“You were—”
“Trying to get control of his whole fleet.”
“Because you’re Autumn Rain.”
“The original, baby.”
“You tried to use me to kill the admiral but your buddy Carson backstabbed you.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. You’re a traitor.”
“Whatever,” says Lynx. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“That if you can keep me talking long enough your armor can trace me.”
“So far it’s working.”
“But here’s the thing you should be wondering: why the hell haven’t you informed the SpaceCom razor you’ve been paired with that you’ve been chatting with me?”
“What?”
“The SpaceCom razor. The guy who Szilard said go run point in the jungle for. Few score meters back in the shaft behind you, right? I’m sure that guy’s at least a captain. Must be some hotshot razor.”
“He’s tracking you—”
“And he hasn’t found me. So why the hell haven’t you told him that the traitor’s on the line?”
“You’re … fucking with my zone-signal … my software—”
“Sure I am. But tell me why you haven’t even tried to get him on the fucking line!”
“I … don’t know. I—”
“I’ll tell you why. Because you’re dickless. Because I’m the fucking Cheshire cat and I’ve sent you my smile to tell you to wake the fuck up. Szilard’s already sold you out.”
“I—what are you talking about?”
“Jesus Christ! Do you leave your brain at the door when you check into Hotel SpaceCom? Did Szilard take out your fucking batteries? Come on, man: the Lizard’s gonna purge you tonight.”
“Prove it.”
“Watch this.”
Abruptly, the train starts slowing. Rocky walls outside the windows become visible as more than just something flickering by. The train keeps on braking, slows even further, hisses to a halt.
But it’s clear all hell is still breaking loose outside. Vibrations keep on rocking through the floor. Apparently the Americans are pressing home their advantage. Everyone’s looking at one another—except the major who’s looking at nothing in particular, save for the readouts in his own head, affording him a vantage that’s more advantaged than anyone else in the car. He exhales slowly—stands up, straightens out his uniform, and starts heading toward the door to the next car.
“The rats are leaving the ship,” says someone.
“We’re supposed to stay here,” says someone else.
“So stay,” says the major. The car door opens and he goes through as it slides shut behind him. He triggers override codes, locks it shut. He’s in a freight car now—he makes his way through the narrow passage between the metal crates. He moves into the next freight car, and then the next.
Two more cars, and he’s arrived at a door that’s different than the ones he’s been through. It looks to be a great deal thicker. It’s still no match for his codes. It slides open, and he walks on through into the train’s cockpit. The driver and engineer whirl toward him, their expressions just short of priceless.
Spencer and Sarmax get busy getting moving, through the trapdoor in the floor and down into the rooms beneath them. Those rooms are just as packed with nukes as the ones they left. They contain trapdoors that lead to shafts that lead to—
“Fuck,” says Sarmax.
“We really shouldn’t go in there,” says Spencer.
“Not unless we’re feeling lucky.”
Or just really stupid. The shafts below this point aren’t intended for humans. Just nukes, getting slotted through at high speed. Meaning that—
“We’re trapped.”
“Maybe,” says Spencer.
“How many routes are there out of here?”
Depends how you count. The zone’s still down, but Spencer got enough of a glimpse of this area before the lights went out to be able to map it out: a series of interlocking rooms, all of them packed with the fissile material that’s both cargo and fuel. Spencer’s trying to calibrate these rooms against the larger superstructure of the thing they’re in, trying to make some calculations that are really just educated guesses. He’s got no time for anything else.
“This way,” he says, and starts moving through doors that lead to yet more of these rooms that are starting to drive him crazy. He wonders why the Eurasians didn’t just build one big storage chamber. He knows the answer even as he thinks the question, that it’s a matter of contingencies. The nukes themselves are failsafed. But if one of the warheads went off in here anyway, no precaution would matter. Yet the hi-ex trigger mechanism that’s fastened to each warhead is a different story. If those started to detonate accidentally, they could do some serious chain-reaction damage unless they were contained. So each room is the equivalent of a bunker. And he and Sarmax have reached the one they’ve been making for.
“This is it,” says Spencer.
“This is what?”
“Where we get off.”
“What?”
“Well, these nukes weren’t just carried down ladders.”
“Ah,” says Sarmax.
Because the truth is that these rooms don’t add up. Stack them up against one another, and there’s some empty space that runs through the center of them: space around which they’re all clustered.
“The spine,” says Sarmax.
“Now we just need to get in there,” says Spencer.
“Easy enough,” says Sarmax, turning to the wall—
Haskell’s thinking that the best way out of this one is to play it cool. She’s ghosting the passages, coasting past the sentinels, watching the back doors of her own mind. She knows that Carson has the keys to at least one of them. She’s hoping she’s got the keys to turn those keys against him. She heads up a ladder, through a doorway that opens without even knowing it’s been opened. She’s getting in behind the foremost of the InfoCom razors, letting them move ahead of her, running down one of her decoys. She’s tempted to go for Carson himself. But she decides not to press her luck. Particularly as maybe Carson’s luring her in toward him. She crawls on past …
And fires her suit-jets. Now it’s a sprint. Her zone-bombs detonate behind her; two of the InfoCom razors go down writhing—her mind darts on through the gap they’ve left, and then her body follows. Power-suited mechs are firing in all directions, causing chaos. She feels Carson move to shore things up, but she’s not sticking around to see the results; she ducks into a freight-chute, hurtles upward. Moments later, she’s emerging—a quarter-klick farther away. She’s broken through Carson’s perimeter, doubling back toward Congreve.
Only to find another InfoCom force bearing down on her.
Too late, she sees the nature of the real trap. The luxury of numbers: Carson has had a second team of razors and mechs out there, sitting lights-out and waiting for just this kind of breakout. Even so, she’s faster than they thought. But now they’re hot on her heels. She blasts through storage chambers, moves past some of the directed-energy power generators. Wiring connects them to the guns spitting on the surface—and Haskell’s just stealing past them, through a maintenance shaft, dropping into the chamber she’s been headed toward.
The train that stretches through the room sits on rails that are part of the deep-grids: the sublunar rail network that connects the U.S. farside bases and that extends all the way to the lunar nearside. But all Haskell wants to do now is stay ahead of the InfoCom forces that are scarcely half a klick back. She steps inside the train’s first car. There are seven others. All bear the moon-and-eagle SpaceCom standard. All look empty, but she’s not about to make any assumptions. Doors hiss shut behind her. She places herself against a seat as the train accelerates. Walls rush by, so fast they look like they’re buckling.