David Williams - The Machinery of Light

“I was assuming it was Haskell.”

Sarmax looks at him strangely. “Could you tell if it was female?”

“No,” says Spencer.

“You couldn’t tell anything at all?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m trying to figure out who it was.”

Spencer regards Sarmax curiously. “Right. I keep forgetting you knew them.”

“Trained them, sure.” Sarmax shifts the subject. “Look, there’s more than meets the eye here. I was a wet-ops specialist of twenty years when they put me out for forty-eight hours and woke me up with the news that I was the new breed. I asked what the fuck that meant. They said, you’ll see. And they were right. You just act . You make all the right choices, and you know that the other members of the team are making theirs—you just know it. And when you strike, you don’t hesitate. And everybody hesitates. Even if they don’t know it. Even for a fraction of a second. But not when you’re Rain. You get the shot off quicker, and you never miss. You—”

“Carson told me something—”

“Carson told you something?”

“On the way back to Earth. He said the Rain are more than just killers. They’re takeover artists.”

“Sure. Would have thought that was obvious by now.”

“He said it was an instinct for them.”

“Sure. We were taught to seek heights. We sense heights.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Not sure I can explain. Call it intuition.”

“Lot of it running around these days,” says Spencer.

“If you’re talking about the Manilishi, you can forget it. She’s on a whole different level, man. She hacks the light fantastic so hard she’s forced them to invent whole new classifications of razor ability. I’ve got a feeling that if she’d ever been plugged into the rest of the Rain, we’d be dealing with a lot more than mind reading.” Sarmax pauses. “Where are you going with all this anyway?”

“Trying to get a line on the handler’s file,” says Spencer.

“The book.”

“Yeah, the book.”

“Any luck?”

“Not with the part that counts.”

The thing that’s been turning in Spencer’s head contains three. The first is the location of the base they’ve penetrated. The second is the nature of the Eurasian secret weapon they’re inside. Both of those have now been cracked. Neither holds a candle to the third part: the final section of the pages scrawled in languages the last American agent in Hong Kong invented for the sole purpose of better hiding the secrets that had driven him mad. Secrets he committed to the most archaic medium of them all, the only one that’s safe from zone … paper. A whole book’s worth, and now it’s been burned, but not before it was photographed and uploaded by the men who killed him—Spencer and Sarmax—who were even more desperate than the handler was, and who can’t afford to take the precautions he’d been taking. Spencer mulls it all over once again. He exhales slowly.

“It’s definitely what we’re after,” he says.

“Rain,” says Sarmax.

“Yeah. I’ve been able to suss out the section headings, made some inroads on the rest of it. I’ve figured out its source.”

“Its source?”

“Its author.”

“You mean the handler? Jarvin?”

“I mean who he stole it from.”

“Oh.”

“Oh. We’re talking about the key files , Leo. Precise records of the Autumn Rain experiments, right? Sinclair had to keep track of it somehow. And somehow his onetime handler went and got himself a copy.”

“An alleged copy.”

“Sure. May be a fake. But I doubt it.”

“Because?”

“Because I think it really did do something to his mind.”

Sarmax starts to reply—and stops as a faint noise filters in from several rooms above … followed by an unmistakable creak as a hatch swings open. There’s the sound of boots coming down a ladder.

“The access shafts,” says Spencer.

“We need to make ourselves scarce.”

Claire Haskell keeps on running, pursuit hot on her trail, and she’s ever more certain that Carson’s leading that pursuit—that Montrose hasn’t had him liquidated for failing to capture her. Or just liquidated on general principles: because Haskell knows damn well what Carson is doing working for Stephanie Montrose. She wonders if Montrose knows too—wonders if Montrose has used her possession of the executive node to build up some means to protect herself from the world’s most dangerous assassin.

But mostly Haskell’s wondering about the door she’s about to reach. It leads to a shaft she’d really like to get to. One she’s pretty sure isn’t known to Montrose. She wonders if it’s known to Carson. It’s barely known to her—even with her maps, it’s not easy to find. That’s because it’s hidden in the bottom of an empty water pipe, looking like part of the wall within. She traces her hand along the frame—finds a switch and hits it.

Nothing happens.

The door’s not opening. She hits it again. Same result.

She tries to hack the systems of the door, but she can’t even find a zone beyond it. She’s getting frantic now. Because she can feel the pursuit coming in behind her, moving in to cut her off.

And suddenly she gets it—a flash of insight or just some leering thought of his flung through rock for her reception: Carson knows about this door for sure—knows it’s a way to the really deep shafts—and that’s why she’s just managed to get herself trapped against it. He knows damn well that she can’t get through it. The codes she has are wrong. Or maybe they just got changed. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she can’t get through. And that the hunters are approaching along vectors that leave her with no way to get beyond them, back into the base’s larger sprawl. She turns away from the door—

And looks longingly back. For one moment, it’s as though Jason Marlowe himself is on the other side. Her dead lover—she wants to get through that badly. She contemplates using explosives against the portal, but figures that this door was designed to withstand anything up to a nuke. So she tears herself away, turns around, and starts climbing up the side of pipe, back into a passageway, taking stock all the while of the noose that’s tightening around her.

The Operative watches his readouts as they show the margin of error vanishing. It’s all over. Haskell’s officially fucked, regardless of which zone-signature she’s hiding behind. The probabilities are dwindling to the point where all her potential routes intersect with one of his formation’s flanks. And those flanks are sweeping together like jaws …

He figured she’d take the route she did. It was predictable enough. He knows how Haskell thinks. After all, he was there when she started thinking. He intends to be there at the end too. Which can’t be far away. He hopes it will be quick. He lets the contours of the war that’s blazing overhead waft through him as he moves forward, bodyguards closing up behind him, following in the wake of his suit’s thrusters.

Find the traitor.

Find the fucking traitor and rip out his fucking heart. Tear his flesh to bits. Gobble his flesh right off the floor. Fucking eat him.

Find the traitor.

But other than that, there’s not much in the way of thought. There’s just a set of nerve-reflexes honed to professional levels and looking for a target. Because somewhere in this spaceship there’s a traitor. And loyal SpaceCom soldiers are looking for that traitor. Loyal soldiers just like—