Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (53 page)

All he had to do was open the door. Even if this
Jovellanos
wasn't lying about ordering the crew to stand down, they wouldn't have had time to pack up yet. Someone could just tap an icon and Alice Jovellanos would be jammed. Another, she'd be traced. The situation wasn't even close to out of control.

He could afford a few moments…

"The Trip's been weakening in you ever since you shared air with Killjoy there," Jovellanos was saying. "You're calling your own shots now, Ken. Kind of changes things, doesn't it?"

"Alice, are you completely—" Desjardins sounded almost in tears. "That's the only leash he ever
had
."

"Actually, that's not true. Ken Lubin's one of the most moral men you could ever meet."

"For God's sake, Alice—I'm fucking tied to a chair with my face caved in—"

"Trust me. I'm looking at his medical records right now. No serotonin or tryptophan deprivation, no TPH polymorphisms. He may not be a fun date, but he's no impulse-killer. Which is not to say that you don't have a few issues, Ken. Am I right?"

"
How did you—
" but of course she'd be able to access his files, Lubin realized. It was just that any normal 'lawbreaker wouldn't be able to justify such an intrusion to Guilt Trip, not in the course of a normal assignment.

She actually did it somehow. She
freed
me…

He felt like throwing up.

"What was it like all those years, Ken?" Jovellanos purred in his ear. "Knowing she'd got away with it? All those nifty childhood experiences that made you so
right
for the job—of course you thought about revenge. You spent your whole
life
fantasizing about revenge, didn't you? Anyone would have."

What am I going to do?

"You say it's an infection," he said, trying to deflect her.

"But you never once acted on it, did you Ken? Because you're a moral man, and you knew that would be
wrong
."

"How does it work?"
Don't respond. Don't let her play you. Keep on target.

"And when the slip-ups started, those were just—mistakes, right? Inadvertent little breaches that had to be sealed. You killed
then
, of course, but there wasn't any choice. You always played by the rules. And it wasn't your fault, was it? The Trip
made
you do it."

"
Answer me
."
No, no… control. Relax.

Don't let her hear it…

"Only it started happening so
often
, and people had to wonder if you hadn't found some way to have your cake and eat it, too. That's why they sent you someplace where there weren't any security issues or mission priorities that could set you off. They didn't want to give you a choice, so they sent you someplace you wouldn't have an
excuse
."

His respiration rate was far too high. He concentrated on bringing it down. A few steps away, Clarke's silhouette seemed dangerously attentive.

"You're still a moral man, Ken." Jovellanos said. "You follow the rules. You won't kill unless you don't have a choice. I'm telling you, you've got a choice."

"Your
infection
," he grated. "
What does it do
?"

"Liberates slaves."

Bullshit answer. But at least she was out of his head.

"How?" he pressed.

"Complexes Guilt Trip into an inactive form that binds to the Minksy receptors. Doesn't affect anyone who isn't already Tripped."

"What about the side-effects?" he said.

"Side effects?"

"Baseline guilt, for example," Lubin said.

Desjardins moaned. "Oh,
shit
. Of course. Of
course
."

"What's going on?" Clarke said. "What are you talking about?"

Lubin almost laughed aloud. Regular, garden variety guilt. Plain old conscience. How would
they
ever get into play, now that their receptor sites had been jammed? Jovellanos and her buddies had been so busy tweaking the synthetics that they'd forgotten about chemicals that been there for aeons.

Except they hadn't forgotten. They'd known exactly what they were doing. Lubin was sure of it.

All hail the Entropy Patrol. The power to shut down cities and governments, the power to save a million people here or kill a million somewhere else, the power to keep everything going or to tear it all to shreds overnight—

He turned to Clarke. "Your fan club's been throwing off the shackles of oppression," he said. "They're free now. Not slaves to Guilt Trip, not slaves to guilt. Untouchable by conscience in any form."

He raised a hand in the darkness, a bitter toast: "Congratulations, Dr. Jovellanos. There's only a few thousand people with their hands on all the world's kill switches, and you've turned them all into clinical sociopaths."

* * *

"Believe me," Jovellanos said. "You'll hardly notice the difference."

Desjardins was noticing, though. "Shit.
Shit
. I wouldn't even
be
here, I mean—I just picked up and
left
. I threw everything away, didn't care about the world going to pieces, I just—for
one person
. Just because I
wanted
to."

"We psychos are notorious for bad impulse control," Clarke said, approaching him. "Ken, how do you spring these bindings?"

Lubin glowered at her back.
Doesn't she
get
it?

"Come on, Ken. The situation's contained. None of us is going anywhere for the time being, and any rules we were playing by before seem to have pretty much gone out the window. Maybe we could start working together for a change."

He hesitated. Nothing she said raised any kind of alarm in his gut. Nothing urged him into action, no other presence tried to take control of his motor nerves. Almost experimentally, he crossed into the living room and depolarized the tanglethreads. They slipped to the floor like overcooked pasta.

For good measure, he pulled a lightstick from his pocket and struck it; light flared in the gutted room. Desjardins blinked over shrinking pupils and gingerly explored the bruise on his cheek.

"Conscience is overrated anyway," Jovellanos said all around them.

"Give it a rest, Alice," Desjardins said, rubbing his wrists.

"I'm serious. Think about it: not everyone even
has
a conscience, and the people that do are invariably exploited by the ones that don't. Conscience is—irrational, when you get right down to it."

"You are so full of shit."

"Sociopathy doesn't
make
you a killer. It just means you aren't
restrained
from being one if the situation calls for it. Hey, Killjoy, you could think of it as a kind of
liberation
. "

The 'lawbreaker snorted.

"Come on, Kill. I'm right, you know there's at least a chance I'm right."

"What I
know
is that the most I can hope for is to be out of a job right up until the world ends. If I'm not dead ten minutes from now."

"You know," Jovellanos said, "I may even be able to do something about that."

Desjardins said nothing.

"What's that, Killjoy? Suddenly you're not telling me to fuck off?"

"Keep talking," he said.

She did. Lubin pulled the bead out of his ear and stood up; the lightstick threw his shadow huge and ominous across the room. Lenie Clarke sat with her back propped against the far wall; Lubin's silhouette swallowed her whole.

I could kill her in an instant
, he thought, and marveled at how absurd the thought seemed.

She looked up as he approached. "I hate it here," she said softly.

"I know." He leaned his back against the wall, slid down at her side.

"This isn't home," she continued. "There's only one place that was ever home."

Three thousand meters below the surface of the Pacific. A beautiful dark universe filled with monsters and wonders that didn't even exist any more.

"What is home, really?"

It was Desjardins who had spoken. Lubin looked back at him.

"Alice's been doing a little snooping, down avenues a bit more—political than I ever really bothered with." Desjardins tapped the side of his head. "She came up with some interesting shipping news, and it raises the question: what's home? Where your heart is, or where your parents are?"

Lubin looked at Lenie Clarke. She looked back. Neither spoke.

"Ah well. Doesn't really matter," Desjardins said. "Turns out you may be able to go back either way."

A Niche

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge was a shitty place to raise one's kids, Patricia Rowan reflected.

Not that there'd been many options, of course. In point of fact there had been three: build an onshore refuge and trust conventional quarantine technology; escape into high orbit; or withdraw behind the same cold, heavy barrier that had shielded the earth for four billion years before N'AmPac had punched a hole in the global condom.

They'd done the analyses from every angle. The off-world option was least cost-effective and most vulnerable to acts of groundside retribution: orbital stations weren't exactly inconspicuous targets, and it was a fair bet that at least some of those left behind would be ungracious enough to lob a vindictive nuke or two up the well. And if groundside quarantine tech had been up to the job, they wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place; that option must have been on the table only to accommodate a bureaucratic obsession with completist detail. Or maybe as some kind of sick joke.

There
had
been a fourth option—they could have stayed behind and faced ßehemoth with the rest of the world. They'd undergone the necessary retrofits, after all. Even if they'd stayed on shore there would have been none of the—disintegration—that was in store for everyone else. Not for them the lost hair and fingernails, the oozing sores, the limbs coming apart at the joints. No blindness, no ulcers. No short-circuit seizures as insulation frayed from nervous circuitry. No organs reduced to mush. None of the thousand opportunistic diseases usually listed as proximate cause-of-death. They could have stayed, and watched it happen to everyone else, and synthesized their food from raw elements once the biosphere itself was lost.

That option hadn't received a whole lot of discussion, though.

We're not even running from ßehemoth
.
We're running from our own citizens.

All of Atlantis knew that, even if nobody talked about it. They'd seen the mobs from their penthouses, seen
civil unrest
graphed against
time
on exponential curves. ßehemoth, coupled with the Clarke meme: a big enough threat, a sufficiently compelling role-model, and revolution was suddenly a lot closer than the usual three meals away.

We were lucky to get out in time
, Rowan reflected.

But they had, and here they were—several hundred corpses, essential support personnel, families and assorted hangers-on—termites dug in three kilometers down in a jumbled cluster of titanium/fullerene spheres, safely distant from the world outside, invisible to all but those with the very best technological eyes, the very best intel. It was an acceptable risk: most of those people were already down here.

There was lots of headroom. There were two gymnasiums, half a dozen greenhouses and gardens thoughtfully distributed with an eye to redundancy in the unlikely event of a local implosion. Vats of acephalic organcloners with elongate telomeres. Three power plants that fed from a small geothermal vent—certified ßehemoth-free, of course—a nice safe twelve hundred meters on the far side of an interpositioned ridge. And somewhere out on that basalt escarpment lay a veritable junkyard of unassembled components, fragments of libraries and playgrounds and community centers, all squirreled away against some future less constrained by the need for speedy cowardice. In the meantime, Rowan had heard many residents of Atlantis complain about crowding.

She felt somewhat less imposed upon than most. She'd seen the specs on the rifter stations.