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  “I see them,” Silver said. She sounded calm. “Hold fire.”

  “They could rush us,” Carter said, voice rising. “They’re getting closer, Silver. I—,” he jerked his rifle sporadically, Jessica saw. And then she saw them, man-high and moving with slight ticks on the concrete floor. One flowed up and over a row of what looked like a pile of suitcases. Black insectoid shapes in the blue darkness, stalking them. Menace seemed to radiate from them. They ignored Grandmother and Murn, she saw, who had their backs to the wall, and focused instead on the four walkers.

  “They won’t hamper us,” Smoke said. “At least, I don’t think they will,” he added. He looked at Jessica. “Almost there.”

  They had gained the entrance to the passageway now, and passed through the doors in to an antechamber of sorts, the mouth of a tunnel. The spiders did not hamper them. Silver and Carter backed through, and Jessica followed Smoke inside ahead of them. A wide ring of some sort of glass or crystal encircled the passage, like an archway. Smoke paused, then walked forward underneath it, holding up his hand to slow Jessica from passing through with him.

  As he passed under it, the arch glowed a pale green. Smoke paused on the other side, looking at them. “Security,” he announced. “Some sort of scan on passengers.” He motioned Jessica ahead, and she stepped quickly forward. The arch glowed the same pale green as it had for Smoke.

  “Carter,” Silver said. “You next.” She faced backwards, aiming back to where the spiders lurked, just outside the entrance to the passage.

  Carter sidled under the arch. It glowed deep red. “Can’t move, Silver,” he said, voice cracking. “Some kind of block.” He struggled against it. “I’m stuck,” he said, resigned. “Advice?”

  “Put your gun down,” Smoke advised. “This is a security scan.”

  “Do it, Carter,” Silver said. “No guns on the station, apparently.”

  Carter took a step back, easing out from under the red arch, and laid his rifle down on the passage floor. He shrugged out of his ammo pouch and took off his helmet. “OK,” he said. “Let’s try this your way.” He stepped forward and was greeted by the green glow, allowed to pass.

  Silver took a long look down the passage at the spidery black shapes she could see beyond the door. They were motionless, but watchful. Jessica watched as she laid her weapon down alongside Carter’s, and stepped quickly through the archway. It glowed green. The spiders didn’t move.

  She sighed. “OK, let’s go,” she said. “I never really liked guns anyway.” She walked half-turned through the end of the passage, watching the motionless spiders as she joined the others. They hurried. A few more steps and they crossed a threshold that was more of a slight seam in the smooth stone passage floor. They were in the Elevator capsule.

  “Passenger car,” Smoke said. “Looks like it would hold maybe a dozen people?” There was a circular bench along a curved wall. The walls were the same white ceramic-looking substance as the outside of the capsule had been covered with. There was a loud snick and the door behind them closed. A very subtle clank, from underneath them, and then a feeling of upward motion. “Well, we’re going,” he said. “It is an Elevator after all.”

  “Jesus,” Carter said, examining a small countertop bar set discretely along one wall. “First class,” he said, raising two bottles of amber liquid. “Lagavulin,” he said, frowning at the bottle. “How’s that possible.”

  “This thing has been in storage in orbit,” Smoke said. “Pump it full of nitrogen or something inert, it should last.” Jessica ran her finger along the surface of the bar. It was clean and free of dust.

  The walls became windows, fading from opaque white to translucence to transparency. Or they were screens, more likely, Jessica thought. They were already high above Star City, and climbing with impressive speed. She leaned out over the curved couch and looked down behind it, through the transparent wall below. Already she could see the bend of the Earth’s horizon.

  “Amazing,” she breathed, shaking her head. “That this is real.” She turned to Silver. “Why are we here? Alpha explained a little but not much.” Smoke nodded as she said this.

  Silver nodded to her as well. “Lots to explain, I think. And not much time,” she said. “After we…left, there appears to have been a rapid expansion in technology. Specifically, materials science and bioengineering.” She shrugged. “They built this, a space Elevator, and tethered a large asteroid to it somehow. It doesn’t matter how,” she said, raising a hand to forestall questions. “I think the elites, the rich and powerful, used this to escape the growing threat of war between rival AI-driven factions. They bailed, and then things went sideways.”

  “The Center saw this in many of the Filtered Worlds,” Smoke said, agreeing with Silver. “Factionalism, tribalism, division. Humans are easy to exploit this way. It never ends well.”

  “So what happened? There was war? With those spider things?” She looked at Silver. “They killed everybody?”

  Silver shrugged. “Not sure,” she said. “The locals called it the Bloom, and it sounds to me like some kind of bio-plague, but caused by nanotechnology, some sort of mechanical plague. It took almost everybody on the planet. All but a few.”

  “Those soldiers,” Jessica asked, “they were from our time?”

  “Some of them were,” Smoke agreed. “Or nearly.”

  “Carter was,” Silver said, nodding at him as he sniffed at the whiskey bottle.

  Carter looked up. “I shot the president,” he said. He shrugged and took a swig. He winced. “Pleased to meetcha,” he rasped.

  “One of the focuses for their bioengineering was longevity,” Smoke continued. “I think, or rather, Alpha thinks that they got some of Silver or Gold’s cells to study, from the data center in the mountains. Things seemed to have accelerated rapidly after that. China was a big driver of this, and we know they were very interested in New Frontiers.” New Frontiers was the Silicon Valley startup that had created Alpha, the original AI. It was her origin.

  “Wow,” Jessica said, considering this. “We started all this?”

  “Actions have consequences,” Silver said. “So we’re going up here to confront them. The elites. Somebody is up here, I’m betting on it.”

  “Did he really shoot the President?” Jessica asked Silver, lowering her voice.

  “Carter,” Silver grinned. “Did you really shoot the President of the United States?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, glumly. “Probably a dumb thing to do. But it seemed right at the time.”

  “What year was this?” Jessica asked, feeling her long-latent journalist instincts stirring. She looked at him. “That didn’t happen when we were around.”

  Carter opened his mouth to speak, but Silver cut him off, taking the bottle.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Silver said. “It was after. That’s not our story.” She sniffed the amber liquid. “Thousand-year-old Scotch,” she said. “Rare stuff.” She raised the bottle in a mock toast. “To shooting the President.” She took a swig, wincing at the bite. “Still good,” she said, voice hoarse from the whiskey.

  There was a slight shift in motion, and their view slewed around in a graceful arch. Jessica felt her stomach lurch. They were in free fall for a long moment. Outside something flashed past them. Jessica had a confused impression of a wide disk, stacked with rectangular containers. Then their weight slowly returned.

  “We just let go of the cable,” Smoke announced. “That was a cargo frame, the kind Warren told us about.” He peered over the edge, and Jessica craned her neck to look as well. There was a bright dot beneath them, but that was all. “There will likely be others.”

  Silver took another swig. “I’m sure they’re up there,” she said. “They’re probably listening to us now.”

  Jessica gaped, and Smoke nodded. “Probably,” he said. “If they’re there.”

  “Find out soon enough,” Carter said, settling back on the couch. “Might as well enjoy the ride.”

&n
bsp; “Don’t get drunk,” Silver said, offering the bottle to Jessica and Smoke. Jessica shook her head, and Smoke waved it away. Silver shrugged, put the bottle back into the wet bar.

  “You’re not the boss of me, Silver,” Carter said. “I don’t have a gun, and I’m not a super-hero type. I deserve to get drunk. It’s been a long, long time.”

  Another lurch and period of freefall, this one slightly longer. They passed several more disklike frames, each with a cake-like stack of cargo containers on it. “We’re slowing down,” Smoke said, as they watched one of the frames slide past them. He craned his neck upwards. “We must be approaching the station.”

  Carter tipped his bottle to his lips. “That was fast. Twenty minutes to orbit?” He shook his head. “The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.”

  Suddenly Smoke straightened, his eyes going glassy and unfocused. Silver sprang to her feet. “Smoke, talk to me. What is it?”

  He leaned back, waving her off, but still staring in the distance. A distance only he could see. “It’s the Boy. He’s there. He’s down there.”

  “What’s happening?” Silver asked. “Can you tell?”

  “I can tell,” Smoke said, with the eerie intonations of Alpha’s voice. “I’m not sure how’s she’s doing it, but I’m in touch with Grandmother. She is using some kind of reverberation effect through the cable.”

  “What’s going on down there?” Silver said. “Can you tell us?”

  “War,” Smoke/Alpha said. “War is happening.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Alpha saw through Grandmother’s eyes. Smoke could, with an internal twist of his senses, find himself seeing what the old woman saw. It was disconcerting, an otherworldly experience unlike anything he’d felt before, even the sim training he’d had as a Seeker trainee in his youth. He didn’t just see what she saw with her eyes, he felt what she perceived, and what she perceived was totally alien to him.

  Grandmother, it seemed, was hyperaware. She knew where every spider in her vicinity was. She heard their footfalls, the snick snick snicket of their spindly legs on the concrete floor of the Elevator station. She saw them with crystal clear vision, despite the thick clouds of cataracts Smoke had always thought obscured her sight. She even smelled them. All her senses were on high alert as she shepherded Murn through the station.

  She also had power. Power that Smoke had never, in all the years of his training, from boyhood as a new trainee recruit, through his rebellious adolescence, to his many missions as a Seeker…he had never known she was a Power among the Select. How she wielded it was beyond his understanding, but while he was in her, while he observed what she did from the top of the Elevator, he was amazed.

  A spider rushed her, and with a flick of her wrist she crumpled it into a pile of greasy sticks, sparking with the last vestiges of its battery’s stored discharge. Confronted by multiple spiders at once, she clapped her hands mildly, and they flew apart like leaves in a stiff breeze. She walked unhurried through the darkness, Murn clutching her robe fearfully, while her enemies attacked her in their dozens and died.

  The Boy had come, Smoke knew, via Alpha, who had a different kind of link with Grandmother than he did. Smoke could not talk with her, or convey anything other than, he felt, his presence with her. Perhaps he sensed her amusement that he was watching her, through her eyes. Seeing what she was capable of…what she had always been capable of, in all the years he had known her, but never once had she hinted at any of it.

  His lying, his dissembling, his evasion. She had surely pierced them easily with these senses, these powers. No mere boy as he had been could have hoped to deceive her. She was Grandmother, and saw everything. It was her function, he realized, to know the truth of things. To understand.

  She walked steadily down the stairs to the lower level. Around her, battle raged, and yet Murn and Grandmother passed through it unscathed. Bullets flew from the barrels of the Unit’s guns. Shrapnel exploded in clouds of twisted metal scrap from their bombs. Spiders scrambled forward and slashed with their scimitar-tipped claws, but Grandmother dispersed them with a wave of her gnarled hand. Nothing touched her, or Murn. They were inviolate, it seemed.

  A wave of spiders menaced Truck, who hooted and huffed an alarm while methodically grasping and smashing spider after spider with his massive arms. Gold and Li were in the cage, Gold shooting calmly into the mass of writhing black legs and snapping mandibles. Li was reloading for Gold, clutching magazines at the ready until Gold held out her hand for a fresh one.

  Warren and her force had been driven, herded, into the central arch near Truck. There didn’t look like there were that many of them left, Smoke thought, watching Warren direct their fire with ruthless efficiency. He saw the Archer hoist a minigun with a smashed tripod and fire it from the hip into a swarming mass of spiders. The Unit was coalesced in a loose ring, firing in all directions at will. At their center was a mass of gear, their reserve of ammunition, Smoke thought. And something else.

  His heart leapt into his throat as he realized what he was looking at. Warren had two techs bent over the long rectangular crate in the company’s center. The weapon. The nuclear device stolen from the long-dead People’s Republic of China’s arsenal. Warren was readying it for use. She knew they were losing. For long years the deep factories of Star City had been creating spiders. They had never ended their vigilance after driving out the Unit, and had long prepared for the Unit’s return. Their war had never ended.

  And now they were directed by Chen, who knew about the bomb. He knew what they would do, what Warren was intent on doing, and he was intent on stopping her. His spider-army was surging forward when Grandmother arrived, stepping daintily down the broad main stairwell from the upper levels. She saw Chen, a lone dark, skeletal spider atop a pile of rubble just outside the main entrance arch where Truck blocked the advance of his main force.

  Grandmother raised her hand, and Smoke saw Chen’s triangular head swivel towards her. The spiders attacking Truck and the Unit scuttled backwards from their attack. The Unit kept up a steady barrage for a few more moments until officers and Warren realized what had happened, and called out a cease-fire. Gold rested her rifle on the bars of the cage, the heat rising off her barrel in waves. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand and looked for why the fighting had stopped. Li slumped back against the rear wall of the cage, and covered her ears with her hands. Smoke saw it all through Grandmother’s strange hyper-perception.

  A hushed silence fell, disturbed only by the huffing thrum of Truck’s turbines. Grandmother stepped forward, Murn following. Murn looked left and right, clearly terrified. Grandmother lowered her hand, scanning the assembled combatants. She looked severe, her mouth pressed into a firm line. Disappointed, Smoke thought. Like she had found a knot of trainees behind the Blue Barracks at the Center involved in a scrap. He could almost hear her tisking him. He’d seen this face on her before.

  “Where are you?” she called, in a clear, high voice. “Show yourselves, all of you.”

  Smoke did not at first understand, but then it became clear. From a corner of the archway, hidden by deep shadows, the air shimmered and wavered. From the darkness a shape moved. A small shape that resolved through a series of wavelike pulses into higher resolutions. Some sort of cloak or shield had hidden them, Smoke realized, watching the form grow sharper. It was small, and familiar to him. Childlike. The Boy.

  The Boy stepped from the darkness, flanked by a cluster of silver-eyed Guides bearing sleek white weapons. Guns. He had brought guns out of the Center, Smoke realized, a thing which had never been done before, in his understanding. Smoke could feel Alpha register surprise at this. The weapons were curved, white, and had bores like shotguns. Energy weapons, Grandmother had said.

  Alpha started an analysis, but Smoke tuned her out. He didn’t care how they worked. They worked, that was all that mattered. The Boy had, in the weeks or months he’d had since Grandmother and Jessica and the others had arrived, bent th
e power of the Center towards making weapons of war. And he’d brought them here. The Boy himself bore one with the rest of them.

  Grandmother raised her right hand towards Warren and the Unit, who had reacted with surprise at this sudden entrance by unknown forces. Guns had been trained on the Guides from their barricades, and only the discipline of a thousand years had kept them from shooting without command.

  Smoke recognized Mak and Jin among the Guides. His friends from childhood, and comrades in the Seeker cadre. Close as brothers to him, once. Now aligned with the Boy. He wanted to call out to them, to tell them they were on the wrong side, to turn their guns on the bald thing in the child’s body and to join him. But he was mute, watching through Grandmother’s eyes.

  “You come bearing guns,” Grandmother said, “and yet you have not fired them. Still picking sides?” She spoke conversationally, yet loud enough for all to hear.

  The Boy grinned. A feral grimace. “You cannot harm me, old woman. Certainly not here.” He looked around him imperiously. “Why should we choose sides when both of them seem intent on destroying each other, and take us all down with them?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Warren called, from her barricade. She had a large rifle trained, along with many others, on the Boy’s skinny chest. “I’m giving you ten seconds to clear my line of fire. We’ve got business with Chen, not you.”

  The Boy laughed. “You do not command me, woman.” He turned to her. “You seek your own doom here, I see it. But you don’t know what that means.”

  “Nine, eight, seven,” Warren chanted. More guns swiveled from her barricade, troopers readying themselves to fire.

  “Stop,” Grandmother said, and gestured at Warren. She seemed to freeze in mid-count, along with the rest of the Unit. “Stop this foolishness.” Smoke thought back to a woman in a long-distant thread, a queen, an avatar of Silver, who had silenced a crowd of worshippers like this.

  “You cannot hold them long,” the Boy chimed, his voice ripe with delight. “Not here.”