“Drones,” confirms Sarmax.
“What else?” yells Lynx.
A lot else, thinks the Operative. As always, Autumn Rain has rigged proxies to do the dirty work. Thousands of miniature drones, hundreds of Euro police robots, scores of heavy-equipment droids—all of it making for one big problem for anyone trying to cross the cylinder as fast as possible. How many of these things were brought in by the hit teams, how many of them were rigged in advance by remote artifice, the Operative doesn’t know. He scarcely cares.
“They hacked everything,” says Sarmax on the one-on-one.
“So kill everything that’s not us,” snarls the Operative.
“This is getting hot!” yells Lynx.
“So let’s get lower!” screams Sarmax.
Sarmax on the right, Lynx on the left, the Operative in the center, scores of meters separating them—they streak forward over those fields, descend into a grove of trees, start roaring up depressions in the ground within them. The whole Platform shakes—and shakes again as microwave bolts smash against it. As long as the Helios is out there, nothing can get off the Europa Platform.
“That fucking thing,” says Sarmax.
“Reminding us who’s boss,” says the Operative.
“That’d be the devil,” says Lynx.
Flames erupt through the dark, shapes dimly visible through smoke as the Praetorian formation steams forward, keeping low, crushing everything in its path. What’s visible through her vehicle’s camera feeds is like nothing Haskell’s ever seen. Fire lights up the valleys overhead. She can see bodies burning all along the center axis.
But the real data’s on the screens within her mind; she’s obtaining that data in the most judicious way possible, routing most of the traffic through a neighboring vehicle in order to keep the Rain guessing the same way she’s guessing—trying to work out the nature of whatever zone they’ve got going, trying to work out the location of their triads. Which would be tough enough given Autumn Rain’s megahack. But it’s even tougher as the electrical systems in the cylinder collapse, along with everything else. Haskell estimates the place is down to about 30 percent oxygen. Millions of civilians are dead. All she can do is write them off as collateral. Because the only casualties that mean anything now are those of the Praetorians in her formation. A percentage that’s already well on its way into the double digits.
“Unacceptable,” says a voice.
The man who’s calling the shots. Huselid’s taken up position in the cockpit. He’s scarcely a few meters from where she’s crouching with her bodyguards, just aft of the forward gunners, as far away from all the windows as possible. They’ve already argued about that. She felt she should be in another vehicle altogether—that putting them both together was too great a risk. He pointed out that if one of them got hit the other would be pretty much fucked anyway. And that they were too likely to lose contact with each other in the maelstrom now unfolding. Looking at what’s going on outside, she’s starting to think he’s probably right.
“We’ve got no choice but to accept it,” she says. “We’re taking fire from every direction.”
“I can see that!”
“Then you can also see there’s no way out of this save forward.”
“Which we’re going to lose the ability to do unless we make good our losses.”
“With reinforcements,” she says.
“Of course.”
“Can’t go fishing for those without taking a risk.”
He laughs. “What the hell would you call this?”
Movement close at hand. Spencer sees figures climbing up what’s left of the spaceship hull. They’ve clearly seen him and are making straight for him. All he’s got is a sidearm.
They’ve got a lot more than that. They’re Praetorian marines in full armor, their guns pointing right at him.
They’re almost on him. Spencer’s comlink buzzes. He activates the receiver. Uncoded transmission echoes in his head.
“Give us one good reason why we should let you live.”
“I suck a mean dick,” replies Spencer.
The suit jams a weapon right up against Spencer’s visor. “How’d you survive the crash?”
“You’re Autumn Rain,” says someone else.
Spencer laughs. “If I was, think that I’d be sitting around waiting for you assholes?”
The suit pauses for a moment. The others gesture. It looks like they’re arguing among themselves. Spencer can understand their dilemma. They don’t know what’s going on. Everything’s gone wrong. They need information. They suspect everybody who might have it. Spencer decides not to wait for them to make up their minds.
“Look,” he says, “I’m a razor from the ship’s bridge crew. The Rain brought down the zone and then hosed down the fleet with that DE megacannon outside—”
The marine cuts him off. “If you’re a razor, motherfucker, you’re definitely Rain. Only way you could be alive.”
“Tell him what happened to Petyr,” says another voice.
“I can guess,” says Spencer wearily.
“He’s a fucking vegetable. We left him laying in his own shit about half a klick back.”
“The Rain wiped him out.”
“They wiped all the razors out.”
“I wasn’t in the primary node,” says Spencer. “That’s how come they missed me. I was secondary razor—”
“Doesn’t mean shit to me, fuckface.”
“Enough of this.”
“Kill him and let’s go.”
“Where?” asks Spencer.
They glance at each other. They don’t have a great answer for that. And at that moment more vibrations shake the ship beneath them. The Praetorians are looking at what’s over Spencer’s shoulder. It’s clearly making an impression on them. He tries to take advantage of that fact.
“And by the way” he says, “the gang now approaching is going to face the same problem with you as you’ve got with me. If you start killing survivors from this crash out of hand, you’ll just be answering their question for them.”
“We should go,” says someone.
“Start running from our own side?” asks someone else. “That’s going to get old fast.”
“How do we know it’s our own fucking side?”
“Look at those things,” says someone. “Those are fucking earthshakers coming up that valley.”
“And a shitload of cycles on the flanks.”
“If that shit ain’t Praetorian, we’re fucked anyway.”
“Jesus Christ,” says someone else. Spencer sees flaring reflected in his visor. He turns to face what’s coming.
The Praetorian triad’s going full throttle, punching out ahead of the main formation. The bulk of the combat’s now behind them. Which isn’t to say they’ve left it in the dust altogether. Sarmax starts unleashing his pulse rifle at long range on some wayward drones. The three men roar at ground level up and over a hill. The crashed ship is just ahead of them, half protruding from the gash it tore through the cylinder’s side. There’s some kind of activity atop what’s left of it. The Operative starts broadcasting on what’s left of the Praetorian frequencies.
“This is for anyone who’s still in the fight. What’s coming up behind us is the Throne’s own Hand. We’re going to storm the Aerie and rip the Rain apart. Tune into the following frequency and stand by for new downloads. Anyone who doesn’t can die right here.”
“How do we know you’re not the Rain?” says someone. Sarmax fires his pulse rifle, takes off that someone’s head. The body topples.
“Any other questions?” yells the Operative as he hurtles in.
There aren’t. He knows these marines could just open up on him en masse. But he also knows they know they’re within range of the long-range guns atop the heavy vehicles. That they’re just going to have to roll the dice. The three men roar past the ship’s wreckage: the Operative to the left, Sarmax to the right, Lynx straight above. They keep on going, broadcasti
ng that same message. The area of heaviest drop-ship deployment is just ahead of them.
But now the Operative feels something descend through his mind—something that suddenly drops in from above him in the jury-rigged zone, wraps him in its endless folds, commandeering his suit and his brain, propelling the latter out into the minds behind him and wiring over downloads. They’ve tuned into the frequency he stipulated. Ten Praetorian marines, one Praetorian officer, one Praetorian razor—
Not a Praetorian razor.
Something else. The Operative feels something click within his skull. He hears a voice. It’s Haskell, along with the Hand’s own codes.
“Carson,” she says. “Leave this one to me. Keep going. Keep gathering the lost under our banner.”
He acknowledges, and accelerates as Lynx and Sarmax keep pace.
• • •
Spencer watches the suits swoop past—watches as those suits are blotted out by a woman’s face that expands in from what seems to be some suddenly activated zone. The face curves about him, envelops him in endless eyes. And now a woman’s voice enfolds him within some endless hollow:
“Interesting. Wheels within wheels.”
“Who are you?”
“You’re InfoCom,” replies the voice.
“Listen, I don’t know why they put me here,” says Spencer. He’s transmitting as rapidly as he can. “I serve Montrose and she serves the Throne and—”
“That’s why. The Throne covers all his bases. You were a counterweight against possible treachery within the Praetorian ranks. A conduit to sniff out possible treachery within InfoCom itself. None of which matters now. I need every razor I can get. These marines will stay with you until my vanguard reaches your position.”
The voice cuts out. Spencer shakes his head as though to clear it. The marines are looking at him.
“Sir,” says one.
“About fucking time,” replies Spencer.
“What are your orders?”
Spencer looks around. There’s combat on the far left. But the armored earthshakers roaring up the valley seem to have broken through whatever resistance they were encountering. They’re making straight for the wreckage on which Spencer and the soldiers are standing. At the rate they’re going, they’ll be here in less than a minute.
“My orders,” says Spencer, “are to do whatever the guys driving those things tell us.”
• • •
Haskell disconnects as her mind swoops up to take in the overall situation. It’s bleak. Seven of the eight Praetorian ships managed to unload their soldiers in drop ships along the cylinder. Two of those ships were the ones that docked at the New London spaceport. The troops within those were the ones that she started out with. The other five got deployed all along the cylinder, in drop-zone patterns calculated to pin down and destroy the two Rain triads that were lurking there. But the overthrow of the zone has thrown those Praetorians into chaos. They’re scattered, their chains of command shattered and their ability to tell friend from foe smashed. With the inevitable result that they’re fighting each other, letting the drones and robots of the Rain clean them up piecemeal.
But Haskell hasn’t given up. As her shaker gains height, she searches for the zone through which the Rain’s orchestrating all this. She’s getting glimpses of fragments here and there: clouds of what may or may not be communications flying back and forth. But everything she can discern is well south of the cylinder’s equator. She’s starting to suspect that the Rain triads are nowhere near the onrushing Praetorian wedge, and that all these drones have been prepped to operate without a zone, deliberately dumbed-down and programmed to just get in there and do as much damage as possible to anything that looks like organized opposition. Haskell knows damn well that by now the force that bears the Hand’s standard is the only thing that’s even capable of looking the part.
Which is why he’s ordered her to take such a chance with the Praetorian stragglers. Integrating their rewritten nodes into the zone she’s bootstrapped requires that she make herself vulnerable to hacks from Rain units wearing false colors. And that she risk exposing her physical location. So she’s working through proxies insofar as possible. The few razors under her command are now well out in front of the main formation, taking heavy casualties. But she’s hoping that the influx of reinforcements they’re bringing in is worth the trade-off.
“As long as we keep them on the formation’s edges,” he says.
“I’ve cleared them,” she replies.
“I don’t care.”
And she can’t blame him. Not when every calculation has fallen short. Not when the Rain has proven the equal of every contingency. Not when God only knows what the next twenty kilometers have in store.
They’re hugging the ground, well into the area where the main drops went down. They’re broadcasting the codes they’ve been given—the codes that override the Praetorians’ blocked systems, tell them to rally to the Hand. And from the remnants of buildings in which they’d taken shelter, from basements where they’d destroyed the droids within, from armored drop-pods they’d never left: Praetorians are returning the signals.
Not that they need that much convincing. Most of their razors are dead. Their world’s been torn apart. They can see the size of the force that’s bearing down upon them. They’re swarming in toward the Operative.
“Because now they’ve got a reason to live,” he says.
“You mean a reason to die,” says Lynx.
It’ll have to do. Because there’s plenty of fighting to be done. Most of which now seems to be occurring in the center: behind them, far to the right—distant flashes denoting fresh fighting at the spearhead of the main formation.
“Must be a whole mess of the fuckers still in front of us,” says Lynx.
“Not to mention the Rain’s hit teams,” says Sarmax.
“Who are inside the Aerie working out on the Throne,” says the Operative. “That fucking asteroid is where it’s at. These fucks are just trying to delay us.”
“And the Manilishi wants you to send all these marines back to the main force?” asks Sarmax.
“She gave me discretion.”
“So use it.”
“I intend to.”
Spencer watches as the earthshakers sweep in toward him. Each is several meters long, covered with guns and turrets. One’s churning past the ship on treads. Another’s running on legs that are a blur. Another roars past on its jets. Another suddenly leaps; Spencer ducks involuntarily along with the soldiers standing next to him as it sails past them, hits the ground running on the other side of the ship. Another stops close to one of the fissures from which the ship is protruding. Its forward cockpit swivels, tilts upward like some misshapen head. Sensor-clumps that look disconcertingly like eyes regard Spencer.
“You the razor?” says a voice.
“I’m a razor,” replies Spencer.
“Then get in.”
A hatch opens just behind that forward cockpit. Spencer stares at it.
“Better do what he says,” says one of the Praetorians standing next to Spencer.
“What about you guys?”
“Never mind those guys,” says the voice. “Get down here.”
Spencer clambers down from the ruined ship—slides along panels, using ripped cables to steady himself—and grabs onto the edges of holes torn in the ship’s side. He soon reaches the level of the shaker, which edges carefully forward until he can step over to it. He reaches out, grabs the hatch, pulls himself inside. The hatch swings shut behind him.
“Hold on,” says a voice—and in the next moment Spencer’s thrown to the floor as the shaker reverses at speed. He rolls against the wall, activates magnetic clamps as the vehicle starts to race forward. The space he’s in looks like the interior of a fuselage. A hatch leads rearward. Most of what’s further forward is cockpit. Windows are slits amidst instruments. A man’s working the controls. His hands are a blur as they play across the dials. He glances back at
Spencer. His hair’s white. His eyes are hollow.
“One-way ticket to Ragnarok,” he says. “Sit back. Enjoy.” Lights flash outside the window. Something crashes against the shaker’s left side, bounces off with a dull clang. Spencer’s audio feed howls as one of the turrets farther back discharges on full auto. A rumbling rolls through his bones as the earth-shaker’s gears shift.
“Protected my Throne against the East for years,” mutters the pilot. “Now we fight to save him from demons.”
“You mean the Rain,” says Spencer.
“I mean the false Christ,” says the pilot. Lights streak past the window. Off to the right there’s an explosion that lights up torn terrain and shattered mirrors. Several other shakers are visible in the near distance. Those that are flying are keeping low. One’s on fire—still surging forward all the same. “God’s own messenger leads us through the gates of hell tonight. She’s Joan of Arc. She’s beautiful. I saw her face, you know.”
“So did I.”
“So rejoice.”
Spencer’s not so sure about that. But the pilot keeps on talking, keeps going on and on about the hinge of the cosmos and the fate of the universe and the final judgment. Spencer suspects that he’d be carrying on just as eloquently even if he didn’t have an audience. He realizes this man’s mind is processing a situation he can’t understand as best he can. But Spencer knows he wasn’t picked up by this craft to get up to speed on its pilot’s metaphysics. So he cuts in as tactfully as he can manage:
The Burning Skies Page 10