The Machinery of Light

that fact. She isn’t going to escape, though he knows damn well that’s not going to stop her from trying. That’s why she’s the Manilishi—the foremost razor in existence, off-the-charts battle management capabilities merely the tip of the iceberg. That’s why he needs her—to get her involved in the showdown with the East.

But first he has to catch her.

“Sir?”

The Operative looks at the bodyguard.

“Sir, the president wants an update.”

And for just the briefest of moments the Operative thinks the bodyguard’s talking about Andrew Harrison. The man who ruled the United States for more than twenty years before he was shot dead by the Operative about twenty minutes ago. There’s a brand-new boss now—the one who orchestrated the death of the old one and blamed the whole thing on the Eurasians. She’s on the line, and the Operative can guess what she wants to talk about.

“Put her through,” he says.

“Carson.” The voice of Stephanie Montrose is clipped, terse. There’s a lot of background noise. Her image is fuzzy. She’s clearly looking into a live feed rather than using a cranial implant. The Operative clears his throat.

“Madam President,” he says.

Static. Then: “Carson. Can you hear me?”

“I can.”

“Do you have her?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s taking so long?”

“What’s taking so long is that she’s hell on wheels.”

Montrose says nothing. “How’s it looking up there?” the Operative adds.

“We’re winning.”

“But not yet won.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“Just the facts,” says the Operative.

“Spare me,” snaps Montrose. “Their def-grids are collapsing. Their cities lie helpless before us.”

“I don’t believe in counting chickens.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“The Eurasians may have some tricks up their sleeves.”

Her hawklike face looks at him almost curiously. “Do you know that for a fact?”

“Not even vaguely.”

“So leave the contingency planning to me.” Montrose shifts her head; the Operative gets a glimpse of the war room behind her: rows of screens and consoles, analysts pacing through narrow passages between them. “What the East is facing is the heaviest zone-attack ever mounted. Whatever last-ditch games they want to play can’t matter. I’ll rule the Earth-Moon system within the hour.”

“You and Szilard.”

“Again, I detect sarcasm.”

“And again, I plead innocence.”

“Szilard doesn’t have the executive node software,” says Montrose. “He’s the junior partner.”

“And what am I?”

“If you deliver Haskell, you’re whatever you want to be.”

“I want Mars,” says the Operative.

“You’ll have it,” replies Montrose.

“Roll it up as a U.S. protectorate, make me protector?”

“Done upon the peace. Now bring the Manilishi back to me—alive or dead.”

He stares at her.

“Believe me,” she says, “I’d love to plug the bitch into my battle-management grid just to watch the sparks fly. But it’s no longer a requirement. Our forces are carrying all before them. All I need’s her body—one way or another.”

“Understood.”

“Report in as soon as possible.”

The Operative cuts off the comlink. He looks at the three bodyguards that Montrose has assigned to be in his presence at all times. Their visors stare back at him impassively. He knows they’ve been assigned to kill him under certain conditions. He’d love to know precisely which ones. He lets screens snap on within him that show him the next two klicks of underground chambers—show him, too, the cloud of probabilities that denote the best guess as to Haskell’s position, now slashing out past the left flank of the trackers. The InfoCom razors recalibrate. The mechs move onto the outer boundary of Haskell’s position.

Montrose’s eyes flick away from the screen, return to flitting through a hundred others. Battle readouts parade in rapid-fire fashion before her, but they’re just the summaries of summaries. The war room around her is processing more information per second than the entire twentieth century produced. Most of the actual targeting is being handled by computers; at a tactical level, the situation’s moving far too quickly for humans to get involved, though razors are continually optimizing the targeting sequences and making overrides as necessary to the prioritization algorithms. But most of the human involvement is occurring at more strategic levels, some of it at the most strategic level of all—and now a new light’s flashing. Montrose’s aide-de-camp coughs discreetly as he steps up behind her.

“Admiral Szilard,” he whispers.

“Put him through,” says Montrose as she wipes the annoyed expression from her face. The face of the SpaceCom commander appears on a screen before her, looking nothing if not sardonic.

“Stephanie,” he says.

For a moment she’s tempted to insist he call her Madam President. But she’s come too far in life to get tripped up by formalities. Particularly when the man she’s facing is one of the few factors she doesn’t have full control of in a situation that’s otherwise going her way.

“Jharek,” she says smoothly. “What’s the situation?”

“Funny,” he says, “that’s why I was calling you.”

She knows they don’t need such preliminaries. But somehow they’re still playing this game. Same one they’ve been playing since they were both pretending to be loyal servants of Andrew Harrison. Same indirectness as always, born of dealing through back-channels and intermediaries. Didn’t stop her and Szilard from mapping this whole thing out—from figuring out that the only way to deal with the president was to combine their strength and take him from both directions: lure him into concentrating on SpaceCom, lull him into thinking InfoCom was something he could trust. Or rather, use—and in reality Montrose was the one using him. She seduced the president, and she did it in more ways than one. Because Stephanie Montrose isn’t wired like most people are. She thinks at angles to everybody. That’s how she climbed to the top of Information Command by the age of thirty-eight. Now she’s forty-nine, one of the youngest presidents in American history, and she thinks she might just have found a way to rule forever. She stares at the head of Space Command—the man they call the Lizard— looks into his eyes and smiles her most winning smile.

“We’re winning,” she says.

“I noticed,” he replies.

There’s no way he couldn’t have. Not with the fattest wireless pipeline ever configured linking her base with his flagship. Behind Szilard she can see the bridge of the Montana—an HQ that looks to be every bit as extensive as her own. She takes in the screens that are visible, isn’t surprised to see that the SpaceCom camera that’s capturing the feed is systematically blurring the images of the readouts. She knows full well that what she’s got with Szilard is an uneasy partnership. She wonders for how long it’s going to be sustainable. She’s knows a lot of that depends on what they’re talking about now.

“The Manilishi,” he says.

“Ah,” she says.

“Do you have her?”