lights move through it.
“Get me off this roof,” says Haskell.
“Yes, ma’am,” replies one of the soldiers. He turns. She follows him toward a single-story structure set atop the center of the roof. As they reach its door, the soldier steps aside, gestures for her to enter. She steps within, finds herself on a metal-grille stairway. The door closes behind her. She hears atmospheric purifiers working as she descends.
At the bottom of the stairway she finds a room. It looks to be some kind of storage chamber. A single door’s set within the opposite wall. Two men stand before that door. One’s another power-suited soldier. The second isn’t. He’s wearing civilian chem-clothes. His face is gaunt. His eyes are pale.
“Claire Haskell,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“My name’s Morat. You can take your breath-mask off now.”
“Thanks,” she says. But she leaves it on.
“It’s clean in here,” says Morat.
“It doesn’t feel that way,” she replies.
“You get used to it,” he says.
She stares at him. She pulls her mask off, lets brown hair fall back. He grins at her naked face.
“Welcome to what’s left of Brazil.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“How was your trip?”
“Uneventful.”
“So it was good.”
“Until I got here, yes.”
“A sense of humor,” says Morat. “I like that.”
She doesn’t reply.
“Come with me,” he says.
Morat turns, opens the door behind him. He starts to walk down a corridor, stops, turns back toward her.
And beckons.
“Come with me,” he repeats.
This time she does. The soldier steps in behind her. She realizes that she can hear his footfall. She really shouldn’t. She thought those suits were supposed to be silent. Evidently, this one’s not. Or else the pre-zone rush is rendering her all too sensitive…because she can hear everything—the slight clank of feet against the floor, the tiny hisses of gas from neck joints, the whirring of cooling motors…all of it trailing in her wake down the corridor.
At the end of the corridor’s an elevator. Its doors slide open. Morat enters. Haskell follows, turns—looks into helmeted visor. The soldier’s stopped at the elevator’s threshold. The doors slide shut. The elevator starts to drop. It’s just the two of them now.
“Can we talk freely in here?”
“Nothing’s ever free,” Morat replies, pulling out a pistol. “Particularly not talk. This is cleared terrain in theory. In reality”—he hands her the pistol, hilt first—“you’d better hang on to this.” She takes the weapon. He flips open a panel in the wall, pulls a lever. The elevator shudders to a stop.
“Where do you want to begin?” she asks.
“With you.”
“There’s so much I can’t recall.”
“And so much you’re about to.”
Blind man in the city: but Jason Marlowe utilizes the coordinates programmed into his heads-up as he maneuvers his glidewing amidst the buildings of this megalopolis. Occasional thinnings of the mist reveal vast grids of light, stretching out of nothing, dissolving into even less. Marlowe’s steering in toward one grid in particular. It swims toward him on the heads-up display, one column protruding past the others. He can’t allow himself to drop below its roof. He’s got to slow down: he works the flaps, sails down toward it. Suddenly it’s filling the screens. He braces himself. And then he’s striking that roof at speeds that knock the breath from him—even as he jettisons the glidewing, rolls along the roof, springs to his feet in a semicrouch.
Marlowe looks around at the buildings that tower around him. No one seems to have spotted him. He steps lightly to a trapdoor in the rooftop’s corner, wrenches it open. He finds a ladder, disappears within.
The maw of delta-city has now moved to the very center of the window. The Operative stares down at the spires that rise out of the clouds that gather more than two klicks up.
“Penthouse suite,” he says.
“The Citadel,” replies the pilot.
“The what?”
“
“Maybe I’m just testing you.”
“Test away, asshole. I’m not afraid of you.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“Maybe you don’t know shit about the biggest hedgehog of them all. Room with a view. They say the Jaguars can’t get within a kilometer of the basement.”
“A kilometer’s a pretty specific number,” replies the Operative. “Particularly when it involves classified operations. You’re merchant marine. Where are you getting all this from?”
“Information’s harder to lock down in space.”
“Give me another example.”
“How about
“Such as?”
“What’s your business on the Moon?”
The Operative laughs. “Who says I have business on the Moon?”
“That’s where we’re supposed to drop you, isn’t it?”
“Maybe that’s just my transfer point.”
“And maybe it’s not. Come on, man. We’ve got three days together.”
“So?”
“So indulge me. It’s not like I expect you to tell me the
“Then what the hell do you expect?” asks the Operative.
“How about a good story?”
“Even if it’s a lie?”
“Remember what I said about killing time?”
“I thought you said this wasn’t a social call.”
“So I’m mixing business with pleasure.”
“So put the Elevator back on that screen.”
“I never took it off,” the pilot says.
“Where is it?”
“Lower right-right.”
“Put it at the center.”
“Sure thing.”
It’s the surest thing there is. It’s scarcely two hundred klicks distant. It’s practically a drive-by. Yet it still requires magnification to make out the workers on its side—still requires magnification to discern how they’ve jury-rigged whole series of pulleys to haul themselves along it while they lay down the maglev tracks along which the freight will someday flow. The Operative lets his gaze stray down toward the Elevator’s extremity at Nadir Station some hundred klicks below. Below that’s only atmosphere.
