His bruises were already healing, thanks to Miri's attentions. The rest of his face paled behind them. "The witch?" And then, remembering: "But I brought you that cure, right…?"
"The cure wasn't—all we'd been hoping for," Clarke said. "It actually turned out to be something…else…"
He thought about that a moment. He pushed his splayed fingers against the membrane. The membrane stretched, iridescing.
"You saying…you saying it's like another disease?"
"Afraid so."
"So that explains it," he murmured.
"Explains what?"
"Why I been so weak the last coupla days. Prob'ly still have my bike if I'd been just that much faster." He frowned at her. "So you go around broadbanding how this germware kicks ßehemoth's ass and how we're supposed to like, collect it and all, and it's really just another bug?"
"Sorry," she said softly.
"Fuck." Ricketts lay back on the pallet and threw one arm over his face. "Ow," he added, almost as an afterthought.
"Yeah, your arm's going to be sore for a bit. You were pretty badly beat up, the MI can't fix everything just like that."
He held up the limb and examined it. "It does feel a lot better, though. Everything feels better. Thanks."
Clarke forced a smile.
He was up on his elbows, looking from the smaller cage into the larger one. "This whole set-up isn't bad. Way better than that priestly meat wagon."
It wasn't, of course. Phocoena's med facilities were rudimentary at best, far below what the MI could offer. "I'm afraid you'll have to stay in there for a while," Clarke said apologetically. "I know it's cramped, but the onboard's got games and shows, help you pass the time." She gestured at a headset hanging from the roof of the nook. "I can give you access."
"Great. Better'n an oven."
"Oven?"
"You know." He tapped his temple. "Microwaves. Give you a fine buzz if you jimmy the doors and stick your head just so."
Good trick, Clarke mused.Wish I'd known it when I was a kid.
Then again, maybe I did…
"What if I have to shit?" Ricketts wondered.
She nodded at a convex button set into the recessed bulkhead. "The pallet converts. Push that when you have to go. It's pretty straightforward."
He did, then let out a little yelp of surprise as the midsection of the pallet slid smoothly away underneath him. His ass bumped down on the wide rim of the bowl beneath.
"Wow," he whispered, impressed out of all proportion. Another press of the button and the pallet reintegrated.
"So what now?" he asked.
Now you get to be a lab rat. Now you'll go to some place where machines cut pieces out of you until either you die, or the thing inside of you does. Now, you'll be grilled on how long you hung around in Freeport, how many others you might have breathed on, how many others theymight have. They'll find out about that asshole who beat you up and maybe they'll want to interview him. Or maybe not. Maybe they'll just decide it's already gone too far for pleasant interviews and nice individual extractions—because after all, if we have to sacrifice you to save Freeport, surely we also have to sacrifice Freeport to save New England now, don't we? That's the greater good for you, kid. It's a sliding scale. It's concentric.
And nobody's life is worth shit when they slap it onto the table.
She'd roll the dice. Maybe hundreds would die in flames. Maybe only Ricketts would, in pieces.
"Hello?" Ricketts said. "You here?"
Clarke blinked. "Sorry?"
"I said, what now?"
"I don't know yet," she told him.
Paranoid
Aaron had led to Beth. Beth had led to Habib, and Habib had led to Xander, and the whole lot of them had led to twenty thousand hectares of wasted New England countryside being put to the flame. And that wasn't alclass="underline" According to the chatter on the restricted band there were at least three other operatives sweeping the field further south, Desjardins's preference for low profiles notwithstanding.
Eight days now, and Seppuku was living up to the hype. It was spreading faster than ßehemoth ever had.
Xander had also led to Phong, and Phong was fighting back. Lubin had him cornered in the mouth of an old storm-sewer that drooled slimy water into the Merrimack River. The mouth was a good two meters in diameter, set into a concrete cliff perhaps three times that height. It had a tongue, a triangular spillway widening out towards the river, flanked by rising abutments that held back the banks to either side. The spillway constituted the only clear avenue of approach and was slippery with brownish-green scum.
The mouth also had teeth, a grate of metal bars set a meter back from the opening. They kept Phong from escaping underground, and had forced him to fall back on his one high card: an antique firearm that shot bullets of indeterminate caliber. Lubin trumped him twice over on that score; he carried a Schubert active-denial microwave pistol that could heat flesh to 60 °C, and a Heckler & Koch rapid-fire PDW that was currently loaded with mitigated conotoxins. Unfortunately there was way too much earth and concrete for the microwaves to penetrate from Lubin's present position, and getting a clear shot with the H&K would involve exposing himself on the slimy slope of the spillway.
It shouldn't have mattered. Under normal circumstances it would still be the furthest thing from an even match, even granting Lubin's rusty marksmanship after five years. Even though Phong's refuge was in shadow, and the sun stabbed directly into Lubin's eyes whenever he peeked around the corner. Those all made the shot trickier, no question. Still. Lubin was a professional.
No, what really skewed the odds was the fact that Phong seemed to have a thousand bodyguards, and they were all attacking Lubin at once.
He'd scarcely noticed them on approach: a cloud of midges hovering over a patch of resistant greenery on the embankment. They'd always been completely harmless in Lubin's experience. He'd dispersed them with a wave of his hand as he passed through, his attention on the concrete barrier that cut the riverbank just ahead…and in the next instant they'd attacked, a swarm of mosquito-sized insects with piranha-sized attitudes.
They bit, and they distracted, and they broke both his concentration and his stealth. Phong, stealing a drink from the sewer, had seen him coming and squeezed off a near miss before ducking back under cover. He'd almost escaped entirely, but Lubin had plunged through the insectile onslaught to the edge of the drainage apron, just in time to trap his quarry back against the tunnel.
"I'm here to get you to a hospital!" he called. "You've been exposed to—"
"Fuck you!" Phong shouted back.
A squad of dive-bombing insects attacked Lubin's hand, almost in formation; the little bastards had followed him. He slapped down hard. He missed his attackers but welcomed the sting of the impact. He unrolled the gloves from the wrists of his isolation skin and slipped them on, juggling the Schubert, then reached over his shoulder for the hood.
The velcro tab on the back of his collar was empty. His hood was probably hanging off some low-lying branch in the woods behind him.
And he was going up against someone who'd been exposed to Seppuku for two full days. Lubin allowed himself a muttered, "Shit."
"I don't want to hurt you!" he tried again. Which wasn't exactly true, and getting less so. The desire to kill something was certainly circling around his self-control. More insects attacked; he crushed them between hand and forearm, and reached to wipe the smashed body parts off against the river bank. He paused, briefly distracted: it was hard to be certain, but those crushed bodies seemed to have too many legs.