Beebe Station.
Private menus bloomed around the edge of his vision. He focused on Personnel.
Let's-call-him-Colin grunted.
Four women, four men. Desjardins brought up the men; whoever was standing next to him probably hadn't changed that much.
"And if there's two separate strains, our propagation models are probably wrong," he said aloud.
Employee headshots. All faces unfamiliar. But the eyes…
He looked up. Let's-call-him-Colin looked back through a luminous palimpsest.
Those eyes…
The flesh had been reconstructed around them. The irises were darker. But for all that, the differences were cosmetic; a flaw in the iris left unchanged, a telltale capillary snaking across the sclera. And the overall aspect ratio of the face was identical. A casual change in appearance, more disguise than reconstruction. A new face, a new pair of socks, and—
"Something wrong?" asked Kenneth Lubin.
Desjardins swallowed.
"Uh, the caffeine," he managed. "Sort of sneaks up on you. I'll be right back."
He barely saw the corridors scroll past. He missed the washroom entirely.
Oh God. He's been in my home he's breathed in my face he even stabbedme in the neck with something and he's probably rotten with ßehemoth, it's probably growing in menow it's probably—
Shut up. Focus. You can deal with this.
If Lubin were infected, he'd be dead already. He'd said as much himself. So he probably wasn't a carrier. That was something.
He could still be packing, of course: Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, lugging ßehemoth around in a petri dish. But what if he was? Why would he cross a continent just to innoculate Achilles Desjardins of all people? If he'd wanted Desjardins dead for some reason, he could have done it while the 'lawbreaker was laid out on his own living room floor.
That was something, too.
Probably both of them were clean. Desjardins allowed himself a moment to feel sick with relief, then opened the door to Jovellanos's cubby.
It was empty; she'd taken the day to burn off some accumulated overtime. Achilles Desjardins thanked the Forces of Entropy for small mercies. He could use her board, at least for a few minutes. For however long one might reasonably be expected to spend on the toilet.
He hooked his account and considered:
Lubin wanted him to see Beebe's personnel files. Didn't he realize that Desjardins would make the connection, once the ID photos came up? Maybe not. He was only human, after all. Maybe he'd forgotten about the pattern-matching enhancements that 'lawbreakers came equipped with these days. Maybe he'd never known in the first place.
Or maybe he had wanted Desjardins to see through his new identity. Maybe this was some twisted loyalty test courtesy of Patricia Rowan after all.
Still. It seemed more plausible that Col— that Lubin was interested in the other rifters. He either wanted to know something about them, or he wanted Achilles Desjardins to know something about them.
Desjardins fed names to the matchmaker and sent it hunting.
"Semen-sucking savior," he whispered two seconds later.
She was proliferating in plain sight. She'd been reported on half a dozen continents in a single day. Lenie Clarke was on the run in Australia. She was making friends in N'AmPac and planning an insurrection in Mexico City. She was wanted in connection with an assault in HongCouver. She was a porn star who'd been snuffed at eleven years of age.
More ominously, Lenie Clarke was ending the world. And nobody—at least as far as Desjardins could tell—had actually noticed.
Nobody that mattered, anyway. The official news threads, jam-packed with the latest on this terrorist group or that arboviral outbreak, had nothing to say about her at all. The intel channels listed a few scattered acts of violence or sabotage, backtracked to anarchists and malcontents who'd cited the name as inspiration. But bad times bred dime-store messiahs like roaches, and there were thousands with more of a profile than Lenie Clarke.
Hell, none of the official outlets had even bothered to issue a denial on the subject.
It didn't make sense. Even the wildest rumors had to come out of the gate somewhere—how could all these people have started trumpeting the same thing at the same time? There'd been no media coverage, and there was way too much traffic for mere word-of-mouth to account for.
There was so much stuff on Lenie Clarke, in fact, that he almost didn't notice Ken Lubin and Mike Brander peeping over the lower edge of the scope. There wasn't much on them—a few hundred threads, all starting within the past couple of days. But they, too, seemed strangely susceptible to corrupted address headers and blocked-sender syndrome. And they, too, were proliferating.
What about the rifters? That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days…
Lubin's words. Achilles Desjardins was the one with the optimised wetware, and still Lubin had had to connect the dots for him. All Desjardins had seen was a bunch of sick tragic fucks in the news, slick uniforms—a fashion thing, he'd thought. A fad. It had never occurred to him that there might be individuals at the center of it all.
Okay. Now you know. Where does that get you?
He leaned back in Jovellanos's seat, ran his fingers along his scalp. No obvious correlation between rifter sightings and ßehemoth outbreaks, as far as he could tell. Unless—
His feet hit the floor with a thump. That's it.
His hands danced across the panel, almost autonomously. Axes rose from the swampy baseline, stretched to credible limits, sank back into the mud. Variables clustered together, fell apart like swarms of starlings. Desjardins grabbed them, shook them out, stretched them along a single thread called time.
That's it. The sightings cluster in time.
Now, take the first sighting from each cluster and throw away the rest. GPS them on a map.
"Will you look at that," he murmured.
A rough zigzag, trending east to west across temperate North America, then veering south. ßehemoth bloomed along the same trajectory.
Someone was watching Maelstrom for sightings of Lenie Clarke. And whenever they found one, they dropped a whole cluster of fake sightings into the system to muddy the waters. Someone was trying to hide her tracks and make her famous at the same time.
Why, for God's sake?
In the back of his head, synapses fired.
Something else lurked in that data, something that coalesced along the same axis. The homegrown parts of Achilles Desjardins glimpsed that shape and recoiled, refusing the insight. The optimized parts couldn't look away.
Maybe a coincidence, he thought, inanely. Maybe—
Someone knocked on the door. Desjardins froze.
It's him.
He didn't why he was so certain. Could've been anyone, really.
It's him. He knows where I am. Of course he knows, he's probably got me radiotagged, I bet he's got me pegged to the centimeter—
— And he knows I lied to him.