The Burning Skies

by David J. Williams

  “About ten minutes ago.”

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

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

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

  “Yeah.”

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

  “He’ll see just what he expects to.”

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

  “Not if we skip that meeting.”

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

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

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

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

  Sarmax shrugs. “Shit happens.”

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

  “And sabotaging a superweapon isn’t?”

  “This might collapse the whole Eurasian net.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

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

  “Not if that little fucker does its job.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And his Chinese counterpart?”

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

  “Sir.”

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

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

  “What’s the story?” says Sarmax.

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

  “What about the handler’s mystery file?”

  “The book’s divided into three sections.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s it.”

  “That’s what you call progress?”

  “It’s what I call a start.”

  “You’re not funny.”

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

  “And the third?”

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

  “So you’re stonewalled.”

  “So I am.”

  “So let’s do this.”

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

  But the answer comes back long before it arrives.

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

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

  Spencer is breathing heavily. His heart feels like it’s about to explode. He’s covered with sweat. He’s almost shaking.

  “You okay?” says Sarmax.

  “I think so,” he replies.

  He’s lying. He’s more than okay. He’s never felt anything like this. For one moment he was the most powerful creature in existence. And he can still feel her somehow lingering back there within his mind. Though according to his screens there’s no live connection. Which makes no sense.

  And the map of the place he’s in makes even less. Because it seems to have shifted. He’s trying to put his finger on precisely how. He can’t see anything tangible. It’s just more of the same: endless corridors and chambers and munitions posts and barracks and fuel-dumps and guns and soldiers and trains.

  Trains.

  Suddenly he’s scanning the handler’s book with new insight. Suddenly it’s all starting to make sense. Some of the tables in the first section—numbers packed into as-yet-undeciphered column headers—he’d thought those numbers were disguised coordinates. But now that he’s ablaze with fresh insight, it’s all too clear: he realizes that factoring those figures in certain ways means they line up a little too neatly with some of the historical data in the logistics mainframes of this base. Because they’re really inventories. That contain schedules.

  Of trains.

  Like the one he’
s in now … no. Larger than the one he’s in now. Much larger. Like the one he and Sarmax came in on. Those trains are everywhere. They’re the main conduit for supplies coming in. They come from underground and above-ground railways that stretch for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers, all the way to the Ural and Altai mountain ranges. They’re all accounted for.

  Except they’re not.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” says Sarmax.

  “There are way more freight cars coming into this place than there are leaving.”

  “So they’re doing a mega buildup.” Sarmax looks unimpressed. “That surprises you?”

  “You don’t fucking get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Those trains aren’t accumulating anywhere. They’re disappearing.”

  “To where?”

  That’s what he’s trying to figure out. Some of the excess is getting piled up in plain sight. The entrances to the base are getting pretty jammed. But not all of the rolling stock is accounted for. There are a lot of locomotives that are just vanishing. Which ought to be impossible. But now Spencer’s seeing how it’s been done. Because the Manilishi’s hack is wiping away the false camera feeds and showing Spencer the real views into this base’s chambers. Focusing him in on a series of rail yards on the western extremity of the complex where several trains are waiting.

  Only problem is that those rail yards are empty.

  Spencer double-takes. Double-checks: these trains are there on the screens. They’re there in the base’s databases. They’re crystal clear on zone.

  Just not in real life. That yard’s empty. Spencer’s checking out the last forty-eight hours of actual footage and it’s showing him that the trains have gone west from there, into tunnels where there aren’t any cameras. Tunnels that supposedly dead-end almost immediately. Tunnels not wired for maglev, either. He mentions this to Sarmax.

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It makes way too much sense,” replies Spencer.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning let me show you something I’ve just realized about the schematics for these trains.” Spencer beams Sarmax the data. But even as he does so, the Eurasian captain suddenly turns toward them:

  “Sir. I just got the Moscow data—”

  “Thanks,” says Sarmax. He fires at the captain and the driver in quick succession, strikes each man in the head. Bodies sprawl in their chairs.

  “Can’t trust anyone these days,” says Sarmax.

  “Tell me about it,” says Spencer.

  Light transfixes her. Faces surround her. She’s shaking, coming apart amidst the maelstrom of impressions. Marlowe and Morat and Lilith and Hagen and Indigo and all the others these last few days, all the years before that into which so much has been crammed and all of it could just be—

  “False memory I’m triggering right now,” says Carson. “That’s all it was. It all stats now. You’ve been sitting in this room the whole fucking time dreaming of being something you’re not.”

  “Not?” Her voice is weak. She can barely hear it.

  “You’re not Manilishi, Claire. You’re just human.” He says this last word like it’s a curse.

  “That’s not true,” she says.

  “It’s true to you,” he says. “Because it’s your fantasy. That’s all it is.”

  “Then why are you devoting so much attention to me?”

  “I’m not,” he says. “I’m not even here. You’ve gone insane.”

  “Bullshit,” she snarls.

  “So fucking prove it.”

  Specific words, couched in a specific tone, heard in a specific emotional state. The moment she hears the trigger phrase she turns the lock within herself, opens the door in her mind—the one that leads to the lost country of the true past. Though at first it seems so familiar. She steps past the missions on which she’s riding shotgun behind the Moon and beneath the Himalayas, moves through all the events she already knows. The last week stretches out before her in all its fucked-up glory, the Europa Platform, the Rain’s base beneath HK, the spaceplane, Morat, Sinclair, Jason. Jason.

  Jason.

  She remembers him as the years streak by—remembers being with him so long ago. She misses him so much. She sees the members of the Rain once more: sees herself as a child at play with them. She remembers a garden at night. There was nothing then. No sense of destiny. No sense of mission. No sense they’d ever get old. They were just children. They were just there.

  And then they weren’t. She was separated from them. She never saw them again. She and Jason are the only ones left. They’re brought up, trained as CICom agents. The others get pushed beyond the brink of memory. Replaced by a man who she’s forgotten until now. But there’s no such thing as forgetting. Particularly not this man.

  Who calls himself Carson.

  “No,” she says.

  “You made it,” he says.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Is that all you can say to an old friend?”

  “You weren’t my friend.”

  “No,” he says. “I wasn’t. Tutors don’t befriend their pupils. They can’t. They—”

  “You taught me nothing.”

  “I taught you how to forget.”

  “Fuck you,” she repeats.

  “How to keep out of sight from yourself,” he continues. “How to build up your talents till you were bursting at the seams and didn’t even know it.”

  “I didn’t even know I wanted it.”

  “But you did.”

  “And I’d trade it all for—”

  “You were a trojan horse, Claire. One that contained yourself. We didn’t even know what you were becoming.”

  “You still don’t know.”

  “We’re still finding out.”

  “And thus you’re here.”

  “You’ve got your missions, I’ve got mine.”

  “The Throne ordered you to—”

  “Get right up inside you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I wouldn’t be averse. Especially now that you’ve broken all your chains.”

  “Except the one you’re holding.”

  “Guess I’d better hang onto that one, huh? At least until the runs are over.”

  “You mean until the war’s finished.”

  “The war will end in a single strike.”

  • • •

  The SpaceCom flagship Montana. The first permanent structure established at L2. Forty years ago it was little more than a glorified tin can. But that was before decades of near-continuous construction. Now it’s a little more impressive.

  “The hub of it all,” says Lynx.

  Three massive metal wheels are rigged around a central structure that’s larger than any of the colony ships will ever be. It bristles with gun-platforms. It shimmers with lights. The shuttle starts its final approach toward a landing bay that’s opening like some giant mouth.

  “How’s it feel to be back?” asks Lynx.

  “What makes you think I ever got inside this thing?”

  “You never did?”

  “Christ no. I was strictly outer perimeter material.”

  “So you’re moving up in the world.”

  “So?”

  “So congrats.”

  The landing bay engulfs them. The shuttle slides into its dock. The hangar that’s revealed is a flurry of activity. Ships are getting prepped, worked over. An airlock tube locks against the shuttle’s hatch, which then slides open.

  “Leave your suits here,” says the pilot.

  “What?” asks Linehan.

  “Standard procedure,” says Lynx on the one-on-one.

  “But this is a fucking officer’s battlesuit—”

  “And you really think they’re nuts enough to let you run around in here with it?”

  Linehan grimaces. Starts to take off his suit. Lynx does the same.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll get you another one.”

  They l
eave the suits behind, exit via the docking tube, which leads through the hangar wall and into a room that’s clearly intended as a waiting area. The hatch to the docking tube slides shut with a hiss.

  “Now what?” asks Linehan.

  “Now I shoot you.”

  “Very funny.”

  “No, really” says Lynx—and flicks the dart gun that’s set into his wrist, sends a dart flying into Linehan’s forehead—even as the man launches himself at Lynx, who steps lightly out of the way, lets paralyzed flesh drift past him.

  “Don’t fight it,” he says.

  Linehan definitely is. He’s trying to speak. He’s not succeeding.

  “I’m serious,” says Lynx. “You just said hi to a curare derivative. One that plays hell with your software interfaces and your voluntary muscle functions. People get aneurysms trying to be heroic. Everything’ll be fine.”

  Linehan clearly has his doubts about that. Or else he no longer gives a fuck. He’s foaming at the mouth. Garbled transmissions on the one-on-one reach Lynx’s brain.

  “Ahh shut up,” says Lynx. He fires a second dart into Linehan’s back, turns to the two suited marines now entering the room. “Was wondering when you guys would get here.”

  The marines salute, say nothing—just start strapping Linehan onto a gyro-powered gurney They fire the gyros up. One pushes the gurney. The other gestures at Lynx.

  “After you, sir.”

  Lynx smiles, starts moving. They leave the room, proceed down a corridor, transition into one of the Montana’s rotating areas. Gravity kicks in. They step inside another room. Sensors sprout from every corner, along with what are presumably weapons. Lynx feels the prickle of spectra probing him. He feels the software in him going dormant. He stretches. Yawns.

  “Looks like you got them all,” he says.

  “Sir,” says one of the marines. He gestures. The sensors switch off. One of the walls slides away.

  The office that’s revealed looks like it could have been ripped straight out of any modern corporation. Lavishly appointed furnishings center on an oversize desk. A man’s got his feet up on the desk. The name on his uniform says JANSEN. He claps slowly. Almost mockingly.

  “The prodigal son returns,” he says.

  “Just in time for the mother of all parties,” says Lynx.