The Machinery of Light Read online

  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 aga
inst 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 g
oing 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.”