Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  At any rate, against all expectations they've cruised unchallenged all the way here, just outside Halifax Harbor. Only to nearly run into this. Whatever this is.

  It's virtually invisible in the sub's lights. It's even less visible to sonar, which can barely pick it up even at point-blank range. A transparent, diaphanous membrane stretches from seabed to surface: the periscope shows a float line holding its upper edge several meters above the waves. It appears to stretch across the entire mouth of the harbor.

  It billows inward, as if the Atlantic is leaning on it from the outside. Pinpoint flashes of cold blue light sparkle across its face, sparse ripples of stardust echoing the gentle subsurface surge. Clarke recognizes the effect. It's not the membrane that sparkles, but the tiny bioluminescent creatures colliding with it.

  Plankton. It seems somehow encouraging that they still exist, so close to shore.

  Lubin's less interested in the light show than its cause. "Must be semipermeable." That would explain the oceanographic impossibility that belied its presence, a sudden sharp halocline rising across their path like a wall. Discrete boundaries are common enough in the sea: brackish water lying atop heavier saline, warm water layered over cold. But the stratification is always horizontal, a parfait of light-over-heavy as inevitable as gravity. A vertical halocline seems to violate the very laws of physics; the membrane itself may have been undetectable to sonar, but the sheer knife-edged discontinuity it produces showed up like a brick wall from a thousand meters away.

  "Looks pretty flimsy," Clarke remarks. "Not much to keep us out."

  "It's not there for us," Lubin says.

  "Well, yeah." It's a ßehemoth filter, obviously. And it must be blocking a whole range of other particles too, to generate this kind of density imbalance. "What I mean is, we can just punch right on through."

  "I don't think so," Lubin says.

  He brings the periscope down from the surface and sends it sniffing towards the barrier; on the panel, the cowering cityscape disappears in a swirl of bubbles and darkness. Clarke glimpses the 'scope's tether through the viewport, a pale thread of fiberop unwinding overhead. The periscope itself is effectively invisible, a small miracle of dynamic countershading.

  Clarke watches it on tactical instead. Lubin brings the drone to within half a meter of the membrane: a faint yellow haze resolves on the right-hand feed, where naked eyes see only darkness. "What's that?" Clarke wonders.

  "Bioelectric field," Lubin tells her.

  "You mean it's alive?"

  "Probably not the membrane itself. I'd guess it's run through with some kind of engineered neurons."

  "Really? You sure?"

  Lubin shakes his head. "I'm not even sure it's biological—the field strength fits, but it doesn't prove anything." He gives her a look. "Did you think we had a sensor to pick up brain cells at fifty paces?"

  No witty rejoinder springs to mind. Clarke turns back to the viewport, and the dim blue aurora flickering beyond. "Like an anorexic smart gel," she murmurs.

  "Probably a lot dumber. And a lot more radical—they'd have to tweak the neurons to work at low temperatures, high salinity—the membrane itself could handle osmoregulation, I suppose."

  "I don't see any blood vessels. I wonder how they get nutrients."

  "Maybe the membrane handles that too. Absorbs them right from seawater."

  "What's it for?"

  "Other than a filter?" Lubin shrugs. "An alarm, I should think."

  "So what do we do?"

  Lubin considers a moment. "Poke it," he says.

  The periscope lunges forward. On the wide-spectrum display the membrane flares on impact, bright threads radiating from the strike like a fine-veined tracery of yellow lightning. In visible light it just floats there, inert.

  "Mmm." Lubin pulls the periscope back. The membrane reverts to lowglow.

  "So if it is an alarm," Clarke says, "I'm guessing you've just set it off."

  "Not unless Halifax goes to red alert every time a piece of driftwood bumps their perimeter." Lubin runs his finger along a control bar: on tactical, the periscope heads back to the surface. "But I am willing to bet this thing'll scream a lot louder if we actually tear through it. We don't need that kind of attention."

  "So what now? Head down the coast a bit, try a land approach?"

  Lubin shakes his head. "Underwater was our best shot. A landside approach will be a lot tougher." He grabs a headset off the bulkhead and slips it over his skull. "If we can't get to a hard line, we'll try the local wireless nets. Better than nothing."

  He cocoons himself and extends feelers into the attenuate datasphere overhead. Clarke reroutes nav to the copilot's panel and turns Phocoena back into deeper water. An extra klick or so shouldn't interfere with Lubin's trawl, and there's something disquieting about being in such shallow water. It's like looking up to find the roof has crept down while you weren't looking.

  Lubin grunts. "Got something."

  Clarke taps into Lubin's headset and splits the feed to her own panel. Most of the stream's incomprehensible— numbers and statistics and acronyms, scrolling past too quickly for her to read even if she could make sense of them. Either Lubin's dug beneath the usual user interfaces, or Maelstrom has become so impoverished in the past five years that it can't support advanced graphics any more.

  But that can't be. The system has room enough for her own demonic alter-egos, after all. Those are nothing if not graphic.

  "So what's it saying?" Clarke asks.

  "Missile attack of some kind, down in Maine. They're sending lifters."

  She gives up and pulls the 'phones from her eyes.

  "That could be our best way in," Lubin muses. "Any vehicles CSIRA deploys will be operating out of a secure site with access to good intel."

  "And you think the pilot would be willing to pick up a couple of hitch-hikers in the middle of a contaminated zone?"

  Lubin turns his head. Faint lightning flickers around the edges of his eyephones, ephemeral tattoos laid over the scars on his cheeks.

  "If there is a pilot," he says, "perhaps he'll be open to persuasion."

  Gehenna

  Taka Ouellette emerged into a nightscape of guttering flame. She drove at a crawl through a hot dry snowfall, the windshield's static field barely keeping the flakes from the glass. Ash flurried white as talc in Miri's headlights, a fog of powdered earth and vegetation blinding her to the road ahead. She killed the lights, but infrared was even worse: countless particles of drifting soot, the brilliant washouts of raw flame, arid little dust-devils and writhing updrafts overloaded the display with false-color artefacts. Finally she settled for an old set of photoamp glasses in the glove compartment. The world resolved into black and white, gray on gray. The viz was still terrible, but at least the interference was in sharp focus.

  Maybe there were survivors, she told herself without much hope. Maybe the firestorm didn't reach that far. She was a good ten kilometers from the spot where her MI had risen up and slaughtered the locals. There'd been no closer cover: no storm sewers or parkades more than a few levels deep, and if there'd been any hardened shelters nearby her surviving patients wouldn't have been inclined to tell her about them. So she'd fled east while the contrails arced overhead, buried herself in a service tunnel attached to an abandoned tidal bore drilled in from Penobscot Bay. A few years ago the shamans had promised that bore would keep the lights on from Portland to Eastport, world without end. But of course the world had ended, before the first turbine had even been installed. Now the tunnel did nothing but shield burrowing mammals from the short-term consequences of their own stupidity.

  Ten kilometers over buckled and debris-strewn roads that hadn't seen service since before ßehemoth. It was nothing short of a miracle that Taka had made it to safety before the missiles had hit. Or it would have been, if the missiles had actually caused any of the devastation she was driving through now.

  She was pretty sure they hadn't. In fact, she was pretty sure they'd ne
ver even touched the ground.

  The hill she was climbing crested a hundred meters ahead. Fresh wreckage blocked her way halfway up that rise, the remains of some roadside building that had collapsed during the attack. Now it was only a great tumbledown collection of smoking cinder blocks. Not even Taka's eyeglasses could banish the shadows infesting that debris, all straight lines and sharp angles and dark empty parallelograms.

  It was too steep for Miri's limited ground-effectors. Ouellette left the van to its own devices and climbed around the wreckage. The bricks were still hot to the touch. Heat from the scorched earth penetrated the soles of her boots, a subtle warmth, unpleasant only by implication.

  On the uphill side of the debris she passed occasional objects which retained some crumbly semblance of human bones. She was breathing the dead. Perhaps some of those she inhaled would have died even earlier, if not for her efforts. Perhaps some she'd helped today were still alive, in spite of everything. She managed to take some faint comfort in that, until she crested the hill.

  But no.

  The landscape spread out before her was as wasted as the path she'd just climbed: flickering eruptions of white firelight punctuating a vista blackened as much by carbon as by nightfall. The land had not been laid waste by missiles or microbes, not this time. The thing that had done it was still visible in the distance: a tiny dark oval in the sky, barely darker than the cloud bank behind it, hanging a few degrees over the horizon. Taka almost missed it at first, even with the specs. Its outline was fuzzy, sparkling with the faint visual static of errant photons unreasonably boosted.

  But the gouts of flame that poured from its belly in the next instant showed up clearly enough even to naked eyes.

  Not a missile. Not a microbe. A lifter, scouring the distance as it had already scoured the foreground.

  And for all Taka Ouellette knew, she had been the one to bring it here.

  Oh, it wasn't dead certain. Wide-scale incendiary purges still happened under official pretext. There'd actually been a time when they were pretty routine, back in the early panic-stricken days when people thought they might actually be able to contain ßehemoth if they just had the balls to take drastic steps. Those had scaled back when it had grown apparent that N'Am was blowing its whole napalm reserve to no good effect, but they still happened sometimes in some of the wilder zones out west. It was even possible that such steps might have been undertaken without CSIRA bothering to extract their field personnel, although Taka doubted that even she would be left that far out of the loop.

  But not so far from here, not so long ago, she had let a monster escape into the real world. Floods and firestorms always seemed to follow in the wake of such breaches, and Taka had almost forgotten a time when she believed in coincidence.

  There'd be no shortage of proximate causes. Perhaps some rogue autopilot afflicted with faulty programming, tricked by a typographic error into burning the wrong part of the world. Or maybe a human pilot misled by garbled encryption, commands misheard through static and interference. None of those details mattered. Taka knew the bigger question: who had tweaked any code that subverted the automatic pilot? What had garbled instructions heard by the flesh and blood one?

  She knew the answer, too. It would have been obvious to anyone who'd seen the monster in her eyephones, a few hours before. There were no accidents. Noise was never random. And the machinery itself was malign.

  Here, staring out at a photoamplified crematorium stretching to the very horizon, it was the only explanation that made sense.

  You were a scientist once, she told herself. You rejected incantations outright. You knew the truths that protected you from bias and woolly-mindedness, and you learned them all by heart: correlation is not causation. Nothing is real until replicated. The mind sees order in noise; trust only numbers.

  Incantations of another sort, perhaps. Not very effective ones; they hadn't, for all their familiarity, saved her from the creeping certainty that she'd called an evil spirit into her vehicle. She could rationalize the superstitious awe in her head, justify it even. Her training gave her more than enough tools for that. Spirit was only a word, a convenient label for a virulent software entity forged in the fast-forward Darwinian landscape that had once been called Internet. Taka knew how fast evolutionary changes could be wrought in a system where a hundred generations passed in the blink of an eye. She remembered another time when electronic lifeforms—undesigned, unplanned, and unwanted—had grown so pestilential that the net itself had acquired the name Maelstrom. The things called Lenies, or Shredders, or Madonnas—like the Gospel demons, their names were legion—they were simply exemplars of natural selection. Extremely successful exemplars: on the other side of the world, whole countries abased themselves in their names. Or in the name of the icon on which they were based at least, some semi-mythical cult figure who'd risen to brief prominence on ßehemoth's coattails.

  This was logic, not religion. So what if these things had power beyond imagining, yet no physical substance? So what if they lived in the wires and the wireless spaces between, and moved at the speed of their own electronic thoughts? Demon, spirit—shorthand, not superstition. Only metaphor, with more points of similarity than some.

  And yet, now Taka Ouellette saw mysterious lights flashing in the sky, and found her lips moving in altogether the wrong kind of incantation.

  Oh God, save us.

  She turned and headed downhill. She could probably get around the blockage, take some back road to continue on this way, but what was the point? It was a question of cost-benefit analysis, of lives-saved-per-unit-effort. That value would certainly be higher almost anywhere but here.

  The collapsed building loomed ahead of her on the road again, gray and colorless in the amplified light. The angular shadows looked different, more ominous from this angle. They formed crude faces and body parts way past human scale, as if some giant cubist robot had collapsed in an angry heap and was summoning the strength to pull itself back together again.

  As she began to pick her way around the pile, one of the shadows detached itself and moved to block her path.

  "Holy—" Taka gasped. It was only a woman, she saw now, and unarmed—these days you noticed such things almost instinctively—but her heart had been kicked instantly into fight/flight. "Jesus, you scared me."

  "Sorry. Didn't mean to." The woman took another step clear of the debris. She was blonde, dressed entirely in some black skin-tight body stocking from neck to feet; only her hands and head were exposed, pale disembodied pieces against the contrasting darkness. She was a few centimeters shorter than Taka herself.

  There was something about her eyes, too. They seemed too bright, somehow. Probably an artefact of the specs, Taka decided. Light reflecting off the wetness of the cornea, perhaps.

  The woman jerked her chin back over her shoulder. "That your ambulance?"

  "Mobile Infirmary. Yes." Taka glanced around the full three-sixty. She saw no one else. "Are you sick?"

  A laugh, very soft. "Isn't everyone?"

  "I mean—"

  "No. Not yet."

  What is it about those eyes? It was hard to tell from this distance—the woman was ten meters away—but it looked like she might be wearing nightshades. In which case she could see Taka Ouellette way better than Taka Ouellette could see her through these fratzing photoamps.

  People in the wildlands did not generally come so well-equipped.

  Taka put her hands casually into her pockets; the act pushed her windbreaker away from the standard-issue Kimber on her hip. "Are you hungry?" she asked. "There's a cycler in the cab. The bricks taste like shit, but if you're desperate..."

  "Sorry about this," the woman said, stepping forward. "Really."

  Her eyes were like blank, translucent balls of ice.

  Taka stepped back instinctively. Something blocked her from behind. She spun and stared into another pair of empty eyes, set in a face that seemed all scarred planes and chipped stone. She didn't reach for
her gun. Somehow, he already had it.

  "It's gene-locked," she said quickly.

  "Mmm." He turned the weapon over in his hands. He wore the look of a professional appraiser. "We apologize for the intrusion," he told her, almost absently, "But we need you to disable the security on your vehicle." He did not look at her.

  "We're not going to hurt you," the woman said from behind.

  Taka, unreassured, kept her eyes on the man holding her gun.

  "Certainly not," he agreed, looking up at last. "Not while there are more efficient alternatives."

  Bagheera was one password. There were several others. Morris locked down the whole kit and kaboodle, so that not even Taka could start it up again without live authorization. Pixel electrostabbed any passengers who didn't match her pheromone profile. Tigger unlocked the doors and played dead until it heard Taka say Schroedinger: then it locked down and pumped enough halothane into the cab to turn a 110-kg assailant into a sack of jelly for a minimum of fifteen minutes. (Taka herself would be up and at 'em in a mere ninety seconds; when they'd given her the keys to Miri they'd also tweaked her blood with a resistant enzyme.)

  Mobile Infirmaries were chock-full of resources and technology. The wildlands were chock-full of desperate people literally dying for an edge, any edge. Anti-theft measures made every kind of sense, and more than a little irony: when it came right down to it, Miri was far better at killing and incapacitation than it was at healing the sick.

  Now Taka stood beside the driver's door, white-eyed blackbodies on either side. She ran through her options.

  "Tigger," she said. Miri chirped and unlocked the door.

  The woman pulled the door open and climbed into the cab. Taka started to follow. A hand clapped down on her shoulder.

  Taka turned and faced her captor. "It's gene-locked, too. I'll have to reset it if you want to drive."

  "We don't," he told her. "Not yet."