Hammerjack Read online

  “NOW!”

  Twin bursts of pure energy traversed the void between the hovercraft and the pulser, exploding off the flight grid like fireworks. The Inru ship then lurched into a dive—its pilot anticipating the powerful concussion that would occur when the beams struck their target, steering clear of the debris cloud that would form when the pulser disintegrated. With full weapons at point-blank range, a miss was impossible on a stationary object. It only remained to go back and visually confirm the kill once it was done.

  But there was no bright flash, no dust cloud, no kill—and no pulser. The deadly beams seared through thin air, going off wild until they were harmlessly absorbed by the grid. The Inru pilot jerked his head around, looking everywhere for the target he knew was there, but saw nothing but empty space.

  Until his proximity alarms went crazy, and the weight of something ominous fell over him.

  A scant two meters off his starboard side, the pulser thundered past him. It had dropped completely off the grid, its nose pirouetting downward to move enough air over the foils to maintain a steep glide. The fore and aft receptor dishes had gone dark—but the dorsal remained active, spitting out residual energy from the trajectory beam like a powerful laser.

  The pulser’s wake flipped the hovercraft over, sending it into a flat spin. The pilot reacted quickly, mashing down on his reaction control jets and slowing his forward velocity to a hover—a maneuver that saved his ship from barreling into one of the surrounding skyscrapers, but also made him fatally vulnerable. Sitting out in the open sky, he had become the stationary target; and as the pulser’s energized dish swung around to catch him, the Inru pilot had just enough time to realize he was the cause of his own death.

  The waning power of the trajectory beam lanced out at the hovercraft, one fraction of what it had been—but still enough to cut the small ship in half. Fuel components scattered as its tanks ripped open, creating a volatile mist that exploded as soon as it came in contact with the beam. The resulting concussion shattered windows in the nearby towers, creating a shower of glass that fell into the streets below. Pieces of the hovercraft joined in that downpour, consuming themselves in fire as they trickled down.

  The bright halo above Manhattan faded.

  And the pulser rushed to meet its own fate.

  “Distance to grid!” Cray shouted.

  “Ninety meters,” Heretic replied, barely audible in the melee of noises filling the cockpit. “Eighty meters . . . sixty-five—shit! We’re gonna splash all over that grid if we don’t lose some goddamned speed!”

  Cray didn’t need the hammerjack to tell him that. It was spelled out in lethal terms by the images outside the canopy glass. Swallowed by the narrow corridor between the towers of Church Street, Cray was assailed with peripheral flashes of brilliant radiance—lights shining through the windows of surrounding buildings, coming together into a blur as they marked his accelerated fall out of the sky. Down below, traffic along the busy traverse grid loomed closer and closer, vehicles idling back and forth, suspended above the city streets by threads of light—unaware of the bomb about to drop on them.

  “Fifty meters!”

  Cray held his breath, pulling back on the dead stick as hard as he could. The pulser was never designed to function as a glider, and responded to his commands like a sinking stone. It bounced from side to side, metal grinding against metal, tossing Cray around and threatening to murder his wounded shoulder—but still he held on, too stubborn to let go, too hopeless to wish for a miracle.

  “Thirty-five!”

  A loud screech penetrated the cabin from behind. Looking back, Cray watched the dorsal receptor dish tear loose from its support pylon. It caught the wind and was yanked away, tumbling a few times before dropping out of sight.

  “Thirty meters,” Heretic reported. “Twenty-five . . . twenty.”

  The pulser’s nose began to rise.

  “Hot damn, boss!” the hammerjack said. “I think we got ourselves a head wind!”

  Precious air spilled over the foils, allowing Cray some more control of the ship. It wasn’t much—but it flattened out his angle of attack, giving him a chance at parking this thing. Trying out the z-axis foils, he nudged the pulser to starboard and lined himself up with the closest grid lane he could find.

  “Ten meters. Leveling off.”

  Damn, Cray thought. The lane was choked with traffic, pulsers lined up with no more than thirty meters between them.

  “Jack the traverse grid,” he told Heretic. “Spread these guys out. Gimme some room here.”

  “No time. We only got about eight seconds.”

  Cray looked around for other options, but couldn’t find one. With the head wind dying fast, he was committed. “Bring the gain up on the dishes to full,” he instructed. “Catch the photon wash if you can. Channel it through our main axis to get us some more stability.”

  Cray saw the forward dish come up, sniffing around for any energy it could find. Delicate tendrils of static electricity formed along its rim before being drawn in. He positioned the pulser as best he could, then thrust down on the flight stick.

  “Contact,” Heretic said.

  The injured ship hit the traverse grid like a hammer, hijacking the trajectory beam and greedily stuffing photons down its throat. The beam nearly collapsed under the weight of the abrupt drain, creating a ripple effect that thrashed the chain of pulsers in the lane like objects on the end of a whip. They snapped back into place as soon as the beam regenerated itself—including the unexpected guest that had caused the trouble in the first place. Spewing an intense blue flare out of its aft dish, the pulser flipped over several times before righting itself—then roared off on a collision course with the ship directly in front of it.

  The Port Authority computers, detecting a major malfunction, slammed on the brakes. The polarity of the trajectory beam neutralized, its component particles redirected to absorb the pulser’s inertia. That brought all the other ships in the lane to an instant halt—all except the runaway, which continued to lumber forward, driving a shower of sparks ahead of it.

  A backflow of energy built up within the body of the pulser, growing to proportions that could blow the ship apart. Some of it bubbled over into the hole where the dorsal dish had been, venting into the atmosphere as the pulser finally began to slow down, creating an otherworldly aura that made it seem as though a ghost ship had appeared in the middle of New York. The ghost menaced the other pulser in its path, deliberately creeping up on its tail, threatening to crush the aft receptor dish and create another disaster. It came within less than a meter, but then relented, easing off as the forces that drove the runaway abated.

  The ghost ship was still.

  As was the city around it.

  Cray sank into his seat.

  It was the first time he could recall breathing since he left the Works. Closing his eyes, he soaked up the sounds coming up from the street below: the traffic, the sirens, the collective pulse of a thousand souls staring up into the sky. His body ached terribly, but it felt good just the same. He was alive—and that was more than he deserved.

  He let go of the flight stick. Heretic retracted it along with the throttle, locking the controls back up in the box.

  “I never want to ride in one of these things again,” Cray sighed.

  “That ain’t a bad idea for now,” the hammerjack said. “I’ve found a place to set you down and get you out of here. I suggest you make tracks before the CSS hears about this.”

  Cray held up his MFI, regarding it now as more a person than a piece of electronics.

  “How did you know about Avalon?”

  “She had a chat with her Inru buddies while you were in the Tank,” Heretic said. “I dropped in on their conversation. Those guys want you real bad, Alden. They took one hell of a chance trying to grab you like that.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s something I’ll have to explain to you—in person.”

  Cray thought about i
t. He was tired, confused—and possibly a fugitive at this point. However he looked at it, he couldn’t possibly explain himself to Special Services, even if he tried. He was too out of bounds.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “A little place I know in the Zone,” Heretic said. “A real commerce dive. You’ll like it.”

  “Sounds like home.”

  “We’ll be safe there,” Heretic promised. “We can talk. There’s a lot about this you don’t understand, Alden. You sure you can handle it?”

  “Yes,” Cray said. “As long as it’s real.”

  It took Cray the better part of an hour to find a taxi willing to pick him up. Cabbies had better instincts than most when it came to people and had a tendency to pass on the kind of man who wandered around Manhattan covered in blood. It was only after he flashed some hard currency that Cray found a driver willing to take the chance—and that was a techead with an implant fetish, who looked even scarier than he did.

  But the cabbie knew his way around the Zone, precisely what Cray needed. Two gold Krugerrands got him into Chelsea, and two more got him directions to what the cabbie described as one of the better flesh barns in town. From all the body art the kid had on display, Cray was inclined to take his word for it.

  A simple neon sign marked the place, an advertisement nowhere near as lurid as the naked baby doll peddling her wares in the window. A hologram identified her as one of the shop’s “clients”—an understatement considering all the enhancements the woman had undergone, but at this point Cray didn’t care. All he needed was a derm transplant and a bone-set to repair his shoulder, plus a few painkillers. He could spring for some professional cosmetic surgery later.

  The shop quack had him fixed up in about twenty minutes. Cray then walked down the block to a clothier who specialized in not-quite-legal streetwear, paying cash for a dark Armani suit that made him come off like a gangster. He pitched his old clothing into an incinerator, going back to the boulevard and projecting attitude. As a rule, street species didn’t fuck with Yakuza. The illusion was the next best thing to carrying a gun.

  The bar Heretic had told him about wasn’t hard to find. It was down at the end of the low-tech market district, past the open-air outlets that hawked everything from fresh fish to oriental rugs, worlds off from the rave clubs and subculture only a few kilometers away. Wall-to-wall bodies pressed against each other on the inside: mostly the alcohol crowd, although there were a few tables where tec pushers set up shop and catered to wealthy tourists looking for an expensive thrill. They eyed Cray suspiciously, the typical reaction of lightweight sinners when confronted with a truly dangerous person. The image didn’t fit into their fantasies of thug life.

  Cray found a seat at the bar with a decent view of the place. He ordered a beer. Like everything else there, the brew was a pale imitation of the real thing. Making time with his drink, he casually surveyed the faces around him. There were no obvious signs of danger, which was a relief; but there were also no clues to Heretic’s identity, a danger in itself.

  Cray finished his beer and ordered another. A prostitute observed his solitary status and sauntered up to him, offering a pitch for her services. Cray passed her some money to go away. A few minutes later, another woman appeared behind him and used a decidedly different approach. Sliding her hands over his shoulders, she ran her fingers all the way down his chest. Bringing her lips to his ear, she whispered sweetly.

  “Jumping that grid was better than sex, wasn’t it?”

  Cray bolted up from his seat. Standing there, decked out like the other pay-for-play girls, was the same woman who had propositioned him at the airport in Vienna. She tossed her blond hair aside, looking him up and down like any potential customer. It wasn’t so different from the routine she had used on him before—and its effect was just as potent.

  Cray said the first thing that popped into his head.

  “You sure do get around for a hooker.”

  “Charming,” Lea said, her green eyes narrowing. “I like a man who isn’t afraid to make an ass of himself.”

  “Sorry. I’ve had a bad day.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Her voice was a purr. She pressed herself up against him, hanging on his arm like a pretty ornament. “What do you say the two of us get out of here so you can tell me all about it? I know a place not far from here. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.”

  Cray breathed deeply, taking in her perfume. The scent was melodic, intoxicating.

  “How much?” he asked, going along.

  Lea sparkled.

  “More than you can afford.”

  The hotel was the kind of establishment that rented by the hour: microscopic rooms, questionable hygiene, and a clientele that didn’t give real names. A jungle, even by Zone standards—but a haven for those seeking anonymity.

  Lea navigated the dim hallways like she knew the place, stepping around the dozen or so junkies who decorated the floor. Some of them stirred, but most lay still—either dead or hopelessly stoned. Then there were the women, who stole from the carcasses and eyed Cray hungrily. Tesla girls, he thought, remembering the ones he had seen in the Asian Sphere: Vampires, riding a permanent tec high, allergic to the light. Not quite prostitutes, the Crowleys used them as a tool of inducement for their religion. They reacted to Cray’s body temperature, moving in on him until Lea warned them off with a glance.

  Not my trick, she told them, without saying a word. They heeded.

  Leading him down to the end of a filthy corridor, Lea slipped a key into one of the doors and ushered him inside. He flipped on the lights while she locked the door, the pale glow of the fluorescents adding a harshness to the squalid surroundings. A single plastic chair sat next to a bare foam mattress, which completed the décor of the room. Peeling walls stained with graffiti enclosed the tiny space, which was riddled with a permanent funk of cheap drugs and cheaper sex. It was quite a change from the Waldorf Astoria.

  Lea affixed a small electronic device to the door. A sensor globe, Cray decided—probably thermal, collecting heat signatures from the hall. She went across the room and placed another one on the window. “A lot of peeping Toms in the neighborhood,” she explained, closing the torn flap of nylon that acted as a privacy curtain. “Good news is that the Zone Authority mostly ignores this place. There isn’t much profit in busting pimps and small-time dealers. We should be safe here for a while.”

  “I wasn’t planning on staying here that long.”

  She turned around. “You in a hurry to get some place in particular?”

  “Not really,” he admitted, taking in the room with a mixture of disgust and amazement. “CSS should have an arrest warrant for me by now, so it’s not like I have a lot of choices—”

  Cray never got to finish the thought. The sight of a weapon in Lea’s hand stopped him cold. She had slipped a v-wave emitter out from under her skirt when he wasn’t looking and was pointing it at his head.

  “Does this mean the party’s over?”

  Lea rolled her eyes. “Just shut up and put your hands behind your head.”

  Cray did as he was told. Lea obviously knew what she was doing, and he was in no position to put up a struggle. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” he said. “I’m Cray Alden—you know, the guy who trusted you enough to come out here.”

  “Lea Prism,” she replied, unimpressed. “Hold still, will you? You’re making me nervous.”

  “Sorry,” Cray said. “If I had known this was a ripoff, I would have brought more money.”

  “Yeah, yeah—keep talking.” She came up with a small pouch filled with coin and Cray’s MFI. The cash she tossed onto the bed. The integrator, however, held more than a casual interest. She examined it carefully, eyes brightening as she turned it over in her hand. “Cool,” she pronounced. “Very cool.”

  “Glad you approve.”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Alden,” Lea chided him, handing the MFI back and putting away her weapon. “
It’s just security. You know how dangerous it is out here. I have to make sure Heretic isn’t walking into a trap.”

  “Heretic came to me,” Cray reminded her, straightening out his jacket. “I wasn’t the one who asked for this. And I sure as hell don’t need one of his ballbusters working me over.”

  “Suit yourself. You can blow out of here anytime you want.”

  Lea did nothing to stop him. She even stepped away from the door, giving him a free and clear path. But that meant going back to the Assembly, back to CSS—and a number of questions he wasn’t prepared to answer.

  He took a seat in the old plastic chair.

  “What does Heretic want with me?”

  “He can explain that to you later,” Lea said. “Right now, his main concern is keeping you away from the Collective.”

  “That’s why you’ve been dogging me?” Cray asked. “For protection?”

  “Believe me, you needed it. You’re dealing with some bad people, Alden. The Assembly doesn’t even know how deep this goes.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Ever since that business in Singapore,” Lea told him. “He keeps an eye on all of the corporate spooks—especially the good ones. After Zoe got killed, his interest in you got personal. He’s been tracking your movements ever since.”

  “Vienna?”

  “That’s where we picked up the trail. You covered your tracks pretty good. Took us nearly forty-eight hours to sniff out where you were headed.”

  “And I thought you were a honey trap,” Cray grumbled, berating himself for not figuring it out sooner. “Is that when you jacked my MFI?”

  “A little package we’ve been developing,” she said. “I used the same carrier wave you were on to upload a ROM-specific protovirus.”

  Cray remembered the travel vestibule at the airport. He had used his MFI to open an Axis port and run a feedback trace on himself, just as a precaution. If Lea had been standing outside, she could have nailed down the frequencies he was using and piggybacked them—a slick piece of work, as he never ran an open jack without encryption. That she had done it without his knowing was even more impressive.