Hammerjack Read online

  “Lyssa,” she whispered.

  “You can’t destroy something you’re supposed to protect,” Cray said. He superimposed another graphic, this one an animated sequence that traced a convoluted series of links between the Tank and the automation complex several floors above. “These are the lines Lyssa used when she jacked fire control and locked down the building. You can see how they now terminate short of a complete interface. The Works engineers shut down remote access and unplugged all the systems to prevent it from happening again. But suppose,” he said, extending the links back into the automation computers, “just suppose they get an indicator that these systems came back online. We plant the idea that Lyssa is back in control. What’s the first thing CSS will do?”

  “The same thing I’d do,” Funky said. “Get the hell out of there.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Wait a second,” Lea interjected. “You want to force an evacuation with a false alarm? How can you do that if those systems have been disconnected at the source?”

  “By tripping an alarm at a remote location,” Cray said, illustrating his plan with a fresh construct. The Works broke apart like a jigsaw puzzle, then reorganized itself into the virtual conduit he had created just moments earlier. As Lea had pointed out, the Works side was completely dead; GenTec, however, was alive and pinging—a package waiting to be delivered, wherever Cray directed. “We then feed those indicators through this pipeline, creating the illusion of an emergency. Every threat sensor in the place will light up like a Christmas tree. CSS will think an anvil just came down on them.”

  “What if they don’t buy it?”

  “They won’t take that chance,” Cray said, with the utmost confidence. “I know these people. They’ll follow procedure until they’re sure there’s no danger.”

  “Live by the rules, die by the rules,” Funky finished. “How long until GenTec figures it out and calls off the party?”

  Cray thought about it.

  “Ten minutes,” he guessed. “Maybe fifteen.”

  “That’s pretty slim timing, mate.”

  “I know,” Cray admitted. “That’s why this has to go by the numbers. Otherwise, it’s adios muchacho.” He locked the interface down, then walked over to where Funky stood. “You’ll have full access to all CSS communications through this node. All I need is for you to bait the trap. After that, just keep an eye on them for as long as you can. Try to give me a couple minutes’ warning before they come.”

  “Sounds easy,” Funky said. “You sure you’ve thought this through?”

  “As much as I’m going to.”

  Funky held his hands out. “Then count me in.”

  They shook hands, then embraced. It was as much fear as bravado, the reassurance of men about to embark on something suicidal. That was how Lea understood it, because she felt the same emotions herself. But she also felt responsible, as if she were the principal architect of this madness—or, at the very least, its catalyst.

  “Where does that leave me?”

  Lea asked a pointed question, backed up with that raw determination she had used to survive in the Zone. She still thought the exercise was dangerous—perhaps even fatal. But if there was no stopping it, she was determined to have a part.

  “That depends,” he said. “Think I could use a hand?”

  “You’ll need a lot more than that, hoss.”

  He smiled.

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  Lea acknowledged his affection, her eyes locking with his for the few moments she would allow it. Then she was back to business, leaving him and going over to a nearby storage locker. She keyed a combination to open the door, then rolled out a small rack of weapons. Most of it was mercenary merchandise—street heat, like gangbangers used in closet combat. Lea handled all the toys expertly.

  “Think fast,” she said, tossing Cray a wave pistol. She stuffed two more into a holster that she looped around her shoulders, supplementing her firepower with a quicksilver blade. It glinted against the dark blue fabric of her secondskin, emitting radiation that slid down its diamond-sharp edge. She slipped it into a thigh sheath for easy access. “The lot of good it’ll do us if we get busted.”

  “I’ll try not to let that happen.”

  “Just in case it does,” Lea started, retrieving the last of the weapons and bringing it over to Cray. His face flushed with recognition as he saw his old MFI. “The components were fried, so Funky stripped it down and packed in a high explosive. I figured it might come in handy in a pinch.”

  “Thanks,” Cray said. “Sorry I didn’t get you anything.”

  “That’s okay,” Lea told him. “Just remember me next time.”

  “I built in a proximity fuse and a timer,” Funky explained. “There’s also a hot button you can use to set it off manually—though I wouldn’t recommend it. The charge has enough power to shear the top off that building and then some.”

  “Thanks for the safety tip,” Cray said.

  Funky smiled, a cheerful and sad expression.

  “Stay alive, Vortex,” he said.

  Cray nodded. “Best of luck, Funky.”

  Funky then turned to Lea, wrapping his arms around her with a delicacy belied by his size. When he was finished, Lea reached up to kiss his forehead.

  “You could give a bloke a heart attack, you know that?”

  “Just promise me you’ll get out of here if it starts to fall apart,” Lea said. “You won’t do us any good if they catch you here.”

  “You talking about the Inru, or CSS?”

  “Does it really matter?”

  Funky shrugged.

  “If it comes to that,” he said, “I’ll have a few surprises for them.”

  The automated approach panel beeped, catching his attention. Funky took a seat at the interface, assuming his position as their link to the outside world. One with the machine, he now had the luxury of pretending his friends did not exist. In terms of the near future, they were only scattered bits of numeric data.

  “Limo’s here,” he reported. “You better get yourself up there.”

  By the time he turned around, they were gone.

  Three hovercraft flew in tight formation, down on the deck at ten meters. The highest waves on the ocean licked against the belly hulls of the tiny ships, but that only urged them on faster. Invisible to ground-based tracking systems, the heat blooms from their turbine engines still made them vulnerable to satellite detection—unless they closed the distance to their objective during a blackout window. Such a hole had opened up in the skies above the Eastern Seaboard, but it would not last long. The latest calculations indicated less than six minutes, four of which had already burned off the clock.

  Avalon paid close attention to the time, ticking off the seconds in her head and watching the window close on her cockpit tactical display. She plotted the course directly ahead, her sensuit augmenting her reflexes and allowing her to fly at the edge of the envelope. The others had no choice but to follow, as dangerous as the path was.

  “Vector Two,” she signaled. “Tighten up. You’re starting to drift.”

  The hovercraft on her port side did as ordered, closing to within two meters of her wing. Avalon maintained the lead, pushing down on the throttles even harder to compensate for a nasty head wind. They could make it in time, but it was going to be close.

  “Distance to target,” she said.

  Seated next to her was a Zone agent—another Inru recruit from within those ranks, like the troops aboard the other hovercraft. There were a couple more in back already high on the action, the cabin hot with their breath and thick with synthetic steroids.

  “Fifty clicks,” the agent reported. There was an edge in his voice, steely as the camochrome armor that encased his body. “Should be coming up on visual range.”

  Avalon was way ahead of him. Her infrared had already picked out the cluster of domes on the horizon, bright and constant as neutron stars against the abyssal fabric of night. Ev
en at this distance they were impossibly huge—a colossus of primal forces cradling fusion fire within.

  “Communications,” Avalon said.

  “No voice, just data,” the agent told her, tapping the link between the Fusion Directorate onshore and the power plants at sea. “Automated stream. Routine I/O and diagnostics, standard encryption.”

  “What about air traffic?”

  “Nothing in the immediate proximity—” the agent began, interrupted by a red indicator on the tactical display. “Wait a second. Looks like a single contact, originating at the control complex. Scanning for configuration now.”

  Avalon didn’t wait for him. She flooded the sky ahead with her own active sensors, running the full spectrum at maximum resolution. Even at that, she barely picked out the tiny dot rising from the central platform—but she easily read the column of energy that pushed it up to high altitude.

  “Pulser,” she said.

  The agent lifted his mechanical stare from the display and turned toward her.

  “Might just be cargo,” he suggested. “They run at irregular intervals.”

  “Check the transponder. If it’s maintenance, they’ll be transmitting.”

  The agent sifted through the Directorate frequencies, but came up dry. By then, Avalon had already decided.

  “It’s him,” she pronounced.

  “Our orders are to secure the power plant.”

  “Fuck the power plant,” Avalon snapped. “Alden is the target. Where he goes, we follow.” She punched up the gridpaths the pulser could take once it jumped off the leased routes. They numbered in the thousands, the closest no more than ten minutes out. If Alden got into the network, she would never find him again. “I’m plotting a parallel course. We’ll stick on him until he reaches his destination, then pick him up.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  Avalon considered it for a moment, glancing out each side of the cockpit window. Her escorts remained close on her wing.

  “Vector Two, Vector Three,” she hailed them. “Proceed to primary target and carry out your mission as instructed. Vector One team will move to intercept the outbound contact. We’ll rendezvous at our designated alternate point in two hours’ time.”

  The other pilots acknowledged her signal. Avalon dropped out of formation, allowing them to roar past her in a straight line while she banked hard to port and headed north. She stayed low for as long as the satellites would allow, then shot straight up into the sky until she reached six thousand meters. After that, the hovercraft settled into one of the standard free-approach paths. Avalon flipped on her transponder and started squawking on a diplomatic frequency. The Port Authority would just assume they were another spook flight.

  The agents, meanwhile, stared at her. Avalon knew the look from her combat days. She had just taken away their edge, throwing them into a new situation—not that she gave a damn. As far as she was concerned, they would be most useful if they got killed before they had a chance to get in her way.

  “Wire,” she announced. “Positive acquisition.”

  The agent next to her fed the reading through the cockpit monitor.

  “Fixed,” he said, adding, “You better be right about this.”

  Avalon searched the contact out through the canopy glass, finding the pulser’s strobe lights off her starboard. By then she could see Alden, even without sensors, and wondered briefly if he could see her. Illogically, the thought of it excited her.

  “Just tell me if he changes course,” she said.

  Cray withdrew for most of the journey, staring ahead at the gridlines that marked his path but processing little more through his conventional senses. Instead, he assembled his view of the outside world from singular bits of data—individual pieces, rather than the sum of the parts, still tainted with the memory of what had happened to him the last time he crossed the skies like this. Fear, of all things, was keeping him human—fear that took the shape of Avalon’s bloodied face, that blind determination and murderous delight.

  Lea sensed it. If anything, she seemed relieved that Cray was still connected. “Method to your madness,” she said. “Just keep telling yourself.”

  Cray smiled, welcoming the distraction for as long as it lasted. He was losing touch with himself, but at the same time gaining a detailed awareness of everything around him. Even the shores of Manhattan, laid out before him and teeming with 15 million souls, presented itself as a series of facts he could readily assimilate. Cray felt their heartbeats, sensed their neural energy, and synthesized it with the network of domains and conductors and optics that formed the backbone of the city.

  And he understood it.

  It wasn’t some abstract concept, but a reality that everyone took for granted—and only he could fully see. The framework was all there: in the towers, in the streets, coursing like blood through a massive body, directed to a single purpose. And pulling the strings, at the heart of it all, was the reason he needed to return there.

  “She knows.”

  Lea turned toward him. Her glance was accusatory, but subtle.

  “Lyssa?” she asked.

  Cray shivered. The lights of the metroplex loomed in the cockpit window, crisscrossed by shimmering webs of pulse energy that formed a ceiling over the city.

  “She’s been waiting,” Cray said, fixated on the skyline. He closed his eyes, trying in vain to clear the image. It remained pressed, stubbornly, inside his lids. “This is going to be hard, Lea.”

  “We can still abort, Cray.”

  He reached for her hand without looking, gently pulling it away from the inverter control before she could slow them down. The move startled her, as if Cray had passed along some kind of static charge.

  His voice was even and reassuring. “I’m okay.”

  Lea watched him closely. Whatever spiked his adrenals had backed off, at least for the time being.

  “How long are you going to be able to do this?”

  “I’ll make it,” Cray promised.

  Cray could tell she was caught, halfway between belief and doubt. It was the same doubt that he felt himself—the warmth of his flesh and bones supplanted by a growing detachment to his body, as intellect rushed in to fill the void. Resistance consumed almost all of his strength—but he was determined to fight.

  “Hang on,” Lea said.

  The Metro gateway towers parted as the pulser passed between them, a new shock of energy slicking down its center axis and pushing them into the overflight grid. Lea kept her eyes open for traffic, playing dodge with a couple of cargo jobs before entering the relatively clear zones over central Manhattan—and discovering just how alone they were up here. Spread out in all directions, the gridlines were empty. A few booster buoys marked the horizon, but most of the traffic was on the traverse grid down near street level.

  “Quiet night,” she observed, jacking the navigation console and patching into the Port Authority autoframe. The display showed a heavy concentration of sentry drones circling the lower half of the island. They darted in and around the overflight grid, making random sweeps on their intended path. She muttered a brief but potent curse.

  “What is it?” Cray asked.

  “Charlie foxtrot,” Lea said. “Take a look.”

  Cray checked out the monitor. His fingers hovered over the display, drawing data from behind the image. Simultaneously, he tapped into the comm web that controlled the movements of the drones, scanning the subfrequencies for mission chatter.

  “That’s what I thought.” He sighed, even before the resulting stream appeared on the display. “The Port Authority stepped up patrols on all the free sectors—probably running interference for potential threats.”

  Lea was amazed. The contacts were everywhere.

  “Looks like your last trip through town put a bug up their ass.” She ran a few trajectory computations, shaking her head at the results. “They got the whole Lower East Side locked down. If you have any ideas, now would be the time.”

&nb
sp; “You feel like playing chicken?”

  She laughed—until she saw he wasn’t kidding.

  “Don’t worry,” Cray told her, diving back into the nav console. “I got it covered. Just let me know when they get close.”

  He motioned for her to proceed. Lea made the turn to starboard, nudging the throttles forward until proximity sounded in the cockpit. The navigational fail-safe had detected the obstacles as soon as they came into range, and bled off speed as it barked warnings about an impending collision.

  “Cray?”

  He bypassed the fail-safe and returned control to her.

  “Stay on your heading,” he said.

  It wasn’t easy. As the pulser crept back up to its cruising speed, Lea looked straight down her gridline and saw the flotilla of sentry drones for the first time. They were close, not more than fifty meters distant, visual sensors glowering red like demonic eyes peeking out of the dark. Lea tried a few evasive maneuvers to shake them off, but they matched her move for move.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she said.

  Cray’s face was awash in the blue glow coming off the navigational display, his features gaunt in the long shadows.

  “Just give me a few more seconds.”

  As soon as he spoke, six more drones dropped in on the chase. They assumed positions on the pulser’s flank, while the ones out in front arranged themselves into a spear formation—the better to impale them if they were crazy enough to make the run.

  “It’s getting crowded out here.”

  Cray finally finished and buttoned up the interface. He was nearly breathless, his forehead slick and shiny with sweat. He closed his eyes while he recovered, then opened them up again and smiled.

  “Let’s rock,” he said.

  The pulser reacted to Cray’s command.

  The throttle lever jumped out of Lea’s hand, ramming itself forward and snapping the pulser like a slingshot. Up ahead, the sentry drones clustered together in an angry swarm. They lit up the pulser with wave after wave of active sensor energy, which punched through the deck in a rapid beat. Lea held her breath as the pounding grew louder and louder, the pulser shaking as it plunged headlong into that solid mass.