Hammerjack Read online

  As the mass of wreckage settled, a single shot from the agent’s pulse rifle burned a hole into the night. Veering wildly, it careened into the sky and disappeared. It could have been the last defiant act of a dead man, but Cray doubted it. Whatever was at work inside of him—flash, intuition, a sixth sense—told him that the agent was still very much alive, leaving them with precious few seconds to act.

  Cray checked the charge indicator on the pistol. It was dry.

  “Listen to me,” he told Lea. “You have to make a run for it. Head for the cargo docks. If I don’t show up in fifteen minutes, you hop the next pulser and get the hell out of the city. Understand?”

  “No. Why don’t you just come with me?”

  “Because they found me too damned fast,” Cray said. “I don’t know what it is, but they’re tracking me somehow. You’ll be a lot safer without me until I can shake this last guy loose.” He stopped talking when he saw something in Lea’s eyes—something akin to recognition.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said, even though it was still there. “I’ll see you at the docks.”

  She started to leave. Cray stopped her briefly, taking her by the hand. It was a softer touch, tender even—meant to reinforce what he had said earlier.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he reminded her.

  Lea smiled. “Don’t make me come looking for you.”

  Then she was gone. Cray remained behind, until she rounded the corner and disappeared down the street. Back near the hotel, he saw the crowd of Zoners milling around like a group of zombies. They had torn the fallen agent to pieces and were now in search of a fresh kill.

  The sound of groaning metal made them disperse. As they parted, a human form emerged from the remains of the fire escape, its shape augmented to formidable proportions by the bulky armor it wore. The camochrome had been damaged in the fall, lending a ghostly aura to the surviving agent. Parts of him were invisible, while other parts were opaquely solid.

  His pulse rifle was gone. He grabbed a blade from his weapons compartment and pointed it at Cray. Its edge glinted in the pale lamplight.

  Cray ran.

  He lost himself in the market, melting into the dizzying array of faces in a mass confusion of exchange. It was like Babel. Cray heard a dozen languages in the space of as many steps—Chinese, Thai, German, Russian—a smattering of different tongues, bargaining with each other with raw and fervent energy. The atmosphere reeked of ganja, spoiled fruit, decaying meat, animal dung—things used and discarded by industrial society, then recycled for the lower strata of the subculture.

  A gridlock of human columns bumped against him with scarce thought or reason, performing their basic functions like cells in a malignant tumor. Cray was sick with their heat and his exhaustion, but he kept moving. He would use himself up before he allowed the agent to take him—but even if that happened, Cray resolved he would not be taken alive. He wouldn’t give Phao Yin the satisfaction.

  Ducking behind one of the retail stands, Cray checked his watch. Five more minutes before Lea was supposed to be out of here. Eyes piercing the crowd, he searched for the Zone agent. The hulking shape did not materialize.

  Where is he?

  He slid the knife he had stolen out of his pocket. It reminded him of the blade Avalon had used on him. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and emerged from his hiding place. Glancing over the tent poles of the market, he spotted the tall stacks of crates being forklifted off the cargo docks. It was a thirty-second sprint, tops. Thirty more seconds to safety.

  Cray went for it.

  And ran up against an armored wall.

  The agent sprang from nowhere, coming down on Cray like an anvil. Arms groped out and clutched him by the shoulders, heaving him up and driving him back into the ground again. Cray crumpled like paper, the knife tumbling out of his hand. None of the bystanders treated this as an unusual occurrence; in fact, they spread out a bit to give the agent more room to do his thing.

  The agent planted a foot on Cray’s chest and pinned him against the pavement. He hovered there for a few moments, hoping to enjoy the terror he inspired—but Cray didn’t give it up. He just clenched his teeth and went with the pain.

  “What are you waiting for, you stupid fuck?”

  Scalded, the agent drew back his fist. Cray closed his eyes.

  Then the weight was gone, and he was free.

  In memory, Cray would believe he saw it in his imagination: Lea appearing from the crowd, launching herself through the air, using her momentum to knock the agent off-balance. In those dreams, her grace and strength were epic—but even that would not compare to the reality he found when he opened his eyes. She was energy and discipline, fused into one entity—a weapon of human proportions.

  Lea was on the agent before he could recover from her initial attack. A roundhouse kick to the side of the agent’s head dented his helmet, partially unmasking a face that had gone purple from surprise and frustration; but all color drained the moment she landed another brutal kick—this one against his chest, which knocked him back into one of the retail stands. Discounted electronics flew everywhere as the stand came crashing down, inspiring a brief riot of looters who pocketed as much as they could before the agent got back up.

  Like roaches, they knew when to scurry. They opened a path between Lea and the agent, the two squaring off against each other in a combat dance. Money changed hands in a round of instant betting. Lea paid no attention to the odds.

  “Put me down for twenty,” she said, and moved in.

  The agent was ready for her this time, swinging his right arm around in what would have been a crippling blow. But Lea sidestepped him at the last second, upsetting the agent’s center of gravity and making him stumble forward for a few steps. The advantage was still hers—but she knew better than to take him from behind. Even as she thought of it, a series of spikes punched out of the armor around his shoulders, turning him into a human mace. This one was more dangerous without his gun.

  Spinning around on a dime, the agent faced her again. He crouched, the blades on his shoulders pointed toward her like the horns of a rhino.

  He charged.

  Cray willed her to get out of the way—but she stood her ground. She seemed determined to allow the deadly tackle, and made no move to avoid it. But the darkness concealed a multitude of secrets—from Cray, and from the crowd.

  With a single, fluid motion, the v-wave emitter was in her hand. It had no hope against the agent’s armor—but in this case, it wasn’t necessary. Lea waited until the agent was close enough, then fired at the seam between his shoulder plate and his neck. The connective mesh there superheated and melted, searing the flesh beneath. The agent howled and lost his balance—but that was not the worst of it. The force of the v-wave’s impact had torn the shoulder plate loose, and it now flapped around like a flag in a strong breeze. Liquefied metal flew into the agent’s face, burning his cheeks and his eyes. Some flew into his mouth.

  When he collapsed, he fell on his injured side. The heated spikes drove themselves into the side of his neck, putting a merciful end to a painful process. When the onlookers stepped in for a closer look, they saw very little blood. Only smoke from cauterized wounds.

  Lea went back to collect Cray—but not before she collected her winnings. There was swearing and cursing in several languages, but they all paid up.

  “I thought you were supposed to be on the next flight out of here,” he said.

  “I have a problem with authority,” she replied, counting her money. “Besides, we needed some traveling cash.”

  “Just watch how you hit those speedtecs,” Cray cautioned, dragging himself off the ground. “Push it like that again, you’ll end up in a puddle.”

  “Who said I use speedtecs?”

  “I’m sorry,” he stammered, caught off guard. “It’s just—well, I assumed—”

  “Don’t assume anything,” Lea corrected him. “Just do as you’re told before y
ou get us both killed.” She then headed for the docks, leaving Cray with something new to think about.

  And a warning never to underestimate her again.

  The cargo pulser was a single point in a whole constellation of light. It ejected itself from the stellar aftermass of the Eastern Seaboard megaplex, into the shroud of true night over the Atlantic Ocean. Following a curvilinear path to the jump grid, the automated ship headed south: away from Manhattan, then up to high altitude and safe obscurity. Its navigation lights blinked steadily, but only as pinprick holes in an endless black tapestry. For all practical purposes, the ship was invisible, and for a short time at least, its occupants did not exist.

  Cray sensed the abyss beneath him, as he looked past his reflection in the window. Running his finger along the cold surface of the glass, he traced the contours of the East Coast etched in the orange glow of distant sodium light. Up here, boundaries were meaningless. New York, Baltimore, Boston, Washington—they were little more than concepts. Lines on a map, drawn with arbitrary and abstract precision. But never had those lights seemed so beautiful to him. Nor had they seemed so remote.

  “We’ve cleared the Port Authority threshold,” Lea announced, buttoning up the pulser’s diagnostic console. “I’ve redirected the signal from the location transponder to cover our tracks. As far as Manhattan is concerned, this bird is heading for Montreal. That should give us enough time to reach our destination before they get wise and start looking for their missing ship.”

  Cray drew a pensive breath.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “East Coast Fusion Directorate.” Lea settled back and let the pulser fly itself, observing her passenger with a guarded curiosity. “About a hundred clicks out to sea, right off the D.C. coast. They maintain a network of power plants out there—enough juice to supply the whole eastern continent. It’s quite a setup.”

  “I can imagine,” Cray said. In truth, he didn’t need to imagine anything. GenTec had subcontracted him to the Directorate a couple of years ago to jackproof some of their systems. Their security had been full of holes, which led Cray to believe somebody had been working the place from the inside. He couldn’t prove it at the time—though now, he thought it interesting that Lea had picked that particular place to hide out. “I was under the impression that those plants were automated.”

  “Not quite,” Lea told him, letting her smile imply the rest. She changed the subject. “You doing okay over there? You haven’t said much since we left the Zone.”

  “I’m fine.” He paused for a few moments, then said earnestly, “Listen, I didn’t get a chance to thank you for what you did back there.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You held up your end.”

  “And I’m sorry for that crack about the speedtecs.”

  “Sorry you called me a junkie?” She laughed. “I’ve been called a lot worse than that, Dr. Alden.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the point.” He struggled to explain his reasons, trying not to come off as morose. “After you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you make judgments about people. It’s what keeps you alive. After watching what happened to Zoe . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.

  “She didn’t use all the time, you know.”

  Cray blinked. “What?”

  “Zoe wasn’t in the habit,” Lea explained. “She only did it the one time. The run was too damned important. She dropped the speedtecs for insurance in case she got caught.” She reached over and touched his arm. “Heretic doesn’t blame you for what happened, Cray. The agents called the plays, just like they did tonight. You did everything you could for her.”

  Cray shook his head, unconvinced.

  “I didn’t have to find her.”

  “You didn’t have a choice,” Lea said. “Yin would have had you killed and sent someone else. It was your job, Cray. And now it’s your job to let Heretic show you what’s real.”

  “What if I don’t want to know?” He allowed that to hang for a while, not even certain that he wanted to bring it up. “Dex gave me a pretty good look at the stuff Zoe was running.”

  Lea considered what he had said. As Cray watched her reaction, he saw sympathy in her eyes—something he hadn’t expected.

  “It’s a war,” she said. The words came out virtual, dreamlike, unreal. “The Collective and the Inru have been going at it for a while. When you’ve been fighting long enough, you start thinking about ways to end it. That’s what the Inru have been working on—a big gun they can use to settle things once and for all.”

  There was Heretic’s voice again, echoing inside of Cray’s head: You already have the proof. You just don’t know it yet.

  “The new flash.”

  “A blueprint for the Ascension.” It was a ghost story, a rendering of the supernatural. “The Inru believe the only way to fight Lyssa and the legions of SIs that follow is to outpace them—to advance human intelligence to a point far beyond what’s possible in a bionucleic system. Lyssa and others like her would be the redundant components among a race of superbeings, instead of the other way around. No more SIs, no more threat.”

  My God, Cray thought. No wonder Phao Yin made up a story to get this stuff back. Nobody would believe it even if they knew.

  “Their basic idea was sound,” she continued. “The bionucleic matrix is based on chaos logic, which makes it inherently unstable and unpredictable. That it’s based on living components helps, but it’s still nowhere near as adapted to intelligence as the human mind. The new flash is supposed to augment that—to mimic the superfast relays of a bionucleic system and apply them to the human brain, freeing it from the limitations of its own electrochemistry.”

  “How did Zoe fit into this?”

  “Heretic had been working between the two factions, trying to keep them both off-balance,” Lea said. “The idea was to slow down the bionucleic project as well as the development of the new flash. When Heretic got word that the Inru had completed their experiments, he jacked the GenTec domain to steal their prototype. Zoe was his runner, so she went to collect the data. Phao Yin sent you to get it back for him.”

  Cray absorbed what Lea told him, but there was still a piece missing. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “Heretic is a professional hammerjack. It doesn’t make sense he would get involved in something political. There sure as hell isn’t any profit in it.”

  “Not everything is about money, Alden.”

  “Yin told me the same thing.”

  “Yin is a partisan.”

  “If you really knew Yin,” Cray said, “you wouldn’t be saying that. Now what about Heretic? How did he get mixed up in this business?”

  “It seems like a long time ago,” Lea said. Her tone was distant, drifting into the realm of the personal. “He used to work for the Inru, you know. That’s where he learned his chops, jacking Collective domains, plundering data—fighting the establishment, the usual bullshit.” She drifted back, resuming a more practical—and detached—demeanor. “Heretic obtained the Collective’s research on the bionucleic project. Using that, the Inru got a jump start on their own program. Reverse engineering saved them years of testing and development, putting them way ahead of the game. That information is what made everything possible. Without it, the Inru might never have succeeded.”

  “So what changed his mind?”

  “He found out his friends were even crazier than his enemies.” Lea shuddered a little. “The Inru leadership started talking jihad. Righteous fire cleansing the Earth, battling for human souls, some real apocalyptic stuff. By the time Phao Yin came on board, they were talking selective evolution—engineering a civilization in which only the true believers would be chosen for the Ascension, while the rest would be made to serve the master race. Heretic decided it was time to get out.”

  The cabin was murky, with only the lights from the instrumentation to illuminate the soft features of Lea’s face. The shadows made her appear much wiser than her years.

  �
��It couldn’t have been easy,” he said.

  Lea shook her head. “It was bloody.” Then turning toward him, she added, “Or so I’ve heard. You don’t just leave the Inru—not when you get to that level.”

  “So what is this? Penance?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “A worthy cause,” Lea said. “Heretic doesn’t have many people he can trust. Zoe was one of them. I’m another.”

  “Where does that leave me?”

  Lea regarded him with some affection, though it was more guarded than that. She’s feeling me out, Cray decided—which was just fine with him. He was doing the same to her.

  “That remains to be seen,” she told him.

  A subtext moved beneath whatever Lea said. There was a lot that Cray wanted to know about her, so many questions he wanted to ask—but that was another part of her that fascinated him. To find out too much too soon would upset a delicate balance. It was better to see it in glimpses, rather than all at once.

  The navigation console beeped, putting that moment on hold. Lea reached for the interface, calling up a display of their current position. “We’re two minutes out,” she reported. “I’m transferring approach over to Directorate control.”

  Cray looked at the display. The screen showed a virtual construct of the fusion platform, with an overlay of their flight path. The power plant was massive—but unlike the structures of New York, it was isolated. Rising out of the waves on a black ocean, it towered over the flat nothingness without even the company of air traffic. The cargo pulser was the only blip on the screen, the stars the only other lights in the sky. As hiding places went, it was sheer perfection.

  Cray leveled his eyes on the horizon, where the platform was beginning to appear. It quickly grew to magnificence, inspiring in Cray an awe he had not known in a long time. Lea had sold him on the idea of sanctuary—and though it was fleeting, at least it gave him a moment’s rest. For the moment, that would be enough.