ramp’s edge.
“Come again?” says the Operative.
“Water,” repeats Sarmax. “Or should I say
“Which is how you made your fortune,” says the Operative.
“My
He stops just short of the edge. He gestures at the sloped walls. He looks back at the Operative. He smiles. He’s so close the Operative can see teeth through visor.
“You’re a resourceful man,” he says quietly.
“Look who’s talking,” replies the Operative.
“It’s just too bad that such resourcefulness has to compensate for such lack of planning,” continues Sarmax. “Such a goddamn shame it’s forced to rely so heavily on pure luck. You almost brought the roof down on your stupid head, Carson. It’s a wonder you didn’t get buried in those tunnels.”
“Would that have been such a terrible outcome?” asks the Operative.
“Now that,” says Sarmax, “depends on your point of view.” He gestures at the ramps and ladders stacked about him. “You see before you the industry of a new era, Carson. We live in the dawn times, old friend. Humanity is poised to boil out beyond the Earth-Moon system. The red planet will be colonized en masse within the next two decades. The prospectors are even now testing the tug of the gas giants. The Oort is surrendering her secrets to the probes. It’s all there for the taking, Carson. And it all makes me say I don’t give a fuck if you take me down. I don’t give a damn about the Rain or anybody else. Let them squabble. Let them plot. What does it matter when history itself is at last coming into focus?”
“I’m sure the Rain couldn’t say it any better,” says the Operative.
“But you and I know that all they’re really doing is playing the same old game.”
“Which is?”
“Power. They want it all, Carson. They’re using all of us to make it happen.”
“Including you, Leo?”
“I’m sure they’d like to. One more reason why I took myself out of the equation. One more reason I content myself with commerce. Leave the politics to others, Carson. Leave the games to those who would play them.”
“Is that a statement or an invitation?”
“What makes you think it’s not both?”
“Tell me about the latter.”
“You already know it. You’re the best I ever trained. You’re the man whose instincts were always closest to my own. You want to set up shop for yourself. You want it so badly you’d shut your own razor out of the picture. Hell of a move, Carson. Only you would try it. Not that it mattered in the end. You were always going to have to venture into my garden. You were always going to have to descend into what I built beneath it.”
“Not if I’d broken you upstairs,” says the Operative.
“But you didn’t,” says Sarmax. “It was almost the other way. I fully expected to pull your body out from under rubble.”
“You may yet,” says the Operative.
“The suspense is killing me.”
“Lynx knew the mine was down here, Leo. But he thought it was abandoned decades ago. He didn’t think there was any connection between it and the surface fortress. Especially not when the maps assured him of that fact.”
“Then he’s a fool, Carson. You were right to cut him loose.”
“On the contrary,” says the Operative. “I was inspired to do some research on my own. I tapped into Shackleton’s archives. I learned everything I could about this mine’s dimensions. So when I ended up in the vicinity, I knew how close the labyrinth was taking me to the main chambers. And if I’d bought the farm anyway, I figured we could always settle this in Valhalla.”
“Well,” says Sarmax, “now you don’t even have to wait.”
“I’ve already waited far too long,” says the Operative.
“We both have, Carson. We both know it. Look at us. We’re practically old men. You’ve been around for half a century. I’ve been on the loose for even longer. Not for us are the ways of the new breed. Not for us the zeal of the latest contenders. Turn your back on this whole thing, man. Turn your back on that crazy plan. You know that’s what you want. An alliance between us was where this was always going. We’ll put all our energy into pushing it outward. We’ll shove the frontier out to where time mills dust into forever. You and I, Carson. This is where it all begins.”
“And ends,” says the Operative.
He steps backward into space. Sarmax whips his arms up, lets flame erupt from his wrists. Fire shoots through the space where the Operative just stood—but he falls below the level of the platform, tumbles down amidst a webwork of support beams. He starts his jets, roars into a new maze. Lasers streak down from on high as Sarmax dashes to the edge.
“Keep running and you might actually win,” he sneers.
“Exactly,” says the Operative.
He fires his last micromissiles. They explode amidst the beams. The edifice above him starts to sway. Sarmax leaps from it, blasts upward. The Operative emerges from the other side, rockets over more ramps, opens up on Sarmax. The two men roar parallel to one another as they exchange fire.
Until Sarmax scores a direct hit on the Operative’s thrusters.
There’s an explosion. The Operative feels heat across his back. He feels like his spine just got severed. He fires the auxiliary jets on his wrists and ankles at full blast. They give him a tiny amount of leverage. Tiny—and nowhere near enough. He hurtles past more ramps, somehow dodges a crane. He veers beneath all that infrastructure, closes in on the sloping wall of the chamber. Rocks rush toward him. He feels something smash against his arm. He hits the ice and starts to slide. He extends claws on hands and feet. They shear inward. His arm is almost ripped from its socket as his visor slams up against the ice.
The Operative retracts one hand, lets himself dangle outward. He takes in the situation. His shoulder racks are wrecked. He’s on a slope some thirty degrees in incline. He twists around to face that nightmare structure. He can see now how it’s built out over these slopes of ice. How it’s intended to allow drills to be shoved up against the surface. He can see the drills themselves, slung low along some of the platforms.
But he can also see Sarmax. A suit of armor far more together than his own, circling some twenty meters overhead.
“Carson. Didn’t I always tell you engines are more important than weapons?” The soaring flight pattern proclaims nothing save triumph. But the voice is almost sad.
“Fuck you,” says the Operative.
“On the contrary.”
“I may yet surprise you.”
“I don’t think anything that happens in what remains of your life is going to be the least bit surprising,” says Sarmax. He swoops downward, fires a salvo five meters to the Operative’s left. Then another, five meters to the Operative’s right. “Though it’s funny it should come down to this, isn’t it? All those times and all those runs and it all ends up with you stuck to a wall like an insect. And all I need to do to make it official is grind my boot.”
“So get it over with,” says the Operative.
“Not before you tell me where Lynx is holed up.”
“Why the fuck should you want to know that?”
“So I can nail him too, Carson. Was that fuel sustaining your mind as well? I have to take him out lest they send more mechs for me.”
“They probably will anyway.”
“Nothing wrong with buying myself a little time. Where is he, Carson?”
“Surely you can pull the answer from my skull after you finish with me.”
“But it’d be so much easier if you told me.”
“You mean if I told the Rain, Sarmax.”
But Sarmax only laughs. “I’m not the
