Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Lubin hit the shore rolling, came up safely outside the sealion's attack radius. The animal had hooked its upper jaw around the shaft embedded in its neck, and was trying to dislodge it. Lubin circled, came up from behind. The bull saw him coming, wheeled clumsily like a battered tank. Lubin feinted; the bull charged weakly to the left. Lubin spun back, jumped, grabbed: the wood sent splinters into his palms as he jammed it down with all of his weight.

The bull rolled screaming onto its back, pinning one of Lubin's legs under a body that—even at half its normal weight—could still crush a man. A monstrous face, full of pain and infection, lunged at him like a battering ram.

He struck at the base of the jaw, felt bone tearing through flesh. Some deep pocket of corruption burst in his face like a stinking geyser.

The battering ram was gone. The weight shifted from his leg. Thalidomide limbs flailed at the gravel by Lubin's face.

The next time he got the spear he hung on to it, pulled from side to side, felt the deep scrape of wood over bone. The bull heaved and bucked beneath him; in a confusion of agony from so many sources, it didn't seem to know where its tormentor was. Suddenly the point slid into a groove between cervical vertebrae. Once more, with all the strength left to him, Lubin pushed.

Just like that, the heaving mass beneath him went limp.

It wasn't completely dead. Its eye still followed him, dull and resigned as he circled the animal's head. He'd merely paralyzed it from the neck down, deprived it of breath and motion. A diving mammal. Adapted over how many millions of years to survive extended periods without breathing? How long would it take that eye to stop moving?

He had an answer. Sealions were just like other mammals in any number of ways. They had that opening at the base of the skull, that place where the spinal cord climbed up into the brain. The foramen magnum, it was called; such anatomical tidbits were always coming in handy to people in Lubin's line of work.

He pulled his weapon free of the flesh and repositioned it near the back of the skull.

The eye stopped moving about three seconds later.

He felt a brief stinging in his own eyes as he prepared to leave the island, a lump in his throat that the tightness of his diveskin couldn't quite account for. The feeling was regret, he knew. He had not wanted to do what he'd just done.

Nobody who encountered him was likely to believe that, of course. He was, among other things, a murderer. When called for. People who learned that about Ken Lubin rarely tried to get to know him any better.

But in fact he had never wanted to kill anything in his life. He regretted every death he had caused. Even the death of some big, stupid, incompetent predator who hadn't been able to meet the standards of its own species. There was never any choice in such matters, of course. Those were the only times he ever did it; when there was no choice.

And when that was the case—when all other avenues had been exhausted, when the only way to get the job done was through a necessary death—surely there was nothing wrong with doing the job efficiently, and well. Surely there was nothing wrong with even enjoying it a little.

It wasn't even his fault, he reflected as he waded into the surf. He'd simply been programmed that way. His masters had as much as admitted it themselves, when they'd sent him on sabbatical.

Back on shore, a hillock of decomposing flesh caught the corner of his eye. There'd been no choice. He had ended suffering. One good deed, to pay back the place that had kept him alive these past weeks.

Goodbye , he thought.

Now he sealed his hood and tripped his implants. His sinuses, bronchi, GI tract all writhed in brief confusion, then surrendered. The Pacific sluiced through his chest with reassuring familiarity; tiny sparks shocked bonded molecules oxygen and hydrogen apart, handed the useful bits off to his pulmonary vein.

He didn't know how long it would take him to reach that intermittent line of sparkles near the horizon. He didn't know how long it would take them to carry him back to the mainland. He didn't even know exactly what he'd do when he got there. For the time being, knowing one thing was enough:

Ken Lubin—lover of all life, Guilt-Tripped assassin, cannon so loose that even Black Ops had been compelled to store him on the seabed like radioactive waste—

Ken Lubin was going home.

Sou-Hon Perreault was closing on a riot when they shut her down.

It was Amitav, of course. She knew that the moment she saw the location of the disturbance: a Calvin cycler in trouble at Grenville Point, less than two klicks from his last known position. She jumped into the nearest botfly and rode it down.

Somehow the refs had uprooted a lightstand and used it as a battering ram; the cycler had been skewered through the heart. A dozen brands of amino goop oozed viscously from the wound, a pusy mix of ochres and browns. Underweight refugees—some oozing blood from scabby sores— shouted and pushed against the front of the wounded machine, toppling it.

The larger crowd on all sides drew back, rudderless and confused, as powerless as ever.

" kholanA ApakA netra, behen chod! "

Amitav, climbing onto the fallen cycler. Perreault's botfly parsed phonemes, settled on Hindi .

" Open your eyes, sisterfuckers! Is it not bad enough you should eat their poison? Will you sit here with your hands up your asses while they send another wave to finish the job! Lenie Clarke wasn't enough for you, yes? She survived the center of the storm itself, she told you who the enemy was! She fights them while you sleep on the dirt! What will it take to wake you up?"

Amitav's disciples shouted ragged approval; the others milled and murmured among themselves. Amitav, Perreault thought, you've crossed the line.

The stickman glanced skyward and threw up one spindly arm, pointing at Perreault's descending botfly. "Look! They send machines to tell us what to do! They—"

Sudden darkness, silent and unrelieved.

She waited. After a few seconds, two lines of luminous text began blinking against the void:

CSIRA Containment Zone

(N'AmPac Biohazards Act, 2040)

She'd run into dark zones before, of course. Some 'fly she was riding would drop suddenly into shadow, floating serenely blind and deaf for fifty meters or twenty klicks. Then, safely out of insight's way, it would come back online.

But why cite the Biohazards Act over a trashed cycler?

Unless it isn't about the cycler…

She linked into the next 'fly back in line: CSIRA Containment Zone flashed against unwelcome darkness. She relinked to one before that, and the one after, bouncing back and forth toward the edges of the blackout.

Eight point one eight kilometers from end to end.

Now she was sighted and riding southbound, just beyond the northern perimeter. She topped out the whole spectrum, stared through a tangle of false-color infra and X and UV, poked into the fog with radar—

There—

Something in the sky. A brief image, fading almost immediately to black.

CSIRA Containment Zone…

She backjumped again, set her defaults to repeat the maneuver whenever visual went down. She saw it again, and again: a great curtain, darkness. A billowing wall descending to earth, darkness. An inflatable barrier, swelling smoothly across the width of the Strip.

Darkness. CSIRA Containment Z—

She considered.

They'd cut off eight kilometers of Strip, a segment nearly nine hundred meters wide. It would take several dampers to cover that much area, assuming they were squelching tightbeam as well as broadband. The dampers would probably be mounted on the wall itself.