music played on in the background without missing a beat.

After a moment that seemed to go on forever, people remembered to scream.

The Red-eyed man, all threat and bluster gone from his body, stood dumbfounded and pincushioned by a dozen neurotoxic darts. He gaped soundlessly at Taka, teetering. He raised his hands, palms up, supplicating: goddamn woman, I never meant…!

He toppled, rigid with tetanus.

People ran, or twitched, or lay still. The lasers dipped and weaved, scrawling blackened gibberish onto the ground. Fire guttered here and there among the curlicues, bright staccatos against the failing light.

Taka pulled frantically at the passenger door; fortunately the renegade system hadn't charged the hull. It had locked her out, though; this was the door that was supposed to stay unlocked, the route to refuge—

It's online how in God's name can it be online —

But she could see the telltale on her dashboard, flashing scarlet. The MI was somehow uplinked to the wide wireless world, to the networked monsters that lived and hunted in there, to—

A Madonna. A Lenie. It had to be.

Another telltale winked from a different part of the dashboard. Belatedly, Taka read the signs: the driver's door was unlocked. She threw herself around the front of the vehicle. She kept her eyes on the ground, some religious impulse averting them from the wrath of God, if I don't see it maybe it won't see me but she could hear the turret just above her, tracking and firing, tracking and—

She piled into the cab, yanked the door behind her, locked it.

The cab's eyephones lay on the floor beside the seat. A tiny aurora of light writhed across the deck from its oculars. She snatched up the phones and held them to her face.

The Madonna's twisted face raged within an inset on the main display. There was no sound—Taka left the headset muted by default.

Shitsucker. It got in through GPS. She always kept GPS offline when she wasn't traveling; somehow the invader must have spoofed the system.

She killed nav. The screaming thing in the window went out. Overhead, the lasers ceased fire with a downshifting whine.

Water Music had ended sometime during the massacre. Tchaikovsky had stepped into the gap. Iolanta.

It seemed like a very long while before she dared to move.

She killed the music. She hugged herself, shaking. She tried very hard not to cry like a frightened child. She told herself she'd done what she could.

She told herself it could have been worse.

Madonnas could do almost anything in their own environment. Cruising through the walls and the wires and the wavelengths of N'AmNet they could penetrate almost any system, subvert almost any safeguard, bring down almost any calamity upon the heads of people for whom disaster had long since become the status quo. Just the week before, one had breached the flood-control subroutines of some dam in the Rockies, emptied a whole reservoir onto an unsuspecting populace sleeping in the spillway's shadow.

Forcing access into one lousy MI would have been simplicity itself to such a creature.

It hadn't downloaded, at least. No room. Neither nav nor weapons-system chips were anywhere near big enough to support something so complex, and the medical systems—the only habitat in the van that could hold something that size—were kept manually disconnected from the net except for prearranged updates. The monsters could do a lot of things in virtual space, but they hadn't yet figured out how to reach into the real world and physically flip a switch. So this one had simply extended long, vicious fingers from some faraway node, wreaking havoc from a distance until Taka had cut it off.

Her own dim image stared back, haunted and hollow-eyed, from the darkened dashboard. The perspex, subtly convex, stretched her reflection lengthwise, turned gaunt into downright attenuate. A fragile refugee from some low-gravity planet, civilized and genteel. Banished to a hellish world where even your own armor turned against you.

What if I— she thought, and stopped herself.

Wearily, she unlocked the door and climbed out onto the killing floor. There were still a fair number of patients in sight. None were standing, of course. Few moved.

What if I didn't—

"Hello!" she called to the empty streets and dark façades. "It's okay! It's gone! I shut it out!"

Moans from the injured. Nothing else.

"Anybody! I could really use a hand here! We've got—we've got…"

What if I didn't turn GPS off?

She shook her head. She always took it offline. She didn't specifically remember doing it this particular time, but you never remembered rote stuff like that.

"Anybody?"

Maybe you fucked up. Wouldn't be the first time.

Would it, Dave?

It seemed so dark all of a sudden. She raised her eyes from the carnage; twilight was bleeding away to the west.

That was when she noticed the contrails.

Condom

Phocoena's bulkheads are luminous with intelligence. The periscope feed delivers crisp rich realtimes of the maritime nightscape: dark sparkling waves in the foreground, black fingers of dry land reaching into the view from either side. A jumble of bright buildings rises above the coastline in center screen, huddled together against the surrounding darkness. Boxy unlit silhouettes to the south belie the remains of a whole other city south of the Narrows, abandoned in the course of some recent retreat.

The city of Halifax. Or rather, the besieged city-state that Halifax has evidently become.

That naked-eye visual occupies the upper-left quarter of the main panel. Beside it, a false-color interpretation of the same view shows a fuzzy, indistinct cloud enveloping the lit buildings; Clarke thinks of the mantle of a jellyfish, enclosing vital organs. The shroud is largely invisible to human eyes, even rifter ones; to Phocoena's spectrum-spanning senses, it looks like a blue haze of heat lightning. Static-field ionization, Lubin says. A dome of electricity to keep airborne particles at bay.

The seaward frontier is under guard. Not that Clarke ever expected to simply sneak into the harbor and pull up next to the local clam shack; she knew there'd be some kind of security in place. Lubin was expecting mines, so for the last fifty klicks Phocoena crawled towards the coast behind a couple of point drones zig-zagging ahead, luring any countermeasures out of concealment. Those flushed a single burrower lying in wait; awakened by the sound of approaching machinery, it shot from the mud and corkscrewed into the nearest drone with a harmless and anticlimactic clunk.

That lone dud was the only countermeasure they came across on the outer slope. Lubin figures that Halifax's subsurface defenses must have been used up fending off previous incursions. The fact that they haven't been replenished doesn't bode well for the mass-production of industrial goods in the vicinity.

At any rate, against all expectations they've cruised unchallenged all the way here, just outside Halifax Harbor. Only to nearly run into this. Whatever this is.

It's virtually invisible in the sub's lights. It's even less visible to sonar, which can barely pick it up even at point-blank range. A transparent, diaphanous membrane stretches from seabed to surface: the periscope shows a float line holding its upper edge several meters above the waves. It appears to stretch across the entire mouth of the harbor.

It billows inward, as if the Atlantic is leaning on it from the outside. Pinpoint flashes of cold blue light sparkle across its face, sparse ripples of stardust echoing the gentle subsurface surge. Clarke recognizes the effect. It's not the membrane that sparkles, but the tiny bioluminescent creatures colliding with it.

Plankton. It seems somehow encouraging that they still exist, so close to shore.

Lubin's less interested in the light show than its cause. "Must be semipermeable." That would explain the oceanographic impossibility that belied its presence, a sudden sharp halocline rising across their path like a wall. Discrete boundaries are common enough in the sea: brackish water lying atop heavier saline, warm water layered over cold. But the stratification is always horizontal, a parfait of light-over-heavy as inevitable as gravity. A vertical halocline seems to violate the very laws of physics; the membrane itself may have been undetectable to sonar, but the sheer knife-edged discontinuity it produces showed up like a brick wall from a thousand meters away.

"Looks pretty flimsy," Clarke remarks. "Not much to keep us out."

"It's not there for us," Lubin says.

"Well, yeah." It's a ßehemoth filter, obviously. And it must be blocking a whole range of other particles too, to generate this kind of density imbalance. "What I mean is, we can just punch right on through."

"I don't think so," Lubin says.

He brings the periscope down from the surface and sends it sniffing towards the barrier; on the panel, the cowering cityscape disappears in a swirl of bubbles and darkness. Clarke glimpses the 'scope's tether through the viewport, a pale thread of fiberop unwinding overhead. The periscope itself is effectively invisible, a small miracle of dynamic countershading.

Clarke watches it on tactical instead. Lubin brings the drone to within half a meter of the membrane: a faint yellow haze resolves on the right-hand feed, where naked eyes see only darkness. "What's that?" Clarke wonders.

"Bioelectric field," Lubin tells her.

"You mean it's alive?"

"Probably not the membrane itself. I'd guess it's run through with some kind of engineered neurons."

"Really? You sure?"

Lubin shakes his head. "I'm not even sure it's biological—the field strength fits, but it doesn't prove anything." He gives her a look. "Did you think we had a sensor to pick up brain cells at fifty paces?"

No witty rejoinder springs to mind. Clarke turns back to the viewport, and the dim blue aurora flickering beyond. "Like an anorexic smart gel," she murmurs.

"Probably a lot dumber. And a lot more radical—they'd have to tweak the neurons to work at low temperatures, high salinity—the membrane itself could handle osmoregulation, I suppose."

"I don't see any blood vessels. I wonder how they get nutrients."

"Maybe the membrane handles that too. Absorbs them right from seawater."

"What's it for?"

"Other than a filter?" Lubin shrugs. "An alarm, I should think."

"So what do we do?"

Lubin considers a moment. "Poke it," he says.

The periscope lunges forward. On the wide-spectrum display the membrane flares on impact, bright threads radiating from the strike like a fine-veined tracery of yellow lightning. In visible light it just floats there, inert.

"Mmm." Lubin pulls the periscope back. The membrane reverts to lowglow.

"So if it is an alarm," Clarke says, "I'm guessing you've just set it off."

"Not unless Halifax goes to red alert every time a piece of driftwood bumps their perimeter." Lubin runs his finger along a control bar: on tactical, the periscope heads back to the surface. "But I am willing to bet this thing'll scream a lot louder if we actually tear through it. We don't need that kind of attention."

"So what now? Head down the coast a bit, try a land approach?"

Lubin shakes his head. "Underwater was our best shot. A landside approach will be a lot tougher." He grabs a headset off the bulkhead and slips it over his skull. "If we can't get to a hard line, we'll try the local wireless nets. Better than nothing."

He cocoons himself and extends feelers into the attenuate datasphere overhead. Clarke reroutes nav to the copilot's panel and turns Phocoena back into deeper water. An extra klick or so shouldn't interfere with Lubin's trawl, and there's something disquieting about being in such shallow water. It's like looking up to find the roof has crept down while you weren't looking.

Lubin grunts. "Got something."

Clarke taps into Lubin's headset and splits the feed to her own panel. Most of the stream's incomprehensible— numbers and statistics and acronyms, scrolling past too quickly for her to read even if she could make sense of them. Either Lubin's dug beneath the usual user interfaces, or Maelstrom has become so impoverished in the past five years that it can't support advanced graphics any more.

But that can't be. The system has room enough for her own demonic alter-egos, after all. Those are nothing if not graphic.

"So what's it saying?" Clarke asks.

"Missile attack of some kind, down in Maine. They're sending lifters."

She gives up and pulls the 'phones from her eyes.

"That could be our best way in," Lubin muses. "Any vehicles CSIRA deploys will be operating out of a secure site with access to good intel."

"And you think the pilot would be willing to pick up a couple of hitch-hikers in the middle of a contaminated zone?"

Lubin turns his head. Faint lightning flickers around the edges of his eyephones, ephemeral tattoos laid over the scars on his cheeks.

"If there is a pilot," he says, "perhaps he'll be open to persuasion."

Gehenna

Taka Ouellette emerged into a nightscape of guttering flame. She drove at a crawl through a hot dry snowfall, the windshield's static field barely keeping the flakes from the glass. Ash flurried white as talc in Miri's headlights, a fog of powdered earth and vegetation blinding her to the road ahead. She killed the lights, but infrared was even worse: countless particles of drifting soot, the brilliant washouts of raw flame, arid little dust-devils and writhing updrafts overloaded the display with false-color artefacts. Finally she settled for an old set of photoamp glasses in the glove compartment. The world resolved into black and white, gray on gray. The viz was still terrible, but at least the interference was in sharp focus.

Maybe there were survivors, she told herself without much hope. Maybe the firestorm didn't reach that far. She was a good ten kilometers from the spot where her MI had risen up and slaughtered the locals. There'd been no closer cover: no storm sewers or parkades more than a few levels deep, and if there'd been any hardened shelters nearby her surviving patients wouldn't have been inclined to tell her about them. So she'd fled east while the contrails arced overhead, buried herself in a service tunnel attached to an abandoned tidal bore drilled in from Penobscot Bay. A few years ago the shamans had promised that bore would keep the lights on from Portland to Eastport, world without end. But of course the world had ended, before the first turbine had even been installed. Now the tunnel did nothing but shield burrowing mammals from the short-term consequences of their own stupidity.

Ten kilometers over buckled and debris-strewn roads that hadn't seen service since before ßehemoth. It was nothing short of a miracle that Taka had made it to safety before the missiles had hit. Or it would have been, if the missiles had actually caused any of the devastation she was driving through now.

She was pretty sure they hadn't. In fact, she was pretty sure they'd never even touched the ground.

The hill she was climbing crested a hundred meters ahead. Fresh wreckage blocked her way halfway up that rise, the remains of some roadside building that had collapsed during the attack. Now it was only a great tumbledown collection of smoking cinder blocks. Not even Taka's eyeglasses could banish the shadows infesting that debris, all straight lines and sharp angles and dark empty parallelograms.

It was too steep for Miri's limited ground-effectors. Ouellette left the van to its own devices and climbed around the wreckage. The bricks were still hot to the touch. Heat from the scorched earth penetrated the soles of her boots, a subtle warmth, unpleasant only by implication.

On the uphill side of the debris she passed occasional objects which retained some crumbly semblance of human bones. She was breathing the dead. Perhaps some of those she inhaled would have died even earlier, if not for her efforts. Perhaps some she'd helped today were still alive, in spite of everything. She managed to take some faint comfort in that, until she crested the hill.

But no.

The landscape spread out before her was as wasted as the path she'd just climbed: flickering eruptions of white firelight punctuating a vista blackened as much by carbon as by nightfall. The land had not been laid waste by missiles or microbes, not this time. The thing that had done it was still visible in the distance: a tiny dark oval in the sky, barely darker than the cloud bank behind it, hanging a few degrees over the horizon. Taka almost missed it at first, even with the specs. Its outline was fuzzy, sparkling with the faint visual static of errant photons unreasonably boosted.

But the gouts of flame that poured from its belly in the next instant showed up clearly enough even to naked eyes.

Not a missile. Not a microbe. A lifter, scouring the distance as it had already scoured the foreground.

And for all Taka Ouellette knew, she had been the one to bring it here.

Oh, it wasn't dead certain. Wide-scale incendiary purges still happened under official pretext. There'd actually been a time when they were pretty routine, back in the early panic-stricken days when people thought they might actually be able to contain ßehemoth if they just had the balls to take drastic steps. Those had scaled back when it had grown apparent that N'Am was blowing its whole napalm reserve to no good effect, but they still happened sometimes in some of the wilder zones out west. It was even possible that such steps might have been undertaken without CSIRA bothering to extract their field personnel, although Taka doubted that even she would be left that far out of the loop.

But not so far from here, not so long ago, she had let a monster escape into the real world. Floods and firestorms always seemed to follow in the wake of such breaches, and Taka had almost forgotten a time when she believed in coincidence.

There'd be no shortage of proximate causes. Perhaps some rogue autopilot afflicted with faulty programming, tricked by a typographic error into burning the wrong part of the world. Or maybe a human pilot misled by garbled encryption, commands misheard through static and interference. None of those details mattered. Taka knew the bigger question: who had tweaked any code that subverted the automatic pilot? What had garbled instructions heard by the flesh and blood one?

She knew the answer, too. It would have been obvious to anyone who'd seen the monster in her eyephones, a few hours before. There were no accidents. Noise was never random. And the machinery itself was malign.

Here, staring out at a photoamplified crematorium stretching to the very horizon, it was the only explanation that made sense.

You were a scientist once, she told herself. You rejected incantations outright. You knew the truths that protected you from bias and woolly-mindedness, and you learned them all by heart: correlation is not causation. Nothing is real until replicated. The mind sees order in noise; trust only numbers.

Incantations of another sort, perhaps. Not very effective ones; they hadn't, for all their familiarity, saved her from the creeping certainty that she'd called an evil spirit into her vehicle. She could rationalize the superstitious awe in her head, justify it even. Her training gave her more than enough tools for that. Spirit was only a word, a convenient label for a virulent software entity forged in the fast-forward Darwinian landscape that had once been called Internet. Taka knew how fast evolutionary changes could be wrought in a system where a hundred generations passed in the blink of an eye. She remembered another time when electronic lifeforms—undesigned, unplanned, and unwanted—had grown so pestilential that the net itself had acquired the name Maelstrom. The things called Lenies, or Shredders, or Madonnas—like the Gospel demons, their names were legion—they were simply exemplars of natural selection. Extremely successful exemplars: on the other side of the world, whole countries abased themselves in their names. Or in the name of the icon on which they were based at least, some semi-mythical cult figure who'd risen to brief prominence on ßehemoth's coattails.

This was logic, not religion. So what if these things had power beyond imagining, yet no physical substance? So what if they lived in the wires and the wireless spaces between, and moved at the speed of their own electronic thoughts? Demon, spirit—shorthand, not superstition. Only metaphor, with more points of similarity than some.

And yet, now Taka Ouellette saw mysterious lights flashing in the sky, and found her lips moving in altogether the wrong kind of incantation.

Oh God, save us.

She turned and headed downhill. She could probably get around the blockage, take some back road to continue on this way, but what was the point? It was a question of cost-benefit analysis, of lives-saved-per-unit-effort. That value would certainly be higher almost anywhere but here.

The collapsed building loomed ahead of her on the road again, gray and colorless in the amplified light. The angular shadows looked different, more ominous from this angle. They formed crude faces and body parts way past human scale, as if some giant cubist robot had collapsed in an angry heap and was summoning the strength to pull itself back together again.

As she began to pick her way around the pile, one of the shadows detached itself and moved to block her path.

"Holy—" Taka gasped. It was only a woman, she saw now, and unarmed—these days you noticed such things almost instinctively—but her heart had been kicked instantly into fight/flight. "Jesus, you scared me."

"Sorry. Didn't mean to." The woman took another step clear of the debris. She was blonde, dressed entirely in some black skin-tight body stocking from neck to feet; only her hands and head were exposed, pale disembodied pieces against the contrasting darkness. She was a few centimeters shorter than Taka herself.

There was something about her eyes, too. They seemed too bright, somehow. Probably an artefact of the specs, Taka decided. Light reflecting off the wetness of the cornea, perhaps.

The woman jerked her chin back over her shoulder. "That your ambulance?"

"Mobile Infirmary. Yes." Taka glanced around the full three-sixty. She saw no one else. "Are you sick?"

A laugh, very soft. "Isn't everyone?"

"I mean—"

"No. Not yet."

What is it about those eyes? It was hard to tell from this distance—the woman was ten meters away—but it looked like she might be wearing nightshades. In which case she could see Taka Ouellette way better than Taka Ouellette could see her through these fratzing photoamps.

People in the wildlands did not generally come so well-equipped.

Taka put her hands casually into her pockets; the act pushed her windbreaker away from the standard-issue Kimber on her hip. "Are you hungry?" she asked. "There's a cycler in the cab. The bricks taste like shit, but if you're desperate..."

"Sorry about this," the woman said, stepping forward. "Really."

Her eyes were like blank, translucent balls of ice.

Taka stepped back instinctively. Something blocked her from behind. She spun and stared into another pair of empty eyes, set in a face that seemed all scarred planes and chipped stone. She didn't reach for her gun. Somehow, he already had it.

"It's gene-locked," she said quickly.

"Mmm." He turned the weapon over in his hands. He wore the look of a professional appraiser. "We apologize for the intrusion," he told her, almost absently, "But we need you to disable the security on your vehicle." He did not look at her.

"We're not going to hurt you," the woman said from behind.

Taka, unreassured, kept her eyes on the man holding her gun.

"Certainly not," he agreed, looking up at last. "Not while there are more efficient alternatives."

Bagheera was one password. There were several others. Morris locked down the whole kit and kaboodle, so that not even Taka could start it up again without live authorization. Pixel electrostabbed any passengers who didn't match her pheromone profile. Tigger unlocked the doors and played dead until it heard Taka say Schroedinger: then it locked down and pumped enough halothane into the cab to turn a 110-kg assailant into a sack of jelly for a minimum of fifteen minutes. (Taka herself would be up and at 'em in a mere ninety seconds; when they'd given her the keys to Miri they'd also tweaked her blood with a resistant enzyme.)

Mobile Infirmaries were chock-full of resources and technology. The wildlands were chock-full of desperate people literally dying for an edge, any edge. Anti-theft measures made every kind of sense, and more than a little irony: when it came right down to it, Miri was far better at killing and incapacitation than it was at healing the sick.

Now Taka stood beside the driver's door, white-eyed blackbodies on either side. She ran through her options.

"Tigger," she said. Miri chirped and unlocked the door.

The woman pulled the door open and climbed into the cab. Taka started to follow. A hand clapped down on her shoulder.

Taka turned and faced her captor. "It's gene-locked, too. I'll have to reset it if you want to drive."

"We don't," he told her. "Not yet."

"The board's dark," the woman said from behind the wheel.

The hand on her shoulder tightened subtly, pressed forward. Taka felt herself guided to the cab; the other woman slid over into the passenger seat to give her room.

"Actually," the man said, "I think we'll let the doctor here take the passenger seat." The hand pressed down. Taka ducked in through the driver's side, slid between the seat and the steering stick as the other woman left the cab through the passenger door. The woman grasped the edge of that door and started to push it shut.

"No," said the man, very distinctly. The woman froze.

He was behind the wheel now; his hand hadn't come off Taka's shoulder for an instant. "One of us stays outside the cab at all times," he told his partner. "And we leave both doors open."

His partner nodded. He took his hand off Taka's shoulder and looked at the dark, unhelpful face of the dash.

"Bring it online," he said. "Touch only, no voice control. Do not start the engine."

Taka stared back at him, unmoving.

The blond leaned in over her shoulder. "We weren't bullshitting you," she said quietly. "We really don't want to hurt you, unless there's no choice. I'm betting that's a pretty charitable attitude for these parts, so why are you pushing it?"

These parts. So they were new in town. Not that this came as any great surprise; these two were the furthest thing from wildland refugees that Taka had seen in ages.

She shook her head. "You're stealing an MI. That's going to hurt a lot more people than me."

"If you cooperate you can have it back in a little while," the man told her. "Bring it online."

She keyed the genepad. The dashboard lit up.

He studied the display. "So I take it you're some sort of itinerant health-care worker."

"Some sort," Taka said carefully.

"Where are you out of?" he asked.

"Out of?"

"Who sets your route? Who resupplies you?"

"Bangor, usually."

"They airlift supplies to you in the field?"

"When they can spare them."

He grunted. "Your inventory beacon's disabled."

He spoke as if it were a surprise.

"I just radio in when my stocks get too low," Taka told him. "Why would—what are you doing!"

He paused, fingers poised over the GPS menu he'd just brought up. "I'm fixing some locations," he said mildly. "Is there a problem?"

"Are you crazy? It's still practically line-of-sight! Do you want it to come back?"

"Want what to come back?" the woman asked.

"What do you think did all this?"

They eyed her expressionlessly. "CSIRA, I expect," the man said after a moment. "This was a containment burn, wasn't it?"

"It was a Lenie!" Taka shouted. Oh Jesus what if he brings it back, what if he—

Something pulled her around from behind. Glacial eyes bored directly into hers. She could feel the woman's breath against her cheek.

"What did you just say?"

Taka swallowed and held herself in check. The panic receded slightly.

"Listen to me," she said. "It got in through my GPS last time. I don't know how, but if you go online you could bring it back. Right now I wouldn't even risk radio."

"This thing—" the man began.

"How can you not know about them?" Taka cried, exasperated

The two exchanged some indecipherable glance across her.

"We know," the man said. Taka noted gratefully that he'd shut down GPS. "Are you saying it was responsible for yesterday's missile attack?"

"No, of course n—" Taka stopped. She'd never considered that before.

"I never thought so," she said after a moment. "Anything's possible, I guess. Some people say the M&M's recruited them somehow."

"Who else would have done it?" the woman wondered.

"Eurasia. Africa. Anyone, really." A sudden thought struck her: "You aren't from—?"

The man shook his head. "No."

She couldn't really blame the missile-throwers, whoever they were. According to the dispatches ßehemoth still hadn't conquered the lands beyond Atlantic; those people probably still thought they could contain it if they just sterilized the hot zone. A phrase tickled the back of Taka's mind, some worn-out slogan once used to justify astronomical death tolls. That was it: The Greater Good. "Anyway," she went on, "the missiles never made it through. That's not what all this is."

The woman stared out the window, where all this was lightening to smoky, pre-dawn gray. "What stopped them?"

Taka shrugged. "N'Am defense shield."

"How could you tell?" asked the man.

"You can see the re-entry trails when the antis come down from orbit. You can see them dim down before they blow up. Smokey starbursts, like fireworks almost."

The woman glanced around. "So all this, this was your—your Lenie?"

A snippet from a very old song floated through Taka's mind. There are no accidents 'round here...

"You said starbursts?" the man said.

Taka nodded.

"And the contrails dimmed down before detonation."

"So?"

"Which contrails? The incoming missiles or the N'Am antis?"

"How should I know?"

"You saw this last night?"

Taka nodded.

"What time?"

"I don't know. Listen, I had other things on my mind, I—"

I'd just watched a few dozen people sliced into cold cuts because I might have left a circuit open somewhere...

The man was watching her with a sudden unwavering intensity. His eyes were blank but far from empty.

She tried to remember. "It was dusk, the sun had been down for—I don't know, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes?"

"Is that typical of these attacks? Sunset?"

"I never thought about it before," Taka admitted. "I guess so. Or nighttime, at least."

"Was there ever an attack that occurred during broad daylight?"

She thought hard. "I...I can't remember any."

"How long after the contrails dimmed did the starbursts appear?"

"Look, I didn't—"

"How long?"

"I don't know, okay? Maybe around five seconds or so."

"How many degrees of arc did the contrails—"

"Mister, I don't even know what that means."

The white-eyed man said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. He did not move. Taka got the sense of wheels in motion.

Finally: "That tunnel you hid in."

"How did—you followed me? All the way from there? On foot?"

"It wasn't far," the woman told her. "Less than a kilometer."

Taka shook her head, amazed. At the time, inching through gusts of scorched earth, it seemed as if she'd been in motion for days.

"You stopped at the gate. To cut the chain."

Taka nodded. In hindsight it seemed absurd—the MI could have crashed that barrier in an instant, and the sky was falling.

"You looked up at the sky," he surmised.

"Yes."

"What did you see?"

"I told you. Contrails. Starbursts."

"Where was the closest starburst?"

"I don't—"

"Get out of the cab."

She stared at him.

"Go on," he said.

She climbed out into gray dawn. There were no more spirits inhabiting the shattered building before her: the rising light stripped away the Rorschach shadows, leaving nothing but a haphazard pile of cinderblocks and I-beams. The few scorched trees still standing nearby, burned past black to ash white, flanked the road like upthrust skeletal hands.

He was at her side. "Close your eyes."

She did. If he was going to kill her, there wasn't much she could do about it even with her eyes open.

"You're at the gate." His voice was steady, soothing. "You're facing the gate. You turn around and look back up the road. You look up at the sky. Go on."

She turned, eyes still closed, memory filling the gaps. She craned her neck.

"You see starbursts," the voice continued. "I want you to point at the one that's most directly overhead. The one that's closest to the gate. Remember where it was in the sky, and point."

She raised her arm and held it steady.

"What's the deal, Ken?" the woman asked in the void. "Shouldn't we be—"

"You can open your eyes now," said the m—said Ken. So she did.

She didn't know who these people were, but she was coming to believe at least one thing they'd told her: they didn't want to hurt her.

Not while there are more efficient alternatives.

She allowed herself a trickle of relief. "Any more questions?"

"One more. Got any path grenades?"

"Loads."

"Do any of them key on bugs that aren't ßehemoth?"

"Most of them." Taka shrugged. "ßehemoth tracers are kind of redundant hereabouts."

She dug out the grenades he wanted, and a pistol to fire them. He checked them over with the same eye he'd used on her Kimber. Evidently they passed inspection. "I shouldn't be more than a few hours," he told his partner. He glanced at the MI. "Don't let her start the engine or close the doors, whether she's inside or out."

The woman looked at Taka, her expression unreadable.

"Hey," Taka said. "I—"

Ken shook his head. "Don't worry about it. We'll sort it out when I get back."

He started off down the road. He didn't look back.

Taka took a deep breath and studied the other woman. "So you're guarding me, now?"

The corner of the woman's mouth twitched.

Damn, but those eyes are strange. Can't see anything in there.

She tried again. "Ken seems like a nice enough guy."

The other woman stared a cold eyeless stare for an instant, and burst out laughing.

It seemed like a good sign. "So are you two an item, or what?"

The woman shook her head, still smiling. "What."

"Not that you asked, but my name's Taka Ouellette."

Just like that, the smile disappeared.

Oh look Dave, I fouled up again. I always have to go that one step too far...

But the other woman's mouth was moving. " Le—Laurie," it said.

"Ah." Taka tried to think of something else to say. "Not exactly pleased to meet you," she said at last, trying to keep her tone light.

"Yeah," Laurie said. "I get that a lot."

The Trigonometry of Salvation

This does not parse, Lubin thought.

Mid-June on the forty-fourth parallel. Fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset—say, about five degrees of planetary rotation. Which would put eclipse altitude at about thirty-three kilometers. The missiles had dropped into shadow four or five seconds before detonation, if this witness was to be trusted. Assuming the usual reentry velocity of seven kilometers per second, that put actual detonation at an altitude no greater than five thousand meters, probably much lower.

She'd reported an airburst. Not an impact, and not a fireball. Fireworks, she'd called them. And always at twilight, or during darkness.

The sun was just clearing the ridge to the east when he arrived at the back door of Penobscot Power's abandoned enterprise. Phocoena and the doctor's MI had coexisted briefly in the bowels of those remains; her service tunnel had run along the spine of a great subterranean finger of ocean, sixty meters wide and a hundred times as long, drilled through solid bedrock. At the time of its conception it had been a valiant recreation of the lunar engine that drove the tides of Fundy, two hundred klicks up the coast. Now it was only a great flooded sewer pipe, and a way for shy submarines to slip inland unobserved.

None of which was obvious from here, of course. From here, there was only a scorched chain-link fence, carbon-coated rectangles of metal that had once proclaimed No Trespassing, and—fifty meters on the other side, where the rock rose from the earth—a broken-toothed concrete-and-rebar mouth in the face of the ridge. One of the gate's two panels swung creaking in the arid breeze. The other listed at an angle, stiff in its hinges.

He stood with his back to the gate. He raised his arm and held it. He remembered where the doctor had pointed, corrected his angle.

That way.

Just a few degrees over the horizon. That implied either a high distant sighting or a much closer, low-altitude one. Atmospheric inversions were strongest during twilight and darkness, Lubin remembered. They were generally only a few hundred meters thick, and they tended to act as a blanket, holding released particulates close to the ground.

He walked south. Flame still flickered here and there, consuming little pockets of left-over combustibles. A morning breeze was rising, coming in from the coast. It promised cooler temperatures and cleaner air; now, though, ash still gusted everywhere. Lubin coughed up chalky phlegm and kept going.

The doctor had given him a belt to go with the grenades. The little aerosol explosives bumped against his hips as he walked. He kept the gun in hand, aiming absently at convenient targets, stumps and powdered shrubs and the remains of fenceposts. There wasn't much left to point at. His imagination invested what there was with limbs and faces. He imagined them bleeding.

Of course, his witness had hardly been a GPS on legs. There were so many errors nested in her directions that correcting for wind speed was tantamount to adding one small error to a half-dozen larger ones. Still, Lubin was nothing if not systematic. There was a reasonable chance that he was within a kilometer of the starburst's coordinates. He turned east for a few minutes, to compensate for the breeze. Then he popped the first grenade onto his pistol and fired at the sky.

It soared into the air like a great yellow egg and exploded into a fluorescent pink cloud twenty meters across.

He watched it dissipate. The first tatters followed the prevailing winds, tugging the cloud into an ovoid, delicate cotton-candy streamers drifting from its downstream end. After a few moments, though, it began to disperse laterally as well, its component particles instinctively sniffing the air for signs of treasure.

No obvious movement against the wind. That would have been too much to hope for, this early in the game.

He fired the next grenade a hundred meters diagonally upwind of the first; the third, a hundred meters from each of the others, the closing point of a roughly equilateral triangle. He zigzagged his way across the wasted landscape, kicking little drifts of ash where bracken and shrubbery had clustered a day earlier, navigating endless rocky moguls and fissures. Once he even hopped across a scorched streambed, still trickling, fed by some miraculous source further upstream than the flamethrowers had reached. At rough, regular intervals he shot another absurd pink cloud into the sky, and watched it spread, and moved on.

He was aiming his eighth grenade when he noticed the residue of the seventh behaving strangely. It had started as puffy round cumulus, like all the others. Now, though, it was streaked and streaming, as though being stretched by the wind. Which would indeed have been the case, if it had been streaming with the breeze instead of across it.

And another cloud, more distant and dissipated, seemed to be breaking the same rules. They didn't flow, these aerosol streams, not to the naked eye. Rather, they seemed to drift against the wind, towards some point of convergence back the way Lubin had come, about thirty degrees off his own track.

And they were losing altitude.

He started after them. The motes in those clouds couldn't be called intelligent by any stretch of the word, but they knew what they liked and they had the means to get to it. They were olfactory creatures, and they loved the smell of two things above all else. The first was the protein signatures put out by a wide array of weaponised biosols; they tracked that aroma like sharks sniffing blood in the water, and when they finally found that ambrosia and rolled around in it they changed, chemically. That was the other thing these creatures loved: the smell of their own kind, fulfilled.

It was the classic biomagnifying one-two punch. Too often, traces of one's quarry were too faint to do more than whisper to a few passing motes. Those would lock on, enzyme-to-substrate, and achieve their own personal nirvana — but that very merger would quench the emissions that had lured them in the first place. The contaminant would be flagged, but the flag would be far too small to catch any mammalian eye.

But to be aroused not only by prey, but by others similarly aroused—why, it scarcely mattered whether there was enough to go around. A single offending particle would be enough to start an orgiastic fission reaction. Each subsequent arrival would only brighten the collective signal.

Lubin found it half-buried in the gravel bed of a shallow gully. It looked like a snub-nosed bullet thirty centimeters long, perforated by rows of circular holes along half its length. It looked like the salt shaker of a giant with pathologically high blood pressure. It looked like the business end of a multiheaded suborbital device for the delivery of biological aerosols.

Lubin couldn't tell what color it had originally been. It was dripping with fluorescent pink goo.

Ouellete's MI changed before his eyes on the final steps of his approach. Bright holographic phantoms resolved within the vehicle—the plastic skin grew translucent, exposing neon guts and nerves beneath. Lubin was still getting used to such visions. His new inlays served up the diagnostic emissions of any unshielded machinery within a twelve meter radius. This particular vehicle wasn't quite as forthcoming as he would have liked, though. It was riddled with tumors: rectangular shadows beneath the dash, dark swathes across the passenger door, a black unreflective cylinder rising through the center of the vehicle like a dark heart. The MI had a lot of security, all of it shielded.

Clarke and Ouellette stood to one side, watching him approach. Ouellette was nothing special to Lubin's new eyes. Dim sparkles glimmered from within Clarke's thorax, but they told him nothing; inlays and implants spoke different dialects.

He toggled the inlays; the hallucinatory schematics imploded, leaving dull plastic and white dust and nonluminous flesh and clothing behind.

"You found something," Ouellette said. "We saw the clouds."

He told them.

Ouellette stared, openmouthed: "They're shooting germs at us? We're already on our last legs! Why bother hitting us with Megapox or Supercol when we're already—"

She stopped. The outrage on her face gave way to a puzzled frown.

Clarke looked the question over the doctor's confusion: ß-max? Lubin shrugged.

"Perhaps N'Am isn't dying fast enough," Lubin remarked. "A significant number of M&Ms regard ßehemoth as divine retribution for North America's sins. It's official policy in Italy and Libya, at least. Botswana too, I believe."

Clarke snorted. "North America's sins? They think it just stops at the Atlantic?"

"The moderates think they can keep it at bay," Ouellette said. "The extremists don't want to. They don't get into heaven until the world ends." Her mind seemed elsewhere; she spoke as if absently flicking at some hovering insect.

Lubin let her think. She was, after all, the closest available approximation to a native guide. Perhaps she could come up with something.

"Who are you people?" Ouellette asked quietly.

"Excuse me?"

"You're not feral. You're not clave. You sure as hell aren't CSIRA or you'd be better equipped. Maybe you're TransAt—but that doesn't fit either." A faint smile passed across her face. "You don't know what you're doing, do you? You're making it up as you go along..."

Lubin kept his face neutral and his question on target. "Is there any reason not to believe that people might launch a biological attack against North America simply to—hasten things along?"

She seemed to find this amusing. "You don't get out much, do you?"

"Am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong." Ouellette spat on the ashy ground. "Lots of folks might help Providence along, if they had the chance. That doesn't mean this is an attack."

"What else would it be?"

"Maybe it's a counteragent."

Clarke looked up at that. "A cure?"

"Not so personal, maybe. Something that kills ßehemoth in the wild."

Lubin eyed Ouellette. She eyed him back, and answered his unspoken skepticism: "Of course there are crazies out there who want the world to end. But there have to be a lot more people who don't, wouldn't you agree? And they'd be working just as hard."

There was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before. They almost shone.

He nodded. "But if this is a counteragent, why do you suppose they tried to shoot it down? And why deliver it suborbitally? Wouldn't it be more efficient to leave deployment to the local authorities?"

Ouellette rolled her eyes. "What local authorities?"

Clarke frowned. "Wouldn't someone have told—everybody? Wouldn't someone have told you?"

"Laurie, you make something like this too public and you're painting a bullseye on your chest for the M&Ms. As for missile defense—" Ouellette turned back to Lubin— "Did the people on your planet ever mention something called the Rio Insurrection?"

"Tell us about it," Lubin said. Thinking: Laurie?

"I can't, really," Ouellette admitted. "Nobody really knows what happened. They say maybe a bunch of Madonnas got into CSIRA's Rio de Janeiro offices and went crazy. Launched attacks all over the place."

"Who won?"

"The good guys. At least, Rio got vaporized and the trouble stopped, but who knows? Some people say that it wasn't Lenies at all, it was some kind of civil war between rogue 'lawbreakers. But whatever it was, it was—way out there." She waved a hand at the horizon. "We had our own problems to deal with. And the only real moral of the story is, nobody knows who's running things any more, or whose side they're on, and we're all too busy hanging on by our fingernails to afford the time for any Big Questions. For all we know N'Am's battellites are running on autopilot, and ground control just lost the access codes. Or the Lenies are doing a little target practice. Or—or maybe the M&Ms have someone on the inside. The fact that something's shooting at these bugs doesn't prove anything, one way or another."

Lubin focused on that. "No proof."

"So I'm going to get some. I'm going to sequence the bug. Now are you going to let me drive back to the scene, or am I going to have to walk?"

Lubin said nothing. From the corner of his eye, he saw Clarke open her mouth and close it again.

"Fine." Ouellette proceeded to the back of her van and opened the access panel. Lubin let her extract a steriwrap cartridge and a collapsible stretcher with ground-effector coils built into the frame. She looked at him calmly: "It'll fit on this?"

He nodded.

Clarke held the folded device against Ouellette's back while the doctor cinched the shoulder straps. Ouellette nodded cursory thanks and started down the road, not looking back.

"You think she's wrong," Clarke said as the other woman dwindled, shimmering in the rising heat.

"I don't know."

"What if she isn't?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter." Clarke shook her head, almost amused. "Ken, are you crazy?"

Lubin shrugged. "If she can get a usable sample, we'll know whether it's ß-max. Either way, we can drive to Bangor and use her credentials to get inside. After that it should be—"

"Ken, did you even hear what she just said? There could be a fix. For ßehemoth."

He sighed.

"This is exactly why I didn't want you coming," he said at last. "You've got your own agenda, and it's not what we're here for. You get distracted."

"Distracted?" She shook her head, astonished. "I'm talking about saving the world, Ken. I don't think I'm distracted at all."

"No, you don't. You think you're damned."

Instantly, something in her shut down.

He pushed on anyway. "I don't agree, for what it's worth."

"Really." Clarke's face was an expressionless mask.

"I'd say you're only obsessed. Which is still problematic."

"Go on."

"You think you destroyed the world." Lubin looked around at the scorched landscape. "You think this is all your fault. You'd give up the mission, your life, mine. In an instant. Just so long as you saw the slightest chance of salvation. You're so sick of the blood on your hands you'd barely notice that you were washing it off with even more."

"Is that what you think."

He looked at her. "Is there anything you wouldn't do, then? For the chance to take it all back?"

She held his gaze for long seconds. Finally she looked away.

Lubin nodded. "You've personalized the Greater Good in a way I've never seen in a baseline human before. I wonder if your brain hasn't concocted its own form of Guilt Trip."

She stared at the ground. "It doesn't change anything," she whispered at last. "Even if my motives are—personal..."

"It's not your motives that worry me. It's your judgment."

"We're still talking about saving the world."

"No," he said. "We're talking about someone else, trying to—possibly. We're talking about an entire country or consortium, far better-equipped and better-informed than two hitchhikers from the Mid Atlantic Ridge. And—" holding up his hand against her protest—"we are also talking about other powerful forces who may be trying to stop them, for reasons we can only guess at. Or perhaps for no reason at all, if Ouellette's speculations are correct. We're not players in this, no matter how desperately you wish we were."

"We've always been players, Ken. We've just been too scared to make a move for the past five years."

"And things have changed during that time."

She shook her head. "We have to try."

"We don't even know the rules any more. And what about the things we can change? What about Atlantis? What about the rifters? What about Alyx? Do you really want to throw away any chance of helping them in favor of a lost cause?"

He knew the instant he said it that he'd miscalculated. Something flared in her, something icy and familiar and utterly unswayable. "How dare you," she hissed. "You never gave a shit about Alyx or Grace or—or even me, for that matter. You were ready to kill us all, you switched sides every time the odds changed." Clarke shook her head in disgust. "How dare you talk about loyalty and saving lives. You don't even know what that means unless someone feeds it to you as a mission parameter."

He should have known it would be no use arguing with her. She wasn't interested in assessing the odds of success. She wasn't even balancing payoffs, weighing Atlantis against the rest of the world. The only variables she cared about came from inside her own head, and neither guilt nor obsession were amenable to cost-benefit analysis.

Even so, her words provoked a strange feeling in his throat.

"Lenie, I didn't mean—"

She held up her hand and refused to meet his eyes. He waited.

"Maybe it's not even your fault," she said after a while. "They just built you that way."

He allowed himself the curiosity. "What way?"

"You're an army ant. You just bull ahead with your feelers on the ground, following your orders and your mission profiles and your short-term objectives, and it never even occurs to you to look up and see the big picture."

"I see it," Lubin admitted softly. "It's very much bigger than you seem willing to admit."

She shook her head, still not looking at him.

He tried again. "Very well. You know the big picture: what do you suggest we do with that information? Can you offer anything beyond wishful thinking? Do you have any kind of strategy for saving the world, as you put it?"

"I do," said Taka Ouellette.

They turned. She stood back beside the MI, arms folded. She'd obviously ditched the stretcher and circled back while they weren't looking.

Lubin blinked in astonishment. "Your sample—"

"From that warhead you found? Not a chance. The tracers would've metabolized any active agent down to the atoms."

Clarke shot him a look, clear as binary even through the frosting on her eyes: Not quite on your game, superspy? Letting some dick-ass country doctor sneak up on you?

"But I know how we can get a sample," Ouellette continued, looking straight at Clarke. "And I could use your help."

Migration

Obviously she had come late to the conversation. If she had heard the way it started, Clarke knew, Taka Ouellette wouldn't have wanted anything to do with her.

The good doctor had contacts on the ground, so she said. People she'd saved, or bought time for. The loved ones of those whose suffering she'd ended. Occasional dealers, wildland hustlers who could sometimes conjure up drugs or spare parts to be weighed against other items in trade. They were the furthest thing from altruists, but they could be life-savers when the closest resupply lifter was a week away.

All of them had a healthy sense of self-interest. All of them knew others.

Lubin remained skeptical, of course. Or at least, Clarke thought, he continued to act skeptical. It was part of his schtick. It had to be. Nobody would honestly turn their back on the chance, however faint, to undo even a part of what—

—what I set in motion...

There was the rub, and Lubin—God damn him—knew it as well as she did. Once you've helped destroy the world, once you've taken fierce stinging pleasure in its death throes, it's not easy to claim the moral high ground over someone who's merely reluctant to save it. Even if it's been a while. Even if you've changed in the meantime. If there's a Statute of Limitations on terracide, there's no way it expires after a lousy five years.

Taka Ouellette had proposed a southern course towards whatever was left of Portland; and even if there was no way into the datapipe from there, Boston would be that much closer. Besides, Ouellette was an official person in these parts, someone with recognized credentials and identity. Almost an authority figure, by local standards. She might even be able to walk them in through the front door.

"Authority figures don't drive around handing out derms from the back of a truck," Lubin said.

"Yeah? And what have your efforts netted us lately? You still think you can hack into the global nervous system when all the back-door nerves have been burned away?"

In the end he agreed, with conditions. They would go along with Ouellette's plan so long as it took them in the right direction. They would make use of her MI after every counterintrusion device had been ripped out of the cab; he would ensure her cooperation while she advised Clarke on the necessary monkeywork.

The MI's cab was a marvel of spatial economy. Twin cots folded down in the space behind the seats, and a little shower/head cubicle squeezed into the rear wall between a Calvin cycler and the forward medical interface. But what really amazed Clarke was the number of booby traps infesting the place. There were gas canisters hooked into the ventilation system. There were taser needles sheathed in the seat cushions, ready to shoot through flesh and insulative clothing at a word or a touch. There was a photic driver under the dash, a directional infrared strobe that could penetrate closed eyelids and induce seizures. Taka Ouellette itemized them all, Lubin standing at her back, while Clarke scrambled about with a toolkit and pulled the plugs. Clarke had no way of knowing if the list was comprehensive—for all she knew, Ouellette was leaving an ace up her sleeve against future necessity—but Lubin was a lot less trusting than she was, and Lubin seemed satisfied.

It took them an hour to disarm the cab. After Ouellette asked if they wanted to disable external security as well, she actually seemed disappointed when Lubin shook his head.

They split up. Lubin would pilot Phocoena down the coast and try to access Portland independently; Clarke, keeping a copy of the ß-max sequence close to her chest, would accompany Ouellette towards a rendezvous near one of her regular waypoints.

"Don't tell her about ß-max before you have to," Lubin warned, safely out of Ouellete's earshot.

"Why not?"

"Because it defeats the only defense anyone's ever been able to muster against ßehemoth. The moment she realizes something like that exists, her priorities are going to turn upside down."

Clarke was initially surprised that Lubin would let either of them out of his sight; he wasn't fond of potential security breaches even without his kill reflex engaged, and he knew Clarke was chafing against his mission priorities. He wasn't a trusting soul at the best of times; how did he know that the two women wouldn't simply turn inland and abandon him altogether?

It was only when they'd gone their separate ways that the obvious answer occurred to her. Of course, he'd been hoping for that very thing.

They drove through a land blasted and scoured clean of any live thing. The MI, built for rough terrain, climbed over fallen tree trunks that crumbled beneath its wheels. It navigated potholes filled with ash and soot, drove straightaways where swirls and gusts of gray powder swept across the refrozen asphalt like tiny Antarctic blizzards, centimeters high. Twice they passed deranged billboards half-melted against the rock, their lattices warped and defiantly semifunctional, advertising nothing now but the flickering multicolored contours of their own heat stress.

After a while it began to rain. The ash congealed like paste on the ground, stuck to the hood like blobs of papier maché. Some of those blobs were almost heavy enough to thwart the windshield, leaving light smudges on the glass before the static field bounced them away.

They didn't exchange a word during that whole time. Unfamiliar music filled the silence between them, archaic compositions full of clonking pianos and nervous strings. Ouellette seemed to like the stuff, anyway. She focused on driving while Clarke stared out the window, reflecting on the allocation of damage. How much of this devastation could be laid at her door? How much at the doors of demons who'd adopted her name?

Eventually they left the scorched zone behind. Now there was real grass at the side of the road, occasional shrubs pocking the ditches further back, real evergreens looming like ranks of ragged, starving stickmen on the other side. Mostly brown, of course, or turning brown, as though in the grip of a great endless drought.

This rain wouldn't help them. They were hanging on—some even flew flags of hardy, defiant green from their limbs—but ßehemoth was everywhere, and it was implacable, and it had all the time in the world. Sometimes it massed so abundantly that it was visible to the naked eye: patches of ochre mould smothering the grass, or spreading across the trunks of trees. And yet, the sight of all this vegetation—not truly alive, perhaps, but at least physically intact—seemed cause for some small celebration after the charnel house they'd just escaped.

"So, do you ever take those out?" Ouellette wondered.

"Sorry?" Clarke brought herself back to the moment. The doctor had gone to autopilot—a simple follow-the-road mode, with no dangerous navigational forays into GPS.

"Those caps on your eyes. Do you ever...?"

"Oh. No. Not usually."

"Nightshades? Let you see in the dark?"

"Sort of."

Ouellette pursed her lips. "I remember seeing those, years ago. All over the place, just before everything went bad. They were really popular for about twenty minutes."

"They still are, where I come from." Clarke looked out the rain-spattered side window. "With my tribe, anyway."

"Tribe? You're not all the way from Africa?"

Clarke snorted softly. "Fuck no." Only about half the way, actually...

"Didn't think so. You don't have the melanin, not that that means much these days of course. And the Tutsis wouldn't be over here anyway, except maybe to gloat."

"Gloat?"

"Not that you can blame them, mind you. There's barely anyone left over there more than forty years old. Firewitch is pure poetic justice as far as they're concerned."

Clarke shrugged.

"So if not Africa," Ouellette said, pushing it, "maybe you're from Mars."

"Why would you say that?"

"You're definitely not from around here. You thought Miri was an ambulance." She patted the dashboard affectionately. "You don't know about the Lenies—"

Clarke clenched her teeth, suddenly angry. "I know about them. Nasty evolving code that lives in the Maelstrom and raises shit. Vengeance icon for a bunch of countries that hate your guts. And while we're on the subject, maybe you could explain how you came to be blundering around handing out derms and mercy-kills while the whole eastern hemisphere is trying to lob a cure for ßehemoth onto your head? Not being from Mars doesn't seem to have kept you all that up-to-speed on current events."

Ouellette watched her curiously for a moment. "There you go again."

"What?"

"Maelstrom. It's been years since I heard anyone use that word."

"So what? What difference does it make?"

"Come on, Laurie. You show up in the middle of nowhere, you hijack my van, neither of you is normal by any stretch of the imagination—I mean, of course I want to know where you came from."

Clarke's anger faded as suddenly as it had flared. "Sorry."

"In fact, given that I still seem to be some kind of honorary prisoner, you could even say you owe me an explanation."

"We were hiding," Clarke blurted out.

"Hiding." Ouellette didn't seem surprised. "Where is there to hide?"

"Nowhere, as it turns out. That's why we came back."

"Are you a corpse?" Ouellette asked.

"Do I look like one?"

"You look like some kind of deep-sea diver." She gestured at the vent on Clarke's chest. "Electrolysis intake, right?"

Clarke nodded.

"So I guess you've been underwater all this time. Huh." Ouellette shook her head. "I'd have guessed geosynch, myself."

"Why?"

"It was just one of the rumors going around. Back when the witch was just getting started, and the riots were taking off—this thread started growing, that a few hundred high-powered corpses had vanished off the face of the earth. I don't know how you'd ever prove something like that, nobody ever saw those people in the flesh anyway. They could've all been sims for all we knew. Anyway, you know how these things get around. The word was they'd all jumped offworld from Australia, and they were all nice and comfy up in geosynch watching the world come down."

"I'm not a corpse," Clarke said.

"But you work for them," Ouellette guessed.

"Who didn't?"

"I mean recently."

"Recently?" Clarke shook her head. "I think I can honestly say that neither Ken nor I—Christ!"

It jumped out from some hiding place under the dash, all segments and clicking mandibles. It clung to her knee with far too many jointed limbs, a grotesque hybrid of grasshopper and centipede the size of her little finger. Her hand came down of its own accord; the little creature splattered under her palm.

"Fuck," she breathed. "What was that?"

"Whatever it was, it wasn't doing you any harm."

"I've never seen anything like—" Clarke broke off, looked at the other woman. Ouellette actually looked pissed.

"That wasn't—that wasn't a pet or anything, was it?" It seemed absurd. Then again, it wouldn't be any crazier than keeping a head cheese.

I wonder how she's doing...

"It was just a bug," Ouellette said. "It wasn't hurting anybody."

Clarke wiped her palm against her thigh; chitin and yellow goop smeared across the diveskin. "That just—that was wrong. That wasn't like any bug I've ever seen."

"I keep telling you. You're behind the times."

"So these things are old news?"

Ouellette shrugged, her irritation apparently subsiding. "They're starting to show up here and there. Basically, regular bugs with too many segments. Some kind of Hox mutation, I'd guess, but I don't know if anybody's looked at them all that closely."

Clarke looked at the sodden, withering landscape scrolling past the window. "You seem pretty invested in a—a bug."

"What, things aren't dying fast enough for you? You have to help them along?" Ouellette took a breath, started over. "Sorry. You're right. I just—you kind of empathize with things after a while, you know? Spend enough time out here, everything seems—valuable..."

Clarke didn't answer. The vehicle navigated a fissure in the road, wobbling on its ground-effect shocks.

"I know it doesn't make much sense," Ouellette admitted after a while. "It's not like ßehemoth changed much of anything."

"What? Look out the window, Tak. Everything's dying."

"That was happening anyway. Not as fast, maybe."

"Huh." Clarke regarded the other woman. "And you really think someone's throwing a cure over the transom."

"For Human stupidity? No such thing, I suspect. But for ßehemoth, who knows?"

"How would that work? I mean, what haven't they already tried?"

Ouellette shook her head, laughing softly. "Laurie, you give me way too much credit. I don't have a clue." She thought a moment. "Could be a Silverback Solution, I suppose."

"Never heard of it."

"Few decades ago, in Africa. Hardly any gorillas left, and the natives were eating up the few that remained. So some conservation group got the bright idea of making the gorillas inedible."

"Yeah? How?"

"Engineered Ebola variant. Didn't harm the gorillas, but any human who ate one would bleed out inside seventy-two hours."

Clarke smiled, faintly impressed. "Would that work for us?"

"It'd be tough. Germs evolve countermeasures a lot faster than mammals."

"I guess it didn’t work for the gorillas either.”

Ouellette snorted. "It worked way too well."

"So how come they’re extinct?"

"We wiped them out. Unacceptable risk to Human health."

Rain pelted against the roof of the cab and streaked along the side windows. Up front, the drops hurtled at the windshield and veered impossibly off-target, centimeters from impact.

"Taka," Clarke said after a few minutes.

Ouellette looked at her.

"Why don't people call it Maelstrom any more?"

The doctor smiled faintly. "You do know why they called it that in the first place, right?"

"It got...crowded. User storms, e-life."

Ouellette nodded. "Most of that's gone now. So much of the actual network has degraded, physically, that most of the wildlife went extinct from habitat loss. This side of the wall, anyway—they partitioned N'amNet off years ago. For all I know it's still boiling along everywhere else, but around here—"

She looked out the window.

"Here, the Maelstrom just moved outside."

Karma

Achilles Desjardins woke to the sound of a scream.

It had died by the time he was fully awake. He lay in the darkness and wondered for a moment if he had dreamt it; there had been a time, not so long ago, when his sleep had been filled with screams. He wondered if perhaps the scream had been his, if he had awakened himself—but again, that hadn't happened in years. Not since he'd become a new man.

Or rather, not since Alice had let the old one out of the cellar.

Awake, alert, he knew the truth. The scream had not risen from his mind or his throat; it had risen from machinery. An alarm, raised in one instant and cut off the next.

Odd.

He brought up his inlays. Outside his skull, the darkness persisted; inside, a half-dozen bright windows opened in his occipital cortex. He scrolled through the major feeds, then the minor ones; he sought threats from the other side of the world, from orbit, from any foolhardy civilian who might have blundered against the fence that guarded his perimeter. He checked the impoverished cluster of rooms and hallways that his skeletal day staff had access to, although it was barely 0400 and none of them would be in so early. Nothing in the lobby, the Welcome Center, the kennels. Loading bays and the physical plant were nominal. No incoming missiles. Not so much as a plugged sewer line.

He had heard something, though. He was sure of that. And he was sure of something else, too: he had never heard this particular alarm before. After all these years, the machines that surrounded him had become more than tools; they were friends, protectors, advisers and trusted servants. He knew their voices intimately: the soft beeping of his inlays, the reassuring hum of Building Security, the subtle, multi-octave harmonics of the threat stack. This alarm hadn't come from any of them.

Desjardins threw back the sheet and rose from his pallet. Stonehenge loomed a few meters away, a rough horseshoe of workstations and tactical boards glowing dimly in the darkness. Desjardins had a more official workspace, many floors above; he had official live-in quarters too, not luxurious but far more comfortable than the mattress he'd dragged down here. He still used those accommodations now and then, for official business or other occasions when appearances mattered. But this was the place he preferred: secret, safe, an improvised nerve center rising from a gnarled convergence of fiber optic roots growing in from the walls. This was his throne room and his keep and his bunker. He knew how absurd that was, given the scope of his powers, the strength of his fortifications—but it was here, in the windowless subterranean dark, where he felt safest.

Scratching himself, he plunked down onto the chair in the center of Stonehenge and began scanning the hardline intel. The world was full of yellow and red icons, as always, but nothing acute. Certainly nothing to warrant an audible alert. Desjardins dumped everything into a single events list and sorted on time; whatever had happened, had just happened. He scrolled down the list: CAESAR meltdown in Louisville, static-field failure in Boulder, minor progress re-establishing his surveillance links down along the Panhandle. More chatter about mutant bugs and weeds spreading up from the Panama line...

Something touched him, lightly, on the leg. He looked down.

Mandelbrot stared up at him with one eye. The other was gone, a dark sticky hole in a face torn half away. Her flank was slick and black in the gloomy half-light. Viscera glistened through matted fur.

The cat swayed drunkenly, her forepaw still upraised. She opened her mouth. With a silent miaow, she toppled.

Oh God no. Oh please God no.

He made the call even before bringing up the lights. Mandelbrot lay bleeding into a puddle of her own insides.

Oh Jesus, please. She's dying. Don't let her die.

"Hi," the tac board chirped. "This is Trev Sawyer."

The fuck it was. It was an interactive, and Desjardins didn't have time to waste dicking around with dialog trees. He killed the call and accessed the local directory. "My vet. Home number. Kill any overrides."

Somewhere in Sudbury, Sawyer's watch started ringing.

You got into the kennel, again, didn't you? Mandelbrot lay on her side, chest heaving. Stupid cat, you never could resist taunting those monsters. You just figured—oh God, it's amazing you even made it back.

Don't die. Please don't die.

Sawyer wasn't answering. Answer your watch, you stumpfucking idiot! This is an emergency! Where the fuck can you be at four a.m.?

Mandelbrot's paws twitched and flexed as if dreaming, as if electrified. Desjardins wanted to reach out, to staunch the flow or straighten the spine or just pet her for Chrissakes, offer whatever pitiful comfort he could. But he was terrified that any inexpert touch might just make things worse.

It's my fault. It's my fault. I should have scaled back your clearance, you're just a cat after all, you don't know any better. And I never even bothered to learn what your alarm sounded like, it just never occurred to me that I wouldn't—

Not a dream. Not a Worldwatch alert. Just a veterinary implant talking to his wristwatch: a brief scream as Mandelbrot's vitals lurched into the red, then silence as teeth or claws or sheer shocking inertia reduced signal to noise.

"Hello?" muttered a sleepy voice in mid-air.

Desjardins's head snapped up. "This is Achilles Desjardins. My cat's been mauled by—"

"What?" Sawyer said thickly. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"I'm sorry, I know, but this is an emergency. My cat's—oh God, she's torn apart, she's barely alive, you've got to—"

"Your cat," Sawyer repeated. "And why are you telling me?"

"I—you're Mandelbrot's vet, you—"

The voice was icy: "I haven't been anyone's veterinarian in over three years."

Desjardins remembered: N'Am's vets had all been conscripted into human service when ßehemoth—and the thousand opportunistic bugs riding its coattails—had overwhelmed the health-care system. "But you're still, I mean, you still know what to—"

"Mr. Desjardins, forget the hour. Do you even know what year it is?"

Desjardins shook his head. "What are you talking about? My cat's lying on the floor with her—"

"It's five years after the dawn of the Firewitch Era," Sawyer continued in a cold voice. "People are dying, Mr. Desjardins. By the millions. Every day. To even waste food on a mere animal, under these circumstances, is scandalous. To expect me to spend time and resources saving an injured cat is nothing short of obscene."

Desjardins eyes stung. His vision blurred. "Please—I can help you. I can. I'll get your cycler ration doubled. I can get you unlimited water. I can get you into fucking geosynch if that's what you want, you and your family. Anything. Just name it."

"Very well: stop wasting my time."

"Do you even know who I am?" Desjardins cried.

"I certainly do. And I'm astonished that any 'lawbreaker—let alone one of your evident stature—would have such completely misplaced priorities. Aren't you supposed to be immune to this sort of thing?"

"Please—"

"Good night, Mr. Desjardins."

Disconnect, added a little icon in a corner of one screen.

Blood bubbled at the corner of Mandelbrot's mouth. Her inner lid slid halfway across that one bloodied eyeball and retracted.

"Please," Desjardins whimpered. "I don't know what to..."

Yes you do.

He bent over her, reached out a hand, pushed tentatively at a bulging loop of intestine. A spasm shuddered through Mandelbrot like a passing spirit. She meowed faintly.

"I'm sorry...I'm sorry..."

You know what to do.

He remembered Mandelbrot latching on and biting his father's ankle when the old man had come by to visit back in '48. He remembered Ken Lubin, standing in Desjardins's bathroom in his underpants, scrubbing his trousers in the sink: "Your cat pissed on me," he'd said, a hint of grudging respect in his voice. He remembered a thousand nights pinned on his bed, bladder full to bursting but unwilling to disturb the furry sleeping lump on his chest.

You know.

He remembered Alice showing up at work, her lacerated hands struggling to hang on to a scrawny, hissing kitten that wasn't taking any shit from anybody: "Hey Killjoy, want a watch-cat? Chaos made flesh, she is. Reversible ears, needs no batteries, guaranteed not to let anyone past your front door with all their body parts..."

You know. Mandelbrot convulsed again.

He knew.

There was nothing nearby he could use—no injectables, no gas, no projectiles. All of that stuff was loaded into the booby traps and would take far too long to extract. The room was a stripped-down shell of bone-gray walls and fiberop vines. The neuroinduction field would...hurt...

Just a fucking brick, he thought, swallowing against the grief in his throat. Just a rock, they're all over the place outside...

No time. Mandelbrot wasn't even living any more, she hadn't been living since she'd started back from the kennels. All she was doing was suffering. And all Desjardins could do was end that.

He raised his foot over her head. "You and me, Brotwurst," he whispered. "We had higher clearance than anyone inside a thousand klicks..."

Mandelbrot purred once. Something sagged in her as she left. Whatever remained lolled bonelessly on the floor.

Desjardins kept his foot raised a moment, just in case. Finally he brought it back to the concrete floor. Mandelbrot had never been one to yield the initiative.

"Thank you," whispered Achilles Desjardins, and wept at her side.

Dr. Trevor Sawyer woke for the second time in as many hours. A dark shape hung over his head like a great fist. It hissed softly, a hovering reptile.

He tried to rise. He couldn't; his arms and legs wobbled like unresponsive rubber. His face tingled, his jaw hung slack as cooked pasta. Even his tongue felt swollen and flaccid, sagging loose and immovable in his mouth.

He stared up at the ovoid shape above the bed. It was a great dark Easter egg hanging in the air, half as long as he was, and wider. Its belly was disfigured by ports and blisters, barely-discernible, reflecting slivers of gray half-light from the hallway.

The hissing subsided. Sawyer felt a trickle of drool worm onto his cheek from the corner of his mouth. He tried to swallow, and failed.

He was still breathing. That was something.

The Easter egg clicked softly. A faint, almost subsonic hum emanated from somewhere nearby—either a ground-effect field, or the static of nerves misfiring in his own cochleae.

It couldn't be neuroinduction. A botfly would never even get off the ground carrying coils that heavy. Neuromuscular block of some kind, he realized. It gassed me.

It gassed us...

He willed his head to turn. It lay like a ten-kilogram rock on the pillow, defying him. He couldn't move his eyes. He couldn't even blink.

He could hear Sandra beside him, though, breathing fast and shallow. She too was awake.

"Went right back to sleep, I see," the botfly remarked in a familiar voice. "Didn't lose a wink over it, did you?"

Desjardins...?

"It's okay, though," the machine went on. "Turns out you were right. Here, let me give you a hand..."

The botfly tilted nose-down and descended until it was literally nuzzling Sawyer's cheek. It nosed him gently, like a hungry pet pestering its master for food. Sawyer's head lolled sideways on the pillow, stared past the edge of the bed to the crib against the far wall, barely visible in the gloom.

Oh God, what—

This couldn't be happening. Achilles Desjardins was a 'lawbreaker, and 'lawbreakers—they simply didn't do this sort of thing. They couldn't. Nobody had ever admitted it officially, of course, but Sawyer was connected, he knew the scoop. There were—restraints, right down at the biochemical level. To keep 'lawbreakers from misusing their power, to keep them from doing exactly what—

The robot floated across the bedroom. It came to rest about a meter over the crib. The thin crescent of a rotating lens glinted on its belly, focusing.

"Kayla, isn't it?" the botfly murmured. "Seven months, three days, fourteen hours. I say, Dr. Sawyer. Your genes must be very special, to justify bringing a child into such a shitty world. I bet it pissed off the neighbors something awful. How'd you get around the pop-control statutes?"

Please, Sawyer thought. Don't hurt her. I'm sorry. I—

"You know, I bet you cheated," the machine mused. "I bet this pissy little larva shouldn't even be here. Ah well. Like I said before, you were right. About real people. They really do die all the time."

Please. Oh dear God give me strength, let me move, at least give me strength enough to beg—

Bright as the sun, a fiery proboscis licked down through the darkness and set Kayla alight.

The botfly turned and regarded Trevor Sawyer through a dark cyclopean eye, while his child screamed and blackened.

"Why, there goes one now," it remarked.

"For Mandelbrot," Desjardins whispered. "In memory."

He freed the botfly to return to its appointed rounds. It would not be able to answer any of the inevitable questions resulting from this night, even in the unlikely event that anyone could trace it back to the honeycombed residential warren at 1423-150 Cushing Skywalk. Even now it could only remember a routine patrol along its prescribed transect; that was all it would remember, until a navigational malfunction sent it on a suicidal corkscrew into the no-go zone around Sudbury's main static-field generator. There wouldn't be enough left afterwards to reconstruct so much as a lens cluster, let alone an event log.

As for the bodies themselves, even the most superficial investigation would reveal telling indications of Trevor Sawyer's resentment over his forcible conscription into the Health Corps, and previously-unsuspected family ties to the M&M regime recently risen to power in Ghana. Nobody would waste time asking questions after that; those associated with the Madonna's New Order were notorious for their efforts in bringing down the old one. With Sawyer's hospital clearance and medical expertise, the damage he could have done to the law-abiding members of the community was incalculable. Sudbury was better off without him, whether he'd been killed by his own or whether some vigilant 'lawbreaker, near or far, had tracked him to his lair and terminated his terrorist activities with extreme prejudice.

It wasn't as though these kind of surgical strikes didn't happen all the time. And if some 'lawbreaker was behind it, it was—by definition—all for the best.

One more item checked off the to-do list. Desjardins wrapped Mandelbrot in his t-shirt and headed outside, cradling the bloody bundle against his bare chest. He was drowning in a vortex of emotion; he was empty inside. He tried to resolve the paradox as he ascended to ground level.

Grief, of course, for the loss of a friend he'd had for almost ten years. Satisfaction for the price exacted in return. And yet—he had hoped for more than this grim sense of a debt restored. He had hoped for something more fulfilling. Joy, perhaps, at the sight of Trevor Sawyer watching his wife and child burn alive. Joy at the sight of Sawyer's own immolation, flesh crisping from the bones, eyeballs bursting like great gelatinous grubs boiled in their sockets, knowing even there at the end, feeling it all, he'd never even found the strength to whimper.

Joy eluded Desjardins. Granted he'd never felt it any of the other times he'd balanced the books, but he had hoped for more this time. Certainly, the cause had been more heartfelt. But still: only grief, and satisfaction, and—and something else, something he couldn't quite put his finger on...

He stepped outside. Pale morning light rose on all sides. Mandelbrot was growing cold and stiff in his arms.

He took a few steps and turned to look up at his castle. It loomed huge and dark and ominous against the brightening sky. Before Rio, a small city's worth of would-be saviors had labored there. Now it was all his.

Gratitude, he realized, astonished. That's what he felt. Gratitude for his own grief. He still loved. He could still feel, with all his heart. Until this night and this loss, he had never been completely sure.

Alice had been right all along. Sociopath was far too small a word to contain whatever it was he had become.

Perhaps he'd go and tell her, once he'd laid beloved Mandelbrot to rest.

DisArmor

Leave Cadavers Here Only

Unauthorized Disposal Will Be Prosecuted

N'AmAt/CSIRA Biohazards Statute 4023-A-25-sub5