by Neal Asher
Other soldiers had already fallen free through the atmosphere barrier and the plasma tube. Their informant had assured them passage was safe, as long as they did not linger—but Mirsky trusted only experience and survival. He could not see whether his comrades were alive or dead when he saw them at all, they were too tiny to make out details. They were dwarfed—how could a few hundred soldiers command an object as big as a republic?
The perspective changed very slowly as he fell away from the axis.
He felt no wonder whatsoever at how selfish his emotions were now, and how much hate filled him. Mirsky had felt these emotions many times before, during training or the horrid endurance tests. These were the emotions of soldiers in battle, hard and bitter, touched with fear but mostly with overwhelming self-interest.
He could not have cared less about the state, the Motherland, the revolution. There was no shame in him.
Only falling. Spiraling outward as the great cylinder turned around him. He kept place with the landmarks using his thrusters. Silence, not even the sound of wind yet. He prepared his air-sled, fanning out and locking its segments.
Then he noticed he was drifting some degrees away from the bridge. He corrected with another thruster burst. There was so little sensation he might go mad and yet he had been falling for only a minute or so, very slowly...
He felt—perhaps only in his mind—a tingle and knew he was passing through the plasma tube. Below that, but only by a few hundred meters, lay the upper limits of the atmosphere, beyond the restraining barrier. He braced himself behind the sled and strapped his arms and legs to the concave inner surface. Whatever angle he first brushed the atmosphere, the sled would flip him around to the shape of least resistance. He would plummet through the upper air until he could hear the whistle of its passage, then he would kick free of the sled and begin his fifteen- or sixteen-kilometer dive, releasing the chute only two or three kilometers from the floor of the chamber. He would be lighter, falling; the impact would not be very hard at all.
Another soldier came close enough to wave—one he didn't recognize, with the insignia of Sixth Battalion, from Rolls-Royce. Mirsky waved back and motioned for him to prepare his sled. The soldier held it up—folded, in tatters from a projectile impact and shrugged, flipping it aside. They were to maintain radio silence, but the soldier used his rockets to approach close enough that they could read lips.
—Can I survive without?
—I don't know. Tuck up into a ball and present your back to the air ... if you can.
That was difficult to convey with lip movements, so Mirsky mimed by folded himself up as best he could behind the shield, drawing up his knees and wrapping his arms around him.
The soldier nodded and signaled okay with his thumb and index finger. They drifted apart—the soldier falling more slowly because of his thrust toward Mirsky. Mirsky watched the soldier thrust again to move away from the cap surface, toward which he was drifting, and then busied himself preparing for the entry.
He checked his position with relation to the bridge. One more adjustment with the thrusters. He could feel some pressure now against the sled. A vibration, weak nudges.
He made one more thrust and then unfastened and discarded the rocket pack. Where it fell he did not care, so long as it didn't land on him.
For an instant, through the preparations and the near-fury of anticipation, he looked again at the city and wondered what the Potato's secret actually was. Why were they fighting for it? What could it bring them?
How would the West react, facing the theft of its greatest prize? Or the attempt (he had heard rumors) to take out its orbital platforms and spy satellites?
How would Russia react in the same circumstances?
He shuddered.
The sled jerked and whirled around. He blacked out for a moment, then came awake to a bone-crushing slam and a highpitched, wavering scream.
Coming down.
The sled swung around again and bucked but was now committed to one orientation. He was pressed against its inner surface, padded elbows and knees braced, hoping he had broken no bones. It had been more violent than the falls from three meters in training. He tasted blood in his mouth. He had bitten almost through his inner cheek—he could
flap the tissue with his tongue. He closed his eyes against the pain—
(And gathered up his chute in the golden grassy field, smiling at the burning sun, looking for his comrades, shielding his eyes to spot the distant specks of the transport plane—)
And fell. He hastily unbuckled from the sled. The air roared around him. Then he grasped the straps loosely in his hands. He flipped the sled over and it was torn from his fingers.
Made it!
From here on it was a simple freefall and parachute exercise. He tucked to roll, and spread his arms and legs to flatten out and stabilize. The bridge was still only a line of white over the blue-black river. Was it really the right bridge, really the zero bridge?
Yes—he could spot the tiny speck of a guard shack nearby and make out lines of defense and sandbag emplacements.
And he couldn't have fallen so far wrong as to traverse a third of the chamber's area ... He was right on, too close in fact—he would have to drift away some.
The wind hummed mildly past his helmet now. He checked his laser and Kalashnikov and made quick surveys of his equipment belt.
Chute release had to be gauged purely by eye. There was no sense counting from the axis, since everyone would fall at a different rate. He held out his thumb. It covered the length of the bridge.
He pulled the rip cord and the chute leaped away, billowed, collapsed and billowed again, spreading wide in the shape of a package of small sausages.
Mirsky jerked and dangled and gathered his guidelines in both hands, pulling one, then the other, spilling a little air from one side of the chute to move in one direction, then from the other side.
He saw with relief that he would land some five kilometers from the objective. Unless they had far more men than reported—and radar-aimed automatic guns within the chambers, which their informant had told them they did not—they would probably not bring him down.
He saw others coming down beside him and above him, only a few below. In all, hundreds of them.
Mirsky tried to hold back tears and could not.
*27*
"Where's Patricia?" Carrolson looked around the mess.
"I don't know," Farley said. "She was here a few minutes ago."
"We should go find her."
"I'll go," Carrolson said. She had to get outside anyway; she wasn't sure she could stand the scene in the cafeteria any longer.
She stepped out under the tubelight and looked back and forth across the compound. Her eyes fixed on something astonishing. Against the dark gray southern cap, tiny points of white were falling like snow—dozens, then hundreds of them. A marine ran by carrying two Apples. "Look!" she cried, pointing and turning a half-circle. No one paid her any attention. The marine jumped onto the tailgate of one of the fully loaded troop trucks rumbling out of the compound.
Carrolson shook her head to clear it. She was drunk with grief and anger; any solid thought seemed to be vomited away by a nauseated mind. She couldn't afford such a handicap now. She had to think clearly and she had to find Vasquez.
On the opposite side of the compound, a train pulled away from the elevated station. She glanced at her watch; as scheduled, the fourth chamber stop, 1400 hours. The platform was empty; none of the trains were being used for troops, only trucks. The trains were doing their automatic best to keep everything normal.
"Jesus," she said, suddenly realizing. Vasquez had wanted to return to the library. Which one did she mean?
Farley ran up beside her. "We're being invaded," she said, astonished. "Paratroopers. Russian soldiers. Cosmonauts. Whatever they are, they've come down in the first and second chambers. They're coming down here, too."
"I've seen them," Carrolson said. "Patricia's gone to t
he library. We have to find her."
"How? The train's gone. Not another for half an hour. We can't take a truck—they're all in use."
Carrolson had never felt so helpless and out of place. She stood with fists clenched, facing the southern cap. Most of the parachutes had descended below their line of sight.
Patricia stared at the seat ahead of her, biting her lower lip. Nobody was guarding the train; that was either an oversight, or providential.
She had been in a dream ever since leaving Earth. Was it possible to be trapped in a dream?
In a dream, you can do anything, if you learn how to control, to shape and command.
And the equations hit by the chalk...
If what she had seen in the equations was correct, then at this very moment, there was a place—a curve—where Father sat in his chair, reading Tiempos de Los Angeles; and the corridor would pass right near it. She only had to search for the right door, the right section of the corridor, and she could find Rita and Ramon, Paul and Julia.
She could hardly wait to tell Lanier. He would be pleased. Rimskaya would be proud he had recommended her. She had solved the secret of the corridor—the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place in a dream, no less.
She could take them all home again.
The train came to her stop and she exited, climbing the stair to the ground level.
"Miss Vasquez?"
Patricia turned to face a man she had never met before. He sat on the concrete edge of the underground entrance. His hair was black and short and he wore a close-fitting black suit.
"Excuse me," she said, her eyes not really focusing on him. She was in the grip of a powerful working state. "I don't know who you are. I can't stay."
"Nor can we. You must come with us."
A tall creature with a head almost as narrow as a board and jutting eyes rose from behind the ceiling. Its shoulders were wrapped in silvery fabric; otherwise it wore nothing. Its skin was smooth as fine leather and just as brown.
She stared, inner concentration evaporating.
"Things are in quite a riot here, aren't they?" the man said. Patricia realized that he had a nose but no nostrils. His eyes were pale blue, almost blank, and his ears were large and round.
"Excuse me," she said more softly. "I don't know who you are."
"My name is Olmy. My companion is a Frant; they don't have names. I hope you don't mind our intruding. We've been watching everybody very closely."
"Who are you?" Patricia asked.
"I lived here, centuries ago," Olmy said. "And my ancestors before me. For that matter, you could be one of my ancestors. Please. We don't have time to talk. We must leave."
"Where?"
"Down the corridor."
"Really?"
"That's where my home is. The Frant and his people come from elsewhere. They ... well, working for us doesn't quite describe it."
The Frant shook its head solemnly. "Please don't be frightened," it said, its voice like a large bird's, low and warbling.
A breeze from the northern cap pushed through the outskirts of the third chamber city, rustling the nearby trees. Following the breeze came a slender craft about ten meters long, shaped like a cone flattened lengthwise, with the nose truncated. It drifted gracefully around a tower and landed on the point of a single central pylon.
"You've done some remarkable work,' Olmy said. "There are people where I live who will be very interested."
"I'm trying to go home," Patricia said. She realized she sounded like a lost child speaking to a policeman. "Are you a policeman? Do you guard the cities?"
"Not always," Olmy answered.
"Please come with us," the Frant said, stepping forward on long and oddly bent legs.
"You'll kidnap me?"
Olmy held out his hand, whether supplicating or indicating the situation was not his to control, she could not say.
"If I don't go willingly, you'll make me?"
"Make you?" He seemed puzzled, then said, "You mean, force you?" Olmy and the Frant exchanged glances. "Yes," Olmy said.
"Then I had better go with you, hadn't I?" Her words seemed to be spoken by a distant and heretofore unknown Patricia, calm and better versed in the analysis of nightmare.
"Please," the Frant said. "Until things are better here."
"Things are never going to be better here," she said. Olmy took her hand with a courtly bow and led her to the open oval hatchway in the craft's flat nose.
The interior of the craft was confined, a T expanding at the rear, the walls like abstract billows of polished marble, all white curves. Olmy took hold of a soft bulkhead and stretched it out to form a couch. "Please lie here." She lay in the softness. The substance firmed up beneath her, molding to her body.
The narrow-headed, knock-kneed brown Frant climbed farther back through the whiteness and nestled into its own couch. Olmy pulled out a section across the aisle from Patricia and sat in it, again touching his torque.
He smoothed his hand over a bulge before him and the curved surface erupted into an intaglio of black lines and red circles. Beside her, the whiteness faded to an elongated transparency, forming a long elliptical window. The edges of the window remained milky, like frosted glass.
"We're going to leave now."
The third chamber city glided away beneath her. As the craft banked, the window filled with the austere grayness of the northern cap.
"I believe you'll truly enjoy where we're going," Olmy said. "I've grown to admire you. You have a remarkable mentality. The Hexamon will be impressed, too, I'm sure."
"Why don't you have a nose?" the distant Patricia asked.
Behind them, the Frant made a sound like an elephant grinding its teeth.
*28*
The Soviet troops assigned to the second chamber had come down on a two-hundred-meter-wide strip of parkland separating the river from the southern cap. The squads had regrouped at two points on opposite sides of the zero bridge, each about three kilometers from that objective. Communications with the squads on the opposite side of the bridge were good.
Mirsky's group had taken shelter in a dense forest of gnarled pines; they had determined the bridge was heavily guarded and would soon be reinforced; they had to strike now. The equipment had not yet been dropped from Zhiguli, heavy-lifter seven, and fully three-fourths of the thirly squads were not up to full strength. Attrition in the bore hole had been hideous, and of those who survived the bore hole, about one out of twenty had not completed the journey and para-sail drop.
The squads were designed for flexibility; surviving sergeants shepherded broken squads together to form new ones. Mirsky had only 210 soldiers in his immediate command and, of course, little hope of getting more. Nobody knew how many had survived the drops in the other chambers.
Twenty SPETSNAZ diversionary troops assigned to Mirsky's battalion, communicating by radio after swimming the river, had established lookouts in the second chamber city.
They had been in the chamber for two hours now. The NATO troops at the bridge had not made an offensive move; this worried Mirsky. He knew that in the defenders' situation, the best plan would be an immediate and devastating offensive. They could conceivably have attacked as his men came down from the axis; apparently, they had been confused and not yet up to strength.
Between his group and the objective, there was the forest and several broad concrete foundations of unknown utility. While there was sufficient cover for his troops, momentarily, the cover could easily be turned into a series of disastrous pin-downs.
General "Zev"—Major General I. Sosnitsky—had survived his descent into the second chamber but had been injured on landing, breaking both legs when his para-sail ripped at a hundred meters. He was now sedated, lying concealed in a copse of trees and guarded by four soldiers Mirsky could ill afford to do without. The political officer Belozersky had—of course—survived also, and stayed very close to the general, like a hopeful vulture.
Mirsky had spent a fe
w weeks training with Sosnitsky in Moscow. He respected the major general. Sosnitsky, about fifty-five but as fit as any thirty-year-old in the training regiments, had taken a shine to Mirsky and no doubt had had something to do with his rapid promotion on the Moon.
No one of higher rank than colonel had come down in the second chamber besides "Zev." Effectively, that meant Mitsky was in control. Garabedian had survived the drop and that gave Mirsky some assurance. He could hope for no better deputy commander.
