by Peter Watts
“Too bad,” she says.
INCOMING
THE missiles shot from the Atlantic like renegade fireworks, heading west. They erupted in five discrete swarms, beginning a ten-minute game of speed chess played across half a hemisphere. They looped and corkscrewed along drunken trajectories that would have been comical if it didn’t make them so damned hard to intercept.
Desjardins did his best. Half a dozen orbiting SDI antiques had been waiting for him to call back ever since he’d seduced them two years before, in anticipation of just this sort of crisis. Now he only had to knock on their back doors; on command, they spread their legs and wracked their brains.
The machines turned their attention to the profusion of contrails scarring the atmosphere below. Vast and subtle algorithms came into play, distinguishing wheat from chaff, generating target predictions, calculating intercept vectors and fitness functions. Their insights were profound but not guaranteed; the enemy had its own thinking machines, after all. Decoys mimicked destroyers in every possible aspect. Every stutter of an attitude jet made point-of-impact predictions that much murkier. Desjardins’s date-raped battellites dispatched their own countermeasures—lasers, particle beams, missiles dispatched from their own precious and nonrenewable stockpiles—but every decision was probabilistic, every move a product of statistics. When playing the odds, there is no certainty.
Three made it through.
The enemy scored two strikes on the Florida panhandle and another in the Texan dust belt. Desjardins won the New England semifinals hands-down—none of those attacks even made it to the descending arc—but the southern strikes could easily be enough to tilt the balance if he didn’t take immediate ground action. He dispatched eight lifters with instructions to sterilize everything within a twenty-k radius, waited for launch confirmations, and leaned back, exhausted. He closed his eyes. Statistics and telemetry flickered uninterrupted beneath his lids.
Nothing so pedestrian as βehemoth, not this time. A new bug entirely. Seppuku, they were calling it.
Thank you, South Fucking Africa.
What was it with those people? They’d been a typical Third World country in so many ways, enslaved and oppressed and brutalized like all the others. Why couldn’t they have just thrown off their shackles in the usual way, embraced violent rebellion with a side order of blood-soaked retribution? What kind of crazy-ass people, after feeling the boot on their necks for generations, struck back at their oppressors with—wait for it—reconciliation panels? It made no sense.
Except, of course, for the fact that it worked. Ever since Saint Nelson the S’Africans had become masters at the sidestep, accommodating force rather than meeting it head-on, turning enemy momentum to their own advantage. Black belts in sociological judo. For half a century they’d been sneaking under the world’s guard, and hardly anyone had noticed.
Now they were more of a threat than Ghana and Mozambique and all the other M&M regimes combined. Desjardins understood completely where those other furious backwaters were coming from. More than that, he sympathized: after all, the western world had sat around making tut-tut noises while the sex plagues burned great smoking holes out of Africa’s age structure. Only China had fared worse (and who knew what was brewing behind those dark, unresponsive borders?). It was no surprise that the Apocalypse Meme resonated so strongly over there; the stunted generation struggling up from those ashes was over seventy percent female. An avenging goddess turning the tables, serving up Armageddon from the ocean floor—if Lenie Clarke hadn’t provided a ready-made template, such a perfect legend would have erupted anyway through sheer spontaneous combustion.
Impotent rage he could handle. Smiley fuckers with hidden agendas were way more problematic, especially when they came with a legacy of bleeding-edge biotech that extended all the way back to the world’s first heart transplant, for fuck’s sake, almost a century before. Seppuku worked pretty much the way its S’African creators did: a microbial judo expert and a poser, something that smiled and snuck under your guard on false pretenses and then …
It wasn’t the kind of strategy that would ever have occurred to the Euros or the Asians. It was too subtle for the descendants of empire, too chickenshit for anyone raised on chest-beating politics. But it was second nature to those masters of low status manipulation, lurking down at the toe of the dark continent. It had seeped from their political culture straight into their epidemiological ones, and now Achilles Desjardins had to deal with the consequences.
Gentle warm pressure against his thigh. Desjardins opened his eyes: Mandelbrot stood on her hind legs at his side, forepaws braced against him. She meeped and leapt into his lap without waiting for permission.
Any moment now his board would start lighting up. It had been years since Desjardins had answered to any official boss, but eyes from Delhi to McMurdo were watching his every move from afar. He’d assured them all he could handle the countermeasures. Way off across any number of oceans, ’lawbreakers in more civilized wastelands—not to mention their Leashes—would be clicking on comsats and picking up phones and putting through incensed calls to Sudbury, Ontario. None of them would be interested in his excuses.
He could deal with them. He had dealt with far greater challenges in his life. It was 2056, a full ten years since he had saved the Med and turned his private life around. Half that time since βehemoth and Lenie Clarke had risen arm-in-arm on their apocalyptic crusade against the world. Four years since the disappearance of the Upper Tier, four years since Desjardins’s emancipation at the hands of a lovesick idealist. A shade less than that since Rio, and voluntary exile among the ruins. Three years since the WestHem Quarantine. Two since the N’Am Burn. He had dealt with them all, and more.
But the South Africans—they were a real problem. If they’d had their way, Seppuku would already be burning across his kingdom like a brushfire, and he couldn’t seem to come up with a scenario that did any more than postpone the inevitable. He honestly didn’t think he’d be able to hold them off for much longer.
It was just as well that he’d planned for his retirement.
TOR BOOKS BY PETER WATTS
Starfish
Maelstrom
βehemoth: β-Max
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
βEHEMOTH: β-MAX
Copyright © 2004 by Peter Watts
Utah Phillips quote used with his kind permission.
The writing of this book was in part supported by a grant from the Toronto Arts Council.
All rights reserved.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book
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First Edition: July 2004
eISBN 9781466881136
First eBook edition: August 2014
