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 never 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.