"She has other grudges," Lubin said. "Maybe she's—going home."
Rowan frowned, concentrating. "Her parents, you mean."
"She mentioned Sault Sainte Marie."
"Suppose she couldn't get to her parents?"
"Don' know."
"What would you do?"
"I'd—keep trying…"
"Suppose her parents were dead," Rowan suggested.
"…'f we killed them for her?"
"No, suppose they were already—suppose they'd been dead a long time."
Clumsily, Lubin shook his head. "The people she hates're very mush…alive…"
"Suppose, Ken." Rowan was getting impatient. "Theoretical scenario. You've got a score to settle with the GA, and a score to settle with your parents, and you know you'll never get to either of them. What do you do?"
His mouth moved. Nothing came out.
"Ken?"
"— I redirect," he said at last.
"What do you mean?"
Lubin jerked like a blind marionette with most of its strings cut.
"The whole world fucked me over. I–I wanna return the favor."
"Huh." Rowan shook her head. "She's pretty much doing that already."
One crucifixion was enough, as it turned out. Achilles Desjardins was clean, if still vulnerable; the second surgery, prepped and waiting, had no interest in scouring his insides.
It only wanted to change him into a flounder.
Lubin's little chamber of horrors had backed off for the moment. The pallet had folded itself up into recliner mode; the assassin sat on it while a mechanical spider skittered across his body on legs like jointed whiskers.
In the adjacent cube, Desjardins looked down at an identical device on his own body. He'd already been injected with a half-dozen tailored viruses, each containing the code for a different suite of ßehemoth-proof proteins. There'd be other injections over the next few days. Lots of them. The fever would start within a week; the nausea was already underway.
The spider was taking baselines: bacteria from skin and hair, organ biopsies, gut contents. Every now and then it plunged a hair-thin proboscis into his flesh, provoking a diffuse ache from within the tissues. Reverse-engineering was a tricky business these days. If you weren't careful, tweaked genes could change the microflora in the gut as easily as the flesh of the host. E. coli. could turn from commensal to cancer with the flip of a base-pair. A few wily bacteria had even learned how to slip some of their own genes into viral carriers en route, and hence into human cells. It made Desjardins long for those good old-fashioned germs which merely fed on antibiotics.
"You didn't tell her," Lubin said.
Rowan had left them to their own devices. Desjardins looked at the other man through two layers of membrane and tried to ignore the creepy tickle on his skin.
"Tell her what?" he asked finally.
"That I took you off Guilt Trip."
"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"
Lubin's spider scrambled up his throat and tapped on his lower lip. The assassin obligingly opened his mouth; the little robot scraped at the inside of his cheek with one appendage and retreated back down the torso.
"She wouldn't have left us alone otherwise," Lubin said.
"I thought you were leashed, Horatio."
He shrugged. "One leash of many. It doesn't matter."
"It sure the fuck does."
"Why? Do you really think I was so out of control before? Do you think I'd have even been able to unTrip you, if I honestly thought you'd breach?"
"Sure, if you sealed it up afterward. Isn't that your whole problem? You set yourself up to kill people?"
"So I'm a monster." Lubin settled back in the chair and closed his eyes. "What does that make you?"
"Me?"
"I saw what you were playing at when we first met."
Heat spilled across Desjardins's face. "That's fantasy. I'd never do that in real life. I don't even fuck in real life."
Lubin opened one eye and assayed a trace of smile. "Don't trust yourself?"
"I've just got too much respect for women."
"Really? Seems a bit inconsistent with your choice of hobbies."
"That's normal. That's brainstem." It had been such a relief to discover that at last, to see aggression and sex sharing the same hardwired pathways through the mammalian brain— to know his secret shame was a legacy millions of years old, ubiquitous for all the denial of civilized minds. But Lubin…"As if you don't know. You get your rocks off every time you kill someone."
"Ah." Lubin's not-quite-smile didn't change. "So I'm a monster, but you're just a prisoner of your inner drives."
"I fantasize. You kill people. Sorry, you seal security breaches."
"Not always," Lubin said.
Desjardins looked away without answering. The spider ran down his leg.
"Someone got away once," said a strange soft voice behind him.
He turned. Lubin was staring into space, not moving. Even his spider had paused, as if startled by some sudden change in its substrate.
"She got away," Lubin said again. He almost sounded as though he were talking to himself. "I may have even let her."
Clarke, Desjardins realized.
"She wasn't really a breach then, of course. There was no way she'd ever make it out alive, there was no—but she did, somehow."
Lubin no longer wore the face of a passionless predator. There was something new looking out from behind those eyes, and it seemed almost…confused…
"It's a shame," he said softly. "She really deserved a fighting chance…"
"A lot of people seem to agree with you," Desjardins said.
Lubin mm'd.
"Look.." Desjardins cleared his throat. "I need some of those derms before you go."
"Derms." Lubin seemed strangely distant.
"The analog. You said a week or ten days before the Trip kicked back in, and that was three days ago—if they spot-test me in the next few days I'm screwed."
"Ah." Lubin came back to earth. "That's out of my hands now, I'm afraid. Horatio and all."
"What do you mean, it's out of your hands? I just need a few derms, for Chrissake!"
Lubin's spider skittered off under the pallet, its regimen complete. The assassin grabbed his clothes and began dressing.
"Well?" Desjardins said after a while.
Lubin pulled on his shirt and stepped out of the cube. Its skin swirled in his wake.
"Don't worry about it," he said, and didn't look back.
Anthopleura
Mug Shot
Exotics Infestation: Executive Summary (nontechnical)
DO NOT mail
DO NOT send through Haven
DO NOT copy
PURGE AFTER DECRYPT
To: Rowan, PC.
Priority: Ultra (Global PanD)
EID Code: ßehemoth
General Classification: nanobial/decomposer
Taxonomy: Formal nomenclature awaiting declassified release to Linnean Society. Eventual outgroup clade to be at supraDomain level.
Description: Unique heterotrophic nanobe, 200-250nm diameter. Opportunistic freeliver/commensal. Genome 1.1M (pRNA template): nonsense codons <0.7 % of total.
Biogeography: Originally native to hydrothermal deep-sea environments; 14 relict populations confirmed (Fig. 1). Can also exist symbiotically in intracellular environments with salinity £ 30ppt and/or temperatures ranging from 4-60 °C. A secondary strain has been found with advanced adaptations for intracellular existence.