It was a staggering feat of engineering. Alex ignored it.
“What are you doing?” Harmony asked furtively. “It wasn’t until this morning that I realized what I’ve done. Name of God, man-!”
“Don’t worry,” Alex said soothingly. “I’m just keeping an eye on things.”
“And talking to Izumi and Khresla? And activating Tony McWhirter?”
“What busy little ears we have.”
It was all that Harmony could do to keep his voice from cracking. “Alex, I was drunk! I should never have said anything at all!”
“ So there you have it.” Through the skeletal derrick Alex could see four “skyhooks” on the dome at once: tower, Star-whale, Beanstalk, and a tremendous spinning cable whose endpoints dipped into the Earth’s atmosphere. “ Even the cheapest of these projects would be expensive; the others are much worse. Each of these fantasy devices could lift cargo to space at a few dollars a pound. Each would cause awesome destruction if it failed. And each would be far cheaper, easier to build, less massive, and less dangerous if built to serve Mars!”
Mars replaced Earth. “ Mars rotates in just over twenty-four hours, but is far less massive than Earth. Stressed by only two-fifths of a gravity-” Sudden close-ups of the Beanstalk and Pinwheel showed each to be considerably shorter and much more slender. The rings being fired up and down the tower moved more slowly; the Starwhale was scores of miles long instead of hundreds of miles.
“ Each of these devices can serve Mars for around fifteen percent of their cost at Earth. Their lower energies make each far safer. More to the point, they may loft their goods from the surface of Mars and land supplies for the colonists and materials for the terraforming project; but if they fail-”
They failed all at once. The Beanstalk wrapped Mars in fire. The endpoints of the Pinwheel, which had been dipping low above the surface six times per orbit, now pounded the desert itself until shock waves shattered it. Misdirected rings shredded the tower. A rising spacecraft entered the orbiting rail gun off-center and tore it into a chaff of shredded superconducting wire.
Disasterlight painted Harmony’s broad, battered face with crimson highlights. His eyes blazed.
Alex could see the panic there. He asked, “What do you think I’m going to do? Publish a letter in the Times? Activate the Dream Park hit squad?” Alex’s mind’s eye built him an army of three-dimensional cartoon figures dressed as Ninjas. A black-robed Minnie Mouse, a sword-wielding Baby Huey, and Popeye the Sailor covered with Yakuza tattoos, closed in on a whimpering Fekesh…
“Alex!” Harmony’s voice was rigid with alarm. “Stop smiling like that.”
“Sorry. I’m easily distracted.”
“Dammit, this is serious. You’re likely to stir up more problems than you’ve ever dreamed of!”
Behind them, with staggering sound and visual effects, Martian colonists were battening hatches and shoveling Marsdust to cover glass walls. Mars was ringed in fire and meteoroids.
Alex pulled back from his friend, deeper into the shadow of the derrick, away from the illumination of the fireclouds. “Thadeus, you hired me because you trust me. Not just to do the day-to-day work, but on the big things. And just maybe you hired me specifically for this.”
Harmony wagged his head regretfully. “I was crazy. We’re talking about a hundred billion dollars. At least. Alex-”
Something on Alex’s face must have given Harmony pause, because suddenly he was speechless.
“Thadeus,” Alex said softly. “Did somebody get to you?”
“ If they fail, the meteors will pound only a lifeless world. We’ll build again. And again, until we get it right. And then we can build skyhooks for Earth. And then the solar system is ours!” Spacecraft rose from Earth and Mars, all sizes, all shapes, in ever-denser numbers, flung outward by Beanstalks and Pin-wheels. They spread across the solar system… but Alex Griffin and Thadeus Harmony saw none of that.
Harmony wiped a broad hand over his vast forehead, checked the palm for sweat. “No, Alex. They’re just watching all the time. Sometimes I feel like a goldfish in a bowl. Listen, I’m worried.”
“You should be. But, Thadeus, now it’s in my lap.”
“We backed down before that son of a bitch.” Harmony had glimpsed Fekesh. He studied the tall Arab, then abruptly looked away. “We backed down, but we had reason. We don’t do that lightly, Alex. He had us.”
“You’d almost whipped yourselves before Fekesh ever got there. You told me about it, remember? We’re stronger now, Thadeus. And the girl came back. Raw coincidence, the stuff of dreams and parables. if there’s a trace of superstition in Kareem Fekesh, he must think the fates have come for him.”
Harmony’s mouth opened and shut twice without producing sound. Then: “You’re dreaming.”
“Maybe.”
“Will you at least let me know what’s going on?”
“Minute by minute.”
Harmony gave a long, sighing exhalation. “All right, all right. I’m going to go and make a public face. Just… hell. I’ll be in touch.”
Harmony slouched away, a big, worried bear with an artificial smile plastered across his face, trying to make happy with the guests.
Alex watched him. Harmony wandered across the room shaking a hand here, clasping a shoulder there. Then, as if in response to Alex’s somewhat sadistic prayer, found himself facing Kareem Fekesh.
Both froze. Then Fekesh smiled graciously, walked around Harmony, and disappeared into the crowd.
Alex watched Harmony’s expression as he turned to watch Fekesh leave. The public smile had cracked open. Beneath it was something incandescent with loathing.
Max popped out of the water. The bubble above him burst, left him standing on a perfectly balanced piece of ice in a choppy sea. Other Gamers popped to the surface around him. The world buoyed for a few moments, then righted.
A few yards away, Hippogryph and Charlene bobbed up. Charlene was leaning on her rotund companion. They weren’t exactly holding hands, but…
Brother Orson’s eyes were fixed on the couple, and there was, if not primal fury, at the very least disappointment and discomfiture in his gaze.
Max’s chunk of ice drifted to the edge of an ice field, and fit into the rest of the floe as neatly as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
The sky flowed with an endless ribbon of color. The northern lights? Aurora borealis? It was stunningly bright, seemed near enough to touch, and he stood on tiptoes, stretching his fingers up…
“What in the world are you doing?” Eviane asked.
“Ah… stretches.”
She was pulling a lightweight jacket out of her backpack, and he followed suit. The air carried a bit more chill here. Nothing but white, nothing but ice in all directions. Wherever they were, it was in the heart of the arctic. They had no magical reprieve from the cold.
He looked down at Eviane’s feet, startled to realize that she cast no shadow. Where she walked, her feet left no imprint. It gave him the creeps.
There were no birds overhead. There were no mountains or trees to break the endless, bleak plain. The wind howled, and the chill seemed to penetrate to a level beyond the physical.
The other Gamers donned their jackets. Max noted that Yarnall, the National Guardsman, was still with them. How hard had the Gods tried to kill him out? Hard to guess… but Max expected the Game to get considerably rougher now. He put a hand on Eviane’s shoulder, and then walked over to Snow Goose. A light wind from the… east? blew steadily, carrying an unwelcome load of snow.
“What next?”
“Ceremony,” Snow Goose said. “We need shelter from this wind, so that we can perform a ceremony. There aren’t enough of us who are Eskimo to build a snow shelter, so we’ll just have to use Robin’s prefab units.”
The Gamers gathered around in a circle to hear her. They looked tired, but exultant. The wind around them moaned a dirge, but their mood was unaffected. They were strong. They were victorious. They were on a goddamned roll.
“We’re going to need to construct shelter,” she told them. “There’s a storm coming in.”
Robin Bowles took center stage. “In the bottom of everyone’s pack there should be a segment of a shelter unit. Please extract that. Now, there are instructions included, but if you’ll just listen to me, you won’t need to take
