Rowan ignored the hint. "That's not a problem. We selected you for your pattern-recognition skills, not your brushfire reflexes."
"Okay, then." He sighed to himself. "What about an actual signature?"
"Excuse me?"
"If you're talking about depressed chlorophylls, I'm assuming conventional photosynthesizers are being replaced. By what? Any new pigments I should be looking for?"
"We don't have a signature yet," the woman told him. "If you can work one up that'd be great, but we're not hopeful."
"Come on. Everything's got a signature."
"That's true. But this thing's direct sig may not show up at a distance until it's already at outbreak concentrations. We want to catch it before then. Indirect telltales are probably your best bet."
"I'd still like the lab stats. An actual culture too, of course." He decided to float a trial balloon. "Alice Jovellanos could be helpful in this. Her background's in biochem."
"Alice hasn't had her shots yet—" Lertzman began.
Rowan smoothly cut him off: "By all means, Dr. Desjardins. Anyone you think could be helpful. Keep in mind though, the security classifications are subject to change. Depending at least partly on your own results, of course."
"Thanks. And the culture?"
"We'll do what we can. There may be concerns about releasing a live sample, for obvious reasons."
Uh-huh.
"Start your search along coastal N'AmPac. We think this bug's limited to the Pacific northwest. Between Hongcouver and Coos Bay, most likely."
"So far," Desjardins added.
"With your help, Dr. Desjardins, we don't expect that to change."
He'd seen it all before. Some pharm had lost control of another bug. The quake had cracked open an incubator somewhere, and the competing forces of corporate secrecy and agricultural Armageddon had beat each other senseless in a boardroom somewhere else, and Patricia Rowan—whoever she was working for—had emerged from the wreckage to dump the whole thing into his lap. Without giving him the right tools for the job, natch; by the time they'd skimmed off all the molecules with patents hanging from them, his culture sample would amount to 20cc's of distilled water.
A sound sneaked out, half laugh, half snort.
"Excuse me?" Rowan arched an eyebrow. "You had a comment?"
A brief, cathartic fantasy:
Actually I have a question, Ms. Rowan. Does all this bullshit turn your crank? Does the senseless withholding of vital information give you some kind of hard-on? It must. I mean, why bother retrofitting me down to the fucking molecules? Why bioengineer me into some paragon of integrity, only to decide I still can't be trusted when the chips are down? You know me, Rowan. I'm incorruptible. I couldn't turn against the greater good if my life depended on it.
Into the growing silence, Lertzman emitted a brief panicky cough from behind one clenched fist.
"Sorry, no. Nothing really." Desjardins tapped his watch, his hands safely beneath the table. He grabbed at the first heading to come up on his inlays: "It's just, you know, a cute name. ßehemoth. What's it from?"
"It's biblical," Rowan told him. "I never liked it much myself."
He didn't need an answer to his unspoken questions anyway. He figured Rowan had a very good reason for playing things so close to her chest; of course she knew he couldn't work against the greater good.
But she could.
Bang
For Lenie Clarke, the choice between sharks and humans was not as easy as it might have been. Making it, she paid another price: she missed the darkness.
Night, no matter how moonless and overcast, was no match for eyecaps. There weren't many places on earth dark enough to blind them. Light-sealed rooms, of course. Deep caves and the deep sea, at least those parts free of bioluminescence. Nowhere else. Her caps doomed her to vision.
She could always remove them, of course. Easy enough to do, hardly different from popping out a pair of contact lenses. She vaguely remembered the look of her naked eyes; they were pale blue, so pale the irises almost got lost in the whites. Sort of like looking into sea ice. She'd been told her eyes were cold, and sexy.
She hadn't taken her caps out for almost a year. She'd kept them on in front of people she'd fought against, fought for, fucked over. She hadn't even taken them off during sex. She wasn't about to strip now, in front of strangers.
If it was darkness she was after, she'd have to close her eyes. Surrounded by a million refugees, that wasn't the easiest thing to do either.
She found a few square meters of emptiness. Refugees huddled under blankets and lean-tos nearby, slept or fucked in darkness that must have afforded some cover to their eyes, at least. They'd pretty much left her alone, as Amitav had said they would. In fact, they accorded her considerably more space than they granted each other. She lay back in her little patch of sand, her territory, and closed her eyes against the brilliant darkness. A soft rain was falling; the diveskin numbed her body to it, but she could feel it on her face. It was almost a caress.
She drifted. She imagined she must have slept at some point, but her eyes happened to be open on two occasions when botflies passed quietly overhead, dark ellipses backlit by a brightness too faint for naked eyes. Each time she tensed, ready to flee into the ocean, but the drones took no notice of her.
No initiative, she reflected. They don't see anything they're not programmed to look for. Or perhaps their senses weren't as finely-tuned as she'd feared. Perhaps they just couldn't see her implants; maybe her aura was too faint, or too far away. Maybe botflies didn't see as deeply into the EM spectrum as she'd feared.
I was all alone, that first time, she thought. The whole beach was closed off. I bet that's it. They pay attention to trespassers…
So did Amitav, evidently. That was shaping up to be a problem.
He appeared at the cycler the next morning with a dead botfly in his arms. It looked a bit like a turtle shell she'd once seen in a museum, except for the vents and instruments studding the ventral surface. It was split along its equatorial seam; black smudges lined the breach.
"Can you fix this?" Amitav asked. "Any of it?"
Clarke shook her head. "Don't know anything about botflies." She lifted the carapace anyway. Inside, burned electronics nested under a layer of soot.
She ran one thumb along a small pebbled convexity, felt the compound lenses of a visual cluster beneath the grime. Some of the tech was vaguely familiar, but…
"No," she said, setting it on the sand. "Sorry."
Amitav shrugged and sat, cross-legged. "I did not expect so," he said. "But one can always hope, and you seem to have such familiarity with machines yourself…"
She smiled faintly, freshly aware of the implants crowding her thorax.
"I expect you will be going to the fence," Amitav said after a moment. "Your people will let you through when they see you are one of them."
She looked to the east. Off in the distance, the border towers rose from a fog of human bodies and trampled scrub. She'd heard about the high-voltage lines and the razorwire strung between them. She'd heard other things, too, about refugees so driven by their own desperation they'd climbed seven or eight meters before the juice and their own cumulative dismemberment had killed them off. Their lacerated remains were left rotting on the wires, the story went—whether as an act of deterrence or simple neglect was unclear.