Hammerjack Read online

  “No place like home,” she said.

  The fusion plant spread out across a platform the size of a city block, supported by four gigantic columns that plunged through the opaque depths into the ocean floor. Banks of floodlights lined its perimeter, creating a white aura around the four reactor domes that dominated its surface. A lone traverse beam shimmered through the sky directly above the plant, as if bearing the lightning from an approaching storm; but what appeared out of the night was the tiny form of a single ship, which slowed as it entered the platform’s airspace and came to a hover over one of its landing pads.

  Liquid light enveloped the cargo pulser as tether beams brought the ship down. From inside, Cray watched fat droplets of sea spray splatter against his window as the pulser connected with the deck. Then the tethers disengaged and the sound of fading power was displaced by a steady wail that was almost human in its insistence.

  Cray followed Lea into the cargo bay, where she opened up the belly hatch and pushed a folding ladder down to the deck below. The funneling wind caught her long hair and tossed it around her head in swirls. She pushed the tresses away from her face and gestured toward the open hatch.

  “After you.”

  Cray stepped down into a whipping gale that nearly blew him off his feet. He steadied himself and reached up the ladder to help Lea down, her body incredibly light in his hands. It was only when they were both outside that he realized they were not alone. A single figure concealed beneath a hooded coat emerged from the dirty glow of the landing lights. He carried two more coats under his arm.

  “Put these on!” the stranger shouted, handing one to each of them. Lea bundled herself up while Cray tried to get a look at the man’s face. It was difficult to see anything between the glare and the maelstrom, and he quickly gave up on the idea. By the time he zipped up and donned his hood, he was just grateful for the warmth.

  “Thanks,” Cray told him.

  “No problem,” the man replied. “Now if you don’t mind . . .”

  Cray felt the business end of some weapon poke him in the ribs. The stranger held a pulse pistol, his finger poised on the trigger. Looking back up, Cray caught the glint of something metallic underneath the man’s hood. Platinum teeth, he thought, knowing without seeing. The son of a bitch is grinning at me.

  Cray tried to put himself between the stranger and Lea—but that was before he realized she had a weapon on him as well, the same v-wave emitter she had used back in the Zone. Her expression told him she had no reservations about using it if necessary.

  “Don’t I feel like an asshole,” he said.

  “Sorry about this, Alden,” Lea apologized. “But it’s for your own good, trust me.”

  Cray put his hands up.

  The stranger laughed—more of a giggle, the kind of thing you heard in the street when somebody got burned. Nudging Cray, he pointed his attention toward the northeast, where a line of intense thunderstorms was gathering. The enormous clouds revealed themselves in bursts of sporadic lightning, as deadly as they were beautiful.

  “Winter storm,” the stranger informed him. “Maybe hurricane force. You picked a hell of a night to come out.”

  Cray couldn’t agree more.

  A salt-encrusted porthole was the only window in the chamber where they took him, but at least it permitted a view of the outside. To hear the rain and the thunder without a visual reference would have been maddening. The thrum of electrical power that permeated the place was already oppressive, like a trillion heartbeats pressed against the outer walls. Cray wondered how long they intended to keep him there.

  He was strapped down to a table in the middle of the room, surrounded by racks of equipment he did not recognize. Mounted in the ceiling above him was another device—a homemade job cobbled together from various parts, including a radiation inducer that rotated on an electric bearing. It whirred about until it pointed itself at Cray’s head. Watching that medieval instrument close in on him, Cray still doubted that Lea had brought him all the way out here just to kill him. But torture? That was a different matter altogether.

  “Hold still,” she said, via a speaker on the wall, while she watched from the other side with a remote camera. “This should only take a minute.”

  Cray squeezed his eyes shut as the thing opened up on him, bathing his face with a blinding, invasive energy. It poured down like a flood, first hot, then cold, tearing into his senses and bombarding him with images from outside his own self. For one moment he hovered above the table, watching himself writhe and struggle against his restraints. His mouth contorted into a scream from some deep pit in his soul—disembodied impulses springing from an angry hive, like some demon driven out in exorcism. Then his soul returned, burning from the friction of its reentry and sickening him with the weight of its gravity.

  But lighter. Not everything that went up had come back down.

  Cray contorted, gagging and coughing. The nausea was brutal, passing only when he realized he wasn’t going to die.

  The door to the chamber opened and Lea appeared.

  “What . . .” Cray forced out between breaths. “What did you do to me?”

  “What needed to be done.”

  He wanted to ask another question, but darkness closed in on him. He did not fight, but chose to embrace it. His last impression was of Lea standing next to him, her hand gently stroking the side of his face—perhaps the cruelest punishment of all. It made him want to believe whatever she told him.

  “Just rest,” she said. “You’ll be safe now.”

  Cray woke up alone, facedown in a bunk bed, surrounded by four steel walls. He felt groggy, unaware of how much time had passed. A nuclear headache pounded his skull when he tried to move. He cried out in surprise as much as pain before he could clamp his mouth shut, but he had already alerted his captors. The door to the small room opened, allowing outside light to stab through the dimness that encased him.

  It was Lea again. She glided over to his bedside, sitting down and cradling his head in her arms. In her hand she held a single pill, which she slipped between his lips before he could resist.

  “It’ll kill the pain,” she said.

  Cray swallowed, not caring if it was poison.

  “Sorry about that,” she went on. “It was necessary. After what happened in the Zone, I figured you were being profiled. We couldn’t take the chance.”

  He had to mouth the words a couple of times before they finally came out.

  “What did you do to me?”

  “A little shake and bake. The Collective tagged you with a neural implant. That’s how Yin knew where to find you.”

  Cray shook his head weakly. The effort made him dizzy, but the pain was already starting to pass.

  “No way.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Lea assured him. “But don’t worry. We took care of it with some targeted radiation. Leaves you with a hell of a hangover, doesn’t it?”

  Cray still had a difficult time processing the information.

  “How . . . How did they . . . ?”

  “It’s a biological implant,” she explained. “Completely passive—works on interfacing with the Axis subnets. It feeds sensory input processed by your brain into a flash buffer and dumps the data whenever a request is made by a remote user. Think of it as a ball and chain for reformed hammerjacks.”

  She smiled. She knew his secret.

  “That’s right,” she said, patting him on the hand, then standing. “You have some explaining to do. I’ll be in the control center two decks up—just follow the ladder right down the hall. Meet me upstairs when you’re ready.” She stopped short of the door and looked back at him. “I cannot wait to find out who you really are.”

  She was gone again. Cray fell back into his pillow and sighed.

  “Neither can I.”

  Cray took a little time to get cleaned up and regain his status as a human being. He still looked like hell, but at least he felt better—which, considering the events of
the past twenty-four hours, was a miracle in and of itself. Discovering fresh clothes next to his bed, he changed and took his first tentative step back into the world.

  He found the ladder exactly where Lea said it would be and began the climb upstairs. His shoes clinked loudly against the metal rungs, bouncing off steel bulkheads and ducts before being absorbed by the low, constant rumble that reverberated through the decks. The space was confined yet vast, like crawling through an intricate network of catacombs. At the top, Cray saw a sealed hatch. He tried the locking wheel, which spun easily, and with a single push popped it open. Cold, dry air cascaded down on him from above, the preferred climate of machines.

  Cray hauled himself up through the hole, closing the hatch behind him. He was in another compartment with low ceilings—cramped by human standards, but not much consideration had been given to ergonomics in its design. It was a home primarily for computers, row upon row of which monitored and directed the fusion plant’s automated operations. Some of the equipment was vintage, installed when the facility was constructed more than thirty years earlier, intermixed with a bizarre assortment of modern gear that leeched off the racks like digital parasites. Conduit cable ran all over the floor, creating a tangled mass of power lines and fiber optics that interconnected with one another, a design that exceeded his ability to comprehend. Somebody had rigged the place thoroughly.

  “Well, well, well,” a voice unfamiliar to him said. “If it isn’t Rip van Winkle.”

  Cray turned to face the owner of the voice. He might have mistaken the man for a techead had it not been for the crazy assortment of tools he wielded and the obvious expertise he had with all things mechanical. The man was tall, broad in the shoulders, with a bald head that nearly touched the pipes running across the ceiling. His eyes, yellow and intense, regarded Cray with a measure of suspicion.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cray deadpanned.

  “A lot of people make that mistake,” the man replied. His accent was pure West End London, his skin African ebony, cheeks marked by rows of tribal scars. “Must be that messiah vibe I keep giving off. You looking for Lea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Figures,” the stranger replied evasively, as if he was holding it against Cray. “The way she chats you up—downright unseemly, if you ask me.”

  “You the guy who fixed this place up?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing much,” Cray said, turning a critical eye on all the chop shop modifications. “It just reminds me of that torture chamber of yours. That was quite a job you did on me.”

  “Only gave you as much as you could take.”

  “How’d I do?”

  The stranger smiled.

  “Any more and I could have cooked you up for supper,” he said. “Lucky for you I don’t eat pork. Come on, she’s waiting.”

  Cray followed him into the maze of stacks, twisting and turning through the narrow corridors until they came to an open area at the end of the command center—an interface substation, from the looks of it. A virtual conference table had been converted into a hub for the half dozen smaller stations that surrounded it, all of them active and feeding into a composite construct that hovered above the surface of the table. Behind the semitransparent image, Cray could see Lea: fingers brushing lightly against the touch controls, her eyes expertly navigating the complex Axis passageways—a telltale web of electrodes pasted to her forehead. The sheer bulk of information she juggled was a marvel to watch.

  “Isn’t she lovely?” the stranger said.

  She was. She’s taking it out in trade, Cray thought, remembering how Lea had copped his secret in the radiation room downstairs. Showing me who she really is.

  Lea let go of the controls and the construct went dark. She peeled the electrodes off, shifting back to conventional reality without breaking a sweat.

  “What’s the matter?” Lea asked. “You never see a woman interface before?”

  “I’ll be damned,” Cray said, torn between admiration and disbelief. He settled on the only word that could describe what he just witnessed: “Heretic.”

  “In the flesh,” she said, sounding flirtatious. “Congratulations, Dr. Alden. You’re the first corporate spook to verify my identity.”

  “I suppose you’ll have to kill me now,” Cray said, taking a seat at the table. “I’ve been getting a lot of that lately.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Lea cajoled him. “I might hurt you, but I won’t kill you—unless you give me a reason.” She nodded at the man standing behind Cray. “You been playing nice with our guest?”

  “He’s got me in a nark, if you want the truth of it,” the stranger said, hopping on the table and laying between them. “You know how jealous I get.”

  “You’re just too much man for one woman to handle,” Lea said, then rolled him over and presented him to Cray. “Alden, say hello to Funky. Like myself, a former partisan who traded the monastic existence of a fanatic for the far more agreeable life of information trafficking.”

  Funky grinned like a silver crocodile. “Charmed.”

  “He’s from the old school,” Lea said. “Not much on manners, but he’s the best interface engineer in the business. If it’s been jacked, chances are Funky built the hardware for the job.”

  “So I’ve seen,” Cray remarked. “How did you end up here?”

  “Rehab,” Funky said, sitting up and bending himself into a yoga position. “Got tossed a few years back for dealing face kits to a couple of anarchy types. CSS worked me over for a couple of months, then bartered my services to the Directorate as part of my prison sentence. Now I’m working for the man.”

  “Funky helps me out from time to time,” Lea explained. “Believe it or not, this is the perfect place for it. As long as the power keeps flowing, the Directorate doesn’t much care what happens out here.”

  “Call it Club Med for the legally challenged,” Funky added with a chuckle, then bored into Cray with a schizophrenic seriousness. “Sound like somebody you know?”

  “Could be,” Cray replied evasively. “Looks like all of us could do with some confession. Since trust is in short supply, I’ll start off with something simple.” He paused for a moment, preparing himself for what he was about to hear. “How did you know about the implant?”

  “It’s standard procedure,” Lea told him. “Whenever Special Services processes a new arrival, they inject a covert biologic stem with the usual series of vaccinations. The stem quickly develops into a neural mass that attaches itself to the sensory complexes in the brain. After a while, they see everything you see. They hear everything you hear. Funky here knows all about it from personal experience, because they did the same thing to him.”

  She read the disbelief on Cray’s face.

  “Don’t kick yourself for not knowing,” Lea said. “CSS keeps its secrets better than most people think. We only found out by accident, and even then we were damned lucky to find a way to counteract the implant.” She leaned back in her chair, putting distance between them as her tone shifted from empathy to hard truth. “Of course, not everybody gets the Special Services treatment—only political prisoners and hammerjacks. So I guess the real question is how you fit into that design, Dr. Alden.”

  They both waited expectantly for his answer. To his own surprise, Cray found one corner of his mouth twisting into a wry smile. Some of it was admiration, but most of it was simple relief. Cray had been in hiding for so long, he didn’t even remember what it was like to be himself. There had only been Phao Yin’s creation—the thing that kept him alive, only to kill him a little at a time.

  “Who are you?” Lea prodded.

  “Crayton Alden,” he said.

  “That’s just a name.”

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Cray intoned, and hit the touch controls on his side of the table. He bypassed the electrodes and called up a free-associative construct. He then selected a series of peak gateways, utilizing hand-eye coordination to plunge himself into
the vast tunnels of rigid data, racing through the unpredictable twists and turns at astonishing speed. When he emerged, the logical momentum he had built up catapulted him across an endless tundra of isolated bits and chatter, disparate pieces that coalesced into a fine crystalline structure that represented the fabric of the Axis. Coming back down again, Cray ended his journey just outside of Tagura’s corporate domain—what he suspected would be familiar territory for Lea.

  “My God,” she whispered. Her eyes jumped back and forth between the construct and Cray’s face, regarding him with a mixture of apprehension and amazement. That he completed the run that fast was incredible. That he had done it without a direct interface was beyond her comprehension.

  Funky echoed that sentiment, staring into the misty image. It stared back at him like spectral light, taunting him with glimpses of an amorphous form that stood guard at the Tagura gates—shape-shifting strands of exotic code, there but not there, principles of uncertainty.

  The signature of a crawler.

  “Shit” was all Funky could say.

  “You remember this place?” Cray asked Lea, his tone a challenge.

  She smiled back at him knowingly.

  “I’ve seen it,” she said. “It’s where Lea Prism ends.”

  “And Heretic begins?”

  Lea lifted her gaze back toward the construct. The crawler fluttered about, as if on the wings of a bat, lacking substance but growing larger. A defensive posture. The thing knew Cray was there.

  “Impress me,” she said.

  Cray nailed the gateway hard, focusing his attack on the crawler. The module sidestepped his approach, meaning to let him pass, then flank him—but Cray was wiser. Predicting the shift, he simply turned directly into it, arriving at that point in real time before the module did, then moving in before it could react. Skirting the edge of its matrix, Cray peeled off entire strings of code and wrapped them around himself, cloaking his signature and making it indistinguishable from the module itself. As far as the crawler was concerned, Cray was invisible—and since he was invisible, he no longer existed in that continuum. The module returned to passive mode, resuming its post outside the domain.