“You are so full of shit. Saving thousands? There are people trying to save the world, and you’re trying to stop them. You’re killing billions. You’re killing everyone. So you can get away with this...”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s like I tried to explain to Alice the First. When someone steals your conscience, you have a really hard time giving a shit.”
“You’ll lose. You don’t run the world, you only run this...piece of it. You can’t keep Seppuku out forever.”
Achilles nodded thoughtfully. “I know. But don’t worry your pretty little head about it. I’ve already planned for my retirement. You have other concerns.”
He pushed her head down against the stocks, stretching her neck. He kissed her nape.
“Like for example, the fact that you’re late for class. Let’s see. Yesterday we were talking about the origin of life, as I recall. And how some might think that ßehemoth had evolved on the same tree that we did, and it took a while but you eventually remembered why those people had their heads up their asses. And that was because...?”
She hadn’t forgotten. ßehemoth’s pyranosal RNA couldn’t cross-talk with modern nucleic acids. There’d be no way for one template to evolve into the other.
But right now, there was no way in this hell that she was going to bark on command. She clenched her jaw and kept silent.
Of course it didn’t bother him a bit. “Well, then. Let’s just do the review exercises, shall we?”
Her body spun back into position. The assembly locked into place. The exoskeleton drew back her arms, spread her legs. She felt herself cracking open like a wishbone.
She vacated the premises, pushed her consciousness back into that perfect little void where pain and hope and Achilles Desjardins didn’t exist. Far beneath her, almost underwater, she felt her body moving back and forth to the rhythm of his thrusting. She couldn’t feel him in her, of course—she’d been spoiled by all the battering rams he’d used to pave the way. She found that vaguely amusing for reasons she couldn’t quite pin down.
She remembered Dave, and the time he’d surprised her on the patio. She remembered live theatre in Boston. She remembered Crystal’s fourth birthday.
Strange sounds followed her through from the other world, rhythmic sounds, faintly ridiculous in context. Someone was singing down there, an inane little ditty rendered off-key while her distant body got the gears:
There had to be a subtext, of course. There would be a quiz at the end of class.
Only there wasn’t. Suddenly the thrusting stopped. He hadn’t ejaculated—she was familiar enough with his rhythms to know that much. He pulled out of her, muttering something she couldn’t quite make out way up here in the safe zone. A moment later his footsteps hurried away behind her, leaving only the sound of her own ragged breathing.
Taka was alone with her body and her memories and the tiled creatures on the floor. Achilles had abandoned her. Something had distracted him. Maybe someone at the door. Maybe the voice of some other beast, howling in his head.
She was hearing those a lot herself these days.
Firebreathers
The airwaves seethed with tales of catastrophe. From Halifax to Houston, static-field generators sparked and fried. Hospitals deep within the claves and fortresses on the very frontier flickered and blacked out. A report from somewhere around Newark had an automated plastics refinery melting down; another from Baffin Island claimed that a He-3 cracking station was venting its isotopes uncontrollably into the atmosphere. It was almost as if the Maelstrom of old had been reborn, in all its world-spanning glory but with a hundred times the virulence.
The Lenies were on the warpath—and suddenly they were hunting in groups. Firewalls crumbled in their path; exorcists engaged and were reduced to static on the spot.
“Lifter just crashed into the Edmonton Spire,” Clarke said. Lubin looked back at her. She tapped her ear, where his borrowed earbead relayed privileged chatter from the ether. “Half the city’s on fire.”
“Let’s hope ours is better behaved,” Lubin said.
Add that to your total score, she told herself, and tried to remember: this time it was different. Lives sacrificed now would be repaid a thousandfold down the road. This was more than Revenge. This was the Greater Good, in all its glory.
Remembering it was easy enough. Feeling right with it was something else again.
This is what happens when you get Lenie to like Lenie.
They were back on the coast, standing on the edge of some derelict waterfront in a ghost town whose name Clarke hadn’t bothered to learn. All morning they had crept like black, blank-eyed spiders through this great junkscape of decaying metaclass="underline" the dockside cranes, the loading elevators, the warehouses and dry-docks and other premillennial monstrosities of iron and corrugated steel. It was not a radio-friendly environment under the best conditions—and right here, the intermittent voices in Clarke’s ear were especially thick with static.
Which was, of course, the whole idea.
To one side, a corroding warehouse with sheet-metal skin and I-beam bones faced the water. To the other, four gantry cranes rose into the sky like a row of wireframe giraffes sixty meters high. They stood upright, their necks looming over the lip of the waterfront at a seventy-degree angle. A great grasping claw dangled from each snout, poised to descend on freighters that had given up on this place decades before.
A thin leash ran through a nose ring on the crane nearest the warehouse, a loop of braided polypropylene no thicker than a man’s thumb. Both ends of that loop draped across empty space to a point partway up the neck of the second crane in line; there, they had been tied off around a cervical girder. Against the backdrop of cables and superstructure the rope looked as insubstantial as spider silk.
Spider silk was what they’d been hoping for, actually. Surely, in this whole godforsaken industrial zone, somebody must have left some of the stuff behind. Spider rope had been a dirt-cheap commodity in the biotech age, but it had evidently grown a lot scarcer in the bioapocalyptic one. All they’d found was a coarse coil of antique plastic braid, hanging in an abandoned boathouse at the far end of the strip.
Lubin had sighed and said it would have to do.
Clarke had nearly passed out just watching him climb that leaning, precarious scaffold. The rope uncoiling in his wake, he’d wriggled up the first giraffe’s throat and dangled head-down like an ant from its eye socket, his legs wrapped around some spindly brace she was convinced would snap at any moment. She hadn’t taken a complete breath until Lubin was safely on the ground again. Then she’d gone through the whole nerve-wracking experience all over again as he climbed the second crane, carrying both ends of the rope this time. He’d stopped well short of the top, thank God, tying off the ends and leaving the rope looped between the structures like a nylon vine.
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.”