The Machinery of Light (55 page)

T
hey blast down the doors and into the seething mob, fighting their way back the way they came. It’s as if every wayward colonist is waiting for them, seeking to overwhelm them. The Operative can see they’re about to get buried. Which might have its silver lining. Especially with the collision alarms sounding in the cockpit they’ve just left.

T
hey head through into a room they recognize: the cockpit access chamber. It looked a little more stately back on the other megaship, though. Now it’s an utter fucking mess. Bodies are everywhere. But the combat’s finished here. They haul open the elevator doors, enter the access shaft—

A
nd she jets through them and nothing’s touching her. The SpaceCom forces are reeling in disarray. She’s dropping deeper into Moon, and they can’t stop her. But her intuition’s screaming ever louder—

A
terrible cracking noise as the
Memphis
slices into the
Harrison
. The walls start tearing away to reveal more walls—those of the
Harrison
itself. The Operative and his team fire their jets, blasting away from the colonists. The
Memphis
plows ever farther into the
Harrison
, bodies pouring into vacuum—

T
hrough the shaft and into the cockpit of the
Righteous Fire-Dragon
. The three men move from room to room, looking for anything living. They can’t find anything worth the name.

“Now what?” says Sarmax.

“Now we make ourselves comfortable,” says Spencer.

S
he’s at full throttle, plunging headfirst, her jets adding to the speed of her descent down the shaft. She’s gotten past the SpaceCom forces. The nuke they’ve fired after her is a different story. It gets within half a klick before it detonates.

T
he
Memphis
has thoroughly embedded itself in the
Harrison
. And the ones who put it there are hitting the SpaceCom flagship in textbook fashion. The three mechs get out ahead, butchering everything in their path. The two razors trail in their wake, their minds leaping out ahead to fuck the defenses. The
Harrison
is plunging into chaos. The situation isn’t helped by the thousands of psychotic colonists pouring into the ship and attacking everything in sight. It’s total carnage. The Operative’s loving every moment. His zone-view shows Linehan cutting inside the bridge’s outer perimeter.

S
omething wrong?” asks Sarmax.

“I just lost Haskell,” says Spencer.

And he’s wondering how the hell they’re supposed to keep the Rain at bay now. They’re doing what they can. They’ve mined the elevator shaft and strewn it with sensors capable of detecting
anything down to nano. They’ve found an escape shaft and mined that, too.

“There’s no other way in,” says Jarvin.

“Search this place again,” says Sarmax.

T
he nuke ignites apocalypse in her mind—fries her circuitry, leaves her with nothing but static. It’s not just her software that’s affected either—not just her view onto the zone. It’s also her access to the telepathy, the glimpses of other minds—all of it. It’s all gone, and she’s falling into herself as her body plunges ever farther—

G
od this is good,” says Lynx.

The Operative nods. He’s feeling it too. He’d almost forgotten how lethal Lynx and he are when they combine their minds like this. Subterfuge and stealth are one thing. Frontal assault’s another. There’s nothing like it. Especially when they’ve got three of the best mechs alive running point, smashing through all resistance, detonating barricades and—

“We’re in,” says Linehan.

T
hey’re going through the cockpit again, searching every nook and cranny, pulling the covers off consoles, running scans, looking for false spaces and hollow walls. Spencer wanders into one of the adjacent rooms. There’s something about it he can’t quite place. It seems like a dead end.