The Mirrored Heavens (5 page)

“Sure it’s a combined operation. But you can leave all that to me, Claire. The word’s come down from the old man himself. Both kinds of runners hit this city tonight. The razors work the wires and the mechanics kick in the doors. But the razors
aren’t
working the mechs’ leashes. Not this time, anyway. The whole thing’s too compartmentalized. And your part is crucial. What you’re crawling into could be the lair of the Jaguars. Or it could be nothing.”

“Or it could be a trap,” she repeats.

“Or it could be a trap. But if it’s not, we could end this war tonight.
You
could, Claire. We need someone who can get in there without triggering any alarms. Someone who can tell us where to strike. We need your talents, Claire. It’d be worth a lot to your future.”

“So would living,” she replies. “How secure is this perimeter?”

“As secure as I can make it. This place has been swept. Along with this whole block. It’s clean. If they have anything rigged, it’d be inside the zone itself.”

“Great. And if I find something?”

“Map out the physical locations of the executive nodes of that network. And then get out.”

“In that order?”

“In whatever order you can manage.”

“Right,” she says. She breathes deeply. She looks around her. “I’m ready to do this.”

“Excellent.”

“You’re acting like I have a choice.”

“You always have a choice, Claire.”

“Can we get out of this shaft?”

“We can.” He turns to the wall panel, adjusts the controls. They start to descend. They gain speed, hissing down through scores of floors. They slow. They halt. The door slides open.

N
othing. There’s nothing here. It’s as if there never was. Marlowe’s making his way down ladders and stairs and through trapdoors and it’s as if they’ve all just been dormant, waiting for his presence. Yet he can feel the presence of the ones he seeks close at hand. The force they have in here probably isn’t large enough to set up watch over the whole building. They’re probably keeping as low a profile as possible. But sooner or later he’s going to reach their perimeters.

Probably sooner. For now he’s reached apartments that are inhabited. Open doors give way to living quarters—laundry hung all about tiny chambers, kids squawking, mothers screaming. Marlowe moves through them like a ghost, his suit’s camo cranked up as far as it’ll go, letting him take on the ambience of wall, of doorway, of ceiling—whatever surface he’s in front of at whatever moment. The most trouble he gets is from a dog that won’t stop barking. It knows something’s up. But Marlowe ignores it, becomes one more thing in that animal’s life that’ll never reach the lives of the humans who feed it. He descends through several more such levels. He steps over sleepers, moves past men and women engrossed in card games, drinking, laughing—he reminds himself it’s Saturday night, wonders how much it differs from all the other nights that go down in this city. Truth to tell, the cities up north aren’t that different. They’ve just got more money to blow on this kind of thing. Not to mention a better chance of surviving to see tomorrow’s parties.

But the lower he gets, the more the ones going on around him fizzle out. Finally he finds himself moving through deserted halls once more. Most of the overhead lighting’s gone. And now Marlowe’s circuits are humming. His heads-up’s giving him the alert: there are sensors in here. There are wavelengths brushing against him like cobwebs. But his suit’s camoed in more than just the visible spectrum. It’s state-of-the-art.

Now put to the test.

I
ntervention on the Elevator: the Operative watches through the magnifiers as two patrol ships move in toward the construction area. They’re drifting cables—and fixing those cables to the web of scaffolding that encrusts the Elevator’s spine. Hatches open. Suits emerge, fire jets, flit in toward the workers clustered along the scaffolding.

“What’s going on?” says the Operative.

“Looks like a raid,” replies the pilot.

“Any idea why?”

“What do you know about those workers?”

The suits are going to town. They’re fanning out through the scaffolding. They’re grabbing workers, dragging them out of latticed depths. There seems to be struggling going on in several places. Several workers are being hustled into one of the ships.

“Less than I thought,” says the Operative.

“Here’s a hint—those guys aren’t drawing a salary, friend. They’re not in it to win it. They’re either soaking up the radiation on that thing or else they’re breaking rocks beneath the Mare Imbrium.”

“They’re convicts.”

“And usually political ones. Sentenced to life by definition. Nothing left to lose. Someone was probably doing petty sabotage. Or plotting hopeless escape. Shit, man. This kind of bust happens a lot more often than you’d think.”

But someone must be refusing to go out easy. Because now another swarm of suits is billowing from both ships. They latch on to the scaffolding, start getting in there. The Operative shakes his head.

“Look at them go.”

“This is getting good.”

It’s getting even better. Because now the jets of both ships are flaring. Those craft are still tethered. They’re turning on their axes. The KE gatlings in their tails are starting to track on something.

“Hello,” says the Operative.

“Shit,” says the pilot.

Both guns fire simultaneously.

T
he elevator doors give way to a room that’s really a warehouse. It cuts through at least three stories. Catwalks line the walls. Power-suited soldiers stand at intervals along the lower catwalks. Some kind of structure occupies most of the floor—sections of plastic wall partition the space into many sections.

Morat leads the way into the maze. Occasional glimpses through open entryways reveal equipment, crates, dust—sometimes all three and always at least the last. At first Haskell wonders why the partitions haven’t been removed. But then she realizes that what’s about to happen is for her eyes alone: hers, and maybe Morat’s—and now he’s leading her into one particular room. It contains a metal rack in which a console sits. Wires protrude from the floor, nest around that console like snakes. Five screens gleam atop it.

“Here we are,” says Morat, halting. “We’ve dug in, hooked up these interfaces. When you jack in, the connection goes live.”

Haskell just stares. At the screens. At the console. She walks toward it. She halts in front of it, looks it over. She turns back to Morat.

“I’ll watch your flesh,” he says.

She says nothing—just turns, adjusts the manual controls. Takes out the implants, connects them. Slots them into her head. The hooks hang heavy in her skull. She sits down on the floor. Crosses her legs. Glances up at Morat.

“The fuck you will,” she says as she jacks in.

M
arlowe’s given up on the stairs. He switches to the elevator shaft. He squirts the components of an acid compound from the finger-cartridges of his glove, lets that acid activate and corrode a hole in the elevator doors. He climbs through into the shaft. The light here is very faint. He loops a tether around a beam, drops down the shaft’s length. He sees sensors positioned in its walls. He feels their emissions scrape against him, watches his suit run countermeasures. He wonders whether he’s showing up on anybody’s scopes.

That’s when something emerges from the gloom below. It’s the elevator car. It’s about twenty-five floors beneath him. It’s just gone motionless. Marlowe doesn’t know how fast it can move. He only knows that it’s time to get out of the shaft.

But before he can do that, the doors to the floor immediately above the elevator car open. He goes very still.

Two figures in light battlesuits leap into the shaft, land on the elevator’s roof. They’re looking upward. Not as high as Marlowe is. But high enough. Marlowe watches on his heads-up as the spectrums start to get crowded. He realizes that the suits are probing. That they’re about to detect him. The stealth part of this run is officially over. He lines up his targets.

N
o half measures: the KE gatlings triangulate, slice through scaffolding like it’s so much matchwood. Shreds of suit and meat spray out in slow motion.

“Shit,” says the Operative.

But the pilot says nothing. And now the workers are swarming in among the power-suits where the big guns can’t touch them. They’re bringing the suits down with sheer numbers. They’re grabbing weapons, turning them on their assailants.

“Shit,” says the Operative.

But all he hears is silence.

“You still there?”

There’s no answer. Now the ships are opening up on everybody in that section of the spine, friend and foe alike. It’s a total massacre. One of the ships suddenly explodes—opening up like a tin can packed with gunpowder.

“Shit,”
says the Operative.

It’s the same ship into which the prisoners were taken. The Operative wonders what was in those workers. The other ship fires its thrusters, swans away from the scene of the killing. The scaffolding starts to drip. Starts to melt. Workers just disappear—or at least parts of them do. Those still alive are fleeing. It’s not helping. That whole section of the Elevator is being targeted by distant guns. The Operative can’t see them. He can’t see what they’re projecting either. Directed energy is invisible in vacuum. But he can see the precisely calibrated result. The Elevator itself is unscathed. But no one in that construction zone could have survived. The Operative is starting to wish he wasn’t so close to whatever’s going down.

The screens shut off. Leaving only wall.

And window.

A
nd zone. And somewhere in that zone’s the mind’s horizon. And somewhere past that horizon’s a center that’s still unfound. But all you’ve got right now is day torn apart by night: dark sun rolls overhead, higher in an even darker sky, and the run’s on, kicking in around you, churning into your deepest recesses, making them aware of one another for the first time. Rendering inconsequential all that has come before. Dreams, ego, consensus of memories, nexus of consciousness—all these are fictions. The zone is not. You know that. You know how it goes (even though you forget it every time)—past the tipping point, and the only way out is in. The universe: nothing but momentum. The world: vanished in the face of the real one. The run: that which transcends all mundane confusions. Claire Haskell wouldn’t have it any other way.

So she drifts deeper. This place is strange. It’s definitely alive. It’s definitely zone. And yet it’s not. It’s so old. It’s almost incomprehensible.

Which is why she’s unleashing the codes. She’s flipping through templates. She’s mating them, breeding them. Thousands of generations beget themselves and die. She keeps their genes on file, archives her data-banks with the patterns of their bones. Then she regresses back across the eons, tracing the paths of software ancestry. Logic quotients climb. They climb still farther. They converge in upon each other. They touch. It all shifts into focus.

E
ver get the feeling you’re being stalked? Here’s how it works. Everywhere you look there’s nothing. Not a thing: just the hollow sound of your own breathing echoing in the darkness of your mind while you probe the spectrums for evidence of what you suspect but just can’t prove. Yet in truth it’s probably nothing. Not a thing—just the sensors overreacting again. You cast your beams this way and that. You scan the readouts from every angle. You’re coming up short. You’re ready to pack it in and get the hell out of this shaft.

And that’s the last thought of your entire life.

Marlowe opens up on the two suits at point-blank range, his wrist-guns set for flechette swarm. The armor worn by Marlowe’s targets is good. It’s nowhere near enough. Marlowe cuts through it like he’s wielding a giant buzzsaw. The figures he’s facing suddenly aren’t figures anymore. Marlowe fires his thrusters, plunges down the shaft toward what’s left of them. He lands on the roof of the elevator car. He leaps through the open doors from which the dead men emerged.

He’s in another corridor. He moves down it at speed, firing point-blank at the men who are rushing from the doors that line the passage. They’ve got their weapons out. They scarcely have the chance to use them. The barrels on Marlowe’s wrists howl. The minigun mounted atop his right shoulder chatters on automatic spray. Men duck in under his guns, grapple with him. He runs power through his armor’s skin, electrocutes them. Nozzles protrude from his helmet, spray forth gas. That gas isn’t just toxic. It’s also thick. Clouds waft up against Marlowe’s visor. He switches to thermal. Most of the heat sources are now writhing on the floor.

But now more suited figures are stepping into view at the corridor’s other end. They’re opening up on Marlowe—who fires two micromissiles from his hip-launcher in rapid succession. The first screams down the corridor toward the suits. The second’s set on a lower yield. It takes down the wall adjacent to him. He steps through that opening, feels the whole place shake as his first projectile slams home. He moves through another doorway, keeping low—almost crawling now. He’s not slackening his pace. It’s as he expected. Most of these men aren’t even Jaguars. They’re just militia conscripted into service. They’re huddling in the rooms as he passes—some of them firing at him, some of them not daring. But the shots Marlowe’s sending out on all sides don’t differentiate between those who cower and those who fight. He leaves a trail of bodies behind him.

And then he steps on a mine.

Primitive construction, not showing up on any scanner: looks like people here knew not to go any farther down this particular corridor. Nor is that mine small: walls, floor, and ceiling get torn to shreds as Marlowe’s hurled off his feet and twisted sideways, tumbling to the now-exposed level below him. He hits that lower floor with a force that almost knocks him senseless. He’s far too full of inhibitors to feel any pain. But his screens have all gone dark. His suit’s computer’s out. He can’t move. Through a visor caked in dust he can see faces peering down at him. Men start to jump down to where he’s sprawled. They’re clearly celebrating. One of them leaps onto his chest and starts dancing. Marlowe reaches out with his tongue, hits something that’s neither flesh nor tooth. He hears a whirring as his backup systems kick in: men whirl their guns toward him but he’s already lifting his arms and firing at point-blank range. Shouts of triumph turn to screams. Marlowe hits his thrusters, blasts back to the upper level as militia units scatter. He rockets down the corridor, sparing scarcely a glance at the screens that show the damage to his armor. Primary systems gone, outer hull compromised…he tunes it out, keeps going.