“Probably.”
“Definitely.”
“So why haven’t they switched this thing on?”
“I presume,” says Sarmax, “that they’re waiting for their moment.”
Spencer nods. He figures that moment will come soon enough. The two men are deep inside something that was separated from the exterior zone to begin with, machinery that’s situated in a mammoth cave beneath several klicks of rock, cut off from the rest of this black base, with all systems shut off as an additional precaution. Because you can never be too careful.
“Failsafe after failsafe,” mutters Spencer.
“Hostile razors could be inside already,” says Sarmax.
“Imagine that.”
“We’ll need to keep a close read on the politics when it all lights up.”
And that’s putting it mildly. The Eurasian Coalition is like two bodies sewn together. There’s a reason its zone felt so jury-rigged—why it was so difficult to line up all the operational hierarchies. Spencer’s wishing he had paid more attention to them on the way in, before they left the zone behind and reached this compartmentalized microzone deeper in the Earth than he’s ever been before. Parts of it were opaque to him even then—the inner enclaves, presumably, but now the entire thing’s been turned off, and he’s blind. He doesn’t like it.
Apparently Sarmax likes it even less. The mech’s blind by definition, and it wasn’t hard for Spencer to get him to agree to stay here until things clarify. So they’ve remained in this chamber for the last quarter-hour—just them and the unholy amount of nuclear warheads that line the walls around them.
“What do you think the total count is?” says Sarmax.
“About fifty thousand.”
“Gotta be more than that—”
“I’m talking about the ones we’ve seen,” says Spencer.
“I’m asking you to guess about the ones we haven’t.”
“We’re more than a klick deep into this bitch,” says Spencer. “How the fuck am I supposed to guess—”
But that’s when he feels something clutch at his mind—
And retract. Sitting here at L5, she can’t reach that deep. She knows someone’s down there, though. Right now that’s all she needs to know. She hauls her mind back to the borders of the zone—lets herself slot through that zone, out of the Himalayas, out beneath China—and back into the U.S. zone, back out into space. Earth is getting closed off to her now anyway. The carpet of directed energy has become too thick. It’s all interference now—all satellites spitting light and plasma at one another in a web that’s starting to look almost solid. Earth’s upper atmosphere blooms incandescent. The lower orbits are a chaos of wreckage.
It’s only slightly cleaner higher up. There’s more space, though, and so far both sides are maintaining the integrity of their positions. The woman routes her signal through the American flagship
Or she would be, were she human.
She certainly looks it. Same way she
Which surprises the woman. She would have thought that the L2 fleet would have joined with L5’s guns to catch the Eurasian L4 fortresses in a crossfire. But it looks like the American high command has elected to allow the duel between L4 and L5 to continue to play out. It’s not what the prisoner told her he expected. She wonders at that, wonders if he was deliberately misleading her, wonders if he’s engaged in unseen battles of his own. But she sees the logic in the American move. They’re gambling that they can shut down the Eurasian forces on the Moon before the L4 guns break through L5’s defenses. So now she focuses on the Moon; her vantage point at L5 gives her a partial look at the farside—but she needs more than that. She routes herself through to the farside’s center—Congreve, the main American base there—whips past its dome, drops through the city and into its basements and on into the sub-basements. The traffic is thinning out along with the wires, but she keeps on threading deeper all the same, honing in on the activity that she’s detecting. Some kind of chase is in progress. She’s almost at the limits of the sub-basements now, at the edge of the natural tunnels that honeycomb so much of the Moon—lava tubes that bubbled through ancient magma, some of them rigged with zone and used for mining, so many left unexplored even to this day. The woman drops in around the pursuers. An elite InfoCom squad … and she can’t see what it’s pursuing. She doesn’t need to. All she needs to do is hack in and do what she does best.
Listen.
Somewhere deeper down, Claire Haskell is listening too. Not that it’s doing her much good. The team that’s hunting her is composed of experienced trackers. They’re locked into a tightbeam mesh less than half a klick back, trailing in her zone-wake via some machination of the one who’s leading them. Haskell can practically
On screens within his head, a man orchestrates the pursuit. The Operative is several levels up, but he’s got the target right where he wants her. The target he’s been pursuing all his life, though he’s only just waking up to