"Not recently." Things just kept getting better.
Burton, unrebukably occupied with his own duties, nonetheless seemed to have an ear cocked in Lubin's direction. "I'll be right out," Lubin said after a moment.
"That's okay," Seawall said. "I can just feed you a—"
Lubin killed the channel.
Whitewater roared from a mouth in the revetment, wide as a tanker truck. Lubin couldn't begin to guess at the force of that discharge; it extended at least four meters from the wall before gravity could even coax it off the horizontal. The tanglefoam had retreated on all sides; Lake Michigan heaved and thrashed in the opened space, reclaiming even more territory.
Great.
There were eleven drains just like this along the secured waterfront. Lubin redeployed two dozen inshore personnel to the seawall.
City Planning beeped in his ear. "…nd some…"
He cranked up the filters on his headset; the roar of the storm faded a bit. "Say again?"
"Found something! Two-d and low-res, but it looks like there's nothing down there but a service crawlway running above the ceiling and a sewer main under the floor."
"Can they be accessed?" Even with the filters, Lubin could barely hear his own voice.
Engineering didn't seem to have any trouble, though. "Not from the concourse, of course. There's a physical plant under the next block."
"And if she got into the main?"
"She'd end up at the treatment plant on Burnham, most likely."
They had Burnham covered. But—"What do you mean, most likely? Where else could she end up?"
"Sewage and storm systems spill together when things get really swamped. Keeps the treatment facilities from flooding. It's not as bad as it sounds, though. By the time things get this crazy, the flow's great enough to dilute the sewage—"
"Are you saying—" A bolt of lightning cut the sky into jagged fragments. Lubin forced himself to wait. The thunderclap in the ensuing darkness was deafening. "Are you saying she could be in the storm sewers?"
"Well, theoretically, but it doesn't matter."
"Why not?"
"There'd have to be an awful lot of water going through before the systems would mix. The moment your fugitive crossed over she'd be sucked down and drowned. No way she could fight the current, and there wouldn't be any airspace left in the pi—"
"Everything's going through the storm system now?"
"Most of it."
"Will the grates hold?"
"I don't understand," Engineering said.
"The grates! The grills covering the outfalls! Are they rated to withstand this kind of flow?"
"The grates are down," Engineering said.
"What!"
"They fold down automatically when tonnes-per-sec gets too high. Otherwise they'd impede flow and the whole system would back up."
Heavy metal strikes again.
Lubin opened an op-wide channel. "She's not coming overland. She's—"
Kinsman, the dolphin woman, cut in: "Gandhi's got something. Channel twelve."
He switched channels, found himself underwater. Half the image was a wash of static, interference even the Bayesians couldn't clear in realtime. The other half wasn't much better: a foamy gray wash of bubbles and turbulence.
A split-second glimpse, off to the left: a flicker of darker motion. Gandhi caught it too, twisted effortlessly into the new heading. The camera rotated smoothly around its own center of focus as the dolphin rolled over on its back. The murk darkened.
He's going deep, Lubin realized. Coming up from underneath. Good boy.
Now the image centered on a patch of diffuse radial brightness, fading to black on all sides: the optics of ascent toward a brighter surface. Suddenly the target was there, dead to rights: silhouetted arms, a head, flashing stage left and disappearing.
"Hit," Kinsman reported. "She never saw it coming."
"Remember, we don't want her bleeding out there," Lubin cautioned.
"Gandhi knows the drill. He's not using his pecs, he's just ram—"
Again: a piecemeal human shadow, found and lost in an instant. The image jarred slightly.
"Huh," Kinsman said. "She saw that coming somehow. Almost got out of the way in time."
The implants. For an instant Lubin was back on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, comfortably suspended under three kilometers of black icewater. Feeling Beebe's sonar tick-tick-ticking against the machinery in his chest…
"She can feel the click trains," he said. "Tell Gandhi to lay—"
Another pass. This time the target faced her attacker head-on, eyes bright smudges in a dark jigsaw, one arm coming up in a vain attempt to ward off two hundred kilograms of bone and muscle wait a second she's holding something she's—
The image skidded to the left. Suddenly the water was spinning again, no smooth controlled rotation this time, just a wild slewing corkscrew, purely ballistic, slowing against ambient drag. The darkness of deep water swelled ahead. A different darkness spilled in from the side, a black gory cloud spreading into brief cumulus before the currents tore it apart.
"Shit," Kinsman said. Lubin's headset amped the whisper loud enough to drown thunder.
She kept her billy. All the way from Beebe, hitching and walking and riding across the whole damn continent.
Good for her…
The vision imploded to darkness and a final flurry of static. Lubin was back on the waterfront, sheets of rain beating the world into a blur scarcely brighter than the one he'd just left.
"Gandhi's down," Kinsman reported.
Kinsman tag-teamed two more dolphins to the site of Gandhi's last stand; Lubin pulled abreast on the seawall a few moments after they arrived. Burton was waiting there with a charged squid, water cascading from his rainskin.
"Fan them out," Lubin told Kinsman over the link. "Hyperbolic focus on the carcass, offshore spread." He grabbed his fins off the scooter and stepped to the edge of the seawall, Burton at his side. "What about Gandhi?"
"Gandhi's sockeye," Kinsman said.
"No, I mean what about emotional ties? What impact will his loss have on the efficiency of the others?"
"For Singer and Caldicott, none. They never liked him all that much. That's why I sent them."
"Okay. Line up the rest on a converging perimeter, but keep them away from the outfalls."
"No problem," Kinsman acknowledged. "They wouldn't be much good in there anyway, with those acoustics."
"I'm switching to vocoder in thirty seconds. Channel five."
"Got it."
Burton watched neutrally as Lubin bent over to pull on his fins. "Bad break!" he shouted over the storm. "About the sewers, I mean!"
Lubin snugged his heel straps, reached out for the squid. Burton handed it over. Lubin sealed his face flap. The diveskin reached across his eyelids and bonded to the caps beneath, blocked nose and mouth like liquid rubber. He stood, isolated from the downpour, calmly suffocating.
Good luck, Burton mouthed through the rain.
Lubin hugged the squid to his chest and stepped into space.
Michigan closed over his head, roaring.
Fifteen meters to the north, one of Chicago's outfalls spewed an endless vomit of wastewater into the lake; the whirlpools and eddies from that discharge reached Lubin with scarcely-diminished strength. A fog of microscopic bubbles swirled on all sides, smeared muddy light throughout the water. Bits of detritus looped through eccentric orbits, fading to white just past the reach of his fingers. Water sucked and slurped on all sides. Overhead, barely visible, the rain-pelted surface writhed like mercury under rapid-fire assault—and all around, omnipresent in the heavy surge, the deep deafening roar of waterfalls.