Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"Hey," he said after a moment, "are you a—"

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him out of the alcove. "Enough of this bullshit. Let's fuck."

She was something else.

She had seams in her chest, and a perforated metal disk poking out between her ribs. She told him, around mouthfuls of cock, that a childhood injury had left her with a prosthetic lung. It was an obvious lie, but he didn't call her on it. Everything was making sense now, right down to the way she kept freezing up and trying to hide it, the way she acted hot to cover how cold she was.

She was a rifter. Quammen had heard about them—hell, they were the competition. N'AmPac had sent them down to hydrothermal vents all over the eastern Pacific, until word got out that they were all completely fucked in the head. Something about abuse survivors being best-suited for risky deep-sea work, some reductomechanist shit like that. It was no wonder Lenie wasn't keen on sharing her life story. Quammen wasn't going to push her on it.

Besides, the sex was pretty good. The occasional flinch notwithstanding, she seemed to know exactly what to do. Quammen had heard the usual rumors—the Wisdom of the Old Ones, he liked to call them. If you want good sex, find an abuse victim. Didn't seem quite right to put something like that to the test, but after all, she'd been the one to take the lead.

And what do you know: the Old Ones spake the truth.

He fucked her so hard his cock came out bloody. He frowned, sudden concern wilting him like a stalk of old celery. "Whoa…"

She just smiled.

"Is that you? Are you hurt? Is it—"

— oh crap, is it me?

"I'm an old-fashioned girl," she said, looking up at him.

"What do you mean?" Surely he'd have felt it if something had cut his cock…

"I menstruate."

"You—you're kidding ." Why would anyone choose to — "I mean, that's really TwenCen." He stood and reached for a towel on the dresser. "You could've told me," he said, wiping at himself.

"Sorry," she said.

"Well, pick your own pleasure, by all means," Quammen said. "It's no big deal, I just thought—"

She'd left her pack unzipped on the floor beside the dresser. Something glinted wet and dark from inside. He leaned slightly for a better view.

"Ah," he said, " — sorry if I—ah…"

A utility clip, blade extended. Used.

"Sure," she said behind him. "Fine."

She cut herself. Before we fucked, must've been when I was in the bathroom. She cut her own insides.

He turned back to the bed. Lenie was already half-dressed. Her face was a blank mask; it framed her eyes perfectly.

She noticed his gaze. She smiled again. Marq Quammen felt a tiny chill.

"Nice meeting you," she said. "Go, and sin some more."

The bloodhound nipped him on the finger and fixed him with one dark, suspicious eye.

GT analog my ass , Desjardins thought. What if it doesn't work? What if Colin's lying, what if—

The eye blinked and turned green.

Colin swept past security as Desjardins's guest. Guilt Trip wasn't an honor bestowed upon everyone, not even upon all those who might have legitimate commerce within the halls of the Entropy Patrol. Colin passed beneath eyes that stripped flesh to the bone— thoracic implants , Desjardins noticed, although the machines seemed to think them innocuous enough—but there was no need to drink his blood or read his mind. He was, after all, in the trusted company of Achilles Desjardins, who would never dream of granting access to any potential security threat.

This fucker could kill me , Desjardins thought.

Colin closed the cubby door behind them; Desjardins linked his eyes into the panel and split the feed to the wall so Colin could eavesdrop. He told the board to route incoming assignments around him until farther notice. The system, confident that no minion would shirk responsibility without good reason, acknowledged promptly.

Alone again, with the man who carried long needles in his pocket.

"What do you want to see?" Desjardins asked.

"Everything," Colin said.

"That's pretty sparse," Colin remarked, studying the plot. "Not your usual pandemic."

He must have meant inland; behemoth was sprouting everywhere along the coast.

Desjardins shrugged. "Still has some trouble invading low-pressure habitat. Needs a few dice rolls to get a foothold."

"It seems to be doing well enough on the Strip."

"Superdense population. More dice rolls."

"How's it getting around?"

"Not sure. It didn't book a commercial flight." Desjardins pointed at the scattered blotches east of the Rockies. "These new hits just started showing up a couple of weeks ago, and they're not consistent with any of the major travel corridors." He sighed. "I suppose we're lucky the quarantine held as long as it did."

"No, I mean how does it transmit? Respiratory aerosols, skin contact? Body fluids?"

"In theory it could get around on the bottom of somebody's boot. But you'd probably need more than a dirty boot to carry critical mass, so the secondary wouldn't persist."

"Human reservoirs, then."

Desjardins nodded. "Alice says it'd be nice and comfy inside a body. So yeah, it'd probably spread like some kind of conventional infection. Then when a vector takes a shit or pukes in the grass, you've got an innoculation into the outside world."

"Who's Alice?"

"Just another 'lawbreaker. Shared the assignment." Desjardins hoped Colin didn't ask for details. Anyone that man got curious about might have reason to worry.

But Colin only pointed at the display. "Your vectors. How many got past the mountains?"

"Don't know. Not my case any more. I'd guess only a few, though."

"So who are they?"

"I'd say people who worked on the Beebe construction contract. Infected before anyone knew there was a problem."

"So why aren't they dead, if they were infected first?"

"Good question." Another shrug. "Maybe they aren't infected. Maybe they're carrying it some other way."

"In a jar or something?" Lubin seemed almost amused by that. "Johnny Appleseed with a grudge?"

Desjardins didn't know and didn't ask. "Wouldn't have to be deliberate, necessarily. Maybe just some dirty piece of heavy equipment that gets moved around a lot."

"But you'd be able to track that. Even a bunch of infected contract workers should be easy enough to track down."

"You'd think." Didn't seem to be much of a problem to the guys with the flamethrowers, anyway…

"Yet you couldn't find any candidates in the record."

"No living ones, anyway."

"What about the rifters?" Colin suggested. "That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days. Maybe there's a connection."

"They were all—"

— killed in the quake . But the bottom dropped out of his stomach before he could finish the thought.

What about the rifters?

The scanners at security had seen machinery in Colin's chest.

Desjardins, you idiot.

The rifters.

One of them was standing right at his shoulder.

A single petrified moment to wonder which road had led to this:

Let's-call-him-Colin had risen from the ashes of Beebe Station and was pursuing his own apocalyptic agenda. Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, whatever the fuck that meant—

Or:

Let's-call-him-Colin hadn't been stationed at Beebe at all, he just had a—a personal interest. A friend, perhaps, a fellow rifter sacrificed for the greater good. But maybe Colin wasn't satisfied with the greater good . Maybe Colinwanted closure.