The Burning Skies Read Free

realized we were dealing with a violation of locality that allows the subject—”
    “Don’t
subject
me. I broke beyond those labels.”
    “—to evade the penalties that a razor pays when hacking a remote target. You don’t have the split-second disadvantage that any normal razor has during off-planet hacking. Your reaction times outpace the stimuli your brain receives and nobody knows why. No wonder you’re running rings around L5’s razors.”
    “I’ll do the same to the Rain.”
    “Claire, you’re not invincible.”
    “Without me, neither are the Rain.”
    “They’ll have the advantage.”
    “Once it became clear they’d had turned against you, why did you send me to the Moon?”
    “I wanted to get you someplace safe.”
    “Safe?”
    “Relatively speaking.”
    “The Moon wasn’t even
vaguely
safe. The Rain were up there. To say nothing of the SpaceCom cabal that the Rain was using to try to ignite war.”
    “Once you were on the scene and activated as Manilishi, none of that would have meant much. The Rain’s primary force was on Earth, preparing to hit the superpowers’ leadership. They had one team on the Moon beneath Nansen Station pulling the strings of the SpaceCom conspiracy, and another preparing to hit Szilard on L2. You would have cleaned up the Moon pretty quick.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Besides, you have to be awake to all contingencies. If war with the Eurasians breaks out, the Moon is going to look all the better. It’s the high ground of the Earth-Moon system.”
    “Except the libration points. Except this fortress.”
    “Technically that’s true. But I’m willing to bet that the Moon can sustain a damn sight more damage than this place.”
    “But why didn’t you activate me as Manilishi
before
I left for the Moon? Why wait till I got there?”
    “Because activating you meant restoring your true memories.”
    “My true memories?” Her voice is taut.
    “Once they were restored, your loyalty would have been a wild card without the proper precautions. As the Rain found out the hard way. What’s wrong?”
    Tears are running down her face. “You
know
what’s wrong, you sick fuck. How can I tell what my real memories are?”
    “Because that’s what we linked your activation to.”
    “Fuck you and your sophistry!
How do I know they’re real?”
    “How do you know anything’s real? Claire, you need to get past the past. You’re beyond the range of ordinary definition now. What happened to you back then doesn’t matter. All that matters is what happens now.”
    She takes a deep breath. “What happens now is you keep talking.”
    “About what?”
    “About how I can beat them.”
    “You’ll have to find your own way through on that.”
    “You don’t care who wins?”
    “All I care about is perfecting my role as voyeur.”
    “But you’re blind in here.”
    “I see the crisis of the age in you, Claire. I can see what’s going on out there all too well. I know the capabilities of the respective players better than anyone else. All the scenarios that might have gone down after that spaceplane, after thePraetorian agents arrested me at Cheyenne and began the purge of CICom, all the ways in which the game might have played out across these last four days—it
has
been four days, hasn’t it?”
    She nods.
    “I should imagine that things happened very quickly once they downed your plane, didn’t they?”
    She nods.
    “So … the Rain is clearly still a factor, or you wouldn’t be so desperate to talk about them. But they haven’t won. Otherwise they’d be opening that door, laughing at me.”
    She nods.
    “This base has yet to see major combat—I think I would be aware of that much at least. So the third world war that the Rain were trying to bring about didn’t happen. They
did
try to bring it about, didn’t they?”
    “They tried. But—”
    “So inevitable, given the way they think. They set it up so beautifully with the downing of the Elevator. Each