I smiled and nodded, lifting the bottle and taking a long pull from it. Jabali stood like a good soldier, unmoving, attentive, blank. The gin was smooth, and I drank greedily, savoring the burn. “Well,” I gasped as I swallowed and lowered the bottle, “I may not kill you. I just want to hear what you wanted to say. I want to know what’s happening.”
Terries drank off one more glass and then, without hesitation, drank off the third. He turned and set the glasses gently on the gleaming stone floor at his feet and sank back in the chair. “Mr. Cates, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that most everyone you spent the last few days with is now dead.”
I blinked. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Jabali look up sharply at me, but I didn’t look at him. I hesitated; my instincts were to say nothing-this was about getting information from him, not giving information away. “Yes,” I finally said, “but you can blame Shockley and company on me.”
Terries shook his head, waving his hand at me dismissively. “That was an attempt to burn out the source, Mr. Cates. A desperate attempt at that. I knew I was sacrificing Mr. Shockley.”
I took another pull from the bottle but suspected it would have no effect on me. My heart was pounding, every ligament and muscle tense.
“I’m a learned man, Mr. Cates,” he suddenly said, closing his eyes. “While idiots like you were burning down the cities thirty years ago, I was doing advanced work that might have changed the world. I studied under Miles Amblen. I was doing advanced work!” He opened his eyes and stared at me, suddenly angry. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. I should have known it would be an animal like you who would destroy everything. You live in shit. You eat it, every day. It coats you and you spend your days wriggling through it.”
I nodded. “A disease,” I said. “A plague.”
Terries barked a laugh. “A disease, he says.” He looked at me, suddenly relaxed. “Mr. Cates, there is nothing natural about what is happening. Come! You are here. We have some hours before we are all dead. Let us use them. Maybe you can be useful after all. Or are you such an animal that all you know how to do is threaten and shoot?”
I clenched my teeth. “Dr. Terries-” I stopped myself. What was there to say? I shook myself and nodded. “Let’s go.”
He smiled and pulled himself from the chair slowly, as if exhausted. “I have a lab one level down. There is a private elevator. You may take whatever precautions you wish.”
The elevator was white, too, and when the doors had closed the seam disappeared expertly, creating the illusion of a sealed cube. I felt suddenly claustrophobic, and drank more gin in greedy, steady gulps. As I’d thought, I didn’t feel a thing. When the doors suddenly split apart again, I was surprised.
The lab was better. It was a mess-well lit and surrounded by the same painfully white walls, but cluttered and stained, smelling of smoke. A massive work desk sported several huge video screens, each a few feet across, and Terries led us to them, gesturing them on with a complicated movement of his hand. He pointed at the center one.
“Mr. Cates,” he said, “meet our plague.”
I stared at the screen. For a moment I couldn’t process what it was displaying. It was a blood sample, blown up to an immense magnification. Swimming in it, flitting quickly around the screen, were what at first glance looked like tiny little insects, multiple legs kicking and fluttering to propel them, tiny antennae waving softly. I blinked and leaned forward as Terries turned and walked away, hands clasped behind his back.
The insects glinted softly, shiny.
“What the fuck,” I whispered.
“Mechanical, yes,” Terries said without turning to look at us. “Robots, in a sense. Incredibly small, smaller than your red blood cells. Nanotechnology, extremely advanced. I don’t know what lab in the System could even come close to something of this complexity. They are self-powered, contain fairly sophisticated processing units that give them a fair amount of flexibility, and-most amazingly, Mr. Cates-they are self-replicating. Each one can produce another copy of itself, using the body’s own raw materials.”
“That,” Jabali muttered next to me, “is fucked up.”
“They spread, Mr. Cates. Any human comes within about eight feet of someone infected with these, and they make the leap, through the air. They will hitch a ride on bodily excretions, the usual viral or bacterial vectors, and once a single microscopic unit enters the body, it begins replicating. Once there are enough units in the body, they begin… consuming.” He turned back to us. I looked up at him, and he was smiling a terrible, cadaverous smile. He was a handsome man, his face finely etched, but he looked like a corpse taunting me. “They literally eat you from the inside out.”
I thought of blue-black bruises that eventually burst.
“Someone built these?” I said, my voice a dry rasp. “Someone purposefully built these?”
Terries nodded. “Yes. Generally speaking, the infected are dead within a day or two, depending on their general health to begin with, size and mass, some other factors we haven’t quantified yet.” He shrugged. “It’s spreading. We’re taking steps, but…” He looked at me. “How many people did you pass on your way up here, Mr. Cates? A hundred? Two hundred?” He shook his head. “You’ve killed us.”
Avery Cates, I thought, Destroyer of Worlds.
“Wait a second,” Jabali said. “Killed us? As in, me?”
Terries nodded. “All of us.”
I’d smelled a turning tide too many times before to ignore the obvious signs, so I reached across myself and drew my Roon, holding it pointed down at the floor but in plain sight. “Wait,” I said. “Terries, why am I still alive?”
He blinked at me. “What?”
I was gripping the automatic so tightly my palm hurt. “Everyone I’ve been in contact with over the last few days is now dead. These things kill within days. I’ve seen people dead on the street, for fuck’s sake.” I remembered that peculiar feeling of well-being, on my knees, blindfolded but suddenly not worried about it, and that ruined voice saying and don’t worry: When it is over, you will be punished again. “Why am I alive?”
Terries squinted at me for a moment and then transformed, life flowing back into his face. He threw up both hands. “Do not shoot!” he said, and turned away, running deeper into the lab.
A flash of panic ripped through me, and I brought the gun up, trying to keep Jabali in sight as I walked slowly around to follow. “Doc, don’t fucking do that. Doc?” I met Jabali’s eyes and paused. “You feel sick?” I said.
He stared back for a moment, and then swallowed. “Nah, boss. Guess I don’t.”
I nodded. “If you’re thinking of shooting me in the back, Jabali, at least wait to feel something first, okay?”
He stared at me for a few moments more and then nodded, putting up his hands. “All right, boss. All right.”
I nodded and turned away to follow Terries, but he was already striding back to me, holding a battered metal bin in both hands. “Roll up your sleeve, Mr. Cates,” he panted, sounding suddenly excited.
“What?”
He slammed the bin down on the desk, making his video screens jump. One shut off with a pop. “Roll up your goddamn sleeve, Mr. Cates,” he said, holding up a huge autohypo. “You’re right: You are not sick. Let’s find out why.”