Peter Watts - Behemoth

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

Finally: "That tunnel you hid in."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

"What did you see?"

"I told you. Contrails. Starbursts."

"Where was the closest starburst?"

"I don't—"

"Get out of the cab."

She stared at him.

"Go on," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She raised her arm and held it steady.

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

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

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

Not while there are more efficient alternatives.

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

"One more. Got any path grenades?"

"Loads."

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

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

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

The woman looked at Taka, her expression unreadable.

"Hey," Taka said. "I—"

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

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

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

The corner of the woman's mouth twitched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like that, the smile disappeared.

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

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

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

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

This does not parse, Lubin thought.

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

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

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

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

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

That way .

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

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

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

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

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

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