They got their first live customers at Bucksport.
They pulled off the main drag at about two a.m., next to a Red Cross Calvin cycler with a worrisome yellow telltale winking from its panel. Ouellette examined it by the light of an obsolete billboard, running on stored solar, that worked ceaselessly to sell them on the benefits of smart cloth and dietary proglottids.
“Needs restocking.” She climbed back into Miri and called up a menu.
“I thought they got everything they needed from the air,” Clarke said. That’s what photosynthesis was, after all—she’d been amazed to discover how many complex molecules were nothing more than various combinations of nitrogen, carbon, and oh-two.
“Not trace elements.” Ouellette grabbed a cellulose cartridge, its compartments filled with red and ochre paste, from the dispensing slot. “This one’s low on iron and potassium.”
The billboard was still hawking its nonexistent wares the next morning when Clarke squeezed herself into Miri’s toilet cubicle. When she came out again, two silhouettes were plastered against the windshield.
She stepped carefully over Ouellette and climbed up between the bucket seats. Two Hindian boys—one maybe six, the other verging on adolescence—stared in at her. She leaned forward and stared back. Two pairs of dark eyes widened in surprise; the younger boy emitted a tiny yelp. The next second both had scampered away.
“It’s your eyes,” Ouellette said behind her.
Clarke turned. The doctor was sitting up, hugging the back of the driver’s seat from behind. She blinked, gummy-eyed in the morning light.
“And the suit,” she continued. “Seriously, Laurie, you look like some kind of cut-rate zombie in that get-up.” She reached behind her and tapped the locker in the rear wall. “You could always borrow something of mine.”
She was getting used to her alias. Ouellette’s unsolicited advice was another matter.
A half-dozen people were already lined up when they climbed out into daylight. Ouellette smiled at them as she strode around to the back of the vehicle and lifted the awning. Clarke followed, still sleepy; Miri’s mouths opened as she passed. The throat’s silver lining had withdrawn, exposing a grid of sensor heads studding the cylindrical wall behind.
Icons and telltales flickered across the panel on Miri’s backside. Ouellette played them with absent-minded expertise, her eyes on the accumulating patients. “Everybody’s standing, nobody’s bleeding. And no obvious cases of ßehemoth. Good start.”
Half a block behind the billboard, the two children Clarke had surprised pulled a middle-aged woman into sight around the corner of a long-defunct restaurant. She moved at her own pace, resisting her children as though they were eager dogs straining to slip the leash. Further down the road, picking his way across scattered debris and asphalt-cracking clumps of grass, a man limped forward on a cane.
“We just got here,” Clarke murmured.
“Yup. Usually I blast the music for a couple of minutes, just to let people know. But a lot of the time it isn’t even necessary.”
Clarke panned the street. A dozen now, at least. “Somebody really spread the word.”
“And that,” Ouellette told her, “is how we’re going to win.”
Bucksport was one of Ouellette’s regular stops. The locals knew her, or at least knew of her. She knew them, and ministered unto them as she always had, her omnipresent music playing softly in the background. The sick and the injured passed like boluses of food through Miri’s humming depths; sometimes the passage would take only moments, and Ouellette would be waiting at the other side with a derm or injection, or some viral countervector to be snorted like an antique alkaloid. Other times the patients would linger inside while the MI knitted their bones back together, or spliced torn ligaments, or burned out malignancies with bursts of focused microwaves. Occasionally the problem was so obvious that Ouellette could diagnose it with a glance, and cure it with a shot and a word of advice.
Clarke helped when she could, which was rarely; Miri maintained its own inventories, and Ouellette had little need of Clarke’s limited expertise in fish bites. Ouellette taught her some basics on the fly and let her triage the line-up. Even that wasn’t entirely successful. The rules were easy enough but some of the younger ferals recoiled at Clarke’s appearance: the strange black skin that seemed to ripple when you weren’t quite looking; the little outcroppings of machinery from flesh; the glassy, featureless eyes that both looked at you and didn’t, that belonged not so much to a human being as to some unconvincing robot imposter.
Eventually Clarke contented herself with the adults, and gave them vital tips while they waited their turn. There was, after all, more to dispense than medical attention. Now, there were instructions.
Now, there was a plan.
Wait for the missiles, she told them. Watch the starbursts; track the fragments as they fall, find them on the ground. This is what you look for; this is what it is. Take whatever samples you can—soil in mason jars, rags swept through aerosol clouds at ground zero, anything. A teaspoon-full might be enough. A tin can, half full, could be a windfall. Whatever you can get, however you can get it.
Be fast: the lifters may be coming. Grab what you can and run. Get away from the impact zone, hide from the flamethrowers any way you can. Tell others, tell everyone; spread the word and the method. But no radio. No networks, no fiberop, no wireless. The ether will fuck you up the ass if you let it; trust only to word-of-mouth.
Find us at Freeport, or Rumford, or places between. Come back to us: bring us what you have.
There may be hope.
Augusta made her skin crawl. Literally.
They approached from the east, just before midnight, along the 202. Taka took them off the main drag in favor of a gravel road a short ways down the gentle slope of the Kennebec River valley. They parked on a ridge that overlooked the shallow topography below.
Everything this side of the river had been abandoned; almost everything on the far side had been, too. The bright core that remained huddled amidst a diffuse spread of dark, empty ruins left over from the good old days. Its nimbus reflected off the cloud bank overhead, turned the whole tableau to grainy, high-contrast black-and-white.
Faint gooseflesh rippled along Clarke’s arms and nape. Even her diveskin seemed to be, well, shivering, a sensation so subtle it hovered on the threshold of imagination.
“Feel that?” Ouellette said.
Clarke nodded.
“Static-field generator. We’re just on the outer edge of the field.”
“So it gets worse inside?”
“Not right inside, of course. The field’s directed outward. But yeah, the closer you get to the perimeter, the more your hair stands on end. Once you’re inside you don’t feel it. Not that way, at least. There are other effects.”
“Like what?”
“Tumors.” Ouellette shrugged. “Better than the alternative, I guess.”
A cheek-to-jowl cluster of lights and architecture rose against the dark, its outlines suggesting the contours of a crude, pixelated dome. The new Augusta was obviously squeezing every cubic centimeter it could out of the safe zone. “We going in there?” Clarke asked.
Ouellette shook her head. “They don’t need us.”
“Can we go in there?” For all its lost stature, Augusta must still have portals into the pipe. Lubin might have been better off sticking with them after all.
“You mean, like shore leave? Stop by on our way through for some VR and a hot whirlpool?” The doctor laughed softly. “Doesn’t work that way. They’d probably let us in if there were some kind of emergency, but everybody kind of sticks to their own these days. Miri’s out of Boston.”