Marlowe changes course once more, streaks in above tangled metal and shattered ships. He cuts in toward the craft that’s the cause of all the commotion. He alights upon it. Looks down.
Bullets smash into his helmet, bounce off. He leaps down to his assailant.
“I’m on your side,” he says. “I’m CICom.”
“Says who.”
“Says my codes,” he replies. He beams them to her.
Her contours show her for a woman. Her breath-mask prevents him from seeing her face. Which is fine by him. Faces are currency. No sense in giving them up for free. And yet there’s something about this woman that grips him immediately. Maybe it’s because she just tried to kill him. Maybe it’s because she’s still got that razorwire dangling from her head.
“Hold on to me,” he says.
She doesn’t want to. He can see that. But she does it anyway: steps toward him, embraces him, clasps her arms around his back, looks out over his left shoulder.
“I’m blocking your shoulder rack,” she says.
“I’m shutting it down,” he says. “Careful of the main motors.”
“This isn’t going to work,” she replies. “You’re going to be dodging left and right up there and you’re going to shake me off.”
“You’re right,” he says. “Get down.”
She does. A hatch opens on one of his arms. He starts pulling something out.
“A tether,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “But I figure this is a better use for it than going up a wall. Get back up here.”
She does, grabs the tether from him, starts lashing it about the two of them. He starts tying knots. A few loops and it’s done.
“Is that too tight?” he asks.
“Not for what we’re about to do,” she says. She reaches down, pulls out her boot knife, slices off the excess tether.
“You ready?”
“Can you see?”
“Absolutely,” he replies.
And reignites his suit’s engines.
Face impassive, the Operative pulls himself through the doorway and into the cockpit. Two men sit within its cramped confines. One wears a cap. The other doesn’t. On all sides are clustered all manner of instrument-banks. Narrow windows cut through those banks. Space flickers in those windows.
“So here he is,” says the man with the cap. Beneath his headpiece sits a pair of bushy eyebrows connected by a scar. The contours of his nose and cheekbones are angled in a way that makes his default expression a sardonic one.
“Yes,” says the Operative.
“The man himself,” says the hatless man, whose head is shaved clean like that of the Operative. This man’s older. He looks at the Operative like he’s gazing at a talking horse.
“I’m Riley,” he says. He gestures at his colleague. “He’s Maschler.”
“You’re the one I was speaking with,” says the Operative.
“That’s right,” says Riley.
“You’re the one who cut me off,” says the Operative.
“Started you up too,” says Riley. “Let’s not forget that.”
“We’re the ones who hauled you from the bottom of the well,” says Maschler. “We’re the ones who broke your surly bonds. Without us you’d still be eating dirt. Surely that counts for something?”
“Oh,” says the Operative, “it does.”
They look at him. They’re hanging on his every word. They don’t want him to see that. But to him it’s clear how on edge they are. He’s never felt more relaxed.
“It’s the reason I knocked,” he adds.
“Ah,” says Riley.
“And now you’re going to tell me what’s going on.”
“Who says we know?” says Maschler.
“You know a hell of lot more than I do.” The faintest edge is starting to creep into the Operative’s voice. “You’re in the cockpit of an Antares. You’re hauling a few hundred tons of cargo. Your communications are supposed to be continual throughout the initial ramp. You’ve got cameras pointed in every direction. You’ve cut me off from the outside world because you thought I might be involved with what’s going down. And I am. But only in the same way you are. So help me out here, gentlemen. Because it’s the only way I can help you.”
“You can’t help,” says Riley. “I wish you could.”
“What’s going on out there has nothing to do with us,” says Maschler.
“It does now,” replies the Operative softly.
“We just want to run our freight,” says Riley. “We never looked for trouble.”
“We should have shut off those cameras,” says Maschler.
“It’s okay,” says the Operative. His voice is soothing. “It’ll be okay.”
Maschler and Riley look at each other. “You tell him,” says Maschler.
“No you,” says Riley.
“You start,” says Maschler.
And Riley does.
* * *
The journey upriver. Once you start along that winding road you don’t stop. You just keep on rushing toward that distant source.
“You’ve set the water on fire.”
“Like I had a choice.”
He didn’t want to. But there was too much floating hardware chasing them. So Marlowe’s hit downstream with jets of flame. The fact that there’s more pollution than water in that river means it’s burning merrily. Now the only thing they have to outrace is fire. Smoke is wafting everywhere. The temperature’s starting to rise.
“How you feeling?”
“Warm.”
“But still breathing.”
“I’ll let you know when that starts to be an issue.”
Marlowe figures that will be soon. The tolerance of a breath-mask is far lower than a suit’s. The people out there must be dying in the thousands. And that’s just in this district. He doesn’t even want to think about the rest of it. The rising that the Jaguars had sought to bring about is finally underway. The city’s final demise has finally begun. The canopy of smoke is growing ever thicker. The topography’s getting ever more complex. The river keeps on forking—into channels that diverge, converge, intersect with one another. But Marlowe steers his way through them with the confidence of one who’s got nothing save the latest maps.
“Complicated,” says the razor.
“It’s Amazon,” he replies.
Roof closes in above this channel of the river. The smoke in here’s too dense for anyone lacking masks to breathe. But through that smoke they can see the combat all around them. Looks like this is the day of reckoning among the river-pirates. Shantytowns along the shore are in the throes of combustion. The combatants spare scarcely a shot for the ones now streaking past them and back into the open. Though open’s a relative concept. The smoke’s almost thicker than it was within that enclosure. The heat is overwhelming. Marlowe’s temperature readouts are climbing inexorably.
“We’re not going to make it,” he says.
“I know.”
Not that it’s not obvious now. The fires sweeping the buildings on both shores are merging, covering the river ahead. They’re blocking the way forward. There’s nothing but smoke and flame in front of them. Oxygen’s being sucked up to heaven, taking God knows how many souls with it.
“One choice,” he says.
“Right,” she replies.
They streak upward.
Somewhere in that sky two men regard a third. They’re not accustomed to having their cargo crash their party. They’re not down with the notion of taking orders from their freight. They’re used to being firmly in control.
They’re making a rapid adjustment all the same.
“We don’t know the whole story,” says Riley.
“We don’t know what the hell’s going on,” says Maschler.
“No one’s told us a goddamn thing. We’ve been cut off.”
“We only know what we can see.”
“That’s all I want,” says the Operative.
“The missiles.”