Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  Now, back on solid ground, he told her that she'd get better traction during her own climb if she wore—

  "No fucking way," Clarke said.

  "Not to the top. Just to where the line's tied off. Halfway."

  "That's more than halfway and you know it. One slip and I'm sockeye."

  "Not at all. The crane leans. You'll be dropping into the water."

  "Yeah, from fifty meters. You think I—wait a second, I'm supposed to drop into the water?"

  "That's the plan."

  "Well it's a really bad one."

  "They'll be on guard as soon as they realize they've been decoyed. If they notice the rope at that point it could be fatal. You'll untie it and pull it down with you. You'll be safe enough underwater."

  "Forget it, Ken. It's just a rope, and your plan's so far into the Oort that it would take another lunatic to figure it out even if he did see—"

  She stopped herself. Lunatic might, after all, be a reasonable description of the man they were dealing with. For an instant she was back on that scorched hulk off Sable, lifting her foot from a human ribcage.

  And Lubin had said Whoever's behind this is smarter than me...

  "I don't want to take any chances," he said now, softly.

  She tossed off a few more protests, but they both knew it was only theatre. Eventually she drove Miri to a safe distance and hiked back along the road while Lubin called in his report from the ultralight: a vector holed up in an abandoned warehouse, growing industrial quantities of Seppuku in a basement lab.

  Control cabs nestled between the shoulder blades of each crane. Vandals or weather had long since knocked out most of the windows. Clarke and Lubin took cover there and waited. A faint whistle of rising wind sang through the framework above them.

  It came down from the sky like a bloated dragon, vented gas roaring from its trim bladders. The whirlwind heralded its coming; a nor'easter had built throughout the day, and now it whistled across the waterfront with strength enough to drown voices. Sliding sheet-metal doors caught the wind and tugged clanging against their rollers; thin stretched wires and massive cables rang and thrummed like Hell's own string section. The lifter groaned and sparked down through the blow. It settled above the water, in front of the warehouse, and rotated to bring all its guns to bear.

  Lubin put his head next to Clarke's. "Go."

  She followed him from the gutted cab. Within seconds he was meters above her, sliding up through the crane like an arboreal python. She gritted her teeth and climbed after. It wasn't as bad as she'd feared; a narrow ladder ran up the inside of the structure like a trachea, sprouting safety hoops at one-meter intervals. But the wind buffeted on all sides, and surrounding girders sliced it into quarrelsome and unpredictable vortices. They pushed her against the ladder, twisted her sideways, slipped under her backpack and tried to yank it from her body.

  A sharp thunderclap from her left. She turned, and froze, and clung to the ladder for dear life; she'd hadn't realized how high she'd already climbed. The waterfront shuddered behind and beneath her, not quite a tabletop model yet but close enough, too close. Far below, the harbor churned green and white.

  Another thunderclap. Not weather, though. The wind, for all its strength, howled beneath a blue and cloudless sky. That sound had come from the lifter. Seen from above the vehicle looked like a great gunmetal jewel, faceted into concave triangles: skin sucked against geodesic ribs by the buoyant vacuum inside. It roared briefly above the wind, a hissing bellow of gaseous ballast. Its belly nearly touched the water; its back curved higher than the warehouse roof, several stories above.

  Tame lightning, she remembered. For buoyancy control. High-voltage arcs, superheating trapped gases in the trim tanks.

  And Ken's going to ride this monster.

  Better him than me.

  She looked up. Lubin had reached his departure point and was untying one end of the rope, his legs wrapped around ambient scaffolding. He gestured impatiently at her— then staggered, knocked briefly off-balance by a gust of wind. His hand shot out to steady himself on a nearby cable.

  She kept going, steadfastly refusing to look down again no matter how many obscene noises the lifter made. She counted rungs. She counted girders and crossbeams and rivets as the wind howled in her ears and tugged at her limbs. She counted bare steely patches where the red and yellow paint had sloughed away—until it reminded her that she was climbing a structure so ancient that its color wasn't even intrinsic to the material, but had been layered on as an afterthought.

  After a year or two she was at Lubin's side, somewhere in the jet stream. Lubin was studying the lifter, the ubiquitous binocs clamped around his head. Clarke did not follow his gaze.

  One end of the rope was still tied firmly down. From that terminus it led out and up to the apex of the next crane, looped through whatever needle's eye Lubin had found up there, and stretched back to the final half-meter of polyprope now wrapped around his diveskinned hand. A satcam, looking down on the tableau, would have seen two thin white lines pointing towards the lifter from their current roost.

  It would also have seen an ominously large, empty space between the point where the line ended and the point where the lifter began.

  "Are you sure it's long enough?" Clarke shouted. Lubin didn't answer. He probably hadn't heard the question through the wind and the 'skin of his hood. Clarke had barely heard herself.

  His tubular eyes stayed fixed on the target for a few more moments. Then he flipped the binocs up against his forehead. "They just deployed the teleop!" he called. The wind blew most of his decibels sideways and pitched in fifty of its own, but she got the gist. All according to plan, so far. The usual firestorm from on high wouldn't do the trick this time around: the hot zone Lubin had reported was too deep in the warehouse, too close to the waterline. It would take a free-moving teleop to scope the situation and personally deliver the flames—and local architecture hashed radio so badly that the little robot would have to stay virtually line-of-sight just to maintain contact with the mothership. Which meant bringing the lifter down low.

  So low that a sufficiently motivated person might be able to drop onto it from above...

  Lubin had one arm hooked around a cable as thick as his wrist—one of the fraying metal tendons that kept the necks of the cranes upright. Now he unhooked his legs from their purchase and ducked under that cable, coming up on the other side. The out side. He was now hanging off the edge of the crane, not rattling about within it. He had one arm wrapped in polypropylene and the other hooked around the cable, his feet braced against a girder by nothing beyond his own weight.

  Suddenly Ken Lubin looked very fragile indeed.

  His mouth moved. Clarke heard nothing but wind. "What!"

  He leaned back towards the structure, enunciating each syllable: "You know what to do."

  She nodded. She couldn't believe he was actually going to go through with this. "Good lu—" she began—

  And staggered, flailing, as the hand of an invisible giant slapped her sideways.

  She grasped out blindly, at anything. Her hands closed on nothing. Something hard cracked against the back of her head, bounced her forward again. A girder rushed by to her right; she caught it and hung on for dear life.

  Ken?

  She looked around. Where Lubin's face and chest had been, there was nothing but howling space. His forearm was still wrapped around the cable, though, like a black grappling hook. She lowered her gaze a fraction: there was the rest of him, scrabbling for purchase and finding it. Regaining his balance in the gale, pulling himself back up, that fucking plastic rope still wound around one hand. The wind slackened for the briefest moment; Lubin ducked back into the wireframe cage.

  "You okay?" she asked as the wind rose again, and saw in the next instant the blood on his face.

  He leaned in close. "Change of plans," he said, and struck her forearm with the edge of his free hand. Clarke yelped, her grip broken. She fell. Lubin caught her, pul
led her abruptly sideways. Her shoulder slammed against metal and twisted. Suddenly the crane wasn't around her any more. It was beside her.

  "Hang on," Lubin growled against her cheek.

  They were airborne.

  She was far too petrified to scream.

  For endless seconds they were in freefall. The world rushed towards them like a fly-swatter. Then Lubin's arm tightened around her waist and some new force pulled them off-center, into a sweeping arc that only amended gravity at first, then defied it outright. They swooped down over whitecaps and churning flotsam, and she seemed to grow kilograms heavier; then they were rising again, miraculously, the wind catching them from behind. The colossal squashed spheroid of the lifter loomed above and then ahead and then below, its numberless polygons reflecting like the facets of some great compound eye.

  And then they were dropping again, through an invisible tingling barrier that scratched sparks across her face, and Clarke barely put her hands out in time to break the fall.

  "Ow!"

  They were on a steep slope, facing uphill. She lay on her stomach, hands splayed forward, in a triangular depression perhaps three meters on a side. Her diveskin squirmed like a torture victim. Lubin lay half on top of her, half to one side, his right arm pressed into the small of her back. Some defiantly functional module in her brain realized that he'd probably kept her from rolling off the edge of the world. The rest of her gulped air in great whooping breaths and played I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive on infinite loop.

  "You all right?" Lubin's voice was low but audible. The wind still pushed at their backs, but it seemed suddenly vague, diffuse.

  "What—" Tiny electric shocks prickled her tongue and lips when she tried to speak. She tried to slow her breathing. "What the fuck are you—"

  "I'll take that as a yes." He lifted his hand from her back. "Keep low, climb up the slope. We're far too close to the edge of this thing." He clambered away uphill.

  She lay in the depression, the pit in her own stomach infinitely deeper. She felt ominously lightheaded. She put one hand to her temple; her hair was sticking straight out from her scalp as if her head had its own personal Van Allen belt. Her diveskin crawled. These things have static-fields, she realized.

  Taka Ouellette had talked about cancer.

  Finally her heart slowed to jackhammer rhythm. She forced herself to move. She squirmed on her belly past the lip of the first polygon and into the concavity of the second; at least the ridges between provided a foothold against the slope. The grade lessened with each meter. Before too long she dared to crouch, and then to stand upright.

  The wind blew harder against chest than legs—some kind of distance-cubed thing going on with the static field—but even against her head it wasn't as strong as it had been up in the crane. It blew her levitating hair into her face every time she turned around, but she barely noticed that inconvenience next to the ongoing convulsions of her diveskin.

  Lubin was kneeling near the lifter's north pole, on a smooth circular island in a sea of triangles. The island was about four meters across, and its topography ranged from thumbnail-sized fiberop sockets to hatches the size of manhole covers. Lubin had already got one of those open; by the time Clarke reached him he'd put whatever safecracking tools he'd used back into his pack.

  "Ken, what the fuck is going on?"

  He wiped blood from his cheek with the back of one hand. "I changed my mind. I need you along after all."

  "But what—"

  "Seal up." He pointed at the open hatch. Dark viscous liquid lapped in the opening, like blood or machine oil. "I'll explain everything once we're inside."

  "What, in there? Will our implants even wor—"

  "Now, Lenie. No time."

  Clarke pulled up her hood; it wriggled disquietingly on her scalp. At least it kept her hair from flying everywhere.

  "What about the rope?" she said suddenly, remembering.

  Lubin stopped in the middle of sealing his face flap. He glanced back at the gantry cranes; a fine white thread lashed back and forth from the nearest, a whip in the wind.

  "Can't be helped," he said. "Get in."

  Viscous, total darkness.

  "Ken." Machine voice, vocoder voice. It had been a while.

  "Yes."

  "What are we breathing?"

  "Flamethrower fuel."

  "What!"

  "It's perfectly safe. You'd be dead otherwise."

  "But—"

  "It doesn't have to be water. Hydroxyl groups contain oxygen."

  "Yeah, but they built us for water. I can't believe napalm—"

  "It's not napalm."

  "Whatever it is, it's got to gum up our implants somewhere down the road."

  "Down the road isn't an—isn't an issue. We'll be fine if they last for a few more hours."

  "Will they?"

  "Yes."

  At least her diveskin had stopped moving.

  A sudden tug of inertia. "What's that?" she buzzed, alarmed.

  "Fuel feed. They're firing."

  "At what? There wasn't any hot zone."

  "Maybe they're just being cautious."

  "Or maybe Seppuku was really there all along and we didn't know it."

  He didn't answer.

  "Ken?"

  "It's possible."

  The surge had pushed her against something soft, and slippery, and vaguely flexible. It seemed to extend in all directions; it was too smooth to get any kind of a grip.

  They weren't in a tank, she realized. They were in a bladder. It didn't just empty, it deflated. It collapsed.

  "Ken, when this thing fires...I mean, could we get sucked out into—"

  "No. There's a—grille."

  Vocoders stripped most of the feeling out of a voice at the best of times, and this syrupy stuff didn't improve performance any. Still, she got the sense that Lubin didn't want to talk.

  As if Ken's ever been King of the Extroverts.

  But no, there was something else. She couldn't quite put her finger on it.

  So she floated there in amniotic darkness, breathing something that wasn't napalm, and remembered that electrolysis involved tiny electrical sparks. She waited and wondered if one of them would ignite the liquid passing through her and around her, wondered if her implants were about to turn this whole lifter into an airborne fireball. Another victim of the Lenies, she mused, and smiled to herself.

  But then she remembered that Lubin still hadn't told her why she was here.

  And then she remembered the blood on his face.

  In Kind

  By the time they reached their destination, Lubin was blind.

  The frayed cable on the crane hadn't just gashed his face; it had torn his hood. The lifter's incendiary saliva had seeped through that tear before the diveskin could heal. It had diffused across his face. A thin layer had pooled beneath his eyecaps, corroding his corneas down to pitted jelly. A calm, mechanical voice in the darkness had told Clarke what he expected: the ability to tell light from dark, at least. Perhaps some vestigial perception of fuzzy blobs and shadows. The resolution of actual images was very unlikely. He would need her to be his eyes.

  "Jesus Christ, Ken, why did you do it?"

  "I gambled."

  "You what?"

  "We could hardly have stayed on top of the lifter. There are sterilization measures even if the wind didn't blow us off, and I wasn't certain how corrosive this—"

  "Why didn't we just walk away? Regroup? Do it again later?"

  "Later we could well be incapacitated, assuming your friend is still contagious. Not to mention the fact that I filed a false report and haven't called in since. Desjardins knows something's wrong. The more we delay the more time he has to prepare."

  "I think that's gullshit. I think you've just got such a hard-on for getting back at him that you're making stupid decisions."

  "You're entitled to your opinion. If I had to assess my own performance lately, I'd say a worse decision was not leaving you back
on the Ridge."

  "Right, Ken. Achilles had me on a leash for the past two weeks. I was the one who read Seppuku ass-backwards. Jesus, man, you've been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for five years just like the rest of us. You're not exactly at the top of your game."

  Silence.

  "Ken, what are we going to do? You're blind!"

  "There are ways around that."

  Eventually, he said they'd docked. She didn't know how he could tell—the sloshing of liquid that contained them, perhaps, some subtle inertia below Clarke's own perceptual threshold. Certainly no sound had tipped him off. Buried deep in the lifter's vacuum, the bladder was as quiet as outer space.

  They crept out onto the back of the beast. It had come to rest in an enormous hanger with a clamshell roof whose halves were sliding shut above them. It was deep dusk, judging from the opacity of the sky beyond. The lifter sloped away in all directions, a tiny faceted planet birthing them from its north pole. Light and machine sounds came from below—and an occasional human voice—but these upper reaches were all grayscale.

  "What do you see?" Lubin said in a low voice.

  She turned and caught her breath. He'd peeled back his hood and removed his eyecaps; the gray of his skin was far too dark, and pebbled with blisters. His exposed eyes were clusters of insectile compound bumps. Iris and pupil were barely visible behind, as if seen through chipped, milky glass.

  "Well?"

  "We—we're indoors," she told him. "Nobody in sight, and it's probably too dark for drybacks to see us up here anyway. I can't see the factory floor, but it sounds like there are people down there. Are you—fuck, Ken, did it—"

  "Just the face. The 'skin sealed off everything else."

  "Does it—I mean, how do you—"

  "There's a gantry on an overhead rail to the left. See it?"