grey as his eyes. “Claire, my name’s Huselid.”
“The Throne’s own Hand.”
“I need you to remove your helmet.”
She complies wordlessly. Brown hair spills out as she breathes in the air around her. The Praetorians standing to either side of Huselid begin pulling material out of their suits, begin to erect what looks for all the world like a tent around them. Walls quickly cut them off. What seemed to be fabric at first is now hardening into something that’s more like plastic.
They’re in a room within a room. She feels everything closing in around her. She feels the universe billowing out beyond her. Huselid doesn’t take his eyes off her.
“Claire, there are a couple of scans we have to run. I need you to remove your suit.”
“Don’t you fucking get it?” she says, but though it sounds like protest it’s really not. It’s more like ritual. “There’s no time. They might hit us at any moment.”
“Precisely why you need to hurry.” The Praetorians pull themselves out of the structure, affix its plastic to the larger chamber’s walls. One of them steps back in, stands with her weapons trained on Haskell as Huselid continues: “I apologize, but prudence dictates precautions. Gentlemen, if you’d be so kind.”
Carson and Sarmax salute and leave, pulling the door-flap shut behind them. Haskell shrugs, opens up her suit, steps out, strips off her shirt and pants. She stands there, noticing that Huselid’s noticing the bloody scars wreathed upon her.
“What are those?” he asks.
“Schematics that depict how the Rain might be taking the ground out from under our feet while we sit here chatting.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” he says—gazes at her, and she realizes he’s scanning on multiple spectrums. She takes him in—soldier of the Throne, playing the hand he’s been dealt. Though apparently he’s still fully capable of multitasking:
“It wouldn’t have worked,” he says.
“What wouldn’t have?”
“Breaking into the Aerie to confront the Throne.”
“Only way to be sure the Rain weren’t listening in. Only way he could be sure
“But they were trying to follow you in. You almost fell into their trap.”
“They almost fell into mine. Once I’d combined with the Throne directly, we could have destroyed them at point-blank range.”
“We’ll give you the next best thing.”
“Remote-junction’s too great a risk.”
“It’s the only risk the Throne will take,” he replies.
“Then he’s a fool.”
Huselid says nothing. But his eyes say everything. She doesn’t even know why she’s arguing. She’s just following the script. Because how she gets to the impending moment doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s about to be unleashed. And now a door in the enclosure folds up and two more Praetorians float a small cart into the room. It contains an object: a cube about a meter on each side, covered in a metallic paperlike substance peeling all around its edges. A screen’s attached to one end. What looks like a small radar dish exudes from the other. One of the soldiers takes her clothes and pulls her suit from the enclosure. The other adjusts the dish. Looks at her.
“Hold still,” he says, and points that dish at her. She feels nothing. She counts the seconds, watches herself reflected in the dish’s hazy mirror, watches the scar-maps on her skin distorted by its curves. She feels like she’s on the verge of seeing something new within those patterns. She feels as though she’s on a river drifting toward the roar of falling water….
“Turn around,” says the Praetorian. She does. More seconds pass. “Face me again.” She does. “We need a DNA scan,” he says. “Hold out your hand.” She holds it out. He peels off some of the metal-paper from the cube, touches it to her hand. “Your tongue,” he says. She sticks out her tongue. He repeats the procedure with more of the metal-paper. Huselid takes all of this in without expression.
“Are you finished?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. Another Praetorian pulls another suit into the room. It’s heavy armor. It’s obviously packed with weapons. “This is your new suit,” says Huselid.
“What’s it do?” she asks.
“What doesn’t it,” he replies.
The Praetorian salutes, leaves. She looks at the armor. Garments hang off the back of it: light pants and shirt. She puts them on, climbs into the suit, hits the ignition. Lights flare out around her. She feels time starting to quicken.
“Now what?” she says.
“Now we do what I was sent for,” Huselid replies. The enclosure suddenly opens up, drapes inward as it reverts back to cloth. A Praetorian holds up one corner. Huselid ducks beneath, gesturing at her to follow. He fires his thrusters, floats down into the basin of the inner room, lands at an alcove set within one side—an alcove cut off from the line-of-sight of both the windows. Wires protrude from its wall, their ends grasped by Praetorians. She scans the alcove, scans those wires, puts her suit through its paces as she does so. It’s working like clockwork. She instinctively moves toward the zone for the rest of the routine checks she’d usually run.
And stops.
And waits. She’s bracing herself for what’s about to happen. She’s resigned to it. She’s just a tool of the future now, even if it wasn’t precisely what she was planning. Because now that the Throne’s calling the shots there’s no way he’s going to let her near him. Not until she’s been tested, via a hidden line rigged across the whole of the cylinder, all the way to the Aerie. And Haskell figures what the hell. She’s ready to take to the zone to merge with the Throne itself—to integrate her capabilities with his and put her sword at his service. Though she swears to God she won’t hand him her mind.
She stops near Huselid. Two other soldiers move in, scan the walls around them. Huselid takes a wire from one of his soldiers, extends it toward her. She feels herself teeter on the brink. He looks straight at her and she struggles to meet his gaze through the contingency pouring in upon her.
“Claire Haskell. President Andrew Harrison asks for your forgiveness for all that you’ve suffered at the hands of his servants. He asks that you work with him now to save our people from the thing that assails us. When that’s done, he’ll grant you anything you wish. Anything at all. He asks that you join with him to triangulate the locations of the Rain hit teams throughout the Earth-Moon system.”
“What about the back door to my own systems?”
“We’ll give you the key.”
“Which the Rain already has.”
“We know the nature of the game we’re playing.”
“Do the Eurasians?”
He pauses. She laughs, but only just. “They really sent their leadership?”
“They really did,” he says. “But we’re talking about two separate zones here. Meaning that the triangulation the Throne’s attempting with what we believe to be the Eurasian executive node—in the other asteroid—won’t yield results for hours. With you, it’ll take a minute to clean out the U.S. zone. Then we can worry about helping the East out.”
“Give me that wire.”
Huselid hands it to her. She looks at the metal, feels everything tilt around her—and then she shoves the wire into the side of her head. She steps inside the zone, and right before her in that endless grid is something that looks like an endless head and its eyes are like windows and its mouth is time itself and it’s the Throne upon the ramparts of the highest firewalls imaginable: the Throne itself blazing light down upon her and then she meets that light and feels herself swept upward, rising above it, feeling it rise above her as she bears the Throne up on wings of intuition and lets the U.S. zone fold in around her. She sees the bulwark of Montrose’s InfoCom flaring off to one side—notices the extent to which it and the Throne have opened to each
