The Burning Skies (9 page)

But one of them isn’t listening.

She sends more commands. It’s not responding. It’s just circling in toward her, on a course to intercept both her and her pursuers, only a couple of klicks distant now. She stares at it. Realization hits her like a meteor smashing into a planet.

F
uck,”
says the Operative, “lost it.”

“What the hell do you mean you lost it?”

“I mean I fucking lost the goddamn signal!”

“How the fuck did you manage to do that?” asks Sarmax. He’s no longer pointing his gun at the Operative. But he looks like he wouldn’t mind shooting him anyway. “Maybe our equipment fucked up.”

“Maybe
you
fucked up,” says Sarmax.

“What’s fucked up is this whole fucking scene.”

“No shit.”

The Operative shakes his head. He’s starting to feel like a pinball getting flung around inside a machine. He and Sarmax are still roaring through the bowels of the cylinder, still watching wall shoot past them. Still trying to make sense of the data that’s streaming through their skulls.

“It dropped off the zone,” says the Operative.

“That’s your fucking excuse?”

“That’s my fucking explanation.”

And it’ll have to do. Because the Operative can’t think of any others. Not without taking apart his armor and trying to see what makes that zone interface tick. Besides, that interface couldn’t
really
be malfunctioning. Because now it’s detecting something else, back in the area they started in. It’s very faint, and it quickly disappears. But for a moment there it was unmistakable. The Operative mentions this to Sarmax.

“What?”

“You heard me,” says the Operative.

“Where?”

“Closing.”

“So what are you waiting for?”

I
t’s off the zone,” says Spencer.

“The target?”

“The hunters, too.”

“Because something’s hunting them.”

“Starting to look that way.”

“More than just starting,” says Linehan. “Textbook setup, man. We’re the reserves. Out in space. We’re flying cover while our forward operatives—whoever the fuck
they
are—cover the area through which we know hostiles have to pass.”

“You’ve got me, Linehan. How do you know hostiles
have
to enter the cylinder?”

“I don’t. Can you get me a readout of the shipping activity across the whole Platform across the last four days?”

“Define shipping activity” says Spencer.

“Times and locations on the Platform at which ships have landed or departed. Normalized against historical activity across the last three months.”

“Easy enough.” Spencer pulls it up. “Here.” But as he’s sending the file over to Linehan he’s taking a look himself.

And drawing some quick conclusions.

“Fuck,”
he says.

“Fasten your seat belts,” says Linehan.

G
reenery’s everywhere. Haskell’s standing on the stairs one level above the floor of a much larger chamber. She can barely discern its contours. A translucent roof stops just short of the cylinder’s hollow interior above her. Light’s dribbling dimly through. Greenhouse structures are stacked along its edges. The floor’s partitioned into giant squares, given over to different types of crops.

Haskell leaps from the stairs, dropping into the plants beneath her. The tall grasses close in over her head. She brushes through them, finds the closest irrigation channel, and starts running along it in a crouch.

Which is when someone steps from the grass farther up ahead.

Someone in a suit of armor that’s completely beaten her own suit’s camo. A nasty-looking minigun’s mounted on its shoulder. The gun’s barrel swivels toward her, even as she springs back onto the zone and finds that whoever’s in the armor has isolated himself from all nets—presumably to deal
with the likes of her. She stares into that barrel, and it’s as though it’s already fired. As though she’s already gone.

But she’s not. She’s still frozen in that moment, still watching existence freeze about her. The suit holds up a hand, gestures at the side of its helmet. As though it wants to talk. She obliges, activating a tightbeam channel, and a voice crackles in her head.

T
he habbed asteroids,” says Spencer.

“The Aeries. Yeah.”

“
Nothing’s
landed there since this whole thing started.”

“And nothing’s going to either. Like I said, targets have to pass through the cylinder.”

“But why would targets even come to the Platform in the first place?”

“It’s not like either of us is a stranger to this type of drill, Spencer. There are only two ways to bag a target, right? Either you go get it or—”

“You make it come to you.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s the bait?”

“I’ll take a wild guess: something impossible to resist.”

G
oing somewhere?” the voice says.

Haskell doesn’t reply. Time spirals slowly sideways. Cosmic background static pours through her. She feels herself drowning in it. She feels herself rising past it. She hears the voice continue.

“Take off your helmet. I want to see you.”

Her body’s so full of adrenaline she can barely move her hands from where she’s got them above her head. But she does: lowers those hands against infinite resistance, unclasps the helmet’s seals, lifts the helmet off, tosses it aside. The suited figure moves forward with all the purpose of a predatory insect—so close now she can see ebony skin through the visor. She can even see what looks like silver hair.

But she can also see that gun—adjusting minutely on its axis as it aims directly between her eyes.

F
lame and motion in the windows of the bridge: two of the other Praetorian ships are firing their motors. They’re dropping out of orbit, toward the cylinder.

“They’re sending a couple of ships in,” says Spencer.

“Drop ships?” asks Linehan.

“No, entire fucking ships. Decked out as medium-grade freighters, American, same as this one. Guess the rest of us are providing cover. Along with whatever they’ve got mounted on the Helios power station.”

“That Helios is quite a structure. Ten klicks of lasers and microwave—”

“I’ll say. Talk about directed-energy capability—”

“How soon till the ships hit the Platform?”

“About a minute.”

“Which end are they heading toward?”

“North Pole. The spaceport end. You called it.”

“Damn right I did,” says Linehan.

“So what the fuck’s in those asteroids? The Euro Magnates?”

“I think they’ve been taken off the board, Spencer. I think the thing that’s in that cylinder’s Aerie is the same thing that’s directing this whole operation.”

“While simultaneously doing everything it can to convince its prey that it’s ripe for the taking?”

“I see you see where I’m going with this.”

Y
ou’re a woman,” says the man within the suit.

“And you’re Stefan Lynx.” A momentary pause. “What the hell makes you say that?”

“I’ve seen your file. I recognize your face. You dye your hair silver. You’re not that hard to pick out of a crowd.”

“You’ve hacked through to the heart of our systems.”