Behemoth r-3

by Peter Watts

  “Fuck, Ken!” Clarke staggered back as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. “What are you...”

  From the rustling cliff dwellings above them, sudden silence.

  Lubin had Laurel laid out on her back, his pack at her side. Her cat eyes stared up at the belly of the squat, wide and astonished.

  “Ken!”

  “I told you in-kind services might be necessary.” He fished a handgrip of some kind from his pack, pressed a stud on its hilt. A thin blade snicked into view. It hummed. One stroke and Laurel’s unitard was split from crotch to throat. The elastic fabric pulled apart like slashed mesentery.

  Chat. Snap. Sag. Just like that. It was impossible to banish the image.

  Deep abdominal cut, right side. No blood. A wisp of blue smoke curled up from the incision. It carried the scent of cauterizing flesh.

  Clarke looked around frantically. There was still no one else in sight, but it felt as though a thousand eyes were on them. It felt as though the whole teetering structure over their heads was holding its breath, as though it might collapse on them at any second.

  Lubin plunged his hand into Laurel’s side. There was no hesitation, no exploratory poke-and-prod. He knew exactly where he was going. Whatever he was after must be showing up on his inlays.

  Laurel’s eyes turned in her head. They stared at Lenie Clarke.

  “Oh God, she’s alive...”

  “She can’t feel it,” Lubin said.

  How could he do this? Clarke wondered, and an instant later: After all these years, how could I still be surprised?

  Lubin’s blood-soaked hand came back into sight. Something pea-sized glistened like a pearl in the clotting gore between thumb and forefinger. A child began crying somewhere in the warren overhead. Lubin lifted his face to the sound.

  “Witnesses, Ken...”

  He stood. Laurel lay bleeding out at his feet, her eyes still fixed on Lenie Clarke.

  “They’re used to it.” He started walking. “Come on.”

  She backed away a few steps. Laurel stared steadily at the place where Lenie Clarke had been.

  “No time,” Lubin called over his shoulder.

  Clarke turned and fled after him.

  Island Airport pushed up against the southern reaches of the static dome. There was no island that Clarke could see, only a low broad building with helicopters and ultralights scattered across its roof. Either there was no security or Lubin’s negotiations had seduced it; they walked unaccosted to a four-seater Sikorsky-Bell outfitted with passive cloaking. The pearl shucked from Laurel’s guts proved to be the keys to its heart.

  Toromilton dimmed in the distance behind them. They flew north beneath the sight of some hypothetical radar, threading between silver-gray treetops. Darkness and photocollagen hid a multitude of sins; for all Clarke knew every plant, every rock, every square meter of the landscape below was coated in ßehemoth. You couldn’t tell through the photoamps, though. The terrain scrolling past was frosted and beautiful. Occasional lakes slid beneath them like great puddles of mercury, dimly radiant.

  She didn’t mention the view to Lubin. She didn’t know if his prosthetic eyes came equipped with night vision, but he’d switched them off anyway—at least, the little green LED was dark. Nav must be talking directly to his inlays.

  “She didn’t know she was carrying it,” Clarke said. They were the first words she’d spoken since Laurel’s eyes had fixed and dilated.

  “No. Yuri made her a home-cooked meal.”

  “He wanted her dead.”

  “Evidently.”

  Clarke shook her head. Laurel’s eyes wouldn’t leave her alone. “But why that way? Why put it inside her?”

  “I suspect he didn’t trust me to keep up my end of the deal.” The corner of Lubin’s mouth twitched slightly. “Rather elegant solution, actually.”

  So someone thought that Ken Lubin might be reluctant to commit murder. It should have been cause for hope.

  “For the keys to a helicopter,” Clarke said. “I mean, couldn’t we just—”

  “Just what, Lenie?” he snapped. “Fall back on all those high-level contacts that I used to have? Call the rental agency? Has it still not dawned on you that a continental hot zone and five years of martial law might have had some impact on intercity travel?” Lubin shook his head “Or perhaps you don’t think we’re giving Desjardins enough time to set up his defenses. Perhaps we should just walk the distance to give him a sporting chance.”

  She’d never heard him talk like this before. It was as if some chess grand-master, renowned for icy calm, had suddenly cursed and kicked over the board in the middle of a game.

  They flew in silence for a while.

  “I can’t believe it’s really him,” she said at last.

  “I don’t see why not.” Lubin was back in battle-computer mode. “We know he lied about Seppuku.”

  “Maybe he made an honest mistake. Taka’s an actual MD and she even—”

  “It’s him,” Lubin said.

  She didn’t push it.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Sudbury. Evidently he didn’t want to give up home-field advantage.”

  “It wasn’t destroyed during Rio?”

  “Desjardins caused Rio.”

  “What? Who told you that?”

  “I know the man. It makes sense.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Desjardins was the first to slip the leash. He had a brief window in which he was the only man on the planet with all the power of a ’lawbreaker and none of the constraints. He used it to eliminate the competition before Spartacus freed them.”

  “But it wasn’t just Sudbury. Rio took out cities all over.” She remembered words and images streaming across the Atlantic. An industrial lifter inexplicably crashing into the CSIRA tower in Salt Lake. A fast-neutron bomb in the unlikely hands of the Daughters of Lenie. Quantum shriekers falling from orbit onto Sacramento and Boise.

  “Sudbury wouldn’t have been the only franchise seeded,” Lubin pointed out. “Desjardins must have obtained the list and gone to town.”

  “And blamed it on Rio,” Clarke murmured.

  “All the post-hoc evidence pointed there. Of course, the city was vaporized before anyone had a chance to ask questions. Very little forensic evidence survives ground zero.” Lubin tapped a control icon. “As far as anyone knew at the time, Desjardins saved the day. He was the toast of the town. At least he was the toast of anyone with enough clearance to know who he was.”

  There was a subtext to the aridity in Lubin’s voice. His clearance had been revoked by then.

  “But he couldn’t have got everyone,” Clarke said.

  “He didn’t have to. Only those infected with Spartacus. That would have been a minority even in seeded franchises, assuming he hit them early enough.”

  “There’d still be people off shift, people off sick—”

  “Wipe out half a city, you get them too.”

  “Still—”

  “You’re right, to a point,” Lubin allowed. “It’s likely some escaped. But even that worked in Desjardins’s favor. He can’t very well blame Rio for his actions now. He can’t blame everything on Madonnas, but as long as convenient scapegoats from Rio or Topeka are at large, nobody’s likely to suspect him when some piece of high-level sabotage comes to light. He saved the world, after all.”

  She sighed. “So what now?”

  “We go get him.”

  “Just like that, huh? Blind spy and his rookie sidekick are going to battle their way through sixty-five floors of CSIRA security?”

  “Assuming we can get there. He’s likely to have all approaches under continuous satellite surveillance. He must have planned for the word getting out eventually, which means he’ll be equipped to handle large-scale retaliation up to and including missile attacks from overseas. Far more than we can muster.”

  “He thinks he can take on the rest of the world?”

  “More likely he onl
y expects to see the rest of the world coming in time to get away.”

  “So is that your plan? He’s expecting an all-out assault so he won’t notice one measly helicopter?”

  “That would be nice,” Lubin admitted with a grim smile. “I’m not counting on it. And even if he doesn’t notice us on approach, he’s had nearly four years to fill the building itself up with countermeasures. It would probably be impossible for us to guard against them all even if I knew what they were.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’m still working on the details. I expect we’ll end up walking through the front door.”

  Clarke looked at his fingernails. The dried blood beneath turned their edges brown.

  “You’ve put all these pieces together,” she said. “They make him a monster.”

  “Aren’t we all.”

  “He wasn’t. Do you even remember?”

  Lubin didn’t answer.

  “You were going to kill me, remember? And I’d just killed everyone else. We were the monsters, Ken, and you remember what he did?”

  “Yes.”

  “He tried to save me. From you. He’d never even met me face to face, and he knew exactly who I was and what I’d done, and he knew first-hand what you were capable of. And it didn’t matter. He risked his life to save mine.”

  “I remember.” Lubin tweaked controls. “You broke his nose.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “That person doesn’t exist any more,” he said. “Spartacus turned him into something else.”

  “Yeah? And what did it do to you, Ken?”

  His blind, pitted face turned.

  “I know one thing it didn’t do,” she went on. “It didn’t give you your murder habit. You had that all along, didn’t you?”

  The pince-nez stared back at her like mantis eyes. A green LED ignited on its left lens.

  “What’s it like, Ken? Is it cathartic? Is it sexual? Does it get you off?” A part of her looked on, alarmed. The rest couldn’t stop goading him. “Do you have to be right there, watching us die, or is it enough to just plant the bomb and know we’ll be dropping like flies offstage?”

  “Lenie.” His voice was very calm. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish?”

  “I just want to know what you’re after, that’s all. I don’t see anyone waving pitchforks and torches at you just because Spartacus rewired your brain. If you’re sure about this, if he really did all these things and he’s really some kind of monster, then fine. But if this is just some fucked-up excuse for you to indulge your perverse little fetish, then...”

  She shook her head in disgust and glared into the darkness.

  “You’d like his perversions somewhat less than mine,” Lubin said quietly.

  “Right,” she snorted. “Thanks for the input.”

  “Lenie...”

  “What?”

  “I’m never gratuitous,” he told her.

  “Really?” She looked a challenge at him. “Never?”

  He looked back. “Well. Hardly ever.”

  Expiration Date

  Equal parts dead and alive— and hardly caring which way the balance went—Taka Ouellette had figured it out.

  She’d never done well under pressure. That had always been her problem. And Achilles the monster hadn’t understood that. Or maybe he’d understood it too well. Whatever. He had put her under the mother of all high-pressure scenarios, and of course she’d fallen apart. She’d proven once again to be the eternal fuck-up. And it was so unfair, because she knew she had a good head on her shoulders, she knew she could figure things out if only people would stop leaning on her. If only Ken hadn’t been there with his biowar canister, expecting answers right now. If only Achilles hadn’t come within a hair of incinerating her alive, and then rushing her through Seppuku’s gene sequence without so much as letting her catch her breath.

  If only Dave hadn’t been so impatient. If only she hadn’t hurried on that last crucial diagnostic...

  She was a smart lady. She knew it. But she was terrible under pressure. Bad, bad Alice, she chided herself.

  But now that the pressure was off, see how well she put everything together?

  It had only taken two things to get her over the hump. Achilles had to leave her alone for a bit, give her a chance to think. And she had to die. Well, start dying anyway. Once she knew she was dead, once she felt it in her bones, no reprieves, no last-minute rescue—all the pressure disappeared. For the first time in her life, it seemed, she could think clearly.

  She didn’t know how long it had been since Achilles had been by to torture her. She figured at least a day or two. Maybe a week—but no, surely she’d be dead already if he’d left her here for a whole week? Her joints had frozen up in the meantime. Even if she were to be released from the exoskeleton, her body was as rigid as rigor...

  Maybe it was rigor. Maybe she’d already finished dying and hadn’t noticed. Certainly things didn’t seem to hurt as much as they had—although maybe she just didn’t notice the pain so much now, on account of the raging thirst. One thing you could say about Achilles, he’d always kept her fed and watered. Didn’t want her too weak to perform, he’d said.

  But it had been so very long since he’d come by. Taka would have killed for a glass of water, if she hadn’t already died for want of one.

  But wasn’t it nice that nothing mattered any more? And wasn’t it nice that she’d actually figured it out?

  She wished that Achilles would come back. Not just for the water, although that would be nice. She wanted to show him. She wanted to prove he was wrong. She wanted him to be proud of her.

  It all had to do with that silly little song about the fleas. He must have known that, that’s why he’d serenaded her in the first place. Has smaller fleas that on him prey, and these have smaller still to bite ’em...

  Life within life. She could see it now. She was amazed that she’d never seen it before. It wasn’t even a new concept. It was downright old. Mitochondria were littler fleas that lived in every eukaryotic cell. Today they were vital organelles, the biochemical batteries of life itself—but a billion years ago they’d been independent organisms in their own right, little free-living bacteria. A larger cell had engulfed them, had forgotten to chew before it swallowed—and so they’d struck up a deal, the big cell and the little one. The big cell would provide a safe, stable environment; the little one, in turn, would pump out energy for its host. That ancient act of failed predation had turned into the primordial symbiosis...and even today, mitochondria kept their own genes, reproduced on their own schedule, within the flesh of the host.

  It was still going on. ßehemoth itself had stuck up a similar relationship within the cells of some of the creatures that shared its deep-sea environment, providing an energy surplus which the host fish used to grow faster. It grew within the cells of things here on land, too—with somewhat less beneficial consequences, true, but then virulence is always high when two radically disparate organisms encounter each other for the first time...

  Achilles hadn’t been singing about fleas at all. He’d been singing about endosymbiosis.

  Seppuku must carry its own little fleas. There was more than enough room—all those redundant genes could code for any number of viral organisms, as well as merely masking the suicidal recessives. Seppuku not only killed itself off when its job was done—it gave birth to a new symbiont, a viral one probably, that would take up residence inside the host cell. It would fill the niche so effectively that ßehemoth would find nothing but no-vacancy signs if it came sniffing around afterwards, looking to move back in.

  There were even precedents, of a sort. Taka remembered some of them from med school. Malaria had been beaten when baseline mosquitoes lost out to a faster-breeding variant that didn’t transmit Plasmodium. AIDS stopped being a threat when benign strains outnumbered lethal ones. Those were nothing, though, diseases that attacked a handful of species at most. ßehemoth threatened everything
with a nucleus; you’d never beat the witch by infecting the Human race, or replacing one species of insect with another. The only way to win against ßehemoth would be to counterinfect everything.

  Seppuku would have to redesign life itself, from the inside out. And it could do it, too: it had an edge that poor old ßehemoth had never even dreamed of. Achilles had forced her to remember that too, half an eternity ago: TNA could duplex with modern nucleic acids. It could talk to the genes of its host cell, it could join the genes of its host cell. It could change anything and everything.

  If she was right—and hovering at the edge of her life, she’d never been more certain of anything—Seppuku was more than a cure for ßehemoth. It was the most profound evolutionary leap since the rise of the eukaryotic cell. It was a solution far too radical for the fiddlers and tweakers who hadn’t been able to see beyond the old paradigm of Life As We Know It. The deep-sea enzymes, the arduous painstaking retrofits that had allowed Taka and others like her to claim immunity—improvised scaffolding, no more. Struts and crutches to keep some teetering body plan alive long after its expiration date. People had grown too attached to the chemical tinkertoys that had defined them for three billion years. The most nostalgia could ever do was postpone the inevitable.

  Seppuku’s architects were more radical. They’d thrown away the old cellular specs entirely and started from scratch, they were rewriting the very chemistry of life. Every eukaryotic species would be changed at the molecular scale. No wonder Seppuku’s creators had kept it under wraps; you didn’t have to be an M&M to be terrified by such an extreme solution. People always chose the devils they knew, even if that devil was ßehemoth. People just wouldn’t accept that success couldn’t be achieved through just a little more tinkering...

  Taka could barely imagine the shape of the success that was unfolding now. Perhaps the strange new insects she’d been seeing were the start of it, fast short lives that evolved through dozens of generations in a season. Achilles hadn’t been able to keep it out after all: those joyful, monstrous bugs proved it. He had only been able to keep it from infecting Humanity.

  And even there, he was doomed to fail. Salvation would take root in everything eventually, as it had taken root in the arthropods. It would just take more time for creatures who lived at a slower pace. Our turn will come, Taka thought.