“To ask for help.”
“Exactly,” says Spencer.
“And how is the one you’re asking likely to take it?”
“Very badly, I suspect,” says Spencer.
T he jet-copter slides down the runway in horizontal landing mode, slowing all the while. It slants off the straight, taxis along ramps that thread it through the heart of the spaceport’s tangled maze. It proceeds past other craft waiting. It waits while other craft proceed. Sometimes the runway upon which it rolls bridges other routes. Sometimes it’s the reverse.
“Complicated,” says Marlowe.
“It’s Houston,” says Haskell.
The craft rolls into a less-trafficked area. Lights rise and fall through the haze at the far reaches of the runways. Hangar clusters draw closer.
“Looks like that one’s ours,” says Marlowe.
“Take my advice,” says Haskell, “drop the possessives.”
“Why?”
Because: they’re lazy. They constitute labels. They represent assumptions. They hide the truth. Beyond the periphery of your vision: that’s where it all goes down. Behind your own eyeballs: that’s where it all hangs out. Secret names in the dark that you’re hiding even from yourself: shadowed orbits that might just be revealed when the mood strikes them.
Or you.
“All I’m saying is that we need to revert to first principles,” says Haskell.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Marlowe.
“Makes two of us,” replies Haskell.
Makes for one dynamic partnership, that’s for sure. She figures that must be the point. Volatility’s been known to strengthen the mix sometimes. Let agents bitch and moan and wonder all they want. But give them something to sink their teeth into and a reason to care…
“Tell me then,” says Marlowe, “how you think this’ll play out.”
“Take my advice,” she says. “Don’t think.”
The jet-copter trundles across an apron. It rumbles into a small hangar and rolls to a stop. The doors open. Marlowe and Haskell get up, get out, get hustled by waiting soldiers across the concrete and into an elevator set within one wall. Seconds later, they’re rising through the ceiling—and then through many more. It’s almost enough to make them think that this is the way into space after all.
But eventually the elevator slows and stops. Their escorts lead them down another corridor and into a room.
With a view. Windows occupy the entirety of one wall. Gantries and runways sprawl all the way to ocean. The sky’s filled with craft receding and craft approaching. Exhaust hangs heavy overhead. Concrete shimmers in the heat.
“Welcome to Houston,” says a voice.
The voice’s owner sits within a chair set in the corner. He regards Marlowe and Haskell without expression.
It’s Morat.
* * *
You say that Earth’s south pole is dark six months a year? The Moon’s nets all twelve with ease. Picture Malapert Mountain gleaming overhead, a black and furnaced pearl. Picture a plateau anchored halfway down into the void beneath it—and you’ve got your fix on Shackleton. But to really understand that place, you have to move beyond it. So picture the trails that lead down to nowhere. Picture the prospectors gone missing for more than five decades now. The bulldozers that hauled away and never came back. The valleys that lead to cul-de-sacs of killing angles, the caves that become catacombs, the craters within craters within craters. So tangled, that land: even worse than man’s mind—and now the Operative wanders through the streets that make up an outpost suspended above the polar maw itself.
He figures no one will give a shit about the Elevator down here. He’s right. These guys are rugged individualists. They think they’re so tough they don’t need a dome. Most of Shackleton is underground anyway. Including the main rail station. The Operative’s in that station’s lockers now. He keys the door to one locker in particular, picks up several packages. He whistles up a conveyor, places the packages on its platform, lets its gyro-stabilized bulk trail him as he walks out into corridors and passageways that are a lot wider than those within Agrippa Station.
Lot brighter, too. Turns out these guys are light hogs—they crank the illumination in compensation for their lack of sun. Technicians everywhere. Some suited. Some not. There are a fair number of soldiers. Ladders carve upward along the walls, lead to rows of shopfronts and businesses. Main drag, they call it—one lane for people walking and another for flitcars. Yet another for bona fide crawlers. And still another for thrusters.
But the Operative’s just walking. He leaves the central grid behind, leads his conveyor down a side street. The walls and ceiling close in. The passage zigzags through the rock. The lights grow more sporadic. Graffiti covers at least half the doors. What’s left of the overhead lighting stutters fitfully. The low-rent sector: and hopefully someone’s been paying the rent on one room in particular…
Someone has. The Operative triggers the lock, goes on in. It’s not much. Even less than what he had in Agrippa, in fact: just a cot and a wall-screen on one wall and a toilet on the other. Plus an incandescent coil overhead. The Operative flicks on the light. He unloads the conveyor and scrambles its memory before sending it on its way. He shuts the door, goes to work, starts opening containers.
Five minutes later he’s standing in the suit. Its material clasps in around his legs, arms, torso. He hears his breath echoing hollowly. This suit looks like a typical miner’s outfit, though in truth it’s anything but. The Operative lets his weapons range upon his screens. He checks over all his systems.
Suddenly he hears a voice between his ears.
Not his either.
T he twenty-first century wasn’t long in the coming before New York started to grow again. Refugees from the strife down south, immigrants fleeing the chaos abroad, fugitives from the rural as the combines took over, escapees from the shutdown of towns—and all such infusions intensified by a proliferation of birthrates across all demographics as the world grew more desperate and the mass of population grew poorer and the peasant mentality took over on the streets. Wasn’t just New York by that point, either. It was Newark and Boston and Philly all rolled into one thing that encompassed them all and piled on upward toward the heavens. Same story for so many other megacities. The Mountain isn’t even the biggest of them. But at the dawn of the twenty-second century, it’s the largest in the States by far. For five hundred klicks, it’s the Eastern Seaboard. For two hundred klicks inland, it’s the land itself.
For those within, it’s the whole world.
The two men exit the intercity at Grand Central, take a local from there. It blasts through the tube, sweeping recycled air before it. It stops three times, disgorging humans, taking them on. It stops a fourth time—and that’s their destination. Spencer and Linehan get out, rise on escalators that give way to a larger space—rivers of glass and steel, and all around: translucent tubes with people pouring through them, no ceiling in evidence save blur. The two men step off at the appointed platform. They pass along a ramp. They walk through a wide doorway.
Suddenly they’re inside in a way they weren’t before. The hubbub of conversation has shifted from the fragmented roar of the streets to the more subdued burbling into which voices conscious of each other recede. They’re standing in a foyer. Plush carpeting, chandeliers hung overhead. Clerks and bellhops looking bored. Savoy Metropole. Second-rate hotel. First choice for them right now.
