Behemoth (34 page)

“And wake the fucker with a kiss,” Clarke finishes. “Who's to say I can't?”

He swims on, toward the glow that's just starting to brighten the way ahead. His eyes reflect crescents of dim light.

“I guess we'll find out,” he says at last.

FULCRUM

S
HE'D
avoid it altogether if she could.

There's more than sufficient excuse. The recent armistice is thin and brittle; it's in little danger of shattering completely in the face of this new, common threat, but countless tiny cracks and punctures require constant attention. Suddenly the corpses have leverage, expertise that mere machinery cannot duplicate; the rifters are not especially happy with the new assertiveness of their one-time prisoners. Impossible Lake must be swept for bugs, the local seabed for eyes and detonators. For now there truly is no safe place—and if Lenie Clarke were not busy packing for the trip back, her eyes would be needed for perimeter patrol. Dozens of corpses died in the latest insurrection; there's hardly time to comfort all the next of kin.

And yet, Alyx's mother died in her arms mere days ago, and though the pace of preparation has not slowed in all that time, Lenie Clarke still feels like the lowest sort of coward for having put it off this long.

She thumbs the buzzer in the corridor. “Lex?”

“Come in.”

Alyx is sitting on her bed, practicing her fingering. She puts the flute aside as Lenie closes the hatch behind her. She isn't crying. She's either still in shock, or a victim of superadolescent self-control. Clarke sees herself at fifteen, before remembering: her memories of that time are all lies.

Her heart goes out to the girl anyway. She wants to scoop Alyx up in her arms and hold her into the next millennium. She wants to say she's been there, she knows what it's like; and that's even true, in a fractured kind of way. She's lost friends and lovers to violence. She even lost her mother—to tularemia—although the GA stripped that memory out of her head along with all the others. But she knows it's not the same. Alyx's mother died in a war, and Lenie Clarke fought on the other side. Clarke doesn't know that Alyx would welcome an embrace under these conditions.

So she sits beside her on the bed, and tries to think of some words, any words, that won't turn into clichés when spoken aloud.

She's still trying when Alyx says, “Did she say anything? Before she died?”

“She—” Clarke shakes her head. “No. Not really,” she finishes, hating herself.

Alyx nods and stares at the floor.

“They say you're going too,” she says after a while. “With him.”

Clarke nods.

“Don't.”

Clarke takes a deep breath beside her. “Alyx, you—oh God, Alyx, I'm so
sorr
—”

“Why do you have to go?” Alyx turns and stares at her with hard, bright eyes that reveal far too much for comfort. “What are you going to do up there anyway?”

“We have to find out who's tracking us. We can't just wait for them to start shooting.”

“Why are you so sure that's what they're going to do? Maybe they just want to talk, or something.”

Clarke shakes her head, smiling at the absurdity of the notion. “People aren't like that.”

“Like what?”

Forgiving
. “They're not friendly, Lex. Whoever they are. Trust me on this.”

But Alyx has already switched to Plan B: “And what good are you going to be up there anyway? You're not a spy, you're not a tech-head. You're not some rabid psycho killer like
he
is. There's nothing you can do up there except get killed.”

“Someone has to back him up.”

“Why? Let him go by himself.” Suddenly, Alyx's words come out frozen. “With any luck he
won't
succeed. Whatever's up there will tear him apart and the world will be a teeny bit less of a shithole afterward.”

“Alyx—”

Rowan's daughter rises from the bed and glares down at her. “How can you help him after he killed Mom? How can you even
talk
to him? He's a psycho and a killer.”

The automatic denial dies on Clarke's lips. After all, she doesn't know that Lubin
didn't
have a hand in Rowan's death. Lubin was team captain during this conflict, as he was during the last; he'd probably have known about that so-called
rescue mission
even if he hadn't actually planned it.

And yet somehow, Clarke feels compelled to defend the enemy of this grief-stricken child. “No, sweetie,” she says gently. “It was the other way around.”

“What?”

“Ken was a killer first.
Then
he was a psycho.” Which is close enough to the truth, for now.

“What are you talking about?”

“They tweaked his brain. Didn't you know?”

“They?”

Your mother.

“The GA. It was nothing special, it was just part of the package for industrial spies. They fixed it so he'd seal up security breaches by any means necessary, without even really thinking about it. It was involuntary.”

“You saying he didn't have a
choice
?”

“Not until Spartacus infected him. And the thing about Spartacus was, it cut the tweaks, but it cut a couple of other pathways too. So now Ken doesn't have much of what you'd call a conscience, and if that's your definition of a psycho then I guess he is one. But he didn't
choose
it.”

“What difference does it make?” Alyx demands.

“It's not like he went out shopping for an evil makeover.”

“So what? When did any psycho ever get to choose his own brain chemistry?”

It's a pretty good point, Clarke has to admit.

“Lenie, please,” Alyx says softly. “You can't trust him.”

And yet in some strange, sick way—after all the secrecy, all the betrayal—Clarke still trusts Ken Lubin more than anyone else she's ever known. She can't say it aloud, of course. She can't say it because Alyx believes that Ken Lubin killed her mother, and maybe he did; and to admit to trusting him now might test the friendship of this wounded girl further than Clarke is willing to risk.

But that's not all of it. That's just the rationale that floats on the surface, obvious and visible and self-serving. There's another reason, deeper and more ominous: Alyx may be right. The past couple of days, Clarke has caught glimpses of something unfamiliar looking out from behind Lubin's eyecaps. It disappears the moment she tries to bring it into focus; she's not even sure exactly how she recognizes it. Some subtle flicker of the eyelid, perhaps. A subliminal twitch of photocollagen, reflecting the motion of the eye beneath.

Until three days ago, Ken Lubin hadn't taken a human life in all the time he'd been down here. Even during the first uprising he contented himself with the breaking of bones; all the killing was at the inexpert, enthusiastic hands of rifters still reveling in the inconceivable rush of power over the once-powerful. And there's no doubt that the deaths of the past seventy-two hours can be completely justified in the name of self-defense.

Still. Clarke wonders if this recent carnage might have awakened something that's lain dormant for five years. Because back then, when all was said and done, Ken Lubin
enjoyed
killing. He craved it, even though—once liberated—he didn't use his freedom as an excuse, but as a challenge. He
controlled
himself, the way an old-time nicotine addict might walk around with an unopened pack of cigarettes in his pocket—to prove that he was stronger than his habit. If there's one thing Ken Lubin prides himself on, it's self-discipline.

That craving. That desire for revenge against the world at large: did it ever go away? Lenie Clarke was once driven by such a desire; quenched by a billion deaths or more, it has no hold on her now. But she wonders whether recent events have forced a couple of cancer-sticks into Lubin's mouth despite himself. She wonders how the smoke tasted after all this time, and if Lubin, perhaps, is remembering how good it once felt …

Clarke shakes her head sadly. “It can't be anyone else, Alyx. It has to be me.”

“Why?”

Because next to what I did, genocide is a misdemeanor. Because the world's been dying in my wake while I hide down here. Because I'm sick of being a coward
.

“I'm the one that did it,” she says at last.

“So
what
? Is going back gonna
undo
any of it?” Alex shakes her head in disbelief. “What's the
point
?
”
She stands there, looking down like some fragile china magistrate on the verge of shattering.

Lenie Clarke wants very much to reach out to her right now. But Lenie Clarke isn't
that
stupid. “I—I have to face up to what I did,” she says weakly.

“Bullshit,” Alyx says. “You're not facing up to anything. You're running away.”

“Running away?”

“From me, for one thing.”

And suddenly even Lenie Clarke, professional idiot, can see it. Alyx isn't worried about what Lubin might do to Lenie Clarke; she's worried about what Clarke might do to herself. She's not stupid, she's known Clarke for years and she knows the traits that make a rifter. Lenie Clarke was once suicidal. She once hated herself enough to want to die, and that was before she'd even done anything
deserving
of death. Now she's about to re-enter a world of reminders that she's killed more people than all the Lubins who ever lived. Alyx Rowan is wondering, understandably, if her best friend is going to open her own wrists when that happens.

To be honest, Clarke wonders about that too.

But she only says, “It's okay, Lex. I won't—I mean, I've got no intention of hurting myself.”

“Really?” Alyx asks, as if she doesn't dare to hope.

“Really.” And now, promises delivered, adolescent fears calmed, Lenie Clarke reaches out and takes Alyx's hands in hers.

Alyx no longer seems the slightest bit fragile. She stares calmly down at Clarke's reassuring hands clasped around her limp, unresponsive ones, and grunts softly.

“Too bad,” she says.

INCOMING

T
HE
missiles shot from the Atlantic like renegade fireworks, heading west. They erupted in five discrete swarms, beginning a ten-minute game of speed chess played across half a hemisphere. They looped and corkscrewed along drunken trajectories that would have been comical if it didn't make them so damned hard to intercept.

Desjardins did his best. Half a dozen orbiting SDI antiques had been waiting for him to call back ever since he'd seduced them two years before, in anticipation of just this sort of crisis. Now he only had to knock on their back doors; on command, they spread their legs and wracked their brains.

The machines turned their attention to the profusion of contrails scarring the atmosphere below. Vast and subtle algorithms came into play, distinguishing wheat from chaff, generating target predictions, calculating intercept vectors and fitness functions. Their insights were profound but not guaranteed; the enemy had its own thinking machines, after all. Decoys mimicked destroyers in every possible aspect. Every stutter of an attitude jet made point-of-impact predictions that much murkier. Desjardins's date-raped battellites dispatched their own countermeasures—lasers, particle beams, missiles dispatched from their own precious and nonrenewable stockpiles—but every decision was probabilistic, every move a product of statistics. When playing the odds, there is no certainty.

Three made it through.

The enemy scored two strikes on the Florida panhandle and another in the Texan dust belt. Desjardins won the New England semifinals hands-down—none of those attacks even made it to the descending arc—but the southern strikes could easily be enough to tilt the balance if he didn't take immediate ground action. He dispatched eight lifters with instructions to sterilize everything within a twenty-k radius, waited for launch confirmations, and leaned back, exhausted. He closed his eyes. Statistics and telemetry flickered uninterrupted beneath his lids.

Nothing so pedestrian as
β
ehemoth, not this time. A new bug entirely.
Seppuku
, they were calling it.

Thank you, South Fucking Africa
.

What
was
it with those people? They'd been a typical Third World country in so many ways, enslaved and oppressed and brutalized like all the others. Why couldn't they have just thrown off their shackles in the usual way, embraced violent rebellion with a side order of blood-soaked retribution? What kind of crazy-ass people, after feeling the boot on their necks for generations, struck back at their oppressors with—wait for it—
reconciliation panels?
It made no sense.

Except, of course, for the fact that it worked. Ever since Saint Nelson the S'Africans had become masters at the sidestep, accommodating force rather than meeting it head-on, turning enemy momentum to their own advantage. Black belts in sociological judo. For half a century they'd been sneaking under the world's guard, and hardly anyone had noticed.

Now they were more of a threat than Ghana and Mozambique and all the other M&M regimes combined. Desjardins understood completely where those other furious backwaters were coming from. More than that, he sympathized: after all, the western world had sat around making
tut-tut
noises while the sex plagues burned great smoking holes out of Africa's age structure. Only China had fared worse (and who knew what was brewing behind
those
dark, unresponsive borders?). It was no surprise that the Apocalypse Meme resonated so strongly over there; the stunted generation struggling up from those ashes was over seventy percent female. An avenging goddess turning the tables, serving up Armageddon from the ocean floor—if Lenie Clarke hadn't provided a ready-made template, such a perfect legend would have erupted anyway through sheer spontaneous combustion.