She told him what she could. Finally he climbed back into sunshine and headed for the ultralight. Halfway there he paused and looked back.

She could make a run for it, he thought. She's not too sick to drive. She could try to escape.

Or, eyeing the stained water by the road, she could just lurch into the water and infect the whole bog. Much more difficult to contain after that.

Maybe she's a loose end.

Idle musing, of course. There was no immediate threat here, nothing to justify extreme prejudice. Not that that was always likely to be the case, the way this thing was spreading. This was the second vector Lubin had tracked down, and the first of Ouellette's original trio. The other had been a secondary who'd picked up the baton in her wake, and he'd admitted to seeding still others. How far the other two Patient Zeroes had run was still anyone's guess. And now there was Aaron to deal with, not to mention the half-dozen places where this woman had dribbled little aliquots of Seppuku in her wake...

He could afford to wait, he told himself. The way things were going, he'd have all the excuse he needed before long. Not that he needed excuses any more, of course. Ken Lubin had been a free agent for years.

Play nice, he told himself. Play by the rules.

He did. He called the ambulance before he called the flamethrowers, stood guard until it floated in from the west, sprayed himself down and climbed back into the sky. He banked southeast, backtracking the vector's route. A lifter appeared in the middle distance and paced him for a while, cruising like a great dark cloud towards the target areas he'd pinpointed. Pilot lights sparked faintly at the tips of the long, incendiary muzzles hanging from its underbelly. Puffy pink and green clouds erupted intermittently in the airspace beneath it, cotton-candy litmus tests sniffing out infection.

He edged up the throttle. By now, Aaron's partner would be bagged and on her way. Taka Ouellette would be running tests on her by nightfall.

If Ouellette was running tests on anything, of course. Lubin had his doubts.

He remembered the first time he had met Achilles Desjardins. He had broken into the 'lawbreaker's home and caught him in flagrante delecto with a VR sensorium that served up wraparound scenarios of sexual torture. Desjardins would have never inflicted those impulses on the real world back then, of course, but a lot of things had changed in the meantime. Rules had changed. Leashes had been slipped. Official hierarchies had crumbled, leaving those who wielded power miraculously free of oversight.