Peter Watts - Behemoth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taka stared back at him, unmoving.

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

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

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

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

She keyed the genepad. The dashboard lit up.

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

"Some sort," Taka said carefully.

"Where are you out of?" he asked.

"Out of?"

"Who sets your route? Who resupplies you?"

"Bangor, usually."

"They airlift supplies to you in the field?"

"When they can spare them."

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

He spoke as if it were a surprise.

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

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

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

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

"What do you think did all this ?"

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

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

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

"What did you just say?"

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

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

"This thing—" the man began.

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

The two exchanged some indecipherable glance across her.

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

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

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

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

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

The man shook his head. "No."

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

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

Taka shrugged. "N'Am defense shield."

"How could you tell?" asked the man.

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

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

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

"You said starbursts ?" the man said.

Taka nodded.

"And the contrails dimmed down before detonation."

"So?"

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

"How should I know?"

"You saw this last night?"

Taka nodded.

"What time?"

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

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

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

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

"Is that typical of these attacks? Sunset?"

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

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

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

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

"Look, I didn't—"

" How long ?"

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

"How many degrees of arc did the contrails—"

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