“Oh Christ,” says Spencer. “Oh Jesus Christ.”
“What’s your point?” asks Linehan.
“We killed them.”
“We? You’re the one who took our ship through the Yards.”
“You’re the one who told me to!”
“And I’m the one who’s telling you to shove everything out there out of your fucking mind. And replace it with nothing but thinking about how you’re going to stay in here with the oxygen.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning take control.”
And he’s right. Because now they’re rushing downward. Now the tunnel’s sloping as the Atlantic drops down from continental shelf. Spencer fights to master the current as the ship picks up speed.
“Just keep us away from the walls,” says Linehan.
“Like it matters,” mutters Spencer.
Though he’s trying. And somehow succeeding even as that speed increases. The controls are like a live animal in his hands. He compensates, adjusts, guesses. He sees nothing now save water. He feels himself pressed down to depths he’s never dreamed of.
The B-130 is no longer flying. It’s disintegrating. The back wall of the main cargo chamber is practically staved in. The floor’s crumpling. Morat and the drones are thrown toward the front wall. On the way they pass Marlowe, who’s fired what’s left of his thrusters as Haskell hit the detonator. He’s rocketing toward the shaft above. Shots dance around his feet as he roars upward. Wreckage of drones is everywhere. But past that wreckage he can see the opening airlock doors of the still-intact upper ship.
Yet even as he tears toward them, he’s forced to change direction, bouncing off the walls as the vertical tube through which he’s moving slopes toward the horizontal while the stricken ship plunges downward. He’s yelling at Haskell to close the airlock doors. She’s not waiting—the doors are sliding shut as he rushes toward them. The space between him and them is a narrowing window. She’s set them going too fast: Marlowe accelerates as drones sear into the shaft after him; he rushes past the surviving gun installations, through the closing gap into the room beyond. The doors slam shut behind him as he extends his hands, shoves himself off the ceiling. His jets cut out. He drops toward the front of the upper ship’s cargo chamber, yells at Haskell to blast off.
And she does.
The motors ignite. The Janus leaps from the back of the stricken B-130. It hurtles downward, parallel to the other ship. Then it veers away. Marlowe’s shoved toward the room’s rear. He grabs on to the wall, holds on. He can’t see Haskell anywhere.
“Where are you?” “In the cockpit,” she says.
She’s strapped in, wired to the instruments. Her eyes are watching through the windows while her mind’s carving through the zone. She started laying into the drones as soon as the bomb went off—took advantage of their momentary confusion to get in amidst them, start slicing them apart. The only drones still extant now are on a rendezvous with ocean. Haskell withdraws her mind from theirs, peels the ship away from the intended destination. It’s scarcely ten klicks off. It’s city-covered mountains looming through the haze. She lets the ship bend back out over the ocean.
But suddenly she’s pulled back wholly into zone. She’s under furious assault from something coming in from out of empty, from the broader zone around. It’s smashed through the firewall she’s configured around her ship and is powering in upon her, fighting her for the controls.
Which means nobody’s in control at all.
F ifteen meters behind her, Marlowe holds on as the ship writhes through the air. He’d been on the point of convincing himself that it was going to be a smooth ride to the nearest U.S. ships. But clearly it’s going to be nothing of the kind. The ship ascends at a sickening rate. It twists off to the side. It spirals back toward the ocean. It uses both jets and rockets. The latter are intended only for space. The former are intended only for landing planetside. But now both are firing almost at random. It’s all Marlowe can do to keep his head from hitting metal. He’s acutely aware that the craft is being subjected to near-lethal strains.
But then it levels out. Marlowe doesn’t waste a moment: he leaps to the floor, grabs more weapons from the wall racks, sprints across the chamber—and through the door and down into the room where he and Haskell rode out the takeoff. He rushes into the cockpit-access corridor, reaches the cockpit. The door is open. He looks inside.
To find Haskell lolling in her straps. He lunges to her side. She’s still breathing. He shakes her. She doesn’t respond. He shakes her harder. She opens her eyes. She smiles weakly.
“You’re back.”
“What happened.”
“They threw me out of the zone,” she replies. “They almost killed me.”
“The drones?”
“Not them. Them.” She gestures at the window. Marlowe hadn’t even looked. He sees the towers of transplanted Hong Kong approaching once more. Mist and rocks wrap around their bases. Ocean sprawls beyond.
“That’s where the Rain are,” she says. “That’s where they’re based. They’re hacking us at point-blank range. They’re too close for our own side to jam.”
“Why didn’t they do this earlier?” says Marlowe.
“Don’t you understand? We’re dealing with something that works through proxies.” She’s whispering now. “That set this creature Morat and all his creatures against us. That only gets involved when it has to. They have us, Jason.”
“We’ve still got suit-jets,” he says. “We bail out.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason we couldn’t earlier. The hack controls this ship’s weapons.”
“You didn’t disable them?”
“I didn’t have a chance,” she snaps. “We’d be like fish in a barrel. We’ll be shredded long before we get to sea.”
“Then what are you saying we do? Just wait to be taken?”
“No,” she says suddenly. “We cut the ground out from under it.”
“How?”
“We get out on the hull. We take down the comlink. We shear off all means via which it can ram its signal into us.”
“Works for me,” he says.
He crouches down once more upon the cockpit floor, bends once again to the trapdoor. He severs wires to deprive the thing that controls the ship of any chance of forestalling him. He works the manuals, opens the door and crawls in. He looks back up at her.
“Go,” she says.
But he says nothing—just starts down the chute. She pushes the door shut behind him. He wriggles all the way to the bottom—the airlock door that’s the miniature of the one back in the cargo bay. He disables its locks manually and opens it. He slides through into the tiny room within, pulls the door shut behind him, and disables the charges he placed there. He works more manual overrides and pulls the last door open.
City’s crammed up against his face. Buildings at least a klick high are streaking by. Marlowe holds on as best he can—pushes his feet against the walls of the chamber, extends his hands to the opposite wall, lowers his head. He’s staring back along the ship’s undercarriage. Its wings are extended for the landing. Ships are scattered across the city sky beyond it. There seem to be several formations of them.
But Marlowe’s main focus is on a certain panel just behind the rear wheel wells. He’s trying to get line of sight to it. He has to lean out farther. He’s practically hanging out of the forward escape hatch.
Which is when the ship starts to writhe once more. Marlowe activates what’s left of the magnetic clamps in what’s left of his suit and sidles out upon the hull. He clings to it as it slopes and slants and turns. Each and every view now contains nothing save buildings. They’re totally enclosed by city. It roofs them in as they fly ever deeper into its depths. It constrains the extent to which the hack can send the ship on erratic courses. Which means Marlowe’s still holding on. And lining up that comlink once again…