Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (11 page)

* * *

There'd been a time, not so long ago, when Lenie Clarke would have obeyed without thinking. She'd have followed orders even though she knew what was coming, because she'd learned that you deal with violence by just shutting up and
getting it over with
. It would hurt, of course. That was the whole point. But it was better than the chronic queasiness, the
expectation
, the endless interludes between assaults where you could only wait for it to happen.

More recently, she would have simply fled. Or at least withdrawn.
None of my business
, she'd have told herself, and departed before anyone even knew she was there. She had done that when Mike Brander, denied revenge upon those who'd made his childhood a living hell, had used Gerry Fischer as a convenient proxy. It had been
none of my business
when Beebe Station resounded with the sound of Brander's rage and Fischer's breaking bones. It had been
none of my business
when Brander, shift after shift, had stood guard in the wet room, daring Fischer to come back inside. Eventually Fischer had faded from man to child to reptile, an empty inhuman cipher living on the edge of the rift. Even then, it had been none of Lenie Clarke's business.

But Gerry Fischer was dead now. So was Lenie Clarke, for that matter. She'd died with the others: Alice and Mike and Ken and Gerry, all turned into white-hot vapor. They were all dead, and when the stone had been rolled away and the voice had rung out,
Lazarus! Come forth!
it hadn't been any of Lenie Clarke's friends that had risen from the grave. It hadn't even been Lenie Clarke. Not the soft squirming career victim of her dryback days, anyway. Not the opaque chrysalis gestating down on the rift. It had been something newly-forged, acid-washed, some white-hot metamorph of Lenie Clarke that had never existed before.

Now it was confronted by a familiar icon—an authority, a giver of orders, an eager practitioner of the legal right to commit violence upon
her
. She did not regard its challenge as an order to be obeyed. She did not consider it a situation to be avoided.

For Lenie Clarke Mark II, it was a long-overdue invitation to dance.

Pixelpal

BCC5932 TRIGGER STIMULUS / THROUGHPUT INTERCEPT

Obj. Class: file packet / benign

Obj. Species: pers. comm. (NI) / packet 7 of 23 / voice modem decrypt

Obj. Source:
corrupted

Obj. Destination: multi (ref. cc)

EXCISE CRITERION: 255-CHR BRACKET INI/FIN TRIGGERING STIMULI.

EXCERPT BEGINS

that likely to get away with it forever. A little too metallic if you know what I mean. Anyway, they haven't caught us at it yet.

We
did
get caught a few days back, though, over something else again. Except we lucked into this avenging angel. No shit.
Lenie Clarke
, her name was. It was our own stupid fault, I guess. Didn't check for leakage when we logged on. Anyhow,
les beus
came down on us, they got everyone except Haj and me, and what could
we
do except run for it? And they had everybody down and all of a sudden there's this K-selector walking out of nowhere, looks like one of those old litcrits with the teeth, you know, vampires. All in black and she's wearing the absolute thickest ConTacs you ever saw, even thicker than
les beus
. Barely see her eyes behind them. Anyhow, she just walks out of the shadows and right into them.

You wouldn’t think she’d last two seconds. I mean, she didn’t even
notice
the shockprods, I don’t think that suit of hers carries a charge, but
still
. She just wasn’t that big, you know? And they were really whaling on her, and she just
took
it. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Or like—you know—almost like she
got off
on it, or something.

Anyway, she wraps her arms around this big beefy antibody and she just
pushes
, and they go right over the edge, and the sterilites go on when they hit the water—kind of wild those things still work, pier hasn’t seen any boat traffic in
years
—and the water lights up all cool and radium-glow and there’s some splashing and then there's this big
whoomf
and it's like this huge bubble of blood and guts just sort of boils up to the surface and the water's like
completely
gone to rust.

She's like some kinda amphibian, one of those rifter cyborgs. We met up with her after, she came back to pick up her fins when things had cooled down. Don't ask me what she was doing here in the middle of the night. Didn't talk much and we didn't push. We set her up with some snacks and supplies—she'd been eating from cyclers on the
Strip
, if you can believe it. Although it didn't seem to've dulled her edge any. Gave her my watch. She hadn't even heard about the curfew. I had to show her how to get around the timelock. Guess you lose touch with things when you spend all your time on the bottom of the ocean. Not that it held her back any. You should’ve
seen
that asshole. They fished him out of the water like an old rag. I would've
paid
to see his face, you know?

I tried to look her up but
Lenie Clarke
isn't exactly sockeye on the registry. Got more hits than holocausts. She did mention her home town, I think, but I couldn't find that either. Any of you guys ever hear of a place called
Beebe
?

Anyhow, far as I know she's still at large.
Les beus
are probably looking for her, but I bet fifty QueBucks they don't even know what she
looks
like under all that gear, never mind who she
is
. I mean, they hardly ever catch
us
, and they know everything there is to know about us. Well, not everything. Right, m

EXCERPT ENDS

CALL
ßehemoth

Lenie Clarke/Beebe CONFIRMED.

ADD SEARCH TERMS: amphibian/s, rifter/s, cyborg/s

OVERLAY TEMPLATE. RESEQUENCE TEXT.

COPY. TRANSLOCATE.

SPREAD THE WORD.

Third-person Limited

Perreault hadn't needed Amitav's permission, of course. She'd programmed the botflies to recognize him anyway. She'd dropped a cloud of mosquitoes, too, little flying sensors no bigger than rice grains. They were braindead, but they could afford to be; they relayed raw telemetry back to the 'flies for all the
real
analysis. That increased coverage by an order of magnitude, at least until their batteries gave out.

It would still be a crap-shoot: a botfly or skeet would have to be line-of-sight with Amitav once she'd put out the call, and there'd have to be enough of him visible to make an ID—very iffy, given the human congestion on the Strip. It would be easy enough for the stickman to hide, should he choose to.

Still. Long odds were better than none.

She finished a late supper across the table from her husband, noted his forlorn hopeless scrutiny almost in passing. Marty was doing his utmost, she knew—giving space, giving support. Waiting for that predictable moment when the shock wore off, her defenses fell, and she needed help picking up the pieces. Every now and then Perreault would search herself for signs of that imminent breakdown. Nothing. The antidepressants were still having some effect, of course, even after her system had shocked itself into partial immunity; but that shouldn't have been enough. She should be
feeling
something by now.

She was. Intense, passionate, all-consuming. Curiosity.

She squeezed Martin's hand across the table and headed toward her office. It was almost a half-hour until her shift began, but nobody on the circuit minded if she started early. She slid into her seat—a favored antique with flared arms and a skin of real leather—and was reaching for her headset when her husband's hand fell lightly onto her shoulder.

"Why does she matter so much?" he asked. It was the first time he'd come into her office since the breakdown.

"Marty, I've got to go to work."

He waited.

She sighed and swiveled her chair to face him. "I don't know. It's—it's a mystery, I guess. Something to solve."

"It's more than that."

"Why? Why does it have to be?" She heard the exasperation in her own voice, saw its effect on her husband. She took a breath and tried again. "I don't know. It's just—you wouldn't think a single person could count for much, but—she's making an impression, you know? At least on the Strip. She
matters
, somehow …"

Martin shook his head. "Is that what she is to you? A role model?"

"I didn't say—"

"She could be something else, Sou. What if she's a fugitive?"

"What?"

"It must have crossed your mind. Someone from N'Am—or I don't know, not your standard refugee, anyway. Why's she staying out on the Strip? Why doesn't she want to go home? What's she hiding from?"

"I don't know. That's what makes it a mystery."

"She could be dangerous."

"What, to me? She's way out on the coast! She doesn't even know I exist!"

"Still. You should report it."

"Maybe." Perreault swiveled deliberately back to her desk. "I really have to work now, Martin."

He wouldn't have let her off so easily before, of course. But he knew his assigned role, he'd been coached by a half-dozen well-meaning authorities
. Your wife has just come through a very traumatic experience. She's fragile. Let her move at her own pace.

Don't push.

So he didn't. A little piece of Sou-Hon felt guilty for taking advantage of that restraint. The rest was reveling in the cradling embrace of the headset around her skull, the sudden pinpoint control over what
was
and
wasn't
perceived, the—

"
Semen-sucking savior,
" she whispered.

The alert was flashing all over the left side of her visual field. One of the botflies had got a nibble. More than a nibble; a big predatory bite. It was hovering less than three meters off-target.

Not Amitav either, this time. A marriage of flesh and machinery. One woman, with clockwork.

* * *

Deep night, beneath an endless cloudbank. Across the black water, floodlights and heaters smudged distant light along the Strip. Perreault triggered the photoamps.

The mermaid crouched directly ahead on a jagged reef, a hundred-fifty meters from shore. The ocean, sparkling with microbial phosphorescence, tried to dislodge her. Between waves, the reef jutted a meter above the waterline, myriad tiny waterfalls draining down its sides; when the water crested the mermaid became a round black boulder herself, barely visible in the luminous foam.

She climbed to her feet. The surge rose above her knees; she staggered, but stayed upright. Her face was a pale oval painted onto a black body. Her eyes were paler ovals painted onto her face. They panned past the hovering botfly.

They did not seem to notice it.

Her face tilted down, stared directly ahead. One slick ebony arm reached forward, the fingers extended; a blind woman, reaching for something she couldn't see. Clarke's mouth moved. Any words were lost in the roar of the surf. Perreault slid filters past critical thresholds. Ocean sounds squelched into silence. Now only the shriek of distant gulls and a few syllables:

"No. Not—
ain
."

Perreault squelched the high frequencies as well. Now the mermaid stood in an utterly silent tableau, the Pacific crashing soundlessly on all sides.

"You never did," she said. Tide surged silently between her legs. The mermaid's reaching fingers closed around empty space. She seemed surprised.

Another wave swept the reef. The mermaid staggered, recovered. Perreault noticed that both of her hands were balled into fists.

"
Dad.
" Almost a whisper.