The Mirrored Heavens (4 page)

She doesn’t reply.

“Come with me,” he says.

Morat turns, opens the door behind him. He starts to walk down a corridor, stops, turns back toward her.

And beckons.

“Come with me,” he repeats.

This time she does. The soldier steps in behind her. She realizes that she can hear his footfall. She really shouldn’t. She thought those suits were supposed to be silent. Evidently, this one’s not. Or else the pre-zone rush is rendering her all too sensitive…because she can hear everything—the slight clank of feet against the floor, the tiny hisses of gas from neck joints, the whirring of cooling motors…all of it trailing in her wake down the corridor.

At the end of the corridor’s an elevator. Its doors slide open. Morat enters. Haskell follows, turns—looks into helmeted visor. The soldier’s stopped at the elevator’s threshold. The doors slide shut. The elevator starts to drop. It’s just the two of them now.

“Can we talk freely in here?”

“Nothing’s ever free,” Morat replies, pulling out a pistol. “Particularly not talk. This is cleared terrain in theory. In reality”—he hands her the pistol, hilt first—“you’d better hang on to this.” She takes the weapon. He flips open a panel in the wall, pulls a lever. The elevator shudders to a stop.

“Where do you want to begin?” she asks.

“With you.”

“There’s so much I can’t recall.”

“And so much you’re about to.”

B
lind man in the city: but Jason Marlowe utilizes the coordinates programmed into his heads-up as he maneuvers his glidewing amidst the buildings of this megalopolis. Occasional thinnings of the mist reveal vast grids of light, stretching out of nothing, dissolving into even less. Marlowe’s steering in toward one grid in particular. It swims toward him on the heads-up display, one column protruding past the others. He can’t allow himself to drop below its roof. He’s got to slow down: he works the flaps, sails down toward it. Suddenly it’s filling the screens. He braces himself. And then he’s striking that roof at speeds that knock the breath from him—even as he jettisons the glidewing, rolls along the roof, springs to his feet in a semicrouch.

Marlowe looks around at the buildings that tower around him. No one seems to have spotted him. He steps lightly to a trapdoor in the rooftop’s corner, wrenches it open. He finds a ladder, disappears within.

T
he maw of delta-city has now moved to the very center of the window. The Operative stares down at the spires that rise out of the clouds that gather more than two klicks up.

“Penthouse suite,” he says.

“The Citadel,” replies the pilot.

“The what?”

“
You
don’t know what the
Citadel
is?”

“Maybe I’m just testing you.”

“Test away, asshole. I’m not afraid of you.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“Maybe you don’t know shit about the biggest hedgehog of them all. Room with a view. They say the Jaguars can’t get within a kilometer of the basement.”

“A kilometer’s a pretty specific number,” replies the Operative. “Particularly when it involves classified operations. You’re merchant marine. Where are you getting all this from?”

“Information’s harder to lock down in space.”

“Give me another example.”

“How about
you
give
me
an example?”

“Such as?”

“What’s your business on the Moon?”

The Operative laughs. “Who says I have business on the Moon?”

“That’s where we’re supposed to drop you, isn’t it?”

“Maybe that’s just my transfer point.”

“And maybe it’s not. Come on, man. We’ve got three days together.”

“So?”

“So indulge me. It’s not like I expect you to tell me the
truth
.”

“Then what the hell do you expect?” asks the Operative.

“How about a good story?”

“Even if it’s a lie?”

“Remember what I said about killing time?”

“I thought you said this wasn’t a social call.”

“So I’m mixing business with pleasure.”

“So put the Elevator back on that screen.”

“I never took it off,” the pilot says.

“Where is it?”

“Lower right-right.”

“Put it at the center.”

“Sure thing.”

It’s the surest thing there is. It’s scarcely two hundred klicks distant. It’s practically a drive-by. Yet it still requires magnification to make out the workers on its side—still requires magnification to discern how they’ve jury-rigged whole series of pulleys to haul themselves along it while they lay down the maglev tracks along which the freight will someday flow. The Operative lets his gaze stray down toward the Elevator’s extremity at Nadir Station some hundred klicks below. Below that’s only atmosphere.

“Am I ever going to get to see it out that window?” he asks.

“You could if the window weren’t facing Earth.”

“I can see it’s facing Earth. What I’m asking is, is that going to change soon.”

“Man’s in luck. When we prime the burn we’ll shift our angle. You should get yourself a good view then.”

“Excellent.”

“So what’s going down on the Moon?”

But the Operative’s just noticed something going down on the screens.

I
’m an envoy,” says Morat.

“I’d guessed as much,” replies Haskell.

“I’m an envoy,” he repeats, as though her words compel reiteration. “I report directly to the handlers.”

“How direct can it be when you never see them either?”

“As direct as it needs to be for me to give you your final orders. You’ve been primed across your dreams. You face me in the flesh for activation.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“You already know what’s going on,” he says. “We’re getting hammered.”

“By the Latins.”

“By the Jaguars. The Latins didn’t mean shit until the Jags gave them a voice. Five years ago, these cities were virtually pacified. Everything was locked down. Look at them now. The governments we bought and paid for don’t dare to go inside. The militias are like iron filings over which a magnet’s passing. They’re focused like they’ve never been before.”

“Which is why I’m here,” says Haskell.

“Which is why you’re here.” Morat smiles without warmth. “This city is where they’re making their latest push. It started ten days back. Now it’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it. I tell you, Claire—we either find a way to break them, or else one of these days it’s going to be the other way. And if we’re going to win this, it’s going to have to be CounterIntelligence Command that gets in there and does it. The other Commands won’t. Army’s a hollow shell. Space rides high and disdains dirt. Info avoids the human touch. Navy steers clear of anything that isn’t ocean. The Praetorians have their hands full safeguarding the Throne. It’s going to have to be CICom. It’s going to have to be you, Claire.”

Silence. For minutes. For hours. Is she tripping on the pre-zone rush? Maybe. A structure’s forming in her head, aggregating out of nothing—it spins before her. It’s everything they told her while she was sleeping. It’s the codes that will allow her to beat what she’s about to face. Yet it’s as blurry as the mist outside. It needs the trigger words that Morat’s about to give her to make it real. Those words don’t have to make sense on a conscious level to unearth what’s been buried further down. If they do, it’s only because Morat is choosing to bind them up in context. But context is optional. Codes aren’t.

“Is this building empty?” she asks. She realizes that Morat has just spoken. That her reverie’s all gone down in one moment.

“Of course not,” Morat replies. “It’s filled with our soldiers.”

“If they’re our soldiers, why are they wearing Army colors?”

“Because ArmyCom’s been divvied up by the rest of the Commands.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

“Shouldn’t let yourself get so out of the loop, Claire. Army did, and now it’s dead in the water. They’re keeping the name, but that’s about it. CICom got the franchise for all operations in this city. The Throne’s charged Sinclair with cleaning the place up.”

“Have these Army units been reconditioned?”

Morat looks at her like she’s stupid.

“Where are we in relation to this hedgehog’s perimeter?” she asks.

“About two or three streets from the edge. We extended the perimeter to encompass these blocks only yesterday.”

“And which floor are we heading to next?”

“The ninety-fifth,” he replies. “It’s the one we were tipped off to.”

“Who tipped us off?”

“An informant. Highly placed in what we believe to be the Jaguars’ command structure.”

“Is this informant reliable?”

“Reliable enough.”

“Enough for this?”

“What are you getting at?”

“That it might be a trap.”

“Of course it might be a trap. But if it’s not, we could roll them up. It’s worth the risk.”

“You mean it’s worth risking
me
.”

“Well,” says Morat, “I don’t think Sinclair imagines that you’ll be sacrificed. He likes you, Claire. He tells the handlers you’ll live forever. Even if it
is
a trap—he thinks you’ll be the one who’ll be able to get out and tell us all about it.”

“I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel.”

“You’re getting pretty close to insubordination.”

“I’m not interested in your threats,” she replies. “Not interested in the old man either. Just tell me what we’ve got here.”

“What we’ve got here,” says Morat evenly, “is a tunnel back in time.”

“Excuse me?”

“A tunnel back to the way things used to be.” He grins. “A tunnel straight on through to the way they still are.”

“Are you on drugs?”

“No,” says Morat, “but I know you are. I know you razors. How else do you bear the blast of zone?

Can’t even say I blame you. But let me tell you this, Claire—what you’re about to enter is no ordinary zone. Or rather, it was ordinary once upon a time. Just not now. Not any longer.”

“You’re talking legacy.”

“Of course. This city used to be two. Belem and Macapa: a few decades back, they became one. Right about the time the first world-net got sundered. Right about the time the superpowers were building walls around their nets and calling them zones and the Euros were establishing theirs: this place was preoccupied with concerns that were far more local. She was the platform for the last rush to take down the Amazon. And when the bulk of green was gone, and the strip-mining of the Andes took off—once again, this was the place to be. Now she’s ours. Whether we like it or not. She’s got twenty million people. And ten million of those live outside the zone.”

“You mean they live beyond
our
zone.”

“Many of them live beyond any net whatsoever. Many don’t. This gateway I’m about to show you—as best as we can tell, it leads to conduits that constituted the center of this city’s power grid in the year 2060. It’s been buried a long time. We thought it no longer existed. And we might still be right. It might not be active anymore. In fact…”

He keeps on talking, but Haskell’s scarcely listening. At least not consciously. It hardly matters. What matters is that his words are confirming the glidepath down which her run’s going to slot. Visions burn through her brain: images, plans,
recollections
. The wrinkles of the old man’s face. The walls of that room. The surface of that sea. She sees once more those sterile corridors. Once again the codes course through her. The operating systems and the software of half a century back crystallize inside her mind. The parameters of the still-functioning nets of yesteryear echo through her head. They burn within her skull, flare behind her eyes; they course straight through her, and all the while that pale gaunt face keeps talking.

“See, Claire,” it says. “We’re not idiots. We’ve long suspected the Jaguars have a net of their own. That they’re not just coordinating between cities by means of couriers. And we’ve long suspected that net’s physical. Our jamming mechanisms are too good for them to use wireless in any but the most tactical of situations. Which means they run that net through wires that lie beyond our maps. But the problem is that what’s beyond those maps is also out of our control. As out of control as this city. If there were more of a government here, we could clean them up comprehensively. But outside our own fortresses, law’s a product of the street. That leaves a lot of net-fragments remaining for the Jaguars to exploit. We’ve shut many down. But there are many others. Some of them are linked. Some aren’t. Some are just islands. Maybe this one is too. We don’t know. We’ve been looking for a way in from our zone. We’ve been looking for a way in from any of the fragments we know about. So far we haven’t found one. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t one. As you well know.”

“I do,” says Haskell, and she does. She knows that when a layperson says
zone
, they think of something monolithic, something sleek and grey and all-encompassing. Something that couldn’t be further from the chaos of the truth. A tangle of interfaces, a web of trapdoors, mirrors, dead ends: layer upon layer of construction, some of it fitting evenly, much of it not, so much of it built at cross-purposes, or simply without coordination—as uncoordinated as the traffic that flows through it. All that data skating over all the ice that crusts above a sea of legacy. Rarely does anything go any deeper. Unless you’re talking about something that’s pretty covert. And you can pursue that covert data if you like, can dig in that sea’s own bed through the strata of bygone technology, back through quantum cables, back through fiber optics, back through copper wires, back through what’s abandoned—or at least uncharted. As uncharted as the link to an antique power grid might be…

“But we found it,” says Morat. “On the ninety-fifth floor. X marks the spot. We dug in the place where we were told, and we found it.”

“And now you want me to crawl in there.”

“And get on the trail of the Jaguars’ net. And if you find it—if there really
is
a link between these wires and their lairs—then come back without tipping them off.”

“Who I am coordinating with?”

“Me.”

“I mean what other razors? What other mechs? I’m assuming this is part of a combined operation?”