Rifters 2 - Maelstrom Read Free Page B

the botfly had spotted her…
    Of course she'd known.
    Perreault rode the 'fly up a few hundred meters and scanned the ocean. Nothing out there that looked like a support vessel. (A submarine, maybe?) Directly beneath another botfly tracked south on its appointed rounds, a giant metallic beetle untroubled by the mystery that had confounded its predecessor.
    And somewhere out there, below the waves, someone in hiding. Not a refugee. Not the usual kind, anyway. Someone who'd crawled ashore, starving, in the wake of an apocalypse. A woman with machinery in her chest.
    Or perhaps a machine, with a woman on the outside.
    Sou-Hon Perreault knew how that felt.
     
    Deathbed
     
    He'd made it a point not to track the time. You learned tricks like that, in Lubin's line of work. You learned to focus on the moment and deny the future. He'd tried to work it backward, too, reverse time's arrow and erase the past, but that hadn't been as easy.
    It didn't matter. After a year's blind night—the earth cracking open beneath him, the relentless Pacific pushing down like a hydraulic press—he wept with gratitude at the half-remembered feel of dry land. This was grass . Those were birds . Oh dear God, that was sunlight . It was a scabby little rock lost somewhere in the Pacific, all lichens and dry scrub and shit-hawks, and he'd never been anywhere so beautiful.
    He couldn't think of a better place to die.
     
    * * *
     
    He awoke under a clear blue sky, a thousand meters beneath the ocean's surface.
    Fifty klicks from Beebe Station, maybe fifty-five from ground zero. Too far for the blast light to penetrate. He didn't know what he was seeing in that instant: Cherenkov radiation, perhaps. Some obscure effect of pressure waves on the optic nerve. A vision of afterlight, bathing the abyss in a deep and piercing blue.
    And while he hung there like a speck suspended in gelatin, a little shockwave rumbled up from below.
    An ancient, arboreal part of Lubin's brain gibbered in panic. A more recent module gagged it and began calculating: fast P-wave propagation through bedrock. Perpendicular ancillary waves rising off the bottom: the tremor he'd just felt. Two short sides of a right-angle triangle.
    And afterward, clawing through a sluggish medium so much lighter than the seabed: the hypotenuse, the slower main shockwave.
    Slower, but vastly more powerful.
    Pythagoras said twenty seconds.
    He was immune to absolute pressure: every sinus, every cavity, every pocket of internal gas had long-since been purged by the machinery in his thorax. He'd spent a year on the bottom of the ocean and barely felt it. He was solid flesh and bone, a viscous organic liquid, as incompressible as seawater itself.
    The shockwave hit. Seawater compressed.
    It looked like staring into naked sunlight: that was the pressure crushing his eyes. It sounded like the Tunguska Blast: that was the sound of his eardrums imploding. It felt like being ground between the Rocky Mountains: his body, squeezed briefly down to some flatter dimension as the front passed, then rebounding like a rubber ball yanked from a vise.
    He remembered very little of what happened next. But that cold blue light—it had faded, hadn't it? After just a few seconds. By the time the shockwave had hit, all had been darkness again.
    And yet here it was, still. Blue light, everywhere.
    The sky , he realized at last. It's the sky. You're onshore.
    A gull flew across his field of view, open-beaked. Lubin thought his ruined ears might have heard a faint, tinny bird-scream, but maybe that was his imagination. He heard very little these days, beyond a distant ringing that seemed to come from the other side of the world.
    The sky .
    Somehow, he must have made it.
    He remembered hanging in the water like a torn mass of seaweed, unable to scream, unable to move without screaming. His body must have been instantly transformed into one continuous bruise. Under all that pain, though, nothing felt broken. Midwater, after