"That's barely even a pattern, Killjoy. Anything-"
"Take a guess at the magnitude," he broke in.
"Loss of plant cover, right?" Jovellanos shrugged. "Assuming it is a real effect, say half a degree? Quarter?"
Desjardins showed her.
"Holy shit," she said. "This bug starts fires?"
"Something does, anyway. I scanned the municipal archives along the coast: all local firestorms, mostly attributed to acts of terrorism or 'industrial accidents'. Also a couple of tree farms going down for some agro pest—budworm or something."
Jovellanos was at his elbow, her hands running over his console. "What about other fires in the area…"
"Oh, lots. Even keeping strictly within the search window, I found a good eight or nine that didn't correlate. A ties to B, but not vice versa."
"So maybe it's a fluke," she said hopefully. "Maybe it doesn't mean anything."
"Or maybe somebody else has a better track on this bug than we do."
Jovellanos didn't answer for a moment. Then: "Well, we might be able to improve our own track a bit."
Desjardins glanced up. "Yeah?"
"I've been working up that sample they gave us. They're not making it easy, they haven't left a single intact organelle as far as I can tell—"
He waved her on: "It all looks the same to a mass spec."
"Only if they left all the pieces behind after they mashed them."
"Of course they did. Otherwise you'd never get an accurate sig."
"Well, I can't find half the stuff that's supposed to be there. No phospholipids, even. Lots of nucleotides, but I can't get them to fit a DNA template. So your bug's probably RNA-based."
"Uh-huh." No surprises there—lots of microbes got along just fine without DNA.
"Also I've managed to reconstruct some simple enzymes, but they're a bit too stiff in the joints to work properly, you know? Oh, and this is kind of weird: I've found a couple of D-aminos."
"Ah." Desjardins nodded sagely. "That means what, exactly?"
"Right-handed. The asymmetric carbons stick off the wrong side of the molecule. Like your usual left-handed amino, only flipped."
A mirror image. "So?"
"So that makes 'em useless; all metabolic pathways have been geared for L-aminos and only L-aminos, for the past three billion years at least. There's a couple of bacteria that use R-aminos because they're useless—they stick them onto their cell walls to make 'em indigestible—but that's not what we're dealing with here."
Desjardins pushed back in his chair. "So someone built this thing completely from scratch, is that what you're saying? We've got another new bug on our hands."
Jovellanos shook her head, disgusted. "And that corpse didn't even tell you."
"Maybe she doesn't know."
Jovellanos pointed at the GIS overlay. Two dozen crimson pinpoints sparkled along the coast from Hongcouver to Newport. Two dozen tiny anomalies of soil and water chemistry. Two dozen visitations from an unknown microbe, each presaging a small fiery apocalypse.
"Somebody knows," Jovellanos said.
Afterburn
On all sides Hongcouver licked its wounds.
The city had always been a coward, hiding behind Vancouver Island and a maze of local bathymetry. That had spared it from the worst effects of the tsunami. The quake itself had been another story, of course.
In an earlier day, before Maelstrom and telecommuting and city centers half-abandoned, the death toll in the core would have been three times as high. As it was, those who'd been spared vivisection downtown had merely died closer to home. Whole subdivisions, built on the effluvial sediment of the Fraser Delta, had shuddered into sudden quicksand and disappeared. Richmond and White Rock and Chilliwack didn't exist any more. Mount Rainier had awakened overnight in a bad mood; fresh lava continued to flow over most of its southern face. Mount Adams was stirring and might yet blow.
In the Hongcouver core, damage was more heterogeneous. Streets stretched for blocks without so much as a broken window. Then, across some arbitrary intersection, the world became a place of shattered buildings and upended asphalt. Bright yellow barriers, erected after the fact, drew boundaries around the injured areas. Lifters hung above the dark zones like white blood cells on a tumor. Fresh girders and paneling descended from on high, reconstructive grafts of metropolitan skin and bone. Heavy machinery grumbled in the canyons where they touched down.
In between, patches of cityscape hummed at half-power, emergency Ballard stacks jumpered into convenient substations. Those streets that hadn't upended, those buildings that hadn't been shrugged into False Creek, had been swept clean and reactivated. Field crematoria belched ash from the corner of Georgia and Denman, keeping—so far—one step ahead of the cholera bug. More barriers than buildings, these days. Not that there was anywhere else to go; CSIRA had sealed the border at Hell's Gate.
Benrai Dutton had survived it all.
He'd been lucky; his splitfit condo was halfway up Point Gray, an island of granite in a sea of sand. While neighborhoods on all sides had vanished, the Point had merely slipped a little.
Even here there was damage, of course. Most of the houses on the lower face had collapsed; the few still standing listed drunkenly to the east. No lights shone from them or the lamp-posts lining the street, even though night was falling. A jury-rigged line of portable floods shone from poles separating wrecked homes from standing ones, but they had a defensive air about them. They existed, not to bring light to the ruins, but as a perimeter against them.
They existed to blind Benrai Dutton when a crazy woman leapt at his throat from the shadows.
Suddenly he was transfixed: cold bright eyes without pupils, glaciers embedded in flesh. A disembodied face, almost as pale as the eyes it contained. Invisible hands, one around his neck, one at his chest—
— no not invisible she's in black she's all in black—
"What happened?"
"What—what—"
"I am not going to give up!" She hissed, slamming him against a chain link fence. Her breath swirled between them like backlit fog."He took his shots, he took athousand fucking shots, and I am not going to let him just walk away!"
"Who—what are you—"
She stopped, suddenly. She cocked her head as though seeing him for the first time.
"Where the fuck did you come from?" she said, absurdly.
She was a good fifteen centimeters shorter than he was. For some reason it did not occur to him to fight back.
"I don't, I–I was just going home…" Dutton managed.
"That place," the woman said. Her eyes—nightshades of some kind? — drilled his own.
"What place?"
She slammed him back against the chain link. "That place!" — jerking her chin at something over his left shoulder. Dutton turned his head; another splitfit, intact but empty and dark all the same.
"That place? I don't—"
"Yes, that place! Yves Scanlon's fucking place. You know him?"
"No, I–I mean, I don't really know anyone here, we kind of keep to—"
"Where did he go?" she hissed.
"Go?" he said weakly.
"The place is absolutely empty! No furniture, no clothing, not so much as fucking light bulb!"
"Maybe—maybe he left—the quake—"
She knotted her fists more tightly into his clothing, leaned in until they were almost kissing. "His place doesn't have a fucking scratch on it. Why would he leave? How could he? He's nobody, he's a fucking pissant, you think he could just pick up and walk past the quarantine?"