Peter Watts - Behemoth

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.

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.