David J. Williams - The Machinery of Light

Special thanks to

Brian De Groodt, for getting out
Michelle Marcoccia, for getting back
James Wang, for the big picture
Marc Haimes, for the road less traveled
Mark Williams, for riding shotgun from the early days
Steven Klotz, for helping me keep dinosaurs at bay
Peter Watts, giant squid and SF giant
Rebecca Fischler, cos shes into survival
Cassandra Stern, legend in her own lifetime
Spartacus, for having no concept of time
Jen Hitt, for talking me out of the tree
Magen Aucoin, for taking charge of the legions
Jenny Rappaport, for getting me started
David Pomerico, for helping me finish
Michael Schur, for teaching me much about acceleration

Thanks also to

Ajax, John Joseph Adams, Jon Allison, Charlie-Jane Anders, Greg Bear, Alan Beatts, Kat Beight, Al Billings, Patricia Bray, Mike Brotherton, Michael Briggs, Colleen Cahill, John Carrasquillo, Jeff Carlson, Gail Carriger, Karen Casey, Erin Cashier, Roz Clarke, Mike Collins, Lino Conti, Rob Cunningham, Richard Dansky, Jessica Dawson, David Deutsch, Eric Dorsett, Tom Doyle, David Louis Edelman, Jerry Ellis, Kelley Eskridge, Nathan Evans, Jude Feldman, Graeme Flory, Jim Freund, Rick Fullerton, Larry Giammo, Tom Goss, Nicola Griffith, Mia Haimes, Inga Hawley, Lisa Heselton, Jess Horsley, Leslie Howle, Dave Hutchinson, Faisal Jawdat, Michael Kanouse, Joshua Korwin, Justin Kugler, Randall MacDonald, Justin Macumber, Richard Morgan, Mollie Mulvanity, Mysterious Galaxy, Rob Neppell, James Nicoll, Annalee Newitz, Hope OKeefe, Mike OMalley, Joshua Palmatier, Maria Perry, David Pickar, Heidi Pickman, Jerry Pournelle, Glenn Reynolds, Ripley, Paul Ruskay, Jack Sarfatti, Zakhorov Sawyer, Joseph Scalora, Tom Schaad, Russ Selinger, Mike Shepherd, Stacey Sinclair, Jeri Smith-Ready, Steven Sobel, Starship Sofa, Tim Stringer, Melinda Thielbar, Robert Thompson, Sanho Tree, Uberjumper, Juliet Ulman, Duane Wilkins, Albert Williams, Sarah Williams, Susan Williams, Pete Yared, Don Zukas, Derek Zumsteg, and Captain Zoom.

Dupont Circle, Washington D.C.
September 2000February 2010

BY DAVID J. WILLIAMS

THE AUTUMN RAIN TRILOGY
THE MIRRORED HEAVENS
THE BURNING SKIES
THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT

Descended from Australian convicts, D AVID J. W ILLIAMS nonetheless managed to be born in Hertfordshire, England, and subsequently moved to Washington, D.C. Graduating from Yale with a degree in history some time later, he narrowly escaped the life of a graduate student and ended up doing time in Corporate America, which drove him so crazy he started moonlighting on video games and (as he got even crazier) novels. Learn more about the world of the early twenty-second century at www.autumnrain2110.com.

A woman listens to the world burn.

Its hard to miss. Its on every channel. Reports rendered in toneless staccato, attack sequences confirmed by unseen machines, horrified civilian newscasts that suddenly go silent the womans jaw hangs loose while her mind surfs the signals reaching the room in which shes riding out the storm, as far away from this crafts hull as possible. Vibrations pound through the walls as energy smashes into the ship from the vacuum beyond. The woman hears shouts as the soldiers in the corridors around her react to the blast-barriers starting to slide shut. She hears the muffled boom of each one closing, growing ever closer, the succession of walls parading past her and echoing in the distance.

Shes locked into one of the modular sections now, along with ten other guardsand the prisoner in the high-security cell theyre guarding. She looks just like the rest of those sentinels, though really shes nothing of the kind. Shes not sealed in either; she may be confined behind these doors, but shes still in touch on zone, her razor awareness reaching out to the rest of the ship. Nearly half a klick long, the Lincoln sits at the heart of the L5 fleets defenses, on the libration point itself. The whole fleet turns around it. Beyond that is a sight like nothing ever seen

World War Three began ten seconds ago, with a sudden U.S. attack on the Eurasian Coalitions forces across the Earth-Moon system. A cacophony of light hit the Eastand within a second the East hit back with everything it had left. A myriad of guns keep on flaring like theres no tomorrow. For many millions, there wont be. The war to end all wars is underway in style. Way behind the speed-of-light weapons come the kinetics: hundreds of thousands of hypersonic missiles, projectiles, railgun-flung rocksall of it swimming through space and streaking through atmosphere. And right now most of its way too slow in the face of massed particle beams and lasers: directed-energy batteries that flail against incoming targets even as they triangulate on one another. On the screens, the woman can see the Earth glowing as portions of the outer atmosphere reach temperatures they really shouldnt. Chunks are coming off the Moons surface. The room in which shes sitting starts to shake even harder. She hears one of the guards prayinghis words audible only inside his helmet, but shes hacked into that helmet, getting off on every fucking wordand every word is just one among so many because now shes honing in on Earth, sifting through the traffic thats getting through the swathe of energy thats bathing the planet. Its so bad she has to take one of the mainline routes in; riding on the command frequencies, she plunges through air thats shimmering with heat, drops deep beneath the Rocky Mountains and into the command bunker within which Americas planetside generals are monitoring events.

Those generals are exclusively InfoCom and SpaceCom. All the other ranking officers have been purged, or have sworn to obey the new order. The death of the president has been announced to the armed forces, along with the order to take revenge upon the Eurasian foe whose assassins struck him down in his hour of triumph. Theres a new president now, and everyones getting in line fast. Theyre too busy dealing with the blizzard of death blazing through the sky to do anything else. But so far the cities in both East and West are being left untargeted. Neither side can afford to bother with them. Both sides are bringing every resource they can to bear upon the challenge of breaking down the def-grids of the other, def-grids largely consisting of DE cannon arrayed in strategic perimeters, shooting at the waves of projectiles heading in toward them. It looks to be the mother of all free-for-alls.

Its anything but. The woman can detect an initial pattern already. The American preemptive strike has drawn blood. The Eurasians are reeling. Shes studying the planetside portion of the Eurasian zone now, watching the webwork of nodes that stretch from Romania to Vladivostok, from the wastes of Siberia to the Indian Ocean. She takes in the Eastern def-grids as they struggle to adjust to the onslaught. Shes looking for an opening, following the routes shes been instructed to take. Moving beneath the American firewall and through a back door into the neutral territoriesinto a data warehouse in London, from there to Finland and across the Arctic Circle and through long-lost phone lines beneath the tundra, straight into the Eastern zone straight into Russia. Shes never worked the zone like this before. Shes running codes that make her virtually unstoppable, swooping in across the steppes, closing upon a target.

T he targets a man. Hes sitting in the sixth car of a Russian train, several hundred klicks east of the Caspian Sea, going at several thousand klicks an hour: full-out supersonic maglev, heading southeast. The train just went below the surface, and theres palpable relief aboard at getting underground before the rail got pulverized. It looks to be a normal transit trainthe last ten cars of the train are packed with equipment, the first ten cars with specialists and staff officers, bound for various bases and various locales. Theres nothing aboard thats even remotely atypical.