Hammerjack Read online

  The pulser was still. Silent. Contemplating.

  Tell me a story.

  It was a huge thing, designed for mass transport of goods—as well as the occasional smuggling, if its battle scars were any indication. Avalon kept her sensors at low gain as she approached the pulser, playing instincts over enhancements in her search for clues. She ran a hand along its belly, finding the surface rough and caked with an array of exotic impurities. A rapid spectral sifted most of the components. Dust from silicon slag, fluorocarbons, stray benzene, crystalline hydrochlorics—all of them suggested more than a few flights through the Zone, where the atmosphere was rich with such pollutants.

  There were also patchy concentrations of sodium chloride, deposited from evaporation, which formed granular deposits that clung to the skin of the ship. Avalon watched them crumble between her gloved fingers, the olfactory receptors of her sensuit translating the chemical composition into a pungent aroma.

  Brine. The ocean. Sea salt.

  The pulser had been docked at a coastal port. More than that, it had been close to the water’s edge—close enough to be doused in sea spray. High-breaking waves would account for the large volume of salts she found, which indicated the pulser had likely touched down at the edge of a heavy storm system. The salts were also clean, free from the grime and trace elements that covered the rest of the ship. That meant the storm had been recent, probably within the last twenty-four hours.

  Avalon made a careful note of her findings, filing everything away into temporary buffers for later analysis. Brushing the dried powder from her hands, she went over to the open belly hatch and hoisted herself inside. She came up into the cargo bay, a cavernous and empty space still reeking from the residue of old shipments. Everything from livestock to drugs to prostitutes had occupied the chamber at one time or the other, leaving behind a collage of stains and smells that reeked of the subculture. Avalon found it stifling.

  She spent as little time in there as possible, making a brief sweep for more evidence but finding it impossible to bag anything coherent. She then climbed up into the cockpit, taking a seat in one of the forward chairs and waiting for Alden’s presence to join her. Since closing her eyes was impossible, she darkened her visual sensors and substituted that input with her imagination, assembling his likeness from her memories.

  Staring through the window. Face reflected in the glass. You are not alone. The woman is close to you. You know who she is, but nothing of what she’s about.

  Avalon took in a deliberate breath, the world taking shape around Cray’s image.

  The night passes. Stars in the void. Then clouds hide the stars. The rains come, and they take you—where?

  Avalon saw the lightning and heard the thunder, the wind slapping against the pulser so hard it shook. Then unsteady ground beneath the ship as it landed, the cockpit glass crisscrossed with rivulets of seawater. Even now, the haze remained over the windows.

  Someplace safe. Where could that be?

  Slowly, Alden turned toward her and smiled. That cocky smile of his.

  He disappeared.

  Avalon was aware of her anger, but fell short of experiencing it. A disjointed emotion, it flashed and faded like the hallucination of Alden sitting next to her—but not before she had her hands around his throat, not before she made him bleed. When she came out of that fugue, she was exhausted. Killing, even when it was imaginary, took a lot out of you.

  She sank back into the pilot’s chair, resuming her focus on all things real. Absently, she glazed over the instrument panel with her sensors, finding little of interest on the surface. Even fingerprints had been wiped clean. Avalon reached forward and flipped open the navigational interface, jacking the lockout codes so she could have a look at the latest series of flight logs. New York to Montreal—nothing in between. Perfect, right down to the arrival and departure times.

  So what’s missing?

  Port Authority records were useless. Avalon had seen the telemetry, and it matched everything she found aboard, even the diagnostics. Alden and his friends had done a thorough job altering the pulser’s history—but they had done nothing to eradicate the trace evidence on the hull. If Alden had overlooked that detail, he could have overlooked something else. Something invisible and unique.

  Avalon played a hunch, punching up a current diagnostic. She ran through everything—avionics, structural integrity, communications—but it was a minor anomaly in the pulser’s electromagnetic throughput that made her stop and look more closely. As the computer routed a simulated transmission beam down the center axis of the airframe, it displayed a .07 percent variance in conductive efficiency—a miniscule amount, but enough to suggest that the ship had suffered some damage during the course of her journey.

  What do we have here?

  A detailed scan revealed no physical defects. Avalon ran the test again, this time comparing the input/output ratio of the transmission beam. She eventually traced the fault to the forward receptor dish. It was drawing power at rated standards, but delivering less than it took in. Materials drag accounted for some of the differential—but not the levels she saw.

  Something had altered the EM characteristics of the photon receptors in the dish.

  Avalon studied the numbers. The effect was so subtle that an engineer would probably have missed it—but there it was, taunting her with the riddle of its origin. There weren’t many events that could account for that kind of attenuation. An overload was one possibility; but that would have caused more widespread damage, fusing circuits and rendering the pulser inoperable. This wound was more of a sting, inflicted with such delicacy that it escaped notice.

  An electromagnetic pulse.

  Not a strong one. More likely a series of waves spaced out over time, radiating from a powerful, shielded source. The location would be off the main pulser routes, at a distance from the metroplex because of the potential for electronic interference. It also could have obscured the signal coming off Alden’s tracer implant, giving him sufficient cover to make his escape.

  Radiation and seawater. It began to make sense.

  A heat signature at the edge of Avalon’s sensor range grazed her concentration like a stray bullet. A ground vehicle approached the hangar, with a jumble of life signs that suggested three or four bodies—a modest contingency of airport cops, appearing a bit sooner than she expected. Avalon could have handled them if she chose, but there was no reason for bloodshed. She had all the information she needed.

  Slipping outside the same way she came in, Avalon went still. She stayed around long enough to watch the airport cops arrive and perform like the amateurs they were, as they walked the hangar up and down and searched in all the wrong places. Avalon retreated while their backs were turned, moving like the wind across the tarmac and back to where her hovercraft waited.

  Moments later, tendrils of frosty air gathered around the small ship as its engines powered up. It rose into the atmosphere, turning back toward the southeast and picking up speed as it gained altitude and cast itself into the ribbon of night.

  “SAM 2000,” the air traffic controller spoke over the cockpit speaker. “We have you crossing the outer marker, departing Montreal airspace. Come to course one-one-seven, free outbound at two thousand meters. Maintain speed and altitude to grid boundary.”

  “Copy,” Avalon replied. “Estimating two minutes out.”

  “Montreal, acknowledging. Please give our regards to the Collective.”

  “I will,” Avalon said, switching off her transponder. “I certainly will.”

  Cray Alden was used to being under a microscope. It was the curse of a spook to have his life scrutinized by those who knew him best. He had been measured by every conceivable standard at one time or the other: fascination, greed, fear, envy—a full spectrum of human frailty that filtered the way his associates viewed him. Pity, however, was never part of the equation. Confronted with it, he realized it was better to be hated than mourned.

  “I would app
reciate it,” he announced, “if everyone would stop acting like I was dead.”

  Lea made an effort, but her eyes kept drifting back to the empty extraction tank. Funky paced from one point to another, triple-checking all of his equipment and losing his patience when he couldn’t find anything wrong.

  “Bollocks,” he cursed.

  “Give it a rest, Funky,” Cray told him.

  In all fairness, Cray couldn’t blame them. If he wasn’t dead, he sure as hell looked the part. He had dried off and changed back into his clothes, but his flesh was still pale and mottled, his hair matted from the gelled accelerating solution. He was cold and tired—but beneath the grunge, his mind was alarmingly dynamic, firing on neurons that had never been active before.

  Funky finally settled down, moving over to the table where Lea and Cray were sitting. He dropped himself into an empty chair and released a heavy sigh.

  “I’m sorry, mate.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cray said, forcing a smile. He shifted to a contemplative state, asking the logical question. “So what are our options?”

  Lea and Funky exchanged a brief glance. Both appeared lost.

  “Protease inhibitors could slow the progress of the infection,” she suggested. “There’s also chemotherapy, or reverse engineering a virus to combat the flash on a genetic level.”

  “A cure worse than the disease,” Cray pointed out. “I’ve seen the charts, Lea. This thing has been remaking my cells in its own image, not the other way around. There just isn’t enough me left in there to recover.”

  “Then there’s stasis,” Lea fired right back. “We stop it right here. We study it. We find its weakness. Then when we’re ready, we bring you back.”

  “That could take years.”

  “You don’t know that, Cray.”

  “How long are you willing to wait?”

  “However long it takes!” she snapped, slamming her palm down on the table. Both men recoiled. It wasn’t the sound. It was the heat of her anger, born of desperation and nuclear in its intensity. “In case you haven’t figured it out, Alden—I don’t know everything. This bug was my idea, and I don’t have the first clue about how to fix it, okay? Don’t point out the obvious and pretend it’s a fucking stroke of genius.”

  She lapsed into whispers, muttering to herself.

  “Stubborn,” she breathed. “Goddamned stubborn.”

  Cray smiled.

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  Funky closed his eyes and shook his head.

  Lea gathered what was left of her calm, and walked over to where Cray was seated. She crouched, leveling a stare at him that was the opposite of the fire she displayed before.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” she said. “I could have put you under back there, but I didn’t. I thought that was a decision you should make for yourself—and I thought you would, once you had a grip on all the facts. If you’re not willing to take this seriously—”

  “I understand what you’re saying.”

  “Really?” she asked, dubious. “Then trust me. If you can’t do that, there’s nothing more I can do for you.” She parted on that ultimatum, strolling over to the interface bank and busying herself with an assortment of random tasks.

  “That’s about as clear as it gets,” Funky said, clapping Cray on the shoulder. “Lea means to have her way. The question is how long before you give in.”

  They both watched her for a time, going about the business of being Lea Prism, expertly handling the beauty and chaos that came with the job. In spite of what she thought, Cray took her seriously. Lea had an almost mystical wisdom that went beyond her age, the product of an accelerated life spent hanging over the edge, staring down into places as dark as they were familiar.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Funky asked. Cray walked back over to the extraction tank and considered her proposal. He searched for the answer within its confines, but only found the image of himself in there—inspired not by his imagination but by the subconscious memories he had of the experience. That part of him, the flash element, had been keenly aware of every moment, even though his body had only been able to respond to the most rudimentary commands. He remembered that helplessness the most: the suffocating panic of being buried alive, the horror of being turned into a zombie.

  And a single, consuming imperative: escape.

  Cray couldn’t help but think of Lyssa. He remembered her invisible prison, and how it wasn’t so different from the one Lea offered him. In the confines of that domain, an eternity could be compressed into a second, and into every second that followed. With the hope of contact just outside the glass wall, to be so close and not be able to reach out was nothing short of maddening. Cray already knew the extremes Lyssa had employed to break free. Would he do anything less?

  The human part of him still had faith that he wouldn’t—but that part was in fast remission. Time was growing short, and Cray needed to make a choice.

  “What if there’s another alternative?” he asked.

  Lea stopped cold.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “The truth nobody wants to mention.” Cray walked over to the other side of the tank, putting the glass sarcophagus between himself and the others. “You spelled the whole thing out for me, Lea—but you never called it by name. Now I’m here, and I’m telling you it’s real. I’m living proof—in the flesh, for as long as that lasts.”

  He aimed the point directly at the two of them.

  “I’m Ascending,” he said. “And we know damned well there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it.”

  Funky closed his eyes.

  “So we shouldn’t even try,” Lea said, dumbstruck by the suggestion.

  “I didn’t say that,” Cray reminded her. “But playing around with cryogenics and gene therapy is only going to waste what little time we have left.”

  “You don’t know that,” she scoffed. “Nobody knows how this stuff works or if it even works. You could also be dying, Cray.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And what makes you so sure?”

  “Because the way I feel now,” Cray said, “I could go on forever.”

  Cray sounded blithe, confident—even arrogant, if such a thing were possible. Lea found it difficult to argue, impossible to reason. It was the same wall she had hit with Zoe, those last few days of her life.

  “Funky,” she said, “would you mind stepping out for a while? I need some time alone with Dr. Alden.”

  “Suits me just fine,” Funky said, hopping up from the table. “I’ll be on the control deck if you need me.”

  Lea gave it some time after he left, distracting herself with the interface. She was numb with numbers, going over them so many times—but looking at them was easier than looking at Cray. It would be different if he felt the same anger she did. But this quiet acceptance was even more disturbing than the images suspended in a curtain of virtual reality. Those she could dismiss with the touch of a button. Cray, however, was more problematic.

  “You’re riding the rapture,” she said.

  Cray appeared curious.

  “That’s an immersion risk,” he said. “I haven’t been in that long for years.”

  “Maybe not in the Axis—but what’s inside of you is already there, Cray. And it will drag you down, sure as any interface junkie getting high off his own juice.” She walked down to the tank and ran her hand along its open edge, absorbing Cray’s resonance before coming face-to-face with him. “Once you’re on, it gets hard to know when to turn it off. You’re still in there, aren’t you?”

  Cray’s eyes followed her to the empty tank. On the bottom was a tangled mass of electrodes, the dead ends terminating into nothingness.

  “You ever been down?” he asked.

  Lea shook her head. “That was Zoe’s territory.”

  “It sticks with you.”

  “It shouldn’t,” she said. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? I
saw the way you reacted. You just tuned in, like it was the most natural thing in the world.”

  “So what if I did?”

  “It wasn’t just words, Cray. You picked up on my thoughts.”

  Cray blinked at her. He appeared to be surprised at this development, but quickly moved to a serene acceptance.

  “That scares you,” he said.

  “I’m scared of the implications,” she admitted. “The flash is spreading at an alarming rate. From what we’ve seen, this is only the beginning of the process. What happens when it goes even further? You could lose yourself, Cray—and turn into something you can’t control.”

  “I’m not a monster, Lea.”

  “Neither was Lyssa. Not until she could be.”

  It was the Inru line, a dirty trick if there ever was one—but not something she would pull out of the arsenal unless she was dead serious. Lea had only her senses to rely on, and already she could tell how much Cray identified with the machine—and how little he identified with her. Cray, for his part, seemed to understand. He stepped back and fell into an uneasy quiet, turning back toward her with a resigned expression.

  “You’re right,” he said. “In some ways, I’m already there. It won’t be long before the rest of me is gone, and I still don’t have any idea where it’s going. Maybe it’s insanity. Maybe it’s just like Lyssa said.” He drew a hollow breath. “All I know is that somehow, she’s the catalyst. I didn’t understand it at the time—but she said everything would become clear when I was ready.”

  Lea drifted toward him as he spoke.

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Cray admitted. “But it’s a place to start.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “The last thing anybody would expect,” he said, withdrawing from her a little. “What I need from you is balance—and a promise that you will do whatever is necessary, even if you think it’s crazy. Can you do that for me?”