The Machinery of Light

PART I INCANDESCE

A woman listens to the world burn.

It’s hard to miss. It’s on every channel. Reports rendered in toneless staccato, attack sequences confirmed by unseen machines, horrified civilian newscasts that suddenly go silent … the woman’s jaw hangs loose while her mind surfs the signals reaching the room in which she’s riding out the storm, as far away from this craft’s hull as possible. Vibrations pound through the walls as energy smashes into the ship from the vacuum beyond. The woman hears shouts as the soldiers in the corridors around her react to the blast-barriers starting to slide shut. She hears the muffled boom of each one closing, growing ever closer, the succession of walls parading past her and echoing in the distance.

She’s locked into one of the modular sections now, along with ten other guards—and the prisoner in the high-security cell they’re guarding. She looks just like the rest of those sentinels, though really she’s nothing of the kind. She’s not sealed in either; she may be confined behind these doors, but she’s still in touch on zone, her razor awareness reaching out to the rest of the ship. Nearly half a klick long, the Lincoln sits at the heart of the L5 fleet’s defenses, on the libration point itself. The whole fleet turns around it. Beyond that is a sight like nothing ever seen …

World War Three began ten seconds ago, with a sudden U.S. attack on the Eurasian Coalition’s forces across the Earth-Moon system. A cacophony of light hit the East—and within a second the East hit back with everything it had left. A myriad of guns keep on flaring like there’s no tomorrow. For many millions, there won’t be. The war to end all wars is underway in style. Way behind the speed-of-light weapons come the kinetics: hundreds of thousands of hypersonic missiles, projectiles, railgun-flung rocks—all of it swimming through space and streaking through atmosphere. And right now most of it’s way too slow in the face of massed particle beams and lasers: directed-energy batteries that flail against incoming targets even as they triangulate on one another. On the screens, the woman can see the Earth glowing as portions of the outer atmosphere reach temperatures they really shouldn’t. Chunks are coming off the Moon’s surface. The room in which she’s sitting starts to shake even harder. She hears one of the guards praying—his words audible only inside his helmet, but she’s hacked into that helmet, getting off on every fucking word—and every word is just one among so many … because now she’s honing in on Earth, sifting through the traffic that’s getting through the swathe of energy that’s bathing the planet. It’s so bad she has to take one of the mainline routes in; riding on the command frequencies, she plunges through air that’s shimmering with heat, drops deep beneath the Rocky Mountains and into the command bunker within which America’s planetside generals are monitoring events.

Those generals are exclusively InfoCom and SpaceCom. All the other ranking officers have been purged, or have sworn to obey the new order. The death of the president has been announced to the armed forces, along with the order to take revenge upon the Eurasian foe whose assassins struck him down in his hour of triumph. There’s a new president now, and everyone’s getting in line fast. They’re too busy dealing with the blizzard of death blazing through the sky to do anything else. But so far the cities in both East and West are being left untargeted. Neither side can afford to bother with them. Both sides are bringing every resource they can to bear upon the challenge of breaking down the def-grids of the other, def-grids largely consisting of DE cannon arrayed in strategic perimeters, shooting at the waves of projectiles heading in toward them. It looks to be the mother of all free-for-alls.

It’s anything but. The woman can detect an initial pattern already. The American preemptive strike has drawn blood. The Eurasians are reeling. She’s studying the planetside portion of the Eurasian zone now, watching the webwork of nodes that stretch from Romania to Vladivostok, from the wastes of Siberia to the Indian Ocean. She takes in the Eastern def-grids as they struggle to adjust to the onslaught. She’s looking for an opening, following the routes she’s been instructed to take. Moving beneath the American firewall and through a back door into the neutral territories—into a data warehouse in London, from there to Finland and across the Arctic Circle and through long-lost phone lines beneath the tundra, straight into the Eastern zone … straight into Russia. She’s never worked the zone like this before. She’s running codes that make her virtually unstoppable, swooping in across the steppes, closing upon a target.

The target’s a man. He’s sitting in the sixth car of a Russian train, several hundred klicks east of the Caspian Sea, going at several thousand klicks an hour: full-out supersonic maglev, heading southeast. The train just went below the surface, and there’s palpable relief aboard at getting underground before the rail got pulverized. It looks to be a normal transit train—the last ten cars of the train are packed with equipment, the first ten cars with specialists and staff officers, bound for various bases and various locales. There’s nothing aboard that’s even remotely atypical.

Except for the man the woman’s tracking.

He’s one of the staff officers, sitting in a compartment all his own, staring at the wall that’s rushing past the window. She can see him quite clearly on the train’s vid, but somehow she can’t seem to get near him on zone. His codes are too good. She can trace the route they’ve taken, though. Doesn’t surprise her in the slightest that he’s come from the very center of Moscow, from cellars deep beneath the Kremlin itself.

And yet he’s undercover. No one else aboard this train has the slightest clue he’s anything but what his ID says he is: a medium-range gunnery officer, attached to somebody’s staff in Burma. But the woman has been told this man is key—has been told she has to watch him closely. She expects she’ll find out what that’s all about soon enough. In the meantime, she’s tracing some signals he’s sending—riding alongside them as they flick out ahead of the train, along the rails and through a maze of tunnels, heading beneath the Himalayas, diving down toward the root of the mountains—

Down here there’s nothing to see. Nothing to hear. Nothing going on at all. It’s just the two of them now, waiting in this room. The lights of zone went off fifteen minutes ago.

“Too long,” says Sarmax.

As he speaks, the mech triggers a light in his helmet. His face is two-day stubble and half a century’s worth of lines. The only warmth his grey eyes hold is some kind of distant amusement.

“I don’t think so,” says Spencer.

“Who cares what you think? It’s already begun.”

“Probably.”

“Definitely.”

“So why haven’t they switched this thing on?”

“I presume,” says Sarmax, “that they’re waiting for their moment.”

Spencer nods. He figures that moment will come soon enough. The two men are deep inside something that was separated from the exterior zone to begin with, machinery that’s situated in a mammoth cave beneath several klicks of rock, cut off from the rest of this black base, with all systems shut off as an additional precaution. Because you can never be too careful.

“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—

And 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.

Somewhere 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.

On 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.”

“Understood.”

“Report in as soon as possible.”

The Operative cuts off the comlink. He looks at the three bodyguards that Montrose has assigned to be in his presence at all times. Their visors stare back at him impassively. He knows they’ve been assigned to kill him under certain conditions. He’d love to know precisely which ones. He lets screens snap on within him that show him the next two klicks of underground chambers—show him, too, the cloud of probabilities that denote the best guess as to Haskell’s position, now slashing out past the left flank of the trackers. The InfoCom razors recalibrate. The mechs move onto the outer boundary of Haskell’s position.

Montrose’s eyes flick away from the screen, return to flitting through a hundred others. Battle readouts parade in rapid-fire fashion before her, but they’re just the summaries of summaries. The war room around her is processing more information per second than the entire twentieth century produced. Most of the actual targeting is being handled by computers; at a tactical level, the situation’s moving far too quickly for humans to get involved, though razors are continually optimizing the targeting sequences and making overrides as necessary to the prioritization algorithms. But most of the human involvement is occurring at more strategic levels, some of it at the most strategic level of all—and now a new light’s flashing. Montrose’s aide-de-camp coughs discreetly as he steps up behind her.

“Admiral Szilard,” he whispers.

“Put him through,” says Montrose as she wipes the annoyed expression from her face. The face of the SpaceCom commander appears on a screen before her, looking nothing if not sardonic.

“Stephanie,” he says.

For a moment she’s tempted to insist he call her Madam President. But she’s come too far in life to get tripped up by formalities. Particularly when the man she’s facing is one of the few factors she doesn’t have full control of in a situation that’s otherwise going her way.

“Jharek,” she says smoothly. “What’s the situation?”

“Funny,” he says, “that’s why I was calling you.”

She knows they don’t need such preliminaries. But somehow they’re still playing this game. Same one they’ve been playing since they were both pretending to be loyal servants of Andrew Harrison. Same indirectness as always, born of dealing through back-channels and intermediaries. Didn’t stop her and Szilard from mapping this whole thing out—from figuring out that the only way to deal with the president was to combine their strength and take him from both directions: lure him into concentrating on SpaceCom, lull him into thinking InfoCom was something he could trust. Or rather, use—and in reality Montrose was the one using him. She seduced the president, and she did it in more ways than one. Because Stephanie Montrose isn’t wired like most people are. She thinks at angles to everybody. That’s how she climbed to the top of Information Command by the age of thirty-eight. Now she’s forty-nine, one of the youngest presidents in American history, and she thinks she might just have found a way to rule forever. She stares at the head of Space Command—the man they call the Lizard—looks into his eyes and smiles her most winning smile.

“We’re winning,” she says.

“I noticed,” he replies.

There’s no way he couldn’t have. Not with the fattest wireless pipeline ever configured linking her base with his flagship. Behind Szilard she can see the bridge of the Montana—an HQ that looks to be every bit as extensive as her own. She takes in the screens that are visible, isn’t surprised to see that the SpaceCom camera that’s capturing the feed is systematically blurring the images of the readouts. She knows full well that what she’s got with Szilard is an uneasy partnership. She wonders for how long it’s going to be sustainable. She’s knows a lot of that depends on what they’re talking about now.

“The Manilishi,” he says.

“Ah,” she says.

“Do you have her?”

“Didn’t I tell you I’d call you when I did?”

“I figured it couldn’t hurt to know the exact status.”

“We’re working on it.”

“Where is she?”

“We’ve got her cornered in the Congreve sub-basements.”

“I heard she’s gotten a little farther than that.”

Which isn’t what she wants to hear. Szilard shouldn’t have access to that kind of data. Then again, he’s had years to put his agents all over Congreve and everything beneath it. The farside may be the only thing that’s out of the direct line of sight of the largest Eurasian guns, but it’s also SpaceCom territory. And Congreve is even more so. That’s why she’s several hundred kilometers away, in a bunker whose construction she supervised covertly for years and which has only just been switched on. Nobody save InfoCom personnel are getting anywhere near her. Still, she can’t help but feel that Szilard is way too close right now.

“She’ll be in custody shortly,” she says.

“And then?”

“We’ve already discussed that.”

“And I’ve been thinking some more about it.”

“Think all you like. She remains with me.”

“You’ve already got the executive node.”

“Because I’m president.”

“And I need to remain admiral of the fleet.”

“You can do that without the Manilishi.”

“Sure, but—”

“What are you proposing, Jharek?”

“Joint control.”

“Out of the question.”

“Or bring her up to the Montana.”

“The where?”

“You heard me. My flagship.”

“You must be joking.”

“I have trouble doing that,” says Szilard. “Look, the farside’s not safe.”

“It’s as safe as anything we’ve got.”

“The East is right there, Stephanie. They’re still holding out at Tsiolkovskiy crater—”

“Not exactly next door, Jharek”—her voice raised enough that nearby analysts dart covert looks her way. “And how is taking her to the Montana in any way consonant with joint control?”

“Doesn’t have to be the Montana,” he says evenly.

“Doesn’t have to be anywhere in the L2 fleet,” she says. “Haskell’s a bona fide superweapon. Why the hell would we put her on a spaceship while combat’s underway?”

“You think my position up here is exposed?”

She doesn’t answer. She knows what’s really going on here. They’re winning so quickly that Szilard has already started trying to define the postwar order. Meaning she might just have to start moving up her plans. Szilard clears his throat.

“Let me try to put you at ease,” he says. “SpaceCom’s built on the reversal of appearance. What might look like vulnerable tin cans are actually the high ground. There couldn’t be a more secure place to keep Haskell—”

“So why not L5?”

“Pardon?”

“We both know L2’s yours. L5’s a little more even. Once the war is over, we can move her there.”

“To where Sinclair’s in custody? I’m not sure putting her anywhere near her former boss is—”

“Interrogating them together may be the best way to crack them both.”

“He may not be crackable. Harrison failed to—”

“So he failed,” she says. “No reason we have to.”

“So you’ll move Haskell?”

“How about you let me catch her first?”

On the outside trying to get in: and just out of reach—Lynx can see the main data conduit that’s been set up between the InfoCom and SpaceCom leadership—can see it, but can’t get in. Which is too bad, because if he could crack the inner enclave, he might be able to figure a way out of this fucking place. He’s still stuck in the shafts of the Montana. He’s been crawling through Szilard’s flagship in the wake of his disastrous attempt on Szilard’s life, running low-grade hacks to keep the local wildlife in check, but unable to get much of a vantage point beyond that … until he got a break, stumbling upon a nest of wires that turns out to be the backup lines for some of the systems on the bridge. He’s been in those wires for the last five minutes, using them to finally broaden his scope beyond this slice of the Montana. The Earth-Moon system is in chaos. He’s relishing the sight.

The fact that SpaceCom marines are closing in on his position is a different story. He’s got a glimpse into the views maintained by the Montana’s garrison—can see they’ve blocked off all the entrances to the shaft-complex he’s in and set up checkpoints, all facing toward him. A move that makes no sense unless it’s accompanied by another. Even though he can’t see it, he knows it beyond a shadow of a doubt: the hunters have entered this section of the shafts. He can practically feel the hands reaching out for his neck.

But he stays where he is, uploading for the next thirty seconds, siphoning as much information from the comps as he can. He figures he’s going to need it—figures you never know what might come in useful, knows he’ll have only a few minutes to find a way to put it to use. He feels data fill him, rise up within him until he’s brimming with practically nothing else. He gets ready to start running.

The Earth shakes as they streak beneath it. It’s clearly only a matter of time before the tunnel collapses around them. They’re way too close to the surface. Presumably that’s why this train’s engineers are pouring on the speed, racing for the junctions that will get them to the one place they need to be.

Deeper.

The man eyes the car around him. Nobody is above the rank of colonel. The man’s only a major, but he’s got pull that goes a little beyond that. Yet right now he’s in the same boat as the rest of them—just Russian officers trying to make their luck go a little further, just soldiers all too glad they got assigned to this train and not the one behind it. There’s nothing back there now. The def-grids are crumbling. American hypersonic missiles are starting to smack into bases in the steppe above them. The train accelerates still further.

Is something wrong?” says Sarmax.

“I’m fine,” says Spencer.

“No you’re not.”

“No?”

“You just felt something grab at your mind, right?”

Spencer blinks. “You too, huh?”

“How much did you feel?” asks Sarmax.

“Just the hint of something.”

“Could you see who?”

“No idea.”

Not that he has much experience with stuff this weird. He was hooked up to the Manilishi during the run-in, via some kind of telepathy that was enabled surgically and had something to do with his zone interfaces. He has no idea as to the exact procedure—has no idea as to what this is really all about. Which is why he’s getting so desperate for some answers.

“You and Lynx and Carson,” he says.

“What about us?” replies Sarmax.

“You guys could only sense one another. You couldn’t read one anothers’ thoughts.”

“Is that a statement or a question?”

“Just answer it.”

“Told you already: only ones who could do that were the real Rain. Not us pipsqueak prototypes. The three of us were just modified flesh, Spencer—just the goddamn precursors. The main team, they were the ones who had it all together.”

“Except they didn’t,” says Spencer.

“Not without the Manilishi, no.”

“She was supposed to be the linchpin of the whole thing.”

“She still is the linchpin.”

“Even though the Rain are finished?”

“You really think so?”

“I thought Haskell wiped them all—”

“All, nothing. Riddle me this, moron: if the Rain are finished, what the fuck was that yanking on our goddamn brains?”

“I was assuming it was Haskell.”

Sarmax looks at him strangely. “Could you tell if it was female?”

“No,” says Spencer.

“You couldn’t tell anything at all?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m trying to figure out who it was.”

Spencer regards Sarmax curiously. “Right. I keep forgetting you knew them.”

“Trained them, sure.” Sarmax shifts the subject. “Look, there’s more than meets the eye here. I was a wet-ops specialist of twenty years when they put me out for forty-eight hours and woke me up with the news that I was the new breed. I asked what the fuck that meant. They said, you’ll see. And they were right. You just act. You make all the right choices, and you know that the other members of the team are making theirs—you just know it. And when you strike, you don’t hesitate. And everybody hesitates. Even if they don’t know it. Even for a fraction of a second. But not when you’re Rain. You get the shot off quicker, and you never miss. You—”

“Carson told me something—”

“Carson told you something?”

“On the way back to Earth. He said the Rain are more than just killers. They’re takeover artists.”

“Sure. Would have thought that was obvious by now.”

“He said it was an instinct for them.”

“Sure. We were taught to seek heights. We sense heights.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Not sure I can explain. Call it intuition.”

“Lot of it running around these days,” says Spencer.

“If you’re talking about the Manilishi, you can forget it. She’s on a whole different level, man. She hacks the light fantastic so hard she’s forced them to invent whole new classifications of razor ability. I’ve got a feeling that if she’d ever been plugged into the rest of the Rain, we’d be dealing with a lot more than mind reading.” Sarmax pauses. “Where are you going with all this anyway?”

“Trying to get a line on the handler’s file,” says Spencer.

“The book.”

“Yeah, the book.”

“Any luck?”

“Not with the part that counts.”

The thing that’s been turning in Spencer’s head contains three. The first is the location of the base they’ve penetrated. The second is the nature of the Eurasian secret weapon they’re inside. Both of those have now been cracked. Neither holds a candle to the third part: the final section of the pages scrawled in languages the last American agent in Hong Kong invented for the sole purpose of better hiding the secrets that had driven him mad. Secrets he committed to the most archaic medium of them all, the only one that’s safe from zone … paper. A whole book’s worth, and now it’s been burned, but not before it was photographed and uploaded by the men who killed him—Spencer and Sarmax—who were even more desperate than the handler was, and who can’t afford to take the precautions he’d been taking. Spencer mulls it all over once again. He exhales slowly.

“It’s definitely what we’re after,” he says.

“Rain,” says Sarmax.

“Yeah. I’ve been able to suss out the section headings, made some inroads on the rest of it. I’ve figured out its source.”

“Its source?”

“Its author.”

“You mean the handler? Jarvin?”

“I mean who he stole it from.”

“Oh.”

“Oh. We’re talking about the key files, Leo. Precise records of the Autumn Rain experiments, right? Sinclair had to keep track of it somehow. And somehow his onetime handler went and got himself a copy.”

“An alleged copy.”

“Sure. May be a fake. But I doubt it.”

“Because?”

“Because I think it really did do something to his mind.”

Sarmax starts to reply—and stops as a faint noise filters in from several rooms above … followed by an unmistakable creak as a hatch swings open. There’s the sound of boots coming down a ladder.

“The access shafts,” says Spencer.

“We need to make ourselves scarce.”

Claire Haskell keeps on running, pursuit hot on her trail, and she’s ever more certain that Carson’s leading that pursuit—that Montrose hasn’t had him liquidated for failing to capture her. Or just liquidated on general principles: because Haskell knows damn well what Carson is doing working for Stephanie Montrose. She wonders if Montrose knows too—wonders if Montrose has used her possession of the executive node to build up some means to protect herself from the world’s most dangerous assassin.

But mostly Haskell’s wondering about the door she’s about to reach. It leads to a shaft she’d really like to get to. One she’s pretty sure isn’t known to Montrose. She wonders if it’s known to Carson. It’s barely known to her—even with her maps, it’s not easy to find. That’s because it’s hidden in the bottom of an empty water pipe, looking like part of the wall within. She traces her hand along the frame—finds a switch and hits it.

Nothing happens.

The door’s not opening. She hits it again. Same result.

She tries to hack the systems of the door, but she can’t even find a zone beyond it. She’s getting frantic now. Because she can feel the pursuit coming in behind her, moving in to cut her off.

And suddenly she gets it—a flash of insight or just some leering thought of his flung through rock for her reception: Carson knows about this door for sure—knows it’s a way to the really deep shafts—and that’s why she’s just managed to get herself trapped against it. He knows damn well that she can’t get through it. The codes she has are wrong. Or maybe they just got changed. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she can’t get through. And that the hunters are approaching along vectors that leave her with no way to get beyond them, back into the base’s larger sprawl. She turns away from the door—

And looks longingly back. For one moment, it’s as though Jason Marlowe himself is on the other side. Her dead lover—she wants to get through that badly. She contemplates using explosives against the portal, but figures that this door was designed to withstand anything up to a nuke. So she tears herself away, turns around, and starts climbing up the side of pipe, back into a passageway, taking stock all the while of the noose that’s tightening around her.

The Operative watches his readouts as they show the margin of error vanishing. It’s all over. Haskell’s officially fucked, regardless of which zone-signature she’s hiding behind. The probabilities are dwindling to the point where all her potential routes intersect with one of his formation’s flanks. And those flanks are sweeping together like jaws …

He figured she’d take the route she did. It was predictable enough. He knows how Haskell thinks. After all, he was there when she started thinking. He intends to be there at the end too. Which can’t be far away. He hopes it will be quick. He lets the contours of the war that’s blazing overhead waft through him as he moves forward, bodyguards closing up behind him, following in the wake of his suit’s thrusters.

Find the traitor.

Find the fucking traitor and rip out his fucking heart. Tear his flesh to bits. Gobble his flesh right off the floor. Fucking eat him.

Find the traitor.

But other than that, there’s not much in the way of thought. There’s just a set of nerve-reflexes honed to professional levels and looking for a target. Because somewhere in this spaceship there’s a traitor. And loyal SpaceCom soldiers are looking for that traitor. Loyal soldiers just like—

“Linehan.”

Linehan looks around. But there’s no one there. Just more of this shaft that he’s been crawling through, more of the endless innards of the Montana. The sights of his suit’s guns triangulate on the walls up ahead, but they’re not picking up anything that even passes for a target …

“Linehan.”

It sounds like it’s right inside his skull. It sounds familiar—like someone Linehan used to know. Someone who knows more about Linehan than maybe even he himself does. Someone who’s become a trait—

“Show yourself,” says Linehan.

“Why?”

“So I can kill you.”

“I don’t think so,” says Stefan Lynx.

“You’re marked for execution.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“You’ve betrayed Admiral Szilard.”

“I didn’t betray anybody, jackass.”

“You were—”

“Trying to get control of his whole fleet.”

“Because you’re Autumn Rain.”

“The original, baby.”

“You tried to use me to kill the admiral but your buddy Carson backstabbed you.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. You’re a traitor.”

“Whatever,” says Lynx. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“That if you can keep me talking long enough your armor can trace me.”

“So far it’s working.”

“But here’s the thing you should be wondering: why the hell haven’t you informed the SpaceCom razor you’ve been paired with that you’ve been chatting with me?”

“What?”

“The SpaceCom razor. The guy who Szilard said go run point in the jungle for. Few score meters back in the shaft behind you, right? I’m sure that guy’s at least a captain. Must be some hotshot razor.”

“He’s tracking you—”

“And he hasn’t found me. So why the hell haven’t you told him that the traitor’s on the line?”

“You’re … fucking with my zone-signal … my software—”

“Sure I am. But tell me why you haven’t even tried to get him on the fucking line!”

“I … don’t know. I—”

“I’ll tell you why. Because you’re dickless. Because I’m the fucking Cheshire cat and I’ve sent you my smile to tell you to wake the fuck up. Szilard’s already sold you out.”

“I—what are you talking about?”

“Jesus Christ! Do you leave your brain at the door when you check into Hotel SpaceCom? Did Szilard take out your fucking batteries? Come on, man: the Lizard’s gonna purge you tonight.”

“Prove it.”

“Watch this.”

Abruptly, the train starts slowing. Rocky walls outside the windows become visible as more than just something flickering by. The train keeps on braking, slows even further, hisses to a halt.

But it’s clear all hell is still breaking loose outside. Vibrations keep on rocking through the floor. Apparently the Americans are pressing home their advantage. Everyone’s looking at one another—except the major who’s looking at nothing in particular, save for the readouts in his own head, affording him a vantage that’s more advantaged than anyone else in the car. He exhales slowly—stands up, straightens out his uniform, and starts heading toward the door to the next car.

“The rats are leaving the ship,” says someone.

“We’re supposed to stay here,” says someone else.

“So stay,” says the major. The car door opens and he goes through as it slides shut behind him. He triggers override codes, locks it shut. He’s in a freight car now—he makes his way through the narrow passage between the metal crates. He moves into the next freight car, and then the next.

Two more cars, and he’s arrived at a door that’s different than the ones he’s been through. It looks to be a great deal thicker. It’s still no match for his codes. It slides open, and he walks on through into the train’s cockpit. The driver and engineer whirl toward him, their expressions just short of priceless.

Spencer and Sarmax get busy getting moving, through the trapdoor in the floor and down into the rooms beneath them. Those rooms are just as packed with nukes as the ones they left. They contain trapdoors that lead to shafts that lead to—

“Fuck,” says Sarmax.

“We really shouldn’t go in there,” says Spencer.

“Not unless we’re feeling lucky.”

Or just really stupid. The shafts below this point aren’t intended for humans. Just nukes, getting slotted through at high speed. Meaning that—

“We’re trapped.”

“Maybe,” says Spencer.

“How many routes are there out of here?”

Depends how you count. The zone’s still down, but Spencer got enough of a glimpse of this area before the lights went out to be able to map it out: a series of interlocking rooms, all of them packed with the fissile material that’s both cargo and fuel. Spencer’s trying to calibrate these rooms against the larger superstructure of the thing they’re in, trying to make some calculations that are really just educated guesses. He’s got no time for anything else.

“This way,” he says, and starts moving through doors that lead to yet more of these rooms that are starting to drive him crazy. He wonders why the Eurasians didn’t just build one big storage chamber. He knows the answer even as he thinks the question, that it’s a matter of contingencies. The nukes themselves are failsafed. But if one of the warheads went off in here anyway, no precaution would matter. Yet the hi-ex trigger mechanism that’s fastened to each warhead is a different story. If those started to detonate accidentally, they could do some serious chain-reaction damage unless they were contained. So each room is the equivalent of a bunker. And he and Sarmax have reached the one they’ve been making for.

“This is it,” says Spencer.

“This is what?”

“Where we get off.”

“What?”

“Well, these nukes weren’t just carried down ladders.”

“Ah,” says Sarmax.

Because the truth is that these rooms don’t add up. Stack them up against one another, and there’s some empty space that runs through the center of them: space around which they’re all clustered.

“The spine,” says Sarmax.

“Now we just need to get in there,” says Spencer.

“Easy enough,” says Sarmax, turning to the wall—

Haskell’s thinking that the best way out of this one is to play it cool. She’s ghosting the passages, coasting past the sentinels, watching the back doors of her own mind. She knows that Carson has the keys to at least one of them. She’s hoping she’s got the keys to turn those keys against him. She heads up a ladder, through a doorway that opens without even knowing it’s been opened. She’s getting in behind the foremost of the InfoCom razors, letting them move ahead of her, running down one of her decoys. She’s tempted to go for Carson himself. But she decides not to press her luck. Particularly as maybe Carson’s luring her in toward him. She crawls on past …

And fires her suit-jets. Now it’s a sprint. Her zone-bombs detonate behind her; two of the InfoCom razors go down writhing—her mind darts on through the gap they’ve left, and then her body follows. Power-suited mechs are firing in all directions, causing chaos. She feels Carson move to shore things up, but she’s not sticking around to see the results; she ducks into a freight-chute, hurtles upward. Moments later, she’s emerging—a quarter-klick farther away. She’s broken through Carson’s perimeter, doubling back toward Congreve.

Only to find another InfoCom force bearing down on her.

Too late, she sees the nature of the real trap. The luxury of numbers: Carson has had a second team of razors and mechs out there, sitting lights-out and waiting for just this kind of breakout. Even so, she’s faster than they thought. But now they’re hot on her heels. She blasts through storage chambers, moves past some of the directed-energy power generators. Wiring connects them to the guns spitting on the surface—and Haskell’s just stealing past them, through a maintenance shaft, dropping into the chamber she’s been headed toward.

The train that stretches through the room sits on rails that are part of the deep-grids: the sublunar rail network that connects the U.S. farside bases and that extends all the way to the lunar nearside. But all Haskell wants to do now is stay ahead of the InfoCom forces that are scarcely half a klick back. She steps inside the train’s first car. There are seven others. All bear the moon-and-eagle SpaceCom standard. All look empty, but she’s not about to make any assumptions. Doors hiss shut behind her. She places herself against a seat as the train accelerates. Walls rush by, so fast they look like they’re buckling.

She starts. They are buckling. She’s being hit by seismic tremors. The train’s coming off the rails. She’s applying the brakes, even though she knows that’s not going to matter—because somewhere behind her a mammoth explosion’s in the process of smashing the tunnel ceiling into the floor. She decouples the first car, fires its emergency rockets, runs them through sequences that her mind’s improvising against the fractal edge of raw moment. She’s crashing all the same. The cars behind hers disintegrate as she decelerates. Her own car’s ceiling folds away from her as she grinds toward a halt. Car walls tear away on either side of her.

She looks around, tests her limbs, tests her mind. Her suit’s still intact. So is she. She leaps out, starts scanning.

The tunnel’s definitely collapsed farther back. If the blast was on the surface, then it was nothing short of colossal. She wonders if the tide just turned against the United States. But the tunnel up ahead still looks clear.

So she turns, hits her suit’s thrusters even as she intensifies her hack on the train’s line. Rail whips past her as she reaches out to the U.S. zone somewhere ahead of her. She can’t find it.

And then she realizes why.

Ineed full data,” snarls the Operative. “Triangulate, give me readings.”

He’s managed to restore some order to his squad. The InfoCom mechs take up defensive positions as the surviving razors mesh, triangulate. Data foams back toward the Operative.

“Fuck,” he says.

There are way too many variables to determine the exact nature of the blast that just shook this area. But the Operative can figure out enough on his own. He no longer has a link to the surface—or even back to Congreve’s basements. Something nasty has almost certainly happened to the largest American farside base. Calculations race through his head. One of the razors comes on the line.

“Sir, we’re narrowing down the blast. Epicenter at”—he rattles off coordinates.

One of the screens that’s surging static suddenly coalesces. The face of Stephanie Montrose regards him. For the first time, it shows concern.

“Carson. You’re still alive. Thank God—”

“Looks like you’re doing okay yourself.”

“We’ve got a Eurasian incursion into the Congreve vicinity.”

“Where?”

“Northwest sector ZJ-3.”

“That’s right on top of me.”

“That’s why I’m calling.”

“How the hell did they get in? Their nearest base is—”

“Apparently they’ve been doing some digging. In anticipation of war. Like the North Koreans used to do back in their DMZ before the entire peninsula—”

“They might just have bagged the Manilishi.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” says Montrose.

“Got any heavy equipment I can use?”

“I’m scrambling everything now.”

“Great.”

“Get in there, Carson. This is your moment. Your time. Not just Mars. Everything beyond that.”

“Over and out,” he says.

His visor’s right up against his face, and on the other side of that plastic are the walls of the shafts of the SpaceCom flagship Montana. But it’s something even closer that’s at stake now. Right inside Linehan’s head, where another voice has just joined in.

“Line of sight,” says that voice, and then Linehan sees it, at the intersection up ahead—the suit of the SpaceCom razor who’s got his mind on the leash around his neck. He’s informing Linehan that he’s now passing into the mech’s visual field. A standard protocol.

But what’s not so standard are the shots that Linehan is getting off: two quick minibursts, one slicing through the razor’s wireless antennae, the other perforating his armor with heated rounds. Pieces of bone and suit fly.

Just as another suit leaps down next to Linehan. And through the visor he can see that face: silver hair and ebony skin and a mouth that just can’t stop laughing—

“Hiya,” says Lynx.

“You fucking bastard,” says Linehan.

“Is that how you thank the man who’s reversed the conditioning Szilard skullfucked you with?”

“That is,” says Linehan, gesticulating at the mess drifting farther down the corridor.

“Nice work,” says Lynx.

“So now I work for you?”

“I wish I could do that kind of conditioning on the fly.” Lynx grins. “Actually now you’re working for you.”

“Say what?”

“Man’s been so long in the cage he can’t even recognize the light of freedom! Better get out there and grab it before—”

“So I could just kill you right now?”

“You could try,” says Lynx. “But I don’t think you want—”

“I’m going to rip your suit apart.”

“Do you realize how many times I’ve heard that?”

“This’ll be the last,” says Linehan—grabs Lynx, shoves him against the wall even as Lynx keeps talking:

“But don’t you want to hear what I was about to tell you about Szilard fucking you over?”

Linehan pauses. Lynx laughs.

“You forgot all about that, didn’t you?”

“I—uh—how come?”

“Because you were having too much fun killing that razor?” “You are controlling me.”

“And it’d be a lot easier if you stopped fighting it. Look, man, Szilard’s got you marked. Think about it. Because even by today’s standards, your history’s pretty checkered.”

Linehan lets go of Lynx. Confusion swirls through his head …

“So let me see if I’ve got it straight,” continues Lynx. “You started out as SpaceCom and then got tracked by Autumn Rain and drenched in old-school drugs and turned by InfoCom, after which you got suborned to the president and then I took you over as part of the rump committee of Autumn Rain and brought you into a hit on Szilard in an attempt to take over the entire—”

He stops. Linehan’s staring at him blankly.

“Do you remember any of this?”

“I—uh—some of it—but—”

“But here’s the thing you’ve got to ask yourself: even if Szilard has found a temporary use for you while he’s busy winning World War Three, do you really think he plans to keep you around?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Well, let me be the first to welcome you to it: he’s about to blow the whole Montana.”

“This ship?”

“No, the fucking state. Big Sky Country’s gonna get it good.” Lynx slaps Linehan’s visor. “Yeah, dumb-ass, this fucking ship!”

“To get at me?”

“Don’t be so full of yourself.”

“But what about Szilard?” asks Linehan.

“What about him?”

“Isn’t he on this ship too?”

“Only if you jump to conclusions.”

Russian trains have names. This one’s called Mother Volga. Its cab is a tight fit under the best of circumstances. Which these most certainly aren’t.

“What the hell are you doing here?” asks the engineer.

“Giving the orders,” says the major, drawing a gun.

“Works for us,” says the driver.

They clearly aren’t looking for trouble. They’ve managed to find it anyway. They’re obviously going to do whatever he tells them. Some things might cause them to hesitate. But not enough to try anybody’s patience.

“I need you to get us moving again.”

“The line’s blocked up ahead,” says the driver.

“Congestion,” says the engineer. “It’s sheer chaos. Everyone and their dog are trying to get the hell—”

“They’ll clear the line,” says the man.

“They will?”

“When you transmit these codes.”

Sarmax activates his suit’s laser and starts burning his way through the wall.

“Are you nuts?” asks Spencer.

“What’s your problem?”

“They’ll be able to see we were here.”

“If they end up in this room, sure.”

“Look, Leo, there’s obviously a door here somewhere.”

“Sure, but we don’t have time to find it.”

“How about giving me a chance to look?”

“How about getting the hell out of my way?”

Sarmax intensifies the beam, lets metal liquefy as he traces an incandescent line along the wall. Spencer watches anxiously. He’s realized that the door out of here is actually the entire wall. If there’s a manual release, it’s on the other side anyway. Sarmax kicks in what’s left of the softened metal and peers through.

“Bingo,” he says.

Spencer takes a look.

“Shit,” he says.

They’re near the bottom of the elevator-shaft complex that runs up the spine. Below them’s only about fifty meters, but above them he can see what must be at least half a klick of shaft before it’s lost in darkness. Other shafts are dimly visible through gaps in the interior walls.

“Our new bolthole,” says Sarmax. Spencer nods—and suddenly his mind reels as the ship’s zone comes to life—

“Damn,” he says.

Data pours across him, and he’s poring over it. And processing the implications—

“What?” says Sarmax. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“The external doors,” says Spencer.

All along the vast metal hull of this thing they’re in, all in one fell swoop in his mind—

“Yeah?”

“They just opened.”

The tunnel up ahead is blocked by Eurasian commandos. She starts to hit the brakes, but it’s too late: they’re already firing a torrent of electromagnetic pulse straight at her. Her armor’s flaring out around her, crashing against the rails, skittering to a stop as she kicks and screams inside her shell. The Eurasians blast down the tunnel toward her. She wonders how the hell she’s going to get out of this—wonders for a moment if she should self-destruct. She ponders that for a moment too long—

Because now they reach her. Mongolian faces stare into her own. They pick her up, hustle her down the tunnel while more tremors shudder through the rock around them.

The Operative signals his team, gets them moving in new directions. They’re charging into a new set of tunnels, well beyond Congreve’s outskirts, dating from the end of the last century. The Operative can feel a whole sector of Congreve scrambling into action behind him. But he’s not waiting—just streaking forward into the areas where the sentinels have stopped reporting.

And all the while he’s thinking furiously. About what the fuck Eurasians are doing in the most important American base on the entire farside. Assuming they even are Eurasians. Assuming that Montrose isn’t fucking with him. He’s been expecting her to try—just not this early. So he has to assume he’s dealing with the East—has to assume, too, that if they’ve managed to get in, it’s due to either treason or a first-rate infiltration squad. Or both—

“Contact,” says a voice.

It’s one of the mechs on point. Data floods the Operative’s skull as he coordinates the assault on the enemy that’s blocking the corridors up ahead. It’s basically an exercise in firepower: Montrose is feeding him reserves as fast as she can—and as fast as he can get them, they’re being fed into the fray that’s raging up ahead. Walls are getting torn up by hi-ex; suits spray one another at point-blank range. The Operative is giving up trying to keep his original force intact. He’s just using it as the centerpiece of a club to break through the resistance as quickly as possible. He’s succeeding—rocketing into the heart of the combat now, firing with all his suit’s guns, getting in hand-to-hand with a Eurasian commando, dispatching him and gunning down the ones behind him.

Even though he knows he’s lost. This Eurasian raid is clearly over. What he’s facing is a rearguard, charged with buying the main force time while it retreats along tunnels that must have been dug awhile back. Tunnels that apparently link up with the U.S. deep-grid lines, hollowed out in preparation for this day. Meaning that presumably there are many others. The Operative’s guessing this particular operation’s based out of Tsiolkovskiy crater, the closest Eurasian farside territory to Congreve. Though he can’t believe that place is still holding out.

Unless …

Even as he breaks through what’s left of the rearguard and hits his jets, the Operative’s working the hotline with Montrose’s HQ, accessing and downloading the latest data for this section of the farside front. Turns out Tsiolkovskiy’s the only place the East’s got that’s still intact on this side of rock. And there’s no sign of Eurasian forces attacking Congreve from any other direction. Meaning what could have been the war-winning move under other circumstances is just a last desperate gamble.

Which is precisely what the Operative’s dreading. He knows all about rearguards—knows, too, all about the word expendable. He’s flooring his motors now, hoping to get past what he knows damn well is about to happen. He can practically feel the blasts start to rip the tunnel apart. It seems his whole life is going up in smoke before him …

But he’s still breathing. Still moving—streaking out of the older tunnels and into newer ones. And as those all-too-recently hewn walls blur past him he starts to see something else. Something that’s inside him—surfacing right inside his fucking head, coming out of nowhere. It’s Haskell herself. Sounding as though she would rather say anything besides what she’s saying now:

Help me.

The Eurasian charges start to detonate around him.

This place could go up any moment,” says Lynx.

Linehan stares at him. “And Szilard really isn’t here?”

“He left the Montana ten minutes ago.”

“Going where?”

“Great question.”

“And why the hell would he blow up his own flagship in the middle of the ultimate smackdown?”

“Because we’re kicking Eurasian ass. So he can afford to write it off.”

Linehan shakes his head. “Fuck,” he says.

“Textbook power play,” says Lynx. “Szilard’s luring everyone in his suspect file aboard this crate—all those other SpaceCom factions and anybody else who even might be trying to plot against him. All of them got assigned aboard the Montana. Seven out of nine of his generals, all the key prisoners, several of his less-reliable wet-ops squads: everyone’s gonna get it good. Gotta admit, Linehan, we really got outplayed by him. Though he still would have gotten fucked if—”

“—you and Carson had managed to stick together.”

“Yeah. Exactly. Look, we need to get off this ship.”

“There’s still a way?”

Lynx nods. “And it ain’t even by way of heaven.”

The codes get transferred; the authorization gets transmitted. The train starts up again, accelerating down the tunnels. Walls flick past as two men struggle to figure out how to deal with a third.

“So what happens to us?” asks the engineer.

“Nothing.”

“You’re going to kill us,” says the driver.

“Keep driving and you’ll keep living.”

“You’re an American agent,” says the engineer.

“What gives you that idea?”

“Why else would you have that gun out?”

“I could be Chinese.”

“He could be Chinese,” says the engineer.

“Doesn’t look it,” says the driver.

“Doesn’t matter,” says the man. “Not these days. Anyone could be anyone.”

The seismic tremors are starting up again, with renewed intensity. The major glances at the controls.

“And now I need you to ditch this train,” he adds.

“You mean get off it?” asks the driver.

“No,” says the man, “sever our link to the rest of it.”

The driver stares at him. “But it’ll stop—it’s not authorized—”

“I don’t feel like arguing.”

Neither does the driver. There’s a bump, then a lurch. The car accelerates markedly as the cars behind them go into automatic shutoff, disappearing in the rearview. The engineer pulls himself to his feet, stares at the major.

“We just dumped twenty fucking cars,” he says.

“And I’ll dump you if you breathe another word,” says the major. “Now floor it.”

“That was our freight,” mutters the driver.

“I’m your freight,” says the man.

The driver nods, doesn’t take his eye from the rail ahead of him. It lances out, not bending for at least the next twenty kilometers. The train builds speed toward the supersonic. The driver exhales slowly.

“So who are you?” he whispers.

“I’m here to make sure we win this war.”

“How?”

“The Americans are killing us,” says the driver.

“Just proceed along the following routes.” The major hands the driver a sheet of paper.

“This is paper.”

“Indeed. Now tell your engineer to sit the fuck down.”

“Sit the”—but the engineer already has.

“And don’t dwell on the baggage we just lost,” says the man. “Tunnel control has already been notified of a breakdown. And no one’s going to believe that the engine disappeared, so they’ll just leave that out of their reports.”

“Someone will think someone’s mainlining vodka,” says the engineer, laughing in a tone that’s just a little too shrill.

“But this is taking us off the maps,” says the driver suddenly.

“Your point being?”

“We should slow down. We’re heading way beneath the Himalayas.”

“Best place to be right now,” says the man.

Hanging in a shaft in the machine to end all machines: Spencer lets his mind expand out into the world around him. Not that it gets very far—he’s stopped at the confines of this vehicle within its microzone, completely shorn from any larger zone. But he can see everything he needs to all the same.

“What the hell’s going on?” asks Sarmax.

“Boarding,” says Spencer—and transmits pictures to the mech’s helmet, letting him take in the shuffle of boots through corridors, the syncopated beat of marching suits. For over a half-kilometer above them, passages are filling with Russian soldiers. The wider galleries beyond that are filling with treaded vehicles.

“Fourth Mountain Division,” says Sarmax.

“You know them?”

“Of them, sure. They’re special forces.”

“They’re just the half of it,” says Spencer, sending more images—these from the half-kilometer of corridors above the Russians. Sarmax laughs mirthlessly, shaking his head.

“Chinese,” he mutters. “Fifth Commando.”

Looking like they’re ready for the fight of their lives and then some. Their suits shuffle forward almost languidly, sit down and start strapping in while swarms of mechanics bolt their vehicles to the walls.

“Time to get this show on the road,” says Sarmax.

“I’m working on it,” says Spencer.

“Work faster,” says Sarmax, as the elevators above them slide into motion.

Haskell becomes dimly aware of faint vibrations. She’s lying on her back, strapped down. She opens her eyes, finds she’s in yet another train. Soldiers stand around her, their guns on her as they make signs to ward off the evil eye. She’s wishing she could find some way to live up to her reputation.

But the soldiers have something else to worry about. Someone more senior is entering the car—the soldiers are saluting, clearly ill at ease. Haskell can see the newcomer only by craning her head inside her helmet—which is abruptly yanked off her. Someone strikes her over the head. Someone puts a metal clamp on the back of her skull. It hurts.

“Fuck,” she says.

“The Manilishi,” says a voice.

She’s looking up at the newcomer—a Chinese officer. His suit’s insignia’s that of colonel. His English is perfect.

“I’m Colonel Tsien,” he says.

“Chinese Intelligence.”

“Of course.”

“And this whole incursion was for my benefit?”

“So to speak,” he says.

“I’m useless to you.”

“No need to be so modest.”

“You know I’m not going to help you.”

“I’m afraid that’s not up to you to decide.”

“Don’t be so sure. A lot could happen between now and Tsiolkovskiy.”

He smiles. “What makes you think we’re going there?”

“Don’t bullshit me. It’s the closest base you’ve got.”

“Tsiolkovskiy’s getting overrun.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s true,” he says. “We just got word. Your accursed Stars and Stripes will be raised over what’s left of it within a quarter-hour. Something that even these soldiers around you don’t know. See how I confide in you, Claire?”

“So where the hell are we going?”

“Somewhere we can hide.”

“You mean somewhere you can interrogate me.”

“I mean somewhere we can finish up.”

“What?”

But Tsien just snaps his fingers—a soldier grabs her head while another slides a new helmet onto her. They lock it into place. She stares up at Tsien as his voice echoes inside her head.

“One chance,” he says.

“Let’s talk this over.”

“We don’t want to damage you.”

“You’ll have to take that risk.”

“This will be painful.”

“Like you care.”

“Of course I care,” he says—his smile increasing. “My people are fighting for their lives. You’re a monstrosity built to destroy them. Such irony if you could be harnessed.”

“Do your worst.”

He does.

The Operative watches on his rear screens as the tunnel behind him collapses. So much for the rest of his force. He’s on his own now. At this point, it’s the way he prefers it. Because there’s nothing left to fight him. The Eurasian rearguard is shattered. Their main force has bugged out, leaving cameras and sensors in their wake. But the Operative’s all over them, hacking them with abandon, snipping off the sensors, getting in there and replacing his image with shots of still more tunnel. He sets course toward Tsiolkovskiy. The tunnel that he’s in merges with others tunnels; those tunnels contain more rails. The Operative knows that if the Eurasians have tossed Haskell onto a train, he’s never going to catch her. But hacking into maglev is the work of a moment: his suit’s insulation protects him as he extends a tendril onto the rail, his view telescoping all the way to Tsiolkovskiy base.

But he can’t see any trains.

The Operative runs the sequence again. Nothing doing. There’s nothing on that line. His mind races, considering all the angles. He’s scanning the last battle management reports he received from Montrose. His side has probably already overrun Tsiolkovskiy. Meaning the East would have been idiots to take Haskell there.

And maybe they have been. People do stupid things in war. But none of what the Operative has seen so far looks stupid. The Operative’s guessing the original idea in digging all these tunnels was simply to disrupt Congreve in the event of conflict. But presumably the Eurasians received intel that gave them a far more specific target. And they must have received that intel recently, because this war’s less than an hour old. Meaning Montrose’s operation has at least one leak. Probably more.

But that’s not the Operative’s main concern right now. The Eurasians will be planning to break Haskell, and they’ll need to break her quickly. The Operative traces along that line again—his mind flashes back and forth to Tsiolkovskiy several thousand times. He starts hacking at the codes that control the line—the data that might reveal what’s happened along it in the last several minutes. He starts feeding in all the other data he’s got on this section of the moon—triangulates from all sides, makes the only connection he can.

His thrusters flare, and he’s closing on a point several klicks ahead, where a number of old mining veins come suspiciously close to this tunnel—veins that are neither American nor Eurasian, that were mined out when the Moon was just another venue for prospectors and cash-hungry combines. The Operative’s noticed that the area where those veins converge is the same place where he’s detecting traces of what might be a zone-bubble designed to maximize stealth. Rendering whatever’s inside almost invisible to detection.

But not quite. Because now the Operative’s hacking into a special set of sensors that have clearly been set up to keep an eye on this part of the tunnel. Their presence confirms what he’s suspecting. By the time he rounds the bend in the tunnel and sees the opening in the wall a short distance ahead, he’s already got a good idea of what he’s going to be facing. No rails lead into that opening. Had he hurtled past at full speed he would have missed it. But it’s positioned in such a way that a railcar equipped with rockets could easily move within.

So the Operative does, too: turns off his motors and steps inside, straight through beams that are intended to act as tripwires—but his suit’s already got the drop on them as he maneuvers through and into a cave beyond. The tripwires are convinced nothing’s tripping them. There seems to be activity up ahead. He’s in full-stealth mode now. Nothing can see him. And—as his sensors adjust—he can see all he needs to …

The razor locks in the mech, and they’re off, traversing the maintenance shafts of the Montana once again. Only now they’ve got a different objective.

“The forward docks,” says Lynx.

“What about them?”

“That’s where the cleanup crew’s basing.”

“Cleanup crew?”

“Can’t put all your enemies in a box and leave no one minding the store, can you? Wouldn’t be very prudent, would it? Someone’s got to make sure it’s all going to go to hell the way the master chef wants it, and—”

“Speak English, for fuck’s sake.”

Lynx laughs. “Szilard sent in some picked marines to ferry in the last of the riff-raff. Not to mention making sure the charges are rigged and that no one else gets off.”

“And we’re heading to where they’ve docked.”

“Sounds almost simple, doesn’t it?”

There’s some sort of barrier up ahead,” says the driver.

“That’s why I’ve been having you slow down,” says the major.

And now they’re coming to a stop. Eurasian soldiers stand in front of the blast-barrier that’s blocking the tunnel. They’ve got their weapons out. The major looks at the driver.

“Open this train’s door,” he says.

The driver’s complying. The door slides open as the train comes to a halt. A power-suited officer looks up into the cab.

“You’re a long way off course,” he says on the one-on-one, his words crackling in the major’s head.

“I need admittance,” says the major.

“I’m sure.”

“Careful how you speak to me.”

“Because you’re under arrest?”

“Because I’m an agent of the Praesidium.”

The officer stares as the major transmits codes. Even though everything seems to be falling apart for the rulers of the Eurasian Coalition, the Praesidium is still the most feared thing this continent’s seen since Mao and Stalin. The special agents who report directly to them are the stuff of legend. No one wants to meet one. Nor does anyone want to prolong any such encounter they might have.

“Sir, a thousand apologies. You’re cleared. But the two men you’ve got with you aren’t autho—”

“I’ll take care of them,” says the man.

“Sir,” says the officer—switches off the one-on-one. The blast-barrier starts to slide open.

The elevators are in motion now, and so are they. They’re hanging onto the cables, moving up the shafts, then shifting onto other cables, descending. They’re camouflaged acrobats, busy doing the one thing all good performers know how to do.

Buy time.

“Got it,” says Spencer.

“Let’s have it,” says Sarmax.

Spencer beams the data over. He hasn’t totally cracked the vehicle’s microzone, but he’s made some serious inroads. He’s figured out where all the places worth cracking are. There’s one in particular that’s looming large on all his screens, more than a kilometer above them.

“That’s it,” he says. “The cockpit.”

“How well defended?”

“So well I can’t even see how to get in.”

“I don’t think we want to get in yet anyway.”

Spencer nods. Sarmax is right. There’s no reason to fuck with the flow. This thing’s taking off, and they’re going with it. Intervention can come later. Spencer takes in the position of the craft’s cockpit and its defenses—marvels at how suspicious the Russians and the Chinese are of each other. The multileveled cockpit’s nestled in just above the forward vehicle-hangars, all approaches scrupulously divided between the soldiers of the two nations. Same with the cockpit personnel. There are two captains, both of them strapped down, along with everybody else. Spencer turns to Sarmax.

“They’re getting ready to hit it.”

“Let’s get in closer before they do.”

She’s plunging downward into herself. Darkness swirls in from all around. She can feel Tsien somewhere out there—circling her like a predator, hungry for what she contains. Fear billows up, threatening to choke her like thick smoke. She knows damn well what her captors are trying to do: turn her into something they can use.

And if they can’t do that, they’re going to destroy her. And since they’re on the brink of utter defeat, they don’t have much time. They’ll have to cut some corners. She can feel them going at it too—coming in from all sides, trying to unravel her to find out what the hell she really is. It’s tough when she doesn’t even know herself. She wants to help them—she really does. She’d do anything to avoid the pressure that’s now gripping her brain. But she can’t see a way past it. She can’t evade it: it’s all starting to come apart and so is she. Darkness starts to shimmer. Shapes start to form within it—a face emerges from out of the blackness. A voice sounds in her ear.

“Claire.”

“Fuck you.”

“You’ve got to wake up.”

“Fuck you,” she repeats.

“Fuck this,” says the voice—and then it’s fire flashing through her, causing her heart to kick into overdrive, and she comes awake in a single instant. She gasps in pain, opens her eyes—finds herself staring into the eyes of Strom Carson.

“Shit,” she says.

Blood’s everywhere. So are shattered suits. What’s left of Colonel Tsien’s seems to have been mashed against the wall.

“You killed them all,” she mutters.

“No one fucks with you and gets away with it.”

“Except for you.”

“You’ll see the light soon enough.”

Lynx steps it up, making the zone think they’re something they’re not, making the sentinels past whom they’re creeping think they’re having just another boring moment. The two men slide on through the makeshift perimeter that’s been thrown up around this portion of the Montana’s docks. They’re starting to pick up a lot of static.

“Jamming,” says Linehan.

“Not exactly,” says Lynx.

They crawl between steel girders, emerging onto the ceiling of one of the medium-sized hangars. Two corvettes dominate the floor. They look like they’re in the final stages of boarding. SpaceCom marines are positioned at the hangar’s interior doorways. The larger exterior door is shut.

“Looks like we’re on time,” says Linehan.

“Just barely,” replies Lynx.

According to his calculations, pushback’s only a few minutes away. He starts leading Linehan along the latticed ceiling, toward the Montana’s hull. They climb up another level and find themselves in a crawlspace. Unearthly light shimmers from some opening up ahead.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” says Linehan.

“Set your visor for maximum shielding.”

The two men creep to the opening, peer out. The fleet beyond is visible—along with so much else.

“Oh my fucking God,” says Linehan.

“God’s dead,” says Lynx. “And that’s the fucking proof.”

The railcar’s accelerating once again, down tunnels whose incline has steepened noticeably. Lights flash past, playing upon the faces of the men within the car.

“What’d you say to that guy?” asks the driver.

“What needed to be said,” says the man.

“Which was?”

“We’re about to reach the end of maglev.”

Not an answer, just more instructions. It’s what the crew needs. They work the controls, seamlessly transitioning the train as maglev gives out and wheels extend. The train rolls on into the darkness of the tunnels beneath the Himalayas. Only about a fifth of the Eurasian rail fleet is capable of traveling on legacy track. That’s one of the reasons the man chose this train. As for the others—

“Are you hunting traitors?” asks the engineer.

The major laughs. “What would give you that idea?”

“You’re some kind of top-secret agent, right?”

“I am?”

“I saw the way that guy looked at you. You’re trying to move so that you’re invisible, and this is a black base and—”

“Will you shut up?” snarls the driver.

“What’s your problem—”

“Now he’s going to have to kill us—”

“He already knows we know more than we should!”

“Both of you relax,” says the man. “You’re loyal servants of Eurasia. That’s all that matters.”

The downward grade steepens even further. Now that they’ve gone beyond maglev, the engineer’s having to apply the brakes. The train sways from side to side, rattles slightly. Up ahead a pinprick of light is visible. The man seems to relax slightly.

“What the hell is that?” asks the driver.

The man just holds a finger to his lips. The light keeps on growing closer. The engineer crosses himself.

“You’re taking us to Hades,” whispers the engineer.

The man shrugs. The train rushes out into an impossibly mammoth cavern—rumbles out over a bridge that spans that cavern, moving in toward the gigantic object that’s the center of more than a thousand searchlights.

“Saints preserve us,” says the engineer—and hits the brakes. The train slides to a halt on one of the adjoining platforms. The driver glances back at the major—isn’t surprised to see what’s in his hand. He holds up his own hands with an expression of what might be resignation.

“You deserved to see it,” says the man.

And fires twice.

This is going to be bumpy,” says Spencer.

“I realize that,” says Sarmax.

They’ve done what they can. Each man has wedged himself into a corner of this particular part of the shaft, three levels down from the cockpit. Their armor’s magnetic clamps are on. But they don’t have the backup straps that the soldiers upstairs do. So they’re just going to have to see what happens next.

Which turns out to be a countdown.

“Three minutes,” says Spencer.

“Roger that,” says Sarmax.

Spencer nods—watches the ship’s zone as all systems sync with the countdown. All the exterior doors slide shut.

Except for one.

Jesus Christ,” says Haskell.

“Thought you might say that,” says Carson.

Fun and games beneath the Moon: He’s propped her up in one of the driver’s seats of the railcar—has strapped her suit in. Through the windows she can see a large cave. The railcar’s sitting on a trestle bridge in the middle of it. Tunnels in the floor lead farther downward.

“What the hell was the East doing?” she asks.

“Not was,” says Carson. “Is. I only killed the ones up here. The rest are down there digging.”

“For what?”

“A way in.”

She stares at him. “How the hell do they know about that?”

“Maybe you told them.”

“Just now? They’ve been set up here for a while.”

“But not for much longer. My charges are about to go off. We need to get the fuck out of here pronto.”

He hits the gas. She feels the vehicle lurch into life as its retrorockets fire. It starts reversing. She watches through the window as cave gives way to tunnel. The Operative works the controls, and the train does a smooth 180-degree turn—and then accelerates forward …

“We’re heading to Tsiolkovskiy,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Is the East still holding out there?”

“Who knows?”

“Then why the hell are we going that way?”

“No one’s going to see us coming.”

The view is almost overwhelming. The Moon’s just backdrop to frenzied space warfare. Ships are strewn all around, firing at will. The L2 fleet is locked in combat with an unseen foe. The DE isn’t on the visible spectrum. It’s lighting up their screens all the same, a barrage of every type of energy weapon imaginable.

“Any idea how it’s going?” says Linehan.

“We’re destroying ’em,” replies Lynx.

Though the East is clearly putting up a fight. Parts of some of the larger ships look like plastic when it’s hit by a blowtorch. A lot of the smaller ships just aren’t there anymore. Clouds of missiles start emanating from a nearby dreadnaught—firing motors, they streak off into space.

“Probably aimed at incoming Eurasian ones,” says Lynx.

There’s a flash: an entire section of another dreadnaught suddenly gets pummeled by long-range laser. Debris and bodies pour from the ship’s interior. As quickly as it began, the flow stops.

“Sealed,” says Linehan. “They’ve cauterized what’s left.”

“Heads up,” says Lynx.

The hangar doors beside them are sliding open.

What the hell …?”

“What’s your problem?” asks Sarmax.

“Someone else just got aboard,” says Spencer.

“What difference does it make? We’ve got a few thousand assholes on this crate already.”

“Seems a little strange to be so last minute.”

Sarmax shrugs. He seems lost in his own thoughts. Spencer’s running zone on the last man aboard this ship—the last door having slid shut right as he got in. An exterior camera shows a train’s engine car reversing away along a bridge. The countdown moves under ninety seconds, and Spencer can’t find anything on the newcomer.

At all.

“This doesn’t add up,” says Spencer.

“So get some hard data,” says Sarmax.

A tremor ripples through the room they’re in. The platforms and catwalks nestled up against the largest spaceship ever built peel away in a single fluid motion.

“Here we go,” says Spencer.

They go supersonic in one easy burst, motoring down the tunnel toward Tsiolkovskiy. It’s going to take them all of twenty seconds—assuming the lines aren’t blocked. On the zone it looks good. But there’s a lot of interference around their destination …

“I’m going to need your help here,” says Carson.

“To enslave me?”

“To live through the next two minutes,” he says, firing a bracket of missiles ahead of them. She watches those missiles go hypersonic, streak into the distance. She knows he’s got a point—knows, too, that he’s got her right where he wants her: siphoning off the requisite processing power, filtering it through his own software. She tries to turn it around, but he knows what he’s doing. Especially with the help of the restraints the Eurasians placed upon her. The cage of his mind closes around hers. The missiles ahead of them start exploding. What’s left of the maglev rails starts to disintegrate as Carson detaches the car they’re in and fires its rockets. They roar toward Tsiolkovskiy’s cellars.

“Shouldn’t we be slowing down?” she asks.

“Yeah right,” he says.

They’re making their move as the first of the corvettes slides out. Their suits’ thrusters flare gently, floating them down onto the hull of that corvette even as Lynx takes the hacks he’s been running to the next level. A hatch opens in the side of the ship, and they drop within. It’s that easy. Though …

“Something just occurred to me,” says Linehan.

“Hold on a second,” says Lynx.

The hatch slides shut and the airlock chamber pressurizes. Lynx looks around at the tiny room, then extends razorwire from his suit and plugs into the wall, tightening his grip on the ship’s computers as that craft draws away from the Montana.

“Look,” says Linehan, “there’s something we should be—”

“I’m sure there is, but will you shut up—”

“Think about it, Lynx.”

“Jesus Christ! Think about what?”

“This isn’t just a matter of getting off the Montana. Szilard won’t just have rigged his flagship. He’ll have these corvettes rigged too.”

Lynx raises an eyebrow. Linehan starts cursing: “Fuck’s sake man! Otherwise, some of the assholes he’s trying to nail might sneak aboard and—why are you laughing?”

“Because I’m way ahead of you.”

Whoever he is, he’s got some kind of special clearance,” says Spencer.

“We’re inside the Eurasian secret weapon, man. What the hell does special clearance mean now?”

“It means I can’t crack him!”

“Because?”

“He’s got some kind of souped-up zone-shield …” But Spencer’s voice trails off as he becomes aware of something else. Something that’s echoing through the ship. With under a minute to go, the countdown’s been patched through onto the loudspeakers. Both men can hear the chanting of the soldiers all around them as they join in. Sarmax nods his head in time with the rhythm.

“This is going to be fun,” he says.

Rocket-powered railcar.

Way too fast.

They roar through Tsiolkovskiy’s maglev station and into wider passages. Carson engages the ship’s guns, slinging shots out ahead of them. Haskell feels him shove her mind even farther out than that as the grids above them click into place. She can see that most of the Eurasians they’re killing are dying because they’re looking the other way—fighting desperately against the American commandos who have occupied the base’s upper levels and are now pushing deeper. The train’s coming in behind a set of last-ditch defenses. Carson’s trying to coordinate with the Americans above. It doesn’t look like he’s succeeding. The Yanks aren’t taking any calls. Up ahead, she can see the rearmost Eurasians turning to face them. Some of them are shoving a makeshift barrier into place. Looks like it’s some kind of wrecked crawler, blocking the tunnel up ahead.

“Fuck,” she says.

“I see it,” he replies—accelerates still further.

“We’re gonna crash,” she yells.

“And how,” he grins.

Szilard’s stacked the whole game,” says Linehan. He’s starting to feel like the walls of this little chamber are closing in—like the man who’s crammed up against him is enjoying this way too much.

“That’s how he plays,” says Lynx.

“So how come you don’t seem concerned?”

“Because I’ve thought of it all already. Of course Szilard would rig this ship. Standard tactic—and it doesn’t matter. It’s still the only possible way off the Montana. Which, by the way, is about to go up like a fucking roman candle.”

“After which we do the fucking same, huh?”

“Charges are rigged just aft of the corvette’s cockpit. They’ll get detonated by wireless transmission.”

“Can you stop ’em?”

“Sure as fuck can try.”

The countdown’s reaching its final seconds. The chanting of the soldiers has reached a fever pitch. The noise is deafening. Spencer adjusts his magnetic-clamps one last time. He takes in the zone around him—the whole expanse of it crammed into this craft that’s about to vault toward the heavens. The last man to get aboard remains impervious to all attempts to breach his barricades. It’s the same with the cockpit. It’s going to be difficult to do much about that until more systems come online. Which presumably is going to happen once things get moving. Spencer glances at the man next to him.

“We’re about to find out how deep this goes.”

“And how high it’ll reach,” replies Sarmax.

The screens hit zero.

Shit,” says Haskell.

“Believe it,” replies Carson; he seizes her with both hands, firing his suit’s jets and bursting through the train window, out into the tunnel as their vehicle blasts past them and into the Eurasian position up ahead. There’s a blinding flash—but Carson’s already crashing through a side door and out into a labyrinth of industrial plants. Haskell feels her body shift as he twists and turns at breakneck speed. He’s obviously trying to steer clear of the bulk of the fighting. She’s doing what she can to oblige.

Lynx has hacked into this corvette’s computers. He’s got them covered. He’s having a little more difficulty with the charges rigged right beneath the pilots’ asses. And he’s running out of time. Because now white light’s permeating the pilots’ view, blossoming across the windows.

“Fuck,” says Lynx.

“What’s up?” asks Linehan.

What’s up is that the SpaceCom flagship just blew to kingdom fuck. A series of microtacticals, rigged at judicious intervals: a gaping hole’s opened at the very center of the L2 fleet. Lynx can see the way the charges have been rigged to minimize the debris—can see the firing patterns of the fleet adjust automatically to take into account the fact that one of their capitol ships is no longer available. But all of that’s secondary to the more immediate problem. The two corvettes have now traversed more than half the distance to the ship they’re making for. Only they’re not going to get there—

“I just thought of something else,” says Linehan.

“Shut up,” says Lynx.

“Even if you defuse the charges, surely the rest of the fleet can just—”

“I said shut up,” snarls Lynx.

The other corvette detonates.

The noise is overwhelming. The floor beneath them’s shoving upward. The G-forces are going to town. The ship’s rising out of the root of the mountain while door after door opens above it. Kilometers of rock are surging past.

“Looking good,” says Sarmax.

Spencer’s barely listening. He’s just probing on the zone, pressing in at the entryways to the ship’s cockpit, calibrating the communications going on all around. He’s gaining more room to maneuver as the weaponry systems come online—all too many bomb-racks, far too many guns. But the real weapon is the ship itself, the name of which rises into view on its own zone like something glimmering within oceanic depths …

“Hammer of the Skies,” says Spencer.

“Catchy,” says Sarmax.

The last door swings open above them.

They rise through a series of ventilation shafts, coming out into one of the auxiliary hangars. It’s just been overrun by American forces. But Carson and Haskell are no longer trying to talk to them. They’re hacking them instead, splicing additional orders into the ones that the soldiers have just received, establishing the two of them as high-value assets that need to be removed from the premises immediately. The hangar doors open as an unmanned SpaceCom drop-pod descends into the chamber. Hatches on the pod slide back. The Operative shoves Haskell in, following right behind her. Engines roar as the hangar drops away, followed by all of Tsiolkovskiy base. Haskell gets a glimpse of American assault troops and ships pressing in upon it from every side. She feels the drop-pod accelerate. Moon streaks by below.

But she’s detecting something else above.

“The hinge of fate,” says Carson softly.

“Is that all?” she replies.

Snipping off the loose ends. It’s what Jharek Szilard is good at. It’s why he’s now second-in-command to the president herself. And why a lot of people aboard the surviving corvette are suddenly realizing they’ve just become something they never planned on being.

Expendable.

Lynx is doing all he can to salvage the situation. He knows the whole thing was a longshot to begin with. He knew all along that should the charges aboard the corvettes not go off, Szilard would have backup guns ready to take out those ships, along with announcements to the rest of the fleet about how the corvettes contained the Eurasian saboteurs who just blew the Montana. Lynx has managed to hack the wireless conduits on the hi-ex, not to mention fucking with the guns that the nearby dreadnaughts have trained on them. He thought he’d done it in such a way that everyone would think the orders were to let the corvettes land—that he could run interference on Szilard’s personal supervision. But now more guns are swinging onto the corvette. He’s giving contrary instructions; his mind races out into the L2 fleet—out in too many directions. He’s getting overextended. He can’t keep up. He knows he’s dead. The screens around him start to flare.

Pressurized armor offers only so much protection. Spencer’s getting knocked black and blue. Yet even with all the specs in his head, he’s having difficulty processing what he’s seeing on the screens. Hammer of the Skies is more than two klicks high, more than half a klick wide. It shits out one nuclear bomb every second, channeling that detonation against the massive pusher plate layered up against its foundation as the ship climbs a column of atomic fire out of the Himalayas. Nuclear contamination rains down beneath it. But when you’re fighting the war to end all wars the last thing you’re worried about is environmental impact statements.

“Holy shit,” says Spencer.

“For sure,” says Sarmax.

The screens show it plainly—that the thing they’re in is merely the pride of the massive fleet it’s leading. The Eurasian Coalition has committed its main reserves from bases hidden deep beneath the Earth. The scale of the force now entering the fray beggars description. The sky above western China is turning black with ships and flame. And now those ships open fire on everything above them.

It’s unmistakable. A new factor’s entered the equation. Something’s bringing long-range fire to bear upon the L2 fleet above them. And from the look of the emissions now lacerating the vacuum, those shots are coming all the way from—

“Earth,” says Haskell.

The shit going on overhead is invisible to the naked eye. But no one uses those anymore anyway—it’s all enhanced vision and extended wavelengths now. The sky is almost caked with fire. Shots slam against L2’s dreadnaughts even as they return the favor.

“The East is bouncing DE off our nearside mirrors,” says Haskell.

“Of course,” says Carson. She’s propped up next to him in the cockpit. He’s injected her with something that makes it tough to feel her flesh. Everything’s gone all fuzzy. But her mind’s working on overdrive all the same.

“We need to talk,” she says.

Lynx isn’t one to miss an opportunity—his mind shoulders the pilots aside, seizes key software nodes in the cockpit, and sets the controls to send the corvette skimming past the nearest dreadnaught and straight at the converted colony ship that’s just beyond it. Both those ships have other shit to worry about right now—like the fact that they’re being shelled from the other side of the Earth-Moon system. Disorder hits the L2 fleet as it struggles to react to the new threat. The corvette plunges in toward the colony ship, which fills the screens as the pilots struggle desperately to regain control. Lynx hasn’t the slightest intention of letting them do so.

Clearing ten thousand meters,” says Spencer.

“Roger that,” says Sarmax.

The coast of Asia is passing beneath them. The vid-feeds show the chaos that’s gripped the Chinese cities across the last hour. The American attack has punctured the Eastern def-grids in multiple places and left the population centers helpless.

“They’re still intact,” breathes Spencer.

“Exactly,” says Sarmax.

The logic’s plain enough. Why wipe out cities when you can tip them into anarchy instead? The electric grids are gone. The zone’s fucked. Spencer and Sarmax gaze on pure pandemonium in the streets of New Shanghai and all its brethren. The occasional DE blast from the American satellites overhead has only added to the madness.

“Not gonna distract the East that much,” says Spencer.

“But every little bit helps.”

Meaning that every military resource the Coalition had in its megacities has been totally preoccupied. Meaning there’s been that much more that the East’s command structure has had to worry about. But now the tide is turning. The fleet that’s just over a minute into its ascent is spreading out around all sides of the Hammer, all ships careful not to stray within the fiery clouds of the behemoth’s exhaust. Yet Spencer can see that he hasn’t been thinking big enough all the same …

“Fuck,” he says.

“Hello,” says Sarmax.

Off to the north: Hammer of the Skies has a twin. With its own fleet spread out around it. Combined, the carpet of Eurasian ships extends for several hundred klicks in all directions. An armada the likes of which the world has never seen—and Spencer can only imagine what it must look like from the American positions in low-orbit.

Blotting out the fucking planet,” she mutters.

“I see it,” he says.

The camera-feeds they’re hacking into go out. Haskell can’t tell whether they got destroyed or whether she’s just lost zone-contact with what’s going on closer to the Earth. There’s enough shit going down that the answer could be both. Though the lunar portion of it still seems to be holding up. Congreve sprawls on the horizon, drifting ever closer. It looks almost serene from up here.

Haskell’s mind is anything but. She turns toward Carson—is surprised to find she can move her neck far enough to do so. He glances at her while he works the craft’s controls.

“Don’t say it,” he says.

“How do you know what I’m about to say?”

“Because you never could fool me.”

“You’re saying you can read minds too?”

“I’m saying we have a connection.”

She almost smiles at that, shakes her head.

“Why did you join with Sinclair?”

“You asked me that already.”

“He’s going to eat you alive.”

“He’ll choke if he tries that.”

The corvette veers and yaws, partially the result of the struggle for control within its systems, but also a function of the evasive maneuvers that Lynx is putting it through. But the colony ship is almost on them; Lynx reaches out, commandeering that ship’s emergency docking procedures. Hangar doors open on the colony ship as the corvette streaks into the outer hangars—plowing through into the inner hangars—

They’re way out over ocean now, gaining height on a trajectory that will cross the coast of North America within the minute. Spencer feels himself shaken ever harder as the Hammer accelerates, spitting out incrementally larger bombs that send it streaking over the eastern Pacific. Directed energy is striking the hull from every direction, though it doesn’t stand much chance of getting through several layers of tungsten hull.

“They can’t touch this,” says Sarmax.

Not by a long shot. Spencer can see that the Hammer’s twin is keeping pace, a hundred klicks north and slightly higher. He zeroes in on it while Sarmax watches over his virtual shoulder.

“We got a name on that thing?”

“Righteous Fire-Dragon,” says Spencer.

“What kind of a name is that?”

“I’m guessing it sounds better in Chinese.”

“Wonder if it’s exclusively theirs.”

“Probably divvied up the same as this one.”

“Doesn’t matter as long as they get to beat up on the Yanks.”

“Speaking of—”

Sarmax nods. The coast of California sweeps toward them.

Two people in a room that comprises their whole ship. There’s so much history between them it threatens to swamp the here and now. But that just seems to amuse Carson. Which pisses off Haskell even more. Especially when they’re talking about the one man who no one’s seen for far too long.

“Sinclair had me train you for a reason,” says Carson.

“Did he arrange for you to fuck me too?”

“Who’s to say I can’t have ideas of my own?”

“Don’t start that again,” she snaps. “I was in love with Jason.”

“Only because you could no longer have me.”

Haskell turns to look back out the window. Congreve’s filling most of it now. Most of the dome’s dark. But lights blink throughout the spaceport that sits atop it. She turns back toward Carson.

“If I wanted you, it was only because I was rigged that way.”

“But what about now?”

“Why does it matter?”

“For me, it was the only thing that did.”

“You are such a fucking liar.”

He looks at her for a moment like she’s never seen him look. “That’d make all this a lot easier.”

“You’re even more cold-blooded than Sinclair.”

“Not so cold as to not see that we’re two of a kind.”

“You and Sinclair?”

“You and me.”

“Give me a break.”

“Already did.”

“What?”

“I trained you for ten years. Watched you grow up. C’mon, Claire. How could I not have fallen for you just a little along the way?”

“This is bullshit.”

“Fine. It’s bullshit.”

“You murdered Andrew Harrison.”

“I’ve murdered a lot of people.”

She raises an eyebrow. He laughs, but it’s not really laughter. “And I had to make it look like I was being played by Montrose. Had to say what she needed to hear.”

“You were about to deliver me into her hands.”

“I was going to break you out later.”

“That is so much shit.”

“Is it? How can I afford to let anyone else possess—”

“Exactly. That word.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“You’ve fucking injected me with a paralyzing—”

“It’s worn off.”

“What?”

“Try it.”

And she does. She’s moving. In the zone as well: the shackles are starting to fall from her mind. She runs sequences as Carson brings the craft down toward a landing.

“I could crush you now,” she says.

“I’m betting you won’t.”

Or has he rigged her to preclude that? Is this all part of his latest game? She starts checking over her systems as the craft touches down—which is when the InfoCom special-ops team that has been staking out this area of the spaceport switches on its lights. Blinding glare pervades the cockpit. The ping of sonic targeting echoes through the ship.

“Fuck,” says Carson. “They’re—”

“Off the zone,” she snarls. “You planned this.”

“I swear to God I didn’t.”

“Then let’s get the fuck out of—”

“We’ve got to make it look like you’re still my captive,” says the Operative—and switches Haskell’s zone-restraints back on.

She stares at him. “You sick little fuck—”

“Sorry, Claire,” says Carson—hits another switch; Haskell convulses—just as the door to the pod gets yanked open by a man wearing a colonel’s uniform. Carson stands up, pulling at Haskell.

“I need you to take us to Montrose,” he says.

“You’re no longer giving orders,” says the colonel.

Now that’s what I call a landing,” says Linehan.

“Shut up,” says Lynx.

But neither man’s pressing the point. They’ve already put what’s left of the corvette behind them. They’re both feeling lucky to be alive. Though Linehan has his doubts about how much longer that’s going to last. Because surely any moment this whole ship will …

“He can’t,” says Lynx.

“What?”

“This ship. Szilard can’t blow it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s one of the largest in his fleet.”

“You’re talking about the man who nuked his own flagship,” says Linehan.

“Back when he was winning the fucking war.”

Hammer of the Skies and Righteous Fire-Dragon synchronize their assaults. Doors open all along their hulls; both ships start laying down a carpet of bombs as they rise through the heart of the defenses above the American homeland, their accompanying fleets following them in swarms that stretch halfway back across the Pacific.

“Surprised they’d lead with explosives,” says Spencer.

“They’re just softening the joint up.”

And then some. Most of the bombs are getting nailed by ground-based DE. But those that remain are detonating—

“Holy fuck,” says Spencer.

“Xasers,” mutters Sarmax.

The ultimate directed-energy weapon: warheads that channel the X rays of their nuclear explosions into a lethal rain of invisible fire that’s wreaking utter havoc on the def-grids. The ships coming in behind start flinging down hails of nukes. The American cities are going dark.

“Fuck me,” says Spencer.

“Those lights won’t be coming on again,” says Sarmax.

The fleets accelerate toward orbit.