The other window had a very different view.
“Oh.” I stepped over to the window. “Oh, fuck me.”
The lights were on beyond that window, as bright as they had been in the factory, and the massive space was filled with activity and motion. Bots darting everywhere, machine arms moving, cranes sliding along tracks that traced circular routes around the exterior of the long, broad cylinder.
I had noticed, when I first spotted the sphere, that it sat at the bottom of one of the base’s missile silos. I just hadn’t considered that a missile silo was not going to be merely structural in an old war base now converted into a secret weapons factory.
“Fuck them,” I said. I could not stop staring. “Fuck.”
It was a massive cylinder, thirty meters across or more, extending so far down I couldn’t see the bottom, and narrowing toward a closed iris in the ceiling. All throughout the space, bots and machines were adding payload to a series of rockets.
Twelve rockets. I counted. I counted again.
I had seen bits and pieces of the rockets in the factory, but I hadn’t quite understood what they meant. I had been assuming all those weapons, the drones and bots and canisters of gas, were going to be packed away in neat rectangular shipping containers and sent to buyers throughout the system. But Parthenope was not just building its own weapons. It was building its own fleet of spacecraft for deploying them, and that fleet was almost ready to launch.
Another spider bot struck the outside of the door with a small explosion; the reinforced walls vibrated ominously. I heard the clatter of metal and saw a flash across the window: Vanguard was scurrying along the wall. It was trying to stop the spiders before they found a way inside. That realization jolted me into action. I couldn’t stand around doing nothing while Vanguard protected me.
With my injured right hand held cautiously at my side, I touched every terminal, waking them all from their slumber.
“Okay, kid,” I said. “What did you want me to see in here? Show me what you know.”
There was a live operation status report that showed me what Sigrah controlled and what Vanguard controlled. Sigrah had several deployments of spiders and beehives and seemed to have access to many more; Vanguard had the mech suits but not much else. I didn’t have time to work out how or why. I had to trust that Vanguard was doing what it could to get the weapons out of Sigrah’s hands.
Sigrah also had control of surveillance. I couldn’t see anything except what was right before me.
And what was before me, according to Vanguard, was mission preparation. I had finally found Parthenope’s Project Sunburn.
It took me a few seconds to realize that I was not looking at a single plan; I was looking at two mission plans, the second of which was an altered version of the first. I checked—I knew exactly what to look for—and confirmed that Mary Ping had created the second plan. There were also two timetables, one with a series of dates well into the future, the other with a single launch date only a fortnight away.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
Everything’s going to change soon, Mary Ping had said to me, before Vanguard killed her. I know you’ll understand when you see it.
She had her own mission, one separate from Parthenope’s, and that meant she had to act before they could. That was what the second plan was all about. That was why she had been so angry when she realized David was about to discover the factory.
Each mission plan had its own list of targets. I asked for a map while I looked over the first list. I didn’t recognize a lot of the names, but the information attached to them confirmed they were active mines, ports, and transit stations across a broad swath of space beyond Parthenope’s current area of control. Stations owned by Carrington Ming, Sorrell-Larkin, Zinoviya, Hennig-Vishal, and a great many other corporations and competitors. I couldn’t tell without digging but would have wagered that all of them ran steward AIs based on the Overseer system.
Parthenope’s plan was to use these weapons to attack and seize several stations around the asteroid belt. Once they were taken, they would be brought under Parthenope control. It was breathtaking in its simplicity. The company had taken a look around the belt, picked out the pieces of it they wanted for themselves, and built a massive weapons force to take them. They knew the stations would be vulnerable, because the Outer Systems Administration did not have the reach or power to prevent a large-scale attack and what remained of the UEN was too far away for a quick response. They were going to start a war to take what they wanted, and nobody would be able to stop them.
I brought up a map that showed how the operation was intended to spread over time. It was a helpfully hideous display of lines of flight and contact emanating from Nimue, of stations shifting into Parthenope control, a sea of bright specks growing smaller and smaller as the scale of the expansion widened. The ratfuckers even had a nice little casualty estimate ticking upward in their plan. The low estimate for smooth and successful infiltration included a few hundred deaths among low-level workers. The higher estimates were for if what happened at Aeolia started happening everywhere else—there was, according to the plan, a thirty-five percent chance of that happening at about half the targets. They knew it could be the Aeolia catastrophe all over again, this time at dozens of stations, but they didn’t care. A thousand dead, two thousand, five thousand, more. On the map, so clinical and calculated,
