He was aiming his eighth grenade when he noticed the residue of the seventh behaving strangely. It had started as puffy round cumulus, like all the others. Now, though, it was streaked and streaming, as though being stretched by the wind. Which would indeed have been the case, if it had been streaming with the breeze instead of across it.
And another cloud, more distant and dissipated, seemed to be breaking the same rules. They didn't flow, these aerosol streams, not to the naked eye. Rather, they seemed to drift against the wind, towards some point of convergence back the way Lubin had come, about thirty degrees off his own track.
And they were losing altitude.
He started after them. The motes in those clouds couldn't be called intelligent by any stretch of the word, but they knew what they liked and they had the means to get to it. They were olfactory creatures, and they loved the smell of two things above all else. The first was the protein signatures put out by a wide array of weaponised biosols; they tracked that aroma like sharks sniffing blood in the water, and when they finally found that ambrosia and rolled around in it they changed, chemically. That was the other thing these creatures loved: the smell of their own kind, fulfilled.
It was the classic biomagnifying one-two punch. Too often, traces of one's quarry were too faint to do more than whisper to a few passing motes. Those would lock on, enzyme-to-substrate, and achieve their own personal nirvana — but that very merger would quench the emissions that had lured them in the first place. The contaminant would be flagged, but the flag would be far too small to catch any mammalian eye.
But to be aroused not only by prey, but by others similarly aroused—why, it scarcely mattered whether there was enough to go around. A single offending particle would be enough to start an orgiastic fission reaction. Each subsequent arrival would only brighten the collective signal.
Lubin found it half-buried in the gravel bed of a shallow gully. It looked like a snub-nosed bullet thirty centimeters long, perforated by rows of circular holes along half its length. It looked like the salt shaker of a giant with pathologically high blood pressure. It looked like the business end of a multiheaded suborbital device for the delivery of biological aerosols.
Lubin couldn't tell what color it had originally been. It was dripping with fluorescent pink goo.
Ouellete's MI changed before his eyes on the final steps of his approach. Bright holographic phantoms resolved within the vehicle—the plastic skin grew translucent, exposing neon guts and nerves beneath. Lubin was still getting used to such visions. His new inlays served up the diagnostic emissions of any unshielded machinery within a twelve meter radius. This particular vehicle wasn't quite as forthcoming as he would have liked, though. It was riddled with tumors: rectangular shadows beneath the dash, dark swathes across the passenger door, a black unreflective cylinder rising through the center of the vehicle like a dark heart. The MI had a lot of security, all of it shielded.
Clarke and Ouellette stood to one side, watching him approach. Ouellette was nothing special to Lubin's new eyes. Dim sparkles glimmered from within Clarke's thorax, but they told him nothing; inlays and implants spoke different dialects.
He toggled the inlays; the hallucinatory schematics imploded, leaving dull plastic and white dust and nonluminous flesh and clothing behind.
"You found something," Ouellette said. "We saw the clouds."
He told them.
Ouellette stared, openmouthed: "They're shooting germs at us? We're already on our last legs! Why bother hitting us with Megapox or Supercol when we're already—"
She stopped. The outrage on her face gave way to a puzzled frown.
Clarke looked the question over the doctor's confusion: ß-max? Lubin shrugged.
"Perhaps N'Am isn't dying fast enough," Lubin remarked. "A significant number of M&Ms regard ßehemoth as divine retribution for North America's sins. It's official policy in Italy and Libya, at least. Botswana too, I believe."
Clarke snorted. "North America's sins? They think it just stops at the Atlantic?"
"The moderates think they can keep it at bay," Ouellette said. "The extremists don't want to. They don't get into heaven until the world ends." Her mind seemed elsewhere; she spoke as if absently flicking at some hovering insect.
Lubin let her think. She was, after all, the closest available approximation to a native guide. Perhaps she could come up with something.
"Who are you people?" Ouellette asked quietly.
"Excuse me?"
"You're not feral. You're not clave. You sure as hell aren't CSIRA or you'd be better equipped. Maybe you're TransAt—but that doesn't fit either." A faint smile passed across her face. "You don't know what you're doing, do you? You're making it up as you go along…"
Lubin kept his face neutral and his question on target. "Is there any reason not to believe that people might launch a biological attack against North America simply to—hasten things along?"
She seemed to find this amusing. "You don't get out much, do you?"
"Am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong." Ouellette spat on the ashy ground. "Lots of folks might help Providence along, if they had the chance. That doesn't mean this is an attack."
"What else would it be?"
"Maybe it's a counteragent."
Clarke looked up at that. "A cure?"
"Not so personal, maybe. Something that kills ßehemoth in the wild."
Lubin eyed Ouellette. She eyed him back, and answered his unspoken skepticism: "Of course there are crazies out there who want the world to end. But there have to be a lot more people who don't, wouldn't you agree? And they'd be working just as hard."
There was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before. They almost shone.
He nodded. "But if this is a counteragent, why do you suppose they tried to shoot it down? And why deliver it suborbitally? Wouldn't it be more efficient to leave deployment to the local authorities?"
Ouellette rolled her eyes. "What local authorities?"
Clarke frowned. "Wouldn't someone have told—everybody? Wouldn't someone have told you?"
"Laurie, you make something like this too public and you're painting a bullseye on your chest for the M&Ms. As for missile defense—" Ouellette turned back to Lubin— "Did the people on your planet ever mention something called the Rio Insurrection?"
"Tell us about it," Lubin said. Thinking: Laurie?
"I can't, really," Ouellette admitted. "Nobody really knows what happened. They say maybe a bunch of Madonnas got into CSIRA's Rio de Janeiro offices and went crazy. Launched attacks all over the place."
"Who won?"
"The good guys. At least, Rio got vaporized and the trouble stopped, but who knows? Some people say that it wasn't Lenies at all, it was some kind of civil war between rogue 'lawbreakers. But whatever it was, it was—way out there." She waved a hand at the horizon. "We had our own problems to deal with. And the only real moral of the story is, nobody knows who's running things any more, or whose side they're on, and we're all too busy hanging on by our fingernails to afford the time for any Big Questions. For all we know N'Am's battellites are running on autopilot, and ground control just lost the access codes. Or the Lenies are doing a little target practice. Or—or maybe the M&Ms have someone on the inside. The fact that something's shooting at these bugs doesn't prove anything, one way or another."