Mirrored Heavens ar-1

by David J. Williams

  “Look at them go,” says Linehan.

  “You’re enjoying this,” says Spencer.

  “Gotta live for the moment,” replies Linehan.

  He raises the auto-pistol, starts firing into the backs of the people in front of him. For a moment, Spencer’s tempted to whirl on him, beg that he stop, shoot him if he doesn’t. But only for a moment. Truth of the matter is that he doesn’t dare. It’s not even that he’s sure Linehan will turn on him if he has to. It’s more that he feels he’s already in too deep, already complicit. He wonders if he still holds out the hope that he can justify these deaths, wonders if thinking along such lines is the worst crime of all. He realizes he still has no idea what Linehan’s plan is anyway.

  So he asks.

  “What makes you think I’ve got one?” says Linehan. He stops firing. Most of the targets have raced out of range. Those who remain are doing their utmost to get there.

  “You’re certainly acting like it,” replies Spencer.

  “That’s what improvisation’s all about,” says Linehan. “Better get ready to use that gun of yours.”

  For a moment, Spencer thinks that Linehan has read his mind, figures that he’s about to turn on him. But then he realizes that what Linehan is referring to is the forward A/V feed. Flame’s gouting toward the screen. People in front of the woman to whom the camera’s been attached are burning. Through that flame, Spencer catches a glimpse of two more suited figures a car or two ahead, spraying out fire from nozzles atop their helmets.

  “They’re killing everybody,” says Spencer.

  “They’re not stupid,” says Linehan. “They’ve realized we’re using the passengers. They must know that’s the only way we could have got hi-ex right next to them.”

  “Did you mine her too?”

  “With something a little less powerful,” says Linehan. “Given that we’re behind her.”

  “You’re a real piece of work.”

  “Thanks.”

  The woman’s been caught in the fires. They’re hot. They consume her quickly. They consume the camera too—Linehan hits the button. Snarls.

  “Too late,” he says.

  “Too bad,” says Spencer.

  “Here they come.”

  Running toward them are the rearmost passengers who’ve had the misfortune to be caught between the two sets of antagonists. Now they’re foremost in fleeing in the direction they’ve come.

  “We need your bullets too, Spencer,” says Linehan as he opens up once more.

  “I can’t do it,” says Spencer.

  “Don’t you get it, man? They’re already dead.”

  The doomed are reversing direction once more—heading forward once again. But a few aren’t turning around. One dies at Linehan’s feet. One lunges toward Spencer—who fends off the lunge, strikes the man with his rifle butt, sends him sprawling. Linehan shoots him through the head, starts moving forward once again.

  “I can’t take this anymore,” says Spencer.

  “Want me to get it over for you?”

  “Fuck you. I’m getting back into the zone.”

  “I thought you said there was no zone to speak of.”

  “There’s a zone alright. It’s just a mess. Wireless isn’t happening. Wires may be more reliable.”

  “So jack in.”

  “So I need to stop.”

  “We can’t stop.”

  “I didn’t say we needed to stop. I said I needed to.”

  He halts, pulls open a door. It leads to the facilities. It’s just a tiny chamber. But Spencer steps inside anyway. He pulls wires from his skull, pulls lights from fixtures. Linehan stares at him.

  “We can’t split up,” he says.

  “Want to bet?” says Spencer.

  “Steel yourself,” says Linehan. “You’re Priam’s man. Do you think that Priam is above all this? That your side never uses innocents as weapons?”

  “This isn’t about morality,” says Spencer. “It’s about strategy. We’ve got to get some zone coverage or we’ll never make it.”

  “Oh,” says Linehan. “I get it. The quintessential razor—fine with anything as long as you’re doing it in zone. But get you out into the real world and you can’t even pull a goddamn trigger.”

  “Shut up,” says Spencer. “Shut that door.”

  “I’ll be back,” says Linehan.

  “And I’ll watch your back,” replies Spencer. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  The door slams shut. Spencer stares at it—watches as it’s replaced in a single moment by a zone that’s just as fuzzy as it was before. Things still haven’t clarified. On the contrary: they’ve retreated still farther into shadow. The train’s one long blur. What’s beyond it is scarcely visible. There’s some intimation of something big somewhere farther out. Something that’s in motion. Spencer pictures a titanic struggle going on out there. He pictures himself as elusive, unattainable. He knows that’s about as false a picture as he can paint.

  But now he can see shards of light glowing close at hand. There’s one about twenty cars up and one on the opposite side of the train, about fifteen cars back. They’re unmistakable.

  They’re his fellow razors.

  Only they’re not on his side. And they’re not on the train either. They’re in vehicles right alongside. The razors are shielding those vehicles’ exact specs. Spencer presumes there are other vehicles out there. Yet the zone’s awash with so much turbulence that it’s impossible for him to say for sure. Nor does he need to: he springs forward, cannons into two of them. Now he’s a battering ram surging. One of his targets gets his shields up in time.

  The other doesn’t.

  Spencer crumples through the defenses like they’re so much paper. He feels his sharpness tearing all the way through to the point where wires meet nerves. He burns those nerves, sears that brain. He slices open all that data.

  And suddenly he’s presiding over several different views of the car that’s fifteen cars back from the one in which he’s hidden. Several different views through several different visors. But far more important than those views is the glimpse he’s now got into these men’s hearts. Spencer flares like lightning through their suit-comps, overrides them, makes them turn on each other with all their automated weapons. He destroys the whole squad that was attached to the gunship he’s just taken over. He revs up the ship’s controls. He’s ready to go places with it and the corpses it contains.

  Only he’s not. Instead the ship’s getting shredded by gunfire from still another farther down the tunnel. Simultaneously he comes under attack from several other razors. They’re trying to triangulate on him. He’s searching for a way to get at them. He needs a better view. He rifles through the train’s systems. He still can’t get at its controls.

  But what he can get at are its cameras. Suddenly he’s got access to the feeds from all eighty cars. Only it’s not eighty. Cars sixty-five and onward are gone. Cars number nineteen through twenty-eight have been scorched with fire. What’s left of the passengers in that section of the train are huddled amidst the seats of cars twenty-nine through thirty-three. Suited figures are moving up through twenty-seven and twenty-eight. There are five of them. The gunship from which they’ve come is moored at car number nineteen. It’s the one whose razor resisted Spencer’s onslaught. That razor’s shielding his men well. He’s trying to get out ahead of them. He’s trying to get into the cameras. But Spencer is blocking him—preventing him from seeing Linehan in car number thirty-four, preventing him from seeing Spencer himself in car number forty.

  Spencer’s got a nasty feeling he’s been made anyway. His view into most of those cars is vanishing, and he can no longer see Linehan or his antagonists—or any of the cars save the ones immediately adjacent to the one he’s in. He’s coming under point-blank zone assault. Other razors are prising the train from his virtual fingers. The gunship behind him accelerates up the tunnel, climbing past the train’s cars, moving past the sixties, the fifties—the fo
rties. It starts to slow down. It moves past car number forty-five. It stops at car number forty-one. Spencer can see it vaguely in the zone. He hurls himself against its razor. But that razor’s dug in. Spencer can’t break through.

  All he can do is watch as though in a dream: the exterior door in car number forty-one slides open and suited figures emerge from a walkway that’s been extended from their gunship. They stride rapidly into car number forty. Spencer watches as they move toward the door behind which his body’s stored. He wants to jack out. He wants to run. He wants to stop them somehow. He doesn’t do any of those things. He just flings himself forward in one final frantic attack at the razor who’s crouched behind the bulwarks so close at hand.

  He fails—ricochets off those barricades. And watches as the suits rip that door off its hinges. He catches a quick glimpse of himself sitting against the sink, eyes rolled back, jaw open—and then they seize him.

  The zone vanishes. He’s staring up at visors staring down upon him. Weapons are thrust in his face.

  “Don’t move,” says a voice.

  It’s not like Spencer would dream of it. They slap a neural lock onto his spine. He’s paralyzed: they’re carrying him back toward their ship like some kind of trussed-up trophy. They move back on through to car number forty-one.

  Which is where they stop. Something seems to be going on. One of them leaps forward, slides shut the door through which they came. They no longer seem to be bent on getting back to their ship. Instead they’re taking up defensive positions. They’re not talking. But they’re clearly communicating. They’re training their guns forward and backward, eyeing the exterior and interior doors alike. Spencer finds himself hurled down upon one of the now-empty seats. He watches as the door from car number forty opens.

  And Linehan enters the room.

  He’s not in armor. Those he faces are. That should be the end of it. But it’s not. And Spencer feels like he’s back in his dream—as Linehan leaps forward, ducking in under the suits’ fire, twisting his whole body through the air as he runs along the wall, right angles to the floor, his whip leaping out, licking onto one of those suits’ helmets. There’s a detonation. The suit topples to the floor, smoke trailing along a quarter-circle arc from what remains of its neck. Linehan continues his charge down the wall—switches to the ceiling as the suits continue to fire at him. His auto-pistol speaks—first left, then right, then left again, even as its wielder’s path blurs onto the other wall, even as that wielder lashes out with the whip again, lands a blow on another suit’s torso. There’s another detonation. Linehan leaps straight forward—knocking what’s left of that suit into the next, grappling with the next one, ripping its arm clean off, firing shots into mangled flesh. But as he does so, the remaining suit’s whirling toward Spencer, taking aim—and then the suit’s gun hand disintegrates as the whip hits home, dances from there to the suit’s head.

  The car’s still. Linehan bends over Spencer, removes the neural lock, tosses it aside.

  “I can walk from here,” mutters Spencer.

  “We’re done with walking,” says Linehan.

  He steers Spencer to the car’s open exterior door. Beyond is some kind of tube. Spencer follows Linehan down it.

  And into the interior of the much smaller vehicle that’s running parallel with the train. There’s not much in that interior. It’s about six meters long and three meters wide, with a cockpit at each end. Each cockpit features controls and a slitted window.

  “Sit down,” says Linehan. “Wire yourself in.”

  “Is this one of their gunships?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “The Rain’s?”

  “If it were, we’d never have made it in here. But we’ve got about ten seconds all the same. So how about we talk as we go?”

  The door slides shut behind them. They strap in. They disconnect the ship from the train. Spencer jacks in. The controls spread before him. The rails stretch far beyond him.

  He hits it.

  S ea and space and aircraft: all have the same type of corridor. All boast new kinds of narrow: like bones bereft of marrow, like hollow when it’s hardly worthy of the word. Marlowe moves carefully through a labyrinth that’s far more complex than the layout of the plane above it. It’s far larger. It’s not lit either. Whoever’s in charge has turned off all the lights.

  But Marlowe’s willing to bet they haven’t turned off the sensors. He’s felt nothing upon him yet, but—camo or no camo—he’s sure he’s being picked up all the same, particularly as the darkness is forcing him to use his own sensors. He sends them probing along a number of spectrums. Among them is the visible.

  The walls and ceiling thus revealed are a combination of plastic and metal. The rooms that they enclose are largely empty. The ship those rooms comprise has seen better days. It was commissioned as a massive bomber—capable of launching a smaller one from its back and into space, and then swooping down upon the enemy anywhere on Earth. But that was twenty years ago. It still constitutes impressive technology. But from a military perspective, it’s obsolete. Smart hypersonic missiles have seen to that. Now the ship’s primarily given over to cargo runs. Usually it’s no longer even armed. Under normal circumstances it would be packed with freight. But for this mission it only had one piece of freight to haul.

  And release. At least, that was the idea. But someone had other ideas. And Marlowe can’t wait to get face-to-face with that someone. But it seems like his body couldn’t be moving any slower. It’s like he’s pulling himself up a mountain—as the descent steepens, the floor is sloping ever more steeply beneath his feet. He’s being shoved toward that floor with a steadily increasing force. The shaking around him is intensifying, the ship rocking in the full throes of reentry. Marlowe keeps to the walls. He moves through the doors like anything could happen.

  But the drone catches him by surprise anyway. It’s propelled by jets—gyros that flare suddenly as it rounds a corner and whips in toward his face. He fires his own jets—meets it in its headlong flight, smashes into it with one fist, sends it slamming into a wall. He lights it up with his guns, keeps going.

  Straight into two more. One’s clinging to the wall—and suddenly springing in toward him. The other’s another gyro-platform. Wicked-looking barrels hang from beneath it. Marlowe dives toward the side, gets the first drone between him and the second. It riddles its comrade, starts to riddle him—but now he’s lashing out with rapid fire to perforate it.

  But not before he’s been hit himself. He’s scarcely got time to assess the damage before he’s taking more of it from every side. They’re rushing him from all angles now. They’re even coming out of the walls: the vent covers are snapping off and machines are leaping from them. Marlowe retracts his thrusters and lets his guns roar. Flamers mounted on his back spray everywhere. His fists and boots dispatch drones of every description. He catches quick glimpses here and there of the things he’s fighting—his helmet cannonades into something that’s more teeth than body, his boot dropkicks a spiked orb into a wall—but mostly he’s just going on reflex. His vision’s a maelstrom of data and drones. He’s getting hit repeatedly. He’s giving out far worse than he’s getting.

  And yet he’s being ground down steadily. There are simply too many of them. One of his flamers gets knocked out. Bullets are lodged all over his suit. The outer armor on his left side’s almost penetrated. His fists are worn dull from punching.

  “Had enough?” says a voice.

  Morat’s voice is being broadcast from one of the drones. Marlowe fires hi-ex into it. The drone detonates. But the others take up where it left off.

  “You’re fighting something you can’t kill,” they say.

  But Marlowe doesn’t answer. He just keeps battling his way through them—straining against the G-force, grabbing two drones, smashing them together, firing point-blank, letting his shots ricochet off walls and into targets. His movements speed up even as his armor corrodes—even as the pressures on his body con
tinue to build as the ship surges through reentry. He’s in some kind of zone all his own now, one where the voices lapping up against his brain are just part of the scenery.

  “You’re not listening, Jason. Once I finish taking off that armor I’m going to start in on what’s left. I’m going to introduce your organs to the air. I’m going to strangle you with a noose made from your own intestines. But I’m going to leave your eyes for last. Know why, Jason?”

  Marlowe doesn’t answer. Now he’s battling just to stay on his feet. The husks of shattered metal pile up around him. The frenzy of the drones’ attack is increasing. He uses his armor as a battering ram, charges into a wall, takes it down, charges away from the onslaught and on through into an adjacent room. It’s empty of drones.

  For about a second.

  “Because I’m going to make you watch, Jason. I’m going to make you watch while I do to her what you can’t even be sure you did all that time ago. Was there ever a time when you weren’t Sinclair’s eunuch? Was there ever a moment when your desire was truly your own?”

  Marlowe has hit on a strategy he likes. It’s pretty much the only one he’s got left—smashing his way through wall after wall—but if he’s making better progress, that’s mostly because the ship’s finally coming out of its reentry. The angle of descent is decreasing. So is the deceleration, which ought to mean he can contact Haskell. But she’s not answering. Or she can’t hear. The drones keep sniping at him. His wrist gets hit hard enough to destroy the gun encased there. He’s pretty much down to the innermost shell of his armor now.

  “But don’t worry, Jason. You’ll get that action yet. I’ll shear off your one last weapon and cram it down her throat. Partially to repay you for what you’ve done to my machines. But mostly to teach her for being such a troublesome cunt. Oh yes: she’s doing much better than you are, Jason. She’s still holding out up there. Whereas you’re about to meet with one wall too many. You’re about to meet with me, Jason. Come on. You’re almost there.”