People ran, or twitched, or lay still. The lasers dipped and weaved, scrawling blackened gibberish onto the ground. Fire guttered here and there among the curlicues, bright staccatos against the failing light.
Taka pulled frantically at the passenger door; fortunately the renegade system hadn't charged the hull. It had locked her out, though; this was the door that was supposed to stay unlocked, the route to refuge—
It's online how in God's name can it be online —
But she could see the telltale on her dashboard, flashing scarlet. The MI was somehow uplinked to the wide wireless world, to the networked monsters that lived and hunted in there, to—
A Madonna. A Lenie. It had to be.
Another telltale winked from a different part of the dashboard. Belatedly, Taka read the signs: the driver's door was unlocked. She threw herself around the front of the vehicle. She kept her eyes on the ground, some religious impulse averting them from the wrath of God, if I don't see it maybe it won't see me but she could hear the turret just above her, tracking and firing, tracking and—
She piled into the cab, yanked the door behind her, locked it.
The cab's eyephones lay on the floor beside the seat. A tiny aurora of light writhed across the deck from its oculars. She snatched up the phones and held them to her face.
The Madonna's twisted face raged within an inset on the main display. There was no sound—Taka left the headset muted by default.
Shitsucker. It got in through GPS. She always kept GPS offline when she wasn't traveling; somehow the invader must have spoofed the system.
She killed nav. The screaming thing in the window went out. Overhead, the lasers ceased fire with a downshifting whine.
Water Music had ended sometime during the massacre. Tchaikovsky had stepped into the gap. Iolanta.
It seemed like a very long while before she dared to move.
She killed the music. She hugged herself, shaking. She tried very hard not to cry like a frightened child. She told herself she'd done what she could.
She told herself it could have been worse.
Madonnas could do almost anything in their own environment. Cruising through the walls and the wires and the wavelengths of N'AmNet they could penetrate almost any system, subvert almost any safeguard, bring down almost any calamity upon the heads of people for whom disaster had long since become the status quo. Just the week before, one had breached the flood-control subroutines of some dam in the Rockies, emptied a whole reservoir onto an unsuspecting populace sleeping in the spillway's shadow.
Forcing access into one lousy MI would have been simplicity itself to such a creature.
It hadn't downloaded, at least. No room. Neither nav nor weapons-system chips were anywhere near big enough to support something so complex, and the medical systems—the only habitat in the van that could hold something that size—were kept manually disconnected from the net except for prearranged updates. The monsters could do a lot of things in virtual space, but they hadn't yet figured out how to reach into the real world and physically flip a switch. So this one had simply extended long, vicious fingers from some faraway node, wreaking havoc from a distance until Taka had cut it off.
Her own dim image stared back, haunted and hollow-eyed, from the darkened dashboard. The perspex, subtly convex, stretched her reflection lengthwise, turned gaunt into downright attenuate. A fragile refugee from some low-gravity planet, civilized and genteel. Banished to a hellish world where even your own armor turned against you.
What if I— she thought, and stopped herself.
Wearily, she unlocked the door and climbed out onto the killing floor. There were still a fair number of patients in sight. None were standing, of course. Few moved.
What if I didn't—
"Hello!" she called to the empty streets and dark façades. "It's okay! It's gone! I shut it out!"
Moans from the injured. Nothing else.
"Anybody! I could really use a hand here! We've got—we've got…"
What if I didn'tturn GPS off?
She shook her head. She always took it offline. She didn't specifically remember doing it this particular time, but you never remembered rote stuff like that.
"Anybody?"
Maybe you fucked up. Wouldn't be the first time.
Would it, Dave?
It seemed so dark all of a sudden. She raised her eyes from the carnage; twilight was bleeding away to the west.
That was when she noticed the contrails.
Condom
Phocoena's bulkheads are luminous with intelligence. The periscope feed delivers crisp rich realtimes of the maritime nightscape: dark sparkling waves in the foreground, black fingers of dry land reaching into the view from either side. A jumble of bright buildings rises above the coastline in center screen, huddled together against the surrounding darkness. Boxy unlit silhouettes to the south belie the remains of a whole other city south of the Narrows, abandoned in the course of some recent retreat.
The city of Halifax. Or rather, the besieged city-state that Halifax has evidently become.
That naked-eye visual occupies the upper-left quarter of the main panel. Beside it, a false-color interpretation of the same view shows a fuzzy, indistinct cloud enveloping the lit buildings; Clarke thinks of the mantle of a jellyfish, enclosing vital organs. The shroud is largely invisible to human eyes, even rifter ones; to Phocoena's spectrum-spanning senses, it looks like a blue haze of heat lightning. Static-field ionization, Lubin says. A dome of electricity to keep airborne particles at bay.
The seaward frontier is under guard. Not that Clarke ever expected to simply sneak into the harbor and pull up next to the local clam shack; she knew there'd be some kind of security in place. Lubin was expecting mines, so for the last fifty klicks Phocoena crawled towards the coast behind a couple of point drones zig-zagging ahead, luring any countermeasures out of concealment. Those flushed a single burrower lying in wait; awakened by the sound of approaching machinery, it shot from the mud and corkscrewed into the nearest drone with a harmless and anticlimactic clunk.
That lone dud was the only countermeasure they came across on the outer slope. Lubin figures that Halifax's subsurface defenses must have been used up fending off previous incursions. The fact that they haven't been replenished doesn't bode well for the mass-production of industrial goods in the vicinity.
At any rate, against all expectations they've cruised unchallenged all the way here, just outside Halifax Harbor. Only to nearly run into this. Whatever this is.
It's virtually invisible in the sub's lights. It's even less visible to sonar, which can barely pick it up even at point-blank range. A transparent, diaphanous membrane stretches from seabed to surface: the periscope shows a float line holding its upper edge several meters above the waves. It appears to stretch across the entire mouth of the harbor.
It billows inward, as if the Atlantic is leaning on it from the outside. Pinpoint flashes of cold blue light sparkle across its face, sparse ripples of stardust echoing the gentle subsurface surge. Clarke recognizes the effect. It's not the membrane that sparkles, but the tiny bioluminescent creatures colliding with it.
Plankton. It seems somehow encouraging that they still exist, so close to shore.
Lubin's less interested in the light show than its cause. "Must be semipermeable." That would explain the oceanographic impossibility that belied its presence, a sudden sharp halocline rising across their path like a wall. Discrete boundaries are common enough in the sea: brackish water lying atop heavier saline, warm water layered over cold. But the stratification is always horizontal, a parfait of light-over-heavy as inevitable as gravity. A vertical halocline seems to violate the very laws of physics; the membrane itself may have been undetectable to sonar, but the sheer knife-edged discontinuity it produces showed up like a brick wall from a thousand meters away.