Madonnas could do almost anything in their own environment. Cruising through the walls and the wires and the wavelengths of N'AmNet they could penetrate almost any system, subvert almost any safeguard, bring down almost any calamity upon the heads of people for whom disaster had long since become the status quo. Just the week before, one had breached the flood-control subroutines of some dam in the Rockies, emptied a whole reservoir onto an unsuspecting populace sleeping in the spillway's shadow.

Forcing access into one lousy MI would have been simplicity itself to such a creature.

It hadn't downloaded, at least. No room. Neither nav nor weapons-system chips were anywhere near big enough to support something so complex, and the medical systems—the only habitat in the van that could hold something that size—were kept manually disconnected from the net except for prearranged updates. The monsters could do a lot of things in virtual space, but they hadn't yet figured out how to reach into the real world and physically flip a switch. So this one had simply extended long, vicious fingers from some faraway node, wreaking havoc from a distance until Taka had cut it off.

Her own dim image stared back, haunted and hollow-eyed, from the darkened dashboard. The perspex, subtly convex, stretched her reflection lengthwise, turned gaunt into downright attenuate. A fragile refugee from some low-gravity planet, civilized and genteel. Banished to a hellish world where even your own armor turned against you.

What if I— she thought, and stopped herself.

Wearily, she unlocked the door and climbed out onto the killing floor. There were still a fair number of patients in sight. None were standing, of course. Few moved.

What if I didn't—

"Hello!" she called to the empty streets and dark façades. "It's okay! It's gone! I shut it out!"

Moans from the injured. Nothing else.

"Anybody! I could really use a hand here! We've got—we've got…"

What if I didn't turn GPS off?

She shook her head. She always took it offline. She didn't specifically remember doing it this particular time, but you never remembered rote stuff like that.

"Anybody?"

Maybe you fucked up. Wouldn't be the first time.

Would it, Dave?

It seemed so dark all of a sudden. She raised her eyes from the carnage; twilight was bleeding away to the west.

That was when she noticed the contrails.

Condom

Phocoena's bulkheads are luminous with intelligence. The periscope feed delivers crisp rich realtimes of the maritime nightscape: dark sparkling waves in the foreground, black fingers of dry land reaching into the view from either side. A jumble of bright buildings rises above the coastline in center screen, huddled together against the surrounding darkness. Boxy unlit silhouettes to the south belie the remains of a whole other city south of the Narrows, abandoned in the course of some recent retreat.

The city of Halifax. Or rather, the besieged city-state that Halifax has evidently become.