Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (29 page)

"That would be a problem."

"That
is
a problem. If you think I'm going to amble innocently into the clutches of someone who won't even give me their name, you're sadly in need of a patch."

"I'm sorry to hear that. However, it doesn't matter. We can still meet."

"Not if neither of us knows how to tag the other, we can't."

"I'll see you on Wednesday," the app told him. "Goodbye."

"Wait a second…"

No answer.

Oh, man.
Someone was going to meet him on Wednesday. Someone who evidently could drop down onto any place under geosynch at 48 hours' notice. Someone who knew of a link between Channer Vent and ßehemoth, and who seemed to think they could find him without any identifiers at all.

Someone was going to meet him whether he wanted to or not.

Achilles Desjardins found that a little bit ominous.

Necrosis

There were places in the world that lived on the arteries between
here
and
there
; whatever they generated
within
wasn’t self-sustaining. When tourniqueted—a quarantine, a poisoned water table, the sheer indifference of citizens abandoning some industrial lost-cause—they withered and turned gangrenous.

Sometimes, eventually, the walls would come down. The quarantine would end or atrophy. Gates would open, or just rust away. But by then it was too late; the tissue was long since necrotic. No new blood flowed into the dead zone. Maybe a few intermittent flickers along underground cables, peripheral nerves where Maelstrom jumped the gap. Maybe a few people who hadn't gotten out in time, still alive; others arriving, not so much seeking
this
place as avoiding some other.

Lenie Clarke was in such a place now, a town full of wreckage and smashed windows and hollow eyes staring from buildings nobody had bothered to condemn. Whatever life was here did not, for the most part, take any notice of her passing. She avoided the obvious territorial boundaries: the toothless skulls of children significantly arranged along a particular curb; a half-mummified corpse, crucified upside-down beneath the cryptic phrase
St. Peter the Unworthy
; derelict vehicles that just happened to block this road or that—rusty barricades, herding the unwary toward some central slaughterhouse like fish in a weir.

Two days before she'd skirted a coven of do-gooders who'd been live-trapping derelicts as though they were field mice, forcibly injecting them with some kind of gene cocktail. Xanthoplast recipes, probably. Since then, she’d managed to avoid seeing anyone. She moved only at night, when her marvelous eyes gave her every advantage. She steered clear of the local headquarters and territorial checkpoints with their burning oil drums and their light poles and their corroded, semi-functional Ballard stacks. There were traps and hidden guard posts, manned by wannabes eager to make their way up the local hierarchy; they seeped slight infrared, or slivers of light invisible to mere meat. Lenie Clarke noted them a block away and changed course, their attendants never the wiser.

She was almost through the zone when someone stepped from a doorway ten meters ahead of her; a mongrel with dominant Latino genes, skin the color of slate in the washed-out light boosted through her eyecaps. Bare feet, shreds of sprayed-on plastic peeling from the soles. A firearm of some kind in one hand; two fingers missing. The other hand had been transformed into an improvised prosthetic, wrapped round and round in layers of duct tape studded with broken glass and rusty nails.

He looked directly at her with eyes that shone as white and empty as her own.

"Well," Clarke said after a moment.

His clubbed limb gestured roughly at the surrounding territory. "Not much, but mine." His voice was hoarse with old diseases. "There's a toll."

"I'll go back the way I came."

"No you won't.”

She casually tapped a finger against her wristwatch. She kept her voice low, almost subvocal: "Shadow."

"Funds transferred," the device replied.

Clarke sighed and sloughed off her pack. One corner of her mouth curled the slightest fraction.

"So how do you want me?" she asked.

* * *

He wanted her from behind, and he wanted her face in the dirt. He wanted to call her
Bitch
and
cunt
and
stumpfuck
. He wanted to cut her with his homebuilt mace.

She wondered if this could be called
rape
. She hadn't been offered a choice. Then again, she hadn't exactly said
no
, either.

He hit her when he came, backhanded her head against the ground with his gun hand, but the gesture had an air of formality about it. Finally, he rolled off of her and stood.

She allowed herself back inside then, let the distant observation of her own flesh revert again to first-hand experience. "So." She rolled onto her back, wiping the street from her mouth with the back of one hand. "How was I?"

He grunted and turned his attention to her pack.

"Nothing you want in there," she said.

"Uh-huh." Something caught his eye anyway. He reached in and pulled out a tunic of black shimmering fabric.

It squirmed in his hand.

"
Shit!
" He dropped it onto the ground. It lay there, inert. Playing dead.

"What the
fuck
…" he looked at Clarke.

"Party clothes," she said, getting to her feet. "Wouldn't fit you."

"Bullshit," the mongrel said. "It's that reflex copolymer stuff. Like Lenny Clarke wears."

She blinked. "What did you say?"

"Leonard Clarke. Deep Sea Gillman. Did the quake." He nudged the diveskin with one gnarled toe. "You think I don't
know
?" He raised his gun-hand to his face; the barrel touched the corner of an eyecap. "How you think I got these, eh? Not the first groupie in town."

"
Leonard
Clarke
?
"

"I
said
already. You deaf, or stupid?"

"I just let you rape me, asshole. So probably stupid."

The mongrel looked at her for an endless moment.

"You done this before," he said at last.

"More times than you can count."

"Get to maybe like it after a while?"

"No."

"You didn't fight."

"Yeah? How many do, with a gun to their heads?"

"You're not even scared."

"I'm too fucking tired. You gonna let me go, or kill me, or what? Anything but listening to more of this shit."

The mongrel took a hulking step forward. Lenie Clarke only snorted.

"Go," the mongrel said in a strange voice. Then added, absurdly: "Where you headed?"

She arched an eyebrow. "East."

He shook his head. "Never get through. Big quarantine. Goes halfway down to the Dust Belt." He pointed south, down a side street. "Better go 'round."

Clarke tapped her watch. "It's not listed."

"Then don't. Fuck lot I care."

Keeping her eyes up, Clarke bent down and picked up her tunic. The mongrel held her pack out by the straps, glancing down into its depths.

He tensed.

Her hand lunged into the pack like a striking snake, snatched out the billy. She held it underhand, pointed at his gut.

He stepped back, one hand still gripping the pack. His eyes narrowed to opalescent slits. "Why didn't you use it?"

"Didn't want to waste a charge. You're not worth it."

He eyed the empty sheath on her leg. "Why not keep it there? Where you can get it?"

"Now, if you'd had a
kid
with you…"

They regarded each other through eyes that saw everything in black and white.

"You
let
me." The mongrel shook his head; the contradiction almost seemed painful. "You had that, and you let me anyway."

"My pack," Clarke said.

"You—set me up." Dawning anger in that voice, and thick wonder.

"Maybe I just like it rough."

"You're contagious. You're a
bughumper
."

She wiggled the baton. "Give me my things and maybe you'll live long enough to find out."

"You
stumpfuck
." But he held out the pack.

For the first time she saw the webbing between the three stumpy digits of his hand, noticed the smooth scarless tips of the stubs. Not violence, then. No street-fight amputation. Born to it.

"You a pharm baby?" she asked. Maybe he was older than he looked; the pharms hadn't deliberately spread buggy genotypes for decades. Sure, defectives spent more than healthy people on fixes, but the global ambience was twisting babies into strange enough shapes on its own by then. Without the risk of consumer backlash.

"You are, aren't you?"

He glared at her, shaking with helpless fury.

"Good," she said, grabbing her pack. "Serves you fucking right."

Snare

The voice in Lubin's ear had lied.

He hadn't been outside N'AmPac since landfall. He hadn't been in Sevastopol or Philadelphia for years. He'd
never
been in Whitehorse, and from what he knew of the place he hoped he never would be.

But he
could
have been. The lie was plausible one, to someone who knew Lubin but not his current circumstances. Or maybe it hadn't been a deliberate lie. Maybe it had been a flawed guess, based on God knew what irrelevant stats. Maybe it had just been a bunch of random words shoveled together with more regard for grammar than veracity.

He wondered if he might have started the rumor himself. Before he left for Sudbury, he put that hypothesis to the test.

He logged back into Haven and began a new name search:
Judy Caraco, Lenie Clarke, Alice Nakata
, and
Kenneth Lubin
.

It was a different voice that accosted him this time. It spoke in soft, gentle tones, almost whispering. It showed no predilection for alliteration or nonsense rhyme. It tended to mispronounce hard consonants.

It called him
Michael
.

* * *

He suborbed to Toromilton, took a shuttle north from that city-state. Endless suburbs kept pace beneath him, spilling far from the megapolitan hub that had once kept them captive. The daily commute had ended decades before, and still the blight was spreading. The outside world passed uneventfully—there were only a few restricted zones in all of Ontario, and none were on his route.

The world
inside
was a bit more interesting. Deep in the seething chaos that was Maelstrom, rumors of Mike Brander's resurrection were beginning to sprout alongside tales of Lubin's own. Mike Brander had been seen in Los Angeles. Mike Brander had been seen in Lima.

Lubin frowned, a small expression of self-disgust. He'd given himself away with his own questions. Something in Haven had taken notice when he'd run searches on all Beebe crew members except himself.
And why doesn't this user ask about Lubin, K.? Because this user must already know about Lubin, K.

Because this user
is
Lubin, K.

Lenie and Kenny are on the comeback trail.

His last troll through Haven, asking about everyone except Mike Brander, had provoked the same attention and the same simple logic. Now Mike Brander was alive and well and living in Maelstrom. QED.

What's doing this? Why?

Why
didn't always enter into it, of course. Sometimes Maelstrom's wildlife would just grab onto popular threads to get around—steal keywords to blend in, sneak through filters by posing as part of the herd. Classic bandwagon effect, blind and stupid as evolution itself. That was why such strategies always fizzled after a while. The fad-of-the-moment would fade into obscurity, leaving poseurs with forged tickets to an empty ballroom. Or the gate-keepers would catch on; the more popular the disguise, the greater the incentive for countermeasures.

Wildlife would hitch a ride on existing rumors, if they were hot enough. Lubin had never heard of them starting rumors of their
own
before.