David Williams - The Burning Skies

“ Then let it happen,” says Sinclair. “Let the Throne play his last card. Let the last of the Rain strike for the center one last time. How I wish I could witness the clash that’s about to occur. To hear the very rafters of heaven shake—if you survive with your mind intact, you would do an old man a very great favor in returning to tell me all that transpired.”

“ I’ll never see you again,” she says.

“ If only you could see that far into the future.”

“ Good-bye, Matthew.”

“ Good-bye, Claire”—but the screen’s already gone blank.

• • •

Blankness suddenly gone—and the Operative’s waking up to find himself laying inside his suit. He’s staring past his visor at a ceiling that’s half a meter from his face. He’s in some enclosed space. He doesn’t know where.

He knows why he’s awake, though. He can thank his armor for that—can see it’s on a prearranged sequence. It’s coming to life around him now—a suit that looks to be better than anything he’s ever worn—powering up per whatever instructions it’s got, letting parameters stack up within his skull. Those parameters tell him all about his armor. They tell him nothing about his mission. Save that it’s begun .

Which is why he’s sitting up—why he’s pushing up against the ceiling, which is really a lid. It swings open, and even as it does so, the Operative’s leaping out of his coffinlike container, vaulting to the floor of the larger room he’s in, looking around.

Not that there’s much to see. Just more containers. And three doors, one of which now slides open. The Operative keeps an eye on the revealed passage while he preps his weapons and scans the containers. The readout says industrial plastics . But the Operative’s got a funny feeling that’s what a scan of his own container would have said. He walks to one of the other containers and extends an arm—igniting a laser, he slices through in nothing flat. All he gets for his trouble is some melted plastic.

And the knowledge that he’s just wasted five seconds. Because something in his head is telling him not to worry about these containers. That same feeling is telling him to go through the doorway. The Operative knows better than to doubt it. Posthypnotic memory triggers are unmistakable. He exits the room and walks down the corridor, eyeing every meter of those walls and ceiling. The door at the end of the corridor looks just like the one he just passed through. He waits a moment, wondering if this door is about to open too.

Sure enough, it slides aside. The Operative finds himself staring straight down the barrel of what looks to be a heavy-duty pulse rifle—a model he hadn’t even realized was in production yet—held by another figure in powered armor. The Operative sees his own image in the visor. He looks past the reflection to behold a face he knows.

And then he hears that voice.

Take a man. Take his world. Turn it upside down. Tell him he’s the very thing he’s fighting. Give him memories you’ve manufactured. Let your enemies dose him with drugs that open doors within him. Let the edges of the zone drip like liquid through him. Let him see his own mind melting on every screen. Let him know time as some blasted fiction.

Then bid him open his eyes.

But all Lyle Spencer can see is blur, and all he can feel is cold. He seems to be floating against the straps that hold him down. He’s in zero-G; he hears murmuring around him, along with the thrumming of remote engines. And a voice cutting through all of it.

“ Sir. Can you hear me, sir?”

“ Yes,” replies Spencer.

“ Move your right foot.”

Spencer does so—even as he gets it. He was in storage. He’s opening his eyes. The walls are lined with cryo-pods like the one he’s in. Most of them are open. Those who can are getting out, pulling on uniforms. Those who can’t are waiting, gathering their strength. Technicians are drifting around the room, facilitating the awakenings. The face of one such technician looks into Spencer’s own.

“ Sir,” she says, “how do you feel?”

“ Like shit.”

“ We need to test your reflexes, sir.”

“ Go for it,” he says.

She offers him clothing and a wire at one end of which is a zone-jack. There’s something weird about her uniform. He struggles to clear his mind, reaches for the jack she’s handing him, glances back at her.

“ Where are we?”

She stares at him with an anxious expression. “You don’t know?”

And suddenly he does know. And wishes he didn’t. Her uniform’s Praetorian. So is the one she’s offering him. He has no idea what he’s doing here. But he knows damn well what these soldiers will do with him if they wake up to the fact that he’s woken up among them.

“ Of course I do.”

“ Sir,” she asks, “what’s the name of this ship?”

“ The Larissa V,” he replies.

He has no idea where that came from. But apparently it’s the right answer. He takes the jack, slots it into the back of his neck. Zone expands all around him. It contains many things, one of them being the face of Seb Linehan, Spencer’s erstwhile partner. A man who should be dead. He doesn’t look it. Though he looks like he wishes Spencer was.

Claire Haskell sits within a container aboard some ship, and darkness sits within her. The conversation with Matthew Sinclair has left her feeling sick. She thought she would have left the wreckage of her past life behind her by now, but it’s only growing ever more insistent—Jason’s face in the throes of passion, Jason’s face as she killed him, his body contorted on the SeaMech’s floor—all of it keeps replaying in her mind, and she wishes she could undo all of it.

Her own weakness appalls her, but she can’t deny that she’d sell out the whole world just to put the clock back four days. She’d throw in her lot with the Rain just to keep Jason alive.

But now he’s dead. And she’s thankful, because it means the key to her heart’s been thrown away forever. No one can hurt her anymore. No one can second-guess her while she takes stock of the whole game—the superpowers as they shore up their defenses, the endless gates of both those zones, those endless eyes scanning endlessly for Rain.

And for her. She can’t see the Rain, though. She hasn’t seen them since their defeat four days ago—in the minutes after that defeat, she got a read on them receding into zone like a leviathan fading beneath the waves: just a quick glimpse of scales and teeth, and then it was gone. She saw enough to realize just how much of a threat they still were. It worries her that she hasn’t seen them since. It worries her even more that they might have seen her . That they might have found some way inside her, and she might not even know it. Even if she is Manilishi, that doesn’t mean she can’t lose.