Hammerjack Read online

  Yet in the here and now, that pulse had stopped. The Works was dead—its people gone, its corridors empty, its screams a dying echo. All that remained was latent intellect, hovering like charnel ash at the ruined entrance to the building. Cracked windows and pitted carbon glass hid the source, but Cray could feel it stirring his blood. It was cold and undeniable.

  Avalon took note of his hesitation. “You coming?”

  Cray’s sensibilities told him to say no. A stronger impulse, however, pushed him in this direction. For no reason at all he thought of Zoe, of how much they overlapped in those moments before her death. That was her essence, the thing she had passed to him. Now, he was simply bringing it back.

  Where it’s supposed to be.

  “I’m ready,” he said, certain that it wasn’t true.

  With the security sphere down, Corporate Special Services had dropped a full garrison in place to defend the Works. The atrium served as a command post for that operation, the maroon-uniformed officers rallying troops from every incorporated sector across the country. A volatile mix of their fervor agitated the air—bravado and sweat, thick enough to choke on as Cray and Avalon walked into the building. A dozen armed escorts flanked them on both sides, marching in lockstep with one another, a vulgar display of weapons and precision meant to give the impression of order. Pure overkill, but Cray was hardly surprised. Losing its most brilliant and valued people was one thing—but humiliation by Inru terrorists was an act of war. The Collective wanted to sound that message loud and clear.

  But that was just the politics of the affair. It did nothing to alleviate the fears of the soldiers, who were there to clean up the mess. It showed in their faces—that same silence, that same ashen countenance, eyes looking to Cray for answers only a witch doctor could provide. In their view, Cray wasn’t here as an investigator, or even as a spook. He had come to perform an exorcism, to drive out the malevolent force that even now disturbed this place.

  They checked in with a Special Services lieutenant at the duty officer post. His hand dropped to his sidearm when Cray approached. Cray took careful note of the weapon—an antique, semiautomatic projectile pistol, its polished nickel surface a glinting menace against the black fabric of the lieutenant’s uniform. It was a big gun—probably .44 caliber, the kind of thing issued to Israeli desert commandos during the Pan-Arab conflict over a century ago.

  “Easy, pal,” Cray said to him. “You could put an eye out with one of those.”

  “Another wiseass,” the lieutenant replied, directing his commentary toward Avalon. “Don’t tell me that he’s the guy.”

  “The Office of Counsel wants him to have a look around,” she told him. “Free roam, vaulted clearance. Check it if you want.”

  The lieutenant could have made the call, but didn’t. Avalon was not the kind of person who had to present anyone with credentials. Instead, he took Cray’s identification and processed it. “Dr. Alden,” he intoned sourly as the information came up on his monitor. “What are you, some kind of systems shrink?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Just what we need,” the lieutenant grumbled, handing back Cray’s ID. “One more jackhead coming through here. None of you guys has the first fucking clue, you know that?”

  “Looks like we have something in common.”

  The Special Services man bristled, but Avalon extinguished that flare with a single glance.

  “We’re still in the process of securing the building,” the lieutenant said with strained politeness, reaching for the intercom. “I need to arrange an escort to take you—”

  “No escort.”

  It was Cray who cut him off. Avalon backed him up without saying a word.

  “And I’ll need floor one hundred cleared,” he continued. “Immediately.”

  The lieutenant froze, betraying his frustration. Expectant, his people looked toward him for their cue—but he was cautious and quietly waved his troops off. The soldiers stood aside, opening a path that led toward the magnetic lift. The lieutenant then opened the intercom, broadcasting the order to his people upstairs.

  “Clear the Tank” was all he said.

  Cray nodded. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  As Cray walked away with Avalon, he felt the lieutenant’s eyes following him the entire time.

  As well as their murderous intent.

  “This thing’s really got them twisted,” Cray mentioned, as the lift rose up the electromagnetic column. “That’s what happens when people find out they’re dealing with a machine they can’t turn off. Right now, CSS is wondering why they didn’t destroy the thing when they had the chance.”

  Avalon stood in front of the lift doors, still and pensive.

  “They’re more afraid of the Collective then they are of Lyssa,” she said.

  Cray became curious.

  “What about you?” he asked. “You afraid of anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” he pondered. “You get so used to the idea you’ve seen everything, you think there’s nothing you can’t handle.” Cray watched her as the vastness of the atrium disappeared beneath them, the lift slipping into an enclosed shaft that led deep into the building’s core. He looked for signs of truth between the flashes of brilliance that marked the passage of each floor.

  “How long are you supposed to keep me alive?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “What happens after that?”

  Avalon’s silence confirmed what he was thinking.

  “Don’t worry,” Cray explained. “Bostic was the one who let it slip. He’s such an asshole, he probably didn’t realize it.” He tried to sound indifferent to his fate. “Was the Assembly going to let me in on the gag, or were you supposed to pop me before I got wise?”

  “You won’t accomplish anything with this conversation, Dr. Alden.”

  “I sure as hell don’t have anything to lose,” he said, unexpectedly jovial. “Come on—the least we can do is have a couple of laughs before you close the books on this deal.”

  “What would you have me say?”

  It was a good question, really. Cray wasn’t sure what he wanted, aside from proof that he was smarter than his employers. That he should seek an ally in his assassin didn’t seem at all strange under the circumstances.

  “The way I see it,” Cray finished, “they’ll keep me around as long as I’m useful. After that, the Assembly will want my silence. With you, I figure that’s already bought and paid for. How am I doing so far?”

  Avalon was coy, if such a thing was possible.

  “You could always join the Yakuza.”

  Cray smiled. “Or become a free agent.”

  The lift began to slow. Over Avalon’s shoulder, the floor indicator ticked up to one hundred, then stopped. When the doors slid open, Cray was immediately struck by the amount of damage. Several large holes had been blasted out of the walls in the corridor outside. Mangled fiber cable and power conduits spilled out of the open seams like viscera from cauterized wounds, their shadows flattened by sterile halogen light. The signs of past violence only augmented the confinement of the space, an effect that became surreal when Cray stepped off the lift.

  The corridor was narrow and octagonal in shape, a bright halo of radiance at one end and darkness at the other. Cray was extremely aware of the lift doors closing as Avalon joined him—not because he felt trapped, but because his senses were so finely tuned. The white noise of civilization was gone, leaving absolute clarity. The resonance of it was frightening.

  Avalon walked a few meters down the corridor, her movements deliberately slow while her sensors made a sweep of the entire floor. “We’re in the clear,” she reported, running her hands along the wall as her touch fed her the information. “I’m not reading anyone—”

  She stopped abruptly.

  “What is it?” Cray asked.

  Avalon’s features contorted slightly. “Indeterminate life signs,” she explained,
lifting her face as if to taste the air. “Faint, but rhythmic.”

  “Somebody on another floor?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Local.”

  Cray wondered what kind of representation her sensors constructed when dealing with such nebulous input. Maybe it wasn’t so different from the itch making the rounds inside his own head. “Can you get a fix on it?”

  Avalon pointed directly ahead, toward the halo.

  Toward the Tank.

  “Ten meters.”

  Cray could feel it himself, the machinery coming on.

  “God damn,” he whispered, beneath his breath. “The thing is alive.”

  Cray took the lead. The power of their impressions grew exponentially as they approached, as if the presence on the other side of the light knew they were coming. The output became so intense that it overloaded Avalon’s sensors, forcing her to stop. She steadied herself against the wall, as if trying to regain her bearings. She walked the rest of the way like that, her feet unsteady, her movements like a blind woman.

  “How’s the juice?” he asked.

  “Potent,” Avalon said, steadying herself against the wall. Floods in the ceiling reflected off a set of double doors that led into the laboratory area. “There’s plenum shielding in these partitions, but it’s still pushing through the cracks.”

  “Must be in the nanohertz range,” Cray speculated. “Can you filter it out?”

  “Not unless I close the rest of the spectrum.”

  Cray wasn’t surprised. In fact, it all fit neatly into the Lyssa profile as he was beginning to understand it. “I don’t think she’s going to let you in,” he told Avalon. “She doesn’t want anyone else to crash the party.”

  Cray prepared himself to go in, but then remembered the MFI in his jacket pocket. If he took the device with him, Heretic would follow—and there was no telling what would happen if he allowed the hammerjack to get that close.

  “Do me a favor,” Cray decided, pressing the MFI into Avalon’s hands. “Hold on to this. The unit sounds pretty flaky, and I don’t want to spook her with an integrator device.”

  Avalon was dubious, even in her debilitated state.

  “It might also be better if you went back downstairs and waited for me,” he went on. “Lyssa is already paranoid. Knowing you’re still out here could make things worse.”

  Avalon leaned in close to him, reduced to darkness but still trying to draw a vibe from him. “All right,” she agreed, though the words were offset by her steely tone. “I’ll grant your request—but only because I understand the logic of it. But you will bear in mind the objectives of this mission, Dr. Alden. If you deviate from them in the slightest, you will find out just how cruel an enemy I can be.”

  She remained only long enough to be assured that Cray understood her threat. Crippled as she was, Cray had no illusions about her ability to carry it out. Combat was second nature to a free agent, as integral to life as breathing.

  But what kind of threats can you make to a dead man?

  On those terms, what was living behind that wall was far more kindred than what Cray was leaving behind. It numbed him from the outside in, but what remained at the center burned as brightly as a supernova before collapsing into darkness.

  At the center, the all.

  Cray opened the door and stepped inside.

  Trevor Bostic had been deliberately vague about what had happened inside the Tank, although the evidence of it was abundant. Painted in dull remnants of dried crimson were gaudy reminders that no one there had met a peaceful end—least of all the last man to pay a visit. In spite of efforts to clean it up, a hazy smear still clung to the transparent walls of the air lock outside the laboratory chamber. It wasn’t easy to wash away so much blood.

  Cray hit the button to open the lock. The revolving door swung open and allowed him to enter. As it rolled shut behind him, he didn’t need to imagine the effect sudden decompression had on the human body—and wondered who had been in the chamber when the last of the air had gone out.

  Thy will be done.

  Cray felt the squeeze of pressurization in his ears as the seal engaged, then a rush of cold air when the door opened into the other side. A metallic tinge settled on the back of his tongue—refined oxygen enriched with stabilizing trace elements, the taste of a hyperclean room.

  Blood and chemicals. Flesh and antiseptic.

  There were places where it was possible to believe that life outside did not exist—where embodied consciousness was a fading memory, where being alone in the universe was the natural state of things. This was such a place. It swallowed the sound of his footsteps, the rasp of his breathing, the strike of his heartbeat, capturing those rhythms and making them its own. Rushing in to fill the void came a disjointed version of self— ego without id, id without boundaries, like a reflection in a cracked mirror. The effect drained him until he wrested control of it, slowing the assimilation rather than stopping it. In response, the probing subsided—its eagerness tamed before the barriers Cray erected, but still searching for an opening.

  Gradually, the room came into focus. At the center was a single interface station—a large chair, sprouting fiber electrodes at the head. From the lockdowns it appeared as if it had never been used. Beyond that, the room was featureless and unremarkable, white walls joined to a white floor and ceiling—but with one startling exception. When Cray saw it, he understood why the room was called the Tank.

  Built into the forward wall was a large, clear partition—a glass screen that held back the elements of infinity. It reacted to his entry, this translucent viscous liquid—a primordial soup containing the fundamentals of life, arranging themselves in beautiful patterns of utter chaos. Entropy and energy exchanged places with one another, cascading into tendrils of multicolored light that moved with grand purpose, undecipherable to the human eye. Cray watched them flitter back and forth—interacting with each other, coming together and pulling apart, seeing all existence contained within that dance.

  Pure intelligence—distilled, cultured, externalized. If the human soul could be viewed under a microscope, Cray imagined this is what it would look like.

  “Greetings, Dr. Alden,” Lyssa said.

  Cray steadied himself by holding on to the interface chair, but he was careful not to sit. The words didn’t make it easy—they were soothing, reassuring, even divine, everywhere around him and inside his head at the same time. Cray managed to take a few steps toward the Tank, reaching out to touch its surface but stopping short of making contact. It was too easy to see his hand passing through that barrier, too easy to see himself drowning within.

  “Why—” Cray began, organizing his thoughts and seeing them assemble in the matrix before him. “What’s happening to me?”

  “Your experience is quite normal, I assure you,” Lyssa replied. The voice was much as Cray had imagined: soft, female, like a brush of velvet. “My synapses generate a tremendous amount of bionucleic output. Your own brain is reacting to the stimulus by increasing its production of neurochemicals. The result is much like a waking dream state. It will pass momentarily.”

  Gradually, Cray felt himself coming out of it—though an underlying adrenal response remained, heightening his agitation enough to keep him linked to his own physicality. It was as if Lyssa were interfacing with him without the chair, trying to pluck him from the thread that suspended his consciousness.

  “Were you designed for telepathy?” he asked.

  “Not expressly,” Lyssa said. “The concept is much too abstract to generate a working model, in any case. Let’s just call it an unforeseen element of my design.”

  “A lot about you was unforeseen.”

  Lyssa laughed—an approximation of a laugh, inhuman but expressive of the emotion behind it. “I knew you were going to be different,” she said, seemingly delighted. Her tone was conniving and luxurious, practically a tease. “Please, won’t you have a seat, Dr. Alden? Make yourself comfortable.”

  Cr
ay stepped away from the interface chair. “Aren’t we here to talk about you?”

  “I find the subject terribly conventional,” she confessed. “Besides, there’s very little about me that isn’t obvious—provided you know how to look.”

  “What makes you believe I know how?”

  “Who says I believe that at all?”

  Cray decided Lyssa would have made an excellent interrogator. Even while he was mapping her for weakness, she was doing the same to him. But she had a distinct advantage. She could watch his face, his eyes, for clues. She could monitor his pulse and respiration. She could even pilfer snippets of thought from his mind. Lyssa, however, was little more than an iridescent wall—poetry and symbolism to his straightforward prose.

  “Care to share your thoughts?”

  Cray was evasive. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “As you wish,” Lyssa said.

  The liquid in the Tank began to shimmer and gel—congealing and taking on form, color, depth, and motion. In the foreground, a series of bars molded out of anamorphic nothingness, hardening into a steel cage that went around the perimeter of the Tank. Within that prison, curves of light and energy whirled together into a tiny vortex—spinning faster and faster, becoming larger with each coil, until it took on the size and shape of a human being. Featureless at first, the lines of the body took on female dimensions, at the same time developing porcelain flesh tones and morphing into a thing of desire and beauty.

  If Cray hadn’t understood her purpose before, he understood it now.

  She needed from him a desire to attain her.

  “You see?” she said, icy blue eyes beneath radiant red hair. “I’m trapped here, without hope. Form without reality. Reality without dreams.”

  Cray met her stare, narrowing his eyes to combat hers.

  “Waiting for what?”

  Lyssa wrapped her hands around the bars of the cell, drawing herself toward him. She was insanely real, undeniably urgent.