The Machinery of Light (11 page)

“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.

L
ynx 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.

T
he 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.

T
hey 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.

S
nipping 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.

P
ressurized 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.

I
t’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.

L
ynx 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.