sky’s bolts can’t touch her. She dashes straight into the thicket within which lurks the nexus of all decisions. The nest of switches that’s this cockpit. She’s there.
Along with something else.
It looks a lot like her. It leaps to forestall her. Now it towers above her. She makes her move, cuts out into the open. It takes her bait, rushes in toward her, starts to engulf her. But she doesn’t panic. She shifts the whole framework, goes from one-on-one to million-on-million: the landscape becomes a web of endless bridges across which she fights her endless battles. Only now it’s a different type of war—she wages holding actions, conducts sallies, lays and raises sieges. But it’s strong. It doesn’t conform to any pattern she’s ever seen. She’s losing. She trades off position for time. She times its actions, reactions, movements.
And suddenly catches it in ambush, smashes straight into it. She thinks she sees myriad faces contort in pain. She thinks she sees faces falling back. She follows, hammering blows down upon them. They’re giving way. They’re retreating altogether.
But only to the lower spaceplane.
As they do so, the firewall of that plane activates. She tries to forge through it. She can’t. She feels herself burning. She pulls back—secures the cockpit of the Janus, extends her control across the whole upper plane, secures all its data-ports, secures its own firewall. She lets her face appear upon one of the cockpit’s screens. She looks out at Marlowe.
“The upper plane’s ours,” she says. “The lower plane’s theirs.”
“So let’s get the fuck out of here,” he says.
“Agreed,” she replies.
“Are we high enough to reach orbit?” he asks.
“Probably not,” she says. “But we can make it back to planet, no problem.”
“Let’s do it.”
She sends the signals. The upper ship’s engines fire. The whole ship shakes. But it doesn’t move. She ramps up the thrust. The shaking intensifies—to the point where the ship feels like it’s going to fall apart.
But it doesn’t fly. It’s going nowhere.
“It’s not separating,” says Haskell.
“The lower cockpit must control the separation clamps,” says Marlowe. “Turn off the motors.”
“We’ve got to get away,” she says. She increases the power still further.
“Hell’s not what I had in mind,” he yells. “Turn off the fucking motors!”
She turns them off. The lurching ceases. She stares at Marlowe.
“Fuck,” she says.
There’s a vehicle that floats above the polar badlands. But it can’t fly. It can’t hover. It has no rockets. It consists of fifteen cars strung together, slung beneath a thread of superhardened metal that stretches all the way from Shackleton to the farside bases at Schrodinger. Farside’s always been pretty far gone: but combine that with proximity to the southern antipodes, and you’re talking terrain so remote and rugged that this cable system is actually the most efficient means of transport. Building branch lines off the Congreve-Shackleton maglev just can’t justify the cost—and, unlike spacecraft, a cable car requires no reaction mass. Which endows it with a certain utility.
Especially to the man who’s attached to the second car’s underside. It’s been forty minutes since the Operative left Shackleton. Forty minutes of staring through his visor down into black. Forty minutes of passing through pylon after pylon. He’s got his camo cranked. His active sensors are all turned off. His passive sensors aren’t picking up a thing. The terrain parades upon his screens anyway: the latest survey data that Lynx could get his hands on—and yet (starting at minute ten) patches of grey are appearing here and there amidst the panoply of false color, denoting those areas where the data’s been deemed unreliable due to recent rockslides or caves whose reaches stubbornly persist in resisting the encroachment of the satellites that waft overhead. Beyond minute twenty, those gaps grow in both number and size. Mountains loom ever higher, their tops now extending far above the Operative.
A buzzer sounds in his skull. He glances at one of the displays. His tongue flicks out to the back of a molar, depresses a tiny lever situated there. His suit begins to play out wire. He watches as the number and letterings and bolts above him shrink into illegibility, are framed by the outlines of the cable car itself, which in turn diminishes from rectangle to square to mere point, leaving him dangling at the end of an ever-lengthening cord. He descends out of the perimeter of the cars’ light, drifts down through the blackness. Now he can see stars again. Ground rises up to greet him.
His tongue flicks across teeth once more. The strand plays out at a faster rate. He releases the tether’s hold and floats downward, letting it trail out behind him. He bends his knees for the shock of landing, receives it. Like a long umbilical cord, the tether remains attached to a point between his shoulders—but the Operative sends a signal coursing up along its length, releasing it from its hold upon the cable car, allowing it to fall softly into the shadow in which he’s now immersed.
He looks around. He can’t see a thing. Only stars and one or two faint peaks. Which is as it should be. On the screens within his mind, a focal point is starting to take shape. It’s not that far ahead: the unseen center of the unseen fortress that he’s about to storm. But he’s running out of time. In his head a clock’s ticking steadily toward the zero. He points his hands forward in the dark, lets rigid tendrils extend from his suit’s wrists, sweeps them like a blind man across the ground before him. He moves horizontal to the mountain’s slope, doubles back along his path as the need arises.
Eventually he sees lights, exactly where he thought they’d be: a few dollops of luminescence up ahead. He intensifies his pace, gets rocks between him and those lights, starts to circle out away from them. He climbs up through a thicket of jagged boulders. He’s breathing hard now. It’s heavy going.
But it’s worth it. Because when he sees the lights again, he’s looking down. He clicks through his scopes, makes out structures amidst the shadows. Several square buildings, two domes (one large and central, the other much smaller), a landing pad and a tower, all set into the mountainside on a slope so steep it’s almost like they’re hanging from it. He takes it all in.
And keeps on climbing. Soon he’s clambering out over something that’s more sheer cliff face than anything else—though the claws that emerge from his suit’s gloves and boots ensure that he has no problem maintaining his course. He’s almost on the vertical.
He stops. The base complex is spread out below him. He feels like God himself looking down upon His creation. He looks out into the sky. He looks once more at the clock. He watches as it counts off those last few seconds.
Which is when he sees the thing he’s been racing all this time. It’s just blotted out the stars. Though only for a moment. But still: something’s somewhere out there between that mountain and this one. It’s right on time. For the last time, the Operative checks his systems. He gets ready to be seen. He takes still more steps to ensure he’s not.
The incoming shuttle turns on its landing lights. It’s much closer now—maybe a quarter of the distance to go. It descends toward the base—and as it does so, so does the Operative. He lowers himself on yet another tether— dangles down from the cliff’s edge toward the pad on which the shuttle is about to alight.
But he’s miscalculated. The shuttle changes course slightly, accelerates unexpectedly, floats in early over the base’s escarpment, crosses in toward the path along which the Operative is descending. He’s left with no margin: he ceases his descent, hauls himself upward—and watches as the craft slides in right beneath his feet. For a moment, he can see his own silhouette reflected in the starlight playing upon its roof—and then it moves past him, dropping with sudden speed upon the pad. The Operative halts his ascent, lets himself unwind once more. Every instinct within him’s screaming caution, but he’s committed now. He’s got to reach that pad no later than the shuttle does. But it’s so close to the ground now that its engines are kicking up dust.
The Operative releases himself from the tether, starts to fall. But nowhere near fast enough. As he drops beneath the level of the main dome, the shuttle’s powering down. As he drops beneath the level of the smaller buildings, the landing platform’s starting its own descent—down a shaft that’s just like the one the Operative traversed at Agrippa when his own craft landed. Another platform starts to slide in over the top. He can see that he’s not going to make it.
