"What makes you such an enculé today?" he grumbled as they stepped into the elevator.

Jovellanos blinked. "Sorry?"

"That whole scene back there."

"Don't you believe in truth in advertising? You don't hide any of that stuff. Mostly."

"I like to control the flow rate, though. Jesus." He punched Admin-6. "Your timing was shitty."

"My timing was great. They want you upstairs now, Killjoy. I don't think I've ever seen Lertzman quite so invested in anything before. If I'd waited for you to go through your usual non-mating dance we'd have been down there 'til the icecaps refroze. Besides, you've got a real problem saying no. You could've ended up fucking her just to keep from hurting her feelings."

"I don't think her feelings are all that fragile."

"So what? Yours are."

The doors opened. Desjardins stepped through. Jovellanos hung back.

He looked at her, a trifle impatiently. "I thought we were in a hurry."

She shook her head. "You are. I'm not cleared for this. They just sent me to get you."

"What?"

"Just you."

"That's bullshit, Alice."

"They're being paranoid about this, Killjoy. I told you. Invested."

The doors slid shut.

He stuck his finger into the bloodhound, winced at a brief stabbing pain. A physical sample. They weren't even trusting distance spec today.

After a moment an executive summary scrolled down the wall in three columns. On the left, a profile: blood type, pH, gas levels. On the right, an itemized list: platelets, fibrinogen, rbcs & wbcs, antibodies, hormones. All the parts of his lifeblood that had come from nature.

In the center, another list, somewhat shorter: the parts that had come from CSIRA.

Desjardins had learned to read the numbers, after a fashion. Everything looked in order. Of course, it was nice to have independent confirmation: the door in front of him was opening, and none of the others were slamming shut.

He stepped into the boardroom.

Three people were arrayed at the far end of the conference table. Lertzman sat in his usual seat at the head; to his left was a short blond woman Desjardins hadn't seen before. Which meant nothing, of course—he didn't know most of the people in admin.

To the blonde's left, another woman. Desjardins didn't know her either. She looked back at him through eyes that literally glittered—tactical contacts. She was only partly in the room. The rest of her was watching whatever overlays those lenses served up. At the edges of her mouth and around her mercurial eyes, faint lines and a slight droop to the right eyelid; otherwise the face was a pale and featureless sketch, a CaucAsian wash. Her dark hair grayed at the temples, a discoloration that seemed to spread infinitesimally as he watched.

The corpse from N'AmPac. Had to be.

Lertzman rose expectantly. The blonde started to follow his lead; halfway out of her chair she glanced at N'AmPac. N'AmPac did not stand. The blonde hesitated, wavered, sat back down. Lertzman cleared his throat and followed suit, waving Desjardins to a seat opposite the two women.

"This is Patricia Rowan," Lertzman said. When, after a few moments, it became obvious that nobody was going to introduce the blonde, Desjardins said, "Sorry to keep you waiting."

"On the contrary," Rowan said softly; she sounded tired. "I'm sorry to drag you back here on your down time. Unfortunately, I'm only in town for a few hours." She tapped commands into a control pad on the table in front of her. Tiny lights scrolled across her eyes. "So. The famous Achilles Desjardins. Savior of the Med."

"I just did the stats," he said. "And they only—postponed the inevitable for a few months."

"Don't sell yourself short," the corpse said. "Mean event resolution thirty-six point eight minutes. That's excellent."

Desjardins acknowledged with a nod.

"The metabase," Rowan continued. "Plagues. Brushfires. Traffic flow. And even setting the Mediterranean aside for the moment, I'm told your projections helped a lot in keeping the Gulf Stream going. A few people have you beat in Maelstrom, certainly, but you've got the edge in biocontainment, economics, industrial ecology—"

Desjardins smiled to himself. Typical old-school: she actually thought she was ticking off a list of different subjects.

"At any rate," the corpse continued, "You seem to be the best local candidate for what we have in mind. We're taking you off your normal rotation and putting you onto a special project, with Dr. Lertzman's approval of course."

"I think we could probably spare him," Lertzman said, embracing the pretense that his opinion mattered. "In fact, after today I imagine Achilles would probably want to leave Maelstrom behind for a while."

Enculé. The sentiment was almost a reflex where Lertzman was concerned.

Rowan again: "There's a biological event we'd like you to keep an eye on. New soil microbe, from the looks of it. So far it's had a relatively minor impact—almost negligible, in fact, but the potential, is, well…" She inclined her head toward the blonde on her right; on cue, that woman tapped her wristwatch. "If you'd open for download…"

Desjardins tapped the requisite shorthand onto his wrist; transfer protocols flickered briefly across his field of view.

"You can study the stats afterward," the blonde told him. "Briefly, though, you're looking for small-scale substrate acidification, reductions in chlorophyll a, maybe some changes in xanthophylls—"

Science. No wonder nobody'd bothered to introduce her.

"— there might be a reduction in soil moisture levels too, but we don't know yet. Probable decline in Bt and associated microflora. Also we suspect the spread will be temperature-limited. Your job is to develop a diagnostic profile, something we can use to tag this bug from a distance."

"That sounds a bit long-term for my skillset," Desjardins remarked. Not to mention boring as hell. "I'm really more optimized for acute crisis work."

Rowan ignored the hint. "That's not a problem. We selected you for your pattern-recognition skills, not your brushfire reflexes."

"Okay, then." He sighed to himself. "What about an actual signature?"

"Excuse me?"

"If you're talking about depressed chlorophylls, I'm assuming conventional photosynthesizers are being replaced. By what? Any new pigments I should be looking for?"

"We don't have a signature yet," the woman told him. "If you can work one up that'd be great, but we're not hopeful."

"Come on. Everything's got a signature."

"That's true. But this thing's direct sig may not show up at a distance until it's already at outbreak concentrations. We want to catch it before then. Indirect telltales are probably your best bet."

"I'd still like the lab stats. An actual culture too, of course." He decided to float a trial balloon. "Alice Jovellanos could be helpful in this. Her background's in biochem."

"Alice hasn't had her shots yet—" Lertzman began.

Rowan smoothly cut him off: "By all means, Dr. Desjardins. Anyone you think could be helpful. Keep in mind though, the security classifications are subject to change. Depending at least partly on your own results, of course."

"Thanks. And the culture?"

"We'll do what we can. There may be concerns about releasing a live sample, for obvious reasons."

Uh-huh.

"Start your search along coastal N'AmPac. We think this bug's limited to the Pacific northwest. Between Hongcouver and Coos Bay, most likely."

"So far," Desjardins added.

"With your help, Dr. Desjardins, we don't expect that to change."

He'd seen it all before. Some pharm had lost control of another bug. The quake had cracked open an incubator somewhere, and the competing forces of corporate secrecy and agricultural Armageddon had beat each other senseless in a boardroom somewhere else, and Patricia Rowan—whoever she was working for—had emerged from the wreckage to dump the whole thing into his lap. Without giving him the right tools for the job, natch; by the time they'd skimmed off all the molecules with patents hanging from them, his culture sample would amount to 20cc's of distilled water.