Peter Watts - Behemoth

"Just the face. The 'skin sealed off everything else."

"Does it—I mean, how do you—"

"There's a gantry on an overhead rail to the left. See it?"

She forced herself to look away. "Yeah." And then, surprised: "Can you ?"

"The guts show up on my inlays. This whole hangar is a wireframe schematic." He looked around as if sighted. "That assembly's on autopilot. I think it handles refueling."

The clamshell doors met overhead with a dull, echoing boom . In the next instant the gantry jerked to life and began sliding towards them along its rail. A pair of waldos unfolded like the forelimbs of a mantis. They ended in clawed nozzles.

"I think you're right." Clarke said. "It's—"

"I see it."

"How do we get out of here?"

He turned his blind, pitted eyes on her. He pointed at the approaching arthropod.

"Climb," he said.

He guided her through rafters and crawlways as though born to them. He quizzed her on the color-coding of overhead pipes, or which side of a given service tunnel was more streaked with the stains of old condensation. They found their way into an uninhabited locker room, traversed a gauntlet of lockers and toilet stalls to an open shower.

They washed down. No longer flammable, they turned their attention to blending in. Lubin had brought dryback clothing wadded up in his backpack. Clarke had to make do with a pair of gray coveralls lifted from a row of a half-dozen hanging along one wall. A bank of lockers lined the wall opposite, locked with snapshots and thumb pads; Lubin made a mockery of their security while Clarke dressed. The weave tightened around her into a reasonable approximation of a good fit.

"What are you looking for?" she asked.

"Sunglasses. Visor, maybe."

Four jimmied lockers later, Lubin gave up. They returned to the echoing arena of the main hanger. They walked brazenly across open space in plain view of eight service techs. They passed beneath the swollen bellies of four lifters, and gaping bays that would have held another three. They wound along rows of clicking, articulated machinery, waving casually across the floor at people in blue coveralls, and—at Lubin's insistence—keeping a discrete distance from others wearing gray.

They found an exit.

Outside, the buildings were packed so closely that their upper floors seemed to lean together. Arches and skywalks spanned the narrow airspace above the street, connecting opposing facades like stretched arteries. In other places the buildings themselves had melded at the fifth floor or the fortieth, overhanging boles of plastic and biosteel fusing one structure to another. The sky was visible only in dark fragments, intermittently sparking with static electricity. The street was a spaghetti of rapitrans rails and narrow sidewalks doubling as loading platforms. Neither rails nor walkways carried much traffic. Colors were a muted wash to Clarke's eyes; drybacks would see intermittent pools of dim copper light, and many deep shadows between. Even in these relict nodes of civilization, energy seemed in short supply.

Ken Lubin would be seeing none of the surfaces. Perhaps he saw the wiring underneath.

She found them a market in the shadow of a third-story overhang. Half the machines were offline, but the menu on the Levi's dispenser twinkled invitingly. Lubin suggested that she trade up from the coveralls; he offered his wristwatch to enable the transaction but the machine sensed the long-forgotten currency chip embedded in Clarke's thigh, still packed with unspent pay from her gig at the Grid Authority. It lasered her for fit while Lubin got a pair of nightshades and a tube of skin cream from a Johnson & Johnson a few stalls down.

She pulled on her new clothing while Lubin whispered into his wristwatch; Clarke couldn't tell whether he was talking to software or flesh-and-blood. She gathered from his end of the conversation that that they were in the northern core of Toromilton.

Afterwards they had places to go. They climbed from the floor of the city into a mountainous range of skyscrapers: office buildings mostly, long-since converted to dormitories for those who'd been able to buy their way out of the 'burbs when the field generators went up. There weren't many people abroad up there, either. Perhaps the citizenry didn't come out at night.

She was a seeing-eye dog, helping her master hunt for Easter eggs. He directed her; she led him. Lubin muttered incessantly into his watch as they moved. His incantations catalyzed the appearance of strange objects in unlikely places: a seamless box barely bigger than a handpad, nestled in the plumbing of a public toilet; a brand-new wristwatch, still in the original packaging, on the floor of an elevator that rose past the mezzanine with no one on board. Lubin left his old watch in its place, along with a tiny ziplock of derms and plug-ins from his own inventory.

At a vending wall on the same level he ordered a roll of semipermeable adhesive tape and a cloned ham-and-cheese. The tape was served up without incident, but no sandwich appeared on its heels; instead a pair of hand-sized containers slid down the chute, flattened opalescent cylinders with rounded edges. He popped one of them open to reveal pince-nez with opaque jade lenses. He set them on his nose. His jaw twitched slightly as he reset some dental switch. A tiny green star winked on at the edge of the left lens.

"Better." He looked around. "Depth perception's not all it could be."

"Nice trick," Clarke said. "It talks to your inlays?"

"More or less. The image is a bit grainy."

Now Lubin took the lead.

"There's no easier way to do this?" she asked him, following. "You couldn't just call up the GA head office?"

"I doubt I'm still on their payroll." He turned left at a t-junction.

"Yeah, but don't you have—"

"They stopped replenishing the field caches some time ago," Lubin said. "I'm told any leftovers have long since been acquired by unilaterals. Everything has to be negotiated through contacts."

"You're buying them off?"

"It's not a question of money."

"What, then?"

"Barter," he said. "An old debt or two. In-kind services."

At 2200 they met a man who pulled a gossamer-fine thread of fiberop from his pocket and plugged it into Lubin's new wristwatch. Lubin stood there for over half an hour, motionless except for the occasional twitching of fingers: a statue leaning slightly into some virtual wind, as if poised to pounce on empty air. Afterwards the stranger reached up and touched the blisters on Lubin's face. Lubin laid one brief hand on the other man's shoulder. The interaction was subtly disquieting, for reasons Clarke couldn't quite put her finger on. She tried to remember the last time she'd seen Ken Lubin touch another person short of violence or duty, and failed.

"Who was that?" she asked afterwards.

"No one." And contradicting himself in the next second: "Someone to spread the word. Although there's no guarantee even he can raise the alarm in time."

At 2307 Lubin knocked at a door in a residential retrofit in the middle reaches of what had once been the Toronto Dominion Center. A brown-skinned, grim-faced ectomorph of a woman answered. Her eyes blazed a startling, almost luminous golden-orange—some kind of cultured xanthophyll in the irises—and she loomed over Lubin by a head or more. She spoke quietly in a strange language full of consonants, every syllable thick with anger. Lubin answered in the same tongue and held out a sealed ziplock. The woman snatched it, reached behind the half-open door, threw a bag at his feet — it landed with the muffled clank of gloved metal—and closed the door in his face.

He stowed the bag in his backpack. "What did she give you?" Clarke asked.

"Ordnance." He started back down the hall.