Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (39 page)

Even in that split-second, Vive took it in: a botfly nearby, spewing canned warnings about orderly dispersal. The movement of the crowd, no longer vague and diffuse but
concentrated
, pushed together like a school of krill in a purse seine. Conversation fading; shouts starting up.

The herding was underway.

Vive's momentum carried the crazy woman less than a meter before the edge of the crowd pushed back. The rebound put both of them inside the booth again. Vive launched herself low, under the other woman's arm—sudden, tearing pain over one eye—

"
Ow!
"

—and a hand closed around her throat, pushed her back, her legs shooting out from under her, her feet briefly trampled by some nameless crowd-particle until she pulled them back with a cry and the door slid shut again, cutting the outside world down to a faint roar.

Oh, felch…

Aviva Lu sat on the floor of the medbooth, her legs pulled up in front of her, and forced her eyes to track upward. Crazy Woman's legs. Crazy Woman's crotch. It seemed like it would take forever to get to the eyes, and Vive was terrified of what she'd find when she got—

Wait a second—

There, just to the left of Crazy Woman's sternum—a tear in her clothing, a hard crescent glint of metal.

That's what cut me. Something metal on her chest. Sticking
out of
her chest…

Crazy woman's hand. Holding her visor, broken in the scuffle, one earpiece gone. Crazy woman's throat; a turtleneck sweatshirt covering any disfigurement there.

Crazy woman's eyes.

What had she said? That's right:
Do you have the slightest clue who this Lenie Clarke even is?

"Oh,
wow
," said Aviva Lu.

* * *

"You're kidding," said Lenie Clarke. They stood facing each other, breathing each other's air in the medbooth.

"One thread said you were infected with nanobots that could reproduce outside your body and start fires when they had a big enough population. They said you were fucking your way across the world to infect everyone else, so we'd
all
have the power someday."

"It's bullshit," Clarke said. "It's all bullshit. I don't know how it got started."

"All of it?" Vive didn't know what to make of all this. For the Meltdown Madonna, Lenie Clarke didn't seem to have a clue. "You're not on some kind of crusade, you're not—"

"Oh, I'm on a crusade all right." Lenie flashed a smile that Vive couldn't decompile. "I just don't think any of you want to see it succeed."

"Well, you
were
down in the ocean," Vive said. "For the Big One. What
happened
down there?" It couldn't
all
be detritus, could it? "And on the Strip? And—"

"What's happening right
here
?" Lenie said.

Vive gulped. "Right."

"How did they even know about me? How did
you
know?"

"Well, like I said, someone spread the word."

Lenie shook her head. "I guess I'd be caught right now if it wasn't for…" – faint crowd sounds filtered through from outside—"
that
…"

"Well, they'll never tag you on visual," Vive said. "There's like a few
sagan
Lenie Clarkes out there, and you don't look like any of 'em."

"Yeah. And how many of them have a chestful of machinery to go with the eyecaps?"

Vive shrugged. "Probably none. But—
oh
. The botflies."

"The botflies." The Meltdown Madonna took a deep breath. "If they haven't tagged me already, I'm going to be a big bright EM rainbow the second I step outside."

"I
wondered
why they weren't jamming our watches," Vive said. "They don't want to scramble your sig."

"What if I just wait in here until everybody goes away?"

"Won't work. I've run this before; half-hour, tops, before they gas the whole place and just walk in."

"Shit.
Shit
." Lenie looked around the booth like some kind of caged alien.

"Wait a sec," Vive said. "Are they looking for your
exact
signature, or just any old EM?"

"How should I know?"

"Well, how do your implants shine?"

"A lot of myoelectrics. Boosted source for the electrolysis assembly and the reservoir dumps, of course. And the vocoder." The rifter smiled, a tiny challenge. "That mean anything to you?"

"Like a prosthetic heart, only stronger."

"Got any friends with a fake heart? Maybe I could use them as a decoy."

"
Les beus
might just round up
everyone
with implants and sort 'em out later." Vive thought. "You don't need a decoy, though. You just need to jam your
own
signal. You shouldn't be putting out more than two milligausse, tops. Standard wall line would mask that, but then you wouldn't be able to move away from the wall. And watches and visors don't have the field strength."

Lenie cocked her head. "You some kind of expert?"

Vive smiled back. "Lady, this is
Yankton
! We've been doing electronics since before the Dust Belt. Lins says they even invented
botflies
here, but Lins slings a lot of slaw. We're supposed to be cramming for our practicums even as we speak, actually, but this sounded like more fun."

"Fun." Those cold blank eyes—more translucent, Vive realized, than the paste the rest of them wore—stared down at her. "That's the word I would've used."

A light came on in Vive's head.

"Hey," she said. "There
is
something that puts out a bit of a field. Portable, too. It'd be touchy—we'd have to play with its insides or it'd attract all kinds of the wrong attention—but you wouldn't have to be around for that part anyway."

"Yeah?" Lenie asked.

"Oh yeah," Vive told her. "No
problem
."

* * *

Les beus
had the crowd cordoned off, and were pushing them back across the concourse. The rifters on the edge were getting shocked, of course, but at least nobody'd dropped any gas bombs yet. The crowd moved like an ocean, great sweeping waves emerging miraculously from the constrained jostling of a million trapped particles. The comparison went farther than that, Vive knew: human oceans had backwash, undertow. People could get sucked underneath and trampled.

She let the currents carry her along. Jen and Lindsey bobbed behind her to either side. Vive had told two friends; they'd told two friends; so on; so on. All around them fission was taking place, just below the surface. You could barely see it at first; people worked their way through the crowd from all sides, tacking against the current until they were just an arm or two away from Vive
et al.
Glances, nods were exchanged. The local turbulence subsided just a tiny bit as friends and allies anchored each other against the push and pull.

Within minutes Aviva Lu was the bull's-eye in a crowded circle of calm.

Three botflies approached in formation a couple of meters above the crowd, reciting the usual riot-act platitudes. Vive glanced at Jen; Jen shook her visored head. The machines cruised past, recessed muzzles dimpling their bellies.

Jen tugged at her sleeve, gestured: another 'fly coming up the concourse. Vive slipped her own visor over her eyes and magged on the target. No obvious gunports or arc electrodes. Purely surveillance, this one. Glorified note-taker. Vive looked back at Jen, at Linse.

Both nodded.

Vive doffed the visor and hooked it over her belt; some things you still needed your own eyes for. Her arms went around Jen's and Lindsey's shoulders, just three ol' girlfriends out for a good time, nothing to see here. The crowd blocked any view of Vive pulling up her legs, now all her weight on the shoulders of her friends, now most of it weighing on the stirrups Jen and Lindsey had improvised by interlocking their hands. The 'fly cruised closer, scanning the crowd. Maybe it was interested in this curious little knot of stability in the Brownian storm. Maybe it was on its way somewhere else entirely.

If so, it never got there.

The botfly was out of reach to anyone jumping unassisted from the floor; it was an easy mark for someone boosted by 'dorphderms and a two-stage launch. Jen and Lindsey bounced into a quick squat and
heaved
, throwing Vive into the air. At the same time, Vive pushed off against their hands. She embraced her inner überchick, endorphins singing throughout her body. The botfly floated into her embrace like a big beautiful Easter egg. She wrapped her arms around it and
hugged
.

The 'fly never had a chance. Built entirely of featherweight polymers and vacuum bladders, its ground-effect lift couldn't have been more than a kilo or two. Aviva Lu shackled it like ball with no chain, brought it down into the arms of the welcoming crowd.

A roar went up on all sides. Vive knew that wordless sound, and she knew what it meant:
First Blood
.

Not the last, though. Not by a long shot.

They smashed the botfly against the floor, shielded by a swaying forest of human bodies. They went after the lens clusters and antennae first; they'd all be sockeye if they didn't get the 'fly offline real fast. It wasn't easy. Modern tech had long since figured out how to combine
light
with
strong
, and evolution hadn't come up with the egg-shape for no reason either. Jen and Linse had their toolkits out.

On all sides, the sounds of escalation.

Shouts turned to screams, rising briefly then lost in the ambient roar. Something exploded nearby. An electronic buzzer honked in the distance like a quarantine siren; official notification that the pigs were on the warpath.

Pre-game show over. First period underway.

Something went

BANG!

right in Vive's ear; she jumped, stumbled against a pair of legs. Jen, a little too eager to cut through the carapace, had ruptured one of the vacuum bladders. A high, pure tone trumped the sound of the riot. Vive shook her head.

A hand on her shoulder; Linse in her face, mouthing
got it
over the dial tone in Vive's head. Jen held up a necklace of optical chips and a battery, strung along a mist of fine fiberop. Behind her, their buffer guard staggered against some conducted impact. The space began to collapse around them.

Go.

Vive grabbed the necklace and stood. A human storm surged and collided on all sides; she could barely see over it. Fifteen meters away a phalanx of botflies was bearing down like the Four Horsemen. Some joker in springsoles trampolined into the air and tagged the one in the lead. A tiny lightning bolt arced between jumper and jumped; Springsole Boy
grand mal
'd in midair and dropped back into the mêlée.

The botflies, undeterred, were heading right for Vive.

Oh shit
. Surge pushed her backward. Her feet tangled in the carcass of the dismembered floater. The opening in the crowd had completely collapsed; bodies pressed close on all sides, kept her from falling. Vive lifted her feet off the ground. The crowd carried her as though she were levitating. The wreckage passed beneath.

Still the botflies came at her.
We weren't fast enough. It got off a signal, it sent a picture--

She could see their electrodes. She could see their gunports. She could even see their
eyes
, staring coldly down at her behind their darkened shields…

Right overhead.

Past.

They're after Jen and Linse
. Vive twisted around, following the flies in their pursuit.
Shit, they just left, they don't have enough of a lead, they're gonna—

Right out of left field, another botfly charged into view and rammed the leader.

What—

The head of the phalanx skidded sideways, out of control. The attacking botfly spun and charged the next in line. It came down from above, hitting its quarry and knocking it down a meter or so.

Far enough. The crowd surged up and engulfed it in a hungry, roaring wave.