Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Her words should have stung him—even provoked him to anger—but he only sat there looking helpless, his hands spread. "Sou, you've been through so much these past few months, of course things look really grim. But I honestly think you're putting way too much weight on a bunch of rumors. Riots, and firestorms, and—I mean, half those postings don't even show up with address headers any more, you can't trust anything that comes out of Maelstrom these days—"

"You'd rather trust N'AmWire? They don't spit out a word without some corpse chewing it for them first!"

"But what do you know , Sou? What have you actually seen with your own eyes? By your own admission you just got a glimpse of one big ship moving inland, and you didn't even see it do anything—"

"Because it shot the 'fly right out from under me!"

" And you weren't supposed to be there in the first place, you idiot! You're lucky they didn't track you down and cancel your contract on the spot! "

He fell silent. The burble of the aquarium in the next room suddenly seemed very loud.

He was backpedaling the next instant: "Oh Sou, I'm sorry . I didn't mean to…"

"Doesn't matter." Sou-Hon shook her head, waving off the overture. "We're done here anyway."

"Sou…"

She stood up from the table. "You could do with a bit of a diet yourself, hubby. Lose some weight, clear your mind. It might even make you wonder what they're putting in that so-called food you keep trying to force down my throat."

"Oh, Sou . Surely you're not saying—"

She went into her office and closed the door.

I want to do something!

She leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. Martin, safely excluded, made soft shuffling noises on the other side and faded away.

I've been a voyeur my whole fucking life! All I do is watch ! Everything's falling apart and now they're bringing in their big guns and laying waste and I'm part of it and there's nothing I can do …

She summoned a curse for the faulty derm she'd worn into Hongcouver. The epithet was an empty and colorless thing; even now, she couldn't truly regret having been slapped awake. She could only rage at the things she'd seen when her eyes had opened.

And Martin's trying so hard to be a comfort, he's so earnest and he probably believes that things really will get better if I go back to being a haploid sheep like him…

She clenched her fists, savored the pain of fingernails in the flesh of her palms. Lenie Clarke's no sheep , she thought.

Clarke had long since left the Strip, for all Amitav's efforts to keep her spirit alive. But she was still out there, somewhere. She had to be. How else to explain the subtle proliferation of black uniforms and empty eyes in the world? Perreault didn't get out much but the signs were there, even the predigested pap that N'Amwire served up. Dark shapes on street-corners. Eyes without pupils, staring from the crowds that always gathered in the background of newsworthy events.

That was nothing new, of course. N'AmPac's divers had been all over the news, almost a year before; first lauded as saviors of the new economy, fashionable icons of cutting-edge reserve. Then pitied and feared, once the rumors of abuse and psychopathy reached some threshold of public awareness. Then inevitably, forgotten.

Just an old fad. Rifter chic had already had its day. So why this sudden new life, breathed into some dusty blip on the rear-view mirror? Why the fine mycelium of innuendo threading its way through Maelstrom, whispers about someone risen from the deep sea, pregnant with apocalypse? Why the fragmentary rumors, their address headers corrupted or missing, of people taking sides ?

Perreault opened her eyes. Her headset rested on its peg, just in front of her desk. An LED blinked on its side: message waiting .

Someone wanting to trade shifts, maybe. Some supervisor wanting to pay her overtime to keep looking the other way.

Maybe another trashed cycler , she thought hopefully. Probably not, though. The Strip had been a much quieter place since Amitav's corner of it had been—excised…

She took a deep breath, one step forward, sat. She slipped on the headset:

Souhon/Amitav (LNU)

lucked into this avenging angel. No shit. Lenie Clarke, her name was.

Oh my God.

The text had been overlaid directly onto the tactical map for the botflies on the Strip. Sou-Hon forced herself to sit quietly, and shoveled dirt back into the tiny pit opening in her stomach.

You're back. Whoever you are.

What do you want?

She hadn't made any secret of her interest in Amitav or Lenie Clarke. There'd been no need, at first; both had been legitimate topics of professional conversation, albeit apparently uninteresting ones to other 'flyers. But she'd kept quiet since Amitav had fallen into eclipse. Just barely. A big part of her had wanted to scream that atrocity into Maelstrom at full voice; afraid of repercussions, she'd settled for screaming at Martin, and hoped that whatever had shot down her 'botfly hadn't bothered tracking it to source.

This wasn't CSIRA or the GA, though. This almost looked like a glitch of some kind.

Another line of text appeared beneath the first two:

She's like some kinda amphibian, one of those rifter cyborgs.

No obvious channel to link in to, no icon to tap. Behind the text, the familiar long chain of red pinpoints patrolled the Pacific coastline, showing no hint of the places where they went into coma.

Les beus are looking for her, but I bet fifty QueBucks they don't even know what she looks like under all that rifter gear. Souhon or Amitav (LNU)?

Perhaps they'd hacked into her headset mic as well. "I'm—Sou-Hon. Hyphenated."

Sou-Hon.

"Yes."

You know Lenie Clarke.

"I—saw her, once."

Good enough.

An invisible fist closed around Sou-Hon Perreault and threw her halfway around the world.

Pacific coastlines and tactical overlays, gone in an instant; a cul-de-sac of brick and machinery suddenly in their place. Gusts of sleet, slashing an atmosphere colder than the Strip had ever seen. It rattled off glass and metal to either side. The stylized greyhounds etched into those surfaces didn't stir.

Not all the flesh had disappeared, Perreault saw. A woman stood directly ahead, her back to a brick wall the color of raw meat. The buses on either side were plugged into sockets extending from that wall, cutting off lateral escape. If there was any way out it was straight ahead, through the center of Perreault's perceptual sphere. But that sphere showed a target framed within luminous crosshairs. Unfamiliar icons flashed to each side, options like ARM and STUN and LTHL.

Perreault was riding some kind of arsenal, and she was aiming it right at Lenie Clarke.

The rifter had gone native. Civilian clothes covered the body, a visor hid that glacial stare, and Perreault would never have recognized her if she'd had to rely on merely human eyes. But botflies looked out across a wider spectrum. This one saw a garish and distracting place, emissions bleeding from a dozen EM sources—but Clarke was close-range and line-of-sight, and there was no wiring in the wall directly behind her. Against that relative shadow, her thorax flickered like a riot of dim fireflies.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Perreault said. Weapons icons flashed accusingly at the corner of her eye; she found a dimmer one that whispered DSRM, and hit it. The arsenal stood down.

Clarke didn't move, didn't speak.

"I'm not—my name's Sou-Hon. I'm not with the police, I'm—I think—" She spared a glance at GPS: Calgary. The Glenmore intercity shuttle nexus.