The Machinery of Light (3 page)

“Failsafe after failsafe,” mutters Spencer.

“Hostile razors could be inside already,” says Sarmax.

“Imagine that.”

“We’ll need to keep a close read on the politics when it all lights up.”

And that’s putting it mildly. The Eurasian Coalition is like two bodies sewn together. There’s a reason its zone felt so jury-rigged—why it was so difficult to line up all the operational hierarchies. Spencer’s wishing he had paid more attention to them on the way in, before they left the zone behind and reached this compartmentalized microzone deeper in the Earth than he’s ever been before. Parts of it were opaque to him even then—the inner enclaves, presumably, but now the entire thing’s been turned off, and he’s blind. He doesn’t like it.

Apparently Sarmax likes it even less. The mech’s blind by definition, and it wasn’t hard for Spencer to get him to agree to stay here until things clarify. So they’ve remained in this chamber for the last quarter-hour—just them and the unholy amount of nuclear warheads that line the walls around them.

“What do you think the total count is?” says Sarmax.

“About fifty thousand.”

“Gotta be more than that—”

“I’m talking about the ones we’ve seen,” says Spencer.

“I’m asking you to guess about the ones we haven’t.”

“We’re more than a klick deep into this bitch,” says Spencer. “How the fuck am I supposed to guess—”

But that’s when he feels something clutch at his mind—

A
nd retract. Sitting here at L5, she can’t reach that deep. She knows someone’s down there, though. Right now that’s all she needs to know. She hauls her mind back to the borders of the zone—lets herself slot through that zone, out of the Himalayas, out beneath China—and back into the U.S. zone, back out into space. Earth is getting closed off to her now anyway. The carpet of directed energy has become too thick. It’s all interference now—all satellites spitting light and plasma at one another in a web that’s starting to look almost solid. Earth’s upper atmosphere blooms incandescent. The lower orbits are a chaos of wreckage.

It’s only slightly cleaner higher up. There’s more space, though, and so far both sides are maintaining the integrity of their positions. The woman routes her signal through the American flagship
Roosevelt
, in the center of the perimeters at the American geosynchronous orbits. From their ramparts, she looks back upon the Earth … and either the air down near the surface is shimmering too, or else the oceans are starting to boil. Maybe both. But the overall picture in the
Roosevelt’s
battle-management computers is clear: the terrestrial Eurasian grids can’t withstand much more of the battering they’re taking. The woman sets various codes to work aboard the
Roosevelt;
she shrinks the Earth in her purview, and collapses back upon the
Lincoln
and her own body in the room somewhere near its center, her mind taking in the duel that’s raging between the American fleet at L5 and the larger Eurasian one at L4. They’re going at each other hammer and tongs, feeding in all reserve power, generators cranking and solar panels sucking in every drop of the Sun that washes across them so they can surge that much more energy into their guns. The shaking in the room the woman’s in has gotten so bad it’s like she’s in the throes of an earthquake. Her visor’s vibrating right in front of her. But she’s not worried. She won’t die. That’s what the prisoner told her. He explained to her the reasons why, and they were utterly persuasive. She’s staring at him now, on a screen that looks in on a room scarcely ten meters away, separated from her by still more locks. She’s the nearest human being to that room.

Or she would be, were she human.

She certainly looks it. Same way she
looks
like a guard. She’s more of a guardian, and she worships the man who’s not really a man and certainly not a prisoner—worships him with all her heart. Nor is her worship based on something so narrow as faith. It’s based on what he’s told her—on what he’s shown her. Before he was arrested as a traitor and taken to this place he’s in now; before she even knew the full extent of where this was all going—back when he told her that she’d come to a room someday and sit there and watch him take in the universe, both of them hiding in plain sight at the heart of all networks, observing everything unfold. The war’s almost a minute old, and it’s looking better by the second for the Americans—and almost perfect for their positions arrayed around the Moon. The extreme flanks of the L2 fleet are starting to scramble from their positions behind that rock, commencing runs that are clearly intended to get the drop on the Eurasian lunar positions. They’re flinging out directed energy while they’re at it, bouncing beams off the mirror-sats strung in orbit around the Moon for just this purpose, impacting the Eurasian ground-to-space artillery dug in along the nearside.

Which surprises the woman. She would have thought that the L2 fleet would have joined with L5’s guns to catch the Eurasian L4 fortresses in a crossfire. But it looks like the American high command has elected to allow the duel between L4 and L5 to continue to play out. It’s not what the prisoner told her he expected. She wonders at that, wonders if he was deliberately misleading her, wonders if he’s engaged in unseen battles of his own. But she sees the logic in the American move. They’re gambling that they can shut down the Eurasian forces on the Moon before the L4 guns break through L5’s defenses. So now she focuses on the Moon; her vantage point at L5 gives her a partial look at the farside—but she needs more than that. She routes herself through to the farside’s center—Congreve, the main American base there—whips past its dome, drops through the city and into its basements and on into the sub-basements. The traffic is thinning out along with the
wires, but she keeps on threading deeper all the same, honing in on the activity that she’s detecting. Some kind of chase is in progress. She’s almost at the limits of the sub-basements now, at the edge of the natural tunnels that honeycomb so much of the Moon—lava tubes that bubbled through ancient magma, some of them rigged with zone and used for mining, so many left unexplored even to this day. The woman drops in around the pursuers. An elite InfoCom squad … and she can’t see what it’s pursuing. She doesn’t need to. All she needs to do is hack in and do what she does best.

Listen.

S
omewhere deeper down, Claire Haskell is listening too. Not that it’s doing her much good. The team that’s hunting her is composed of experienced trackers. They’re locked into a tightbeam mesh less than half a klick back, trailing in her zone-wake via some machination of the one who’s leading them. Haskell can practically
feel
that man who’s pulling the strings—his mental signature a blend of detachment and anticipation that makes her shudder. She feels like she should shut down all her ties with zone, but knows that if she did, they’d be on her even quicker. So she’s just trying to go that much faster, her suit’s camos working overtime as she drops through shafts, races down stairways, trying to calibrate her position against the maps she’s got—trying to put distance between her and the surface where Armageddon keeps on raging. Zone’s camera-images flare on her screens; she takes stock of the carnage as she probes for the American command nodes. High above her, in the L2 fleet, she can see that a portion of the zone within the flagship
Montana
has been shut down—presumably to keep out pesky razors—she flits from there back down to Montrose’s command center beneath Korolev crater, west of Congreve. She can’t get in there either, but she can see the commands blasting out from within. The American attack
intensifies across the Earth-Moon system, probing relentlessly for Eurasian weakness while Haskell keeps on racing deeper into rock.

O
n screens within his head, a man orchestrates the pursuit. The Operative is several levels up, but he’s got the target right where he wants her. The target he’s been pursuing all his life, though he’s only just waking up to that fact. She isn’t going to escape, though he knows damn well that’s not going to stop her from trying. That’s why she’s the Manilishi—the foremost razor in existence, off-the-charts battle management capabilities merely the tip of the iceberg. That’s why he needs her—to get her involved in the showdown with the East.

But first he has to catch her.

“Sir?”

The Operative looks at the bodyguard.

“Sir, the president wants an update.”

And for just the briefest of moments the Operative thinks the bodyguard’s talking about Andrew Harrison. The man who ruled the United States for more than twenty years before he was shot dead by the Operative about twenty minutes ago. There’s a brand-new boss now—the one who orchestrated the death of the old one and blamed the whole thing on the Eurasians. She’s on the line, and the Operative can guess what she wants to talk about.

“Put her through,” he says.

“Carson.” The voice of Stephanie Montrose is clipped, terse. There’s a lot of background noise. Her image is fuzzy. She’s clearly looking into a live feed rather than using a cranial implant. The Operative clears his throat.

“Madam President,” he says.

Static. Then: “Carson. Can you hear me?”

“I can.”

“Do you have her?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s taking so long?”

“What’s taking so long is that she’s hell on wheels.”

Montrose says nothing. “How’s it looking up there?” the Operative adds.

“We’re winning.”

“But not yet won.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“Just the facts,” says the Operative.

“Spare me,” snaps Montrose. “Their def-grids are collapsing. Their cities lie helpless before us.”

“I don’t believe in counting chickens.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“The Eurasians may have some tricks up their sleeves.”

Her hawklike face looks at him almost curiously. “Do you know that for a fact?”

“Not even vaguely.”

“So leave the contingency planning to me.” Montrose shifts her head; the Operative gets a glimpse of the war room behind her: rows of screens and consoles, analysts pacing through narrow passages between them. “What the East is facing is the heaviest zone-attack ever mounted. Whatever last-ditch games they want to play can’t matter. I’ll rule the Earth-Moon system within the hour.”

“You and Szilard.”

“Again, I detect sarcasm.”

“And again, I plead innocence.”

“Szilard doesn’t have the executive node software,” says Montrose. “He’s the junior partner.”

“And what am I?”

“If you deliver Haskell, you’re whatever you want to be.”

“I want Mars,” says the Operative.

“You’ll have it,” replies Montrose.

“Roll it up as a U.S. protectorate, make me protector?”

“Done upon the peace. Now bring the Manilishi back to me—alive
or
dead.”

He stares at her.

“Believe me,” she says, “I’d love to plug the bitch into my battle-management grid just to watch the sparks fly. But it’s no longer a requirement. Our forces are carrying all before them. All I need’s her body—one way or another.”