Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"The gels are behind this?"

She shook her head. "As I said, we took precautions. We tracked down every tainted node, we partitioned them and replaced them, we made damn sure that there was no trace of the meme left. Just to be absolutely sure. But here it is, somehow. Metastasized and mutated and born again. And all we know is that this time, the gels aren't behind it."

"But they were before, is that what you're saying? They—they started the ball rolling?"

"Maybe. Once upon a time."

" Why , for God's sake?"

"Well, that's the funny thing," Rowan admitted. "We told them to."

Rowan fed it all directly to his inlays. There was too much for even an optimized 'lawbreaker to take in on the spot, but the executive summary thumbnailed it in fifteen seconds: the growing threat, the rabid mutual distrust, the final reluctant surrender of control to an alien intelligence with its own unsuspected take on the virtues of parsimony.

"Jesus," Desjardins said.

"I know," Rowan agreed.

"And how the Christ did Lenie Clarke take control?"

"She didn't. That's what's so crazy. As far as we can tell, she didn't think anyone even knew about her until Yankton."

"Huh." Desjardins pursed his lips. "Still. Whatever's out there, it's taking its lead from her."

"I know," she said softly. She glanced at Lubin. "That's where he comes in."

Lubin twitched and jerked under the ongoing assault. His face—the part of it not covered by the headset, anyway—was expressionless.

"What's he watching in there?" Desjardins wondered.

"Briefing stats. For his next mission."

He watched a little longer. "Would he have killed me?"

"I doubt it."

"Who is —"

"He's not someone you have to worry about any more."

"No." Desjardins shook his head. "That's not good enough. He tracked me down across a whole continent, he broke into my home, he—" cut Guilt Trip right out from under me but of course he wasn't going to admit that to Rowan, not now for Chrissakes— "I gather he's got some kind of kill-switch hardwired into him, and he answers to you , Ms. Rowan. Who is he? "

He could see her bristling. For a moment he thought he'd gone too far. No peon truly in Guilt Trip's grasp would ever mouth off to a superior that way, Rowan would know, the alarms would start sounding any second—

"Mr. Lubin has—you might call it an impulse-control problem," she said. "He enjoys certain acts that most would find unpleasant. He never behaves—gratuitously is the word, I guess—but sometimes he tends to set up situations that provoke a particular response. Do you see what I'm saying?"

He kills people , Desjardins thought numbly. He sets up breaches so he'll have an excuse to kill people…

"We're helping him deal with his problem," Rowan said. "And we've got him under control."

Desjardins bit his lip.

She shook her head, a trace of disapproval on those pale features. "ßehemoth, Dr. Desjardins. Lenie Clarke. Lose sleep over those , if you must. Believe me, Ken Lubin's part of the solution ." Her voice went up a touch: "Aren't you, Ken?"

"I don't know her," Lubin said. "Not well."

Desjardins glanced at Rowan, alarmed. "He can hear us?"

She answered Lubin instead. "You know her better than you think."

"You have—profiles," Lubin said. His words were slurred; the induction field must be grazing his facial muscles. "That psychologist. Shcanlon."

"Scanlon had his own issues," Rowan said. "You and Clarke have a lot more in common. Similar outlooks, similar backgrounds. If you were in her shoes—"

"I am in her shoes. I came here …" Lubin licked his lips. A trickle of saliva glistened at the corner of his mouth.

"Fair enough. But suppose you had no information and no clearance, and no—behavioral constraints. What would you be after?"

Lubin didn't speak. His cowled face was an eyeless, high-contrast mask in the spots. His skin almost glowed.

Rowan stepped forward. "Ken?"

"'s easy," he said at last. "Revenge."

"Against who, exactly?"

"The—GA. We did try to kill us, after all."

Rowan's contacts glowed with sudden input. "She was never seen near any GA offices."

"She ashaulted someone in Hongcouver." A spasm ran up the length of Lubin's body. His head lolled. "Looking for Yves Shcanlon."

"But Scanlon was her only lead, as far as we know. It didn't go anywhere. We don't think she's even been in N'AmPac for months."

"She has other grudges," Lubin said. "Maybe she's—going home."

Rowan frowned, concentrating. "Her parents, you mean."

"She mentioned Sault Sainte Marie."

"Suppose she couldn't get to her parents?"

"Don' know."

"What would you do?"

"I'd—keep trying…"

"Suppose her parents were dead," Rowan suggested.

"…'f we killed them for her?"

"No, suppose they were already—suppose they'd been dead a long time."

Clumsily, Lubin shook his head. "The people she hates're very mush…alive…"

" Suppose , Ken." Rowan was getting impatient. "Theoretical scenario. You've got a score to settle with the GA, and a score to settle with your parents, and you know you'll never get to either of them. What do you do?"

His mouth moved. Nothing came out.

"Ken?"

"— I redirect," he said at last.

"What do you mean?"

Lubin jerked like a blind marionette with most of its strings cut.

"The whole world fucked me over. I–I wanna return the favor."

"Huh." Rowan shook her head. "She's pretty much doing that already."

One crucifixion was enough, as it turned out. Achilles Desjardins was clean, if still vulnerable; the second surgery, prepped and waiting, had no interest in scouring his insides.

It only wanted to change him into a flounder.

Lubin's little chamber of horrors had backed off for the moment. The pallet had folded itself up into recliner mode; the assassin sat on it while a mechanical spider skittered across his body on legs like jointed whiskers.

In the adjacent cube, Desjardins looked down at an identical device on his own body. He'd already been injected with a half-dozen tailored viruses, each containing the code for a different suite of ßehemoth-proof proteins. There'd be other injections over the next few days. Lots of them. The fever would start within a week; the nausea was already underway.

The spider was taking baselines: bacteria from skin and hair, organ biopsies, gut contents. Every now and then it plunged a hair-thin proboscis into his flesh, provoking a diffuse ache from within the tissues. Reverse-engineering was a tricky business these days. If you weren't careful, tweaked genes could change the microflora in the gut as easily as the flesh of the host. E. coli . could turn from commensal to cancer with the flip of a base-pair. A few wily bacteria had even learned how to slip some of their own genes into viral carriers en route, and hence into human cells. It made Desjardins long for those good old-fashioned germs which merely fed on antibiotics.

"You didn't tell her," Lubin said.

Rowan had left them to their own devices. Desjardins looked at the other man through two layers of membrane and tried to ignore the creepy tickle on his skin.

"Tell her what?" he asked finally.

"That I took you off Guilt Trip."

"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

Lubin's spider scrambled up his throat and tapped on his lower lip. The assassin obligingly opened his mouth; the little robot scraped at the inside of his cheek with one appendage and retreated back down the torso.