Behemoth: Seppuku

by Peter Watts

  Prey.

  "Flash!" Lubin barked. Almost too late, she remembered to shut her eyes. Four pops sounded in rapid succession. A constellation of dim red suns ignited briefly through her eyelids.

  "Go!"

  She looked. The composite organism had shattered, just like that. Solitary predators wheeled on all sides, blinded and confused. Briefly blind, she remembered. Briefly confused.

  She had seconds to act and nothing to lose. She charged.

  Three meters from the nearest beast she started shooting. She squeezed off five rounds; two hits in the creature's flank. It snapped and dropped. Two others stumbled into each other, a mere arm's length away: one shot each and she was spinning in search of new targets. Somewhere offside, needlefire slammed obliquely across the ground. She ignored it and kept shooting. Something dark and massive hurtled past, bleeding flame. She nailed it in the flank for good measure and suddenly she was transformed yet again, all that adrenalized midbrain circuitry flipping from flight to fight, whimpering paralysis burned away in a fury of bloodlust and adrenaline. She shot a leg. She shot a great heaving ribcage, black and sleek as a diveskin. She shot a monstrous, silently-snarling face, and realized it had been looking back.

  A part of her she hadn't even known was keeping score served up a number: seven. That's the number you can take, before they come for you...

  She broke and ran. Lubin was running too, poor blind Lubin, Lubin the human tank. He'd switched back to clusterfuck and cleared a fiery path down twelve o'clock. He charged down the driveway—

  —I told him no obstructions oh boy will he be pissed if he trips on a sewer grating—

  —like a sighted man. Dogs shook their heads in his wake and wheeled, intent on reacquisition.

  They were closing on Clarke, too. Their paws drummed at her heels like heavy rain on a cloth roof.

  She was back on the asphalt, a few meters off Lubin's stern. "Seven o'clock!" she cried, diving.

  Incandescent sleet streaked centimeters overhead. Gravel and coarse pavement flayed the skin of her palms, bruised her arm and shoulder through nested layers of denim and copolymer. Flesh and fur burst into flame close enough to warm her face.

  She twisted onto her back. "Three o'clock! Flash wore off!" Lubin turned and sprayed fire across the bearing. Three other dogs were closing from eleven; still on her back, Clarke held the gun two-handed over her head and took them out with three meters to spare.

  "Flash!" Lubin shouted again. Clarke rolled and ducked, closing her eyes. Three more pops, three more orange fleshy sunrises. They backlit the memory of that last sighted instant—the instant when Lubin called out and every dog had flinched and turned their heads away...

  Smart, smart doggies, giggled some hysterical little girl in her head. They heard FLASH, and they remembered it from the first time, and they closed their eyes...

  She opened hers, terrified of what she was about to see.

  The trick hadn't worked twice. Lubin was bringing up his weapon, desperately switching modes as some black slavering nemesis launched itself at his throat. There were no stars in its eyes. Lubin fired, blind and point-blank; blood and bone exploded from the back of the creature's skull but the carcass just kept going, a hundred kilograms of gory unstoppable momentum hitting him full in the chest. Lubin went over like a paper doll, gripping his dead attacker as though he could prevail over mass-times-accelleration through sheer bloody-minded determination.

  He couldn't, of course. He couldn't prevail over anything. He had only killed one of them. He disappeared beneath a dozen others.

  Suddenly Clarke was charging forward, firing and firing and firing. There were screams, but none of them came from anything she might have hit. Something hot and hard slammed into her from the side; something cold and harder slammed against her back. A monster grinned down at her, open-mouthed, drooling. Its forepaws pinned her to the ground like piled cinderblocks. Its breath reeked of meat and petroleum.

  She remembered something Ken had said: You may get off easily. I rather suspect they'll be focusing on me. She really should have asked him about that, back when she'd had the chance. Only now it was too late.

  They're saving me, she thought distantly. For dessert...

  From somewhere nearby, the sound of crunching bones.

  #

  Jesus God, Ken. What did you think would happen?

  The weight on her chest was gone. On all sides she could hear the sound of monsters, breathing.

  You thought we had a hope in hell? You were blind, and I—I might as well have been. Were you trying to die, Ken? Did you just think you were indestructible?

  I could understand that, maybe. I almost believed it myself, for a while.

  Strangely, nothing had torn out her throat. I wonder what's keeping them, she thought.

  She opened her eyes. CSIRA loomed into the sky over her head, as though she were staring up from the grave at some colossal tombstone.

  She sat up in a circle maybe four meters across. Massed black bodies circumscribed its edge. They watched her, panting with past exertion, sitting calmly on their haunches.

  Clarke struggled to her feet. Her head itched with the memory of that irritating inaudible tickle, freshly resurgent against her inner ear. She'd felt it when the monsters had first charged. She'd felt it again, just now. Ultrasonics, she realised.

  The Hechler & Koch lay at her feet. She bent to scoop it up. Dark shapes tensed on all sides; jaws snapped, restive. But they didn't stop her.

  The Sikorsky-Bell lay broken-backed fifty meters to her left, fat thorax and slender abdomen rising in a lopsided V from their common juncture. A ragged, charred hole gaped darkly in the cabin wall, as though some white-hot parasite had burst forth from inside. She took one shaky step in that direction.

  The dogs bristled and held their ground.

  She stopped. Turned to face the black tower.

  The pack parted before her.

  They moved as she did, yielding in some approved direction, closing behind in her wake. After a few steps her own shifting bubble of space fused with another; two pockets merged into a single oblong vacuole ten meters down the major axis.

  Two great torn carcasses lay piled before her in a pool of blood and spilled intestine. A foot protruded unmoving from beneath the nearest. Something else--dark, slick, strangely lobate—twitched further along one bloody flank as Clarke approached. It looked like some grotesque swollen parasite, pulsing weakly, spilled from the guts of its disembowelled host.

  It clenched. Suddenly the image clicked: a blood-soaked fist, knotted in gory, matted fur.

  "Ken!" She reached down, touched the bloody hand. It jerked back as if stabbed, disappeared beneath the carcass leaving only the vague sense of some half-glimpsed deformity. The mass of carrion shifted slightly.

  Lubin hadn't torn these two animals apart. He'd merely blown lethal holes in them. Their evisceration had happened after the fact, a demon horde ripping through their fallen comrades in pragmatic, remorseless pursuit of their target.

  Lubin had used these two as a shield.

  "Ken, it's me." She grabbed handfuls of fur and pulled. The blood-slicked pelage resisted her grip. Splinters of bone stabbed her hands through clots of muscle and fur. On the third try, the center of mass tipped past some crucial threshold. The carcass rolled off Lubin like a great log.

  He fired, blind. Lethal shards sprayed into the sky. Clarke dropped to the ground—"It's me, you idiot!"—and stared panic-stricken around the perimeter, terrified that Lubin had jump-started a whole new assault. But the pack only flinched and fell back a few steps, silent as ever.

  "Cl—Clarke....?"

  He didn't even look human. Every square centimeter glistened with black gore. The pistol shook in his hand.

  "It's me," she repeated. She had no idea how much of the blood was his. "Are you—"

  "—dogs?" His breath hissed fast and panicky through clenched teeth, the breath of a terrified little boy.

  S
he looked at her escort. They looked back.

  "Holding back, for now. Someone called them off."

  His hand steadied. His breathing slowed. Discipline reimposed itself from the top down, the old familiar Lubin rebooting himself through sheer force of will.

  "Told you," he coughed.

  "Are you—"

  "Functional..." He got slowly to his feet, tensing and grimacing a half-dozen times. "—barely." His right thigh had been gored. A gash split the side of his face, running from jaw to hairline. It tore straight through the shattered socket of his right eye.

  Clarke gasped. "Jesus, your eye…"

  He reached up to touch his face. "Wasn't doing me much good anyway." The deformity of his hand, barely glimpsed before, was obvious now: two of the fingers were gone.

  "And your hand—Ken, it—"

  He flexed the remaining digits. Fresh membranous scabs tore open at the stumps; dark fluids seeped forth. "Not as bad as it looks," he said hoarsely.

  "You'll bleed out, you'll—"

  He shook his head, staggered slightly. "Enhanced clotting factors. Standard issue. I'm good to go."

  The hell you are. But dogs crowded close on one side, fell back on the other. Staying put obviously wasn't an option either.

  "Okay then." She took him by the elbow. "This way."

  "We're not deviating." It wasn't a question.

  "No. We don't have much choice."

  He coughed again. Clotting fluid bubbled at the corner of his mouth. "They're herding us."

  A great dark muzzle pushed her gently from behind.

  "Think of it as an honor guard," she said.

  A row of glass doors beneath a concrete awning, the official logo of the Entropy Patrol set into stone overhead. The dogs formed a semicircle around the entrance, pushing them forward.

  "What do you see?" Lubin asked.

  "Same outer doors. Vestibule behind, three meters deep. There's—there's a door in the center of the barrier. Just an outline, no knob or keypad or anything."

  She could have sworn that hadn't been there before.

  Lubin spat blood. "Let's go."

  She tried one of the doors. It swung open. They stepped across the threshold.

  "We're in the vestibule."

  "Dogs?"

  "Still outside." The pack was lined up against the glass now, staring in. "I guess they're not—oh. The inner door just opened."

  "In or out?"

  "Inwards. Dark inside. Can't see anything." She stepped forward; her eyecaps would adjust to that deeper darkness once they were in it.

  If they got in it. Lubin had frozen at her side, the remaining fingers on his mauled hand clenched into an impoverished fist. The grenade pistol extended from his other hand, unwavering, pointing straight ahead. His ravaged face held an expression Clarke had never seen before, some smoldering picture of rage and humiliation that bordered on outright humanity.

  "Ken. Door's open."

  The thumbwheel clicked onto shipworm.

  "It's open, Ken. We can walk right in." She touched his forearm, tried to bring it down but his whole body was gripped in a sudden furious tetanus. "We don't have to—"

  "I told you before," he growled. "More sensible to go around." His gun arm swung to three o'clock, pointing straight at the vestibule wall. His useless eye stared straight ahead.

  "Ken—" She turned, half-expecting the monsters at their backs to crash through the panes and rip his arm off. But the dogs stayed where they were, seemingly content to let the drama play out without further intervention.

  "He wants us to go forward," Lubin said. "Always sets it up, always takes the initiative. All we ever do is fucking— react..."

  "And blowing out a wall when the door's standing open? That's not a reaction?"

  Lubin shook his head. "It's an escape route."

  He fired. The shipworm plunged into the side wall, spinning fast enough to shatter an event horizon. The wall erupted like a tabletop Vesuvius; filthy grey cumulus billowed out and engulfed them in an instant. Stinging particles sandblasted Clarke's face. She closed her eyes, choked on the sudden sandstorm. From somewhere deep in the maelstrom, she heard the tinkle of shattering glass.

  Something grabbed her wrist and yanked sideways. She opened her eyes onto the swirling, soupy aftermath of the blast. Lubin drew her towards the ruptured wall; his ravaged face loomed close. "This way. Get us in."

  She steered. He lurched at her side. The air was filled with the hiss of fine sifting debris, the building sighed at its own desecration. An empty, twisted door frame leaned crazily out of the murk. Pebbles of crumbled safety glass crunched beneath their feet like a diamond snowfall.

  There was no sign of the dogs, not that she'd be able to see them anyway unless they were on her. Maybe the explosion had scared them back. Maybe they'd been trained to stay outside no matter what. Or maybe, any second now, they'd find this broken doorway and pour through to finish the job...

  A ragged hole resolved in the wall before them. Water ran from somewhere beyond. A ridge of torn concrete and rebar rose maybe five centimeters from the floor, the lip of a precipice; on the other side there was no floor, just a ruptured shaft a meter across, extending into darkness both above and below. Twisted veins of metal and plastic hung from precarious holdfasts, or lay wedged across the shaft at unforeseen angles. A stream of water plummeted through empty space, spilling from some ruptured pipe above, splattering against some unseen grate below.

  The wall across the gap had been breached. There was darkness beyond.

  "Watch this step," she said.

  They emerged into a dark, high-ceilinged space that Clarke half-remembered as the main reception area. Lubin turned and aimed back at the hole through which they'd come. Nothing jumped out at them. Nothing followed.

  "Lobby," Clarke reported. "Dark. Reception pedestals and kiosks over to the left. Nobody here."

  "Dogs?"

  "Not yet."

  Lubin's working fingers played along the edges of the breach. "What's this?"

  She leaned closer. In the boosted half-light, something glimmered from the torn cross-section like a thin vein of precious ore. Frayed bits protruded here and there from the shattered substrate.

  "Mesh of some kind," she told him. "Embedded in the wall. Metallic, very fine weave. Like thick cloth."

  He nodded grimly. "Faraday cage."

  "What?"

  "Shielding. From the effects of the pulse."

  Like a handclap from God, the lights came on.

  Empath

  Instantly Clarke was snow-blind. She brought up the H&K, waved it wildly in no particular direction. "The lights—"

  "I know."

  From somewhere deep in the building, the sudden hum of reawakened machinery.

  "Jesus Priestpoking Christ," said an omnipresent voice. "You always have to make things so damned difficult. The door was open, you know."

  "Achilles?" Her eyecaps were adjusting; objects and architecture resolved from the whitewash. But the fog wasn't entirely in her caps. Dust from the explosion hung in the air, bleeding contrast from their surroundings. Scree fanned out across the floor from their makeshift entrance. Polished stone paneling on the opposite wall, a good ten meters from the breach, had cracked and fallen in a jagged heap.

  "Or you could've just landed on the roof," the voice continued. "But no. You had to storm the battlements, and look at you now. Look at you now.

  "You can barely stand."

  Ventilators whirred in the distance, tugged wisps and streamers of suspended dust into grilles in the ceiling. The air began to clear. Lubin swayed by the wall, favoring his injured leg. The lights had returned color to Clarke's sight; the gore on Lubin's body glistened shocking rust and crimson. He looked flayed alive.

  "We could really use some help here," Clarke said.

  A sigh from somewhere, from everywhere. "Like the last time you came to town. Some things never change, eh?"

  "This is your fault, you f
ucker. Your dogs—"

  "Standard-issue post-pulse security, and did I tell you to go up against them blind? Ken, what got into you? You're damn lucky I noticed in time."

  "Look at him! Help him!"

  "Leave it," Lubin insisted, barely above a whisper. "I'm all right."

  The building heard him anyway. "You're far from all right, Ken. But you're not exactly incapacitated either, and I'm not stupid enough to let down my guard to someone who's just broken into my home by force. So let's work this out, and then maybe we can get you fixed up before you bleed to death. What are you doing here?"

  Lubin started to speak, coughed, started again: "I think you know already."

  "Assume I don't."

  "We had a deal. You were supposed to find out who was hunting us on the ridge."

  Clarke closed her eyes, remembering: The rest of the plan doesn't change.

  "In case it hasn't sunk in yet, I'm dealing with quite a few demands on my time these days," the room pointed out. "But I assure you, I have been working on it."

  "I think you've done more than that. I think you solved it, even before you lost so much of your resource base. We can tell you how to get that back, by the way. If that factors into your analysis."

  "Uh huh. And you couldn't have just phoned me up from Podunk, Maine or wherever you were?"

  "We tried. Either you were busy dealing with all those other demands on your time, or the channels are down."

  The building hummed quietly for a moment, as if in thought. Deeper into the lobby, past dormant information pedestals and brochure dispensers and an abandoned reception counter, ruby LEDs twinkled from a row of security gates. The leftmost set turned green as Clarke watched.

  "Through there," Desjardins said.

  She took Lubin's elbow. He limped at her side, maintaining a subtle distance; close enough to use her as a guide, far enough to spurn her as a crutch. An asymmetrical trail of dark sticky footprints marked his passage.

  Each gatepost was a brushed-aluminum cylinder half a meter across, extending from floor to ceiling like the bars of a cage. The only way in was between them. A black band the height of Clarke's forearm girdled each post at eye level, twinkling with color-coded constellations—but the whole band flushed red before they were halfway across the room.