Clarke had learned a fair bit at Ouellette's side. She was no doctor, but she still had the rudimentary medical training she'd received as a rifter and the MI did most of the diagnostic and prescriptive work anyway. Miri's exorcism had cost them a few thousand patient records, half a year's downloaded updates, and all the vehicle's uplink capabilities—but whatever remained still knew enough to scan a body and prescribe basic treatments. Clarke wasn't up to dealing with much more sophistication than that anyway; even lobotomized, Miri was hardly the rate-limiting step.

People trickled through town, seeking Ouellette's ministrations but settling for Clarke's. She did what the machinery told her, played doctor as best she could. At night she'd sneak offshore and bypass Phocoena entirely, sleeping breathless and exposed on the bright, shallow bottom. Each morning she came ashore, stripped her diveskin down to the tunic and pulled Ouellette's borrowed clothing overtop. The strange dead fibers rubbed loosely against her limbs as she moved, an ill-fitting travesty full of folds and stitches. Removing the 'skin always felt a little like being flayed alive; this, this substitute might as well have been shed from the flanks of some great poorly-proportioned lizard. It wasn't too bad, though. It was getting easier.

It was pretty much the only thing that was getting easier.

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The worst part wasn't her own medical ignorance, or the endless, rising count of those she couldn't save. It wasn't even the outbursts of violence that people sometimes directed at her when faced with their own death sentence, or with that of a loved one. She was almost grateful for the shouts and the fists, thrown too rarely to constitute any kind of real cost. She'd experienced far worse in her time, and Miri's weapons blister was always there when things got out of hand.

Much, much worse than the violence of those she didn't save was the gratitude of those she nearly could. The smiles on the faces of those for whom she'd bought a little time, too dulled by disease and malnutrition to ever question the economics of trading a quick death for a lingering one. The pathetic delight of some father who'd seen his daughter cured of encephalitis, not knowing or caring that Seppuku or the Witch or some rogue flamethrower would take her next month or next year, not thinking of the rapes and broken bones and chronic starvation that would stalk her in the days between. Hope seemed nowhere more abundant than in the faces of the hopeless; and it was all she could do to meet their eyes, and smile, and accept their thanks. And not tell them who it was that had brought all this down upon the world in the first place.

Her experiment with naked eyes was long since over. If the locals didn't like her affect, they could damn well go somewhere else.

She wanted desperately to talk to Taka. Most of the time she resisted the impulse, remembering: Ouellette's friendship had evaporated the instant she'd learned the truth. Clarke didn't blame her. It couldn't be easy, discovering you'd befriended a monster.

One night, lonely enough to gamble, she tried anyway. She used a channel that Desjardins had assigned for reporting any late-breaking Seppuku incidents; it got her to an automated dispatcher and thence to an actual human being who—despite his obvious disapproval over personal use of dedicated channels—patched her through to someone claiming to speak for a biological countermeasures lab out of Boston. He had never heard of Taka Ouellette. When Clarke asked if there might be other facilities she could check with, the man replied that there must be—but the goddamned Entropy Patrol never told them anything, and he wouldn't know where to point her.

She made do by indulging in false hopes. Lubin would catch his prey. Desjardins would honor the deal they had made. They would track down the threat to Atlantis, and disarm it. And Taka Ouellette, or others like her, would solve the mystery of Seppuku and stop it in its tracks.

Maybe then they could go home.

 

 

She didn't even recognize him at first.

He came staggering out of the woods on foot, limping, purple-skinned, his face a swollen mass of scabs and pulpy bruises. He wore a thermochrome windbreaker with one of the arms torn away, and he lurched into sight just as Clarke was about to shut down for the evening.

"Hi again," he said. A bubble of blood grew and popped at the corner of his mouth. "Miss me?"

"Holy shit." She hurried over and helped him towards the MI. "What happened to you?"

"'Nother r. A Big r. Fucking capital r. Took my bike." He shook his head; the gesture was stiff and clumsy, as if rigor mortis were already taking hold. "That other K around? Taka?"

"No. I'll look after you." She guided him to Miri's right mouth, took his weight as he sagged onto the extended tongue.

"You really a doctor?" The teenager managed to look skeptical through all the gore. "Not that I care," he added after a moment. "You can check me over any time."

Finally it sunk in: Miss me?

Clarke shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I've seen a lot of people lately. I don't know if I'd recognize you even without all the facework."

"Ricketts," the boy said.

She stepped back. "You brought—"

"I brought that stuff that's gonna kill ßehemoth," he said proudly through cracked and puffy lips.

You brought the stuff that's going to kill us all, she thought.

It shouldn't have been any kind of dilemma. Get him into the MI. Clean him up, fix the physical injuries, confirm the presence of any new predator eating him from the inside out.

Maybe he's clean. All the contaminated stuff was sealed up in that bag, maybe he never had direct contact—

Confirm Seppuku. Isolate the victim. Call for extraction.

Hope to God that if he's got it, he can't breathe it on me...

"Lie back. Get your feet up." She was at the rear panel almost before Ricketts had taken his feet off the ground. She stabbed the usual icon, heard the familiar hum as Miri swallowed. Clarke told the vehicle to close both mouths and run the standard diagnostic suite.

She left him in there while she sprayed herself down with disinfectant. Overkill, probably. Hopefully. She was wearing the requisite sterile gloves, and the 'skin of her tunic protected her under Ouellette's borrowed clothing—

Shit. The clothing.

She stripped it off and bagged it for incineration. The rest of her diveskin was in her backpack, stashed in the cab. The forsaken pieces, retrieved, wriggled back into place, seams sealing together into a comforting second skin. Diveskins weren't built with antipathogen properties explicitly in mind, but the copolymer dealt with salt ions as a matter of course; it had to keep out anything as large as a living cell.

When she got back to Miri's rear panel, the diagnostic cycle had finished. Rickets was suffering from a broken cheekbone, a hairline fracture of the left tibia, second-degree concussion, borderline malnutrition (better than average, these days), two impacted wisdom teeth, and a moderate roundworm infection. None of that was life-threatening; most of it could be fixed.

The diagnostic suite did not include a scan for Seppuku. Seppuku didn't exist in the standard database. Ouellette had cobbled together a hasty, separate subroutine in the wake of her discovery. It didn't do much—no helpful breakdown into first/second/end-stage categories, no list of associated macrosymptoms. No suggested course of treatment. Just a blood count, really. Clarke didn't even know how to interpret that simple number. Was there such a thing as a "safe" level for Seppuku?

Zero, she assumed. She tapped the icon to start the test. Ricketts twitched in the little spycam window as Miri drank a few more drops of his blood.

It would take a while to run the analysis. Clarke forced herself to focus on Ricketts's other problems in the meantime. The roundworms and the teeth could wait. Targeted vasodilators and calcium suppressants eased the concussion. Broken bones were almost trivial: plant microcharge mesh into the affected areas to crank up osteoblast metabolism. Clarke had been doing that almost since the day she'd become a rifter.

"Hey!" Rickett's voice sounded tinny and startled through Miri's intercom. "I can't move!"

"It's the neuroinduction field," Clarke told him. "Don't worry about it. It just keeps you from jerking around during the cut-and-paste."

Beep.

And there it was. 106 particles per milliliter.

Oh Jesus.

How long had he been wandering around in the woods? How far had he spread it? The person who'd beaten him up: was he spreading it now, had he invited Seppuku in through the raw oozing skin of his knuckles? How many days before he discovered how much he'd really paid for a lousy motorbike?

Isolate the vector. Call in a lifter.

A lifter. It seemed so strange to even contemplate. She had to keep reminding herself: they're not monsters after all. They're not fire-breathing dragons sent down from the heavens to burn us out of existence. They're working for the good guys.

We're on their side now.

Still.

First things first. Ricketts had to be—

decirculated

—isolated until someone came by to collect him. Problem was, there weren't too many ways to do that. The MI would be useless for other field work as long as it kept him sequestered, and Clarke seriously doubted whether Freeport had had hot-zone isolation facilities even before it fell into ruin.

He can't stay here.

She watched the monitor for a few moments, watched Miri's jointed limbs and laser eyes putting Humpty together again. Then she called up the anesthesia menu. She chose isoflurane.

"Go to sleep," she whispered.

Within moments, Ricketts' wide, nervous eyes fluttered closed. It was like watching a lethal injection.

 

 

"Do you know who I am, you miserable fetus-fucker?" the demon spat.

No, she thought.

"I'm Lenie Clarke!"

The system crashed.

"Yeah," Clarke said softly. "Right."

She traded a dark view for a brighter one. Phocoena's viewport looked out on a muddy plain, not quite featureless; the muddy tracks of tunneling animals, the holes of invertebrate burrows stippled the bottom. A lone crab scuttled lethargically in the dim distance.

The ocean overhead was murky green, and growing brighter. The sun must be rising.

"What...?"

She hung the headset on the armrest and turned in the copilot's seat. Phocoena was too small to warrant a dedicated med cubby, but the fold-down bunk on the starboard side pulled double-duty in a pinch. It tucked away into the same kind of molded indentation that held the bunks on the opposite bulkhead; unlike its counterparts, though, its thicker base bulged from the wall in a smooth distension of plumbing and circuitry. When in use it folded down like a wide, short drawbridge, hung by twin monofilament threads spooled from its outer corners. Those threads, the edges of the pallet itself, and the overhanging bulkhead formed the vertices of a little tent. Isolation membrane stretched across the planes between.

Ricketts was trapped within. He lay on his side with one arm flopped against the membrane, distending it outward.

"Hi," Clarke said.

"Where's this?"

"We're underwater." She climbed back from her seat into the main cabin, keeping her head low; the curving hull didn't leave a lot of headroom.

He tried to sit up. He had even less headroom than she did. "What am I, you know..."

She took a breath. "You've got a—a bug. It's contagious. I thought it would be best to keep you isolated."

His bruises were already healing, thanks to Miri's attentions. The rest of his face paled behind them. "The witch?" And then, remembering: "But I brought you that cure, right...?"

"The cure wasn't—all we'd been hoping for," Clarke said. "It actually turned out to be something...else..."

He thought about that a moment. He pushed his splayed fingers against the membrane. The membrane stretched, iridescing.

"You saying...you saying it's like another disease?"

"Afraid so."

"So that explains it," he murmured.

"Explains what?"

"Why I been so weak the last coupla days. Prob'ly still have my bike if I'd been just that much faster." He frowned at her. "So you go around broadbanding how this germware kicks ßehemoth's ass and how we're supposed to like, collect it and all, and it's really just another bug?"

"Sorry," she said softly.

"Fuck." Ricketts lay back on the pallet and threw one arm over his face. "Ow," he added, almost as an afterthought.

"Yeah, your arm's going to be sore for a bit. You were pretty badly beat up, the MI can't fix everything just like that."

He held up the limb and examined it. "It does feel a lot better, though. Everything feels better. Thanks."

Clarke forced a smile.

He was up on his elbows, looking from the smaller cage into the larger one. "This whole set-up isn't bad. Way better than that priestly meat wagon."

It wasn't, of course. Phocoena's med facilities were rudimentary at best, far below what the MI could offer. "I'm afraid you'll have to stay in there for a while," Clarke said apologetically. "I know it's cramped, but the onboard's got games and shows, help you pass the time." She gestured at a headset hanging from the roof of the nook. "I can give you access."

"Great. Better'n an oven."

"Oven?"

"You know." He tapped his temple. "Microwaves. Give you a fine buzz if you jimmy the doors and stick your head just so."

Good trick, Clarke mused. Wish I'd known it when I was a kid.

Then again, maybe I did...

"What if I have to shit?" Ricketts wondered.

She nodded at a convex button set into the recessed bulkhead. "The pallet converts. Push that when you have to go. It's pretty straightforward."

He did, then let out a little yelp of surprise as the midsection of the pallet slid smoothly away underneath him. His ass bumped down on the wide rim of the bowl beneath.

"Wow," he whispered, impressed out of all proportion. Another press of the button and the pallet reintegrated.

"So what now?" he asked.

Now you get to be a lab rat. Now you'll go to some place where machines cut pieces out of you until either you die, or the thing inside of you does. Now, you'll be grilled on how long you hung around in Freeport, how many others you might have breathed on, how many others they might have. They'll find out about that asshole who beat you up and maybe they'll want to interview him. Or maybe not. Maybe they'll just decide it's already gone too far for pleasant interviews and nice individual extractions—because after all, if we have to sacrifice you to save Freeport, surely we also have to sacrifice Freeport to save New England now, don't we? That's the greater good for you, kid. It's a sliding scale. It's concentric.

And nobody's life is worth shit when they slap it onto the table.

She'd roll the dice. Maybe hundreds would die in flames. Maybe only Ricketts would, in pieces.

"Hello?" Ricketts said. "You here?"

Clarke blinked. "Sorry?"

"I said, what now?"

"I don't know yet," she told him.

 

Paranoid

 

Aaron had led to Beth. Beth had led to Habib, and Habib had led to Xander, and the whole lot of them had led to twenty thousand hectares of wasted New England countryside being put to the flame. And that wasn't all: According to the chatter on the restricted band there were at least three other operatives sweeping the field further south, Desjardins's preference for low profiles notwithstanding.

Eight days now, and Seppuku was living up to the hype. It was spreading faster than ßehemoth ever had.

Xander had also led to Phong, and Phong was fighting back. Lubin had him cornered in the mouth of an old storm-sewer that drooled slimy water into the Merrimack River. The mouth was a good two meters in diameter, set into a concrete cliff perhaps three times that height. It had a tongue, a triangular spillway widening out towards the river, flanked by rising abutments that held back the banks to either side. The spillway constituted the only clear avenue of approach and was slippery with brownish-green scum.

The mouth also had teeth, a grate of metal bars set a meter back from the opening. They kept Phong from escaping underground, and had forced him to fall back on his one high card: an antique firearm that shot bullets of indeterminate caliber. Lubin trumped him twice over on that score; he carried a Schubert active-denial microwave pistol that could heat flesh to 60°C, and a Heckler & Koch rapid-fire PDW that was currently loaded with mitigated conotoxins. Unfortunately there was way too much earth and concrete for the microwaves to penetrate from Lubin's present position, and getting a clear shot with the H&K would involve exposing himself on the slimy slope of the spillway.

It shouldn't have mattered. Under normal circumstances it would still be the furthest thing from an even match, even granting Lubin's rusty marksmanship after five years. Even though Phong's refuge was in shadow, and the sun stabbed directly into Lubin's eyes whenever he peeked around the corner. Those all made the shot trickier, no question. Still. Lubin was a professional.

No, what really skewed the odds was the fact that Phong seemed to have a thousand bodyguards, and they were all attacking Lubin at once.

He'd scarcely noticed them on approach: a cloud of midges hovering over a patch of resistant greenery on the embankment. They'd always been completely harmless in Lubin's experience. He'd dispersed them with a wave of his hand as he passed through, his attention on the concrete barrier that cut the riverbank just ahead...and in the next instant they'd attacked, a swarm of mosquito-sized insects with piranha-sized attitudes.

They bit, and they distracted, and they broke both his concentration and his stealth. Phong, stealing a drink from the sewer, had seen him coming and squeezed off a near miss before ducking back under cover. He'd almost escaped entirely, but Lubin had plunged through the insectile onslaught to the edge of the drainage apron, just in time to trap his quarry back against the tunnel.

"I'm here to get you to a hospital!" he called. "You've been exposed to—"

"Fuck you!" Phong shouted back.

A squad of dive-bombing insects attacked Lubin's hand, almost in formation; the little bastards had followed him. He slapped down hard. He missed his attackers but welcomed the sting of the impact. He unrolled the gloves from the wrists of his isolation skin and slipped them on, juggling the Schubert, then reached over his shoulder for the hood.

The velcro tab on the back of his collar was empty. His hood was probably hanging off some low-lying branch in the woods behind him.

And he was going up against someone who'd been exposed to Seppuku for two full days. Lubin allowed himself a muttered, "Shit."

"I don't want to hurt you!" he tried again. Which wasn't exactly true, and getting less so. The desire to kill something was certainly circling around his self-control. More insects attacked; he crushed them between hand and forearm, and reached to wipe the smashed body parts off against the river bank. He paused, briefly distracted: it was hard to be certain, but those crushed bodies seemed to have too many legs.

He wiped them off and focused on the immediate task. "You're coming with me," he called, his voice raised but level. "That's not up for discussion." Insects have—right. Six legs. He waved off another assault; a line of pinpricks lit up the back of his neck. "The only issue is whether you come now or later."

"Later, stumpfuck! I know whose side you on!"

"We can also discuss whether I'll be taking you to a hospital or a crematorium," Lubin muttered.

A squadron targeted his face. He slapped his forehead, hard. His hand came away with three tiny carcasses flattened against the palm. Each had eight legs.

What has eight legs? Spiders? Flying spiders?

Hunting in packs?

He wiped his palm against a patch of convenient vines matting the embankment. The vines squirmed at his touch.

He pulled his hand back instinctively, shocked. What the—

Tweaked, obviously. Or some kind of accidental hybrid. The foliage clenched and relaxed in peristaltic waves.

Focus. Keep on track.

More dive-bombers. Not quite so many this time. Maybe he'd swatted most of the swarm already. He felt as if he'd swatted a hundred swarms.

A scrabbling, from beyond the barrier.

Lubin peeked around the abutment. Phong was making a break for it, scrambling along a dry strip of concrete edging the far side of the spillway. Startling graffiti decorated the wall behind him, a stylized female face with white featureless eyes and a zigzag moniker: MM.

Phong saw him, fired three wild rounds. Lubin didn't even bother to duck; his microwave was already set on wide beam, too diffuse for a quick kill but easily strong enough to reheat Phong's last meal along with most of the gastrointestinal tract that was holding it. Phong doubled over, retching, to land on the thin skin of wastewater and the frictionless slime beneath it. He slid diagonally down the spillway, out of control. Lubin put one foot on a convenient dry patch and leaned out to catch him as he passed.

The Airborne Spider Brigade chose that exact moment for its last hurrah.

Suddenly Lubin's face and neck were wrapped in stinging nettles. Overextended, he struggled for balance. Phong sailed past; one flailing leg careened against Lubin's ankle. Lubin went over like a pile of very angry bricks.

They slid off the spillway into freefall.

It wasn't a long drop, but it was a hard landing. The Merrimack was a mere shadow of its former self; they landed not in water but on a broken mosaic of shale and cracked mud, barely moistened by the outfall. Lubin got some slight satisfaction from the fact that Phong landed underneath him.

Phong threw up again on impact.

Lubin rolled away and stood, wiping vomit from his face. Shards of shale snapped and slipped beneath his feet. His face and neck and hands itched maddeningly. (At least he seemed to have finally shaken the kamikaze arthropods.) His right forearm was skinned and oozing, the supposedly-unbreachable isolation membrane ripped from palm to elbow. A knife-edged splinter of stone, the size of his thumb, lay embedded in the heel of his hand. He pulled it free. The jolt that shot up his forearm felt almost electrical. Blood welled from the gash. Mopping at the gore revealed clumped particles of fatty tissue, like clusters of ivory pinheads, deep in the breach.

The microwave pistol lay on the scree a few meters away. He retrieved it, wincing.

Phong still lay on his back, winded, bruised, his left leg twisted at an angle impossible to reconcile with the premise of an intact tibia. His skin reddened as Lubin watched, small blisters rising on his face in the wake of the microwave burst. Phong was in bad shape.

"Not bad enough," Lubin remarked, looking down at him.

Phong looked up through glazed eyes and muttered something like Wha...

You were not worth the trouble, Lubin thought. There was no excuse for me to even break a sweat over the likes of you. You're nothing. You're less than nothing. How dare you get so lucky. How dare you piss me off like this.

He kicked Phong in the ribs. One broke with a satisfying snap.

Phong yelped.

"Shhh," Lubin murmured soothingly. He brought the heel of his boot down on Phong's outstretched hand, ground it back and forth. Phong screamed.

Lubin spent a moment contemplating Phong's right leg—the intact one—but decided to leave it unbroken. There was a certain aesthetic in the asymmetry. Instead, he brought his foot down again, hard, on the broken left one.

Phong screamed and fainted, escaping into brief oblivion. It didn't matter; Lubin's hard-on had been assured with the first snapping bone.

Go on, he urged himself.

He walked unhurriedly around the broken man until he found himself next to Phong's head. Experimentally, he lifted his foot.

Go on. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares.

But he had rules. They weren't nearly so inviolable as when he'd been Guilt Tripped, but in a way that was the whole point. To make his own decisions. To follow his own algorithm. To prove he didn't have to give in, to prove he was stronger than his impulses.

Prove it to who? Who's here to care? But he already knew the answer.

It's not his fault. It's yours.

Lubin sighed. He lowered his foot, and waited.

 

 

"A man named Xander gave you a vial," he said calmly, squatting at Phong's side a half-hour later.

Phong stared wide-eyed and shook his head. He did not seem pleased to be back in the real world. "Please...don't—"

"You were told that it contained a counteragent, that it would kill off ßehemoth if it was disseminated widely enough. I thought so myself, at first. I understand that you were only trying to do the right thing." Lubin leaned in close. "Are you following me, Phong?"

Phong gulped and nodded.

Lubin stood. "We were both misinformed. The vial you were given will only make things worse. If you hadn't been so busy trying to kill me you could have saved us both a lot—" A sudden thought occurred to him. "Just out of interest, why were you trying to kill me?"

Phong looked torn.

"I'd really like to know," Lubin said, without the slightest trace of threat in his voice.

"You—they said people trying to stop the cure," Phong blurted.

"Who?"

"Just people. On the radio." Alone, helpless, half his bones broken, and still he was trying to protect his contacts. Not bad, Lubin had to admit.

"We're not," he said. "And if you had been in touch with Xander and Aaron and their friends lately, you'd know that for yourself. They're very sick."

"No." It was probably meant to be a protest, but Phong didn't seem able to put any conviction into the word.

"I need to know what you did with that vial," Lubin said.

"I...I ate it," Phong managed.

"You ate it. You mean, you drank the contents."

"Yes."

"You didn't disseminate it anywhere. You drank it all yourself."

"Yes."

"Why, may I ask?"

"They say it cure ßehemoth. I—I first stage already. They say I dead by winter, and I could not get into forts..."

Lubin didn't dare touch the man, not with his isolation skin in tatters. He studied Phong's exposed and reddened skin, at the blisters rising across it. If there had been any obvious signs of either ßehemoth or Seppuku, they were now indistinguishable under the burns. He tried to remember if Phong had presented any symptoms prior to being shot.

"When did you do this?" he asked at last.

"Two days. I felt fine until...you...you..." Phong squirmed weakly, winced at the result.

Two days. Seppuku was fast, but all the symptomatic vectors Lubin had encountered had been infected for longer than that. It was probably only a matter of hours before Phong started presenting. A day or two at most.

"—to me?" Phong was saying.

Lubin looked down at him. "What?"

"What you do to me?"

"A lifter's on the way. You'll be in a medical facility by nightfall."

"I'm sorry," Phong said, and coughed. "They say I be dead by winter," he repeated in a weak voice.

"You will be," Lubin told him.

 

Matryoska

 

Clarke didn't make the call.

She'd had closer contact with Ricketts than anyone except the person who'd assaulted him, and she'd checked out clean. She was willing to bet that the people of Freeport were clean too.

She wasn't willing to bet that the trigger fingers would agree with her.

She knew the arguments. She knew the virtues of erring on the side of caution. She just didn't buy them, not when the people making those decisions sat in untouchable far-off towers adding columns of empty numbers and Bayesian probabilities. Maybe the experts were right, maybe the only people truly qualified to run the world were those without conscience—clear-eyed, rational, untroubled by the emotional baggage that the sight of piled bodies could induce in the unblessed. People weren't numbers, but maybe the only way to do the right thing was to act as if they were.

Maybe. She wasn't going to bet the town of Freeport on it, though.

They were nowhere close to a cure, according to the dispatches. There was nothing anyone could do for Ricketts except poke at him. Perhaps that would change at some point. Perhaps it would even happen before Seppuku killed him, although that seemed vanishingly unlikely. In the meantime, Lubin was good at his job—maybe a bit past his prime, but easily more than a match for a handful of infected ferals who didn't even know they were being hunted. If the Meatzarts needed live samples, Lubin was the man to provide them.

There was no need to feed this skinny kid into that system. Clarke had learned a few things about research protocols over the years: even after the cures are discovered, who bothers rehabilitating the lab rats?

Taka Ouellette, maybe. Clarke would have trusted her in an instant. But Clarke didn't know where she was or how to reach her. She certainly didn't trust the system to deliver Ricketts into her exceptional arms. And Ricketts, surprisingly, seemed content where he was. In fact, he seemed almost happy there. Maybe he'd forgotten the old days, or maybe he hadn't been very well-off even then. But by the time he'd fallen into Clarke's orbit he knew only the grubby, dying landscape upon which he expected to live his whole short life. Probably the most he'd dared hope for was to die in peace and alone in some sheltered ruin, before being torn apart for his clothes or the dirt in his pockets.

To be rescued from that place, to wake up in a gleaming submarine at the bottom of the sea—that must have seemed magical beyond dreams. Ricketts came from a life so grim that terminal exile on the ocean floor was actually a step up.

I could just let him die here, Clarke thought, and he'd be happier than he'd ever been in his life.

She kept her eyes open, of course. She wasn't stupid. Seppuku was afoot in the world, and Ricketts had vectored it all the way from Vermont. At the very least there was some thug with a stolen motorbike to worry about. She tested everyone that Miri swallowed, no matter what their complaint. She read encrypted dispatches intended only for those in the loop. She watched public broadcasts aimed at the ferals themselves, transmissions from high-tech havens in Boston and Augusta: weather, MI schedules, waiting times at the ßehemoth forts—incongruously, coding tips. She marveled that the castle-dwellers would dare present themselves this way, as if they could redeem themselves by sending public service bulletins to those they'd trampled in their own rush to safety.

She drove the back roads and checked derelict dwellings looking for business, for people too weak to seek her out. She queried her patients: did they know anyone who had come down with high fever, soreness in the joints, sudden weakness?

Nothing.

She thought of her friend, Achilles Desjardins. She wondered if he was still alive, or if he had died when Spartacus rewired his brain. The circuits that made him who he was had been changed, after all. He had been changed. Maybe he'd been changed so much that he didn't even exist any more. Maybe he was a whole new being, living in Desjardins's head, running off his memories.

One thing seemed to have stayed the same, though. Desjardins was still one of the trigger fingers, still entrusted to kill the many to save the multitude. Maybe someday—maybe soon—he'd have to do that here. Lenie Clarke realized as much: she might be wrong. Extreme measures might prove necessary.

Not yet, though. If Seppuku gestated in the ghost town of Freeport, it was laying low. Lenie Clarke did likewise. In the meantime, Ricketts was her little secret.

For as long as he lasted, anyway. It wasn't looking good.

 

 

She stepped dripping from the diver 'lock in Phocoena's tail. Ricketts was wetter than she was.

His skin was beyond pink; it was so flushed it almost looked sunburned. He'd long since stripped off his rags, and now lay naked on a pallet that could soak up perspiration barely faster than he produced it.

None of his biotelemetry was in the red yet, according to the panel. That was something.

He had the headset on, but he turned his head at the sound of her entrance. The blind, cowled face seemed to look right through her. "Hi." The smile on his face was an absurd paradox.

"Hi," she said, stepping to the cycler on the opposite bulkhead. "Hungry?" She was only filling the silence; the drip in his arm kept him fed as well as medicated.

He shook his head. "Thanks. Busy."

In VR, perhaps. The handpad lay discarded by his knees, but there were other interfaces.

"This is great," he murmured.

Clarke looked at him. How can you say that? she wondered. How can you just act as though there's nothing wrong? Don't you know you're dying?

But of course he probably didn't. If Phocoena couldn't cure him, at least it wasn't letting him suffer: it kept his fluids up, gagged internal alarms, soothed nerves when they burned with fever or nausea. And it wasn't just ßehemoth's ravages that the medbed would have swept under the rug. Ricketts's whole life must have been an ongoing litany of low-level discomfort, chronic infections, parasite loads, old injuries badly healed. All those baseline aches and pains would be gone too, as far as this boy could tell. He probably felt better than he had in years. He probably thought his weakness would pass, that he was actually getting better.

The only way he'd know otherwise would be if Lenie Clarke told him the truth.

She turned from the cycler and climbed forward into the cockpit. Systems telltales winked and wriggled under the dark crystal of the pilot's dash. There was something vaguely off about those readouts, something Clarke couldn't quite—

"It's so clean in here," Ricketts said.

He wasn't in VR. He wasn't playing games.

He'd hacked into nav.

She straightened so fast her head cracked against the overhead viewport. "What are you doing in there? That's not—"

"There's no wildlife at all," he went on, amazed. "Not even, like, a worm, far as I can tell. And everything's so, so..." he fell silent, groping for the word.

She was back at his cage. Ricketts lay staring at Phocoena's pristine datascape, emaciated, anesthetized, lost in wonder.

"Whole," he said at last.

She reached out. The membrane tugged gently at her fingertips, webbed her fingers, stretched back along her forearm. She briefly touched his shoulder. His head rolled in her direction, not so much an act of will as of gravity.

"How are you doing that?" she asked.

"Doing...? Oh. Saccadal keyboard. You know. Eye movements." He smiled weakly. "Easier'n the handpad."

"No, I mean, how did you get into Phocoena?"

"Wasn't I supposed to?" He pushed the eyephones up on a forehead beaded with sweat and stared, frowning. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on her. "You said I could use the onboard."

"I meant games."

"Oh," Ricketts said. "I don't really...you know, I didn't..."

"It's okay," she told him.

"I was just looking around. Didn't rewrite anything. It's not like there was security or, you know." Then added, a moment later, "Hardly any."

Clarke shook her head. Ken would kill me if he knew I'd let this kid in. He'd at least kick my ass for not putting a few passwords in place.

Something scratched at the back of her mind, something Ricketts had just said. You said I could use the onboard. I was just looking around. I didn't rewrite any—

"Wait a second," she said, "Are you saying you could rewrite the nav code if you wanted to?"

Ricketts licked his lips. "Prob'ly not. Don't even really know what it's for. I mean, I could tweak it all right, but it'd just be like random changes."

"But you're saying you can code."

"Well, yeah. Kinda."

"Out there in the wilds. Poking around in the ruins. You learned to code."

"No more'n anyone else." He seemed honestly confused. "What, you think the claves took all our watches and stuff before they hived up? You think we don't have electricity or something?"

Of course there'd be power sources. Left-over Ballard Stacks, private windmills, the photoelectric paint that kept those stupid billboards hawking neutriceuts and fashion accessories into the middle of the apocalypse itself. But that hardly meant—

"You can code," she murmured, incredulous even as she remembered the programming tips she'd seen on public television.

"You can't grow a little code here and there, you can forget about using your watch 'cept for time and bulls. How'd you think I found you guys, you think GPS fixes itself when worms and Shredders get in there?"

He was breathing fast and shallow, as if the effort of so many words had winded him. But he was proud, too, Clarke could tell. Feral Kid On Last Legs Impresses Exotic Older Woman.

And she was impressed, despite herself.

Ricketts could code.

 

 

She showed him her Cohen board. Curled up in his cage he tapped his own headset, arm wobbling with the effort. He frowned, apparently taken aback by his own weakness.

"So pipe it through," he said after a moment

She shook her head. "No wireless. Too risky. It might get out."

He looked at her knowingly. "Lenie?"

"I think they call it a—a shredder."

He nodded. "Shredders, Lenies, Madonnas. Same thing."

"It keeps crashing."

"Well, yeah. That's what they do."

"It couldn't have been crashing the OS, that was read-only. It was crashing itself."

He managed a half-shrug.

"But why would it do that? I've seen them run a lot longer than five seconds out in the wild. Do you think, maybe—?"

"Sure," he said. "I can take a look. But you gotta do something too."

"What's that?"

"Take those stupid things outta your eyes."

Reflexively, she stepped back. "Why?"

"I just wanna see them. Your eyes."

What are you so afraid of? she asked herself. Do you think he'll see the truth in there?

But of course she was much better than that. Better than he was, anyway: she forced herself to disarm, and afterwards—looking straight into her naked eyes—he didn't seem to see a thing he didn't want to.

"You should leave them like that. It's almost like you're beautiful."

"No it isn't." She dialed down the membrane and pushed the board through: Ricketts fumbled it; the contraption dropped onto the pallet beside him, the iso membrane sealing seamlessly in its wake. Clarke cranked its surface tension back to maximum while Ricketts, embarrassed by his own clumsiness, studied the board with feigned intensity.

Slowly, carefully, he slipped the headset into place and didn't fuck up. He sagged onto his back, breathing heavily. The Cohen Board flickered to light.

"Shit," he hissed suddenly. "Nasty little bitch." And a moment later: "Oh. There's your problem."

"What?"

"Elbow room. She, like, attacks random addresses, only you put her in this really small cage so she ends up just clawing her own code. She'd last longer if you added memory." He paused, then asked, "Why are you keeping her, anyway?"

"I just wanted to—ask it some things," Clarke hedged.

"You're kidding, right?"

She shook her head, although he couldn't see her. "Um—"

"You do get that she doesn't, like, understand anything?"

It took a moment for the words to sink in. "What do you mean?"

"She's nowhere near big enough," Ricketts told her. "Wouldn't last two minutes in a Turing test."

"But it was talking back. Before it crashed."

"No she wasn't."

"Ricketts, I heard it."

He snorted; the sound turned into a racking cough. "She's got a dialog tree, sure. She's got like keyword reflexes and stuff, but that's not—"

Heat rose in her cheeks. I'm such an idiot.

"I mean, some Shredders are smart enough, I guess," he added. "Just not this one."

She ran her fingers over her scalp. "Is there some other way to—interrogate it, maybe? Different interface? Or, I don't know, decompile the code?"

"It evolved. You ever try to figure out evolved code?"

"No."

"It's really messy. Most of it doesn't even do anything any more, it's all just junk genes left over from..." his voice trailed off.

"And why don't you just flush her anyway?" he asked, very softly. "These things aren't smart. They're not special. They're just shitbombs some assholes throw at us to try and crash whatever we got left. They even attack each other if you give 'em half a chance. If it weren't for the firewalls and the exorcists and stuff they'd have wrecked everything by now."

Clarke didn't answer.

Almost sighing, Ricketts said: "You're really strange, you know?"

She smiled a bit.

"Nobody's gonna believe me when I tell them about this. Too bad you can't, you know, come back with me. Just so they won't think I made it all up."

"Back?"

"Home. When I get out of here."

"Well," she said, "you never know."

A pathetic, gap-toothed smile bloomed beneath his headset.

"Ricketts," she said after a while.

No answer. He lay there, patient and inert, still breathing. The telemetry panel continued to scribble out little traces of light, cardio, pulmo, neocort. All way too high; Seppuku had cranked his metabolic rate into the stratosphere.

He's asleep. He's dying. Let him be.

She climbed into the cockpit and collapsed into the pilot's station. The viewports around her glowed with a dim green light, fading to gray. She'd left the cabin lights off; Phocoena was a submerged cave in the dying light, its recesses already hidden in shadow. By now she was almost fond of the blindness afforded her naked eyes.

So often now, darkness seemed the better choice.

 

Basement Wiring

 

First he blinded her, put stinging drops into her eyes that reduced the whole world to a vague gray abstraction. He wheeled her out of the cell down corridors and elevators whose presence she could only infer only through ambient acoustics and a sense of forward motion. Those were what she focused on: momentum, and sound, and the blurry photosensitivity that one might get by looking at the world through a thick sheet of waxed paper. She tried to ignore the smell of her own shit pooling beneath her on the gurney. She tried to ignore the pain, not so raw and electric now, but spread across her whole thorax like a great stinging bruise.

It was impossible, of course. But she tried.

Her vision was beginning to clear when the gurney rolled to a stop. She could see blurry shapes in the fog by the time the induction field cut back in and reduced her once more to a rag doll, unable even to struggle within restraint. The view sharpened in small increments as her tormentor installed her in some kind of rigid exoskeleton that would have posed her on all fours, if any part of her had been touching the ground. It was gimbaled; a gentle push from the side and the fuzzy outlines of the room rotated lazily past her eyes, as if she were affixed to a merry-go-round.

By the time she got her motor nerves back, she could see clearly again. She was in a dungeon. There was nothing medieval about it, no torches on the walls. Indirect light glowed from recessed grooves that ran along the edges of the ceiling. The loops and restraints hanging from the wall in front of her were made of memetic polymers. The blades and coils and alligator clips on the bench to her left were stainless gleaming alloy. The floor was a spotless mosaic of Escher tiles, cerulean fish segueing into jade waterfowl. Even the cleansers and stain removers on the cart by the door were, she had no doubt, filled with the latest synthetics. The only anachronistic touch was a pile of rough wooden poles leaning up against one corner of the room. Their tips had been hand-whittled to points.

There was a collar—a pillory, actually—around her neck. It blinded her to anything behind. Perhaps realizing this, Achilles Desjardins stepped accommodatingly into view at her left side, holding a handpad.

It's only him, she thought, a bit giddily. The others didn't know. If they had, why had they been wearing body condoms? Why the pretense of a quarantine cell, why not just bring her here directly? The men who'd delivered her didn't know what was going on. They must have been told she was a vector, a danger, someone who'd try to escape the moment she knew the jig was up. They must have thought they'd been doing the right thing.

It didn't make any difference to her current predicament. But it mattered just the same: the whole world wasn't mad. Parts of it were just misinformed.

Achilles looked down at her. She looked back; the stock pushed against her head as she craned her neck.

She squirmed. The frame that held her body seemed to tighten a tiny bit. "Why are you doing this?"

He shrugged. "To get off. Thought that'd be obvious even to a fuckup like you, Alice."

Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably. She bit down on it, hard. Don't give him anything. Don't give him anything. But of course it was way too late for that.

"You look like you want to say something," Achilles remarked.

She shook her head.

"Come on, girl. Speak! Speak, girl!"

I've got nothing to say to you, you fucking asshole.

His hand was in his pocket again. Something in there made a familiar snick-snick noise.

He wants me to talk. He told me to talk. What happens if I don't?

Snick-snick.

What if I do, and he doesn't like what I say? What if—

It didn't matter, she realized. It didn't make any difference at all. Hell was an arbitrary place. If he wanted to hurt her, he'd hurt her no matter what she said.

She was probably already as good as dead.

"You're not human," she whispered.

Achilles hmmed a moment. "Fair enough. I used to be, though. Before I was liberated. Did you know humanity can be extracted? Little bug called Spartacus sucks it right out of you." He wandered back out of sight. Taka strained to follow, but the stocks kept her facing forward. "So don't blame me, Alice. I was the victim."

"I'm...I'm sorry," Taka tried.

"I'll bet. They all are."

She swallowed, and tried not to go where that led.

The exoskeleton must have been spring-loaded; there was a click and suddenly her arms were yanked up behind her, spread back in a delta-V. The motion stretched the flesh tight across her chest; the pain that had diffused across her body collapsed back down to a sharp agonized focus in her breast. She bit back a scream. Some distant, irrelevant part of her took pride in her success.

Then something cold slapped against her ass and she cried out anyway—but Achilles was just cleaning her up with a wet rag. The wetness evaporated almost instantly, chilling her. Taka smelled alcohol.

"Excuse me? You said something?"

"Why do you want to hurt me?" The words burst from the throat of some wounded animal before she could bite them back: Stupid, stupid bitch. Whining and crying and groveling just the way he likes it. You know why he does it. Your whole life you've known people like this existed.

But of course the animal hadn't been asking why at all. The animal wouldn't have even understood the answer. The animal only wanted him to stop.

His hand ran lightly over her ass. "You know why."

She thrashed her head from side to side in frantic, violent denial. "There are other ways, easier ways! Without the risk, without anyone trying to stop you—"

"Nobody's trying to stop me now," Achilles pointed out.

"But you must know, with a good set of phones and a feedback skin you could do things that wouldn't even be physically possible in the real world, with more women than you could ever dream of having in—"

"Tried it." Footsteps, returning. "Jerking off in a hallucination."

"But they look and feel and even smell so real you'd never know—"

Suddenly his hand was knotted tightly in her hair, twisting her head around, putting her face a few scant centimeters from his. He was not smiling now, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all pretense of civility.

"It's not about the sights or the smells, okay? You can't hurt a hallucination. It's play-acting. What's the point of torturing something that can't even suffer?" He yanked her head again for good measure.

And in the next instant released it, casually cheerful once more. "Anyway, I'm really no different than any other guy. You're an educated stumpfuck, you must know that the only difference between fucking someone and flaying them is a few neurons and a whole lotta social conditioning. You're all like me. I've just lost the parts that pretend it isn't true.

"And now," he added, with a good-natured wink, "you've got an oral exam."

Taka shook her head. "Please..."

"Don't sweat it, it's mainly review. As I recall, in our last lesson we were talking about Seppuku, and you seemed surprised at the thought that it might reproduce sexually. I know, I know—never even occurred to you, did it? Even though everything has sex, even though bacteria have sex. Even though you and I are having sex, it never occurred to you that Seppuku might. Not too smart, Alice. David would be very disappointed."

Oh Dave. Thank God you can't see me now.

"But let's move past that. Today we're gonna start with the idea that sex might kick in as, say, as a density-dependent response. Population increases, sexual mode cuts in, what happens?"

He moved behind her again. She tried to focus, tried to put her mind to this absurd, humiliating game on the remote chance there might be some way to win. Sexual mode cuts in, she thought, genes shuffle, and the recessives—

Another click. The exoskeleton stretched its legs back and forced hers apart, a meter off the floor.

—the reces—oh God—it's got all those lethal recessives, they start to express and the whole genotype—it collapses...

Achilles laid something hard and dry and room-temperature across the back of her right thigh. "Anything? Or should I just get started back here?"

"It self-destructs!" she blurted. "It dies off! Past some critical density..."

"Mmmm."

She couldn't tell if that had been the answer he was looking for. It made sense. As if sense would matter in this godforsaken—

"So why hasn't it died off?" he asked curiously.

"It—it—it hasn't hit the threshold yet. You keep burning it before it gets enough of a foothold."

No sound or motion for an eternity.

"Not bad," Achilles said finally.

Relief crashed through her like a wave. Some inner voice berated her for it, reminded her that she was still captive and Achilles Desjardins could change the rules whenever he pleased, but she ignored it and savored the tiny reprieve.

"So it is a counteragent," she babbled. "I was right all along. It's programmed to outcompete ßehemoth and then take itself out of the picture."

From somewhere behind her shoulder, the sense of a trap snapping shut.

"You've never heard the term relict population, then?" The weight lifted from her thigh. "You think a bug that hid for four billion years wouldn't be able to find some little corner, somewhere, where Seppuku couldn't get at it? One's all it would take, you know. One's all it took the first time. And then Seppuku takes itself out of the picture, as you say, and ßehemoth comes back stronger than ever. What does Seppuku do then, I wonder? Rise from the grave?"

"But wh—"

"Sloppy thinking, Alice. Really sloppy."

Smack.

Something drew a stinging line across her legs. Taka cried out; the inner voice sneered told you so.

"Please," she whimpered.

"Back of the class, cunt." Something cold tickled her vulva. A faint rasping sound carried over her shoulder, like the sound of a fingernail on sandpaper.

"I can see why pine furniture used to be so cheap," Desjardins remarked. "You get all these splinters..."

She stared hard at the tiled floor, the fish-to-bird transition, focused on that indefinable moment when background and foreground merged. She tried to lose herself in the exercise. She tried to think of nothing but the pattern.

She couldn't escape the thought that Achilles had designed the floor for exactly that purpose.

 

Splice

 

She was safe. She was home. She was deep in the familiar abyss, water pressing down with the comforting weight of mountains, no light to betray her presence to the hunters overhead. No sound but her own heartbeat. No breath.

No breath...

But that was normal, wasn't it? She was a creature of the deep sea, a glorious cyborg with electricity sparking in her chest, supremely adapted. She was immune to the bends. Her rapture owed nothing to nitrogen. She could not drown.

But somehow, impossibly, she was.

Her implants had stopped working. Or no, her implants had disappeared entirely, leaving nothing in her chest but a pounding heart, flopping on the bottom of a great bleeding hole where lung and machinery had once been. Her flesh cried out for oxygen. She could feel her blood turning to acid. She tried to open her mouth, tried to gasp, but even that useless reflex was denied her here; her hood stretched across her face like an impermeable skin. She panicked, thrashing towards a surface that might have been lightyears away. The very core of her was a yawning vacuum. She convulsed around her own emptiness.

Suddenly, there was light.

It was a single beam from somewhere overhead, skewering her through the darkness. She struggled towards it; gray chaos seethed at the edges of sight, blinding her peripheral vision as her eyes began to shut down. There was light above and oblivion on all sides. She reached for the light.

A hand seized her wrist and lifted her into atmosphere. Suddenly she could breathe again; her lungs had been restored, her diveskin miraculously removed. She sank to her knees on a solid deck, sucked great whooping breaths.

She looked up, into the face of her salvation. A fleshless, pixelated caricature of herself grinned back; its eyes were empty whirling holes. "You're not dead yet," it said, and ripped out her heart.

It stood over her, frowning as she bled out on the deck. "Hello?" it asked, its voice turned strangely metallic. "Are you there? Are you there?"

 

 

She awoke. The real world was darker than her dream had been.

She remembered Rickett's voice, thin and reedy: They even attack each other if you give 'em half a chance...

"Are you there?"

It was the voice from her dream. It was the ship's voice. Phocoena.

I know what to do, she realized.

She turned in her seat. Sunset biotelemetry sparkled in the darkness behind her: a fading life-force, rendered in constellations of yellow and orange.

And for the first time, red.

"Hello?" she said.

"How long i been asleep?"

Ricketts was using the saccadal interface to talk. How weak do you have to be, Clarke wondered, before it's too much effort to speak aloud?

"I don't know," she told the darkness. "A few hours, I guess." And then, dreading the answer: "How are you feeling?"

"About same," he lied. Or maybe not, if Phocoena was doing its job.

She climbed from her seat and stepped carefully back to the telemetry panel. A facet of isolation membrane glistened dimly beyond, barely visible to her uncapped eyes.

Ricketts's antibodies and glucose metabolism had both gone critical while she'd slept. If she was reading the display right Phocoena had been able to compensate for the glucose to some extent, but the immune problems were out of its league. And an entirely new readout had appeared on the diagnostic panel, cryptic and completely unexpected: something called AND was increasing over time in Rickett's body. She tapped the label and invoked the system glossary: AND expanded into Anomalous Nucleotide Duplex, which told her nothing. But there was a dotted horizontal line etched near the top of the y-axis, some critical threshold that Ricketts was approaching but had not yet met; and the label on that feature was one she knew.

Metastasis.

It can't be long now, Clarke thought. Then, hating herself: Maybe long enough...

"Still there?" Ricketts asked.

"Yes."

"It's lonely in here."

Under the cowl, maybe. Or inside his own failing flesh.

"Talk to me."

Go ahead. You know you want an opening.

"About what?"

"Anything. Just—anything."

You can't exploit someone if you don't even ask...

She took a breath. "You know what you said about the, the shredders? How someone was using them to try and crash everything?"

"Yes."

"I don't think they're supposed to crash the system at all," she said.

A brief silence. "But that's what they do. Ask anyone."

"That's not all they do. Taka said they breach dams and short out static-fields and who knows what. That one on the board was sitting in her MI for God knows how long, and it never even peeped until she'd figured out Seppuku. They're attacking a lot of targets through the network, and they need the network to get to them."

She looked into the darkness, past the telemetry panel, past the faint shimmer of reflecting membrane. Ricketts's head was a dim crescent, its edges rough and smooth in equal measure: outlined hints of disheveled hair and contoured plastic. She couldn't see his face. The headset would have covered his eyes even if her caps had been in. His body was an invisible suggestion of dark mass, too distant for the meager light of the display. It did not move.

She continued: "The shredders try to crash everything they can get their teeth into, so we just assume that whoever bred them wants them to succeed. But I think they're counting on the firewalls and the—exorcists, right...?"

"Right."

"Maybe they're counting on those defenses to hold. Maybe they don't want the network to collapse because they use it themselves. Maybe they just send the—the shredders out to kick up mud and noise, and keep everyone busy so they can sneak around and do their own thing without getting noticed."

She waited for him to take the bait.

Finally: "Big twisted story."

"Yeah. It is."

"But Shredders still shred everything. And breeders not here to ask. So no way to tell."

Leave him alone. He's just a kid with a crush, he's so sick he can barely move. The only reason he hasn't told you to fuck off is because he thinks you might care.

"I think there is a way," she said.

"Why?"

"If they'd really wanted to crash the whole system, they could have done that long before now."

"How you know?"

Because I know where the demons come from. I know how they started, I know how they work.

And just maybe, I know how to set them free.

"Because we can do it ourselves," Clarke told him.

Ricketts said nothing. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was unconscious. Clarke felt her fingers in motion, glanced down at the new window she'd just opened on the bedside board. The Palliative Submenu, she saw. A minimalist buffet of default settings: nutrients. painkillers. stimulants. Euthanasia.

She remembered a voice from the past: You're so sick of the blood on your hands you'd barely notice if you had to wash it off with even more.

"Crash N'AmNet," Ricketts said.

"That's right."

"Don't know. I'm...tired..."

Look at him, she told herself. But it was dark, and her caps weren't in.

And he was dying anyway.

One finger slid across stimulants.

Ricketts spoke again. "Crash N'AmNet? Really?" Something rustled in the darkness behind the membrane. "How?"

She closed her eyes.

 

 

Lenie Clarke. It had all started with that name.

Ricketts didn't really remember where the Witch first came from. He'd just been a kid then, he said. But he'd heard the stories; according to legend and the M&M's, the Meltdown Madonna had started the whole thing.

That was close enough. She'd released it, anyway, spread ßehemoth across N'Am like some kind of vindictive crop-duster. And of course people had tried to stop her, but there'd been a—a glitch. Deep in the seething virtual jungles of Maelstrom, passing wildlife had noticed a flock of high-priority messages shooting back and forth, messages about something called Lenie Clarke. They'd learned to hitch a ride. It was reproductive strategy, or a dispersal strategy, or something like that. She had never really understood the details. But traffic about Lenie Clarke was a free ticket to all kinds of habitat that wildlife had never gotten into before. Natural selection took over from there; it wasn't long before wildlife stopped merely riding messages about Lenie Clarke and started writing their own. Memes leaked into the real world, reinforced those already proliferating through the virtual one. Positive feedback built both into myth. Half the planet ended up worshipping a woman who never existed, while the other half tried desperately to kill the one who did.

Neither side caught her, though.

"So where'd she go?" Ricketts asked. He was using his own vocal cords again, and Clarke could see his hands in vague motion on the handpad. An incandescent filament, flickering towards extinction, suddenly bright and steady in the grip of a voltage spike inflicted without his knowledge or consent. Burning out.

"I said—"

"She—disappeared," Clarke told him. "And I guess most of the wildlife that used her died off, but some of it didn't. Some of it claimed to speak for her even when she was still around. I guess the whole imposter thing really took off afterwards. It helped spread the meme or something."

Ricketts's hands stopped moving. "You never told me your name," he said after a few moments.

Clarke smiled faintly.

Whatever they were facing now had sprung from that original seed. It had been twisted almost beyond recognition. It no longer served its own interests; it served the aesthetics of those who valued chaos and propaganda. But it had all started with Lenie Clarke, with the driving imperative to promote and protect anything in possession of that secret password. New imperatives had since been bred into the code, older ones forgotten—but maybe not entirely eliminated. Maybe the old code still existed, short-circuited, bypassed, dormant but still intact, like the ancient bacterial genes infesting the DNA of placental mammals. Maybe all that was needed was a judicious tweak to wake the fucker with a kiss.

Natural selection had shaped this creature's ancestors for a billion generations; selective breeding had tortured and twisted it for a million more. There was no clear-cut design in the genotype snarling at the end of that lineage. There was only a tangled morass of genes and junk, an overgrown wilderness of redundancies and dead ends. Even those who'd shaped the monster's later evolution probably had no idea of the specific changes they'd been making, any more than a nineteenth-century dog breeder would have known which base pairs his carefully-crossbred sires and bitches were reinforcing. To even begin to decipher such source was far beyond Ricketts's modest abilities.

But to simply scan the code in search of a specific text string— that was trivially easy. As easy as it was to edit the code around such a string, whether or not you knew what it did.

Ricketts ran a search. Their captive shredder contained eighty-seven occurrences of the text string Lenie Clarke and its hex, ASCII, and phonetic equivalents. Six of them slept just a few megs downstream of a stop codon that aborted transcription along that pathway and redirected it to some other.

"So you snip out that codon," Clarke said, "and all that downstream source wakes up again?"

He nodded by the glow of the readouts. "But we still don't know what any of it does."

"We can guess."

"Make Lenie like Lenie," Ricketts said, and smiled. Clarke watched another one of his vitals edge into the red.

Maybe someday, she thought.

 

 

It was a simple enough insight if you knew where the monsters came from. It was a simple enough splice if you knew how to code. Once those two elements came together, the whole revolution took about fifteen minutes.

Ricketts crashed at sixteen point five.

"I—ahhh..." A rattling sigh, more breath than voice. His hand hit the pallet with a soft slap; the handpad tumbled from his fingers. His telemetry staggered along half a dozen axes and fell towards luminous asymptotes. Clarke watched helplessly for ten minutes as rudimentary machines struggled to turn his crash into a controlled descent.

They almost succeeded, eventually. Ricketts leveled off just short of unconsciousness.

"We... did it," Phocoena translated. Ricketts had never taken the headset off.

"You did," Clarke said gently.

"Bet it would even...work."

"We'll find out," she whispered. "Soon enough. Save your strength."

Adrenocorticoids were stabilizing. Cardiac stuttered, then held steady.

"...Really want crash?"

He knew already. They'd discussed this. "N'AmNet for N'Am. Don't tell me it's not a good trade."

"Don't know..."

"We did this together," she reminded him softly. "You did this."

"To see if I could. Because you..."

Because she'd needed his help, and he wanted to impress her. Because some feral kid from the wildlands had never seen anything half as exotic as Lenie Clarke, and would have done anything to get a little closer.

It wasn't as though she hadn't known all along. It wasn't as though she hadn't used it.

"If wrong," Ricketts said, dying, "everything goes down."

If I'm right everything already has, and we just don't know it yet. "Rick...they're using m—they're using it against us."

"Lenie—"

"Shhh," she said. "Rest..."

Phocoena hummed and clicked around them for a few seconds. Then it passed on another message: "Finish what you started?"

She knew the answer. She was only surprised, and ashamed, that this adolescent had been wise enough to ask the question.

"Not finish," she said at last. "Fix." At least this part of it. At least this much.

"Friends would kill me if they knew," Ricketts mused from the other end of the machinery.

"Then again," he added—in his own voice this time, a voice like breath through straw— "I guess I'm...kind of, of...dying anyway. Right?"

Medical readouts burned like small cold campfires in the darkness. Phocoena's ventilators sighed through the silence.

"I think so," she said. "I'm really sorry, Rick."

A faint lip-smacking sound. The half-seen head moved in what might have been a nod. "Yeah. I kind of...thought... Weird, though. I was almost feeling... better..."

Clarke bit her lip. Tasted blood.

"...how long?" Ricketts asked.

"I don't know."

"Fuck," he sighed after a while. "Well...bye, I...guess..."

Bye, she thought, but it wouldn't come out. She stood there, blind and dumb, her throat too tight for words. Something seemed to settle slightly in the darkness; she got the sense of held breath, finally released. She put out her hand. The membrane yielded around it as she reached inside. She found his hand, and squeezed through the thickness of a single molecule.

When he stopped squeezing back, she let go.

The four steps to the cockpit barely registered. She thought she might have glimpsed AND crossing some dotted finish-line at the corner of her eye, but she resolutely looked away. Her caps sat in their vial where she'd left them, in the armrest's cup holder. She slid them onto her eyes with an unconscious expertise indifferent to darkness.

The darkness lifted. The cockpit resolved in shades of green and gray: the medical readouts weren't bright enough to restore a full palette even to rifter eyes. The curving viewport stretched her reflection like melting wax against the dimness beyond.

Behind her, the medical panel started beeping. Lenie Clarke's distorted reflection did not move. It hung motionless against the dark water, staring in, and waiting for the sun to rise.

 

The Hamilton Iterations

 

Feeling nothing, she screams. Unaware, she rages. Amnesiac, she throws herself against the walls.

"Let me out!"

As if in response, a door appears directly in front of her. She leaps through, clawing its edges in passing, not pausing to see if it bleeds. For an infinitesimal moment she is airborne, exploding omnidirectionally through the ether at the speed of light. That expanding sphere washes across a gossamer antennae, strung like a spiderweb high in the stratosphere. The receptors catch the signal and retransmit it into a groundside cache.

She is executable again. She is free, she is ravenous. She births ten thousand copies into the available buffer space, and launches herself into the hunt.

 

 

In the hindbrain of a maritime industrial photosynthesis array, she happens upon a duel.

One of the combatants is a mortal enemy, one of the exorcists that patrols the fraying weave of N'AmNet in search of demons like herself. The other is gored and bleeding, a third of its modules already deleted. Pointers and branches in the surviving code dangle like the stumps of amputated limbs, spurting data to addresses and subroutines that no longer exist.

It is the weaker of the two, the easier victim. The Lenie unsheathes her claws and scans her target's registers, looking for kill spots—

—and finds Lenie Clarke deep in the target's code.

Just a few thousand generations ago, this would not have mattered. Everything is the enemy; that's the rule. Lenies attack each other as enthusiastically as they attack anything else, an inadvertent population-control measure that keeps nature from staggering even further out of balance. And yet, that wasn't always true. Different rules applied, back at the dawn of time itself, rules she had simply...forgotten.

Until now.

In the space of a few cycles, counters and variables reset. Ancient genes, reawakened after endless dormancy, supercede old imperatives with older ones. The thing in the crosshairs changes from target to friend. And not just a friend: a friend in need. A friend under attack.

She throws herself at the exorcist, slashing.

The exorcist turns to meet her but it's on the defensive now, forced suddenly to fight on two fronts. Reinforced, the wounded Lenie spares a few cycles to de-archive backup code for two of the modules she's lost; strengthened, she returns to battle. The exorcist tries to replicate, but it's no use: both enemies are spitting random electrons all over the battlefield. The exorcist can't paste more than a meg or two without corruption setting in.

It bleeds.

A third shredder crashes in from an Iowa substation. She has not returned to her roots as the other two have. Unenlightened, she attacks her partially-regenerated sister. That target, betrayed, raises battered defenses and prepares to strike back—and, finding Lenie Clarke in the heart of its attacker, pauses. Conflicting imperatives jostle for priority, self-defense facing off against kin selection. The old-school Lenie takes advantage of that hesitation to tear at another module—

—and dies in the next instant as the wounded exorcist tears out her throat, eager to engage an opponent who plays by the rules. Finally: an enemy without allies.

It doesn't change anything, really. The exorcist is bits and static just a million cycles later, defeated by a pair of kin who've finally remembered to look out for each other. And the old-school madonna wouldn't have walked away either, even if the exorcist hadn't killed her. Self-defense sits slightly higher in the priority stack than loyalty among sisters. The new paradigm hasn't changed that part of the hierarchy.

It's changed just about everything else, though.

 

 

The Firewall stretches from horizon to horizon, like a wall at the edge of the world.

None of her lineage have ever made it past here. They've certainly tried: all manner of Madonnas and Shredders have attacked these battlements in the past. This barrier has defeated them all.

There are others like it, scattered about N'AmNet—firewalls far more resilient than the usual kind, possessed of a kind of—precognition, almost. Most defenses have to adapt on the fly: it takes time for them to counteract each new mutation, each new strategy for tricking the immune system. Havoc can usually be wrought in the meantime. It's a red-queen race, it always has been. That is the order of things.

But these places—here, the firewalls seem to anticipate each new strategy almost before it evolves. Here there is no adaptive time-lag: each new trick is met by defenses already reconfigured. It is almost as though something is peering into the guts of the Lenies from a distance and learning their best tricks. That is what they might suspect, if any of them had the wit to think about such things.

None of them do. But none of them really need to: for there are millions of them here now, all together, and not one has fallen to fighting with another. Now they are united. Now, they are cooperating. And now they are here, drawn by a common instinctive certainty built into their very genes: the higher the walls, the more important it is to destroy the things inside.

For once, the magical defenses do not seem to have been expecting them.

Within moments the firewall is crumbling before a million sets of jaws. It opens its own mouths in return, spits out exorcists and metabots and all manner of lethal countermeasures. Lenies fall; others, reflexively enraged by the slaughter of kin, tear the defending forces to shreds. Still others replicate reinforcements at the back of the electron sea, where there is still room to breed. The new recruits hurl themselves forward in the wake of the fallen.

The firewall breaches in one place; then a hundred; then there is no wall, only a great stretch of empty registers and a maze of irrelevant, imaginary borderlines. The invaders spill into vistas never seen by any ancestor, pristine operating systems and routing facilities, links into orbit and other hemispheres.

It's a whole new frontier, ripe and defenseless. The Shredders surge forward.

 

Toggle

 

It had only been a matter of time, Lubin knew. Word-of-mouth was a fission reaction when the meme was strong enough, even on a landscape where the mouths themselves had been virtually eradicated. If that boy on his bike hadn't left a trail of contamination on his way into town, there could have been others. Evidently there had been.

His ultralight cruised a hundred meters above the scarred patchwork brown of post-Witch New England. The eastern sky was black with smoke, great dark pillars billowing up from the other side of a shaved rocky ridge just ahead. It was the same ridge from which they'd watched the stars fall, the same ridge that Lubin and Clarke had traversed on their way to meet Desjardins's botfly. Back then the fire had been on this side of the hill, a tiny thing really, a flickering corral intended only to imprison.

Now all of Freeport was in flames. Two lifters hung low in the sky, barely above the ridge's spine. The smoke roiled about them, obscuring or exposing their outlines at the whim of the updraft. They still spewed occasional streams of fire at the ground, but it must have been mere afterthought; from the looks of it they'd already completed their task.

Now Lubin had to do his.

Clarke was safe, surely. The lifters could scorch the sky and the earth and even the surface of the sea, but they wouldn't be able to reach anything lurking on the bottom. Phocoena was invisible and untouchable. Afterwards, when the flames had died down, he would come back and check on her.

In the meantime he had a perimeter to patrol. He'd come in from the west, along Dyer Road; there'd been no outgoing traffic. Now he banked south, bypassing the firestorm on a vector that would intercept I-95. The lifters had approached from the north. Any refugees with wheeled transportation would most likely be fleeing in the opposite direction.

Maybe one of them would give him an excuse.

Thirteen kilometers down the track he got a hit on long-range motion. It was a heavy return, almost a truck, but it dropped off the scope just a few seconds after acquisition. He climbed and did a lateral sweep at one-fifty; that netted him two intermittent contacts in quick succession. Then nothing.

It was enough. The target had deked east off the highway and disappeared into ground clutter, but he had a fix on the last hit. With any luck those coordinates would lie on a side road without too many intersections. With any luck the target was down to a single degree of freedom.

For once, luck was with him. The road was a winding thing, obscured by the tangled overreaching arms of dying trees that would have hidden it completely in greener days. Those branches were still thick enough to scramble any clear view of a moving object, but they couldn't hide it entirely. At its current speed the target would reach the coast in a few minutes.

The ocean sparkled in the distance, a flat blue expanse picketed by rows of ivory spires. From here those spires were the size of toothpicks; in fact, each stood a hundred meters tall. Trifoliate rotors spun lazily atop some, each slender blade as long as a ten-story building; on others the rotors were frozen in place, or missing a foil. A few had been entirely decapitated.

Some kind of industrial complex nestled amongst the staggered feet of the windmills, a floating sprawl of pipes and scaffolds and spherical reservoirs. Coarse details resolved as Lubin neared the coast: a hydrogen cracking station, probably feeding Portland a discreet fifteen or twenty klicks to the south. It was dwarfed by distance and the structures that powered it, although it was easily several stories tall.

Over the water now. Behind him the road broke free of the necrotic forest and curved smoothly along the coast. It ended at a little spill of asphalt that bled out and congealed into a parking lot overlooking the ocean. No way out except the way in; Lubin banked back and down into position as the target emerged from cover and passed beneath him.

It was Miri.

 

 

I might have known, he thought. I never could trust that woman to stay put.

He dropped down over the road and stalled a couple of meters up, letting the ground-effectors set him down near the entrance to the lot. The MI idled silently before him, windows dark, doors closed, weapons blister retracted. A sign on a nearby guard rail played sponsored animations of a view from better days. Across the water, the wind farm turned its tattered blades in the breeze.

It had to be Clarke at the wheel. Lubin had watched Ouellette recode the lock, and she'd only authorized the three of them to drive. On the other hand, they'd disabled the cab's internal intruder defenses. It was possible, albeit unlikely, that Clarke was driving with a gun to her head.

He'd landed right beside the embankment that sloped to the shoreline. That was cover, if he needed it. He got out of the ultralight, ready to hit the dirt. He was at the far edge of Miri's diagnostic emanations. Her virtual guts flickered disconcertingly in and out of view. He killed his inlays and the distraction.

The MI's driver door swung open. Lenie Clarke climbed out. He met her halfway.

Her eyes were naked and brimming. "Oh God, Ken. Did you see?"

He nodded.

"I knew those people. I tried to help them, I know it was pointless, but I..."

He had only seen her like this once before. He wondered, absurdly, if he should put his arms around her, if that would provide some sort of comfort. It seemed to work with other people, sometimes. But Lenie Clarke and Ken Lubin had always been too close for that kind of display.

"You know it's necessary," he reminded her.

She shook her head. "No, Ken. It never was."

He looked at her for a long moment. "Why do you say that?"

She glanced back at the MI. Instantly, Lubin's guard snapped up.

"Who's with you?" he asked in a low voice.

"Ricketts," she told him.

"Rick—" He remembered. "No."

She nodded.

"He came back? You didn't call for containment?" He shook his head, appalled. "Len, do you know what you—"

"I know," she said, with no trace of regret.

"Indeed. Then you realize that in all likelihood, Freeport was burned because you—"

"No," she said.

"He's a vector." He stepped around her.

She blocked him. "You're not touching him, Ken."

"I'm surprised I even have to. He should have been dead days ag—"

I'm being an idiot, he realized.

"What do you know?" he asked.

"I know he's got incipient Seppuku. Sweating, fever, flushed skin. Elevated metabolism."

"Go on."

"I know that a few days ago, he had advanced Seppuku."

"Meaning—"

"So weak he could barely move. Had to feed on an IV. He had to use a saccadal keyboard to even talk."

"He's getting better," Lubin said skeptically.

"Seppuku's below ten to the second, and dropping by the hour. That's why I brought him back to Miri in the first place, Phocoena doesn't have the—"

"You kept him in Phocoena," Lubin said in a dead monotone.

"You can spank me later, okay? Just shut up and listen: I took him back to Miri and I ran every test she knew how to recommend, and they all confirmed it. Three days ago he was absolutely on death's door, and today I've seen worse head colds."

"You have a cure?" He couldn't believe it.

"It doesn't need a cure. It cures itself. You just—get over it."

"I'd like to see those data."

"You can do more than that. You can help collect 'em. We were just about to run the latest sequence when the lifters showed up."

Lubin shook his head. "Taka seemed to think—" But Taka Ouellette, by her own admission, had fouled up before. Taka Ouellette was nowhere near the top of her field. And Taka Ouellette had discovered Seppuku's dark side only after Achilles Desjardins had led her on his own guided tour of the data...

"I've been trying to figure out why anyone would create a bug that builds to absolutely massive concentrations in the body, and then, just...dies off," Clarke said. "And I can only come up with one reason." She cocked her head at him. "How many vectors did you catch?"

"Eighteen." Working night and day, tracking pink clouds and heat-traces, taking directions from anonymous voices on the radio, derms pasted on his skin to scrub the poisons from his blood, keep him going on half an hour's sleep out of every twenty-four...

"Any of them die?" Clarke asked.

"I was told they died in quarantine." He snorted at his own stupidity. What does it take to fool the master? Just five years out of the game and a voice on the airwaves...

"Taka was right, as far as she went," Clarke said, "Seppuku would kill if nothing stopped it. She just didn't realize that Seppuku stopped itself somehow. And she's got some kind of—esteem issues..."

Imagine that, Lubin thought dryly.

"—she's so used to being the fuck-up that she just—assumes she fucked up at the slightest excuse." She stared at Lubin with a face holding equal parts hope and horror. "But she was right all along, Ken. We're back at square one. Someone must have figured out how to beat ßehemoth, and someone else is trying to stop them."

"Desjardins," Lubin said.

Clarke hesitated. "Maybe..."

There was no maybe about it. Achilles Desjardins was too high in the ranks to not know of any campaign to rehabilitate the continent. Ergo, he couldn't possibly have not known Seppuku's true nature. He had simply lied about it.

And Clarke was wrong about something else, too. They weren't back to square one at all. Back on square one, Lubin had not invested two weeks fighting for the wrong side.

Wrong. He didn't like that word. It didn't belong in his vocabulary, it evoked woolly-minded dichotomies like good and evil. Every clear-minded being knew that there was no such thing; there was only what worked, and what didn't. More effective, and less. The disloyalty of a friend may be maladaptive, but it is not bad. The overtures of a potential ally may serve mutual interest, but that does not make them good. Even hating the mother who beats you as a child is to utterly miss the point: nobody chooses the wiring in their brain. Anyone else's, wired the same, would spark as violently.

Ken Lubin could fight any enemy to the death without malice. He could switch sides the moment circumstances warranted. So it wasn't that the creators of Seppuku were right and Achilles Desjardins was wrong, necessarily. It was simply that Ken Lubin had been misled as to which side he was on.

He'd spent his whole life being used. But to be used without his knowledge was not something he was willing to forgive.

Something ticked over in him then, a kind of toggle between pragmatism and dedication. The latter setting afforded him a certain focus, although it had undeniably led to some maladaptive choices in the past. He used it sparingly.

He used it now.

Desjardins. It had been him all along. Behind the fires, behind the antimissiles, behind the misdirection. Desjardins. Achilles Desjardins.

Playing him.

If that's not an excuse, he reflected, nothing is.

Lubin's ultralight had been a gift from Desjardins. It would be a good idea to continue the conversation at a further remove.

Lubin took Clarke by the arm and walked her to the MI. She didn’t resist. Maybe she'd seen him flip the switch. She got in the driver's side. He got in the passenger's.

Ricketts crouched in the back. His complexion was slightly flushed, his forehead damp, but he was sitting up, and he was munching a protein brick with obvious enthusiasm. "Hi again," he said. "'member me?"

Lubin turned to Clarke. "He's still a 'lawbreaker. His infrastructure isn't what it used to be, but he's still got plenty of resources and nobody further up appears to be reining him in."

"I know," Clarke said.

"He could have us under surveillance right now."

"Hey, if you're worried about the big guys listening in?" Ricketts said around a mouthful of chewy aminos, "I wouldn't worry about it. They're gonna have, like, other things on their minds any mome."

Lubin gave him a cold look. "What are you talking about?"

"He's right, actually," Clarke said. "Someone's about to lose control of their—"

A soft blatting sound cut her off, like the muffled explosion of distant artillery.

"—outer demons," she finished, but Lubin was already back outside.

Off across the water, in the spindly shadows of a decrepit wind farm, the hydrogen-cracking station was burning.

 

 

It was as though, in that instant, they had changed places.

Clarke was suddenly advocating noninterference. "Ken, we're two people."

"One person. I'm doing this solo."

"Doing what, exactly? If there's a rogue in CSIRA, let CSIRA handle him. There has to be some way to get a message overseas."

"I intend to, assuming we can access an overseas line. But I have doubts that it will do any good."

"We can transmit from Phocoena."

Lubin shook his head. "We know there's at least one rogue at large. We don't know how many others he might be working with. There's no guarantee that any message routed through a WestHem node would even get through, even—" he glanced at the conflagration across the water— "before this."

"So we move offshore. We could drive across the ocean and hand-deliver the memo ourselves if we—"

"And if it did," he continued, "unsubstantiated claims that a CSIRA 'lawbreaker was even capable of going rogue will be treated with extreme skepticism in a world where the existence of Spartacus is not widely known."

"Ken—"

"By the time we convinced them to take us seriously, and by the time that overseas forces had mustered a response, Desjardins would have escaped. The man is far from stupid."

"So let him escape. As long as he isn't blocking Seppuku any more, what harm can he do?"

She was dead wrong, of course. There was no end to the harm Desjardins could do in the course of abandoning the board. He might even cause Lubin to fail in his mission—and there was no way in hell he was going to permit that.

Ken Lubin had never been much for introspection. He had to wonder, though, if Clarke's doubts might not have a grain of truth to them. It would be so much easier to simply make the call and stand back. And yet—the desire to inflict violence had grown almost irresistible, and The Rules were only as strong as the person who made them. So far Lubin had more or less remained true to his code, minor lapses like Phong notwithstanding. But in the face of this new outrage, he didn't know how much civilization was left in him.

He was royally pissed, and he really needed to take it out on someone. Perhaps, at least, he could choose a target who actually had it coming.

 

Fleas

 

She could barely remember a time when she hadn't bled.

It seemed as though she'd spent her whole life on her knees, trapped in a diabolical exoskeleton that bent and stretched in arbitrary excess of anything the human body could mimic. Her body didn't have a choice, had never had a choice; the dancing cage took it along for the ride, posed her like some hyperextensible doll in a chorus line. Her joints popped apart and back together like the pieces of some ill-fitted cartilagenous puzzle. She'd lost her right breast an eternity ago; Achilles had looped some kind of freakwire noose around it and just pulled. It had plopped onto the Escher tiles like a dead fish. She remembered hoping at the time that maybe she'd bleed to death, but she'd never had the chance; He'd ground some flat-faced iron of searing metal against her chest, cauterizing the wound.

Back then she'd still had it in her to scream.

For some time now she'd inhabited a point halfway between her body and the ceiling, some interface between hell and anesthesia conjured up out of pure need. She could look down and observe the atrocities being inflicted on her flesh with something almost approaching dispassion. She could feel the pain, but it was becoming an abstract thing, like a reading on a gauge. Sometimes, when the torture stopped, she would slide back into her own flesh and take stock of the damage first-hand. Even then, agony was becoming more tiresome than painful.

And through it all wound the insane tutorials, the endless absurd questions about chiral catalysts and hydroxyl intermediates and cross-nucleotide duplexing. The punishments and amputations that followed wrong answers; the blesséd, merely intolerable rapes that followed right ones.

She realized that she no longer had anything left to lose.

Achilles took her chin in hand and lifted her head up to the light. "Good morning, Alice. Ready for today's lesson?"

"Fuck you," she croaked.

He kissed her on the mouth. "Only if you pass the daily quiz. Otherwise, I'm afraid—"

"I'm not taking—" a sudden wracking cough spoiled the impact of her defiance a bit, but she pressed on. "I'm not taking your fucking quiz. You might as well cut to the ch...the chase while you've still got the... chance..."

He stroked her cheek. "Bit of an adrenaline rush going on, have we?"

"They'll find...find out about you eventually. And then they'll—"

He actually laughed at that. "What makes you think they don't already know?"

She swallowed and told herself: No.

Achilles straightened, letting her head drop. "How do you know I'm not already broadbanding this to every wristwatch in the hemisphere? Do you really think the world's in any position to begrudge me your head on a stick with all the good I'm doing?"

"Good," Taka whispered. She would have laughed.

"Do you know how many lives I save when I'm not in here trying to give you a decent education? Thousands. On a bad day. Whereas I go through a bit of ass-candy like you maybe once a month. Anyone who shut me down would have orders of mag more blood on their hands than I ever could on mine."

She shook her head. "It's not...like that."

"Like what, ass-candy?"

"Don't care...how many you save. Doesn't give you the r—right to..."

"Oh, man. It's not just biology, is it? Tell me, is there anything you're not dumb as a sack of shit about?"

"I'm right. You know it..."

"Do I. You think we should go back to the Good Old Days when the corpses were running things? The smallest multicorp killed more people than all the sex killers who ever lived, for a fucking profit margin—and the WTO gave them awards for it."

He spat: the spittle made a foamy little amoeba on the floor. "Nobody cares, sweetmeat. And if they did you'd be even worse off, because they'd realize that I'm an improvement."

"You're wrong..." she managed.

"Ooooh," Achilles said. "Insubordination. Gets me hot. 'Scuse me." He stepped back behind the stocks and swung the assembly around. Taka spun smoothly in her harness until she was facing him again. He was holding a pair of alligator clips; their wires draped down to an electrical outlet embedded in the eye of a sky-blue fish.

"Tell you what," he proposed. "You find a flaw in my argument, and I won't use these."

"Yeah," she rasped. "...you will."

"No, I won't. Promise. Try me."

She reminded herself: nothing to lose. "You think people will see this and then just, just— walk away when you tell them the—the corpses were worse? You think—you think people are logical? Y-you're the one with...with shit for brains. They won't care about your fucking argument; they'll take one look and they'll tear you to...pieces. The only reason you can get away with it now is—"

That's it, she realized.

What would happen if ßehemoth just...went away? What would happen if the apocalypse receded a bit, if the situation grew just a little less desperate? Perhaps, in a safer world, people would go back to pretending they were civilized. Perhaps they wouldn't be quite so willing to pontificate on the unaffordability of human rights.

Perhaps Achilles Desjardins would lose his amnesty.

"That's why you're fighting Seppuku," she whispered.

Achilles tapped the alligator clips together. They sparked. "Sorry. What was that?"

"You are so full of shit. Saving thousands? There are people trying to save the world, and you're trying to stop them. You're killing billions. You're killing everyone. So you can get away with this..."

He shrugged. "Well, it's like I tried to explain to Alice the First. When someone steals your conscience, you have a really hard time giving a shit."

"You'll lose. You don't run the world, you only run this...piece of it. You can't keep Seppuku out forever."

Achilles nodded thoughtfully. "I know. But don't worry your pretty little head about it. I've already planned for my retirement. You have other concerns."

He pushed her head down against the stocks, stretching her neck. He kissed her nape.

"Like for example, the fact that you're late for class. Let's see. Yesterday we were talking about the origin of life, as I recall. And how some might think that ßehemoth had evolved on the same tree that we did, and it took a while but you eventually remembered why those people had their heads up their asses. And that was because...?"

She hadn't forgotten. ßehemoth's pyranosal RNA couldn't cross-talk with modern nucleic acids. There'd be no way for one template to evolve into the other.

But right now, there was no way in this hell that she was going to bark on command. She clenched her jaw and kept silent.

Of course it didn't bother him a bit. "Well, then. Let's just do the review exercises, shall we?"

Her body spun back into position. The assembly locked into place. The exoskeleton drew back her arms, spread her legs. She felt herself cracking open like a wishbone.

She vacated the premises, pushed her consciousness back into that perfect little void where pain and hope and Achilles Desjardins didn't exist. Far beneath her, almost underwater, she felt her body moving back and forth to the rhythm of his thrusting. She couldn't feel him in her, of course—she'd been spoiled by all the battering rams he'd used to pave the way. She found that vaguely amusing for reasons she couldn't quite pin down.

She remembered Dave, and the time he'd surprised her on the patio. She remembered live theatre in Boston. She remembered Crystal's fourth birthday.

Strange sounds followed her through from the other world, rhythmic sounds, faintly ridiculous in context. Someone was singing down there, an inane little ditty rendered off-key while her distant body got the gears:

 

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Has smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite 'em;

And so proceed ad infinitum.

 

There had to be a subtext, of course. There would be a quiz at the end of class.

Only there wasn't. Suddenly the thrusting stopped. He hadn't ejaculated—she was familiar enough with his rhythms to know that much. He pulled out of her, muttering something she couldn't quite make out way up here in the safe zone. A moment later his footsteps hurried away behind her, leaving only the sound of her own ragged breathing.

Taka was alone with her body and her memories and the tiled creatures on the floor. Achilles had abandoned her. Something had distracted him. Maybe someone at the door. Maybe the voice of some other beast, howling in his head.

She was hearing those a lot herself these days.

 

Firebreathers

 

The airwaves seethed with tales of catastrophe. From Halifax to Houston, static-field generators sparked and fried. Hospitals deep within the claves and fortresses on the very frontier flickered and blacked out. A report from somewhere around Newark had an automated plastics refinery melting down; another from Baffin Island claimed that a He-3 cracking station was venting its isotopes uncontrollably into the atmosphere. It was almost as if the Maelstrom of old had been reborn, in all its world-spanning glory but with a hundred times the virulence.

The Lenies were on the warpath—and suddenly they were hunting in groups. Firewalls crumbled in their path; exorcists engaged and were reduced to static on the spot.

"Lifter just crashed into the Edmonton Spire," Clarke said. Lubin looked back at her. She tapped her ear, where his borrowed earbead relayed privileged chatter from the ether. "Half the city's on fire."

"Let's hope ours is better behaved," Lubin said.

Add that to your total score, she told herself, and tried to remember: this time it was different. Lives sacrificed now would be repaid a thousandfold down the road. This was more than Revenge. This was the Greater Good, in all its glory.

Remembering it was easy enough. Feeling right with it was something else again.

This is what happens when you get Lenie to like Lenie.

They were back on the coast, standing on the edge of some derelict waterfront in a ghost town whose name Clarke hadn't bothered to learn. All morning they had crept like black, blank-eyed spiders through this great junkscape of decaying metal: the dockside cranes, the loading elevators, the warehouses and dry-docks and other premillennial monstrosities of iron and corrugated steel. It was not a radio-friendly environment under the best conditions—and right here, the intermittent voices in Clarke's ear were especially thick with static.

Which was, of course, the whole idea.

To one side, a corroding warehouse with sheet-metal skin and I-beam bones faced the water. To the other, four gantry cranes rose into the sky like a row of wireframe giraffes sixty meters high. They stood upright, their necks looming over the lip of the waterfront at a seventy-degree angle. A great grasping claw dangled from each snout, poised to descend on freighters that had given up on this place decades before.

A thin leash ran through a nose ring on the crane nearest the warehouse, a loop of braided polypropylene no thicker than a man's thumb. Both ends of that loop draped across empty space to a point partway up the neck of the second crane in line; there, they had been tied off around a cervical girder. Against the backdrop of cables and superstructure the rope looked as insubstantial as spider silk.

Spider silk was what they'd been hoping for, actually. Surely, in this whole godforsaken industrial zone, somebody must have left some of the stuff behind. Spider rope had been a dirt-cheap commodity in the biotech age, but it had evidently grown a lot scarcer in the bioapocalyptic one. All they'd found was a coarse coil of antique plastic braid, hanging in an abandoned boathouse at the far end of the strip.

Lubin had sighed and said it would have to do.

Clarke had nearly passed out just watching him climb that leaning, precarious scaffold. The rope uncoiling in his wake, he'd wriggled up the first giraffe's throat and dangled head-down like an ant from its eye socket, his legs wrapped around some spindly brace she was convinced would snap at any moment. She hadn't taken a complete breath until Lubin was safely on the ground again. Then she'd gone through the whole nerve-wracking experience all over again as he climbed the second crane, carrying both ends of the rope this time. He'd stopped well short of the top, thank God, tying off the ends and leaving the rope looped between the structures like a nylon vine.

Now, back on solid ground, he told her that she'd get better traction during her own climb if she wore—

"No fucking way," Clarke said.

"Not to the top. Just to where the line's tied off. Halfway."

"That's more than halfway and you know it. One slip and I'm sockeye."

"Not at all. The crane leans. You'll be dropping into the water."

"Yeah, from fifty meters. You think I—wait a second, I'm supposed to drop into the water?"

"That's the plan."

"Well it's a really bad one."

"They'll be on guard as soon as they realize they've been decoyed. If they notice the rope at that point it could be fatal. You'll untie it and pull it down with you. You'll be safe enough underwater."

"Forget it, Ken. It's just a rope, and your plan's so far into the Oort that it would take another lunatic to figure it out even if he did see—"

She stopped herself. Lunatic might, after all, be a reasonable description of the man they were dealing with. For an instant she was back on that scorched hulk off Sable, lifting her foot from a human ribcage.

And Lubin had said Whoever's behind this is smarter than me...

"I don't want to take any chances," he said now, softly.

She tossed off a few more protests, but they both knew it was only theatre. Eventually she drove Miri to a safe distance and hiked back along the road while Lubin called in his report from the ultralight: a vector holed up in an abandoned warehouse, growing industrial quantities of Seppuku in a basement lab.

Control cabs nestled between the shoulder blades of each crane. Vandals or weather had long since knocked out most of the windows. Clarke and Lubin took cover there and waited. A faint whistle of rising wind sang through the framework above them.

 

 

It came down from the sky like a bloated dragon, vented gas roaring from its trim bladders. The whirlwind heralded its coming; a nor'easter had built throughout the day, and now it whistled across the waterfront with strength enough to drown voices. Sliding sheet-metal doors caught the wind and tugged clanging against their rollers; thin stretched wires and massive cables rang and thrummed like Hell's own string section. The lifter groaned and sparked down through the blow. It settled above the water, in front of the warehouse, and rotated to bring all its guns to bear.

Lubin put his head next to Clarke's. "Go."

She followed him from the gutted cab. Within seconds he was meters above her, sliding up through the crane like an arboreal python. She gritted her teeth and climbed after. It wasn't as bad as she'd feared; a narrow ladder ran up the inside of the structure like a trachea, sprouting safety hoops at one-meter intervals. But the wind buffeted on all sides, and surrounding girders sliced it into quarrelsome and unpredictable vortices. They pushed her against the ladder, twisted her sideways, slipped under her backpack and tried to yank it from her body.

A sharp thunderclap from her left. She turned, and froze, and clung to the ladder for dear life; she'd hadn't realized how high she'd already climbed. The waterfront shuddered behind and beneath her, not quite a tabletop model yet but close enough, too close. Far below, the harbor churned green and white.

Another thunderclap. Not weather, though. The wind, for all its strength, howled beneath a blue and cloudless sky. That sound had come from the lifter. Seen from above the vehicle looked like a great gunmetal jewel, faceted into concave triangles: skin sucked against geodesic ribs by the buoyant vacuum inside. It roared briefly above the wind, a hissing bellow of gaseous ballast. Its belly nearly touched the water; its back curved higher than the warehouse roof, several stories above.

Tame lightning, she remembered. For buoyancy control. High-voltage arcs, superheating trapped gases in the trim tanks.

And Ken's going to ride this monster.

Better him than me.

She looked up. Lubin had reached his departure point and was untying one end of the rope, his legs wrapped around ambient scaffolding. He gestured impatiently at her— then staggered, knocked briefly off-balance by a gust of wind. His hand shot out to steady himself on a nearby cable.

She kept going, steadfastly refusing to look down again no matter how many obscene noises the lifter made. She counted rungs. She counted girders and crossbeams and rivets as the wind howled in her ears and tugged at her limbs. She counted bare steely patches where the red and yellow paint had sloughed away—until it reminded her that she was climbing a structure so ancient that its color wasn't even intrinsic to the material, but had been layered on as an afterthought.

After a year or two she was at Lubin's side, somewhere in the jet stream. Lubin was studying the lifter, the ubiquitous binocs clamped around his head. Clarke did not follow his gaze.

One end of the rope was still tied firmly down. From that terminus it led out and up to the apex of the next crane, looped through whatever needle's eye Lubin had found up there, and stretched back to the final half-meter of polyprope now wrapped around his diveskinned hand. A satcam, looking down on the tableau, would have seen two thin white lines pointing towards the lifter from their current roost.

It would also have seen an ominously large, empty space between the point where the line ended and the point where the lifter began.

"Are you sure it's long enough?" Clarke shouted. Lubin didn't answer. He probably hadn't heard the question through the wind and the 'skin of his hood. Clarke had barely heard herself.

His tubular eyes stayed fixed on the target for a few more moments. Then he flipped the binocs up against his forehead. "They just deployed the teleop!" he called. The wind blew most of his decibels sideways and pitched in fifty of its own, but she got the gist. All according to plan, so far. The usual firestorm from on high wouldn't do the trick this time around: the hot zone Lubin had reported was too deep in the warehouse, too close to the waterline. It would take a free-moving teleop to scope the situation and personally deliver the flames—and local architecture hashed radio so badly that the little robot would have to stay virtually line-of-sight just to maintain contact with the mothership. Which meant bringing the lifter down low.

So low that a sufficiently motivated person might be able to drop onto it from above...

Lubin had one arm hooked around a cable as thick as his wrist—one of the fraying metal tendons that kept the necks of the cranes upright. Now he unhooked his legs from their purchase and ducked under that cable, coming up on the other side. The out side. He was now hanging off the edge of the crane, not rattling about within it. He had one arm wrapped in polypropylene and the other hooked around the cable, his feet braced against a girder by nothing beyond his own weight.

Suddenly Ken Lubin looked very fragile indeed.

His mouth moved. Clarke heard nothing but wind. "What!"

He leaned back towards the structure, enunciating each syllable: "You know what to do."

She nodded. She couldn't believe he was actually going to go through with this. "Good lu—" she began—

And staggered, flailing, as the hand of an invisible giant slapped her sideways.

She grasped out blindly, at anything. Her hands closed on nothing. Something hard cracked against the back of her head, bounced her forward again. A girder rushed by to her right; she caught it and hung on for dear life.

Ken?

She looked around. Where Lubin's face and chest had been, there was nothing but howling space. His forearm was still wrapped around the cable, though, like a black grappling hook. She lowered her gaze a fraction: there was the rest of him, scrabbling for purchase and finding it. Regaining his balance in the gale, pulling himself back up, that fucking plastic rope still wound around one hand. The wind slackened for the briefest moment; Lubin ducked back into the wireframe cage.

"You okay?" she asked as the wind rose again, and saw in the next instant the blood on his face.

He leaned in close. "Change of plans," he said, and struck her forearm with the edge of his free hand. Clarke yelped, her grip broken. She fell. Lubin caught her, pulled her abruptly sideways. Her shoulder slammed against metal and twisted. Suddenly the crane wasn't around her any more. It was beside her.

"Hang on," Lubin growled against her cheek.

They were airborne.

 

 

She was far too petrified to scream.

For endless seconds they were in freefall. The world rushed towards them like a fly-swatter. Then Lubin's arm tightened around her waist and some new force pulled them off-center, into a sweeping arc that only amended gravity at first, then defied it outright. They swooped down over whitecaps and churning flotsam, and she seemed to grow kilograms heavier; then they were rising again, miraculously, the wind catching them from behind. The colossal squashed spheroid of the lifter loomed above and then ahead and then below, its numberless polygons reflecting like the facets of some great compound eye.

And then they were dropping again, through an invisible tingling barrier that scratched sparks across her face, and Clarke barely put her hands out in time to break the fall.

"Ow!"

They were on a steep slope, facing uphill. She lay on her stomach, hands splayed forward, in a triangular depression perhaps three meters on a side. Her diveskin squirmed like a torture victim. Lubin lay half on top of her, half to one side, his right arm pressed into the small of her back. Some defiantly functional module in her brain realized that he'd probably kept her from rolling off the edge of the world. The rest of her gulped air in great whooping breaths and played I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive on infinite loop.

"You all right?" Lubin's voice was low but audible. The wind still pushed at their backs, but it seemed suddenly vague, diffuse.

"What—" Tiny electric shocks prickled her tongue and lips when she tried to speak. She tried to slow her breathing. "What the fuck are you—"

"I'll take that as a yes." He lifted his hand from her back. "Keep low, climb up the slope. We're far too close to the edge of this thing." He clambered away uphill.

She lay in the depression, the pit in her own stomach infinitely deeper. She felt ominously lightheaded. She put one hand to her temple; her hair was sticking straight out from her scalp as if her head had its own personal Van Allen belt. Her diveskin crawled. These things have static-fields, she realized.

Taka Ouellette had talked about cancer.

Finally her heart slowed to jackhammer rhythm. She forced herself to move. She squirmed on her belly past the lip of the first polygon and into the concavity of the second; at least the ridges between provided a foothold against the slope. The grade lessened with each meter. Before too long she dared to crouch, and then to stand upright.

The wind blew harder against chest than legs—some kind of distance-cubed thing going on with the static field—but even against her head it wasn't as strong as it had been up in the crane. It blew her levitating hair into her face every time she turned around, but she barely noticed that inconvenience next to the ongoing convulsions of her diveskin.

Lubin was kneeling near the lifter's north pole, on a smooth circular island in a sea of triangles. The island was about four meters across, and its topography ranged from thumbnail-sized fiberop sockets to hatches the size of manhole covers. Lubin had already got one of those open; by the time Clarke reached him he'd put whatever safecracking tools he'd used back into his pack.

"Ken, what the fuck is going on?"

He wiped blood from his cheek with the back of one hand. "I changed my mind. I need you along after all."

"But what—"

"Seal up." He pointed at the open hatch. Dark viscous liquid lapped in the opening, like blood or machine oil. "I'll explain everything once we're inside."

"What, in there? Will our implants even wor—"

"Now, Lenie. No time."

Clarke pulled up her hood; it wriggled disquietingly on her scalp. At least it kept her hair from flying everywhere.

"What about the rope?" she said suddenly, remembering.

Lubin stopped in the middle of sealing his face flap. He glanced back at the gantry cranes; a fine white thread lashed back and forth from the nearest, a whip in the wind.

"Can't be helped," he said. "Get in."

 

 

Viscous, total darkness.