Vince smiled. A few days ago, Connors had been in a rush to arrest him and bring him to Washington, and now he wanted to go and she was resisting taking him there. She was so driven to do the right thing. “Can you fix it?”
Connors grunted. “I think so.” She pulled her head out. “You know what they’re going to do to you if you go there? You know, right?”
Vince sighed and nodded.
“This is a national security issue now, not just some jumped-up white-collar crime. They’re going to rip into you.”
“I know.” Vince looked up at the stars. Sooner or later you had to pick sides. “I’m going to tell them everything. Make the call.”
“If you’re thinking this will get you off the hook, get your Phuture News back—”
“That’s not what’s this is about.” Vince looked down into Connor’s eyes. “This is about doing the right thing.”
She met his gaze. “Okay then.” She leaned her head back through the access panel.
“And I want to get you somewhere safe,” he whispered under his breath while her head was deep inside the drone. He glanced at the horizon, at the streak of the comet just rising, then looked up at the stars—but there was nowhere safe to go, not on this world, not anymore.
2
Eight silver capsules hung motionless together, spaced out over a four-kilometer line. The gold and silver webs of city lights crept through nightshade far below. A burst of sunlight illuminated the curve of the Earth, the rising sun blossoming across seas and the wrinkles of snow-capped mountains. Retrorockets fired on the capsules, tiny soundless bursts that slowed them in tandem. One after another they dropped from space, glowing orange and then white as they tore into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
Sid’s display spaces lit up. “We’ve tripped the Alliance defenses. Wait for my signal.”
On Himalayan mountaintops strung along the Chinese side, batteries of slingshot shield-effect and surface-to-air weapons systems powered up, zeroing in on the incoming threats. The first of them lit up, spreading a blanket of incendiary pellets in the path of the capsules. The pellets exploded and flamed into a wall of plasma.
Sid waited, watching the distance close. “Now!”
The capsules shed their blistering shells, and dozens of fragments rocketed out from each at random angles, hundreds of decoys that zigged and zagged on hard angles, spreading across thousands of cubic kilometers of space.
As one of the world’s best players in tactical combat in the gameworlds, Sid had been given command of the infiltration. He’d never been involved in real combat, but there was barely any difference anymore between the real world and the gameworlds he dominated. When they were planning this, he’d insisted that they didn’t have any better options, that he could execute this better than anyone else they had.
Now he was hoping he was right.
His mind spread out into the future, modeling the incoming flux of defensive strategies in hundreds of phutures that evolved and collapsed in fractions of seconds as their predictions came true or faltered. Latency delays between the battle zone and his meat-mind were too long, so he’d embedded an autonomous splinter of his mind into the attacking capsules. A very thin stream of perceptual data updated his primary consciousness several seconds after the fact.
Electromagnetic cloaking systems bent radio and visual wavelengths around the invaders, rendering them nearly invisible, while darknets descended to disrupt the informational spaces that linked this physical space to the cyber-worlds. Weaving and dodging, dozens of the decoys flamed out in the blazing defenses, but one and then another of them got through, slamming into the mountainsides and foothills of the Langtang Valley in the middle of the Himalayan plateau.
“We made it,” sighed Sid’s splinter to nobody else but itself. It had embedded its primary point-of-presence in the fragment-decoy in which Zoraster’s body was encased.
Blasting its way several feet into the granite of the mountainside, the impact of landing imparted thousands of gees onto the capsule, but the core had remained intact. Sid began the rapid heating sequence, thawing Zoraster’s frozen body while he powered up the bots and exoskeletons.
He fired the explosives to separate the exterior casing.
“Incoming,” alerted another splinter of Sid’s mind. On the tactical maps, hundreds of Alliance drones swarmed outward from their bases in the mountains, descending on the seismic signatures that the impacts created.
Railgun slugs tore into the side of the mountain above them.
Sid had to hurry. With a bang the exterior casing exploded away, opening the interior to the wind and snow of the Himalayan plateau they were still rolling across. His splinter was now totally cut off from the outside world as dense security blankets descended on this new theatre of war. In the outside world, he was filling the mediaworlds with propaganda, trying to create a fog of disinformation around the attack.
Nearly a second had passed since they’d hit the ground. The debris and snow was still settling while they rolled to a stop. Sid engaged the robotic surrogate housing him to begin constructing a local situational report. In his mind’s eyes, the other Grilla units came online, and a tactical display began forming. Seven of them, all ex-commandos from Zoraster’s old special-forces team, had made it through the gauntlet.
One was unaccounted for.
In overlaid display spaces, Sid watched each of the Grillas undergo the rapid thaw-and-heat cycles, their bodies coming back to life. He couldn’t help thinking about resurrection, about the Resurrection. How much of the old texts were true—how to separate fact from fiction? Was Judgment Day coming? Would the unforgotten dead rise, springing from the ancient nervenet’s memory banks?
Zoraster twitched as his body came back to life.
And would it be only humans?
The hollow thud of the railgun slugs grew louder. The Alliance defensive systems had located Sid and Zoraster’s capsule, but they were already away, disappearing into the swirling snow. Behind them the capsule exploded in a crunching explosion.
Zoraster’s meat-mind was coming back to groggy life as his exoskeleton marched him along the mountain ridge. He smiled a toothy grin at the drone Sid’s mind hovered in. “You okay, kid?”
Sid laughed. “I’m not the frozen steak dinner. How are you feeling?”
“Not something I’d like to do every day, but okay.” As a protection against the extreme accelerations, they’d put the Grilla commandos in deep-freeze. It was something they were engineered for. To the Alliance, this would all just look like a failed kinetic attack. “Everyone get through?”
Sid relayed the situational report into Zoraster’s systems. Seven of the capsules carrying his Grilla commandos got through. One was still unaccounted for. Now it was listed as destroyed.
The Grilla sighed. “Damn it, Zane.” He looked at Sid’s drone. “He was a good friend.”
Sid tried to find more information, but there wasn’t any. All of Zoraster’s old army buddies had volunteered for the mission, without asking any questions, when he put out the call. Now one of them was dead. They trudged through the ice and boulders in silence. The first stage was complete. There was a long hike ahead, over the spine of the Himalayas to the plains beyond, but so far, that was all Sid knew.
“Do you have any idea how we’re going to get into Arunchel Pradesh?” Sid asked, texting the question quietly into Zoraster’s secondary channels. Arunchel Pradesh—literally, the “land of the rising sun” in Sanskrit—was the location of the first Sino-Indian wars in the Himalayas over a hundred years before. It was also the flashpoint that started the Weather Wars.