Hammerjack Read online

  “Enough to answer a few questions. I figured you’d be curious.”

  Cray decided to go along—for now. “When did you jack my MFI?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve heard most of the good stuff.”

  Cray remembered how Avalon had been holding on to his MFI during his time with the Assembly. In passive mode, Heretic could have been recording every bit of telemetry coming off the neural-imaging systems without setting off a single alarm. Cray had designed the covert mechanism himself.

  “Slick,” Cray said. “Very slick.”

  “I had the talent,” Heretic replied. “You gave me the tools.”

  “Only as long as you keep talking. So what’s this all about, anyway? You pissed at me for what went down in Singapore?”

  “I know all about that, Doc. Zone agents killed Zoe—not you.”

  “Then why have you been dogging me?”

  “So I can warn you.”

  “Typical hammerjack,” Cray scoffed. “You never come right out and say it. You gotta run a mind game on me first.”

  “No mind games, Doc,” Heretic assured him. It sounded like a bad come-on, but that could have just been the synthetic voice. “If I just dropped a letter in your box, you never would’ve bought into this. But now you’ve seen things—not everything, but enough to know that I’m not just full of shit.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Does that mean you’ll listen?”

  Cray considered it for a moment. “Okay,” he decided. “But make it fast.”

  “First off,” Heretic said, “you need to know that what the Assembly said about Lyssa is true. The bionucleic prototype is fully functional. More than that, its input matrix is stable. It’s been running independently for the last two months.”

  “So why did Lyssa malfunction?”

  “She didn’t.”

  Cray was incredulous. “She killed a buildingful of people.”

  “That’s only part of the story. The Assembly didn’t tell you everything—which is why they’ve got a free agent on your ass. She’s there to make sure you don’t figure out the rest.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “The big picture,” Heretic explained. “You already knew that Zoe was doing a job for me back in Singapore. What you don’t know is why I sent her to do it.”

  “You work for the Inru,” Cray said. “Anarchy is your bottom line.”

  “Not anymore,” Heretic replied. “As of now, all bets are off. There’s a race going on, and the only question is who gets to the finish line first.”

  “What’s the game?”

  “Competing synthetic intelligence,” Heretic said. “On one side you have the Collective, and their experiment in bionucleics. That’s why the Assembly’s so damned nervous. They’ve got every last bit of capital invested in this thing. A failure now would be an even bigger disaster than Mars.”

  “And on the other side, you have the Inru?” Cray asked, not hiding his scorn. “They’re just an anti-technology sect—street species on some idealistic crusade. You expect me to believe they’re experimenting with bionucleics?”

  “Something like that, Doc. The movement has a lot more support—and resources—than you could ever imagine.”

  Cray checked his watch. He had been gone for almost ten minutes, which meant Avalon had grown suspicious five minutes ago. “Look,” he said to the MFI, “I know I’ve seen some bizarre shit on this job. But let’s face it—you’re a hammerjack. I hunt down people like you for a living. I can’t just take what you’re saying at face value without some kind of proof.”

  “You already have the proof,” Heretic said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  “Just tell me where to look.”

  There was another pause, another silence. The MFI was just processing information, but to Cray it sounded like Heretic wondering how much trust he could show. Like honor among thieves, that kind of trust was hard to come by.

  “You’ve already performed an extraction on Zoe,” he finally answered. “Have you seen the results of the analysis?”

  “No—” Cray began, remembering Dex Marlowe, and the strange variant of flash Zoe had been carrying around in her bloodstream. “No, my GME is still working on it. Does this have something to do with Lyssa?”

  “Take a look at the numbers when they come back,” Heretic told him. “When you do, we’ll be ready to talk again.”

  “Wait a second—”

  “No,” Heretic interrupted. “You’ll get the next piece, but only when you’re ready for it. I’ve opened your mind enough for now. Besides, you need to get back. You’re no good to me if that barracuda upstairs takes you out.”

  Cray released a breath.

  “And Doc—”

  Cray held the MFI in front of his eyes. A vortex of colors swirled on the screen.

  “If you think the Assembly will let you live after what you’ve seen, you’re mistaken. You know what they are. Your only chance is to play them—as good as you can, as long as you can. The choice is yours, but the odds are better if you keep me close.”

  “I can’t promise that, Heretic.”

  “Fair enough.” The inflection made the voice sound almost human. “Just something for you to keep in mind. Now go and get yourself that drink. You’re gonna need it.”

  Cray brought two drinks back with him—one for the walk back to his seat, one for the rest of the journey. His hope was that his deadened reflexes would provide him with some measure of protection from Avalon, who by now must have been awaiting his return.

  He expected some measure of questioning from her when he arrived, but instead got nothing. She barely acknowledged him as he took his seat—not that a turn of her head or any other gesture was any real indication. For Avalon, everything was a defensive tactic, even her indifference.

  Cray responded in kind. The encounter below was already beginning to take on the distant character of a dream.

  “We’ll be landing in ten minutes,” she informed him.

  Cray buckled his seat belt and yawned.

  “Fabulous,” he said. “It’s been too long since I was in New York.”

  It was after they jumped off the SOT that Avalon presented Cray with an unprecedented request. “Wait here,” she said, ditching him outside a Port Authority bar. “I have to attend to some personal business.”

  That she would even have personal business inspired a certain fascination—as well as a questioning glance, which Avalon answered with her usual, immutable silence. It suggested that the free agent might be making a little mischief of her own—something she didn’t want getting back to the Assembly.

  Some kind of deal on the side? It was possible, Cray decided, his reason filtered through a glass of milky green absinthe—or what passed for it in an airport lounge. Maybe even higher up in the chain of command. The whole damned operation is run by gangsters, so why the hell not?

  He sat alone at the bar, taking small sips of the potent drink and relishing the burn that trickled down his throat. He had just about polished it off when something settled in next to him; something dark, moist, and ancient—its breath the air of catacombs, heavy with stale dust. Cray turned toward it, coming face-to-face with a pallid mask of flesh.

  “Figures I’d finally meet death in a bar.”

  The Urban Goth smiled, the spaces between his razor teeth as black as his eyes.

  Cray returned to his drink. “I thought you guys always worked in pairs.”

  “We do,” the Goth said, motioning toward his partner, who was working the sparse crowd in the rest of the bar. “He’s new, only recently assimilated. You interested in buying?”

  “Sorry, pal.”

  “Could change your day real fast, monsieur. Be not afraid of dying by the time I get through with you.”

  Cray held up his glass. “That’s what I have this for, mon frère,” he said. “But maybe you can deal me some information while you’re here. Interested?”

  The G
oth’s contortion of a smile disappeared. He backed off a few centimeters—subtle anxiety, like a dog that was used to being whipped. “You CSS?”

  “No,” Cray said, shaking his head. “Not even cop. If I was, I wouldn’t need answers now, would I?”

  The Goth seemed to treat this as reasonable. He relaxed.

  Cray slipped a few shiny coins out of his pocket and placed them down on the bar. Not the currency standard, but gold Krugerrands—good for any merchandise traffic in the Zone, with no questions asked. They glinted tantalizingly in the cheap neon light.

  The Goth licked his lips, black tongue trembling.

  “What do you want to know?”

  Cray observed his friend closely. “The Inru,” he asked. “They wouldn’t have been involved in that business at the Works a couple of days ago—would they?”

  The Goth put on a mask of nonchalance. “What would I know about Inru?” He laughed, putting too much effort into it. His eyes, however, never left the pile of money in front of him.

  “You live and die by the hustle, my man,” Cray reminded him. “You don’t catch the vibe, you don’t eat.”

  This time, the Goth observed him.

  “You species?”

  “Close enough.”

  The Goth’s eyes narrowed, awareness percolating within the dark spheres.

  “Spook,” he pronounced. “Guys like you always looking for trouble.”

  “At least guys like me don’t hassle you.”

  The Goth thought about it for a moment, gradually allowing his greed enough traction to overcome his fear. Tentatively, his hand reached out—a single, bony finger hovering above one of the Krugerrands. He waited for Cray to nod his approval, then slid the gold piece into the recesses of his black robe.

  “The Inru know about everything, monsieur.”

  “They know about what was going on inside that building?”

  “Not really sure,” the Goth answered. “They only spread the word on the street. Something big going down, they say—everybody gotta be at the Works to watch it happen.” He shrugged. “Some of us believe the word, some of us don’t.”

  “You’re one of the nonbelievers.”

  “I don’t do no religion like that, you know? I already find my faith in the deathplay. Got my catharsis there. Don’t need to be no slave to the word, okay?”

  Cray held up his hands. “Fine with me, pal,” he said. “So what happened when all your people went over there?”

  The Goth eyed the money again. Cray let him take another coin.

  “Nobody knows,” he said.

  Cray seethed quietly.

  “I didn’t need to pay to hear that.”

  The Goth pleaded innocent. “It’s the truth, monsieur.”

  “It’s not very useful,” Cray retorted. “And since I don’t take refunds, I suggest you come up with something—or else the next deathplay your buddy runs just might be on you.”

  The Goth tossed about a few nervous glances, gathering enough wits to let Cray in on the secret. “All right, monsieur,” he said, caving in. “You the man making the deal. But I swear—all I got are the stories I been hearing, you know? Folks be whispering in the street, right?”

  “I’m listening.”

  The Goth leaned in close. “The reason nobody be talking is that nobody ever get back from the Works that night.” The words came out on his breath, making them sound as ghostly as the tale they were telling. “Everybody—they just disappear, like they was never there. They all just turn to vapor.”

  “Where did they go?”

  The Goth shook his head. “The Inru priests,” he began, like he was speaking of old myths, “they say that all the species—all the folks that was there—they all went on to the Ascension.”

  The story had its intended effect. Cray sat in silence as he assembled it all in his head. Finally, he mustered a response.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “That what I used to think,” the Goth replied. “Now not so sure.”

  Sincerity was not a known trait of street species, but the way this Goth was telling it made him difficult to dismiss. God knew, there were enough crazy stories floating around in the subculture, most of them hallucinogenic tales spun by patch fiends and techeads. But the Ascension—that was a dogma that had been around for a while, even before the Inru started preaching doctrine to the stoned and the displaced. It was a street religion, to be sure—but that didn’t mean it couldn’t have some basis in reality.

  “How many are we talking about?” Cray asked.

  The Goth shook his head. “They say two hundred. Maybe more.”

  “You don’t just disappear two hundred people, my man.”

  “They not just disappearing, monsieur,” the Goth assured him. “They evolving.”

  It was all Cray would get out of him. Still, the Goth eyed the remainder of the coins hungrily, hoping to scoop them up without getting his hand cut off.

  Cray deposited his empty glass next to the money and stood up. “You can pay for my drink,” he said, tapping the Goth lightly on the shoulder as he left. When he reached the door, Avalon was waiting.

  “Been here long?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer, motioning toward his friend at the bar. “Death rush addicts,” she remarked, allowing a hint of disdain to slip. “Not the most reliable source of information, Dr. Alden. You could have saved yourself some money.”

  “Call me a sucker for hard luck cases,” Cray said. “Anyway, he was a lot more straight with me than your bosses were. You got your business taken care of?”

  Avalon nodded, blind eyes turning back toward him. “A corporate transport is waiting for us on Platform D,” she told him, handing over a security voucher. “We leave in five minutes.”

  “For where?”

  “CSS Division Headquarters.”

  “Sounds like you’re putting me under arrest.”

  “Not yet,” Avalon said. “But give it time.”

  Tensile energy radiated across the night sky like spokes on a wheel, converging on the island of Manhattan as if it were the center of the universe. Riding one of those tendrils, a pulser silently glided on an elegant path toward the towers of the Upper West Side, joining the chorus of other vehicles that swarmed about the architectural leviathans.

  Cray watched the city as it came up through the forward window, distant at first but then growing quickly to fill his entire field of vision: a vast plain of glass, concrete, steel, and halogen light. The horizon fell away as soon as the pulser entered Manhattan airspace and joined the overflight grid, climbing to an altitude of two thousand meters before leveling off and locking into an approach trajectory. Performing a series of programmed maneuvers, the pulser weaved gracefully between the apexes of the tallest buildings, held aloft only by the hazy electrical glow of the conductor beam.

  Avalon was seated next to him, coolly observing the inflight data monitors that projected their automated course. She had been pensive ever since they left the Port Authority—more than Cray would have liked. She’s not used to these kind of games, Cray thought, savoring the irony but not surprised. In her line of work, there was little need for subterfuge. For a spook, it was a means of survival.

  “Something on your mind?” she asked, not glancing up from the monitors.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been staring at me for the last two and a half minutes.”

  “Sorry,” Cray said. “I’m in my own zone right now.”

  “Because of what you heard back at the bar? I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, Dr. Alden. The Ascension is a myth.”

  Cray didn’t know why he was surprised that she knew. She could have been standing outside the lounge, listening to every word with her sensuit.

  “You hear something enough times,” he said, “it starts to sound real.”

  “You’ve been in the street long enough to know what is and what isn’t.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” he pondered.


  Avalon wasn’t so easily convinced. “Species use that story on each other the same way they use any other drug,” she said. “It’s a cheap way out. They get high, they get hope. What’s the difference?”

  “The difference,” he replied, “is that yesterday I thought bionucleic technology was just a myth.” Cray sank back into his chair, catching a glimpse of his haggard reflection in the pulser’s canopy glass. “I’m beginning to think it isn’t such a crazy idea. If the Collective can synthesize an intelligent computer from biological components, who’s to say the Inru couldn’t do the same in reverse?”

  “Man becoming machine?” Avalon said, treading lightly. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

  “About as likely as a machine becoming man,” Cray said. The tower that housed CSS headquarters loomed large in front of them, roof floods impaling the dark like blades of stealth light. “And yet here we are.”

  Avalon didn’t seem in the least interested.

  The Inru’s line of thinking wasn’t that radical. It had, in fact, been kicked around in one form or another for decades, a response to encroaching technology that increasingly rendered Homo sapiens obsolete. Mankind, they maintained, would remain the dominant species on the planet only as long as it remained the foremost thinker on the planet. Should the intelligence of the machines eclipse that of the creator, evolution would eventually select the lesser of the two for extinction.

  The earliest incarnations of the Inru movement sought to prevent this by launching a systematic campaign of terror against the Collective. They sabotaged research facilities, used sympathetic hammerjacks to invade and plunder databases—they even went so far as to kidnap engineers and scientists who worked on various SI projects, convincing some of them to work for the cause, murdering the ones who wouldn’t convert. The Assembly responded in kind, issuing liquidation directives against known members of the Inru leadership and turning its free agents loose to carry them out. The result was a bloodbath—a full three years of open warfare, with all the viciousness of a gang jihad.

  The Assembly’s strategy worked, after a fashion. With many of its people dead, with most of its resources decimated, the Inru was forced into the subculture of the Zone—the one place the Collective couldn’t touch them. Having a legend set firmly in place, the Inru then set itself about to operate in the shadows—a brilliant turn that, in time, elevated the movement to a cultlike status. Terrorists became partisans. Partisans became priests. And priests found willing converts in places where the future was, at best, a cold uncertainty. Species took to the message like it had been handed down from God, because it described a world in which they were victims of technology. In time, the message said, they would strike back at the machines that had enslaved them—not through warfare, not through bloodshed, not even through revolution.