Mirrored Heavens ar-1

by David J. Williams

  And resumes inside Spencer’s head.

  “Spencer,” it says, “this will be our last conversation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My ability to inflect this situation is approaching its limits. As is the risk to my position.”

  “The risk to your position? And mine—”

  “Has never been stronger. How much higher can a pawn get than to be the object of so much attention? What could be better than knowing that I’m going to wind you up for one last try?”

  “And while I run you’re going to watch.”

  “And while I watch you’re going to blame me. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But now I need you to focus on the larger picture. A major power struggle is going down in the Inner Cabinet. CICom has been dismembered. Something’s stirring in the depths of SpaceCom. This man is just one fugitive among many now. So join the ranks of the refugees, Spencer. It’s time to travel rough. You made it through the southern tunnels. You’re sitting in the city they call Belem-Macapa. You’re ready to make the run straight up that river.”

  “What else would you suggest?”

  “I wouldn’t. I’d take it all the way.”

  “The Latin run.”

  “Exactly. Go west along the Amazon and then turn south. At this point it’s probably the only hope you have.”

  “Upriver’s insanity, Control. If even half the stories are true—”

  “All the better for you if they are. It’s all in the map that’s hitting you now. Along with the numbers of some neutral bank accounts. My last gifts to you.”

  “And you’re really cutting contact with me.”

  “Only way to play this, Spencer. Whatever happens, I’m all we’ve got in here. I like you, Spencer. But like’s not the same as programming.”

  “You can say that again,” says Spencer.

  “Try to remember that I’m here forever. Or until they bring me to bay for good. That I’m more than sworn to postpone that day as long as possible. As I said, one conversation more. This one. And this is the end between us.”

  “Why are you rationalizing this?”

  “I’m not. I’m trying to focus you one last time. Don’t look backward. Only forward. Now go.”

  The connection terminates. Spencer rips the jack out of his head, tears the wires out of the wall. He shoves past Linehan. He staggers over to the window, presses his face up against the plastic. He exhales.

  “So what else did your imaginary friend have to say,” says Linehan.

  “He’s not my friend,” says Spencer. “He never was.”

  “It’s an overrated concept anyway,” says Linehan.

  But what’s not overrated is your first sight of Congreve. The first city built by man never to know the Earth—the city above which false stars cluster into strange zodiacs that denote the fleet that sits sixty thousand klicks out. Somewhere in those swarms are the SpaceCom flagships. Somewhere in that city two men gaze out a window.

  “Nice place you got here,” says the Operative.

  “I know,” replies Sarmax.

  The geometry of off-world rooftops stretches before them. Distant mountains loom through a translucent dome. The sky’s alive with lights. Shadows play within the darkened room.

  “Lot of activity,” says the Operative.

  “Yes,” replies Sarmax.

  “They’re moving onto war footing.”

  “After major incidents in two oceans, they have to.” Sarmax turns from the window. The curtains swing shut behind him even as the interior lights come up. The room thus revealed is ornately furnished. A crystal globe of the Moon sits within one corner. Sarmax walks to it. Regards it. Shrugs.

  “We have to assume free agency,” he adds. “Until we can prove otherwise, we have to assume that those who are supposed to be in control still are. The East has reason enough to hate us already. Lord knows we’ve got enough reasons to hate them.”

  “But all that’s just context,” says the Operative.

  “Right. It’s all just context. One that the new players are exploiting. We have to remember who we’re dealing with. They aren’t just assassins. They’re takeover artists. They burrow from within. We have to assume that as soon as they succeed in either East or West, they’ll initiate a preemptive strike—if they come to the conclusion they’re not going to be able to pull off a doubleheader.”

  “The worst case of all,” says the Operative.

  “Believe it. They may be able to do this quietly. They may not need war at all.”

  “But they’ve got far too many reasons to press for it.”

  “Meaning what?”

  The Operative stares. “Come on, Leo.”

  “I want you to say it.”

  “Okay,” says the Operative. “I’ll say it. Everything they’ve done is calculated to drive up tension. Why else down the Elevator? Now neither side can trust the other. Talk about taking an axe to détente. And whatever it was they wanted in that spaceplane—they did it in a way that winds the noose ever tighter. They know what they’re doing.”

  Sarmax twirls the globe absently. “That’s what concerns me most. They’ve learned new tricks. They’ve developed an uncanny talent for street theater that frankly scares me shitless. They’re using it to drive the world toward the brink. Which makes it even easier for someone who’s got the moves to creep in toward the center. All those alerts, all those special clearances, all those doors being slammed shut: to a world-class infiltrator, those things are just goddamn tools. The closer to the edge the world gets, the more the Rain enable the very conditions that will underpin their triumph.”

  “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “You’re going to do what your boss told you. Hit the speakeasies. And I’m going to start some transactions you can keep an eye on.”

  “And my boss?”

  “We keep him informed.”

  “We do?”

  “Of course. All we need to hide from him is me, Carson. Which won’t be a problem as long as he buys the duplicate house-node you sold him. Beyond that, we can pretty much feed him anything you and I come up with. Let’s see what he does with it. Let’s see what else he’s got. If he orders you somewhere suddenly, that’s probably where we want to be. And it probably won’t be very far. They’re close, Carson. They’re real close.”

  “It’s a question of time now,” says the Operative. “Not space.”

  T hey’re running smooth through early rush-hour traffic—swooping in upon the Seleucus Flats. Marlowe’s on point. Haskell’s about a klick behind him. He’s riding public transport. She’s in a private vehicle. She’s got both street and zone bound up within her head. She’s taking it in on myriad screens. The city’s streaming past in all its shapes and hues. The news-feeds are keeping tabs on the mounting crisis—keeping tabs, too, on the mounting body count as the gangland hits go out of control. Presiding over it all are the ships of the superpowers—roaring in languid circles far overhead, standing off out over the ocean, staying carefully on the right side of the cordon sanitaire to which they’re keeping. They almost came to blows pursuing the spaceplane down into those canyons. They aren’t going to make the same mistake again.

  Not officially, at any rate. Haskell has no doubt that both East and West have plenty of operatives inside the city already. The handler, for one. She wonders where he is. She’s picked up a few crumbs to suggest that it’s somewhere in the city-center ziggurats that gleam dully in her rearview. She’s not supposed to indulge in triangulation exercises on someone who sits above her in the food chain. But she’s had a few bad experiences of late. So she takes in the angles along which the handler’s signals move in on her, takes in all the views Marlowe’s scanning, takes in all the ways in which many times a billion points of data intersect.

  And then suddenly it all goes blank.

  It’s like the spaceplane: the only way she’s seeing is through her eyes. She can’t see the zone at all. She can see the flitcar in fro
nt of her swerving though, and switches seamlessly to manual, dodges the vehicle as it veers crazily past her—then she turns again to compensate as the momentum of her initial evasion almost carries her straight off the ramp she’s on. She barrels onward while vehicles smash into one another, tumble away into space. She gets a quick glimpse of pedestrians milling in confusion on a nearby walkway—and beyond that, an explosion as something hits a building in the middle distance. That blast is the first of many. Haskell no longer has contact with anyone. She’s just driving all out toward the Flats while the city erupts in pandemonium around her.

  Then the zone kicks back in. But not as it was before. She can see the immediate distance quite clearly. Beyond that it’s like a kaleidoscope on acid. The Seleucus Flats are lost in a wash of colors. The edge of the city isn’t in sight. There’s no sign of Marlowe or the handler. Or anything coherent, for that matter: she ricochets past more cars, switches off onto a side street—roars through alleys, then beneath roofs that put the sky out of sight. She sears through one of the city’s thousand skid rows. Up ahead people are blocking the road, signaling her to stop. She accelerates, runs them down. Shots rip past her—she turns through a junction, roars through a labyrinth of warehouses—and then out into the district’s local downtown. The roof gives out for just a moment—she can see the sky and if anything it looks like there are even more ships out there now. They seem to be holding their formations though. She guesses that whatever’s going on here doesn’t extend all the way out there—so she steers her car into a tunnel, turns from there into a much narrower tunnel, eases her way to where it ends in a wall, and brakes.

  She gets out, a pistol in each hand. She opens a door in the wall—goes through into a corridor that looks like it’s used for storage. She comes out the other end in a roofed street. It’s deserted. It’s lined with doors. She opens one of them, climbs stairs, and goes through another door into a bar. There are two men within it. One’s the bartender.

  The other’s Jason Marlowe.

  “No weapons here,” says the bartender. His accent marks him for Australian. His face marks him for a burn victim once upon a time. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit intimidated by her guns.

  “It’s okay,” says Marlowe. “She’s a friend of mine.”

  “So tell her to put her gear away.”

  But Haskell’s already doing so. She sits down next to Marlowe, who’s sitting in front of a drink. That they found each other isn’t the least bit strange. It’s just standard procedure. Positioned along a rough line between where they started and where they’re going are four other potential rendezvous locations. Which one got used depended on the point at which any disruption of communication occurred. And such disruption was just one contingency among many for which they planned: getting attacked simultaneously, getting attacked individually, picking up the scent of Manilishi, picking up the scent of the Rain themselves….

  “No such thing as surprise,” says Marlowe.

  “I disagree,” replies Haskell. “There’s nothing but.”

  And thus their conversation starts up, maneuvering through inanities and amateur speculation while the one-on-one kicks back in and their real conversation deploys beneath the surface.

  “What the fuck is going on?” says Marlowe.

  “The Rain’s somehow managed to invest primacy in the local nodes all over the city. Each one thinks it runs the whole HK zone.”

  “So it’s irreversible?”

  “For the short term, yes.”

  “Short term’s all that’s left. We’ve got no choice but to make the Flats. We’re only five klicks out.”

  “Think that means anything now? The fact that the Rain can do this citywide means that they probably already have the Manilishi.”

  “We’ve got nothing else to go on,” shoots back Marlowe. “If we can get up to the Flats, we may yet find the trail. How much control do you have in the immediate zone?”

  “Enough to keep us guarded. We’ll be like ghosts. Theoretically anyway.”

  “Real problem’s the local wildlife,” says Marlowe.

  “No,” says Haskell. “Real problem’s whatever the Rain’s preparing behind anarchy’s screen.”

  “You still got the car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the suits?”

  “In the back.”

  “Hey,” says Marlowe out loud. “Thanks for the drink.” He stands up.

  “You kids be safe,” says the bartender. “It’s all shades of shit out there.”

  “It’s just getting started,” says Haskell.

  The door swings shut behind them.

  Several hours up the Amazon amidst several lanes of traffic. The ones nearest to the shore are reserved for local boats—mostly local fishermen running out of things to fish. Civilian freight’s a little farther out. Military craft take up the rest. The center’s reserved for heavy cargo—mostly rocket sections and rocket engines conveyed on massive barges. And all the while lines of fire stitch their way from horizon into sky….

  “They’re really picking up the pace,” says Linehan on the one-on-one.

  He and Spencer are standing on a platform adjacent to the bridge of a tramp steamer that looks like it should have been scrapped long ago. Canvas stretches above them, though both men know that all it’s shielding is the sun. The two men look quite different from the two who boarded the train back in the Mountain—new faces, new skin. New IDs, too. Turns out there’s still enough of an economy left in Belem-Macapa to get the basics done. Especially with Priam burning money like it’s going out of style.

  “No reason they shouldn’t,” says Spencer. “There may be no tomorrow.”

  “If the U.S. puts up too much hardware too quickly, they may provoke the East to strike before they reinforce their orbital positions.”

  “A delicate balancing act,” mutters Spencer.

  “The nature of the game.”

  Then over the roar of ships launching they hear motors close by. They look up. Two jet-copters have swept in over some kind of ramshackle settlement stretched out along the shore. People are running from the shacks, diving into the river. Flame pours in over them. All that’s left of that village is a pier jutting out into the water—and smoke billowing out over the jungle. The jet-copters streak off downstream. The craft nearest shore turn toward the deeper river. Spencer shakes his head. But Linehan just laughs.

  “Local public relations,” he says.

  “No wonder these people hate you.”

  “These people hate anybody who’s stronger. Anyone who’s not, they’ll stamp bootprints on their throat.”

  “Sort of like the Rain did to you?”

  And for a moment Spencer thinks he’s gone too far—thinks that Linehan is about to throttle him or hurl him into the river or both. Spencer desperately winds up for a zone-blast at Linehan’s skull. But then the larger man steps back.

  “Just you wait till we get on the farside of border,” he spits out. “Not only am I going to break out of whatever backstab Control’s got cooked up for me—but I’ll make sure to gut you while I’m doing it.”

  “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? We haven’t even turned south yet.”

  “Well,” says Linehan, “how about you wake me up when we do.”

  He stalks back inside the ship.

  The Operative sits in a room, data flitting across the screens. He’s already well into several thousand deals. He’s putting into motion several thousand more. He eyes the door to the room while he keeps an eye out for any hidden entrances. And when he sees Lynx swim into view before him he’s not in the least surprised.

  “They say that a man doesn’t know the true meaning of fear until he enters Congreve’s speakeasies,” says Lynx. The smile on his face is as warm as the Operative has ever seen it. “They say this is the labyrinth in which even the bravest start praying. Do you think they’re right, Carson?”

  The Operative doesn’t reply. He’s just
working the data—European currencies, Martian underwrites, zero-G real estate, precious metals, drug offloads, information uploads—all of it filtered through hedge after hedge as his portfolio diversifies. The transactions he’s setting in motion are fanning out in every direction. His holdings are getting ever more complex. And all the while the voice of Stefan Lynx keeps furnishing the soundtrack.

  “I should have dug beneath the cellars of this place,” it says. “I should have secreted myself behind these walls. I swear to you that sometimes I think that history itself comes to culmination within each room. I think that’s what the ones who founded Congreve realized. They looked out upon the nothing. They broke beyond the limitations of the Earth. They saw how no sphere of activity could be excluded. Especially the ones we’d most like to forget.”

  The markets into which the Operative’s delving are starting to move beyond the grey. Now he’s setting up negotiations with several of Sarmax’s more dubious contacts. A SpaceCom quartermaster eager to move a little excess inventory. An asteroid harvester looking to evade a tax or two. A Martian speculator in possession of inside information on the latest terraforming schemes…these and so many others with whom he’s now engaging in all manner of business across markets both public and private and all the interstices in between.

  “They labored as you labor,” muses Lynx. “Free of inhibitions. Free of what the fools call morality and what the wise don’t even bother to name. I’ve watched you, Carson. I’ve seen just how sleek you can be. But in the speakeasies, a man takes on new lives to the extent that he takes lives from the ones like him—the ones who try to hold the world at a distance. The ultimate rush—never knowing when one of those with whom you’re dealing will get the key to the chamber in which you’re sitting. The ultimate penalty: to be paid by those who would dare to commit the sin of establishing a private connection with someone who sits beyond these speakeasies. Someone who might be working for Christ knows what outfit. Someone who could advise you in real time. Who might have agendas of his own. Now on my mark, execute the following transactions—”