Maelstrom

All they cared about was that he was like them; loyal, obedient, trustworthy.

They opened doors for him. They gave him funds, and access to medbooths five years ahead of anything available on the street. They gave him back his hearing and, surprisingly, a clean bill of health. They pointed him to a vacant furnished room, waiting like a convenient cocoon to any on the home team who might need a place to crash on short notice.

Above all, they let him into Haven.

There were certain things they wouldn't do for anybody. A hardline to his cocoon was out of the question, for instance. Lubin had to go onsite for his research; an anonymous row of data booths embedded in the fourteenth floor of the Ridley Complex, off-limits to all but those of tailored conscience. About half the booths were occupied at any given time, dark diffuse shapes twitching behind frosted glass like larvae nestled in honeycomb. Occasionally two people would emerge into the hallway at the same time, pass each other without a word or a glance. There was no need for reassuring pleasantries here; everyone was on the same side.

Inside the booth, headset curled snuggly around jaw and eyes and ears, Ke

No significant pathogens registered from Cha

Hmm.

It didn't prove anything, of course. There were lots of nasty facts that didn't make it into Haven. There were other avenues of approach, though.

Assume, for example, that the vent had been nuked to contain some risk. Beebe would never have gone online if that risk had been known beforehand; there had been some period, therefore, when the threat was spreading beneath anyone's radar. And once the threat had been discovered, all those loose ends would have to be tied up in hindsight…

The building contractors. Left Coast Shipyards. They wouldn't use nukes though, not above-ground.

Fire, probably.

He summoned forth a frequency plot of fires over time, within a five-kilometer radius of marine construction and contracting facilities along the N'AmPac coast. Haven showed him a curious spike about three months after Beebe had gone online: Urchin Shipyards, Hanson Fabrication, and Showell Marine's SanFran complex had all hosted infernos within the space of a week. A dozen other facilities had been hit by various acts of arson in the two weeks following, not to mention a couple of places that had burned off large chunks of their property as part of "ongoing renewal programs".

Lubin loosened the scale and ran the request again: all large fires over time, anywhere along the N'AmPac coastline.

The map lit up.

Oh my, he thought.

Something had them scared to death. And it had all started down at Beebe.

No Cha

At Cha

Something at Cha

Haven wasn't exactly sure. But there was a tech report in the gray lit that took a guess: some kind of endosymbiotic infection that increased growth energy. The phrase infectious neomitochondria popped up in the discussion.

The authors of the report—a couple of eggs out of Rand/Washington University—suggested that some microbe at Cha

An infection that caused giantism in fish. Again, hmmm.

One of the first things Lubin had done after coming ashore had been to check himself out for pathogens. He'd tested clean. But this Cha

Lubin's credit was good. More extensive blood work wouldn't be an issue.

There were other issues, though. One of them dawned gradually as he explored, betrayed itself in the way Haven answered his questions. Sometimes the metabase thought for a moment or two before telling him what he wanted to know. That was normal. But other times—other times, it spat an answer back almost before he'd asked the question. Almost as though it had already been thinking along those very lines, as though it didn't have to go and look up the relevant facts.

Maybe, Lubin reflected, that was exactly it.

Haven's agents were not nearly so pressed for resources as the engines that combed Maelstrom; they could afford to cache recent searches. Very few lines of inquiry were utterly unique. If someone asked about the price of a Parkinson's fix today, chances were someone else would want to know something similar tomorrow. Haven's search engines held onto their executive summaries, the better to speed responses to related inquiries.

Ask and it shall be given:

— After a mean of 2.3 seconds when answering questions about giantism in deepwater fish;

— after a mean of 3 seconds when talking about benthic sulfur-reducing microbes;

— about a second for queries containing the phrase "Cha

— 0.5 seconds for searches combining sulfur-reducing microbes with fire.

Fire. Benthic sulfur-reducing microbes. An odd combination of terms. What relevance could fire have to life on the bottom of the ocean?

He added a third concept, almost on a whim: shipyard.

0.1 seconds.

Well.

He was following in someone's footsteps. Someone had been in Haven before him, asking the same questions, making the same co

Ken Lubin resolved to find out.