David Williams - The Burning Skies

“ The comprehensive dossiers on the chief of this place. General Loshenko. And his five subordinates. And quickly.”

“ And his Chinese counterpart?”

“ This is an investigation, captain. Not an instigation of civil war. Now move your ass.”

“ Sir.”

The captain disconnects. Spencer imagines he’s guessing that Spencer’s got his own sources to scope out the Chinese. But the truth of the matter is that Spencer’s just trying to keep the captain busy. He doesn’t need any official requests to Moscow to figure out what they’ve got on the men they’ve sent to run this place. He’s already tapped into Moscow’s files to get to where he is now, reached out across the long-gone steppes to that city he’ll never see, slipped through its streets and basements while he pulled together everything he could find. He’s back beneath those streets now, looking for the key to the place he’s in.

And not finding it. Maybe his clearance just isn’t high enough. Or maybe everything’s just that compartmentalized.

“ What’s the story?” says Sarmax.

“ The story is I can’t find a goddamn thing.”

“ What about the handler’s mystery file?”

“ The book’s divided into three sections.”

“ And?”

“ And that’s it.”

“ That’s what you call progress?”

“ It’s what I call a start.”

“ You’re not funny.”

“ Easy Leo. The first part deals with this base. The second part deals with the weapon that’s in here.”

“ And the third?”

“ I haven’t a fucking clue. And I’m not even that sure about the first two. It’s just pattern-recognition algorithms I’ve been running. The first part contains at least a few disguised maps. The second part seems to be technical descriptions. The third’s Christ knows what.”

“ So you’re stonewalled.”

“ So I am.”

“ So let’s do this.”

Spencer shrugs, closes a circuit in his head, connects the logic bomb’s software to the Eurasian zone. Only there’s no detonation. Just lightning racing out onto the zone—and Spencer’s riding that lightning, getting hauled up along a new path, up through the mountains and into one of the hidden wireless aerials that the Coalition has secreted in the peaks. The signal churns out into space. Out toward a point just behind the Moon.

But the answer comes back long before it arrives.

It’s the Manilishi. There’s no doubt. It’s her face, her touch. And Spencer gets it now—sees that he’s been prepping the ground this whole time. He and Sarmax are the inside guys. Though he wonders why the Manilishi wasn’t in on this from the start; why it wasn’t just her and Sarmax. Perhaps the Throne figured he’d hedge his bets with a razor physically on the scene. But then why wasn’t she running cover from the beginning? Or was she? Spencer wonders what he’s missing. He wonders if the answer’s bound up in the thing he’s seeking.

Or whether it has something to do with the Manilishi. Because there’s something strange about her. Maybe it’s just the pressure she’s causing in his head. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate her. But there’s something almost… tentative about her movements. Not that that makes her any less hell-on-wheels. She starts using the bomb like a missile homing in on its target: straight into the heart of this complex, straight out to its edges. Coordinates flash into place. A new grid locks in to replace the old. The presence fades.

Spencer is breathing heavily. His heart feels like it’s about to explode. He’s covered with sweat. He’s almost shaking.

“ You okay?” says Sarmax.

“ I think so,” he replies.

He’s lying. He’s more than okay. He’s never felt anything like this. For one moment he was the most powerful creature in existence. And he can still feel her somehow lingering back there within his mind. Though according to his screens there’s no live connection. Which makes no sense.

And the map of the place he’s in makes even less. Because it seems to have shifted. He’s trying to put his finger on precisely how. He can’t see anything tangible. It’s just more of the same: endless corridors and chambers and munitions posts and barracks and fuel-dumps and guns and soldiers and trains.

Trains.

Suddenly he’s scanning the handler’s book with new insight. Suddenly it’s all starting to make sense. Some of the tables in the first section—numbers packed into as-yet-undeciphered column headers—he’d thought those numbers were disguised coordinates. But now that he’s ablaze with fresh insight, it’s all too clear: he realizes that factoring those figures in certain ways means they line up a little too neatly with some of the historical data in the logistics mainframes of this base. Because they’re really inventories. That contain schedules.

Of trains.

Like the one he’s in now … no . Larger than the one he’s in now. Much larger. Like the one he and Sarmax came in on. Those trains are everywhere. They’re the main conduit for supplies coming in. They come from underground and above-ground railways that stretch for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers, all the way to the Ural and Altai mountain ranges. They’re all accounted for.

Except they’re not.

“ What the hell are you talking about?” says Sarmax.

“ There are way more freight cars coming into this place than there are leaving.”

“ So they’re doing a mega buildup.” Sarmax looks unimpressed. “That surprises you?”

“ You don’t fucking get it.”

“ Get what?”

“ Those trains aren’t accumulating anywhere. They’re disappearing.”

“ To where?”

That’s what he’s trying to figure out. Some of the excess is getting piled up in plain sight. The entrances to the base are getting pretty jammed. But not all of the rolling stock is accounted for. There are a lot of locomotives that are just vanishing. Which ought to be impossible. But now Spencer’s seeing how it’s been done. Because the Manilishi’s hack is wiping away the false camera feeds and showing Spencer the real views into this base’s chambers. Focusing him in on a series of rail yards on the western extremity of the complex where several trains are waiting.

Only problem is that those rail yards are empty.

Spencer double-takes. Double-checks: these trains are there on the screens. They’re there in the base’s databases. They’re crystal clear on zone.

Just not in real life. That yard’s empty. Spencer’s checking out the last forty-eight hours of actual footage and it’s showing him that the trains have gone west from there, into tunnels where there aren’t any cameras. Tunnels that supposedly dead-end almost immediately. Tunnels not wired for maglev, either. He mentions this to Sarmax.