Peter Watts - Behemoth

Lubin focused on that. "No proof."

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

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

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

He nodded.

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

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

"I don't know."

"What if she isn't?"

"It doesn't matter."

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

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

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

He sighed.

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

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

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

Instantly, something in her shut down.

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

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

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

"Go on."

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

"Is that what you think."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And things have changed during that time."

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

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

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

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

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

"Lenie, I didn't mean—"

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

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

He allowed himself the curiosity. "What way?"

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

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

She shook her head, still not looking at him.

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

"I do," said Taka Ouellette.

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

Lubin blinked in astonishment. "Your sample—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— what I set in motion…

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

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