There are still the Lenies, though, and the things that fight them. She avoids such monsters whenever possible, despite her undeniable kinship. There is nothing those creatures might not attack if given the opportunity. This is something else she has learned.

Now she sits in a comsat staring down at the central wastes of North America. There is chatter on a hundred channels here, all of it filtered and firewalled, all terse and entirely concerned with the business of survival. There is no more entertainment on the airwaves. The only entertainment to be had in abundance is for those whose tastes run to snuff.

She doesn't know any of this, of course. She's just a beast bred to a purpose, and that purpose requires no reflection at all. So she waits, and sifts the passing traffic, and—

Ah. There.

A big bolus of data, a prearranged data dump from the looks of it—yet the scheduled transmit-time has already passed. She doesn't know or care what this implies. She doesn't know that the intended recipient was signal-blocked, and is only now clearing groundside interference. What she does know—in her own instinctive way—is that delayed transmissions can bottleneck the system, that every byte overstaying its welcome is one less byte available for other tasks. Chains of consequences extend from such bottlenecks; there is pressure to clear the backlog.

It is possible, in such cases, that certain filters and firewalls may be relaxed marginally to speed up the baud.

This appears to be happening now. The intended recipient of forty-eight terabytes of medical data—one Ouellette, Taka D./MI 427-D/Bangor— is finally line-of-sight and available for download. The creature in the wires sniffs out the relevant channel, slips a bot through the foyer and out again without incident. She decides to risk it. She copies herself into the stream, riding discretely on the arm of a treatise on temporal-lobe epilepsy.

She arrives at her destination without incident, looks around, and promptly goes to sleep. There is a rabid thing inside her, all muscles and teeth and slavering foamy jaws, but it has learned to stay quiet until called upon. Now she is only a sleepy old bloodhound lying by the fire. Occasionally she opens one eye and looks around the room, although she couldn't tell you exactly what she's keeping watch for.

It doesn't really matter. She'll know it when she sees it.

Without Sin

Harpodon doesn't lie between any of the usual rifter destinations. No one swimming from A to B would have any cause to come within tuning range. Not even corpses frequent this far-flung corner of Atlantis. Too many memories. Clarke played the odds in coming here. She'd thought it was a safe bet.

Obviously she got the odds all wrong.