that ocean is a winged craft that carries another. Atmospheric steed to transport orbital rider to a launching in the rafters. Two within that upper ship to feel it.
“Always a rush,” says Marlowe.
“The real rush,” says Haskell, “hasn’t happened yet.”
But when it comes you’ll know it. That hit to hammer you beyond air: it’s the one thing you can’t escape. That force: you either face it down, or else you stay on Earth forever. See, there were those who died by impact and those who died in the burn and others who perished only to just drift. Everyone who goes up shares their fate. Everyone who makes this climb partakes of what they went through.
If only for a moment.
“You okay,” says Marlowe.
“Yes,” she replies.
But she isn’t. She doesn’t know why. She can’t tell how much of it is the man beside her. How much of it is Sinclair. How much is Morat. How much is Moon itself. All she knows is that it’s like all those things are swirling ever faster inside her head. It’s like she can’t tell what’s going to happen when that swirling stops. It’s like she thinks she’s going crazy. It’s like she can hardly wait.
Nor does she. She reaches out into the zone, disconnects the cameras looking out into the room: releases her straps, pivots out of her seat—and into Jason Marlowe’s. Her lips meet his even as he undoes his own strap, harnesses it around both of them. They may as well be attacking each other for all the force they’re throwing into it. She moans as he gets a hand inside her shirt. He gasps as she runs her fingers down along his crotch.
And yet somehow she still can’t bring herself to focus. The more he touches her the more afraid she gets. Her mind’s fleeing beyond her burning nerve endings. Zone expands on wireless within her skull, anchors itself against the universe. The Sun: infinite energy, the ultimate source of all she sees, and yet the one thing she doesn’t. The Moon: purple clusters of lunar installations shimmering behind a second’s time delay, reflecting possibilities of the routes they might or might not have described during that eon-long lapse. The Earth: carpeted chaos of stations, greyed-out inner enclaves, blacked-out nexi of things she suspects but can’t ascertain. The cluster of connections sprawls up into the orbits all around, surrounds her with endless grids kaleidoscoped together in endless shifting patterns—and all of it regarded through the prism of the node that constitutes the Janus spaceplane and its B-130 suborbital booster.
But somewhere in that node she sees a picture of a room. In that room she can see her body making love to a stranger. She sees her own back arching as he moves on up inside her. She watches as she starts to grind against him. She wonders what it is she’s so terrified of—is she trying to get away from him, or is she looking for something else? She shouldn’t be jacking in during the transit. She shouldn’t be doing anything more than just a little harmless camera-tweaking. But some kind of intuition’s calling to her with an urgency to match her sharpest cries.
So she lets that node blossom around her, closes on that upper cockpit—and jumps from there to the lower. She takes in the two men sitting there—takes in the way they watch the controls, watch the sunset dissolving past them. Red melts across the window, shades off into deeper hues that fall away into something approaching black. She sees her flesh writhing all across that dark. She feels herself pulled back toward it.
But somehow she tears herself away: uses the instruments in both cockpits to inventory the sensors in both ships. The exterior ones just reveal rising heat and fading light. The interior ones show rooms, passageways, corridors, crawl spaces—all the contours of contained space. She keeps on moving through the cameras that monitor those silent chambers. All are normal.
Except for the one that holds Morat.
A compartment in the back of the lower spaceplane: Morat sits in a corner, atop a crate. His face is expressionless. Pale eyes look straight at her. They’re superimposed against Marlowe’s contorting features. Haskell meets both gazes—while simultaneously she lets her mind thread back toward the cockpit—and then toward the instrument panels in that B-130’s cockpit.
But she can’t reach them. She can’t trace a direct link from this particular sensor to what the pilots can see. Something’s blocking the data’s passage. Something’s hacking the comps. A razor immersed can see the truth. A pilot gazing at a screen can’t.
Adrenaline floods Haskell’s body, merges with her distant ecstasy—and as it does so, her perception in the zone sharpens even further. The nervous system into which she’s extended her own crystallizes still finer. The edges grow sharper, the colors brighter, the shadows darker.
And in those shadows she can start to see a pattern. She can see there’s something in the zone with her, something connected to Morat. The zone around him is changing—as though he’s somehow warping it. Haskell wonders how good a razor Morat is. She wonders what the hell he’s doing. She creeps in closer, feels her climax closing in. She pushes through thickets of circuits, gazes through them at Morat. She follows the focus of his efforts—sees that he’s reaching into the zone, reaching far beyond the B-130, accessing one of the nearby navigation satellites with codes so covert she can barely see them deploy. From there he passes in one motion through several more sats, obscuring his trail as he does so—but not so well that she can’t follow. She counts ten sats in all, strung across the globe. She follows him ever deeper into that labyrinth even as her vision blurs. Even as her body shakes. She feels the rush as she comes on the other side of planet.
And then Morat produces a door out of nothing.
And opens it. Haskell can’t believe what she’s seeing. She’s staring straight through the wall of the American zone itself. She’s looking straight down a tunnel that leads right through the middle of the moats and ramparts and battlements intended to forestall precisely this. She’s looking out into the neutral zones: staring straight at a snowstorm of traffic rushing past her, none of it seeing the door that’s opened in the wall of universe.
Which is presumably the point. Secret doors aren’t useful if everybody’s in on the secret. Haskell lets her head rest on Marlowe’s heaving shoulder, looks out over Morat’s shoulder, looks out upon that world, looks in the same direction he is—looking at where something’s suddenly flitting in out of that traffic, making a beeline toward the opening.
But she moves first. She lunges out to snap the connection, slam the door. But the thing’s faster—it darts in, whips past her, straight into the lower spaceplane as the door slams shut behind it. She’s got no idea what’s sustaining its connection. Maybe the door’s actually still open. Maybe it’s got one of its own.
Or maybe connection isn’t the point. Maybe the real issue is activation. Because now something’s coming to life within the crates that surround Morat. Whatever’s just leapt in from the neutral zones seems to have been the seed. But Haskell can’t see into the crates. She doesn’t know what’s sprouting. All she knows is that now virtual tendrils are starting to sidle from the crates out into the lower spaceplane’s systems—snaking through them, closing on the systems that ring the cockpit.
Haskell watches in sick fascination as they move in toward the pilots who sit at the cockpit’s center. She knows she should stop watching. But that thought seems very far away. Even farther than Marlowe as his thrusts grow ever more eager. Far closer is the feeling that she doesn’t need to move very fast at all. That she must be in a dream. That this is some fragment of some half-remembered briefing suddenly engulfing her. That her own mind’s finally tumbled over the brink of sanity. She hauls herself back from that edge—takes in Marlowe, takes in Morat, takes in the shape that’s swelling through the lower spaceplane like some kind of malignant growth. For a moment, she sees straight past it—sees the composite craft as one node among tens of millions, sees the whole zone. It’s her whole world.
And then it’s not.
All goes blank. All sound fades into silence, all sensation collapses to a single point. All existence winks out. There’s nothing left—nothing save the eyes of the man who’s just spent himself inside her. They stare into her own.
“Oh God, Claire,” says Marlowe. “I fucking love you.”
“Morat’s on the booster,” she replies. She’s struggling to pull herself off him.
“He’s what?”
“He’s right below us.”
“You’re seeing things,” says Marlowe. But even as he says this, the lights go out. For a moment there’s darkness. But then the emergency lighting kicks in on deep red.
“You’re damn right I’m seeing things,” Haskell mutters. “I’m finally starting to see them clearly.” She seals her shirt, fastens her pants. She hauls herself to her feet, yanks open one of the doors of the chamber.
