Read Online Rifters 2 - Maelstrom by Peter Watts - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Peter Watts
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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
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
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