A blonde mocha woman sat in the driver's seat, forehead against the wheel, long straight hair obscuring her face. She seemed oblivious to his approach.
He tapped on the window. She turned apathetically at the sound. He knew immediately that something was wrong: her face was flushed and shiny with perspiration.
She knew something was wrong, too. Lubin's isolation skin would have pretty much given that away even if she hadn't been sick.
Three days, he thought.
The door was unlocked. He pulled it open and stepped back.
"They told us…it was a cure," she said. It took her two breaths.
"Do you have any left?" Lubin asked.
She gulped. "Some. Spread most of it around." She shook her head. "Gave some to Aaron, too. Couple of days ago."
A transparent bladder lay on the seat beside her. It had been drained almost flat. The culture that remained, sucked into creases and wrinkles in the deflated bag, was no longer amber in color; it was dark and gray as anoxic mud.
"What happened to it?" he asked.
"I don't know. Changed." She shook her head tiredly. "She said it would last a week…"
He leaned forward. She still had the presence of mind to look vaguely startled when she saw him up close. "You were one of them. You were one of them. I saw you there…"
"I need to know where you seeded it," he said. "I need to know everyone you've been in contact with since Freeport, and how to get in touch with them."
She held up one limp-wristed arm, showing off her wristwatch. "Aaron's in here. We split up. Thought…we'd cover more ground…"
He took the watch. Its phone feature wasn't much use without the earbud, but he could deal with Aaron later.
"I was talking to him just this morning," the woman managed. "He's not—not doing too well himself."
He circled the Fugitive and climbed in the passenger's side. Nav was offline—a precaution left over from the previous week, when the ether had been enemy territory. He brought up dashboard GPS and scaled the map to include the coast.
"Everywhere you stopped," he said. "Everyone you met."
"I'm sick," she sighed.
"I can get you to a hospital. A real hospital," he promised, sweetening the pot. "But you have to help me first."
She told him what she could. Finally he climbed back into sunshine and headed for the ultralight. Halfway there he paused and looked back.
She could make a run for it, he thought. She's not too sick to drive. She could try to escape.
Or, eyeing the stained water by the road, she could just lurch into the water and infect the whole bog. Much more difficult to contain after that.
Maybe she's a loose end.
Idle musing, of course. There was no immediate threat here, nothing to justify extreme prejudice. Not that that was always likely to be the case, the way this thing was spreading. This was the second vector Lubin had tracked down, and the first of Ouellette's original trio. The other had been a secondary who'd picked up the baton in her wake, and he'd admitted to seeding still others. How far the other two Patient Zeroes had run was still anyone's guess. And now there was Aaron to deal with, not to mention the half-dozen places where this woman had dribbled little aliquots of Seppuku in her wake…
He could afford to wait, he told himself. The way things were going, he'd have all the excuse he needed before long. Not that he needed excuses any more, of course. Ken Lubin had been a free agent for years.
Play nice, he told himself. Play by the rules.
He did. He called the ambulance before he called the flamethrowers, stood guard until it floated in from the west, sprayed himself down and climbed back into the sky. He banked southeast, backtracking the vector's route. A lifter appeared in the middle distance and paced him for a while, cruising like a great dark cloud towards the target areas he'd pinpointed. Pilot lights sparked faintly at the tips of the long, incendiary muzzles hanging from its underbelly. Puffy pink and green clouds erupted intermittently in the airspace beneath it, cotton-candy litmus tests sniffing out infection.
He edged up the throttle. By now, Aaron's partner would be bagged and on her way. Taka Ouellette would be running tests on her by nightfall.
If Ouellette was running tests on anything, of course. Lubin had his doubts.
He remembered the first time he had met Achilles Desjardins. He had broken into the 'lawbreaker's home and caught him in flagrante delecto with a VR sensorium that served up wraparound scenarios of sexual torture. Desjardins would have never inflicted those impulses on the real world back then, of course, but a lot of things had changed in the meantime. Rules had changed. Leashes had been slipped. Official hierarchies had crumbled, leaving those who wielded power miraculously free of oversight.
Lubin had eavesdropped briefly on Desjardins's fantasy life before getting down to business. He'd gained some idea of that man's taste in women, as well as what he liked to do to them. And so five years later, when Taka Ouellette had climbed into the belly of a CSIRA helicopter, Lubin had watched with a dispassionate sense of finality.
Desjardins had promised her a role in the fight against Seppuku. He had evoked visions of bright gleaming laboratories normally reserved for bona-fide Meatzarts. The prospect had lit her up like a halogen floodlamp. One look and Lubin had known her secret desire, the desperate, unimagined hope of redemption for some past sin.
By now, it was easy enough to recognize.
He had been interested in whether the aircraft would head southwest, towards Boston. That was where the nearest research facilities would be. But instead it had disappeared to the north, and Lubin had not heard from Ouellette in the days since.
Not that he could have expected to, of course. Even if Desjardins had been telling the truth. And Lubin had to admit, with the logical clarity of an amoral mind, that it didn't make much difference either way. Taka Ouellette was not the caliber of scientist who'd last in the ring against any kind of heavyweight opponent. If she had been, they wouldn't have found her relegated to wildland patrol, handing out crumbs to the ferals. Her loss would matter not at all in the fight against Seppuku.
Achilles Desjardins, on the other hand, was vital. Whether he was also a sexual predator was irrelevant; he might well be instrumental in the saving of billions. Lubin couldn't think of many depravities that could not be overlooked in the pursuit of that higher goal. It was what the Greater Good was all about.
He almost felt envious.
Remedial Ed
Taka Ouellette was, in fact, within a research facility of some sort. She was not, however, playing the role of experimenter. Perhaps the man at her side had arrogated that role unto himself.
His appearance was unremarkable. Brown hair, uncombed, cut with a haphazard asymmetry as consistent with some faux-feral style as with outright incompetence. Thin squarish face. Not enough lines on the forehead, too many around the eyes. Large eyes, brown and wet, almost childlike. Nose slightly off-kilter. Baggy green sweatshirt, a TwenCen throwback with no animations.
She couldn't see below his waist. She was strapped to a medical gurney, flat on her back. If this disheveled r-selector was playing the researcher, it seemed that he'd reserved for her the role of experimental subject.
"Achilles Desjardins," he said. "Pleased to meet you, Alice."
The helicopter had dropped onto a rooftop pad somewhere north of the Great Lakes, well after midnight. She'd debarked and stepped unsuspectingly into a neuroinduction field that dropped her faster than a cervical dislocate. Faceless men in body condoms had brought her, conscious but paralyzed, into this quarantine cell. They had stripped her naked, catheterized her, and departed without speaking. Perhaps they'd been told she was some kind of fugitive or health risk. Perhaps they'd been in on the joke. She'd had no way of knowing, and no way to ask.