The Machinery of Light ar-3

by David J. Williams

  The Operative keys the sequence. The hatches through which they’ve come swing shut. Airlock procedures initiate. The wall’s sliding away …

  “Oh fuck,” says Maschler—but they’re already being flung forward.

  Twenty missiles total—and the five that count have had their accelerations adjusted to make the launch something less than lethal. But even with their suits cushioning the blow, it’s still a wild ride. The view’s making it even more so. They’re right in the thick of the L2 fleet. They just miss a frigate’s antennae, zip past another war-sat and between two dreadnaughts. Linehan watches lights whip by and wonders if he’s died yet. He feels like he must have long ago. One ship in particular’s rushing in toward him.

  They’ve precisely calculated how much time they have before the fleet’s defenses react—or rather, the backup defenses, since they’re taking the precaution of hacking the main ones. Those defenses were designed for a lot of things, but being fired on from within the fleet wasn’t on any of the automatic sequences. That gives the men now maneuvering through vacuum a tiny margin. It’s still not enough to make it to their main objective. They’re settling for the next best thing—

  “Brace for impact,” says Lynx.

  They’re about as fucked as it’s possible to be. They’re heading back up the shaft purely to sell their lives dearly. They’ve got essentially zero chance against a full triad. And in a few more seconds, that triad’s about to pump this bomb-shaft full of grenades. Better to die meeting the enemy head on. Spencer adjusts his zone-shielding, takes in the Rain team’s zone-signature as it enters the room that he and Sarmax and Jarvin just left. He can see them all too clearly.

  And then he hears a voice.

  Spencer,” says Haskell.

  “Jesus Christ,” says Spencer.

  Though of course he’s not saying anything at all. It’s all telepathy—the reactivation of her previous link with Spencer, the one that Harrison configured to expedite the run on the Eurasian secret weapon and that got shorn when everything went awry. But that time she was on the zone. Apparently she’s come a long way in these last few hours. And she feels like she’s still picking up steam. She keeps on dropping through the shafts of the Moon while she springs from Spencer’s mind into the zone of the Righteous Fire-Dragon.

  “Do exactly what I say,” she says.

  Missile strike: an explosion rips through the hull of the colony ship Memphis. Metal tears away space—but it could have been a lot worse, since only one warhead detonated. Somebody went and tampered with the rest—and that same somebody’s now steering more missiles toward the just-created hole, dodging past the chunks of debris flying out it—

  “The brakes,” hisses Lynx.

  Five missiles do a 180-degree turn, use their engines as retrorockets as they decelerate through the new opening, powering down the whole while. The Operative gets a quick glimpse of a corridor streaking past. He figures he won’t feel much if the hi-ex aboard his missile ignites. He’s trying his best to make sure that doesn’t happen. An airlock door’s closing up ahead as the computers of the Memphis attempt to seal off this section of the ship. But the missiles slide through the doorway, skid along the walls, and slow to a stop—even as the five men fire their suit-jets.

  The backup door to the bomb-chamber suddenly swings shut. Looks like they’re trapped in the shaft for real now—

  “What the fuck?” says Jarvin.

  “Back the other way,” yells Spencer.

  “There’s no other way out of this—”

  That’s when the trapdoor that leads to vacuum opens—

  Deep within the Moon, working the gears of the Righteous Fire-Dragon as it puts L5 in the rearview … that’s easy. It’s dealing with the Rain that’s the problem. She sees them clearly on zone—even sees them for real now as she filters out the wavelengths on the bomb-bay’s camera-feeds to reveal them as they truly are: three figures in custom battlesuits, each one painted in a riot of different colors. She figures that’s their private joke. But the joke’s on them now—she cannons against them in zone, almost breaks through entirely. The razor and the razor-mech within that triad merge to fend her off, stopping their pursuit of Spencer’s team while they deal with a whole new enemy—

  Something wrong here,” says Lynx.

  “No shit,” says the Operative.

  But as to what it is, he doesn’t know. There’s definitely something funky about this ship’s zone, though. Especially when it’s presenting to the rest of the L2 fleet as normal. Not that the L2 mainframes are looking too closely. All they care about right now is that the gunnery of the Memphis is working. But as for the crew—

  “What the hell,” says the Operative.

  “Doesn’t change a thing,” says Lynx.

  Spencer hits his jets—feels the ship lurch as he hurtles back down that last shaft—Sarmax and Jarvin following him even though it’s plain suicide. Because out there is nothing but the ship’s bombs detonating—

  But now there’s not even that—

  Righteous Fire-Dragon’s acceleration slows ever so slightly as the bomb-feed halts and three men head out into space. She’s buying them time. It may be all she can give them. The Rain are resurging against her, forming a zone-shield that’s meeting her halfway, pressing back on her onslaught. She’s tempted to go for broke trying to finish them. But for all she knows, this is yet another of their traps. Nor can she rule out the possibility that there’s another triad in these tunnels with her. She has to play it safe, can’t overextend herself. Especially given what she’s now detecting—

  What the hell’s going on?” says Linehan.

  “Shut up,” says the Operative.

  The five of them are streaking through one of the Memphis’s main conduits—part of the axis that runs from end to end. There are a lot of bodies. Dead SpaceCom personnel are floating everywhere. Nothing living. Nothing moving. But with his ayahuasca-soaked senses, Linehan’s somehow sensing something all around.

  “This is fucked up,” says Maschler.

  “This is the least of it,” says Lynx.

  They’re right where they shouldn’t be—smack in the zone of maximum lethality. The surface of the pusher-plate stretches around them on all sides—a surface that could be shoved right up against the sun and still survive. The bombs that spit from the bays blast energy against it that sends the ship forward. But right now there aren’t any bombs. There’s just these three suits, making haste across a landscape no one’s ever seen under these conditions, clinging to it so as not to be left behind. The Eurasian fleet spreads out before them, churning in their wake. Another trapdoor on that pusher-plate opens—

  —Like something sliding aside in her mind. There’s a new peril, close at hand. The SpaceCom dropships now plunging into the South Pole badlands are so real it’s as if she’s seeing them on camera-feeds. And she can’t even reach their zone—it may be switched off altogether. She sees them anyway, though, but that’s all she can do—other than increase her pace as she continues to duel with that Rain triad tens of thousands of kilometers away. They’re falling back now, deeper into the mega-ship, and she’s moving after them, springboarding off Spencer’s mind, increasing the pressure on theirs—

  The Operative’s mind is racing. All this butchery just happened. It’s still fresh. The five men blast through what remains of it. Blood splatters against their visors. Most of the corpses have been torn from their suits, ripped apart.

  “Those look like bite marks,” says Riley.

  “One guess as to why,” says the Operative.

  They head through the second trapdoor, back up a new shaft. Spencer feels like a herd of elephants are trampling on his grave. The Manilishi’s using his mind to battle the Rain, and it’s giving him one nasty headache. He’s struggling to focus. He’s half expecting more bombs to come flying down this new shaft at him. Instead, a hatch in the side of that shaft is opening—he leads the way through into a space that’s far wider—
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  She’s driving the Rain back on the ship’s zone while the SpaceCom forces close in on her for real beneath the Moon. She can see how they’re moving to cut her off. They’re coming in from all angles, ready to join forces just beneath her and catch her. She’s going to have to reckon against the possibility that she’s going to be cut off from Spencer, too, that the Rain are going to find a way to sever that connection. But right now they’re giving way before her—collapsing back into full defensive mode as she drives against them. She can see what their next move is going to be. That’s why she’s getting hers in first.

  Someone hacked the whole place,” says the Operative as they emerge into the main axis of the Memphis. It’s empty. But they know all too well that shit is closing in—

  “Cramping our style,” says Lynx.

  The Operative nods. Then again, he wonders if it’s just one of those things. Shit happens. Particularly in war. Particularly in this one—

  “Here we go,” says Linehan.

  A space that’s as strange as it is large—and most of it’s taken up by the gigantic springs that the pusher-plate shoves up against. The three men use their suit-jets judiciously to maneuver between the vast hydraulic presses—which are cranking back into action again as the bombs begin to fall once more. With each detonation, the springs shudder with enough vibration to rip lesser metals apart. Spencer feels like his mind’s about to do the same. He feels Haskell reach out even farther—

  She slices past the Rain to hit the microzone of the Righteous Fire-Dragon, slams through its cockpit, hits the inner enclave, and fucks it good. Network becomes maelstrom. As the zone of the megaship collapses, she rides it down in style, nailing the suits of the crew along with all the soldiers. Not enough to kill them, of course. Just enough to drive them really, really crazy.

  There were ten thousand colonists aboard the Memphis. All of them woke up with some truly nasty programming. Some of them got taken out by SpaceCom marines. Still more got nailed when the marines blew the airlock. But ultimately numbers won out. There are several thousand left. And a large chunk of them are swarming in toward five men who have never seen anything quite like it. Soldiers less battle hardened might be undone by pure shock.

  The five men start firing, accelerating toward the seething mass.

  They’re seeing no one. It’s fine by them. They’re following the route Haskell’s given Spencer, moving past the swaying springs, crawling into the shafts that lead into the megaship’s hull—and hitting their jets again as they streak between the layers of armor. If oncoming shots smash through the outer layer at the wrong moment, they’re toast. It’s an acceptable risk. Especially given what’s going on inside the ship.

  Total pandemonium. There are at least two thousand Chinese marines aboard. Half of them just went insane. And those who didn’t are finding that their suits just did. The galleries of the ship are filling up with flame and metal. But Haskell’s getting only the merest glimpse of it, basing herself in the wreckage of the AI that controlled the cockpit, triangulating from that shattered mind along with Spencer’s to continue to press the Rain triad while she dwells in this strange region that’s half-zone and half-telepathy. It’s as she figured. The triad has other things to think about besides tracking down prey. She’s planning on giving them a few more while she’s at it.

  Utter carnage inside the Memphis. Half the colonists are still naked. They all look totally nuts. They’re attacking with berserker ferocity, using pieces of metal and piping and—

  “Yeah,” says Maschler, “those are bones.”

  “Someone spiked the alarm clock,” says Riley.

  “Shut up and keep shooting,” hisses Linehan.

  The Operative can see how nasty it must have been. The sleepers came awake in tandem with the dismemberment of the ship’s zone. He wonders whether they were rigged from the start, or whether this is some recent innovation.

  “No wonder the fleet’s in lockdown,” says Lynx.

  “Just one reason among many,” says the Operative.

  They’re making haste inside the armor of one of the two largest ships ever built. Occasionally the shudder of the receding engines is joined by other vibrations—American shots smashing against the hull. If anything makes it through, they’ll be the first to know. Yet now that they’ve got a little margin, Spencer’s doing a little thinking.

  “Manilishi,” he says.

  “My name’s Claire,” says the voice.

  “Where are you?”

  “Right inside your head.”

  “I mean really—”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Are the Rain still out there?”

  “They’re too busy to worry about you for now.”

  “And Sinclair?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is he up here too?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He was earlier, though. She’s sure of it. Sinclair was up at L5 back when she hacked into his cell a week earlier, and subsequently managed to get himself off that fleet. Maybe he used a teleporter to do so. Maybe he left by more prosaic means. And as to when—his mental presence on the lip of the South Pole was indeterminate. His mental presence during the interrogation with Montrose seemed to emanate from L5. The problem is, she’s not sure what Sinclair’s capable of. He may have wanted her to think he was still at L5 back then.

  But there’s no way he could be there now—otherwise she would never have been able to put the Rain triad under such pressure. That triad’s going to ground now, camo on maximum as they vanish into the less trafficked areas of the ship. She’s wishing she could do the same within the Moon. Because the SpaceCom forces are still closing in on her. She can picture all those suits blasting through the shafts of Moon—can almost see the repurposed mining vehicles sliding into position. She wishes that her map wasn’t just confined to the main route she’s trying to take—that she had more data to go on. She can only tell the surrounding routes by the position of her pursuers. They’re accelerating now, and she’s accelerating with them, stretching her suit to the limits of its capacity. Stretching her mind too—

  The key is to keep moving. And shooting—the five men are formed up in what’s essentially a mini-phalanx, the Operative and Lynx on the front, Maschler and Riley on the flanks, Linehan on rearguard. They’re gunning down the colonists in swathes—interlocking fields of fire that mow down everything before them. Yet the Operative somehow feels at one with the people he’s killing. He can’t blame them, really—even if whatever program’s in them was somehow factored out—if you dreamt of Mars and woke instead to Hell, you might just choose to contribute to it. But all that matters now is the section of the Memphis they’re closing on. They blow down more doors, head on through, the bloody horde swirling around them.

  They’re picking up speed now, shooting the length of the ship as it hurtles in toward the Moon. They’re still alive. Still in the dark as well.

  “What makes you so sure Sinclair’s not up here?”

  “If he was, you’d be dead,” she says.

  “Why are you helping us?” he asks.

  “Because I can.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Though the truth of the matter is that she’s not exactly sure herself. Part of her thinks she should just be letting the Rain finish these guys off. Three less players to contend with. Only—Spencer’s no player. Not now that she can reach inside his mind at will. She could reduce him to a drooling meat-puppet if she wanted. But she doesn’t need to. She senses he’s different from the rest of them anyway—that he’s really just trying to keep his head above water. She gets all this because she’s right inside him—can see the way he’s been used and manipulated by those above him. She empathizes with him even as she’s busy doing the same thing herself—even as her SpaceCom pursuers start to draw the noose.

  A couple of cluster bombs, and they’re storming through into the front section of th
e ship. The mob’s doing its best to keep pace with them, but as the terrain narrows, so do their numbers. It’s close quarters now, and the five men are firing at point-blank range, running electricity through their suits to zap any flesh that touches them. Yet some of that flesh is clinging to them anyway. The danger of a pile-on is growing. The Operative and Lynx haul open the doors to the bridge, then turn in the doorway and start firing past the men behind them.

  Doing the lady’s bidding: they head through blast-doors, exit the hull’s interior, and start maneuvering through the innards of the ship. Explosions reach their ears, along with gunfire—

  “What the hell did you do to this ship?” Spencer asks.

  “Fucked it,” says Haskell.

  “And where the hell are we going?”

  She tells him. He doesn’t seem that surprised.

  And that’s just as well. Because she’s got other shit to worry about. She’s now more than ten klicks beneath the lunar surface. The tendrils of the SpaceCom vanguards are about to touch. She’s trying to pass straight between them—a margin way too narrow for comfort.

  The bridge of the Memphis is in shambles. Linehan gets busy sliding the doors shut on manual while Riley and Maschler fire through the narrowing opening. The Operative and Lynx are working the controls. The L2 fleet is panorama in the windows …

  “What do you think?” says Lynx.

  “Doable,” says the Operative.