"Seals, too." Lubin points along the shore to the north, although whatever he sees is too distant for Clarke's unmagnified vision. "Birds. Vegetation."
The dissonance of it sinks in. "Why the sudden interest in wildlife, Ken? I never took you for a nature lover."
"It's all healthy," he says.
"What?"
"No carcasses, no skeletons. Nothing even looks sick." Lubin slips the binocs from his skull and slides them back into his fanny pack. "The grass is rather brown, but I suspect that's normal." He sounds almost disappointed for some—
ßehemoth, she realizes. That's what he's looking for.Hoping for. Up here the world burns its hot zones—at least, it burns those small enough to carry any hope of containment in exchange for the lives and land lost to the flame. ßehemoth threatens the entire biosphere, after all; nobody gives a damn about collateral damage when the stakes are that high.
But Sable is healthy. Sable is unburned. Which means the destruction around them has nothing to do with ecological containment.
Someone is hunting them.
Clarke can't really blame them, whoever they are. She'd have been dying up here with everyone else if the corpses had had their way. Atlantis was only built for the Movers and Shakers of the world; Clarke and her buddies were just another handful of the moved and the shaken as far as that elite was concerned. The only difference was that Achilles Desjardins had told them where the party was, so they could crash it before the lights went out.
So if this is the anger of those left behind, she can hardly begrudge it. She can't even dismiss it as misplaced. After all, ßehemoth is her fault.
She looks back at the aftermath. Whoever did this isn't nearly as good as Desjardins was. They're not bad, mind you; they were smart enough to deduce Atlantis's general whereabouts, anyway. The variant of ßehemoth they rejigged utterly defeats the retrofitted immunity that was supposed to protect its citizenry. The fact that they even got close enough to seed ß-Max in the right vicinity may have won them the game, judging from the body count that was starting up as Phocoena went into the field.
But they still haven't found the nest. They prowl the neighborhood, they've burned this lonely outpost on the frontier, but after all this time Atlantis itself continues to elude them. Now, Desjardins—it took him less than a week to winnow three hundred and sixty million square kilometers of seabed down to a single set of lats and longs. He not only painted the bullseye, he pulled the strings and erased the tracks and arranged the rides to get them there.
Achilles, my friend, Clarke thinks. We could really use your help about now. But Achilles Desjardins is dead. He died during Rio. Even being CSIRA's best 'lawbreaker doesn't do you much good when a plane drops on your head.
For all Clarke knows, he may have been killed by the same people who did this.
Lubin is walking back along the platform. Clarke follows. Wind slices around her, frigid and biting; she could almost swear she feels its teeth through the diveskin, although that must be her imagination. Nearby, some accidental wind-tunnel of pipes and plating moans as if haunted.
"What month is it?" she asks aloud.
"June." Lubin's heading for the helipad.
It seems a lot colder than it should be. Maybe this is what passes for balmy since the Gulf Stream shut down. Clarke's never been able to wrap her head around that paradox: that global warming should somehow have turned eastern Europe into Siberia…
Metal stairs lead up to the pad. But Lubin, reaching them, doesn't climb; he steps behind them and drops to one knee, intent on the underside of the frame. Clarke bends down at his side. She sees nothing but scraped, painted metal.
Lubin sighs. "You should go back," he says.
"Not a chance."
"Past this point I won't be able to return you. I can afford a forty-six hour delay more than I can afford someone slowing me down once we get to the mainland."
"We've been over this, Ken. What makes you think I'm going to be any easier to convince now?"
"Things are worse than I expected."
"How, exactly? It's already the end of the world."
He points at a spot under the stairs where the paint's been scraped off.
Clarke shrugs. "I don't see anything."
"Right." Lubin turns and starts back towards the scorched remains of the control hut.
She sets out after him. "So?"
"I left a backup recorder behind. Looked like a rivet." He brings his hand out, holds thumb and forefinger close together, almost touching, for scale. "Even painted it over. I would never have been able to find it." The forefinger extends; Lubin's pointing hand describes an imaginary line between hut and staircase. "Nice short line-of-sight to minimize power consumption. Omnidirectional broadcast; impossible to backtrack. Enough memory for a week's worth of routine chatter, plus anything they might have sent our way."
"That's not much," Clarke remarks.
"It wasn't a long-term record. When it ran out of new memory it overwrote the old."
A black box, then. A moving record of the recent past. "So you were expecting something like this," she surmises.
"I was expecting that if something happened, I'd at least be able to retrieve some kind of log. I wasn't expecting to lose the recorder. I was the only one who knew it was here."
They've returned to the radio shack. The blackened door frame still stands, an absurd rectangle rising from the rubble. Lubin, perhaps out of some cryptic respect for standard procedure, passes through it. Clarke simply steps over the knee-high tatters of the nearest wall.
Something snaps and cracks around her ankle. She looks down. Her foot is imprisoned in a blackened human ribcage, her leg emerging from a shattered hole where the sternum used to be. She can feel the knobs and projections of the spine underfoot, brittle and crumbling under the slightest weight.
If there's a skull—or arms or legs—they must be buried in the surrounding rubble.
Lubin watches while she pulls her foot from the remains. Something glitters behind his eyecaps.
"Whoever's behind this," he says, "is smarter than me."
His face isn't really expressionless. It just looks that way to the uninitiated. But Lenie Clarke has learned to read him, after a fashion, and Lubin doesn't look worried or upset to her. He looks excited.
She nods, undeterred. "So you need all the help you can get."
She follows him down.
Nightingale
It seemed as if they came out of the ground itself. Sometimes that was literally true: increasing numbers lived in the sewers and storm drains now, as if a few meters of concrete and earth could hold back what heaven and earth had failed to. Most of the time, though, it was only appearance. Taka Ouellette's mobile infirmary would pull up at some municipal crossroads, near some ramshackle collection of seemingly-abandoned houses and strip malls which nonetheless disgorged a listless trickle of haggard occupants, long past hope but willing to go through the motions in whatever time they had left. They were the unlucky unconnected who hadn't made it into a PMZ. They were the former skeptics who hadn't realized until too late that this was the real thing. They were the fatalists and the empiricists who looked back over the previous century and wondered why it had taken this long for the world to end.
They were the people barely worth saving. Taka Ouellette did her best. She was the person barely competent to save them.
Rossini wafted from the cab behind her. Ouellette’s next case staggered forward, oblivious to the music, a woman who might once have been described as middle-aged: loose-skinned, stiff-limbed, legs moving on some semifunctional autopilot. One of them nearly buckled as she approached, sent the whole sad body lurching to one side. Ouellette reached out but the woman caught herself at the last moment, kept upright more through accident than effort. Both cheeks were swollen bruised pillows: the rheumy eyes above them seemed fixed on some indeterminate point between zenith and horizon. Her right hand was an infected claw, curled around an oozing gash.