The Burning Skies (56 page)

“Ever read Dante?” says Lynx.

He and Linehan are sitting behind a pilot who’s maneuvering their shuttle toward a medium-grade war-sat that’s part of L2’s inner defenses. It’s swelling steadily within the window.

“What?” asks Linehan.

“The
Inferno
. Ever read it?”

“Never heard of it.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the only way you can understand what we’re heading into.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The circles of hell, man. We’ve run the outer ones. Now we’ve got to beat the ones that really count.”

“And let me guess: Szilard’s the devil.”

“Except he’s not. He’s just a man. Which is why we’re going to nail him.”

“But we’re men too.”

Lynx just laughs. Because he knows that’s no longer true. Because the download that’s suddenly reaching him has made him far more than what he was a few seconds back. The Manilishi’s codes surge through his brain, right on time, right as Carson assured him they would. Close at hand, too—coming from the ship now closing in on the farside. Lynx’s mind writhes in the rush of power he’s never known. He feels himself building up to heights he’s never dreamed of. He’s got all the leverage he needs and then some.

So he makes his move, seamlessly reaching out into the mainframes of the shuttle’s destination, rigging them so they don’t even know they’ve been rigged. He steals right under the eyes of all the watching razors. He’s got them so beat it’s as if their eyes were his own. He’s almost frightened by how much better he’s suddenly gotten—suddenly realizes that all his razor prowess has been mere show beside the real master of the game. All those moments searching through the corridors of the Moon for keys and clues and fragments of some greater knowledge that’s finally rushing through him—he struggles to control the rush that sends his heart beating faster than it ever has before. He takes a deep breath.

“You okay in there?” says Linehan.

“Can you feel it?” mutters Lynx.

“Feel what?”

“Crosshairs.”

“What?”

“All those … crosshairs. Tens of thousands of them. The Eurasian lunar batteries. Their guns at L4.”

“Aimed at us?”

“And everything else that’s up here, Linehan.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The average DE cannon’s not firing, you think it’s just sitting there and you’d be wrong because it’s cycling through a thousand different targets a second, making itself unpredictable,
right?” Lynx is talking so fast he’s pretty much babbling. “Keeping those who might try to hack it out of the mix. There’s no one war plan, man. There’s infinite plans. Infinite scenarios. In the time since you last spoke, hundreds of guns have flicked their sights on and off this fucking shuttle. The only weapons tracking us without interruption belong to our own side.”

“I’m not following.”

“Because you’re not listening. There’s a difference between war scenarios and in-fleet security, right? This crate we’re in is getting close to the SpaceCom flagship. It’s thus a threat of the first magnitude. Along with all the other craft that are doing the same thing at any given moment. Normal transport, right? But nothing’s normal up here. So they designate certain guns to do nothing but track stuff like us so that the lion’s share of the gunnery can worry about the East. Right?”

“Sure,” says Linehan. “Whatever you say.”

“That’s what I thought. Two particle-beam cannons, one microwave gatling, three high-energy lasers: they’ve got our number. At point-blank range.”

“Are you going somewhere with this?”

“Are you a fucking moron? They’re the back door to reach the ID configurations with which we’re getting inside L2’s inner perimeter. Got it? The guns that are tracking us can be hacked, and then it’s just dribble and shoot to figure out what their computers think we are, and then we get in there and change their mind so we can get clearance to get to the
Montana
itself—Jesus, will you look at
that.”

The war-sat’s swelling through three-quarters of the window. Turrets jut out in every direction. The shuttle drops toward huge doors that are opening to receive it—floats into the landing bay, touches down. The pilot springs the hatch.

“Have a good ’un,” he says.

“Sure thing,” replies Linehan. He and Lynx get up, pull
themselves out of the shuttle and into the landing bay—only to find themselves surrounded by SpaceCom marines who aren’t intimidated in the slightest by the officer insignia on the suits of the men they’ve got their weapons trained on.

“Sir,” says the squad’s sergeant, “we need to run a few checks.”

“We’re running late,” says Lynx.

“Orders, sir,” says the sergeant. “This way.” The marines escort Linehan and Lynx to an airlock. The sergeant and two marines step within, motion the two they’re escorting to join them. Doors close. Atmosphere pressurizes.

“Remove your helmets,” says the sergeant. Lynx and Linehan comply. “We need DNA swabs,” he adds.

“Since when?” asks Lynx.

“Since new regulations got handed down twelve hours back. Sir.” The last word seems like an afterthought.

But the DNA scan clearly isn’t. The marines take it from the inside of each man’s mouth. They also do a retina scan. Not to mention—

“Sir,” says the sergeant, “we need a voiceprint.”

“Don’t you already have that?” says Linehan.

“He means keyed to a lie detector as well,” says Lynx on the one-on-one. “Plus a covert brain scan.”

“Great.”

“Shut up.”

“Sir,” says the sergeant, “what’s your name?”

“Stefan Moseley” says Lynx.

“Position?”

“Major. Intelligence.”

“And your business on the
Montana?”

“A
meeting with my boss.”

“Who is?”

“Rear Admiral Jansen.”

The questions continue, but there’s nothing that Lynx hasn’t expected. It’s all getting relayed to the
Montana
, into
databases that Lynx has already hacked, and from there back to the war-sat. It’s the same with Linehan’s questions. He’s less polite than Lynx is, but just as responsive. Two more minutes, and the sergeant salutes.

“Where’s the shuttle?” says Lynx.

“We’ll take you there,” replies the sergeant.

They leave the airlock room behind, proceed through the corridors of the war-sat. The atmosphere definitely seems pretty tense. Everyone looks like they’re going somewhere quick. Everyone’s averting their eyes.

“Feeding me those answers in real time,” says Linehan. “Jesus Christ, you were cutting it close.”

“How about you cutting me some fucking slack? I only just figured them out myself.”

They reseal their helmets, pass through another airlock, reach another docking bay. This one’s even larger. The marines hustle Lynx and Linehan into a shuttle—which starts its motors, floats from the bay and out into the heart of the L2 fleet. One shape in particular looms ever closer.

“That’s the
Montana
all right,” says Linehan.

“And I can’t fucking wait.”

“So what the fuck’s up here? How the hell did you snag a meeting with the acting head of SpaceCom intelligence?”

“By being Com intelligence ourselves. Obviously.”

“Yeah? When did you switch our IDs?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

“And the guys who really had a meeting with Jansen?”

“Got carved up in a Congreve alley behind a seriously nasty bar. This was one of several ways in, Linehan. I was playing a couple of other angles, but when we got to the war-sat this was pretty much the only way to keep moving.”

“So you keyed the SpaceCom comps to recognize the faces we’re wearing.”

“Yeah.”

“And if Jansen took a look at the camera feeds?”

“He’ll see just what he expects to.”

“And when we’re standing in front of him? Won’t our faces be an issue then?”

“Not if we skip that meeting.”

O
n the loose beneath the Himalayas, the train streaks unmonitored through the hollows. Spencer’s watching rocky walls whip past. Data flashes by far faster. Something’s taking shape within his head.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says.

“It’s just a logic bomb,” says Sarmax.

“No,” says Spencer, “it’s not. It’s a logic
nuke
. It’ll open up a link to the U.S. zone and bring this whole place down around our ears.”

Sarmax shrugs. “Shit happens.”

“What the hell’s going on here, Leo? This is an act of war.”

“And sabotaging a superweapon isn’t?”

“This might collapse the whole Eurasian net.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“That’s a
crazy
thing. For all we know, the Eurasian weapons will fire if their zone gets disrupted.”

“Not if that little fucker does its job.”

Spencer keeps staring at the data that’s flitting through his head. He’s breaking down all its layers, all the way to binary. Those 1’s and 0’s look so innocuous on the screens within his mind. But put enough of them together in enough sequences and they’re capable of anything. Spencer’s starting to think that so is he.

“We’re not here to
stop
a war,” he says slowly.

“We’re here to make sure it’s as one-sided as possible.” Sarmax’s face breaks into a half-smile. “Now how about you figure out where we’re gonna set this thing off?”

A tricky question. Especially because Spencer is still unsure whether he’s found everything in these catacombs. He certainly has access to more than he did. The maps roll through his brain, which takes them apart in all their detail: floor space, transport, logistics, wiring. The scale of the place beggars description. It’s even larger than he thought. Several hundred ground-to-space directed-energy batteries and about fifty heavy launching pads; yet so far it’s just standard stuff. There’s no sign of any one thing that’s particularly special. The scientists got shipped to the complex’s control center. But according to the readouts they’re just being held there. It’s unclear what for. A voice sounds in Spencer’s head.

“How’s it looking, sir?” It’s the captain.

“Not good,” replies Spencer. “Can you get me some files from Moscow?”

“I can try, sir.” The captain sounds nervous. “What do you need?”

“The comprehensive dossiers on the chief of this place. General Loshenko. And his five subordinates. And quickly.”

“And his Chinese counterpart?”

“This is an investigation, captain. Not an instigation of civil war. Now move your ass.”

“Sir.”

The captain disconnects. Spencer imagines he’s guessing that Spencer’s got his own sources to scope out the Chinese. But the truth of the matter is that Spencer’s just trying to keep the captain busy. He doesn’t need any official requests to Moscow to figure out what they’ve got on the men they’ve sent to run this place. He’s already tapped into Moscow’s files to get to where he is now, reached out across the long-gone steppes to that city he’ll never see, slipped through its streets and basements while he pulled together everything he could find. He’s back beneath those streets now, looking for the key to the place he’s in.

And not finding it. Maybe his clearance just isn’t high enough. Or maybe everything’s just that compartmentalized.

“What’s the story?” says Sarmax.

“The story is I can’t find a goddamn thing.”

“What about the handler’s mystery file?”

“The book’s divided into three sections.”

“And?”

“And that’s it.”

“That’s what you call progress?”

“It’s what I call a start.”

“You’re not funny.”

“Easy Leo. The first part deals with this base. The second part deals with the weapon that’s in here.”

“And the third?”

“I haven’t a fucking clue. And I’m not even that sure about the first two. It’s just pattern-recognition algorithms I’ve been running. The first part contains at least a few disguised maps. The second part seems to be technical descriptions. The third’s Christ knows what.”

“So you’re stonewalled.”

“So I am.”

“So let’s do this.”

Spencer shrugs, closes a circuit in his head, connects the logic bomb’s software to the Eurasian zone. Only there’s no detonation. Just lightning racing out onto the zone—and Spencer’s riding that lightning, getting hauled up along a new path, up through the mountains and into one of the hidden wireless aerials that the Coalition has secreted in the peaks. The signal churns out into space. Out toward a point just behind the Moon.

But the answer comes back long before it arrives.

It’s the Manilishi. There’s no doubt. It’s her face, her touch. And Spencer gets it now—sees that he’s been prepping the ground this whole time. He and Sarmax are the inside
guys. Though he wonders why the Manilishi wasn’t in on this from the start; why it wasn’t just her and Sarmax. Perhaps the Throne figured he’d hedge his bets with a razor physically on the scene. But then why wasn’t she running cover from the beginning? Or was she? Spencer wonders what he’s missing. He wonders if the answer’s bound up in the thing he’s seeking.

Or whether it has something to do with the Manilishi. Because there’s something strange about her. Maybe it’s just the pressure she’s causing in his head. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate her. But there’s something almost…
tentative
about her movements. Not that that makes her any less hell-on-wheels. She starts using the bomb like a missile homing in on its target: straight into the heart of this complex, straight out to its edges. Coordinates flash into place. A new grid locks in to replace the old. The presence fades.