“Since you’re inside my fucking head, why don’t you tell me.”
“Anything,” he says. “You’re out of control. You’ve already gone beyond everything you were designed for. Why are you laughing?”
“Because that’s exactly what Sinclair said to me a few days back.”
“So why did you talk to him?”
“He—he was the closest thing to a father I ever had.” She’s surprised at how steady her voice sounds.
“Don’t you realize how black a mark it was against you when we found out?”
“You weren’t supposed to. It was a private matter.”
“My prisons aren’t some opportunity for therapy, Claire.”
“What will you do with him?”
“Execute him. Eventually. Once it becomes clear we’ve no further need for him. Once we can. Why are you crying? He would never have shed a tear over anybody.”
“I know,” she mumbles. “I know. He was cold and heartless. So are you. You all are. I’d sweep you all away if I could. I’d—”
“You see? You can’t hide anything from us.” He gets up, walks around to her side of the table. Looks down. “Not when we’re right here with you.”
“Fuck you,” she says.
“It’s a tragedy that you’ve so much power and so little idea of how to use it.”
“You’re the tragedy,” she says. “You’ll strangle yourself in your machinations yet.”
“You first,” he says.
And puts his hands around her neck, starts squeezing. She kicks against him. But his grip may as well be iron.
“It’s time,” he mutters.
She fights for air. There’s none. Everything goes black.
PART V
RIPTIDE
Claire,” a voice whispers.
But it’s an eternity before she can process it. She’s dwelling in some darkness far beyond all pain. She hears her own name dripping down across some sky some sound in a world where all that lives is silent. She drifts in toward the voice.
“Claire,” it says. “Can you hear me?”
She can. But she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do, save to keep on forging toward it. But now she’s being buffeted by hurt that slams against her. She stumbles onward, upward, toward the light.
“Open your eyes,” the voice says.
She tries to. Fails. Tries again—manages to get one of them open. Through a blur she can see Carson’s face. She groans as headache engulfs her.
“That’s it,” he says.
She opens both her eyes. It’s agony. But she’s keeping them open all the same. She’s back in that room, still strapped to the chair. Carson’s floating in front of her. His legs are crossed.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
It’s a good question. She struggles to come up with an answer. Only to find she can’t.
“I found everything I needed to,” he says. “I’m done.”
“So am I,” she whispers.
“No,” he says. “You’ve just begun. Go back to sleep.”
She drifts away.
Drifting in toward the heart of SpaceCom power: the transport’s passed through four parking orbits, each one tighter than the one before. It’s now well within L2’s outer perimeter. Stars fall past the window. Ships are everywhere.
“Welcome home,” says Lynx.
“Looks like it did when I left it,” says Linehan.
“You’ve only been gone a couple weeks.”
But that was all it took to come full circle. L2 set him in motion. L2 has pulled him back into its maw. He seals his visor in place, grabs onto the wall as the ship fires motors, leaves its latest orbit.
“So what’s the first step?” he asks.
“We do some honest work,” says Lynx.
The ship’s turning. A webwork of metal scrolls past the window, so close that Linehan can see numbers and lettering painted upon it.
“Jesus,” he says. “We’re right up against it.”
“Try inside it.”
“What the hell?”
But as he stares through the window, he sees that Lynx isn’t kidding. The transport has entered the hollow of a much larger, half-built ship. It stretches all around them, like the bones of some vast animal. The rest of the L2 fleet flickers beyond it. Linehan whistles.
“One of the fucking colony ships,” he says.
Lynx laughs. “That’s a strange thing to call them.”
“That’s what they are.”
“That’s what they’re registered as.”
“That’s what they’re built for, man. Straight shot to Mars.”
“By way of Moscow,” says Lynx.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning look at those guns.”
Which don’t look small. They also don’t look like they’d be visible from beyond the construction.
“That’s why they’re building them in here,” continues Lynx. “Armaments to augment the L2 fleet, unreported to Zurich or anybody else. Soon as the shit hits the fan, they can blow the hatches and start laying down the law.”
“Don’t the Eurasians have some of these things, too?”
“Over at L4, yeah. Ours and theirs make for one more piece of glorious joint infrastructure in the wake of Zurich. The next great pioneering fleet. How much do you want to bet that the East is working to rig its behemoths with similar enhancements? Who knows, they might blow the top off Mons Olympus. But I’ll bet you the real target’s a damn sight closer.”
“I don’t take bets I can’t win.”
“Then you’ve come to the wrong place,” says Lynx. The ship’s speakers start barking orders. “Let’s go.”
“We’ve got everything we need?”
“We’ll pick it up as we go.”
Linehan shrugs. They open the interior hatch of the room they’re in, climb through into a corridor, pull themselves along it and into the transport ship’s spine. Right now there’s a lot of traffic. Supervisors are herding the workers out of their quarters, into the spine, and then out through where the nose has been peeled back. Lynx and Linehan head the other way. Crew members pass them. So do supervisors. But no one challenges them. They exit the spine, proceed through more hatches, exit the transport.
They’re moored against some of the more complete parts of megaship infrastructure. Two other transports are tethered alongside. Workers and supervisors are everywhere. One of the supervisors challenges them.
“Who the hell are you guys?” she asks.
“Engineers,” says Lynx. “Who the hell else would we be?”
Linehan doesn’t see the codes get transferred. But it must have occurred. Because the supervisor turns away—and he and Lynx keep on going, alight on the interior of the giant craft. Scarcely ten meters away is the nearest of the cannons: what’s clearly a medium-grade particle beam. Heavy lifting’s easy in the zero-G—workers are maneuvering the weapon into place by hand. Lynx and Linehan move past it.