Hammerjack Read online

  Cray, meanwhile, was inside—floating motionless in logical space, surrounded by spirals of corporate data that were now his for the taking. He was breathing hard, not from exertion but from pure adrenaline. It had been a long time since he had taken a ride like that.

  “Shit,” Funky said again.

  Cray terminated the construct.

  “You showed me,” he told Lea, “So I showed you.”

  Funky circled the table, putting a tentative hand on Cray’s shoulder, touching him just to feel if he was giving off heat. “That was some brilliant work,” he said, beaming as if he had crossed paths with a deity. “If you’re a spook, I’m a duffer.”

  Lea agreed. “What did they call you when you were a hammerjack?”

  Cray let go of the touch controls and rubbed his hands together. They still tingled with the memory of his run, a high he never realized he had missed until now.

  “Vortex.”

  His admission stunned them both into silence. Nobody made runs like Cray just had—not since interfacing had become part of the game. But Vortex had been famous for just that. Vortex had been famous for a lot of things.

  “Vortex fell off the screen ten years ago,” Lea said dubiously. “The way I heard it, one of his own dropped a dime on him. Said he got a little too good.” She scoffed. “Me, I think the whole thing was just a myth.”

  “Some people say Heretic is just a myth,” Cray retorted. “And yet here you are.”

  “You’re serious,” Funky interjected. “You’re really Vortex?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “No such thing as ancient history,” Funky said. “Not when you’re in this life. I grew up on stories about you, mate. Hell, you were making deep-immersion runs before anybody had even heard of a face kit. You set the standard. Everybody in the digital sub wanted to be like you.” He clapped his hands together in delight. “Vortex and Heretic, in the same house! I am truly in the presence of greatness.”

  “So what happened?” Lea asked.

  Cray got up from his chair and strolled over to one of the portholes, watching the storm outside as he cleared his mind and dragged heavy memories to the surface.

  “There were only a few of us in those days,” Cray answered. “Maybe half a dozen who knew what they were doing. By that time, CSS had caught up with most of the amateurs and fragged them. We survived because we knew the territory better than the spooks did.”

  Cray turned away from the window and faced them again. “It got to the point where the competition was insane. We made fortunes doing runs for corporate ventures—so much that the money was meaningless. Pretty soon we were making things up just to keep the juice going. Crazy stuff that had nothing to do with the job. We pushed frontiers to find out what was possible, staying in the Axis for weeks at a time. I used to dream about it when I wasn’t there.”

  Cray trailed off into silence.

  “What about the others?” Lea asked.

  “I knew them all,” Cray told them. “But only by their signatures. We never saw each other’s faces.” He laughed bitterly, a reflection on his own naïveté. “Pretty soon, pushing the envelope turned into trying to knock the other guy off. From then on, I spent most of my time stealing from other hammerjacks to keep my edge. They did the same thing to me—but it wasn’t about the challenge anymore. Things started getting vicious. I didn’t know how bad it was until I caught one of them trying to sniff out my identity. Turns out the son of a bitch was working for the Collective, trying to collect the bounty on my head. I figured if one of them had balls enough to try it, then the others would eventually.” He paused for several breaths. “I decided I wasn’t going to give them the chance.”

  “You did it to them first,” Lea said.

  “One at a time,” Cray confessed. His face was devoid of expression, his soul on autopilot. “I sold them out. I didn’t take the money, but I sold them out.” He looked at Lea. “You want to become a good stalker? Try hunting down your friends. By the time I was finished, there wasn’t anybody else but me.”

  “Man,” Funky moaned. “That’s pretty cold.”

  “I could tell you I didn’t have a choice,” Cray said. “I could even say I was just protecting myself. I’ve told myself the same lie over and over—but it doesn’t change the truth. What I really wanted was to make them pay. I mean, Vortex was a legend. Vortex was the master. Who the hell were they to take me out of the game?” He shuddered. “I was pretty ruthless about it. It wasn’t enough that I turned them in. I had to make sure they knew Vortex was the one who did it.”

  “You broke the code,” Lea observed.

  “There wasn’t any code,” Cray said. “I was the reason they invented the damned code.”

  He shuffled back to his chair. Telling the story had taken even more out of him than the session in Funky’s dungeon.

  “So how did they get you?” Lea asked.

  “I got sloppy,” Cray said. “Business was good, and that’s where my head was. I paid too much attention to what I was doing in the Axis and not enough to the real world. CSS set up a sting and traced one of my numbered accounts back to me. When I went to collect on the job, they were there waiting for me. I never saw them coming.”

  “Maybe you didn’t want to.”

  “Suicide?” he asked her, more than a little amused. “Not my style, Miss Prism. It was my desire to save my own ass that landed me here in the first place.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “I ended up at Special Services,” Cray said. “I told them everything they wanted to know in two hours—but that didn’t stop them from keeping me there for two weeks. After that, they shipped me off to a gulag for a couple of months. I was in solitary the whole time, waiting for the hammer to fall—but all they did was make me watch the other prisoners, like I was getting special treatment. They had no idea who the hell I was, but I could tell they hated me. They hated me because I was on the other side of the glass, and there was nothing they could do to touch me. But I knew what would happen if they could.” He looked away into the distance, still seeing their faces. “I wouldn’t have lasted more than a day.”

  “They were messing with your head,” Funky said. “Special Services got all kinds of ways to do that.”

  Lea reached across the table and took Cray’s hand.

  “What did they offer you?”

  “A full walk,” Cray answered. “A lot of the officers on the Collective board had occasion to use my services in the past and thought that I could be useful. Phao Yin was more impressed with the way I eliminated my rivals. He offered to take responsibility for me if I came to work at GenTec. By then, the choice wasn’t hard to make.”

  “Amen to that,” Funky agreed.

  “So now you know the story,” Cray said, turning his hand over and squeezing Lea’s gently. He didn’t know why, but it comforted him. “Got anything you want to share with me?”

  “Funky here knows most of my secrets,” she said, deliberately coy. “Nobody knows everything.”

  “Maybe I can change your mind.”

  “What if you don’t like what you find?”

  “I wouldn’t care.”

  Lea raised an eyebrow. She could see that he was absolutely serious.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” Funky interrupted. “Far be it from me to break up this little do, but we have some work to finish.”

  Lea withdrew from Cray—just a little, but quickly enough for him to notice. She took up Funky’s proposal, resuming with a tone that was all business. “He’s right. By now, the Assembly knows you’ve gone AWOL—and if they know about it, so does Phao Yin. As soon as he puts you together with me, we’re all going to be in a world of shit.”

  “How much does he know about this place?” Cray asked.

  “Nothing,” Lea said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t find out. Funky, I need you to work up the prelims for a general flash extraction. Any chance we can get him on the table in the next couple of h
ours?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. The sooner we pull that stuff out of him, the better.” She looked back at Cray. “You ready to give up your career as a runner?”

  “Mule is more like it,” Cray said, more than ready. “Just tell me what you want and how much you need.”

  “It’s simple,” Funky explained, taking him by the arm and leading him out of the command center. “I just need a blood sample to run the numbers. After that, we put you out and stick you in the tank. When you wake up, you’ll be nice and clean.”

  Cray tossed a dubious glance back at Lea.

  “Don’t worry,” Lea assured him. “He’ll take good care of you.”

  Lea heard Funky chattering the entire way out, voices receding into the stacks as he rehashed old Vortex stories and asked Cray if they were true. That was the problem with legends: the fantasy was far more interesting than the fact, and far more likely to be carried down through the years. But in Cray’s case, she wasn’t so sure. What she had seen him do on that Tagura run was next to impossible. Sure, she had jacked the same domain herself—but that had been after weeks of planning and dozens of dry runs with the interface. Cray had done it in a heartbeat, using his guts and reflexes.

  And still he bleeds for Zoe, she thought. He needs atonement, just like me. For something he unleashed on the world—just like me.

  Lea reengaged the construct, leaving the interface electrodes alone and absorbing the feel of the naked controls beneath her hands. Cruising the Axis, she ducked through one dark tunnel after the other—anxiously at first, then smoothing out as she hit the populated subnets. Floating above them, she marveled at how much of her concentration was consumed by such a simple task; but it had never occurred to her to do this any other way. The interface had always been her link, but it had never forced her to see anything for herself.

  “You’re a beast, Alden,” she said to herself, a smile percolating across her lips. “Look what you made me do. I’m a virgin again.”

  Ascending into the highest regions of logical space, she kept on climbing. Below her, the Axis shrunk to microscopic levels, with nothing but emptiness between her and the horizon. Endless space, waiting to be taken up.

  Lea wondered if there really was something more.

  Phao Yin had never met his brethren. He only knew them as voices at the other end of a transmission, encrypted by a random key and relayed through a thousand different stations to conceal their points of origin. Communications between all the Inru cells were conducted in the same fashion: tiny bursts, oscillating at stratospheric frequency, concealed in the myriad information exchange between satellites, fiber optics, individual domains, and the vast web of subnets that comprised the Axis. No single cell knew the identity or location of the others. No mention of specific names or places was permitted. Nobody knew the exact structure of the Inru leadership, which made betrayal of it impossible. Security began—and ended—with the strength and weakness of the individual cell.

  Which was why Phao Yin had a disaster on his hands.

  He took the first SOT out of Malaysia as soon as he heard the news, traveling under an assumed name and arriving in New York alone. He then hailed a ground cab into Manhattan, not wanting to risk any contact with the Port Authority. He paid cash for everything and avoided the communication subnets—precautions he normally used to evade his masters at the Collective, but in this case he was evading his brethren. It was only a matter of time before the other Inru discovered his ruse, but it was time Yin would use to rectify his mistake. No longer would he trust the important jobs to his subordinates. This one he would handle himself.

  The cab dropped him off in front of Mount Sinai Medical Center. The gothic structure loomed over Yin as he stepped into the wet street, its spires shooting up past the city’s traverse grid to impale the night. Yin hated hospitals. He hated the idea of the needy, the sick, the dying—not because they reminded him of his mortality but because they personified his humanity. To him, the blood pumping through his veins was a disease, his heartbeat was an annoyance, and his physical urges—regardless of the pleasures they provided—were a prostitution of his potential. Such things made him a slave of self. This place was the embodiment of all that.

  Yin darted into the building, hitting the elevator and taking it straight up to the security level. When the doors opened, he found the entire floor infested with uniformed CSS. Flashing his credentials at the nearest guard, he asked for the person in charge. The guard said nothing but pointed out a corporate man at the end of the corridor before going back to the business of harassing other civilians.

  Yin observed the man closely. Though they had never met, he was familiar with the type: spotless, officious, always making his position known to those around him. It was obvious from the endless stream of orders that poured out of the man’s mouth, assigning various menial tasks to the soldiers and hospital staff. As Yin approached, a few of the officers addressed the man by name. Bostic, they said. Yin had him pegged for a corporate legal counsel.

  “I understand you have one of my people,” he said to the man, leveling an icy stare as he put on another show with his credentials. Beyond that, Yin did not bother to introduce himself. “She is alive?”

  Trevor Bostic sized him up and accurately concluded that Yin was power.

  “Barely,” he replied. “She works for you?”

  “Yes,” Yin told him. “Where might I find her?”

  “In recovery, down the hall.” Cautiously, he asked: “Who is she?”

  “An associate.”

  Yin made it clear that he would offer no more information.

  “There are a lot of questions,” Bostic told him. “She’s already been implicated in a terrorist incident at Shinto America. We have yet to ascertain the extent of her involvement.”

  “She is not a terrorist.”

  Bostic hesitated, but did not contradict him.

  “We still need to interrogate the prisoner,” he said. “As soon as we’re finished, I can talk to my superiors about releasing her to your custody.”

  “That will be suitable.”

  “You want to see her now?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  The corporate man obviously did mind, but showed Yin toward the intensive care unit anyway. The extra security was conspicuous, soldiers carrying enough firepower to suppress a small urban revolt. They also looked strung out. Anxious faces and wary eyes confronted Yin as he walked past, following him in lockstep before moving on. Yin despised such foolishness, though in this case he understood it.

  Two more guards stood post outside the room. Bostic waved them aside, sliding a code key through the slot next to the door and releasing the locks. Slipping the key back into his pocket, he pushed the door open. Inside was dim, but not dark. Quiet, but not silent. Soft beeping from a heart monitor drifted past them, out into the corridor.

  Bostic showed Yin inside. Standing like a shadow less than a meter behind, he watched Yin approach the prone figure on the hospital bed—ready to yell for the guards at the slightest provocation. The woman there appeared peaceful, her angular features softened by sleep and the pale light that cascaded from the vital monitors.

  “It’s a goddamn miracle she survived,” Bostic said. “The hovercraft she flew went through the windows, right into the side of the building. We’re thinking suicide mission—though no faction has claimed responsibility.” Bostic sounded like he was reading from a balance sheet. “Her pilot was killed.”

  “Nobody has talked to her?”

  “She was unconscious when she arrived.”

  Yin crouched down and examined the woman closely. She had suffered dozens of cuts and scrapes. Derm transplants covered every bare patch of skin.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “She’ll make it,” Bostic told him. “They informed us about the Mons virus.” There was a long pause. “She’s a free agent, isn’t she?”

  Yin stood back up and turned around.


  “You will leave us.”

  Bostic was surprised—but also knew when he was outgunned. The lawyer acquiesced with a simple nod, then left.

  Yin watched the door close. He waited a few moments for silence to gather, closing his eyes and pacing himself. His breathing matched the steady, autonomic rhythms of the woman behind him, his heart synchronized to the pulse of the monitors.

  He was ready.

  Yin took an ECM seal out of his jacket pocket and placed it by the door. He then went back to the bed, affixing an emulator chip to the vitals monitor. After recording two full minutes of output, he retooled the interface so that it would accept broadcasts from the emulator. It was then just a matter of looping the signal so that it repeated itself, sending false readings back to the nursing station. Avalon was isolated.

  Yin absorbed her exotic form. Avalon was rarely at rest, and seeing her so vulnerable excited him. She was truly naked—deprived of her sensuit, her reflexes gone, stripped of the elements that made her so dangerous. Giving in to his urges, Yin touched the side of her face. Avalon’s flesh felt as cold as his own, which only drove him harder. He thought of the young hustlers he had brought to his chambers, of how they had been so withdrawn from their own bodies, of how they had been so helpless in his hands.

  Their blood flows freely, Avalon. Does yours?

  To indulge that impulse would have been sweet. This, however, needed to be clinical. Avalon had been a good soldier. He owed her at least that much.

  The instrument he selected was a molecular hypospray. Yin held it up to the diffuse light, contemplating the small ampoule filled with clear liquid and the swift, merciful death it would deliver. He could invoke no suffering, which was a loss; but Yin found a way around that by focusing on the end rather than the means.

  He placed the hypospray against her neck.

  A sublimating mist of poison, meant to be subcutaneous, materialized in the air instead. Yin felt a vise tighten around his wrist, and pain forced his fingers open. The hypospray tumbled out of his hand, then clinked against the floor as it rolled away.