The Machinery of Light

by David J. Williams

  “The key to Sinclair’s cell,” says Spencer.

  More like a missile than a vehicle: it’s a state-of-the-art maglev minicar, already starting to sling itself down the tracks toward the tunnel at the far end of the room. Haskell adjusts her thrusters, matches speeds—drops down into the single seat, straps herself in as the canopy lowers and the car accelerates. She catches a glimpse of suits pouring into the room behind her, but then rounds a bend in the tunnel.

  Should have guessed it,” says the Operative.

  The room contains twenty transluscent cryo-units.

  Each one’s occupied. Half are male, half are female.

  “And none of them are human,” says Lynx.

  “They’re Rain,” says the Operative.

  Sorenson says nothing.

  “Never mind the Rain,” says Lynx on the one-on-one. “We need to find his goddamn teleporter.”

  “He told you already,” says the Operative. “He ain’t got one.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “It was always a longshot. His expertise never extended to that kind of stuff anyway.”

  “So how the fuck are we getting off this fucking fleet?”

  “The old-fashioned way,” says the Operative.

  Who the fuck were these guys?” asks Sarmax.

  “Us,” says Spencer.

  “You mean now we’re them.”

  “I always was,” says Jarvin.

  Sarmax frowns. “What the fuck are you on about?”

  Jarvin kicks one of the Chinese soldiers with his boot. Sarmax can’t help but notice the major’s insignia on the shoulder of the dead man’s armor. And suddenly it all clicks—

  “My counterpart,” says Jarvin.

  “Oh,” says Sarmax.

  “Yeah.”

  “You were sent by the Praesidium as one of the two interrogators of Matthew Sinclair. Took the place of the Russian one—”

  “Who would have died anyway when the Chinese purged them,” says Spencer.

  “Maybe,” says Jarvin. “Maybe not. Who cares? The point is, now he’s dead. And so is this one. And we’ve got their codes.”

  “So let’s go say hi to the head of CICom,” says Spencer.

  Haskell accelerates, pouring on the speed. But she still can’t get access to the larger zone—just a mere fraction of it, a tiny thread that represents this rail line. Obstensibly, this particular tunnel is a component of Sarmax’s ice-processing operation, eighty klicks north of Shackleton. Only now it’s more like sixty klicks. Haskell’s feeling okay about keeping the pursuit behind her for the next few minutes. It’s what’s in front of her that’s got her worried.

  So what exactly was your plan?” asks the Operative.

  Sorenson laughs. “Who says I had a plan?”

  “This flesh,” says Lynx, gesturing at the cryo-tanks.

  Though right now that flesh isn’t saying much of anything. It’s just sitting there, all life systems reduced to an absolute minimum. The Operative can’t read anything in those faces. But he can see a thing or two in Lynx’s. He opens up the one-on-one again.

  “What the hell’s on your mind?” he says.

  “The colony ships,” Lynx replies.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re full of sleepers.”

  “That’s why they call them colony ships, Lynx.”

  “The ships are a subterfuge. Why not the cargo?”

  The Operative addresses Sorenson: “What about the colony ships?”

  “Mostly just colonists.”

  “But not exclusively.”

  “There are a few anomalies here and there.”

  “Made by who?”—but even as he asks the question, the Operative realizes its absurdity. Everyone’s been trying to duplicate the Autumn Rain batch ever since it came out of the vat. Every player’s got their own breed of posthuman in the mix. Szilard’s undoubtedly been working his own angles. But no one’s ever been able to attain the breakthroughs that Matthew Sinclair made two decades back. Nobody’s come close to replicating them. Partially that’s because he executed all the scientists.

  Except for one.

  “I never had the big picture,” mutters Sorenson.

  “Who the hell did?” says the Operative.

  “That’d be you,” says Lynx.

  Flanked by his escorts, the man who’s been charged by the Praesidium with interrogating the most important asset to ever fall into the Coalition’s hands is approaching the section of the Righteous Fire-Dragon that’s been designated as maximum security. All prisoners taken from the L5 fortress have been moved there. There weren’t that many. Most of the garrison was killed subsequent to surrender. But there were a few exceptions …

  “He’s in there, alright,” says Spencer.

  “At least officially,” says Jarvin.

  “And where the hell’s Indigo?” asks Sarmax.

  “Right here,” says Spencer—beams the map over to him, showing the holding cells and their denizens. There are only five: Sinclair, and four of the soldiers who were guarding him. And Spencer’s fairly sure not all of those soldiers are who they seem to be.

  “When they took the libration point, the Eurasians killed everybody,” says Spencer. “A total massacre. They knew what they were up against. They knew that Sinclair wasn’t an ordinary prisoner, that the Rain might have infected L5. That’s why they took no chances—why the only exceptions were quarantined and put into lockdown—why the only ones getting into this cell-block are—”

  “Us,” says Sarmax.

  They turn a corner. Guards block the way ahead.

  You’re barking up the wrong tree,” says the Operative. “Sinclair kept the whole thing compartmentalized. And only he had insight into the specifics of the core quantum processes—”

  “Along with the physicists,” says Sorenson.

  “Who were the first to go,” says the Operative.

  “Because you killed them,” says Lynx.

  “On Sinclair’s orders.”

  “But not before you made them talk.”

  “Let me assure you that Sinclair had already deprived them of that ability.”

  “I was a fucking biogeneticist,” says Sorenson. “I’d heard the stories, sure—of what was really going on at the center of his fucking Manhattan Project. Of tapping into nonlocalized consciousness to tune the mind as a neurotransmitter. Of—”

  “Telepathy,” says Lynx.

  “—leveraging quantum entanglement to enable remote duplication of matter.”

  “Teleportation,” says the Operative.

  He and Sorenson look at each other.

  “And?” asks the Operative.

  Sorenson looks as if he’s about to weep. Lynx looks at the Operative.

  “What do you mean, and?”

  “You know what I mean,” says the Operative to Sorenson. Sorenson closes his eyes.

  “Say it,” says the Operative.

  “Something to do with time,” whispers Sorenson.

  Careening through a hollow tube beneath the lunar mountains: Haskell’s halfway to Shackleton, and she can only imagine what she’s going to find when she gets there. She feels the South Pole beckoning beyond it—feels it with an intensity that makes the antipodes at the Europa Platform look like the artificial constructs they were. Her awareness is cranking up to new heights. And all the while she’s doing her utmost to dissect the nature of the machinery fading behind her.

  Sinclair could see the future,” says Lynx.

  “So could the Manilishi,” says Sorenson.

  “Only Sinclair’s ability trumped Haskell’s,” says the Operative. “She just had it in flashes. Sinclair’s view was a little more comprehensive, wasn’t it?”

  Sorenson shrugs. “But the Manilishi was able to deploy hacks—”

  “Don’t play the retard,” snaps the Operative. “This isn’t just about precognition, is it?”

  “No,” whispers Sorenson.

  For a mome
nt there’s silence. Lynx whistles.

  “Fuck,” he says, “if Sinclair can violate causality wholesale—”

  “Then we’d know it,” says the Operative. “We’d have already lost.”

  “And if one of those teleporters wasn’t really a teleporter,” says Lynx. “And if it got switched on—”

  “Like I said,” says the Operative, “we’d know it.”

  Running scans, checking readouts: it’s somehow only just beginning to dawn on her that she really is on the Moon—that she’s reached the object that she and Jason set out for so long ago. She feels like she’s stabbed him in the back by arriving up here without him—feels like she’s betrayed him repeatedly ever since. And somehow feels him too, like he’s somewhere out there even now. As if anything’s possible. She watches walls streak past. Shackleton’s drawing ever closer.

  Time machines,” says Sorenson. “He was trying to develop time mach—”

  “Is,” mutters Lynx. “We need to move—”

  “I get that,” says the Operative. He shoves his guns up against Sorenson’s face. “Too bad this goddamn hunk of metal where you and that blowup-bitch of yours have been holed up contains not a single portal of any use whatsoever.”

  “God help me it’s true,” says Sorenson. He’s cowering like he knows he’s about to get it any moment—

  “And you don’t even know the details of the fucking recipe to cook up some Rain,” says Lynx. “So what the fuck have you been growing here?”

  “My best effort,” snaps Sorenson.

  “And you were going to activate them when?”

  “I figured to use them as a bargaining chip instead.”

  “You’ve signed your own death warrant, old man.”

  “That happened long ago.”

  “You may yet avoid it,” says the Operative.

  Sorenson looks at him. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Wake them up, of course.”

  Visors can be deceptive. Sometimes the screens that they project can face the other way. These three show Han Chinese faces. But on the inside it’s a different story …

  “Special agent Zhou Tang,” says the man who’s not. “Here to interrogate the prisoner, at the express instruction of the Praesidium.”

  IDs flow up and down the ladders of command. The word comes back. A sentry signals. The door opens—to reveal a second barricade. More sentries step forward.

  You can’t be serious,” says Sorenson.

  “I never joke,” says the Operative.

  He and Lynx have already gotten busy siphoning off all the data—the schematics on this particular batch of would-be superwarriors; the records Sorenson’s kept of his long stealth burn through the glacial layers of the SpaceCom bureaucracy; the tantalizing fragments from all the years before that. He snatches at files with timestamps from the 2080s. Data fills him up till he feels like he could burst. He looks at Sorenson.

  “So fire it up,” he says.

  Sorenson starts warming up the brain-farm.

  She’s coming in on Shackleton like a bomb now, and she still can’t break through to the larger zone beyond. It’s just not happening. She almost wonders if she’s been damaged irreparably by everything that’s gone down. But her mind feels anything but damaged. It feels like it’s burning out in all directions. She’s bringing new insight to the situation at hand. She’s now almost certain that machine was a teleporter—and only that. None of her readouts show a trace of tachyons. Meaning that figure wasn’t from the future. Whoever it was is from the present. Maybe even from somewhere else on the Moon. But within the zone itself, Haskell’s still confined to this tunnel, blocked off at both ends—and even that perspective’s shrinking as someone pulls the plug on the maglev. She wonders why they didn’t do it earlier—maybe they figured there’s no point, because now she’s switching to rockets—she barrels forward toward her destination—

  Cryo-machines hum. Life-support systems chirp.

  Flesh is waking up.

  “How much longer?” says the Operative.

  “Only a couple more minutes,” says Sorenson.

  “And how soon will they be ready for combat?”

  “Within the hour.”

  “Might need to cut some corners,” says the Operative.

  The guards of the second perimeter put them through the paces. Codes, backup codes, failsafes, voice recognition … but Spencer is sufficiently high up in the Eurasian zone that he’s got all the answers. Or at least he’s able to make like he does—he still can’t penetrate the Praesidium itself, but he can fool it into thinking he’s carrying out the orders. The second set of doors slide away—reveal the third and last dead ahead.

  She’s heading into the outskirts of Shackleton, and she still can’t reach the zone. She can only assume that’s because there’s no direct link to it from this tunnel she’s in—a tunnel that’s suddenly starting to widen, joining up with other tunnels. Sarmax’s infrastructure is giving way to the infrastructure of the whole city. It spreads out before her.

  Almost there,” says Lynx.

  The Operative says nothing. He’s lost in the faces of the waking sleepers. They look so familiar. There’s one woman in particular that he feels like he’s seen before. Probably because the face isn’t dissimilar to Claire’s. He can only imagine where she is now. He wonders just how good this batch will be. Not quite up to the stuff of the originals, but maybe that’s just as well. He watches the seconds slide by, gets ready to start giving orders.

  The codes are running. The sentries who guard the last door are waiting for the results. Spencer feels like he’s reached the threshold. Sarmax’s suit-monitors show his pulse accelerating to dangerous levels. Spencer wonders whether he’s going to give them all away. It’s just a few more meters to the man who tried to turn this whole game inside out—the man who may yet be running the whole thing. He feels that power’s within his grasp. He lets the zone-bubble he’s created slide in around them. The doors open—

  Like slalom on acid: Haskell starts weaving her way into the tunnel-network around Shackleton. She’s dodging past other trains, stations, freight. Sirens are sounding. Klaxons are howling. Apparently the garrison is finally waking up. But she’s still detecting no zone presence.

  And suddenly she gets it: they’ve switched it off altogether. Contingency planning—faced with the likes of her, they’ve gone to communicating purely by analog line and loudspeaker. But mobilizing under those kind of conditions is anything but easy. She’s eating up the klicks, rising through levels, closing on the heart of the city. Even as she feels something closing in on her …

  We’re going to need to get them some weapons,” says Lynx.

  “They’re the weapons,” says the Operative.

  And equipping them will be the least of his problems. This war-sat contains enough shit to blow up a small asteroid anyway. Redundancy has its advantages. Same with these twenty men and women. They’ll be the firepower needed to initiate the next phase—the ticket back to the Moon. Sorenson’s files are going to be helpful, too. The Operative glances at the scientist and wonders if there might actually be some use in keeping him alive. The eyelids of some of the sleepers are starting to flicker.

  A repurposed storage chamber: the walls look like they’ve been seriously reinforced. The center is dominated by a squat structure that stretches almost to the ceiling.

  “Huh,” says Spencer.

  It’s a box—a room all its own. It’s been custom built for a single purpose. A single door’s visible, along with a window next to it. The three men move forward as the hatches through which they’ve entered slide shut behind them.

  She rockets through the basements of Shackleton. All the maglev is out, as is the rest of the electricity. It’s all a scorched-earth strategy to slow her down. The SpaceCom garrison is taking up positions. She can’t see it, but she can sense it—and the fact that nearly all of their defense sequences were prepped to deal with attacks from without
makes it difficult to scramble to meet an incursion from within. Particularly since all Haskell’s really concerned about is getting out herself. She swerves back onto a set of passenger rails. Raw contingency hits her like a wave. A face starts boiling up inside her mind.

  The Operative wills himself to remain calm. The last thing he wants is to sit here and wait while these things wake up. Particularly when everything around him is coming to a head. The Eurasians might start their final attack at any moment. The endgame could kick off anytime. The eyes of the sleeper nearest to him open.

  Spencer looks in the window. Sitting cross-legged against the wall opposite them is Matthew Sinclair. Unsuited, his eyes closed. Four people are chained adjacent to him. They wear Praetorian colors. Three are very clearly dead. Blood’s dripping from their ears and noses.

  The fifth looks fine. Her face isn’t one that Spencer recognizes. But it seems like Sarmax does. He’s obviously struggling to control himself.

  “Steady,” says Spencer.

  Sinclair’s eyes open.

  She’s transfixed—can’t turn away. The old man’s surging into her head like some tide she can’t withstand. She’s not sure why she ever wanted to. Her mind collapses in upon itself like some kind of sinkhole, yet the deeper it goes the more acute her insight gets. Tunnel blasts past her while she maneuvers through the Com forces with near-perfect precision. They’re still hoping to trap her and take her alive—and she’s only got a few more seconds before they realize that’s just not going to be possible. But anything can happen in those seconds. Particularly inside the endless reaches of her head. The jaws of Sinclair open to receive her.

  The Operative can’t take his eyes off that woman—the one who resembles Claire. It isn’t her, of course. It’s not even a clone. But he can barely look away. It’s like watching someone being born. He feels the eyes of the others upon him now—feels himself caught up in a vortex of his own making. He wonders what happened to the old Carson—the one who never made mistakes, who always forced others to pay for theirs. He wonders what his motives for all this really are. The woman’s mouth is forming soundless words.

  Spencer’s trying to keep his mind focused. The eyes of Sinclair are like pits into which he’s tumbling. He’s fighting to pull himself away. He’s conscious of almost nothing else.