Hammerjack Read online

  “Once the virus tunnels in,” she went on, “it utilizes host resources to manufacture a construct—in your case, a personality module Heretic devised. Combines local and remote control, which makes it a bitch to extract. Sorry if I messed with your head back there, but the bandwidth constraints meant I had to get close to deliver it.”

  Cray wondered where Heretic had gotten the technology. If the hammerjack had developed it himself, the man was more than brilliant. He was a goddamned virtuoso.

  And for some reason, he wanted Cray.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “A lot of things you don’t know about yet,” Lea answered. “You, my friend, were in the wrong place at the wrong time. None of this would have happened if your boss hadn’t screwed up and lost something very important to him.”

  Cray whispered the name: “Yin.”

  “GenTec has been developing a new strain of flash-DNA,” Lea said, pacing about the room as she spoke. “That part you already know. What Yin didn’t tell you is that the project is strictly off the books—and with good reason. He doesn’t want anybody to know that he’s been using Collective funds to advance an Inru agenda.”

  Cray was stunned. More than that, it was impossible to believe—not because of Phao Yin’s character, but rather his total lack of it. Yin stood as a pillar of greed within the Collective, but he was no revolutionary. If he was working with the Inru, he was also working some kind of angle.

  “If you don’t believe me,” Lea prodded, “think about what Zoe was carrying. Then ask yourself why you haven’t heard from Dex Marlowe.”

  It was the first time Cray had even thought of the genetic medical examiner since leaving Kuala Lumpur. He had no idea how Lea could have known about Marlowe, outside of Heretic’s godlike omnipresence—but she was right. Dex should have tried to contact him. That no message had come across was an ominous sign.

  Cray stood up and grabbed Lea by the arm. She pushed the emitter into his ribs to warn him off, but Cray was too angry to care.

  “What happened to Dex?” he demanded. “What do you know?”

  “Yin heard about what the two of you were doing!” Lea snapped, glaring at him defiantly. “He allowed Marlowe to complete the flash extraction, then killed him, okay? Are you satisfied?”

  Cray fell silent, the pulse of his rage ebbing to a dull ache as he released her.

  “He also put a directive out on you,” Lea finished. The heat of her own anger abated at the sight of Cray’s grief, and segued into a moment of compassion. “Avalon was under orders to bring you in. If that wasn’t feasible, she was supposed to take you out.”

  “Dex didn’t even have time to complete his analysis,” Cray muttered. “What possible threat could I pose?”

  “It’s not what you know that makes you a threat. It’s what you are.”

  Cray didn’t like the sound of it.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that the answer is inside of you,” Lea sighed, lowering her eyes. The bravado was gone, replaced with a forlorn sympathy. She sat down on the edge of the mattress, then looked back up at him. “The flash was infused with a fail-safe replication code. Upon termination of the host entity, the code is instructed to seek out another living system—an organism in close proximity. In Zoe’s case, that happened to be you.”

  The horror of it played out in Cray’s mind: The twitch. A convulsion. Death throes, nothing more. That hand clamping down and refusing to let go . . .

  Cray still felt the cooling flesh upon him—and the sting of injection.

  Dead magic the strongest of all.

  “Jesus,” he shuddered. Cray had heard of the fail-safe inclusions—of how a corpse could rise, seeking to propagate the code floating around in its bloodstream. A cold stab of panic penetrated him, violating him even further.

  Zoe had made him into a runner.

  “You’re the only one besides Yin who has access to the information contained in that flash,” Lea said. “He dumped what he could get out of Zoe into GenTec’s domain—but then you were gone before he realized you were carrying.”

  “What am I carrying?” Cray asked—remembering the images Marlowe had showed him, how the flash invaded Zoe’s tissues like a cancer. “Just what is this stuff supposed to do?”

  “It’s a leap, Alden. Or at least the Inru think it is.”

  “A leap toward what?”

  Lea’s answer was a hush of unspeakable implications.

  Cray backed away from her. All at once, he understood: Zoe had never left him. She had passed on a part of herself, and it had been with him ever since. Even now, it was at work inside of him—changing him, remaking him, into what Zoe was becoming.

  The Ascension . . .

  “We need to extract this thing,” Cray said. “Now.”

  “I’ve already made arrangements,” Lea assured him. “Heretic is waiting for us to—”

  Her words were cut off by a muffled beep at the door. Lea signaled for Cray to remain silent, then went over to check the sensor globe. A pair of contacts had appeared at extreme range—muted heat signatures, moving up the stairwell in a cover formation.

  “We got a couple of live ones,” she said. “Military-style approach. Looks like they’re wearing body armor.”

  “Zone agents,” Cray said, just as the globe at the window went off. He rushed over and peeled the curtain back to watch the fire escape. The camochrome made them hard to spot. By the time he caught a hint of motion, they were already too close.

  “How many?” Lea asked him.

  “Two more.”

  “Know anything about guns?”

  Cray nodded. She tossed him the emitter.

  “Go for the head shot.”

  Cray had another idea. He put the weapon down and activated his MFI, scanning the hyperband frequencies for the agents’ communication loop. He came up dry. They weren’t about to make the same mistake they made in Singapore.

  “Damn,” he whispered.

  “Problems?”

  “I think the Zone Authority is onto my bag of tricks.”

  “You better come up with something new,” Lea said, watching the ghostly contacts as they closed in. “Because we’re gonna have company in about ten seconds.”

  Cray weighed what few options they had. Only one thing was certain: the room was a kill zone. If the agents got inside, he and Lea were dead. Their only hope was to get out in the open where there was room to maneuver—to put themselves directly in their enemy’s sights.

  And there was only one way to do that without getting shot.

  Cray went for the door.

  There was silence in the hallway.

  A pair of Zone agents immersed themselves in the dark, body armor mimicking the shades of murk around them. The lead agent signaled for his man to proceed, holding back a few meters in a firing position while the other one headed to the end of the corridor.

  Their orders were simple: bring Alden back, alive if it all possible, and kill anyone else who might be with him. The Zone Authority had ponied up a hefty sum to make that happen, which made the agents less gonzo than they usually were; but they also knew Alden and what the man had done in the Asian Sphere. Bringing back a live body was not a priority.

  The point man stationed himself outside Alden’s door. He looked back at the lead agent and nodded. The lead agent checked his chronograph, timing the arrival of the outside team. Twenty more seconds and they would be ready to storm the room.

  The lead agent raised his hand, getting ready to drop the hammer.

  But before he could, the hammer dropped on him.

  The door burst off its hinges, coming down on the point man and knocking him to the floor. Two people came tumbling out of the room—one of them male, the other female, clawing at each other in a life-and-death struggle. They fell on top of one another, rolling across the floor as they exchanged blows, a tangled mass of legs and elbows.

  The lead agent leveled
his rifle at the fighting pair.

  “Don’t shoot!” the man shouted. “I’m Alden!”

  A sharp jab to the stomach sent him reeling backward. The woman, who was strong for her size, took the advantage and pounced on him, wrapping her hands around his throat. Alden managed to kick her off, then rolled away to get some distance before jumping back to his feet. The woman went after him immediately. She launched herself at Alden with killer velocity, her aim to crush Alden’s head with her bare hands.

  The lead agent almost took her out, before he saw the weapon in Alden’s hand.

  Microwaves burned the air into a shimmer as they lanced out toward the woman’s chest. The impact stopped her in midstride, as if she had hit an invisible wall—but she remained on her feet, her body convulsing like a puppet on strings. A gurgling sound bubbled from her throat as she continued her bizarre dance, ending in a piercing shriek when Cray let go of the trigger.

  She fell to the floor.

  Alden stood there, panting, frozen in that same stance. The lead agent scrambled over, keeping his rifle pointed at his target, barking orders.

  “Drop it, motherfucker!”

  “It’s okay,” Alden told him in between breaths. “I work for Phao Yin. Check it out. Credentials are in my front pocket.”

  “Drop it now or I’ll drop YOU!”

  Alden let the emitter fall to the floor.

  “She’s the one who grabbed me,” he said, pointing toward the motionless woman. “She’s Inru, off on some crazy mission. You gotta believe me, fellas.”

  “Save it, spook,” the lead agent growled, spinning Alden around and slamming him up against the wall. “You can tell it to Yin when you see him.”

  The other agent began to stir, and crawled out from under the fallen door. A mass of clunky armor, he tried three times before making it to his feet. “What the hell is this?” he asked groggily, glancing back and forth between Alden and the dead woman. “She a hooker?”

  “Just pat him down and take him into custody.”

  “Prettiest damn hooker I ever saw,” the agent went on, unable to contain his fascination as he frisked Alden from top to bottom. “How much you pay for that?”

  While that was going on behind him, the lead agent activated his hyperband transmitter and signaled the rest of his team. “Terminate radio silence,” he instructed. “Abort the insertion. I repeat—abort the insertion. We already have the subject in custody.”

  No other weapons or identification turned up on Alden’s person—just a kooky electronic device that the dim agent had never seen before. He grabbed the thing and stuck it in his prisoner’s face. “What’s this for?”

  Alden clammed up.

  The agent drove his fist into Alden’s stomach to motivate him.

  Alden doubled over. The lead agent returned to assess the situation. His transmitter implant was still active, the other members of his team talking in his earpiece.

  “I found this,” the agent said to his boss, tossing him the electronic device. “Tough guy doesn’t want to tell me what it is.”

  The lead agent inspected the device. It was tiny—no bigger than his palm, with a blank screen in the middle of its face and a few keys for input. It responded to his touch, lighting up and beeping at him in friendly greeting. A skull and crossbones appeared on the screen.

  “Hi, there,” the skull announced. “Bet I can guess what frequency you’re on.”

  An intense pop sounded off in their ears.

  It was easy for the virtual Heretic to sniff out the agents’ comm chatter, but its suicide was another matter. Entwined in the MFI’s ROM, the hammerjack’s virtual consciousness experienced precisely 1.7 polling loops of hesitation—amounting to a full delay of one-ten-thousandth of a second—before jacking the frequency and transmitting the fatal pulse. After that, death was instantaneous.

  So it was with the two agents. Their communication implants detonated like tiny concussion grenades, the intense bursts of pressure focused bilaterally along the route of the auditory canal. Half the burst exited the ear harmlessly; the other half blasted a quarter-centimeter hole through the brain, which drilled all the way to the base of the stem. Both of the agents collapsed into heaps of armor, their extremities twitching slightly before getting the message they were dead.

  Cray looked down on the floor and saw his MFI, still in the hand of the lead agent. He knelt down and pried the device free, watching as the screen fizzled out and the input keys went dark. Heretic was gone—at least in the disembodied sense.

  Lea stirred a little, opening one eye to see if everything was clear. Cray hopped over and helped her up, cradling her under his arm.

  “How you doing?”

  “Man,” she groaned. “Talk about a guy who can’t take no for an answer.”

  “You gave me some pretty good chops yourself. Next time, don’t try so hard.”

  “Now he tells me,” Lea said, standing up. She stepped around the dead agents and pushed the dim one aside, retrieving her v-wave emitter and pushing it back up from the minimum setting. “Nice plan, Alden. We’re lucky these jokers bought it.”

  “Nobody ever failed the corps IQ test,” Cray said, searching the other agent for a less conspicuous weapon. “Your boss really came through. I’m looking forward to meeting this guy.”

  “You won’t get the chance if we don’t get out of here. We got maybe a minute before those goons outside start to wonder what’s going on.”

  “Precisely my point.” Cray worked at the hip compartment in the dead agent’s armor, fumbling with it a couple of times before it popped open. Inside, he found a small arsenal of stabbing weapons and a pulse pistol. The battery pack showed full, good for three or four shots—strictly a backup piece, but at least he could carry it out of here without getting noticed. He stuffed the pistol into his belt, pocketing one of the knives. “This place have a back door?”

  “Fire escape, other side of the hotel.”

  “What about transportation? Can you get us out of the city?”

  Lea fixed him with a knowing smile. “Only if you don’t mind hopping a pulser.”

  “Swell,” Cray muttered, taking her hand and heading for the exit. “This day just keeps getting better and better.”

  Glazed eyes glinted like starlight from the wet pavement below. Between the Zoners and those who evacuated the hotel, two dozen bodies were huddled together at the bottom of the fire escape—striking deals, swapping fluids, underneath an ultraviolet haze of commerce. Cray and Lea’s intrusion drew scant attention, outside of the occasional curious glance. They were little more than hallucinations in that world anyway.

  Cray checked the crowd as soon as he hit the street, keeping one hand glued to his pistol. He felt the fingers of the Tesla girls on him, touch devoid of any human intent, air thick with the hot sweetness of their breath—but saw nothing that stood out. Brushing them aside, he turned back toward Lea.

  “Which way?”

  “The market,” she replied. “We can catch a cargo pulser there. It’s the only one that regularly comes into the Zone.”

  They walked. As the two of them broke from the crowd, Cray began to regret his choice in clothing. While Lea blended in perfectly with her surroundings, Cray stood out like a signal flare in the dead of night. He just hoped they wouldn’t get made before they got out of the red-light district.

  That hope was thrashed when one of the Tesla girls started shrieking behind them.

  It was a tortured sound, like the scrape of teeth against bone. Cray and Lea whirled around, half-expecting to find one of those crazed women chasing them. But it was at a distance, back at the fire escape, where they saw the girl attacking a Zone agent. He had shoved her to the ground, and now she was jumping him from behind—her fingers under his helmet, clawing at his eyes. The agent bellowed out in pain, grabbing the girl by the hair and throwing her over his shoulder. He would have killed her right there, but his sights were still focused on the mark.

  B
lood ran down the exposed parts of the agent’s face from where the girl had gouged him. Mechanically, he raised his rifle toward Cray.

  The girl jumped in front of it.

  Her body was a corona against the bright flash, which caught her full in the chest. The blast knocked her through the air and dropped her back down onto the pavement. A twisted, smoking mass with only the general shape of a human being, the girl rolled to a stop at Lea’s feet.

  “Son of a bitch—” Lea began.

  Cray drew his pistol and fired.

  The single shot struck with devastating impact. The beam hit the agent at the left hip, burning through the armor joint and into tender flesh below. The force of impact tore his leg clean off, toppling the agent and dropping him flat on his back. His rifle went flying.

  Cray lowered the pistol.

  The agent was not dead. He still writhed on the ground, half-blind and trying to drag himself away. But the crowd of Zoners gathered around him in a circle, cutting off his lines of escape. He screamed at them to back off, trying to frighten them—but like vultures, they knew when their meal was vulnerable.

  Leading the charge, the Tesla girls fell on him. Then the others.

  Cray’s breath was a cloud in the frosty air.

  “Lights out,” he whispered.

  His words were punctuated by another electrical discharge. Lightning cut the air in half, digging a crater out of the pavement a few meters in front of them. Lea dove for the ground, while Cray dropped to one knee and aimed his pistol in the direction of the pulse fire. In the fading brightness of the afterimage, through debris and dust, Cray spotted a flash of movement on the hotel fire escape—the last agent, his position obscured by camochrome armor.

  Cray didn’t have the option of locating the target. Instead he took aim at the building and fired off two quick bursts. The beams struck the supports for the fire escape, easily splintering the ancient, rusted struts and blowing them clear out of the wall. A bloom of sparks erupted as metal twisted and vaporized, collapsing to the ground with a roar like that of a fallen dinosaur.