But the gouts of flame that poured from its belly in the next instant showed up clearly enough even to naked eyes.
Not a missile. Not a microbe. A lifter, scouring the distance as it had already scoured the foreground.
And for all Taka Ouellette knew, she had been the one to bring it here.
Oh, it wasn't dead certain. Wide-scale incendiary purges still happened under official pretext. There'd actually been a time when they were pretty routine, back in the early panic-stricken days when people thought they might actually be able to contain ßehemoth if they just had the balls to take drastic steps. Those had scaled back when it had grown apparent that N'Am was blowing its whole napalm reserve to no good effect, but they still happened sometimes in some of the wilder zones out west. It was even possible that such steps might have been undertaken without CSIRA bothering to extract their field personnel, although Taka doubted that even she would be left that far out of the loop.
But not so far from here, not so long ago, she had let a monster escape into the real world. Floods and firestorms always seemed to follow in the wake of such breaches, and Taka had almost forgotten a time when she believed in coincidence.
There'd be no shortage of proximate causes. Perhaps some rogue autopilot afflicted with faulty programming, tricked by a typographic error into burning the wrong part of the world. Or maybe a human pilot misled by garbled encryption, commands misheard through static and interference. None of those details mattered. Taka knew the bigger question: who had tweaked any code that subverted the automatic pilot? What had garbled instructions heard by the flesh and blood one?
She knew the answer, too. It would have been obvious to anyone who'd seen the monster in her eyephones, a few hours before. There were no accidents. Noise was never random. And the machinery itself was malign.
Here, staring out at a photoamplified crematorium stretching to the very horizon, it was the only explanation that made sense.
You were a scientist once, she told herself. You rejected incantations outright. You knew the truths that protected you from bias and woolly-mindedness, and you learned them all by heart: correlation is not causation. Nothing is real until replicated. The mind sees order in noise; trust only numbers.
Incantations of another sort, perhaps. Not very effective ones; they hadn't, for all their familiarity, saved her from the creeping certainty that she'd called an evil spirit into her vehicle. She could rationalize the superstitious awe in her head, justify it even. Her training gave her more than enough tools for that. Spirit was only a word, a convenient label for a virulent software entity forged in the fast-forward Darwinian landscape that had once been called Internet. Taka knew how fast evolutionary changes could be wrought in a system where a hundred generations passed in the blink of an eye. She remembered another time when electronic lifeforms—undesigned, unplanned, and unwanted—had grown so pestilential that the net itself had acquired the name Maelstrom. The things called Lenies, or Shredders, or Madonnas—like the Gospel demons, their names were legion—they were simply exemplars of natural selection. Extremely successful exemplars: on the other side of the world, whole countries abased themselves in their names. Or in the name of the icon on which they were based at least, some semi-mythical cult figure who'd risen to brief prominence on ßehemoth's coattails.
This was logic, not religion. So what if these things had power beyond imagining, yet no physical substance? So what if they lived in the wires and the wireless spaces between, and moved at the speed of their own electronic thoughts? Demon, spirit—shorthand, not superstition. Only metaphor, with more points of similarity than some.
And yet, now Taka Ouellette saw mysterious lights flashing in the sky, and found her lips moving in altogether the wrong kind of incantation.
Oh God, save us.
She turned and headed downhill. She could probably get around the blockage, take some back road to continue on this way, but what was the point? It was a question of cost-benefit analysis, of lives-saved-per-unit-effort. That value would certainly be higher almost anywhere but here.
The collapsed building loomed ahead of her on the road again, gray and colorless in the amplified light. The angular shadows looked different, more ominous from this angle. They formed crude faces and body parts way past human scale, as if some giant cubist robot had collapsed in an angry heap and was summoning the strength to pull itself back together again.
As she began to pick her way around the pile, one of the shadows detached itself and moved to block her path.
"Holy—" Taka gasped. It was only a woman, she saw now, and unarmed—these days you noticed such things almost instinctively—but her heart had been kicked instantly into fight/flight. "Jesus, you scared me."
"Sorry. Didn't mean to." The woman took another step clear of the debris. She was blonde, dressed entirely in some black skin-tight body stocking from neck to feet; only her hands and head were exposed, pale disembodied pieces against the contrasting darkness. She was a few centimeters shorter than Taka herself.
There was something about her eyes, too. They seemed too bright, somehow. Probably an artefact of the specs, Taka decided. Light reflecting off the wetness of the cornea, perhaps.
The woman jerked her chin back over her shoulder. "That your ambulance?"
"Mobile Infirmary. Yes." Taka glanced around the full three-sixty. She saw no one else. "Are you sick?"
A laugh, very soft. "Isn't everyone?"
"I mean—"
"No. Not yet."
What is it about those eyes? It was hard to tell from this distance—the woman was ten meters away—but it looked like she might be wearing nightshades. In which case she could see Taka Ouellette way better than Taka Ouellette could see her through these fratzing photoamps.
People in the wildlands did not generally come so well-equipped.
Taka put her hands casually into her pockets; the act pushed her windbreaker away from the standard-issue Kimber on her hip. "Are you hungry?" she asked. "There's a cycler in the cab. The bricks taste like shit, but if you're desperate…"
"Sorry about this," the woman said, stepping forward. "Really."
Her eyes were like blank, translucent balls of ice.
Taka stepped back instinctively. Something blocked her from behind. She spun and stared into another pair of empty eyes, set in a face that seemed all scarred planes and chipped stone. She didn't reach for her gun. Somehow, he already had it.
"It's gene-locked," she said quickly.
"Mmm." He turned the weapon over in his hands. He wore the look of a professional appraiser. "We apologize for the intrusion," he told her, almost absently, "But we need you to disable the security on your vehicle." He did not look at her.
"We're not going to hurt you," the woman said from behind.
Taka, unreassured, kept her eyes on the man holding her gun.
"Certainly not," he agreed, looking up at last. "Not while there are more efficient alternatives."
Bagheera was one password. There were several others. Morris locked down the whole kit and kaboodle, so that not even Taka could start it up again without live authorization. Pixel electrostabbed any passengers who didn't match her pheromone profile. Tigger unlocked the doors and played dead until it heard Taka say Schroedinger: then it locked down and pumped enough halothane into the cab to turn a 110-kg assailant into a sack of jelly for a minimum of fifteen minutes. (Taka herself would be up and at 'em in a mere ninety seconds; when they'd given her the keys to Miri they'd also tweaked her blood with a resistant enzyme.)