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.
And 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.
Ever 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.
And reaches his target. It’s an armored door, set within armored walls. Guns mounted within those walls triangulate upon him. He destroys them—fires his thrusters, reaches the door, slaps a hi-ex charge on it, reverses back down the corridor, detonates the charge. Pieces of debris are still falling as he pivots back toward the remnants of the door.
But whoever’s in there isn’t going to go out easy. Bullets fly past him, ricochet down the corridor. The bomb-rack on Marlowe’s left shoulder spits out grenades—the first into the room’s ceiling, the next set for one bounce to allow it to careen deeper into whatever lies within. Immediately subsequent to the first explosion—but still before the second—Marlowe’s entering the room at floor level, his rack flinging an incendiary grenade out behind him as he moves quickly along the wall. Several bodies lie about the gutted chamber. Shreds of armor and spent ammo casings are scattered everywhere.
Marlowe has no time to inspect any of it closely. He knows that the flames now licking in his wake will only hold off survivors for a short while. And he still doesn’t know how much opposition remains ahead of him. Or whether the senior Jaguar agent he’s after is here after all. The whole thing might be a trap. If it is, it’s a remarkably elaborate one. He steps over bodies on the floor and through the door opposite.
The Operative’s been trying to get the crew to talk to him. But they’re no longer up for it. His access to the cameras has been shut off. Along with his access to everything else. The whole world’s gone silent. The only frequencies in use now are the ones shrouded in code. And the Operative isn’t in on any of the secrets. He’s been left to keep his own counsel.
So he does. They’re clearly within the vicinity of a live situation. The Operative’s hoping that any moment now the ship’s engines will slam into action and leave this whole mess behind. But he knows how such situations tend to work. He’s keenly aware that those who manage these sorts of crises always respond the same way: quarantine the area in question, shut down the comlinks, contain the scene. Which means that all he can do is sit here until this gets resolved.
And kill time.
He gazes out the window. The city’s moving slowly toward its edge. Ocean’s creeping in. What’s left of the sunlight glistens all along the water save for the space occupied by the massive shadow cast by the city’s pall. Somehow, the Operative’s totally taken by that shadow—at the way the city lights bleed
out through it, at the way other lights shine here and there within it, at the way its black blurs into the greater dark of deeper ocean. He feels himself drifting. He feels his brain going as blank as it did before the launch. He feels that city unfolding through him. He wonders what’s going on inside it.
But the next instant, he doesn’t have to wonder.
Ancient zone’s suddenly crystal clear. Check out those corners coming up everywhere. Check out those doorways where there weren’t even walls before. Check it out: Haskell’s perspective telescopes outward in all directions. She watches as openings take their place within larger structures.
It’s just like Morat said. She’s staring backward into time. She’s gazing at long-ago wreckage. The map of old Belem clicks into her head, along with all that city’s infrastructure—and the lines she’s in wind among that infrastructure, just a few wires among so many millions. Somehow these survived. Somehow they weren’t dug up. Somehow they got overlooked.
She sees why. They got disconnected, the ends sealed. But there’s still data swimming through these lines. An isolated network: and some of the data within looks legit—small-time enterprise trying to eke out existence amidst the urban chaos. But most of it’s small-time crime: porn, snuff, drugs—all the flavors of vice licking back and forth in search of download. And there’s a lot of download points, too—lot of illicit subscribers, paying for the right to get some kind of net.
This doesn’t surprise Haskell. Access to the main zone, the integrated zone—the American zone—can’t be taken for granted. Not down here. Ninety-nine percent of the population on the northern continent’s a part of it, but that number plummets the farther south you get. Meaning that those in the Latin fringes just have to make do. These zone-fragments are illegal. But as long as the Jags aren’t involved, no one cares.
But that’s the point. That’s why she’s looking at all the data set in motion by those who pay protection to the local gangs for the use of rogue systems powered by rogue generators that squat in forgotten basements and derelict rooms. That’s why she’s trying to determine what the larger pattern used to be—intimations of supply lines that once wound inland from the sea…query grids stacked along the floor…even graffiti on the walls: taglines left by bored programmers long since buried far deeper than these wires. She cruises up and down those long-gone roads. She runs up stairways, down ramps, through shafts.
And all the while, she does her best to keep it stealthy. Because she knows her eyes may not be the only ones scanning. She knows that if they’re looking, she probably won’t know it—that if they see her, she might not even guess. She might not even feel it coming either—just one bolt from the black to smack her dream-body senseless, send her meat-body flopping on the floor of the warehouse that’s so far away that she can barely remember what it was like. But that’s the nature of the recon. That’s the nature of this probe.
Which now detects something. Two things, actually. Anomalies. Each of them concealing the other. She can’t see one without seeing both. And they’re in different places. It’s a neat trick. But she’s trickier. She strips away all the history, rips out all the nonessential. She tunes out every last fragment of peripheral traffic, regards what’s left.
These anomalies aren’t data. They’re doors. They’re white where all else is black. They’re stars in the land of void. They’re lava in the land of ice. They’re different. She takes the readings, confirms them, locks in the references. She approaches those gateways. Reaches them. Looks through.
And watches as zone-shard shifts from universe to foreground.
This is no isolated fragment. She’s looking at the Jaguar net. There’s no doubt now. The contours of it show at least some of the codes her own side has captured in the past. It shows her others she’s never seen. Not to mention an expanse she never would have dreamt of. In one direction she can see something that leaps away from the city, tunneling under jungle and through mountains, all the way to what must be Lima, where it opens up to still more networks. In another direction’s Sao-Rio. She imagines those conduits: old telephone lines, cables, comlinks run beneath the floor of jungle before it all came crashing down. She can see that the place she’s been crawling in is a nexus. That the Jaguars have been using it to link their operations elsewhere with their operations in this city. She traces those links in turn and can see all the data now. The structure’s clear enough: patchwork quilt of legacy, and this place is just one thread. Belem-Macapa is just one piece. Just one limb in a stitched-together body.
So where the fuck’s the brain?
Because once she’s mapped that, she can get out. Back to Sinclair’s people. Back to the ones who put her in here. She gets the maps. They work out the vectors. And then they wipe out the Jags in one clean sweep.
Something catches her eye. New data seems to be flowing. Haskell focuses on a series of lines that carry particularly heavy traffic. Each line winds through buildings. Each terminates in what looks to be a dead end. But something’s crouching at each of those ends. Something that seems to be winding up through incremental stages of activation.
Even as she takes this in, she’s noticing the same thing going down in other cities. Sao-Rio. Greater Caracas. Japura. In each city, it’s the same: communications back and forth. Things being queried. Things responding…but what does it mean? Is this a pattern she’s just now seeing? Is something changing? Is this the key to it all? Was this happening already? She can’t figure it out.
For just another moment, she lets it clarify. During which time those nodes keep brightening. To the point where she realizes it’s not just her focus getting better. It’s not just her read on this place improving. These changes are real. They’re making her current position far too dangerous. The Jaguars could be on to her. She’s got to beat a retreat. She’s got enough to go on. She starts to withdraw.
But they move first.
Marlowe looks around. The chamber he’s in is perhaps twenty meters by another fifteen. At least one level has been cut away above it to accommodate its vaulting ceiling. Yet in all this space, it’s the center of the room that really gets Marlowe’s attention.
Because that’s where the missiles are.
Five of them. All of them protruding from a cylinder-shaped launcher that sits upon a dais. Each is about three meters long, with the green cat-skull of the Jaguars painted upon its nose cone. All around lie consoles, electronic equipment, bundles of wire. Marlowe creeps in toward the launcher. Smoke from the flames behind him is beginning to waft into the room. But he pays it no heed. He reaches that center structure and leaps forward, vaulting over it, holding his arms and guns perfectly level.
Two meters in front of where Marlowe’s just landed, a man sits cross-legged, calmly gazing up at him. The man’s skin is darker than that of any of the guerrillas Marlowe has encountered thus far. Greyish-black hair falls down around his shoulders. He regards Marlowe with a strange mixture of interest and indifference. His eyes are as black as his hair must once have been.
“Yanqui.” The voice is low. It sounds almost amused. “You were too fast for us. We thought we would have had more warning. We failed to prepare for just one man.”
The Jaguar’s stalling for time is transparent. But Marlowe needs information. This is almost certainly the man he’s charged with bringing back—but the missiles have changed the nature of the mission automatically. The man opens his mouth to speak again, but Marlowe cuts him off: “Where’d you get the missiles?”
“Missiles?” The man rises to his feet. He smiles. Marlowe’s wrists flex upon the edge of trigger. “I see no missiles. All I see are the teeth of the Great Cat.”
“The jaguar?”
“You defile its name even as you speak it, Yanqui. Just as you defile our land. Do you not recognize these weapons? When the gate to their cage is lifted, they will go faster than the wind, and they have more cunning than do mere men.”
“You’re saying that these missiles are hypersonic?
” Marlowe doesn’t dare turn and inspect the engines to confirm the claim. “Tell me where you got them, or I am going to kill you.”
“Shoot me if you like, then, Yanqui—” Accepting the invitation, Marlowe lowers his left arm and switches to regular ammo, blowing the man’s right kneecap into splinters. Blood and flesh spray through the air. The man goes down—and then rolls over and looks up at Marlowe. Blood’s pouring from his shattered leg. He’s still smiling. And still speaking as calmly as before.
“My soul has already gone to join my ancestors, Jason Marlowe. But I left my body behind to tell you that the Jaguar of all our souls is even now among us. Ready to purge this land of all who oppress us. Ready to lick clean your bones. Are you listening now, Yanqui?”
“How do you know who I am?” says Jason Marlowe, and thrusts one of his guns into the man’s smiling face. “So help me God, man, you’d better tell me what you’re saying.”
“But I’m saying nothing you can understand.” Spittle flicks onto the barrel of Marlowe’s weapon. “Except for the fact that your people are about to be dealt retribution in full. As for how I know your name—Paynal, He Who Walks Upon the Wind and Carries Their Decrees, has imparted much to me. He has informed me that They have decided that if you can pass Their servant’s test of quickness, then you are worthy to play your part in the final drama.”
“If you keep talking, the next bullet’s going straight through your teeth.” Marlowe knows he shouldn’t even bother to make the threat. He knows that he should kill this man right now. But he also knows that he won’t. Now he’s wondering if he’ll be able to shoot him at all. Somehow this crippled man bleeding on the floor has gained the upper hand.
As if sensing his advantage, the man laughs. “The test of quickness, Yanqui. In your language they call it ‘beating the bullet,’ do they not? But no matter—you’ve already failed it, as you sit here prattling with me. For behold, my spirit-guardians have crossed the threshold and are here to join us—and in mere seconds so will my mortal sentinels.” As the man speaks, Marlowe suddenly senses a presence moving up behind him, creeping in between the blind spots of his sensors. He can even see it—some kind of cat that seems to almost glide around the base of the missile platform, its tensing muscles rippling as it prepares to strike—
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