Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"Bye." She was at the entrance.

"Wait!"

Gone.

Perreault spared another look at the other botfly. It was hovering over the aftermath of the fight, its cameras pointing straight down. It had probably been summoned by the 'fly Perreault was riding, just before she'd grabbed the keys. It wasn't paying any attention to her. If its rider even knew that Perreault was in command, he or she didn't seem to care.

Nothing much I can do either way, she thought, and dived through the flytrap.

Thin dirty rain, sparse droplets blown sideways. The sky was brown. The air seemed full of grit. Farther south, then. Some place where it probably hadn't really snowed in years.

A metropolitan skyline hovered behind the dome like a murky histogram. Four-lane blacktop stretched out from that background, bled a puddle of asphalt beside the shelter, and continued to the horizon. On all sides a threadbare weave of smaller roads—some little more than dirt paths—extended through a patchwork of fields and woodlots.

Target , pinned and highlighted like a luminous butterfly, was moving away along one of them.

Still no GPS. Even the compass was offline.

Perreault reacquired the rifter's visor and set off on her trail. "Listen, I can—"

"Fuck off. Last time you were in one of those things it ended up shooting at me."

"That wasn't me! The link went down!"

"Yeah?" Clarke didn't look back. "And what's going to keep it up this time?"

"This 'fly doesn't have any weapons. It's strictly eyes and ears."

"I don't like eyes and ears."

"It couldn't hurt to have an extra set on your side. If I'd been around to do some advance scouting before, maybe you wouldn't have that bruise on your face."

Clarke stopped. Perreault brought the 'fly down and hovered a couple of meters off her shoulder.

"And when your friends get bored?" the rifter asked. "When the link goes down again?"

"I don't know. Maybe the 'fly just goes back to its regular rounds. At least it can't shoot at you."

"It can talk to things that can."

"Look, I'll keep my distance," Perreault offered. "A couple hundred meters, say. I'll stay in range of your visor, but if this thing comes to its senses you'll just be some nameless K who happened to be around when the link came back. They won't look twice."

Two meters off the port bow, Clarke's shoulders rose and fell.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked. "Why is it so important to help me out?"

Perreault briefly considered telling the truth. "I don't know," she said at last. "It just is."

The rifter shook her head. After a moment she said, "I'm headed south."

"South?" Perreault tapped again at the dead compass icon. Nothing. She tried to get a fix on the sun through murky overcast.

Clarke began walking. "This way," she said. And still didn't look back.

Perreault kept well off the road, paralleling Clarke's direction of travel. She called up the camera menu—planning to set a zoom reflex on any motion not consistent with wind action—and was surprised to be offered a choice of views. The 'fly had lateral, stern, and ventral cams as well as the primary stereos up front. She could split the display into four windows and keep simultaneous watch on the whole three-sixty.

Lenie Clarke trudged silently along the road, shoulders hunched against the wind. Her windbreaker flapped against her body like torn plastic.

"Aren't you cold?" Perreault asked.

"Got my skin on."

"Your—" Of course. Her dive suit. "Is this how you always get around?"

" You were the one that warned me off flying."

"Well, yes, but—"

"I bus sometimes," Clarke said. "Hitchhike."

Things that didn't involve ID checks or body scans. There was an irony buried in there, Perreault reflected. Clarke had probably been through more rigorous security in the past few weeks than would have been imaginable just decades earlier—but modern checks and gauntlets were aimed at pathogens, not people. Who cared about artifacts like personal ID any more? Who cared about anything so arbitrary as a political border? National identity was so irrelevant that nobody'd even bothered to dismantle it.

"You're not going to find a ride on this road any time soon," Perreault remarked. "You should've stuck with the main drag."

"I like walking alone. Avoids pointless small-talk."

Perreault took the hint.

She accessed the botfly's flight recorder, fearful of just how much incriminating information the device had stored. But its entire memory had been purged—an act of sabotage well beyond Perreault's capabilities. Even now, the black box somehow failed to retain the routine data stream the 'fly's sensors were sending it.

She was relieved, but not particularly surprised.

"Still there?" Clarke said.

"Uh-huh. Link's still up."

"They're getting better with practice."

Perreault remembered Clarke's reflexive glance at her bare wrist, back in the dome. "What happened to your watch?"

"Smashed it."

"Why?"

"Your friends figured out how to override the off switch."

"They're not—" Not friends. Not even contacts. She didn’t know what they were.

"And now you're getting in through my visor. If I had any brains I'd lose that, too."

"So others have made contact?" Of course they had—why would Sou-Hon Perreault be the only person in the world to be given an audience with the Meltdown Madonna?

"Oh, right. I forgot," the mermaid said wryly. "You don't know anything."

"Have they? Others like me?"

"Worse," Clarke said, and kept walking.

Don't push it .

A stand of skeletal birch separated them for a few minutes. The port camera caught Lenie Clarke in fragments, through a vertical jumble of white slashes.

"I went into Maelstrom," she said. "People are—talking about me."

"Yeah. I know."

"Do you believe it? The stuff they're saying?"

Perreault tried for a light touch, not believing it herself: "So you're not carrying the end of the world around inside you?"

"If I am," Clarke said, "it doesn't show up on a blood panel."

"You can't believe most of the stuff you read in Maelstrom anyway," Perreault said. "Half of it contradicts the other half."

"It's all just crazy. I don't know how it got started." A few seconds of silence. Then: "I saw someone that looked like me the other day."

"I told you. You've got friends."

"No. It's not me you want. It's something in the wires. It just…stole my name for some reason."

Beep .

A sudden luminous rectangle, framing a flicker of motion. The stern camera zoomed reflexively.

"Hold on," Perreault said. "I've got a—Lenie."

"What?"

"You might want to get off the road. I think it's that psycho from the shelter."

It was. Hunched over the handlebars of an ancient mountain bike, he resolved in the zoom window like a grainy nightmare. He pumped, straining, all his weight on the pedals. The vehicle had no seat. It didn't have any tires, either; it rattled along the road on bare rims. It was a skeleton ridden by a monster. The monster's jacket was dark and wet, and missing one sleeve; it was not the one he'd been wearing before.

He kept his eyes on the road; only once did he spare a glance back over his shoulder. Eventually he faded in the murk.

"Lenie?"

"Here." She rose from a drainage ditch.

"He's gone," Perreault said. "The things you see when you don't have your gun. Asshole."

"No worse than anyone else back there." Clarke climbed back onto the road.

"Except for the fact that he beat someone to death."

"And a hundred people stood around and watched. Or didn't you notice?"