Still. There were hints of the wind, changing at his back. Fragments of encrypted conversations between veterans in Helsinki and rookies in Melbourne and middle-management stats-hounds in New Delhi. Disgruntled insistence from Weimers, King Sim himself, that there had to be some undiscovered variable wreaking havoc with his projections. And—
And right this very second, a disembodied chunk of point-counterpoint snatched from the ether by one of Desjardins's minions. It was only a few seconds in length—thanks to a filthy spectrum and the dynamic channel-switching that coped with it, it was almost impossible to grab more without knowing which random seed to apply—but it seemed to have been connecting a couple of 'lawbreakers in London and McMurdo. It took forty seconds and six nested Bayesians to turn it back into English.
"Desjardins saved us from Rio," Mr. McMurdo had opined, moments earlier, in a Hindian accent. "We'd have surely taken ten times the losses had he not acted when he did. How those people threw off the Trip—"
Ms. London: "How do you know they did?" Irish lilt. Enticing.
"Well let me see. They launched an unprovoked attack on a large number of—"
"How do we know it was unprovoked?"
"Of course it was unprovoked."
"Why? How do you know they didn't just see a threat to the greater good, and try to stop it?"
Precious moments of this fleeting excerpt, wasted on astonished silence. Finally: "Are you suggesting that—"
"I'm saying history gets written by the victors. Rio's history. How do we know the good guys won?"
End of intercept. If McMurdo had had an answer, he hadn't got it out before the frequency skidded away.
Wow, Desjardins thought.
It was horseshit, of course. The idea that twenty-one separate CSIRA franchises could have simultaneously gone rogue was hardly more plausible than the thought that Rio alone had. Ms. London was a 'lawbreaker, not an idiot. She knew about parsimony. She'd just been blowing smoke out her ass, yanking poor old McMurdo's chain.
Still, it gave Desjardins pause. He'd gotten used to being the Man Who Stopped Rio. It put him above suspicion on so many counts. And it didn't sit well, to think that there were people out there who could doubt his virtue even for a moment.
That could lead to secondthoughts, he reflected. It could lead to closer looks.
The board beeped again. For a moment he thought that he'd beaten all odds and reacquired the signal—but no. The new alert came from a different source entirely, a broadband dump from somewhere in Maine.
That's odd, he thought.
A Lenie had gotten into a medical database and was spewing random intelligence across half the EM spectrum. They did that a lot, these days—not content to merely scramble and hash, some had taken to shouting into the ether, indiscriminately dumping data into any network they could access. Some reproductive subroutine, mutated to spread data instead of executables. At the very least it threw more chaff into a system already losing usable bandwidth by the hour; at worst it could blow the lid off all sorts of secret and sensitive data.
Either way it was bad news for the real world; that would be enough to keep it going.
This particular demon had uploaded a whole shitload of biomedical stuff from the database it had plundered. Desjardins's board had flagged it for potential epidemiological significance. He popped the lid and looked inside.
And immediately forgot about any trivial bullshit gossip from London.
There were two items, both rife with dangerous pathology. Desjardins was no pathologist, but then again he didn't have to be; the friends and advisors arrayed about him distilled all those biochemical details down to an executive summary that even he could understand. Now they served up a pair of genotypes with red flags attached. The first was almost ßehemoth, only better: greater resistance to osmotic stress, sharper teeth for cleaving molecules. Higher virulence. At least one critical feature was the same, though. Like baseline ßehemoth, this new strain was optimized for life at the bottom of the sea.
It did not exist in the standard database. Which raised the question of what its technical specs were doing in a glorified ambulance out of Bangor.
It would have been enough to grab his attention even if it had arrived unaccompanied. It had brought a date, though, and she was the real ballbreaker. She was the bitch he had always dreaded. She was the last thing he would have ever expected.
Because he had always known that Seppuku would gain a foothold eventually.
But he hadn't expected anyone on his own side to be culturing the damn thing.
Corral
Taka cursed her own lack of foresight. They'd spread the word, all right. They'd told all who came by of their plan to save the world: the need for samples, the dangers of lingering afterwards, the places she'd patrol to take charge of vital payloads. They'd taken special note of those few who'd driven up in cars or motorbikes or even plain old pedal-powered flywheels, got addresses from those who still had them and told the rest to check back regularly: if all went well, they might save the world.
And things had gone well, and then so horribly wrong, in such quick succession. They had their counteragent, or some of it anyway, but no prearranged signals to bring in the couriers. And after all, why would they have even bothered? They could have taken an afternoon and driven around the county. They could have waited for those of no fixed address to check in, tomorrow or the next day.
And now Taka Ouellette had the salvation of the world in her hands, and some shrinking fraction of a sixty-minute window to get it to safety.
She ran the siren continuously from one end of Freeport to the other, a shrieking departure from the music employed to announce her day-to-day presence. Hopefully it would summon the healthy as well as the sick.
She got some of both. She warned them all to take shelter; she promised a mother with a broken arm and a son with incipient stage-one that she'd come back and help them when the fires had passed. She urged the others, as they fled, to send the Six her way, or anyone else with wheels to burn.
After thirty minutes, one of them came by. After forty, two more; she loaded them all with precious milliliters of amber fluid and sent them running. She begged them to send the others, if they knew their whereabouts. If they could find them in time.
Forty-five minutes, and nothing but a ragged handful of the hungry and the feeble. She chased them away with stories about fire-breathing dragons, sent them down to a fisherman's wharf that had once been the community's breadbasket. Now, if they were lucky, it might at least serve as a place from which to jump into the ocean; surely the flames wouldn't scorch the whole Atlantic?
Fifty minutes.
I can't wait.
But there were others here, she knew. People she hadn't seen today. People she hadn't warned.
And they're not coming, Tak.If you want to warn them, you might as well start going door to door. Search every house and hovel within twenty klicks. You've got ten minutes.
Ken had said they could count on sixty minutes. A minimum estimate, right? It might take longer, a lot longer.
She knew what Dave would have said. She still had two liters of culture. Dave would have told her she could make all the difference, if she didn't just sit there and wait for the furnace.
It might not happen at all. What were they basing this on, anyway? A couple of firestorms that happened to follow aborted missile attacks? What about the times when the missiles fell and nothing happened afterwards? There had to be times when nothing had happened. What about the times when the fires came, or the floods or the explosions, with nothing to presage them? Correlation wasn't causation…and this wasn't even strong correlation…
It convinced Ken.
But she didn't know Ken at all. Didn't even know his last name, or Laur—Lenie's. She would have had nothing but their own word that they were who they said they were, if they had even bothered to really tell her even that much. And now even their names were suspect. Laurie was not Laurie at all, it seemed.