Peter Watts - Maelstrom

" —I saw what they did on the Strip. "

The medbooth slid open. Clarke stood framed in the doorway.

Vive leaned close, handed over the necklace. "Keep this up near your chest!" she shouted. "It'll mask the signal!"

The rifter nodded. Someone spilled between them, shouting and swinging indiscriminate fists. Lenie hammered back at that panicky face until it disappeared beneath the surface.

" They sent a tidal wave to kill her. They sent an earthquake. They missed. "

Lenie Clarke turned to the voice. Her eyes narrowed to white featureless slits. Her mouth moved, framing words drowned in the roar:

Oh, shit…

"We gotta go !" Vive shouted. Someone pushed her right up against Lenie's tits. "This way!"

" They're burning the whole world to catch her. She's that important. You can't— "

Squeal. Feedback. The sound of sparking circuitry. Suddenly the rifter seemed rooted in midair.

" —You can't let them have her— "

The four horsemen cut loose. The rogue spun down into the crowd, gushing flame. Fresh screams. The horsemen regrouped and resumed their original course.

"Come on !" Vive yelled. Lenie nodded. Vive led her away along the wall.

The next alcove led into a public washroom. It was jam-packed with rifter wannabes and trapped pedestrians desperate to wait out the party. They were still for the most part, huddled like refugees under a bridge, listening to the muted pounding coming through the walls.

Two friendlies held one of the stalls. They'd already knocked out its ceiling panels. "You Aviva?" one of them asked, blinking rapidly over fake eyecaps.

Vive nodded, turned to Clarke. "And this …"

Something indefinable passed through the room.

" Shit ," said one of the friendlies, very softly. "I didn't think she was real."

Lenie Clarke tilted her chin in a half-nod. "Join the club."

"So it's true then? The burnings and the Big One and you going around raping corpses—"

"Probably not."

"But—"

"I don't really have time to compare notes," Clarke said.

"Oh—right, of course. Sorry. We can get you to the river." The friendly cocked her head. "You still got a diveskin?"

Lenie reached behind her own shoulder and tapped the backpack.

"Okay," said the other friendly. "Let's go." She braced on the toilet, jumped, caught some handhold in the overhead darkness and swung up out of sight.

The first friendly looked around at the assembled huddlers. "Give us fifteen minutes, you guys. The last thing we need is a whole procession banging around in the crawlspace, right? Fifteen minutes, and you can make all the noise you want. Assuming you want to leave the party, that is." She turned to Vive. "You coming?"

Vive shook her head. "I'm supposed to meet up with Jen and Linse over by the fountain."

"Suit yourself. We're gone." The remaining friendly stirruped her hands, held them out to Clarke. "Want a boost?"

"No thanks," the rifter said. "I can manage."

Aviva Lu was a veteran of civil unrest. She rode out the rest of the action against walls and in corners, the low-turbulence areas where you could keep your bearings and your balance without being trampled. Les beus brought out the heavy artillery in record time; Vive's last view of freedom was the sight of a botfly crop-dusting the crowd with halothane. It didn't matter. She went to sleep smiling.

When she woke up, though, she wasn't in Holding with everyone else. She was in a small white room, windowless and unfurnished except for the diagnostic table she awakened on. A man's voice spoke to her through the walls; it was a nice voice, it would have been sexy under happier circumstances.

The man behind the voice knew more about Vive's role in the riot than she'd expected. He knew that she'd met Lenie Clarke in the flesh. He knew that she'd helped trash the botfly. Vive guessed that he'd learned that from Lindsey or Jennifer; they'd probably been caught, too. But the man didn't talk about Vive's friends or anyone else. He didn't even seem all that interested in what Lenie Clarke had said, which surprised Vive quite a bit; she'd been expecting a real third-degree, with inducers and neurosplicers and the whole shot. But no.

What the man seemed really interested in was the cut over Vive's eye. Had she got it from Clarke? How close had the contact been between the two of them? Vive trotted out the obvious comebacks with their obvious lesbian overtones, but deep down she was getting really worried. This voice wasn't playing any of the usual intimidation games. It didn't threaten, or gloat, or tell her how many synaptic rewires it was going to take to turn her into a good citizen. It just sounded very, very sad that Aviva Lu had been dumb enough to get involved with this whole Lenie Clarke thing.

Very sad, because—although the man never actually said it aloud—now there was really nothing he could do.

Aviva Lu sat trembling on a table in a white, white room, and pissed herself.

This is Patricia Rowan. Ken Lubin is plugged into the kiosk just down the hall from your office. Please tell him I want to see you both. I'm in the boardroom on Admin-411.

He will not give you any trouble.

Twenty-six hours fourteen minutes.

Sure enough, Lubin was cauled at the terminal quad by the stairwell. Evidently no one had challenged his presence there.

"What are you doing?" Desjardins said behind him.

The other man shook his head. "Trying to call someone. No answer." He stripped off the headset.

"Rowan's here," Desjardins said. "She—she wants to see us."

"Yeah." Lubin sighed and got to his feet. His face remained impassive, but there was resignation in his voice.

"Took her long enough," he said.

Two prefab surgeries, wire-frame cubes cast into bright relief by overhead spotlights. Their walls swirled with faint soap-bubble iridescence if you caught them at the right angle. Otherwise, the things inside— the restraints, the operating boards, the multiarmed machinery poised above them—seemed completely open to the air of the room. The vertices of each cube seemed as arbitrary and pointless as political boundaries.

But the very walls of the boardroom glistened in the same subtle way, Desjardins noted. The whole place had been sprayed down with isolation membrane.

Patricia Rowan, backlit, stood between the door and the modules. "Ken. Good to see you again."

Lubin closed the door. "How did you find me?"

"Dr. Desjardins sold you out, of course. But surely that doesn't surprise you." Her contacts flickered with phosphorescent intel. "Given your little problem, I rather suspect you nudged him in that direction yourself."

Lubin stepped forward.

"More things in heaven and earth, Horatio," Rowan said.

Something in Lubin's posture changed; a brief moment of tetanus, barely noticeable. Then he relaxed.

Trigger phrase, Desjardins realized. Some subroutine had just been activated deep in Lubin's cortex. In the space of a single breath, his agenda had changed from—

Mr. Lubin's behavior is governed by a conditioned threat-response reflex , he remembered. He's unlikely to consider you a threat unless…

Oh Jesus. Desjardins swallowed with a mouth gone suddenly dry. She didn't start him up just now. She shut him down…

And he was coming for me …

"— would have only been a matter of time anyway," Rowan was saying. "There were a couple of outbreaks down in California that didn't fit the plots. I'm guessing you spent some time on an island off Mendocino…?"