"I know he's got incipient Seppuku. Sweating, fever, flushed skin. Elevated metabolism."
"Go on."
"I know that a few days ago, he had advanced Seppuku."
"Meaning—"
"So weak he could barely move. Had to feed on an IV. He had to use a saccadal keyboard to even talk."
"He's getting better," Lubin said skeptically.
"Seppuku's below ten to the second, and dropping by the hour. That's why I brought him back to Miri in the first place, Phocoena doesn't have the—"
"You kept him in Phocoena," Lubin said in a dead monotone.
"You can spank me later, okay? Just shut up and listen: I took him back to Miri and I ran every test she knew how to recommend, and they all confirmed it. Three days ago he was absolutely on death's door, and today I've seen worse head colds."
"You have a cure?" He couldn't believe it.
"It doesn't need a cure. It cures itself. You just—get over it."
"I'd like to see those data."
"You can do more than that. You can help collect 'em. We were just about to run the latest sequence when the lifters showed up."
Lubin shook his head. "Taka seemed to think—" But Taka Ouellette, by her own admission, had fouled up before. Taka Ouellette was nowhere near the top of her field. And Taka Ouellette had discovered Seppuku's dark side only after Achilles Desjardins had led her on his own guided tour of the data…
"I've been trying to figure out why anyone would create a bug that builds to absolutely massive concentrations in the body, and then, just…dies off," Clarke said. "And I can only come up with one reason." She cocked her head at him. "How many vectors did you catch?"
"Eighteen." Working night and day, tracking pink clouds and heat-traces, taking directions from anonymous voices on the radio, derms pasted on his skin to scrub the poisons from his blood, keep him going on half an hour's sleep out of every twenty-four…
"Any of them die?" Clarke asked.
"I was told they died in quarantine." He snorted at his own stupidity. What does it take to fool the master? Just five years out of the game and a voice on the airwaves…
"Taka was right, as far as she went," Clarke said, "Seppuku would kill if nothing stopped it. She just didn't realize that Seppuku stopped itself somehow. And she's got some kind of—esteem issues…"
Imagine that, Lubin thought dryly.
"— she's so used to being the fuck-up that she just—assumes she fucked up at the slightest excuse." She stared at Lubin with a face holding equal parts hope and horror. "But she was right all along, Ken. We're back at square one. Someone must have figured out how to beat ßehemoth, and someone else is trying to stop them."
"Desjardins," Lubin said.
Clarke hesitated. "Maybe…"
There was no maybe about it. Achilles Desjardins was too high in the ranks to not know of any campaign to rehabilitate the continent. Ergo, he couldn't possibly have not known Seppuku's true nature. He had simply lied about it.
And Clarke was wrong about something else, too. They weren't back to square one at all. Back on square one, Lubin had not invested two weeks fighting for the wrong side.
Wrong. He didn't like that word. It didn't belong in his vocabulary, it evoked woolly-minded dichotomies like good and evil. Every clear-minded being knew that there was no such thing; there was only what worked, and what didn't. More effective, and less. The disloyalty of a friend may be maladaptive, but it is not bad. The overtures of a potential ally may serve mutual interest, but that does not make them good. Even hating the mother who beats you as a child is to utterly miss the point: nobody chooses the wiring in their brain. Anyone else's, wired the same, would spark as violently.
Ken Lubin could fight any enemy to the death without malice. He could switch sides the moment circumstances warranted. So it wasn't that the creators of Seppuku were right and Achilles Desjardins was wrong, necessarily. It was simply that Ken Lubin had been misled as to which side he was on.
He'd spent his whole life being used. But to be used without his knowledge was not something he was willing to forgive.
Something ticked over in him then, a kind of toggle between pragmatism and dedication. The latter setting afforded him a certain focus, although it had undeniably led to some maladaptive choices in the past. He used it sparingly.
He used it now.
Desjardins. It had been him all along. Behind the fires, behind the antimissiles, behind the misdirection. Desjardins. Achilles Desjardins.
Playing him.
If that's not an excuse, he reflected, nothing is.
Lubin's ultralight had been a gift from Desjardins. It would be a good idea to continue the conversation at a further remove.
Lubin took Clarke by the arm and walked her to the MI. She didn’t resist. Maybe she'd seen him flip the switch. She got in the driver's side. He got in the passenger's.
Ricketts crouched in the back. His complexion was slightly flushed, his forehead damp, but he was sitting up, and he was munching a protein brick with obvious enthusiasm. "Hi again," he said. "'member me?"
Lubin turned to Clarke. "He's still a 'lawbreaker. His infrastructure isn't what it used to be, but he's still got plenty of resources and nobody further up appears to be reining him in."
"I know," Clarke said.
"He could have us under surveillance right now."
"Hey, if you're worried about the big guys listening in?" Ricketts said around a mouthful of chewy aminos, "I wouldn't worry about it. They're gonna have, like, other things on their minds any mome."
Lubin gave him a cold look. "What are you talking about?"
"He's right, actually," Clarke said. "Someone's about to lose control of their—"
A soft blatting sound cut her off, like the muffled explosion of distant artillery.
"— outer demons," she finished, but Lubin was already back outside.
Off across the water, in the spindly shadows of a decrepit wind farm, the hydrogen-cracking station was burning.
It was as though, in that instant, they had changed places.
Clarke was suddenly advocating noninterference. "Ken, we're two people."
"One person. I'm doing this solo."
"Doing what, exactly? If there's a rogue in CSIRA, let CSIRA handle him. There has to be some way to get a message overseas."
"I intend to, assuming we can access an overseas line. But I have doubts that it will do any good."
"We can transmit from Phocoena."
Lubin shook his head. "We know there's at least one rogue at large. We don't know how many others he might be working with. There's no guarantee that any message routed through a WestHem node would even get through, even—" he glanced at the conflagration across the water— "before this."
"So we move offshore. We could drive across the ocean and hand-deliver the memo ourselves if we—"
"And if it did," he continued, "unsubstantiated claims that a CSIRA 'lawbreaker was even capable of going rogue will be treated with extreme skepticism in a world where the existence of Spartacus is not widely known."
"Ken—"
"By the time we convinced them to take us seriously, and by the time that overseas forces had mustered a response, Desjardins would have escaped. The man is far from stupid."
"So let him escape. As long as he isn't blocking Seppuku any more, what harm can he do?"
She was dead wrong, of course. There was no end to the harm Desjardins could do in the course of abandoning the board. He might even cause Lubin to fail in his mission—and there was no way in hell he was going to permit that.