The Burning Skies

by David J. Williams

“Christ,” mutters Lynx. Blood dribbles from his mouth. He stares up at Linehan. “You’ve been rigged.”

  “By us,” says Szilard.

  “But InfoCom wiped all that—”

  “You’ve made your last assumption,” says Szilard. “Soldier, kill this traitor.”

  “Gladly,” says Linehan who whips up his pistol at Lynx, fires. The shot goes over Lynx’s head. Linehan fires again. The shot flashes past Lynx’s face. Linehan’s face is starting to twitch.

  “I said fucking kill him!” screams Szilard.

  But now Linehan’s convulsing. He’s pitching forward. Szilard’s standing open-mouthed behind him. Lynx starts running. He’s got no weapons. He’s got nowhere to go. He’s heading there as fast as he can.

  They’re getting the fuck out of that room at speed. They did their best to hide the body of the soldier who crashed their chat—pulled a panel aside, stuffed it in there. And that’s about all they’ve got time for. They’re climbing down ladder after ladder, descending through shafts, seeking out the depths of this place, since that’s where the heart of its zone activity seems to be. And Spencer’s riding toward it. Though without the Manilishi he doesn’t dare to try and hack the core. Not until he understands more about what’s going on.

  Because it’s pretty clear something’s going on. There’s a lot of activity under way—a lot of soldiers and technicians going about their business. Spencer and Sarmax are doing their best to look like part of the scenery hiding behind doors, concealing themselves within shadows, keeping equipment between them and the other men and women within this place.

  But it looks as if they might have been detected anyway. Sirens start going off everywhere. Activity’s suddenly cranking up to a new level of intensity. Shouting echoes down the corridors. They crouch behind some stowed equipment and wait to be found. Soldiers race into the room.

  And keep going. It looked like they weren’t searching for anything—just getting ordered into position. Spencer and Sarmax slink out, find more ladders, climb down. The ladders start to get shaken by a distant rumbling, like something’s starting up. Spencer’s got a feeling that something probably is.

  The Operative leaves the interrogation quarters behind, fires his suit’s thrusters. The soldiers wearing Praetorian colors swarm in behind him. He lets the Manilishi’s hack carve out ahead of him. He’s got control of her as long as she remains within the suit. He has no intention of letting her outside it ever again.

  He rounds a corner and starts firing. As do all those with him. Their targets’ suits are getting shredded. Walls start to buckle under the fusillade. Shots whip past the Operative’s head. But he’s got the advantage. The fact that his team’s maintaining zone integrity allows them to coordinate their shots with deadly precision. He blasts through the dying Praetorian defenders and smashes through into the ship’s forward areas.

  But now the president responds. The executive node roars out to do battle, bulldozes straight into the Manilishi. Two titanic forces strain against each other. The president has the resources of the whole zone to draw from. The Manilishi is the most powerful razor in existence. Penetrating the U.S. zone is no problem for her. She’s already inside it anyway. But assailing its very core is something else altogether.

  Which is why the Operative’s not counting on her to finish the job. He’s planning on doing that the old-fashioned way. He surges forward, tearing his way through more Praetorian defenses. He’s not surprised to feel the ship accelerating, surging toward landfall and the president’s forces in the base at Congreve. But unless the forces within the ship can stop him, the Operative is going to reach the president before they hit the Moon. He’s picking up the pace, too—blasting his way through wall after wall, taking Praetorians by surprise for just the fraction of a second long enough to allow him to destroy them. He’s almost at the threshold of the bridge. He can feel the ship’s descent quicken toward plummet. He wonders how the hell they’re going to stop in time.

  And then he realizes they’re not.

  Haskell’s trying to brace herself but there’s nothing left to brace. She’s already strapped in. The soldiers around her are grabbing onto the walls. The ship’s coming in at lethal speeds. She can feel Carson somewhere in the back of her mind. Clarity’s bursting on her far too late. She understands that Carson knows that his real enemies are his fellow plotters—that he’s riding some deeper scheme.

  But apparently he’s been too devious by half. Because the president’s so desperate to reach the Moon he’s going to crash them all. Haskell feels her stomach lurch as the craft accelerates still further—feels herself involuntarily gasp. She feels her whole life start to flash before her eyes—and it’s really her own life this time. She understands it all. She gets it—sees her mind caught in the jaws of Carson’s trap, sees how he’s turned her against herself. How there’s no way out.

  Not in this world anyway.

  Howling heat and burning light … the universe opens up around her, rises in her like some voice she’s never heard, yet sounds exactly like her own. The minds of everyone she’s ever known and everyone she never will flare through her head, pour past her like some runaway torrent. And in that flood she can see it all: the grids of zone and the reins of power that end in the man who holds them within the bridge of a ship that’s a blip of light above the horizon that’s cutting across a million watching screens—and the woman who’s watching all of them knows it’ll be the last thing she’ll ever see. She’s finally free. Retrofire’s slamming through her. The ship’s firing its brakes. It’s way too late. They hit.

  There’s an explosion. The doors burst open. Szilard’s marines hit the room. But Lynx is already gone, through the duct and into the shaft he used to enter the room. Shots streak after him but they’re way too late. He’s running on all fours like some kind of hunted animal. The mechanized guardians of the Montana’s crawlspaces swarm toward him—and scoot away as he uses what’s left of his crumbling zone position to talk them out of it. He keeps on moving past them.

  He knows he’s reached the end of the line. He’s out of options. Save whatever’s available to him inside all this crawl-space. He’s got a feeling he’s going to know this place all too well before he dies. The maps gleam within his mind. In their stacked grids he catches glimpses of deeper patterns—how triumph turned so swiftly to debacle, how nasty what’s about to happen is going to be. He wonders if it’s already begun.

  • • •

  But if it has, it’s news to them. Because down in the lower levels everything’s silent. It’s as if they’ve stumbled into the domain of ghosts.

  “We’ve gone too low,” says Sarmax.

  “I don’t think so,” says Spencer.

  He’s starting to evolve a theory about what’s really going on within this place. He and Sarmax descend through several more levels, pass through several open hatches.

  And arrive in a strange chamber. One where metallic conveyor belts drop from the ceiling, run along walls, pass through slits in the floor. Spherical objects are slotted within the belts. They look like metallic eggs. Sarmax walks over to them. He stares at the objects. He studies one of them in particular.

  “Is this what I think it is?” he says.

  “I think so,” says Spencer.

  “Probably five-kiloton yield.”

  “Probably.”

  The room has two more exits: a hatch in the floor and one in the ceiling. Spencer does a local hack on the ceiling hatch. They climb a ladder and head on through.

  “Hello,” says Spencer.

  A room that looks to be filled with what must be thousands of those nukes, stacked from floor to ceiling, ready to slot onto the conveyor belts. Spencer breathes deeply.

  “Weirder by the second,” he says.

  “I’d say we’re getting close,” says Sarmax.

  The presidential ship plows into the landing pad and then through the underground hangars stacked beneath, disintegrating as it goes. The base th
rough which it’s now spearing comprises about twenty levels. The ship makes it through half of those before momentum peters out. Stars are visible through the hole the ship’s just bored …

  The Operative opens his eyes to find himself staring at those stars. He’s lying on his back. He’s lost contact with the zone. His armor’s taken a serious beating. But it’s still functional. He activates its backup comps, surges to his feet.

  Wreckage is all around him. As are plenty of bodies. But not the one he’s most interested in. He can’t see Harrison anywhere. Worse, he’s lost contact with the Manilishi. He reactivates his links to zone, hoping it’ll have some answers.

  It does. The Manilishi’s nowhere in sight. But the executive node is clearly visible, still intact, still moving, very close. The Operative fires his thrusters, blasts away from the wreckage and in between the gnarled remains of floors and ceilings. He quickly reaches the more intact areas of the base. He can’t see any Praetorians anywhere.

  But he can see the president, right ahead of him. Crawling on his hands and knees, in a suit so fucked it’s a wonder it’s still pressurized. The Operative blasts toward him, just as more figures emerge from the far end of the corridor. The Operative hits his brakes, starts to engage his weapons. But then he stops.

  And relaxes.

  There are five of them. None are in Praetorian colors. They hit their thrusters, reach the president a fraction of a second before the Operative does. He looks at them. Four are men. One’s a woman. She steps forward. He salutes her.

  “Ma’am,” he says.

  “At ease,” she replies.

  “Stephanie,” says a voice, weakly.

  The Operative looks down. The president is looking up through a bloodied visor—looking past him, at Stephanie Montrose, the head of Information Command. Her bodyguards stand around her. She looks down.

  “Andrew,” she says.

  “Carson is—this man’s a traitor.”

  Montrose laughs. “On my payroll,” she says.

  Harrison stares at her with the expression of a man in whom understanding’s dawned way too late. “You too, Stephanie?”

  “Kinda looks that way.”

  “You were my fucking successor.”

  “Until now,” she says—nods to the Operative. Who places his boot on the president’s chest, fires a single shot through his visor. Looks at Montrose.

  “Consider the torch passed,” he says.

  The look on Montrose’s face is the look of someone who’s just received the software upload that comprises the executive node. The software that holds the reins of the U.S. zone. A transition that’s occurred automatically now that Harrison’s dead. Montrose turns to the Operative.

  “The Manilishi,” she says.

  “Missing,” he replies.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I wish I was.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Or escaped.”

  “I thought her suit prevented her from—”

  “It might have been damaged in the crash.”

  “Or shattered altogether. You’ve fucked up.”

  “I know.”

  “If she really has broken loose—”

  “We’ll find her.”

  “The tunnels beneath this base are endless.”

  “We’ll find her.”

  “They say the Rain themselves were down there before we burned them out—”

  “I said we’ll find her.”

  “Let that be your next task.”

  “I’ll need soldiers.”

  “You’ll have my best.”

  Carson salutes, turns away. Montrose turns, too, gets rushed by her bodyguards down the corridors of the base. It used to belong to SpaceCom, before the Praetorians cleaned them out. But InfoCom assisted with that takeover, and it was child’s play to lay the seeds of yet another one. Now Montrose’s soldiers control this whole place.

  And more besides. Montrose gets hustled into one of the underground trains that connects the various military bases scattered beneath Congreve. The train she’s in is heading out of Congreve, out beneath the crater perimeter, toward the walled plain of Korolev, dropping ever deeper beneath the surface the whole while. Its destination is the largest command center beneath the lunar farside.

  But Montrose doesn’t need to get there to make the call she’s now making. Szilard’s face appears upon a screen within her head. The left side of his face looks like one big bruise.

  “Stephanie,” he says.

  “What’s the situation?”

  “Harrison almost fucked me,” he replies.

  “But he failed.”

  “And I guess I have you to thank.”

  “I guess you do. He’s dead.”

  “Then we’ve won.”

  “Except that the Manilishi may have broken loose.”

  “Fuck,” he says. “Your man—”

  “Did the best he could.”

  “Then we need to wait until—”

  “No waiting,” she says. “We’ll recapture that cunt within the hour or else we’ll dig her out of wreckage. Our forces are primed. We’re at total readiness. We’ll hit the East without mercy and I swear to God they’ll never rise again. It’s now or never.”

  “And our latest diplomatic overtures—”

  “Are worth whatever we make them. There’s no reason to delay.”

  “Twenty seconds prep?”

  “But no prep that’ll tip our hand.”

  “So give the order,” he says.

  “With pleasure.”

  Somewhere else below the lunar surface, someone’s listening. Someone who feels like she should start fucking with the commands Montrose is giving. But she’s not. And she won’t. Partially because she’s got pursuit hot on her tail. But mostly because she can’t see any way around what’s about to happen. And because she’s sick of being played. She’s getting in this game for real now. She’s riding the moment that’s breaking like a wave throughout the U.S. bases. The moment they’ve all been waiting for. Her eyes roll back in her head as it begins …

  With sirens sounding throughout the bases of Earth and Moon and space. Pilots and gunners are sprinting to their stations. Launch codes are flashing down the chains of command. Failsafes are releasing. As one, the directed energy weapons power up, ride astride current capable of lighting every city and then some. Hundreds of thousands of hypersonic missiles slot through the silos. The electromagnetic rails on the mass-drivers surge. The battle management nodes lock in.

  The satellites take the range. The warheads prime.

  The shutters on the zone close.

  And then the sky—

  TO BE CONCLUDED

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to …

  James Wang, éminence grise

  Brian De Groodt, for the jailbreak blueprints

  Jerry Ellis, for canoe rides

  Michelle Marcoccia, for bike rides

  Cassandra Stern, for two decades now and counting

  Marc Haimes, for not growing up either

  Rob Cunningham, for reminding me where the shore was

  Paul Ruskay, for outweirding the competition

  Rick Fullerton, for light all those years ago

  Andrew Silber, copilot on the strangeways

  Zakharov Sawyer, for (not) knowing me in a past life

  Jason Marlowe, for his name

  Sanho Tree, for pure octane

  Mitch Engel, for the best line of 1990

  Peter Watts, for debts I’ll just have to pay forward

  Jennifer Hunter, may she fly always

  And thanks also to …

  Local D.C. writers: Tom Doyle, David Louis Edelman, Craig Gidney Jeri Smith-Ready

  Not-so-local writers: John Joseph Adams, Jon Christian Allison, Stephen Baxter, Jack Campbell, Jeff Carlson, Erin Cashier, Roz Clarke, Doug Cohen, Richard Dansky, Kelley Eskridge, Neile Graham, Nicola Griffith, Leslie Howle, Dave Hutchinson, Simran Khalsa, Amy Lau
, John Scalzi, Stacy Sinclair, Maria Snyder, Melinda Thielbar, Lilah Wild, Bruce Williams, and Mark Williams

  The Industry: Jenny Rappaport for representation; Juliet Ulman, David Pomerico, Chris Artis, and Joseph Scalora at Bantam Spectra; Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen at Nightshade

  The Bookstores:

  —Duane Wilkins at University Book Store, Seattle

  —Alan Beatts, Jude Feldman, and Ripley at Border lands

  Books, San Francisco

  —Maria Perry at Flights of Fantasy, Albany

  —everybody at Borders@BaileysXRoads

  The Artists/Web Maestros:

  —Randall MacDonald—Josh Korwin and Don Zukes at TSA

  —Paul Youll

  —Stephen Martiniere

  The Bloggers:

  —Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders at io9

  —Mike Collins at Rescued by Nerds

  —Patrick St-Denis at Fantasy Bookspot

  —Graeme Flory at Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review

  —Jay Tomio at Bookspotcentral

  —Eric Dorsett at Project: Shadow HQ

  —Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit

  —Robert Thompson at Fantasy Book Critic

  —UberJumper at Relic News

  The Radio Dudes:

  —Jim Freund at Hour of the Wolf

  —Howard Margolis at Destinies

  —David Durica at Sci-Fi Overdrive

  —Adventures in SF Publishing

  —Dead Robot Society

  —Starship Sofa

  The Inspirations:

  —Judas Priest

  —Judge Dredd

  —John Le Carré

  —V for Vendetta

  —Frank Herbert

  —the Lo-Fidelity Allstars

  —J.R.R. Tolkien

  —Robert Anton Wilson

  —Edward Gibbon

  —Thucydides

  —anything starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s

  The Cat:

  —Spartacus (like he gives a #$@!)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Descended from Australian convicts, DAVID J. WILLIAMS nonetheless managed to be born in Hertfordshire, England, and subsequently moved to Washington D.C. just in time for Nixon’s impeachment. Graduating from Yale with a degree in history some time later, he narrowly escaped the life of a graduate student and ended up doing time in Corporate America, which drove him so crazy he started moonlighting on video games and (as he got even crazier) novels. The Mirrored Heavens was written over a seven-year period, and sold to Bantam Spectra in the summer of 2007 along with the rest of the Autumn Rain trilogy.