Hammerjack Read online

  Crunching. Explosions. The terrible scream of metal against metal.

  None of that happened.

  The pulser pierced the solid membrane like it was slipping through water, with only a pass of empty air in its wake. The drones became a figment of the imagination—or had ceased to exist when the pulser came in contact with them. Lea checked for signs of structural damage, but found none. The ship was completely intact.

  Straining to see behind her, Lea peered into the receding scene aft of the pulser. The sentry drones spread outward in a symmetrical bloom, scattering evenly in every direction before constricting back into their previous formation. They forgot all about the pulser. Concluding they were alone in the sky, they broke away from one another and resumed their normal patrol routes.

  “Jesus,” Lea breathed, turning back toward Cray. “We’re invisible.”

  “Not invisible,” he corrected her. “I just changed our signature—made the drones think that we were one of them. Once we became a friendly contact, their safety protocols kicked in and they broke off the intercept.”

  “You mean they scrammed to avoid a collision.”

  “Port Authority made up the standards,” Cray shrugged. “Not me.”

  Lea responded to a beep from the navigation panel, punching up a vector display of their course. Cray had instructed the pulser to make the corrections automatically, and the ship confirmed that they were closing in on their target. Looking up, Lea confirmed it for herself. As they came around the concrete leviathan that was the Volksgott Tower, the Works slipped into her view.

  “Never thought I’d be glad to see that place again,” Lea said.

  “What’s up with the goon squad?”

  She made a quick passive sweep over the grounds outside the Works. “What we expected,” Lea said. “Sentries, countermeasures, mobile weapons platforms—looks like CSS has a whole army posted outside the door.”

  “It’s not them I’m worried about,” Cray said, affixing a microtransmitter to his ear. Lea did the same, listening in as he opened a secure communications channel back to the power plant. “Yo, Funky. How’s your signal?”

  “Five by five,” came the reply. “Bloody nice of you to drop me a line. You fell off my scope a couple of minutes ago.”

  “Had to pull a quick change,” Cray told him. “Everything okay at your end?”

  “I haven’t cocked up, if that’s what you mean,” Funky said cheerfully. “Where are you, anyway?”

  “Approaching the target,” Lea answered. “We’re in visual range now.”

  “I do hope Vortex is playing nice with you.”

  “Champagne and roses,” Lea said. “You wouldn’t believe what this guy does to make an impression. You ready to wake up the natives?”

  “Bring the noise, baby.”

  “Stand by.”

  She took the pulser down, hovering just outside the building’s security sphere. Cray, meanwhile, zoned out to another place. Where that was, Lea could only imagine. It could have been the Axis—or maybe somewhere beyond that, just as Lyssa had described. Whatever the case, Cray’s consciousness resided elsewhere. Nothing registered in his eyes.

  Free of flesh, she pondered. What is it that you see?

  He returned before she could hazard a guess.

  “What’s the word?” Lea asked.

  Cray looked down at the Works with contempt and wonder. There were so many possibilities, but only one outcome.

  “Time to party,” he said.

  Funky opened the door. A chain reaction followed.

  It began half a world away in Malaysia, where among the trillions of processes passing through GenTec’s domain, a single protovirus affixed itself to the outer layer of the firewall that partitioned the security subsystem from the Axis. The virus itself was basically inert, programmed not for stealth but to be noticed—and to mimic the definition of something far more dangerous. Threat detectors had it pegged as a logic bomb, pouring out an infinite stream of random numbers in an attempt to overwhelm the domain. In truth, the virus generated little more than random bursts of white noise and false telemetry. The ruse proved effective. GenTec initiated a full series of countermeasures, slamming the door on network traffic in the infected areas and setting off every alarm in the place.

  Alarms that sounded over at the Works.

  The CSS duty officer on station had no idea what to make of the intrusion when it appeared on his panel. One moment his monitors were clear, the next there were wild spikes in all of the security subsystems—the very systems that were supposed to be down. Assuming a malfunction, he ran through a panicked series of diagnostics, becoming anxious when everything came back normal. He then punched up a schematic of the building, and what had been simple fear turned into abject horror.

  They clicked on one at a time, starting at the apex of the tower and moving downward. Sentry, weapons, lockdown, fail-safe—every single one of the systems was back online.

  There was no way it could be happening.

  There was no way of explaining it.

  Except . . .

  The duty officer barely noticed the crowd of soldiers gathering around him, as he checked on the unthinkable. Their ashen faces mirrored his own fear, mired in a collective certainty that none of them would dare speak. Then the fire control system engaged, and with it the red emergency lights and stark Klaxon horn that preceded the deaths of the building’s former occupants. The same thing was happening, all over again, as if the spirits of those dead had returned to relive their final moments.

  Lyssa, somehow, was loose.

  The duty officer couldn’t report to command. By the time he worked his way through channels and got a response, krylon mist would be flooding the grand foyer. Instead, he sent a general distress signal back to CSS headquarters and broadcast the order to evacuate. There was an entire army standing guard outside. The facility would be safe.

  Nothing in, nothing out. They couldn’t court-martial him for that.

  Even if they did, it was better than dying in here.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.”

  Funky sounded pleased when he made the call, and as Lea checked out the scene below she saw why. Entire columns of soldiers poured out of the Works—a tidal wave of uniforms, weapons, and mass confusion. They performed exactly as Cray had orchestrated, putting distance between themselves and the tower while ground armor rolled in to take up the slack. The vehicles formed themselves into a tight perimeter that bottled up the entire complex, as if they expected an invasion. CSS was on the run for the moment, but they were also digging in.

  “Oh yeah,” Lea radioed back. “I think we lit a fire.”

  “How you like me now?”

  “Thing of beauty, Funky. You isolating any comm chatter?”

  “The full spectrum,” Funky said, patching through a sample. From the sound of things, CSS had declared war. Squad commanders screamed for instructions, while battalion officers tried in vain to keep everything together. There was genuine panic brewing down there, much more than even Cray had predicted.

  Lea caught a slight grin creeping to Cray’s lips.

  “You’re enjoying this,” she said, “aren’t you?”

  “Call it payback.”

  “As long as it’s not personal.” Lea opened up the pulser’s sensor array and scanned the rooftop for heat signatures. “They sure know how to move out in a hurry. Thermal shows clear in the LZ. Looks like the upper floors are clean, too.”

  “I’m showing elevator lockdowns on all floors,” Cray said, reading off the CSS security monitor. It was still pinging active, but in remote mode. “Blast doors are coming down in front, portable sentries going to automatic.”

  “Anything we need to be worried about?”

  Cray stepped up a feedback signal and fried the sentry probes.

  “Not anymore,” he said.

  “Keep talking, cowboy.” Lea checked the situation on the ground one more time. With the
pulser’s running lights off, it was doubtful they would be spotted. CSS wouldn’t be searching for air traffic at that point—but that didn’t mean they couldn’t bring in reinforcements. “Funky, what’s the word on aerial intercepts?”

  “You’re the only thing on the pulser grid right now,” Funky replied. “CSS will need to get clearance from the Port Authority before they can get anything up. I think you caught them with their pants down, boss.”

  Lea turned toward Cray.

  “So far, so good,” she said. “Why do I feel like we’ve overlooked something?”

  Cray didn’t contradict her, but his reaction was an enigma. Alien as it was, Lea detected something in his eyes. She recognized the element of his hunger, felt kinship with his desire; but where he directed them, she could not know.

  “Cray?”

  Up ahead, the pyramid apex was waiting. In many ways, Cray was already there. In many more ways, he had never left.

  “Punch it,” he said.

  “Multiple contacts, hostile probability.” Avalon’s copilot was worried, if his hormone levels and respiration proved any indication. He read the information from his tactical display, while the agents in back unlocked their weapons. “Assuming two-by-two cover positions. It could be a combat patrol.”

  Avalon confirmed the agent’s findings with her sensors, overlaying a three-dimensional high-res of the contacts over her field of vision. There were dozens of them, tiny and spherical, darting in between the towers of lower Manhattan, maintaining a high-altitude ceiling. They trailed waves of sensor energy, like a liquid wake, making no effort to conceal themselves amid the city’s background radiation.

  “Drones,” Avalon said. “Automated search pattern.”

  “Searching for what?”

  “Us,” she informed the agent. “Last bearing to target?”

  “Unknown,” he replied impatiently. “I lost him when that swarm popped up on my scope. Maybe they took him out.”

  “Bet your life on it, you’ll lose.” It was hard not to admire the boldness of Alden’s stroke. “He’s emulating their signature.”

  “So what do we do?”

  She thought about it.

  “You have the position of Alden’s last-known contact?”

  The agent nodded.

  “Put it up on the tactical,” she ordered. “Give me a projected course based on gridpaths in the immediate area, including Collective facilities. Let’s figure out where he’s going.”

  Avalon eased off the throttles while her copilot performed the calculations, turning to a course that paralleled Manhattan airspace. She stayed well below the pulser grid, not wanting to attract the attention of the Port Authority drones—at least not yet.

  “Got it,” the agent said.

  Avalon studied the display, which showed the pulser over Midtown and heading dead east before it disappeared. The computer extrapolated several possible targets based on that course, but only one that got her attention. It made perfect sense, really—and if what Phao Yin said about Alden was true, there seemed a certain inevitability about it.

  He’s going back to her.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Avalon switched the display back to combat mode, swinging the ship into a harsh turn and making a line for the towers. She dropped altitude, charging up the hovercraft’s pulse cannons and mapping out targets as she flew.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the agent demanded.

  “I’m going to insert us on the traverse grid,” Avalon said. “We make some noise on entry, it should pull those drones off their patrol routes and create enough confusion to give us the time we need.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Alden’s headed for the Works.”

  “If he goes there, he’s dead,” the agent protested. “So are we if we follow him.”

  “He got this far,” Avalon maintained. “He’ll go the rest of the way. If you got a problem with that, I can let you off right here.”

  The agent looked back at his men. Avalon knew the man was considering his odds. The three of them might be able to take her on—but she made it eminently clear that she would stuff the hovercraft into the ground before giving up the chase.

  “Dammit,” he said, and manned the guns.

  Avalon put on more speed, feeding her target information into the ship’s tactical computer. Out in front, the skyline closed in. Heavy traffic crossed back and forth on the traverse grid, while high above a small fleet of sentry drones circled. The agent steadied himself as he locked on to those contacts, his hands flexing over the fire control.

  “Single bursts,” she instructed him. “Keep your line of fire short and narrow. Whatever you do, don’t take out the grid. I want to get their attention—not bring the whole city down on our heads.”

  The agent took a breath. “Got it.”

  “Wait for my mark.”

  Avalon’s vision alternated between the high-res and pure visual. She wanted to catch the feel of the cityscape as it unfurled, matching her impressions with what the sensuit told her. She used the tall, thin column of the Liberty Center as her point of reference, calculating the different possible trajectories to find the ideal point of insertion.

  The ship trembled as she pushed it faster, the speed of her synapses becoming its own. In those moments, while the glass façades of the buildings expanded to fill the cockpit window, Avalon savored her incipient mortality—inching herself closer and closer to the edge before nudging the ship over.

  The hovercraft slipped into the narrow space between the towers. Avalon held the controls tight as the ship buffeted, a wake of hot fumes and the scream of turbines pulverizing windows and leaving behind plumes of splintered glass. The ship emerged like a projectile in the heart of the centerplex, a blur of shock waves and hazy motion that arrived before anybody could react—and by then, Avalon was on the attack. She kept the velocity up, rolling the ship over twice to image her surroundings, then banking straight up. A second later, she was on the grid.

  “One shot,” she ordered.

  The agent fired on the nearest pulser—a glancing blow, grazing the starboard wing, achieving the desired effect. A splash of cinders erupted, overwhelming the ship’s guidance system and scramming the grid. Immediately, every pulser within a ten-block radius ground to a halt.

  Countermeasures kicked in. The Port Authority had the alert.

  Avalon scanned the sky. The high-res picked them up, raining down like a flurry of meteorites.

  Drones.

  “Open fire,” she said.

  Pulse cannons spit out bolts of intense blue energy, peppering the metroplex. The agent put most of his rounds into the surrounding buildings, blowing out sections of glass and concrete that fell into the streets below. Avalon looked down and watched the people scatter. The agent noticed what she was doing and smiled. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself.

  She stopped the hovercraft, rotating the ship around to give her gunner the maximum range of targets. The agent pummeled everything in his sights, opening up on stationary targets at random. The resulting panic only added to the disaster, as several pulsers crashed into one another. Static implosions lit up the entire grid, bathing the area in a flickering, ethereal glow that catalyzed the destruction into a life of its own.

  “Cease fire,” Avalon said.

  The agent took his hands off the trigger. The storm carried on, unabated, with the hovercraft at the center of it. Sparks and explosions erupted everywhere, generating a mass of noise and radiation—exactly as Avalon had hoped. She checked the progress of the sentry drones as they closed in on the confusion and saw them dispersing. Their flight patterns became irregular—a sign of sensor overload. Their guidance systems couldn’t handle all the clutter.

  Avalon kicked the turbines back on and pulled up until the hovercraft stood on its tail. She darted in between the transmission beams of the grid, staying hidden in the tangle of vehicles but staring into the freedom of open sky. Directly ov
erhead, a dozen drones swooped down, about a hundred meters distant and closing fast. They banged away on a full active sweep, trying to sift through the civilian traffic in their search for the hovercraft.

  “You got them?” she asked.

  “Affirmative.”

  Avalon eased the hovercraft higher, building up power in the turbines. She held back until it reached a high pitch, then turned it loose. Gravity pinned them in their chairs as the ship catapulted itself skyward. Naked and in the open, the hovercraft instantly got the attention of the attacking drones. They contracted themselves back into a defensive formation, aligning themselves for a combined assault.

  The agent took them out before they had the chance.

  He fired on the center mass first, destroying the lead drones and breaking up the few remaining others. The explosion disoriented them for a moment, giving Avalon enough time to jockey the hovercraft for a few more quick bursts. As the surviving drones recovered, they tried to assume flanking positions, at the same time letting loose with a few salvos of their own. One of the shots struck at an angle, bouncing off before it could do any serious damage; but it rocked the hovercraft hard, overloading one of the panels in the cockpit and shorting out the tactical computer.

  The agent cursed something incomprehensible.

  Avalon ignored him. She wrestled with the fire control manually, using her own sensors to take aim. She only fired four more times—four shots, four hits, cutting down the last of the drones. She poured all remaining power into the turbines and got out of there fast.

  “That was close,” the agent said.

  “What’s our damage?”

  “Can’t tell without tactical,” he replied, inspecting the ship visually. “I don’t think it’s bad—as long as the airframe is intact.”

  “She’ll fly,” Avalon assured him.

  The hovercraft climbed to an altitude just below the overflight grid, then swooped back down in a smooth arc that deposited them on the Volksgott side of the Works plaza. Once there, Avalon let off speed and put the ship into an orbital trajectory. One pass to ascertain what was happening, then she intended to follow Alden’s steps. He had already figured out the way. There was no need for her to do it again.