Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (25 page)

Footprints

Even dead, Ken Lubin had access to more resources than ninety-nine percent of the living.

It made perfect sense, considering his profession. Identities are such transient things after all; height, weight, ethnoskeleton could all be changed by subtle tweaks of the body's endocrine system. Eyeprints, voiceprints, fingerprints—developmental accidents, perhaps unique at birth but hardly immutable. Even DNA could be fudged if you weighed it down with enough pseudocodons. It was too easy for one person to imitate another, and too necessary to be able to
change
without losing access to vital resources. Immutable identity wasn't just useless to Ken Lubin. It was potentially life-threatening.

For all he knew—he never bothered to keep track of such things—he'd never officially existed in the first place.

It didn't matter who he was anyway. Would you let a man through the door just because he'd had his pupils scanned the week before? Anything could have happened since. Maybe he's been deconstructed and turned. Maybe he'd rather betray you than see his hostaged children executed. Maybe he's found Allah.

For that matter, why keep a stranger at bay? Is someone an enemy just because his eyeprints
aren't
on record?

It didn't matter whether Ken Lubin was who he claimed to be. All that mattered was that his brain was spiked with so much Guilt Trip that it would be physiologically impossible for him to bite the hand that dosed him.

It wasn't the usual Trip that ran through his veins. The Community had a thousand different flavors of choice; one for Venezuela, four or five for China, probably a couple dozen for Quebec. None of them trusted any motivator as mealy-mouthed as
the greater good
. Even those do-gooding 'lawbreakers weren't in service to
that
, no matter what their training brochures said. The
greater good
could mean anything; hell, it could even mean the
other
guys.

Ken Lubin was chemically dedicated to the welfare of certain N'AmPac interests which dealt in the generation of electrical power. Those interests had been of paramount importance ever since the Hydro War; they'd been fine-tuning the molecules for most of the twenty years since. The moment Lubin even
intended
to sell his services to the wrong bidders, he'd court a seizure that would make
grand mal
look like a nervous itch on a blind date. That was all the mechanical bloodhounds cared about when they sniffed his crotch. Not his name, or his clothes, or the accumulated heavy-metal essence of ocean that still clung to him after an extended shower in the local community center. Not any exaggerated rumors of his demise, or any unexplained return from the grave.

All they cared about was that he was like them; loyal, obedient, trustworthy.

They opened doors for him. They gave him funds, and access to medbooths five years ahead of anything available on the street. They gave him back his hearing and, surprisingly, a clean bill of health. They pointed him to a vacant furnished room, waiting like a convenient cocoon to any on the home team who might need a place to crash on short notice.

Above all, they let him into Haven.

* * *

There were certain things they wouldn't do for
anybody
. A hardline to his cocoon was out of the question, for instance. Lubin had to go onsite for his research; an anonymous row of data booths embedded in the fourteenth floor of the Ridley Complex, off-limits to all but those of tailored conscience. About half the booths were occupied at any given time, dark diffuse shapes twitching behind frosted glass like larvae nestled in honeycomb. Occasionally two people would emerge into the hallway at the same time, pass each other without a word or a glance. There was no need for reassuring pleasantries here; everyone was on the same side.

Inside the booth, headset curled snuggly around jaw and eyes and ears, Kenneth Lubin logged into Haven and mumbled subvocal questions about Channer Vent. His headset read the buzz of his larynx—a bit of adjustment required, to compensate for the vocoder implanted in his throat—and sent off an agent to hunt for answers. He asked to see a list of references containing the phrase
Beebe Station
, and was instantly indulged. He cross-referenced those results against lists of dangerous microbes from the deep sea.

No significant pathogens registered from Channer.

Hmm.

It didn't prove anything, of course. There were lots of nasty facts that didn't make it into Haven. There were other avenues of approach, though.

Assume, for example, that the vent had been nuked to contain some risk. Beebe would never have gone online if that risk had been known beforehand; there had been some period, therefore, when the threat was spreading beneath anyone's radar. And once the threat
had
been discovered, all those loose ends would have to be tied up in hindsight…

The building contractors. Left Coast Shipyards. They wouldn't use nukes though, not above-ground.

Fire, probably.

He summoned forth a frequency plot of fires over time, within a five-kilometer radius of marine construction and contracting facilities along the N'AmPac coast. Haven showed him a curious spike about three months after Beebe had gone online: Urchin Shipyards, Hanson Fabrication, and Showell Marine's SanFran complex had all hosted infernos within the space of a week. A dozen other facilities had been hit by various acts of arson in the two weeks following, not to mention a couple of places that had burned off large chunks of their property as part of "ongoing renewal programs".

Lubin loosened the scale and ran the request again: all large fires over time, anywhere along the N'AmPac coastline.

The map lit up.

Oh my
, he thought.

* * *

Something had them scared to death. And it had all started down at Beebe.

No Channer pathogens in the metabase, no nasty microscopic predators that ate your body from the inside out. But
macro
scopic predators: Channer'd had those in abundance.
Viperfish and anglerfish and seadragons, oh my
. Black toothy monsters, some studded with bioluminescent running lights, some blind as mud, some that changed sex on a whim, still others whose flesh bristled with the embedded bodies of parasitic mates. Nasty, hideous things. They were everywhere in the ocean's middle depths, and they'd have been scary indeed if they'd ever grown to more than a few centimeters in length.

At Channer, they had. Something had drawn those little nightmares down deeper than they went anywhere else, turned them into ravenous giants big as people. You didn't go outside Beebe without a gas billy strapped to your leg; you rarely came back in without having used it.

Something at Channer had created monsters. Lubin sent a message into Haven asking what it was.

Haven wasn't exactly sure. But there was a tech report in the gray lit that took a guess: some kind of endosymbiotic infection that increased growth energy. The phrase
infectious neomitochondria
popped up in the discussion.

The authors of the report—a couple of eggs out of Rand/Washington University—suggested that some microbe at Channer could infect cells symbiotically, providing extra growth energy to the host cell in exchange for room and board. Whatever the bug was, they claimed it would have some fairly obvious characteristics. Small enough to fit inside a eukaryotic cell, high assimilation efficiency for inorganic sulfur, that sort of thing.

An infection that caused giantism in fish. Again, hmmm.

One of the first things Lubin had done after coming ashore had been to check himself out for pathogens. He'd tested clean. But this Channer thing was new, and strictly speaking, not even a disease. It might not show up on the standard slate.

Lubin's credit was good. More extensive blood work wouldn't be an issue.

There were other issues, though. One of them dawned gradually as he explored, betrayed itself in the way Haven answered his questions. Sometimes the metabase thought for a moment or two before telling him what he wanted to know. That was normal. But other times—other times, it spat an answer back almost before he'd asked the question. Almost as though it had already been thinking along those very lines, as though it didn't have to go and look up the relevant facts.

Maybe, Lubin reflected, that was exactly it.

Haven's agents were not nearly so pressed for resources as the engines that combed Maelstrom; they could afford to cache recent searches. Very few lines of inquiry were utterly unique. If someone asked about the price of a Parkinson's fix today, chances were someone else would want to know something similar tomorrow. Haven's search engines held onto their executive summaries, the better to speed responses to related inquiries.

Ask and it shall be given:

—After a mean of 2.3 seconds when answering questions about giantism in deepwater fish;

—after a mean of 3 seconds when talking about benthic sulfur-reducing microbes;

—about a second for queries containing the phrase "Channer Vent";

—0.5 seconds for searches combining
sulfur-reducing microbes
with
fire.

Fire. Benthic sulfur-reducing microbes. An odd combination of terms. What relevance could
fire
have to life on the bottom of the ocean?

He added a third concept, almost on a whim:
shipyard
.

0.1 seconds.

Well
.

He was following in someone's footsteps. Someone had been in Haven before him, asking the same questions, making the same connections. Searching for answers, or looking for loose ends?

Ken Lubin resolved to find out.

An Archetype of Dislocation

There had been a time when Sou-Hon Perreault had truly loved her husband. Martin had projected a serenity in those days, a gentleness and an unwillingness to judge that made her feel safe. He'd been unfailingly supportive when she needed it (hardly ever, before the breakdown); he'd never been afraid to look at both sides of an issue. For love, he could balance on the edge of any fence.

Even now, he'd forever hold her and whisper inane reassurances. Things couldn't be that bad, he'd say. Quarantines and dark zones always popped up here and there, not without good reason. Sometimes restrictions were necessary for the good of everyone, she knew
that
—and besides, he had it on good authority that there were safeguards even on those who made the Big Decisions. As if he was privy to some grand secret, as if Maelstrom wasn't rotten with threads and rumors about the corpses and their mind-controlling drugs.

Her caring, supportive husband. Sitting across the table, his face overflowed with loving concern. She hated the sight of him.

"You should eat," he said. He put a forkful of mashed
Spirulina
into his mouth and chewed, demonstrating.

"Should I?"

"You're losing weight," Martin told her. "I know you're upset—goodness, you've got every reason to be—but starving yourself won't make you feel any better."

"That's your solution to the world's problems? Stuff your face so we'll all feel better?"

"Sou—"

"That's right, Marty. Just eat a bit more and everything'll be just grand. Suck up all those cheery threads from N'AmWire and maybe they'll lull you right into forgetting about Crys…"

It was a low blow—Martin's sister lived in Corvallis, which had not only been quarantined since the Big One but had dropped completely offline for the better part of a month. The official story involved unfortunate long-term aftershocks that kept taking out the land-lines; N'AmWire pictures showed the usual collage of citizens, shaken but not stirred, gamely withstanding temporary isolation. Martin hadn't been able to get through to Crys for three weeks.

Her words should have stung him—even provoked him to anger—but he only sat there looking helpless, his hands spread. "Sou, you've been through so much these past few months, of
course
things look really grim. But I honestly think you're putting way too much weight on a bunch of rumors. Riots, and firestorms, and—I mean, half those postings don't even show up with address headers any more, you can't trust
anything
that comes out of Maelstrom these days—"

"You'd rather trust N'AmWire? They don't spit out a word without some corpse chewing it for them first!"

"But what do you
know
, Sou? What have you actually seen with your own eyes? By your own admission you just got a glimpse of one big ship moving inland, and you didn't even see it
do
anything—"