Her body spun back into position. The assembly locked into place. The exoskeleton drew back her arms, spread her legs. She felt herself cracking open like a wishbone.
She vacated the premises, pushed her consciousness back into that perfect little void where pain and hope and Achilles Desjardins didn't exist. Far beneath her, almost underwater, she felt her body moving back and forth to the rhythm of his thrusting. She couldn't feel him in her, of course—she'd been spoiled by all the battering rams he'd used to pave the way. She found that vaguely amusing for reasons she couldn't quite pin down.
She remembered Dave, and the time he'd surprised her on the patio. She remembered live theatre in Boston. She remembered Crystal's fourth birthday.
Strange sounds followed her through from the other world, rhythmic sounds, faintly ridiculous in context. Someone was singing down there, an inane little ditty rendered off-key while her distant body got the gears:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
There had to be a subtext, of course. There would be a quiz at the end of class.
Only there wasn't. Suddenly the thrusting stopped. He hadn't ejaculated—she was familiar enough with his rhythms to know that much. He pulled out of her, muttering something she couldn't quite make out way up here in the safe zone. A moment later his footsteps hurried away behind her, leaving only the sound of her own ragged breathing.
Taka was alone with her body and her memories and the tiled creatures on the floor. Achilles had abandoned her. Something had distracted him. Maybe someone at the door. Maybe the voice of some other beast, howling in his head.
She was hearing those a lot herself these days.
Firebreathers
The airwaves seethed with tales of catastrophe. From Halifax to Houston, static-field generators sparked and fried. Hospitals deep within the claves and fortresses on the very frontier flickered and blacked out. A report from somewhere around Newark had an automated plastics refinery melting down; another from Baffin Island claimed that a He-3 cracking station was venting its isotopes uncontrollably into the atmosphere. It was almost as if the Maelstrom of old had been reborn, in all its world-spanning glory but with a hundred times the virulence.
The Lenies were on the warpath—and suddenly they were hunting in groups. Firewalls crumbled in their path; exorcists engaged and were reduced to static on the spot.
"Lifter just crashed into the Edmonton Spire," Clarke said. Lubin looked back at her. She tapped her ear, where his borrowed earbead relayed privileged chatter from the ether. "Half the city's on fire."
"Let's hope ours is better behaved," Lubin said.
Add that to your total score, she told herself, and tried to remember: this time it was different. Lives sacrificed now would be repaid a thousandfold down the road. This was more than Revenge. This was the Greater Good, in all its glory.
Remembering it was easy enough. Feeling right with it was something else again.
This is what happens when you get Lenie to likeLenie.
They were back on the coast, standing on the edge of some derelict waterfront in a ghost town whose name Clarke hadn't bothered to learn. All morning they had crept like black, blank-eyed spiders through this great junkscape of decaying metaclass="underline" the dockside cranes, the loading elevators, the warehouses and dry-docks and other premillennial monstrosities of iron and corrugated steel. It was not a radio-friendly environment under the best conditions—and right here, the intermittent voices in Clarke's ear were especially thick with static.
Which was, of course, the whole idea.
To one side, a corroding warehouse with sheet-metal skin and I-beam bones faced the water. To the other, four gantry cranes rose into the sky like a row of wireframe giraffes sixty meters high. They stood upright, their necks looming over the lip of the waterfront at a seventy-degree angle. A great grasping claw dangled from each snout, poised to descend on freighters that had given up on this place decades before.
A thin leash ran through a nose ring on the crane nearest the warehouse, a loop of braided polypropylene no thicker than a man's thumb. Both ends of that loop draped across empty space to a point partway up the neck of the second crane in line; there, they had been tied off around a cervical girder. Against the backdrop of cables and superstructure the rope looked as insubstantial as spider silk.
Spider silk was what they'd been hoping for, actually. Surely, in this whole godforsaken industrial zone, somebody must have left some of the stuff behind. Spider rope had been a dirt-cheap commodity in the biotech age, but it had evidently grown a lot scarcer in the bioapocalyptic one. All they'd found was a coarse coil of antique plastic braid, hanging in an abandoned boathouse at the far end of the strip.
Lubin had sighed and said it would have to do.
Clarke had nearly passed out just watching him climb that leaning, precarious scaffold. The rope uncoiling in his wake, he'd wriggled up the first giraffe's throat and dangled head-down like an ant from its eye socket, his legs wrapped around some spindly brace she was convinced would snap at any moment. She hadn't taken a complete breath until Lubin was safely on the ground again. Then she'd gone through the whole nerve-wracking experience all over again as he climbed the second crane, carrying both ends of the rope this time. He'd stopped well short of the top, thank God, tying off the ends and leaving the rope looped between the structures like a nylon vine.
Now, back on solid ground, he told her that she'd get better traction during her own climb if she wore—
"No fucking way," Clarke said.
"Not to the top. Just to where the line's tied off. Halfway."
"That's more than halfway and you know it. One slip and I'm sockeye."
"Not at all. The crane leans. You'll be dropping into the water."
"Yeah, from fifty meters. You think I—wait a second, I'm supposed to drop into the water?"
"That's the plan."
"Well it's a really bad one."
"They'll be on guard as soon as they realize they've been decoyed. If they notice the rope at that point it could be fatal. You'll untie it and pull it down with you. You'll be safe enough underwater."
"Forget it, Ken. It's just a rope, and your plan's so far into the Oort that it would take another lunatic to figure it out even if he did see—"
She stopped herself. Lunatic might, after all, be a reasonable description of the man they were dealing with. For an instant she was back on that scorched hulk off Sable, lifting her foot from a human ribcage.
And Lubin had said Whoever's behind this is smarter than me…
"I don't want to take any chances," he said now, softly.
She tossed off a few more protests, but they both knew it was only theatre. Eventually she drove Miri to a safe distance and hiked back along the road while Lubin called in his report from the ultralight: a vector holed up in an abandoned warehouse, growing industrial quantities of Seppuku in a basement lab.
Control cabs nestled between the shoulder blades of each crane. Vandals or weather had long since knocked out most of the windows. Clarke and Lubin took cover there and waited. A faint whistle of rising wind sang through the framework above them.
It came down from the sky like a bloated dragon, vented gas roaring from its trim bladders. The whirlwind heralded its coming; a nor'easter had built throughout the day, and now it whistled across the waterfront with strength enough to drown voices. Sliding sheet-metal doors caught the wind and tugged clanging against their rollers; thin stretched wires and massive cables rang and thrummed like Hell's own string section. The lifter groaned and sparked down through the blow. It settled above the water, in front of the warehouse, and rotated to bring all its guns to bear.
Lubin put his head next to Clarke's. "Go."