Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (14 page)

Session begins:

Welcome to Sears Medical Services. Please open your account.

Thank you. Do you wish to limit your charges?

"No."

What can we do for you today?

"My right shoulder. Sprained or broken or something. And a blood scan. Paths especially."

Please provide blood sample.

Thank you. Please provide your medical history or your WestHem ID#.

"Forget it."

Access to your medical records will help us provide better service. All information will be kept strictly confidential except in the event of a public health or marketing priority, and in such cases we may be legally required to sequence-ID your sample anyway.

"I'll take my chances. No thanks."

Your shoulder has been recently dislocated, but is presently reseated. You will continue to experience pain and stiffness for approximately two months without treatment. You will experience reduced mobility for at least a year without treatment. Would you like treatment for the pain?

"Yeah."

We're sorry, but recent heavy user demand has depleted our stock of painkillers. Anabolic accelerants can reduce the healing period to three to five days. Shall I administer anabolic accelerants?

"Sure."

We're sorry, but recent heavy user demand has depleted our stock of accelerants. Your blood shows minor deficiencies in calcium and trace-sulfur. You have elevated levels of the hormones serotonin, oxytocin, and cortisol; elevated platelet and antibody counts consistent with moderate physical injury within the past three weeks. None of these findings should cause you serious concern, although the mineral deficiencies may reflect poor dietary habits. Would you like dietary mineral supplements?

"You actually have any?"

Sears medbooths are regularly maintained and resupplied to ensure that you have reliable access to the best in quality medical care. Would you like dietary supplements?

"No."

Cellular metabolites are high. Your blood lactate is low. Blood gases and amine count—

"What about diseases?"

All pathogen counts are within documented safe ranges.

"You sure?"

The standard blood panel tests for over eight hundred known pathogens and parasites. More extensive analysis is available for a small additional charge, but the analysis would take up to six hours. Would you like—

"No, I—but that can't be
it
, I mean—is that it?"

Is there some specific symptom that concerns you?

"Aren't there some kinds of infections that cause hallucinations?"

Can you describe these hallucinations?

"Visions only. No sound or smell or anything. I've been having them for a few weeks now, on and off. Once every few days, maybe. They go away by themselves, after a minute or two."

And can you describe what you see in these visions?

"Who cares? It's just bad biochemistry, right? Can't you do a brain scan or something?"

The NMR helmet in this booth is presently out of service, and there are no detectable psychoactives in your blood. However, different conditions can give rise to different types of hallucinations, so I may still be able to offer a diagnosis. Can you describe what you see in your visions?

"A monster."

Could you be more specific?

"This is bullshit. You think I don't know you charge by the second?"

Our rates are strictly

"Tell me what's wrong with me or I disconnect."

I don't have enough information for a proper diagnosis.

"Speculate."

Neurological damage is a strong possibility. Strokes—even very small ones that you may not be consciously aware of—can sometimes trigger visual-release hallucinations.

"Strokes? Ruptured blood vessels, that kind of thing?"

Yes. Have you recently undergone a rapid change in ambient pressure? For example, have you spent some time at high altitude or in an orbital environment, or perhaps returned from an underwater excursion?

Client disconnect 50/10/05/0932

Session ends.

Icarus

There were people who would have described Achilles Desjardins as a murderer a million times over.

He had to admit there was a certain truth to that. Every quarantine he invoked trapped the living alongside the dying, ensured that at least some of those still alive soon wouldn't be. But what was the alternative, after all? Let every catastrophe run free, to engulf the world unchecked?

Desjardins could handle the ethics, with a little help from his chemical sidekicks. He knew in his heart of hearts that that he'd never
really
killed anyone. He'd just—contained them, to save others. The actual killing had been done by whatever pestilence he'd been fighting. It may have been a subtle distinction, but it was a real one.

There were rumors, though. There'd always been rumors: the
next logical step
. The unconfirmed tales of deaths caused, not in the
wake
of some disaster, but in
advance
of it.

Preemptive containment, it was called. Path scans would pinpoint some burb—superficially healthy, but we all know how much stock you can put in
that
— as Contagion Central for The Next Big Bug. Monte Carlo sims would show with 99 percent confidence that the impending threat would get around conventional quarantines, or prove immune to the usual antibiotics. LD90s would estimate the mortality rate at 50%, or 80%, or whatever was deemed unacceptable that week, over an area of so many thousand hectares. So another one of those pesky wildfires would spring up in the parched N'American heartland— and Dicksville, Arkansas would tragically drop off the map.

Just rumors, of course. Nobody confirmed it or denied it. Nobody even really talked about it, except for Alice when she went on one of her rants. On those occasions, Desjardins would reflect that even if the stories were true—and even if such measures were a bit farther down the slippery slope than he was comfortable with—well, anyway, what was the alternative? Let every catastrophe run free, to engulf the world unchecked?

Mostly, though, he didn't think about it. Certainly it didn't have anything to do with him.

But certain items in his own in-box were starting to look really ugly. A picture was forming, a mosaic assembling itself from clouds of data, news threads drifting through Maelstrom, bits of third-generation hearsay. They all came together to form a picture in his mind, and it was starting to look like a seascape.

ßehemoth was correlated with subtle blights of photosynthetic pigment. Those blights, in turn, generally correlated with intense fires. Seventy-two percent of the blazes had occurred at seaports, in shipyards, or on marine construction sites. The rest had taken out bits and pieces of residential areas.

People had died. Lots of people. And when, on a whim, Desjardins had cross-referenced the residential obits by profession, it turned out that almost all of the fires had killed at least one marine engineer, or commercial diver, or sailor.

This fucker hadn't escaped from anybody's lab. ßehemoth had come from the ocean.

The California Current nosed down along N'AmPac's coast from the Gulf of Alaska. It mixed it up with the North Pacific and North Equatorial currents way off to the east of Mexico; those, in turn, bled into the Kuroshio off Japan, and the Eastern Counter and Southern Equatorial Currents in the South Pacific. Which ended up nuzzling the West Wind Drift, and the
ankle bone's connected to the leg bone, the leg bone's connected to the knee bone, and before you know it the whole fucking planet is encircled.

He studied the data cloud and rubbed his eyes.
How do you contain something that moves across seventy percent of the whole planet?

Evidently, you burned it.

He tapped his console. "Hey, Alice."

Her image flashed onto a window, upper-left. "Right here."

"Give me something."

"Can't yet," she said. "Not carved in stone."

"Balsa will do. Anything."

"It's small. Maybe two hundred, three hundred nanometers. Relies heavily on sulfur compounds, structurally at least. Very stripped-down genotype; I think it may use RNA for both catalysis and replication, which is a really neat trick. Built for a simple ecosystem, which makes sense if it's a construct. They never expected it to get out of culture."

"But what does it
do
?"

"Can't say. I'm working with a frog in a blender here, Killjoy. You should actually be kind of impressed that I've gotten as far as I have. You ask me, it's pretty obvious we're not
supposed
to figure out what it does."

"Could it be some kind of really nasty pathogen?"
It has to be. It has to be. If we're
burning
people
,—

"No." Her voice was flat and emphatic. "
We
are not.
They
are."

Desjardins blinked.
I
said
that?
"We're all on the same side, Alice."

"Uh-huh."

"Alice…" Sometimes she really pissed him off.
There's a war going on
, he wanted to shout.
And it's not against corpses or bureaucrats or your imaginary Evil Empires; we're fighting against a whole indifferent
universe
that's coming down around our ears and you're shitting on me because sometimes we have to accept
casualties
?

But Alice Jovellanos had a blind spot the size of Antarctica. Sometimes you just couldn't reason with her. "Just answer the question, okay? Someone obviously thinks this thing is extremely dangerous. Could it be some kind of disease?"

"Biowar agent, you mean." Surprisingly, though, she shook her head. "Unlikely."

"How come?"

"Diseases are just little predators that eat you from the inside. If they're designed to feed on your molecules, their biochemistry should be compatible with yours. The D-aminos suggest they're not."

"Only suggest?"

Jovellanos shrugged. "Frog in a blender, remember? All I'm saying is if A is gonna eat B without throwing up, they should have similar biochemistries. ßehemoth just seems a little too far into the Oort to qualify. I could be wrong."

But the vectors—shipbuilders, divers—
"Could it survive in a human host, at least?"

She pursed her lips. "Anything's possible. Look at A-51."

"What's that?"