Limit of Vision (11 page)

10

Ela Suvanatat crouched
in the prow of a fisherman’s open boat, astounded to find herself in an argument with her job broker, Joanie Liu. “What do you mean you want me to reconsider?” she demanded, shouting to be heard over the roar of the boat’s ancient diesel engine as it ran full speed toward the crash site. “Why should I ‘reconsider’ diving the site? I’m going to be first on the scene! Of course I’m going to do it. I’ll never have an opportunity like this again.”

Ela had promised the fisherman a bonus if he got her to the site ahead of everyone else. Every time the speeding boat hacked across the top of a swell, she found herself drenched in a fine spray of seawater—not that it mattered! Of the handful of boats that had put out from shore, none were closer to the impact site. She presumed there would be helicopters coming down from Saigon, but even they would not beat her to the prize. She was already wearing her wetsuit vest and her rebreather pack. Her goggle cups were ready to attach to her farsights. Her fins were in hand. She could be over the side in thirty seconds . . . so why was Joanie hesitating to broker a deal?

“You’re not listening to me!” Joanie insisted as her image frowned from Ela’s farsights. “I’m serious. This could be a dangerous situation—”

“Being poor is dangerous too! Are you angry because I tried to sell the crash vid without you?”

Joanie looked startled. “No, of course not. What else could you do on such short notice? By the way, it’s a great file, better than anything the big agencies have put out.”

Ela leaned forward. “So you’ll be able to sell it?”

Joanie looked askance, the way she always did when she was about to deliver bad news. “You need to understand, the market is saturated with crash images right now. . . .”

“Shit,” Ela whispered. This day had begun with so much potential, but that was twice now she’d missed a fee by showing up late—and this time it was Joanie’s fault. She’d taken half an hour to pick up Ela’s emergency link—“other business” she had explained.

Ela was determined not to miss out again. With the crash of the EquaSys module, opportunity had fallen in her lap—but it was up to her to make it pay.

She had not waited for Joanie’s permission to begin.

As soon as the water had receded she’d turned the lost baby over to a shell-shocked Phuong. Then she’d climbed the tilted ruins of the broken platform to see what could be salvaged from her equipment. Her backpack was gone of course, but in a joyous discovery she found her diving gear wedged behind a plastic crate. The rebreather pack was covered with mud, but at least the wave had not taken it away.

She grabbed it and hopped off the platform, knowing her career would be made if she moved quickly, if she could get herself out to the crash site before anyone else and provide the first close-up images of the disaster. Which meant she needed to hire a boat right away.

She cast her gaze up and down the shoreline. There were hundreds of people all along the seaside margin of the village. They had come to poke at the debris, or study the broken pilings of the houses. Some just stared out to sea. Ela tried not to see the despair on their faces. This had been a squatters’ village! Doomed from the start by its location on the edge of a rising sea, in the floodplain of a mighty river. No one could have expected the homes here to last more than a few months . . .

. . . but who could have guessed the end would come this soon?

Where would these people go? What would they do?

Watching them made Ela all too conscious of the delicate nature of her own position. If she slipped, if she failed to make the most of the opportunity she’d been given, she could wind up with nothing too.

How ironic that the disaster that had wrecked this village could still prove a blessing for her—if she could exploit it. One solid contract could bring in enough money to get her to Australia, and once there, she might find a real job . . . but first Joanie had to get her a deal.

“I don’t understand what you’re so worried about,” Ela said.

Joanie raised her hands in a pleading gesture. “Can’t you see this is an international incident? Powerful people will be fighting over the salvage—”

“All the more reason to exploit the opportunity,” Ela insisted. “Think of the publicity! These American technocrats have killed people. They’ve endangered the whole world—”

“Ela, the site itself could be dangerous. There could be chemical spills, maybe even a radiation hazard.”

Ela shook her head. There would be no radiation hazard. The news reports had assured the world of that.

There could be chemicals.

Ela glared at the silt-clouded water, remembering the stunned look on Phuong’s face when she had realized she’d lost everything to the wave. Ela had glimpsed herself in Phuong’s eyes. The two of them were so much alike. The only thing that separated them was luck.

Her angry gaze shifted back to Joanie. “If I get sick, you can sue EquaSys.”

Joanie rolled her eyes. “After this, do you think they’ll have anything left to pay?”

The
elevator doors opened, and Summer Goforth looked out on a swirl of police, paramedics, and physicians crowding the close confines of the EquaSys building’s subbasement. Her gaze fixed on the only still point in the kaleidoscope of activity: Daniel Simkin, director of the International Biotechnology Commission. He stood beside the elevator doors in whispered conference with an aide.

Daniel Simkin was not a big man, but there was a power in his compact build that Summer still found attractive. His face was fair; his eyebrows even more so, almost disappearing against his skin. His blond hair was trimmed into a spare, compact helmet on his round head. He looked up as she stepped off the elevator car. He looked her over, his eyes hidden behind the blind silver sheen of opaqued farsights.

During Summer’s visit to the
L
ov
project suite, Daniel had been aboard a UAL flight out of Washington, D.C., but his attention had been with her. He had looked out through her farsights at Virgil Copeland and Randall Panwar, listening to every word of their conversation, studying every nuance of their facial expressions, and interjecting questions for Summer to ask and instructions for her to follow.

The link to Epsilon-3 had been left open at his request. He had wanted to see what Copeland would do, what he might reveal. And thank God Summer’s objections had gone on the record. Given the fallout, it was easy to imagine Simkin trying to put the blame for that decision on her.

“We were lucky,” he said, before she could speak. “If Copeland hadn’t brought the module down, it might have been months before we discovered the escaped
L
ov
s on the Hammer.”

So that was how he would play it.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “You were lucky no one was killed.”

It had been a stupid chance to take, but Daniel would make it look right. He always did. He was a survivor: a Ph.D. biochemist with the wiliness of a politician and the ruthlessness of a third world dictator. Once upon a time Summer had found that combination of traits perversely attractive. Judging by his career, she was not the only one who had ever felt that way.

“You’re right of course,” Simkin said. “If we hadn’t gotten warning bulletins out immediately, untold thousands would have been at risk on the ground.”

“Are we on the record?” she asked.

“From now on, you should assume that.”

After being up all night with Copeland and Panwar, Summer had been glad to get home. But she’d hardly closed her eyes when her
R
osa
woke her with a terse note from Simkin, summoning her back to the EquaSys building:
There’s been an escape attempt.
Consider yourself hired on as a consultant.
We need your expertise
.

Returning downtown had proved an unexpected challenge. A predicted rainstorm had finally arrived from the south, driven by gale winds. The deluge flooded the streets, tying traffic in knots, and a drive that should have taken half an hour consumed nearly ninety minutes instead. Perhaps she had arrived too late to be of any help? Amid the flurry of personnel, she saw no sign of either Copeland or Panwar. “Where are they?” she asked.

Simkin nodded at a steel door set in the subbasement wall. “The paramedics are bringing Randall Panwar out now.”

Summer stepped back a pace as rescue personnel emerged bearing a white-wrapped body strapped to a wire gurney. “My God,” she whispered. “What did you do to him?”

“Shot while attempting to escape,” Simkin said, as the gurney’s wheels were unfolded. “He barricaded himself in the tunnel and bled to death. There was nothing we could do.” At Simkin’s direction, the white sheet was pulled back to reveal Panwar’s face, peaceful in death, the eyes closed. “Summer, I want you to remove his
L
ov
s before they die with him.”

“They’re still alive?” Suppressing her revulsion, she leaned over the body to peer at the tiny flecks of glitter on Panwar’s gray brow. One of them flickered faint blue-green. “
My God
,” she whispered again. How was it possible for his
L
ov
s to be alive? Without Panwar’s blood and body to nurture them, they should have died within a minute, two at most.

Simkin said, “The Villanti girl’s
L
ov
s survived over four hours after her death.”

How could that be? Were they adjusting their metabolism? Slowing down when resources grew scarce? She frowned, thinking hard. She had designed the original
L
ov
s to be fragile, like some pampered strain of lab rat that wouldn’t last a minute in the wild. But Virgil Copeland had described those original
L
ov
s as “museum pieces.” Modern
L
ov
s were different, not even compatible with the antique forms. Copeland had been aware of that, but even he had not understood how much the
L
ov
s had changed.

On her slow drive back to the EquaSys building, Summer had skimmed a first-pass report compiled from what little was known about the mutated
L
ov
s infesting the Hammer’s fiber-optic cables. No
L
ov
should have been able to survive that dry environment. Where had they gotten their nutrients? It seemed impossible, and yet it had happened . . . leading to the ominous conclusion that
L
ov
s were far more adaptable than anyone had guessed.

She straightened, turning to Simkin with a frown. “Do you really want these
L
ov
s to stay alive?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and spoke in a neutral voice. “Well of course, Summer. That’s why I brought you here. Any thug could pull the
L
ov
s out and drop them in a vial of acid. But the main colony is extinct while the feral
L
ov
s left behind aboard the Hammer have been exterminated. These
L
ov
s are the last, so until their status is legally determined . . .”

Oh
. Simkin was covering his ass. Now that Panwar and Copeland represented the last of the
L
ov
s, any court could declare their population an endangered species.

She stepped away from the body. “Even if I knew how to remove the
L
ov
s without killing them—and I don’t—it’s illegal to cultivate them here on Earth. I won’t be a party to it.”

He cocked his head. “You’re refusing to try?”

She glanced again at the body. No one could say anymore what the
L
ov
s were capable of. They were an artificial life-form that had already escaped once from a lockdown facility. Who could guarantee they would not escape again? Only this morning she had worried over the potential of the
L
ov
s to develop into an intellect capable of competing with a human mind . . . but combine that intellectual potential with a talent for
physical
adaptation, and the result was a recipe for disaster. She could no longer doubt that the
L
ov
s were a mistake, a threat best disposed of as quickly as possible. “Yes,” she said. “I am refusing. It’s too dangerous to keep them alive.”

Simkin smiled, looking satisfied with this exchange. “Then we’ll have to find someone else with the expertise to remove them.”

Summer knew she had responded as he’d hoped. By the time he found someone else “qualified” to remove the
L
ov
s, it would be too late—while the responsibility had been neatly transferred to her.

So be it, then. She had brought them into this world; it was only right she take them out. It was the right thing to do.

She watched the gurney being rolled onto the elevator. Then she turned to Simkin. His right hand was tapping as he talked to someone she could not see. It would have been polite to wait, but she didn’t feel polite. “So where is Copeland?”

Simkin cast her an irritated glance. “That is the question of the hour.”

He went back to his conversation, but Summer circled around him. “Wait a minute, Daniel. What are you telling me? You don’t know where he is?”

Simkin scowled, muttering “
Hold on
,” to whoever he was talking to. “He fled down the utility tunnel, with a twenty-minute head start and a choice of some forty possible exits.”

“So? Traffic cams should have picked him up once he hit the streets. You know it’s pouring rain out there. There can’t be that many pedestrians.”

“We’ve put a
R
osa
on it. We’re doing everything we can, Summer.”

But did he understand the urgency? “Daniel, he’s supporting a viable population of
L
ov
s. You can’t let him escape.”

“We’ll find him. It’s only a matter of time.”

She took his arm. She pulled him away from an aide who had stopped to ask a question. “Listen to me,” she whispered, “because I am truly scared. Right now Virgil Copeland has the only viable reservoir of
L
ov
s in the world. What if he decides to change that? What if he decides to let them reproduce? If you give him time to spread them around, you might never know for sure if they’ve truly been exterminated. We could be fighting this problem for years to come.”

“Spread them around? How could he do that? If
you
can’t remove them without damage—”

“You don’t have to remove them to let them reproduce.”

He frowned. “Don’t they require very specific conditions . . . ?”

“I used to think so.”

“Summer—”

“Daniel, think about it! The best way to grow
L
ov
s is in a tank, but that’s not the only way. What if Copeland could induce his
L
ov
s to reproduce in vivo, in the flesh. It shouldn’t be hard. Then he could harvest the progeny and give them away.”

“Who would—”

“A lot of people would. The
L
ov
s can make you smarter, Daniel. They can make your moods more powerful, and more effective. I know quite a few people who would have a hard time saying no to that. If even one escapes, we could be looking at a
L
ov
plague.”

“We’re doing everything we can.”

“I hope so. I hope it’s enough.”