“Perfectly.”
“Perfect. Now, as you yourself just said, you’ll have to leave shortly if you’re going to make Kennedy. We’ll have a team waiting at Cornwall. But you’re going to have to reach them first.”
“And if we get busted at customs or on the train? What then?”
“Probably not much.”
“Great.”
“Relax. I’ve got you covered. I’ve got decoys going. I’ve got you under multiple layers. This is going to happen. You’ll be in London by the dawn.”
“Can’t wait to see her,” mutters Spencer.
But the voice is gone. The line is dead. Now there’s just the room. And the face of Linehan. It stares at Spencer.
“Having fun in there?”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“What did your imaginary friend have to say?”
“That it’s a green.”
“Anything else?”
“That we’re going to take the tunnels.”
“Huh. Where’s the advantage?”
“There may be none.”
“When do we leave?”
“Right now.”
“And how’s your friend gonna get us on that train?”
“He’s going to change us.”
“Change is good. What’s my new name, Spencer?”
And Spencer tells him.
“Do you have the codes to back it up?”
“I do. Are you prepared for download?”
“Meaning am I prepared to take that risk?”
“Interpret my question as you please.”
“No question at all. Gimme the codes.”
Spencer triggers an implant: information whips out from within his eyesocket, leaps the gap between them, alights on Linehan’s own retina. Linehan’s expression doesn’t change. Whatever precautions he’s taking or his razor gave him aren’t visible to Spencer. If Linehan’s to make use of the codes to reconfigure his own ID cards and chips, he’s going to have to brave the possibility of being fucked with. Then again: he probably has his own countermeasures at work. Spencer wonders at those countermeasures, wonders at the possibility that Control’s rigged the codes with trojan, wonders at the potential duel between that unseen creature and the one who stands in front of him.
And then Linehan smiles.
“Excellent,” he says. “These should work. Are they real?”
“I was told they were.”
“What happened to the signified?”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t,” says Linehan. “And what about us?”
“What about us?”
“I’m thinking we still don’t know each other well enough.”
“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying all along?”
“No. Who we are doesn’t matter. What happened in the past, why we’re here, what we’d do without constraints—that’s not what matters.”
“Then what does?”
“Tactics.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that we’re speaking out loud right now.”
“So?”
“So that would mean that when we’re on that train, we won’t be able to coordinate. We won’t be able to talk about anything related to the run.”
“You’re talking about the one-on-one.”
“Of course. Will you risk its configuration?”
“I presume you’re talking coded.”
“Anything else wouldn’t be enough. I’ll do this clean, Spencer. I’ll give you my word if you’ll do the same.”
“What’s that word worth?”
“Whatever you want to make yours, Spencer.”
“I’m a razor.”
“I’m full of surprises.”
“Let’s do it.”
And they do. They connect, and neither feels a thing. If either’s trying to trick the other, neither gives a sign. They connect, and in that moment a new understanding’s born. A new partnership’s afoot. It’s slaked its thirst on names wrenched from the ranks of the recently living. It’s gorged itself on identities furnished by the freshly dead. So now it strikes camp, stalks on out into those sun-starved streets. It catches the scent of sea.
And bears down upon Atlantic.
P owering out over that ocean is a winged craft that carries another. Atmospheric steed to transport orbital rider to a launching in the rafters. Two within that upper ship to feel it.
“Always a rush,” says Marlowe.
“The real rush,” says Haskell, “hasn’t happened yet.”
But when it comes you’ll know it. That hit to hammer you beyond air: it’s the one thing you can’t escape. That force: you either face it down, or else you stay on Earth forever. See, there were those who died by impact and those who died in the burn and others who perished only to just drift. Everyone who goes up shares their fate. Everyone who makes this climb partakes of what they went through.
If only for a moment.
“You okay,” says Marlowe.
“Yes,” she replies.
But she isn’t. She doesn’t know why. She can’t tell how much of it is the man beside her. How much of it is Sinclair. How much is Morat. How much is Moon itself. All she knows is that it’s like all those things are swirling ever faster inside her head. It’s like she can’t tell what’s going to happen when that swirling stops. It’s like she thinks she’s going crazy. It’s like she can hardly wait.
Nor does she. She reaches out into the zone, disconnects the cameras looking out into the room: releases her straps, pivots out of her seat—and into Jason Marlowe’s. Her lips meet his even as he undoes his own strap, harnesses it around both of them. They may as well be attacking each other for all the force they’re throwing into it. She moans as he gets a hand inside her shirt. He gasps as she runs her fingers down along his crotch.
And yet somehow she still can’t bring herself to focus. The more he touches her the more afraid she gets. Her mind’s fleeing beyond her burning nerve endings. Zone expands on wireless within her skull, anchors itself against the universe. The Sun: infinite energy, the ultimate source of all she sees, and yet the one thing she doesn’t. The Moon: purple clusters of lunar installations shimmering behind a second’s time delay, reflecting possibilities of the routes they might or might not have described during that eon-long lapse. The Earth: carpeted chaos of stations, greyed-out inner enclaves, blacked-out nexi of things she suspects but can’t ascertain. The cluster of connections sprawls up into the orbits all around, surrounds her with endless grids kaleidoscoped together in endless shifting patterns—and all of it regarded through the prism of the node that constitutes the Janus spaceplane and its B-130 suborbital booster.
But somewhere in that node she sees a picture of a room. In that room she can see her body making love to a stranger. She sees her own back arching as he moves on up inside her. She watches as she starts to grind against him. She wonders what it is she’s so terrified of—is she trying to get away from him, or is she looking for something else? She shouldn’t be jacking in during the transit. She shouldn’t be doing anything more than just a little harmless camera-tweaking. But some kind of intuition’s calling to her with an urgency to match her sharpest cries.
So she lets that node blossom around her, closes on that upper cockpit—and jumps from there to the lower. She takes in the two men sitting there—takes in the way they watch the controls, watch the sunset dissolving past them. Red melts across the window, shades off into deeper hues that fall away into something approaching black. She sees her flesh writhing all across that dark. She feels herself pulled back toward it.
But somehow she tears herself away: uses the instruments in both cockpits to inventory the sensors in both ships. The exterior ones just reveal rising heat and fading light. The interior ones show rooms, passageways, corridors, crawl spaces—all the contours of contained space. She keeps on moving through the cameras that monitor thos
e silent chambers. All are normal.
Except for the one that holds Morat.
A compartment in the back of the lower spaceplane: Morat sits in a corner, atop a crate. His face is expressionless. Pale eyes look straight at her. They’re superimposed against Marlowe’s contorting features. Haskell meets both gazes—while simultaneously she lets her mind thread back toward the cockpit—and then toward the instrument panels in that B-130’s cockpit.
But she can’t reach them. She can’t trace a direct link from this particular sensor to what the pilots can see. Something’s blocking the data’s passage. Something’s hacking the comps. A razor immersed can see the truth. A pilot gazing at a screen can’t.
Adrenaline floods Haskell’s body, merges with her distant ecstasy—and as it does so, her perception in the zone sharpens even further. The nervous system into which she’s extended her own crystallizes still finer. The edges grow sharper, the colors brighter, the shadows darker.
And in those shadows she can start to see a pattern. She can see there’s something in the zone with her, something connected to Morat. The zone around him is changing—as though he’s somehow warping it. Haskell wonders how good a razor Morat is. She wonders what the hell he’s doing. She creeps in closer, feels her climax closing in. She pushes through thickets of circuits, gazes through them at Morat. She follows the focus of his efforts—sees that he’s reaching into the zone, reaching far beyond the B-130, accessing one of the nearby navigation satellites with codes so covert she can barely see them deploy. From there he passes in one motion through several more sats, obscuring his trail as he does so—but not so well that she can’t follow. She counts ten sats in all, strung across the globe. She follows him ever deeper into that labyrinth even as her vision blurs. Even as her body shakes. She feels the rush as she comes on the other side of planet.
And then Morat produces a door out of nothing.
And opens it. Haskell can’t believe what she’s seeing. She’s staring straight through the wall of the American zone itself. She’s looking straight down a tunnel that leads right through the middle of the moats and ramparts and battlements intended to forestall precisely this. She’s looking out into the neutral zones: staring straight at a snowstorm of traffic rushing past her, none of it seeing the door that’s opened in the wall of universe.
Which is presumably the point. Secret doors aren’t useful if everybody’s in on the secret. Haskell lets her head rest on Marlowe’s heaving shoulder, looks out over Morat’s shoulder, looks out upon that world, looks in the same direction he is—looking at where something’s suddenly flitting in out of that traffic, making a beeline toward the opening.
But she moves first. She lunges out to snap the connection, slam the door. But the thing’s faster—it darts in, whips past her, straight into the lower spaceplane as the door slams shut behind it. She’s got no idea what’s sustaining its connection. Maybe the door’s actually still open. Maybe it’s got one of its own.
Or maybe connection isn’t the point. Maybe the real issue is activation. Because now something’s coming to life within the crates that surround Morat. Whatever’s just leapt in from the neutral zones seems to have been the seed. But Haskell can’t see into the crates. She doesn’t know what’s sprouting. All she knows is that now virtual tendrils are starting to sidle from the crates out into the lower spaceplane’s systems—snaking through them, closing on the systems that ring the cockpit.
Haskell watches in sick fascination as they move in toward the pilots who sit at the cockpit’s center. She knows she should stop watching. But that thought seems very far away. Even farther than Marlowe as his thrusts grow ever more eager. Far closer is the feeling that she doesn’t need to move very fast at all. That she must be in a dream. That this is some fragment of some half-remembered briefing suddenly engulfing her. That her own mind’s finally tumbled over the brink of sanity. She hauls herself back from that edge—takes in Marlowe, takes in Morat, takes in the shape that’s swelling through the lower spaceplane like some kind of malignant growth. For a moment, she sees straight past it—sees the composite craft as one node among tens of millions, sees the whole zone. It’s her whole world.
And then it’s not.
All goes blank. All sound fades into silence, all sensation collapses to a single point. All existence winks out. There’s nothing left—nothing save the eyes of the man who’s just spent himself inside her. They stare into her own.
“Oh God, Claire,” says Marlowe. “I fucking love you.”
“Morat’s on the booster,” she replies. She’s struggling to pull herself off him.
“He’s what?”
“He’s right below us.”
“You’re seeing things,” says Marlowe. But even as he says this, the lights go out. For a moment there’s darkness. But then the emergency lighting kicks in on deep red.
“You’re damn right I’m seeing things,” Haskell mutters. “I’m finally starting to see them clearly.” She seals her shirt, fastens her pants. She hauls herself to her feet, yanks open one of the doors of the chamber.
“Where the hell are you going?” he says.
“Where the hell do you think I’m going?” she says. “I can’t get back into the zone. It’s like there is none. I’ve got to try a wire connection into the control node. We’ve got to get inside the cockpit.” She starts to pull herself up the inclined floor toward it.
“Claire,” says Marlowe. “You’re losing it.”
“If I’m losing it, then who the fuck turned out the lights?”
But Marlowe’s not responding. He’s just pulling himself out of his seat, pulling his own pants up, pulling himself after her. The corridor to which the forward door of their takeoff room leads is about six meters long. The only other door in that corridor leads to the cockpit. Marlowe fights the acceleration, catches up with Haskell when she’s halfway to that door. He tries to grab her arm. She backhands him across the face.
“Don’t you fucking touch me!”
“Easy, Claire,” says Marlowe. “Easy.”
“It’s not like you think,” she says, and now she’s weeping. “I don’t know what’s happening between you and me. All I know is what we’re heading for.” She keeps on hauling herself toward the cockpit. “Morat’s on this fucking plane. His hack threw me straight from zone. I swear it. I swear I’m not going crazy.”
“Then who turned out the lights?”
“I told you already! Morat’s fucking with the plane!”
“I thought Morat was on our side!”
She stares at him. “Are you in league with him?” she asks.
“Who are you in league with? What did you do when you were in there? Why did you choose that particular moment to distract me? You know my file. You know my memories. You know me too well, Claire.”
She stares at him, mouth open. She turns, reaches the cockpit door. She tries to open it. It won’t budge. She works the manuals, slides it open.
The two bodies of the pilots are still in their chairs. Agony’s frozen on their faces. No wounds are evident. The lights of the controls wink around them. The windows show blue that’s almost black.
“Oh Jesus,” says Haskell.
Marlowe’s drawn his gun. He’s pointing it at her with one hand while he holds on to the doorway with the other.
“I’ve got to try to get back in the zone,” she says.
“Sure, Claire,” he replies. “Whatever you say.”
“I didn’t do this!”
“God, I hope that’s true.”
“Put your gun away!”
“Not until we figure out what’s going on.”
She’s tempted to rage at him. She’s tempted to scream. She’s tempted to lunge for his weapon. But she realizes that such actions would compound the problem. So she just talks quickly while she holds on to the back of the chair in front of her.
“Jason. Look at me. I’m on your side. But if I wasn’t, I’d have taken you by surprise. I wouldn�
�t have let it come to this—your gun against my head, two dead to get you totally alert. Think about it, Jason. Something’s wrong and it’s far bigger than the two of us. And besides: if you’re wrong about the person whom you’re pointing that gun at, things are about to go from bad to downright awful unless we start working together, for fuck’s sake.”
He looks at her. He looks at the controls. He looks at the dead pilots. He looks back at her.
“Okay,” he says. “Fine.” He doesn’t put the gun away. But he’s no longer pointing it at her. “Do what you have to. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” says a voice.
They both whirl toward it. A dashboard-encased screen has sprung to life. It casts dull glow across their faces. The face of Morat sits upon it.
“We’ve got a problem,” he says.
“You’re damn right we’ve got a problem.” Haskell levels her finger at the screen. “You’re on this fucking plane.”
“You’re right,” says Morat, betraying no surprise. “I’m here to protect you. You’re in grave danger. The upper plane is infected.”
“With what?”
“With the Rain,” says Morat. “They’ve infiltrated.”
Haskell flings herself across the cockpit, smashes into that screen with both fists. Morat’s face disintegrates. Shards of plastic fly. But even as they hit the ground, that face is flickering back into existence.
On every remaining screen.
“You can’t destroy them all,” he says.
“You were trying to lure us to the lower plane,” says Haskell slowly. “You’re Autumn Rain.”
“No,” he says. “I’m not. But I’m going to take you to them.”
They stare at him.
“Right now,” he adds.
“Going to tell us why?” asks Haskell softly.
“There’d be no point,” he replies. “Save to say that I swore to deliver them live runners.”
“You’re not Morat,” says Marlowe.
“Oh yes he is,” says Haskell.
“And what the fuck do you think you’re getting out of it?” asks Marlowe.
“Everything that matters,” says Morat. “When they hurl the rulers of this planet down in pieces finer than those into which that Elevator burned: I’ll be at their side. When they hold sway over all flesh, I’ll take my place among the anointed. All I have to do is convey you to their sanctuary.”
Mirrored Heavens ar-1 Page 17
