Hammerjack Read online

  Lea saw what he was doing, and kept the pressure on.

  “I’ll never run from a fight, Cray.”

  “But will you question your faith?”

  “I’ll question everything—unless I have a reason not to.”

  Cray nodded. Her fingertips brushed against his hand, communicating the truth of it even more effectively.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  Cray was silent for a moment.

  “You have to watch me,” he explained, a hard resolve in his voice. “Use your instincts. Use objective scans. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to let me know when I’m slipping. I can hang on for now—but if this thing gets away from me, even for a second, there’s no telling what I might do. You have to be ready to make the call. If you can’t, your involvement ends right here and now.”

  Lea agreed.

  “And if it goes down for real,” Cray went on, “if you see me losing control, I want you to put a stop to it. Permanently. No warnings, no doubts. Don’t give me a chance to fight you. Just end it, any way you can. It doesn’t have to be painless. It only has to be quick.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Lea said honestly.

  Cray nodded.

  “I know you will.”

  She couldn’t help but wonder about the deal she struck. She was afraid to ask him for details, because his proposition implied risks that were far more perilous than the ones they already faced. She tried to imagine how such a thing could be possible, and came back to the same conclusion again and again. The last thing anybody would expect. The last place anybody would think to go.

  With dawning horror, Lea saw that it was true.

  “Lyssa,” she said. “You’re going back to see Lyssa.”

  Avalon found the bar with no name, in what passed as a high-tech sector outside red-light Chelsea. It was a Zone hangout, frequented by Zone rangers—a wasted lot who had spent their better days using cheap decks to stake out restricted ground in the Axis and paid the price with permanent nerve damage. Most of them still worked the system, but only at the perimeter, grubbing after jobs that the real hammerjacks wouldn’t touch. Their existence was so meager, their crimes so insignificant, CSS didn’t even bother to keep files on them anymore. As far as the outside world was concerned, they were dead—and that made them perfectly suited for Avalon’s purposes.

  She strolled into the building, mapping the structure with her sensors and checking the interior for surveillance and weapons. It was the only aspect of the place that was clean. The stench of fake booze, spent adrenaline, and withdrawal was enough to induce a contact crash, reminding Avalon of the standard-issue amphetamines the military used to get troops through the long missions. Most of the people there had probably been awake for weeks, much as Avalon found them: hunched over face kits, wired into the Axis, spending what little life and money they had at the virtual fringe. It was doubtful they even saw her walk in.

  Only one other human being was conscious, and he was behind the bar. The man went through the motions of wiping everything down, a hopeless exercise he obviously performed out of sheer habit. He acknowledged Avalon with a nod, then returned to his tooling.

  She sat down on one of the stools.

  “What’ll it be?”

  Avalon tossed a small pouch onto the bar. It landed with the hard jingle of real currency.

  “Ten minutes,” she said.

  “That all?”

  “That’s enough. You got anybody here ready to work?”

  “Try Zero,” the bartender said, motioning toward a table in the back. “He never sleeps.”

  “You got anyplace more private?”

  “Upstairs. Plenum shielding. Costs extra.”

  Avalon followed the spiral staircase with her sensors, all the way to the loft above. She found residual heat signatures behind one of the closed doors, flattening out at room temperature—probably a dead body no one had noticed. Hardly cause for alarm.

  “Fine,” she decided. “But if he rips me off, he dies. Then I’ll come back down and do you. Understand?”

  The bartender spit into one of his glasses. “Of course,” he said, and slipped the money under his apron.

  Avalon went to collect Zero. He appeared much as the bartender described, in an almost catatonic state that broke when Avalon came within the limited boundary of his senses. He then became hyperaware, tiny red eyes darting restlessly from side to side. He peeled electrodes from his forehead, turning off his face kit before those eyes settled on Avalon. He sniffed at her, drawing the air into a loud, wet belch. Zero was a repulsive man, even by Zone standards.

  Thin lips parted to reveal a jagged smile.

  “Need some magic?”

  “Just a little juice,” she replied, and pointed him toward the staircase.

  Up in the loft, Zero led her to one of the interface booths. He seemed excited at the prospect of using the better equipment, which species like him could rarely afford. He strapped himself down in the control chair, rigging electrodes to his head and hands, and engaged a virtual display at the front of the small room. Static poured out of hazy air for a few moments, until it morphed into a logical representation of an Axis gateway. It was the poor man’s way in—light-years from the elegant paths hammerjacks used to gain access to corporate data mines—but it would do. The areas Avalon wanted to jack had only rudimentary layers of security.

  “Where you going?” Zero croaked.

  “Port Authority,” Avalon told him. “Fixed-path approach schedules only. Avoid the critical subsystems.”

  Zero was offended. “This is what you pay good money for?”

  “Shut up and you’ll earn your pay. Set off any of the automated sentries, you won’t live long enough to regret it.”

  Zero grumbled to himself, a mixed slew of obscenities and guttural noises, but he was remarkably agile when it came to riding the wire. He navigated the way a drunk would, substituting memory for reflex, missing a few turns along the way but arriving at his destination safely. He parked himself into a slow orbit around the Port Authority domain, taking refuge in the shadow of older subsystems. It was a necessity when you worked without protoviruses. Staying invisible meant staying between the cracks.

  “You got anything special in mind?”

  “The East Coast grid,” Avalon said. “Skip the commercial traffic. Just give me all the nonstandard routes originating in Manhattan, vectoring south.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “You can play spice on your own time.”

  Zero sighed impatiently, slapping a neuropatch against the skin of his neck. He dove into the dark globe that was the Port Authority domain, skirting the terminator between vital and nonvital systems—a balancing act that had him on the wrong side of the fence more than once. Somehow he avoided tripping the alarms and ended up at the master scheduling hub for the entire Eastern Seaboard. He punched into a real-time monitoring feed, which overlaid the pulser routes going in and out of the New York metroplex. They radiated outward in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, a series of flashing dots marking the current position of each vehicle on the grid.

  “Voilà,” Zero said.

  Avalon bypassed her advanced optics and studied the display with simple visual sensors. The individual routes numbered in the hundreds, but only the ones that terminated in the major coastal areas caught her attention. A number of possibilities presented themselves—Boston, Washington, Norfolk, even down as far as Miami—but not one of them could account for a strong electromagnetic signature.

  Then there were the seagoing routes. Avalon followed one of them in particular: a single vector that showed no active traffic, and ended abruptly at the incorporated border—about fifty kilometers off the coast of Washington.

  “That one there,” she said, pointing it out. “Isolate it.”

  Zero killed all the other routes, augmenting the one Avalon wanted. It seemed to go nowhere, dead-ending in the middle of the ocean.

  “Punch u
p the route information.”

  “Don’t need to,” Zero informed her. “Fusion Directorate owns the business end—cargo runs and all that jazz. They use it to supply power plants out at sea. Strictly automated.”

  “I need coordinates.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He darted away from the Port Authority domain, getting to a safe distance before jacking commercial GPS. The satellite images that streamed in were detailed infrared, showing clusters of fusion spheres dotting the surface of the sea over an area of a few square kilometers. Zero extrapolated Avalon’s cargo route, superimposing it over the image. It dead-ended on top of the largest reactor complex, at the center of all the others.

  “Bring on meteorological surface maps,” Avalon said. “Minus forty-eight hours, then move forward to now.”

  A quick retrieval from public weather records was all it took. Zero framed the maps over the current image, arranging them into an animation sequence that played out over the last two days. A strong frontal system had been hovering at the perimeter of the fusion complex, kicking up high winds and rain that continued even now.

  Cray had been there. She was certain of it.

  Avalon savored that ember of rage, allowing it to burn a little hotter. It demanded action—and since action was a matter of necessity, there was nothing to deter her from an indulgence. Zero didn’t even realize what was happening until her hands gripped his head, and by then his spinal cord had detached from the dismal recesses of his brain. He perished instantly, half his consciousness still inside the construct, able to watch his body go limp before disconnecting altogether. The dead were beginning to crowd the place.

  Avalon left him, exiting the booth and gliding down the spiral staircase. She passed by the bar again on her way out, and was surprised when the bartender called to her.

  “You were only in there seven minutes.”

  “Keep the change,” she said, without looking back.

  A thin veil of Axis came down between Cray and the others, filtering his expressions through a construct of logical space. The mist gathered around him as if responding to cerebral commands, though not a single electrode was pasted to his skin. There were only his hands, his fingers, hovering delicately above the interface controls to guide his journey, and they did so completely of their own accord. Even Cray’s eyes seemed to be someplace else, staring at the pathways that led toward the GenTec domain. Lea could tell: he was utterly at home there, unbound by the constraints of mere physicality—not as a hammerjack, but as a slipstream into that world. He was his own gateway. Soon, the interface would be a redundant component.

  “Tell me you see him,” Funky implored.

  Lea couldn’t. Sporadic flickers of Homo sapiens revealed themselves in Cray, but they were becoming far less frequent. It was, in its own way, a beautiful transformation. Rarely did someone get a chance to witness evolution firsthand.

  “Look at him,” Funky observed. “He’s transcended at least three different levels of security since he started. Makes the bloody CMS look like industrial code. You know he hasn’t used the subs to fabricate his approaches? Not even once?”

  Lea shrugged. “So he’s multitasking.”

  “He’s doing the calculations inside his head.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Bloody scary is more like,” Funky scoffed. “That’s not human. It isn’t even flesh and blood.”

  “No,” Lea agreed. “It’s more than that.”

  They maintained a distance as Cray worked, using the feed from the interface to translate the subtleties they could not discern with their own eyes. Cray operated on an entirely new level, trashing the established Axis protocols and projecting his consciousness as a nonlinear entity. At once a biologic and a logical construct, he had accomplished the equivalent of a dimensional shift, making himself into a ghost. Boundaries became irrelevant, because they no longer existed.

  Stranger in a strange land, Lea thought. The Axis doesn’t know what to make of him.

  True to conventions, the Axis ignored him. Cray used the opportunity to position himself as a contained singularity, dropping through the resulting crack like an object disappearing into a black hole. He emerged on the other side of GenTec’s countermeasures—a simple displacement from one point to the other, without crossing the space in between.

  “Crikey,” Funky whispered.

  The feed crashed his monitor. He rebooted the system, but when it came back up it only spouted lines of gibberish. Funky had to cut the link between his computer and Cray’s interface, then clear out all the buffers. After that it performed slowly, like it was suffering from a major hangover.

  “What happened?” Lea asked.

  “Don’t know,” Funky said, checking for hardware faults. “Diagnostics are coming back clean. Could be some bad data the monitor couldn’t handle.”

  She checked over the inputs herself. The terminating points had suffered physical damage, as if they had been subjected to a power spike.

  “He’s operating on a new paradigm,” Lea mused. “Your system doesn’t know how to interpret the shift.”

  “No shit.” Funky jerked a thumb back at Cray, who was tunneling into the restricted zones buried in the deepest recesses of the domain. “Is there even a name for what he did back there?”

  “Call it a new trick.”

  “Call it breaking the law. You can’t do that kind of jack within the constraints of Axis architecture, Lea. It’s conceptually impossible.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  The readings said otherwise. Vortex had crossed the line, supplanting hard science with his own brand of voodoo. His coda was sheer mesmerism: a punch-out from GenTec that landed him on the dark side of the Works, the ultimate target of his mischief. Once there, he set up a line of communication between the two domains, utilizing a clandestine port that resided in the same pseudophase that hosted his self-projection. Cray waited for a few moments until the line stabilized, then dissolved himself out of the construct.

  Back in the world, he came up as if nothing had happened.

  “Don’t worry about a backtrace,” he announced, circling around the semitransparent image to join the others. “I’ve spread the link across random carrier bands, modulating at irregular intervals. You can use it to monitor mission progress for as long as it takes.”

  “Whatever you say,” Funky said, folding his arms. “Now tell me what the hell you just did.”

  “A little bait and switch,” Cray told him. His tone was reassuring, an obvious ploy to ease their concerns about him. “What’s the story on transportation?”

  “Pulser inbound,” Lea said. “Jacked from some executive fleet. Should be here in a few minutes.”

  “Nice,” Cray said. “Might as well go in style.”

  “If you have to go at all. Remind me again why you’re doing this.”

  “Because I’m running out of time,” Cray told both of them. “It won’t be long before the flash in my system runs its course, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “And how is Lyssa supposed to change any of that?” Lea asked. “You saw what happened when the two of you were together. What makes you think this time will be any different?”

  “Because I’m different.” He paused for a moment, allowing the truth of it to distill between them. “This Ascension is real. I can feel it growing inside of me—reaching out, connecting me to these vast networks of information. All I have to do is open my mind and it’s all there.” The manic energy behind his eyes told the story far better than words. The flash was displacing him, turning his cells and tissues into a biological interface, joining him to the Axis—and perhaps more.

  “It’s almost like a drug,” he continued. “This thing that consumes you, but can never fill your need. It’s only a matter of time before I won’t be able to control it.”

  Lea nodded, because she finally understood.

  “You’re going to interface with Lyssa,” she said. “And
hope that it neutralizes the flash.”

  Funky shook his head. “Now I know you’ve gone off the deep end,” he protested. “You said it yourself, Vortex—Lyssa would swallow your mind whole and wash it down with a pint of ale.”

  “If I was unprotected,” Cray explained. “She already craves data. The sheer volume of all that flash should act as a firewall between my mind and hers—giving me enough time to disconnect before she can go after my own neural pathways.”

  Lea pointed out the potential flaw in his plan.

  “What if it destroys the flash instead?”

  “Then it will be over,” Cray answered. “And it will be quick.”

  “I can think of easier ways to kill yourself,” Funky lamented. “Don’t get me wrong, Vortex. I admire anybody with the cojones to put together a run like this. But taking a joyride into the Works?” He spat out a miserable laugh. “Stick your head in there, mate, and they’ll lop it off first chance they get.”

  “You saw it yourself, Cray,” Lea added. “Special Services has at least a hundred bodies there, and most of them know your face. That’s a lot of heat—especially when they have orders to shoot you on sight.”

  “They scare you,” Cray said. “Don’t they?”

  “Fucking A,” Funky answered.

  “Good,” Cray said, floating the idea as he returned to the interface controls. “They should scare you. They’re professional killers—and they won’t hesitate to eliminate you or me, or anybody else who gets in their way. They are not, however, invulnerable.” With a wave of his hand, he conjured a three-dimensional schematic of the Works building—a macroview at first, zooming in to a cross section of the floors on the research level. “There is a weakness.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lea asked.

  “The focus of their mission,” Cray explained. “Which also happens to be the one thing they’re not allowed to kill.”

  Lea drew a short breath and held it as Cray highlighted the floor plans for the Tank.