“Look,” he says, “I’m a razor from the ship’s bridge crew. The Rain brought down the zone and then hosed down the fleet with that DE megacannon outside—”
The marine cuts him off. “If you’re a razor, motherfucker, you’re definitely Rain. Only way you could be alive.”
“Tell him what happened to Petyr,” says another voice.
“I can guess,” says Spencer wearily.
“He’s a fucking vegetable. We left him laying in his own shit about half a klick back.”
“The Rain wiped him out.”
“They wiped
“I wasn’t in the primary node,” says Spencer. “That’s how come they missed me. I was secondary razor—”
“Doesn’t mean shit to me, fuckface.”
“Enough of this.”
“Kill him and let’s go.”
“Where?” asks Spencer.
They glance at each other. They don’t have a great answer for that. And at that moment more vibrations shake the ship beneath them. The Praetorians are looking at what’s over Spencer’s shoulder. It’s clearly making an impression on them. He tries to take advantage of that fact.
“And by the way” he says, “the gang now approaching is going to face the same problem with you as you’ve got with me. If you start killing survivors from this crash out of hand, you’ll just be answering their question for them.”
“We should go,” says someone.
“Start running from our own side?” asks someone else. “That’s going to get old fast.”
“How do we
“Look at those things,” says someone. “Those are fucking
“And a shitload of cycles on the flanks.”
“If that shit ain’t Praetorian, we’re fucked anyway.”
“Jesus Christ,” says someone else. Spencer sees flaring reflected in his visor. He turns to face what’s coming.
The Praetorian triad’s going full throttle, punching out ahead of the main formation. The bulk of the combat’s now behind them. Which isn’t to say they’ve left it in the dust altogether. Sarmax starts unleashing his pulse rifle at long range on some wayward drones. The three men roar at ground level up and over a hill. The crashed ship is just ahead of them, half protruding from the gash it tore through the cylinder’s side. There’s some kind of activity atop what’s left of it. The Operative starts broadcasting on what’s left of the Praetorian frequencies.
“This is for anyone who’s still in the fight. What’s coming up behind us is the Throne’s own Hand. We’re going to storm the Aerie and rip the Rain apart. Tune into the following frequency and stand by for new downloads. Anyone who doesn’t can die right here.”
“How do we know
“Any other questions?” yells the Operative as he hurtles in.
There aren’t. He knows these marines could just open up on him en masse. But he also knows they know they’re within range of the long-range guns atop the heavy vehicles. That they’re just going to have to roll the dice. The three men roar past the ship’s wreckage: the Operative to the left, Sarmax to the right, Lynx straight above. They keep on going, broadcasting that same message. The area of heaviest drop-ship deployment is just ahead of them.
But now the Operative feels something descend through his mind—something that suddenly drops in from above him in the jury-rigged zone, wraps him in its endless folds, commandeering his suit and his brain, propelling the latter out into the minds behind him and wiring over downloads. They’ve tuned into the frequency he stipulated. Ten Praetorian marines, one Praetorian officer, one Praetorian razor—
Something else. The Operative feels something
“Carson,” she says. “Leave this one to me. Keep going. Keep gathering the lost under our banner.”
He acknowledges, and accelerates as Lynx and Sarmax keep pace.
• • •
Spencer watches the suits swoop past—watches as those suits are blotted out by a woman’s face that expands in from what seems to be some suddenly activated zone. The face curves about him, envelops him in endless eyes. And now a woman’s voice enfolds him within some endless hollow:
“Interesting. Wheels within wheels.”
“Who are you?”
“Listen, I don’t know why they put me here,” says Spencer. He’s transmitting as rapidly as he can. “I serve Montrose and she serves the Throne and—”
“That’s why. The Throne covers all his bases. You were a counterweight against possible treachery within the Praetorian ranks. A conduit to sniff out possible treachery within InfoCom itself. None of which matters now. I need every razor I can get. These marines will stay with you until my vanguard reaches your position.”
The voice cuts out. Spencer shakes his head as though to clear it. The marines are looking at him.
“Sir,” says one.
“About fucking time,” replies Spencer.
“What are your orders?”
Spencer looks around. There’s combat on the far left. But the armored earthshakers roaring up the valley seem to have broken through whatever resistance they were encountering. They’re making straight for the wreckage on which Spencer and the soldiers are standing. At the rate they’re going, they’ll be here in less than a minute.
“My orders,” says Spencer, “are to do whatever the guys driving those things tell us.”
• • •
Haskell disconnects as her mind swoops up to take in the overall situation. It’s bleak. Seven of the eight Praetorian ships managed to unload their soldiers in drop ships along the cylinder. Two of those ships were the ones that docked at the New London spaceport. The troops within those were the ones that she started out with. The other five got deployed all along the cylinder, in drop-zone patterns calculated to pin down and destroy the two Rain triads that were lurking there. But the overthrow of the zone has thrown those Praetorians into chaos. They’re scattered, their chains of command shattered and their ability to tell friend from foe smashed. With the inevitable result that they’re fighting each other, letting the drones and robots of the Rain clean them up piecemeal.
But Haskell hasn’t given up. As her shaker gains height, she searches for the zone through which the Rain’s orchestrating all this. She’s getting glimpses of fragments here and there: clouds of what may or may not be communications flying back and forth. But everything she can discern is well south of the cylinder’s equator.
