around them as the marines give chase. Lynx and Linehan start to double around, back toward Szilard’s command post—
What the fuck are you doing?” yells the Operative.
“Going for it,” says Lynx.
The Operative can see he’s not kidding. The plan was for Lynx and Linehan to make the feint and then let the rest of them get in there. But Lynx has never been one for playing second fiddle. And the Operative figures maybe that’s just as well. If Szilard’s still got anything up his sleeve, then maybe Lynx can be the one to find out first. The Operative signals to Riley and Maschler to get out on the hull as he maneuvers their vehicle in on the heart of the Com defenses …
Still playing their fucking games,” says Velasquez.
“They can’t stop,” says Sarmax.
Apparently. The final twenty klicks, and it’s total chaos. Lynx and the Operative are veering around Szilard’s mobile strongpoint like wolves around a campfire. Half the Com forces are fighting one another as their minds go. But the inner enclave of Szilard’s handpicked marines are holding steady, defending their president, their ranks still unbroken. They’re continuing to forge their way down toward the labyrinth. Which the advance guard has already penetrated—
“And gotten annihilated,” says Velasquez.
“Takes a special kind of maniac to go in there.”
She’s threading through the web of passages and somehow it helps that she doesn’t even know which ones are in her mind and which ones are carved in rock. All she knows is that Control’s looming before her like a disembodied ghost.
“Turn back, Claire.”
“What do you think I’ve already done?”
“I think you’re being very foolish.”
“When I want your opinion, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Which is why he’s coming after me.”
“And you’re not moving fast enough.”
“He’s afraid of me, isn’t he.”
“Try to have some perspective, Claire.”
“I’ll show you fucks a thing or two about perspective.”
“Will you really?” Control laughs, and the noise is hideous. “Szilard’s fed a thousand soldiers into this labyrinth already. None of them made it more than five seconds. We’ll see how much better you can do. Give the old man a run for his money—why not? All the better, in fact. We need a fighter. We
“Precisely,” she says—and hits his mind full force.
What’s the problem?” yells Spencer.
“It may be a decoy,” says Jarvin.
“Fuck.”
It’s hard to tell. Which is probably the point. It’s made all the tougher by the fact that they’ve got no option than to stay on these rails. Because it’s all linear. There’s nothing in here but this shaft. They plunge onward while the pursuit closes in above them and they start to face up to the fact that the real pursuers may be elsewhere—
“Keep your eye on what’s below us,” says Jarvin.
“My thoughts exactly,” mutters Spencer.
Lynx and Linehan impact onto the core of Szilard’s formation, slicing through it, blasting shit aside—bombs flung off to nail huge tractor-tanks trying to maneuver down rift-galleries … Lynx is splintering the zone in the faces of the Com marines as Linehan fires away. Bodies are flying.
“He’s moving,” says the Operative.
“I see it,” says Velasquez.
Szilard’s dwindling forces are still heading forward. The Operative takes a look at the fading zone sensors way overhead, looks at the camera-feeds on all those endless kilometers of upper levels, the lunar cities swarming with the ravaging Eurasian infantry, the slaughter now developing among the civilian populations—they are sparing no one, the Operative notes. He starts detecting wave anomalies radiating out from the Room—
—as the vanguard of Szilard’s bodyguards slams straight into Sarmax and Velasquez’s position, shape- charges eviscerating the marines as their second rank comes up. Sarmax can see Szilard’s retinue accelerating even further, abandoning most of the troops and dodging past his position—
“Suicide run now,” says Carson.
“Or he knows something we don’t,” says Lynx.
“I’m picking up something weird from the labyrinth,” says Sarmax.
It’s like all the ambience around her is really a liquid through which she’s swimming—like she’s still back in that tank in Montrose’s bunker beneath Korolev—like all of it was memory or the event horizon of the initial drug surge … she stares at Control, who wears way too many faces; she composes her own while she slices straight through him, crushing in on his cognition—“
Picking up something ahead,” says Jarvin.
“Fuck,” says Spencer.
Maybe it’s the thing they’ve been running from. Maybe it’s something new. It doesn’t matter. They’ve got no choice but to go straight through it. They accelerate, start ripping out the elevator floor, getting ready to open up on whatever materializes in the shaft below. They’re almost on it.
Lynx and Linehan start the final run, vectoring in on Szilard’s position at near point-blank range. The best that can be said about the marines’ resistance is that it’s heroic. Lynx’s mind flays the meat of cerebellum as he uses the zone like a whip and augments the guns of Linehan, who’s roaring down the tunnel and into a cavern, straight onto one of three Remoraz-class crawlers moving like mountain goats down the walls. One of the crawlers crashes into the other as Lynx destroys their software: both crawlers lose their grip, tumble exploding to the cavern floor. Linehan’s doing his best to get through the armor of the thing he’s hanging onto. Marines elsewhere in the cavern start firing at him—and then Carson and Maschler and Riley come in through a different entrance and start cleaning them up. Linehan’s tearing off the treads of the crawler, ripping out its rocket engines to strand it as a metal coffin. He sticks several shape-charges onto the side, jets away. Lynx enters the room as they detonate.
Get him,” says the Operative.
But Maschler and Riley are already on it—joining up with Linehan to apprehend any survivors, closing on the president’s presumed position. The Operative and Lynx alight on opposite walls of the cavern—supervising the salvage operation that’s going on below while they scan—
“Executive node intact,” says Lynx.
“Roger that,” says the Operative.
But he’s also picking up intensifying pulses from the direction of the labyrinth—from the direction of the
