Hammerjack Read online

  “We got activity,” the agent said, motioning down toward the plaza. “Must be a thousand people down there, all military. Heavy equipment, too.” He directed an accusing stare at the free agent. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “That’s a good question,” she replied, doing a topographical sweep of the airdock complex on the roof. A corporate luxury transport sat on the landing pad—the same configuration she had picked up leaving the power plant. A flip to the high-res confirmed it.

  “He’s here,” she said.

  “You sure it’s him?”

  Avalon checked for heat signatures and found a pair of them moving rapidly through the docking tunnel. She wasn’t close enough for facial recognition, but discerned from their shapes and vitals that there was one male and one female. She then switched over to detailed imaging, plunging sensors into the building itself. The scan crumbled into static eight floors down, but detected nothing in between. Even the electronic spectrum was dead.

  Clever boy . . .

  “Give me a status,” the agent insisted.

  “Two bodies,” Avalon told him. “Heading toward roof access.”

  She took a silent inventory of every weapon she had on her body. They numbered in the dozens, from lethal to more lethal—but none with the potency of her own two hands. They craved sweet contact, without the gloves, skin against bone. If not Alden, then his companion. Phao Yin wanted his man alive, but everyone else was fair game.

  She guided the hovercraft down.

  Among the fusion clusters, two shapes appeared out of the dark.

  Turbine engines glowed bright with plasma and steam, picking up static electricity from the wind and rain. Spidering current crawled over the frames of the hovercraft, their ghostly outlines fading in and out of time as the small ships darted along the surface of the ocean. They approached the cluster together, maintaining a tight formation until they penetrated Directorate airspace. At that point they broke away from one another, following an evasive course among the domes, sniffing out detection countermeasures and jamming them. When the run was complete, they met again at the center of the reactor complex. Hovering for a moment below the deck of the massive dome, they faced one another as their pilots signaled back and forth.

  It was a go. They were committed.

  The two hovercraft swooped over the dome, one at a time, navigating with infrared as they searched for the darkened landing pad. The ships set down as soon as they found it, hatches popping open to unleash eight Zone agents. Camochrome kept pace with the lightning and the rain, their armor taking on the color and characteristics of the steel surroundings.

  The station was theirs. They proceeded with the hunt.

  Lea fell in step behind Cray. She felt a crushing force pushing her through the tunnel, like some tangible presence bleeding out of the hexagonal walls. Perhaps it was just the vibe of the place, which gave off static malice like a battery holding a charge. Such was the strength of its character. In the absence of all other life, the structure had become Lyssa.

  “Funky,” she transmitted. “Gimme the short version.”

  “CSS just got confirmation of the evac,” Funky replied. “All stations are down, all controls on remote. Nobody here but us chickens.”

  “Copy that. Stand by.”

  She and Cray stopped when they reached the roof access doors. Lea crouched down and opened up the lock node, running down the list of indicators on the tiny screen. All of them showed up red, with input status set to resist. She looked up at Cray.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” she said. “It’s magnetically sealed. Can’t even jack the code without a bypass authorization.”

  Cray shook his head.

  “We don’t need to,” he announced, and all the indicators clicked to green. The seal disengaged with a loud hiss, rolling back the thick steel doors and revealing a small corridor beyond. Lea drew back, half out of surprise, half out of amazement. A lift was already waiting to take them down.

  “Warn me before you do that next time.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Cray said, and motioned for her to follow.

  In the elevator, Cray punched the button for the hundredth floor. Lea saw his composure, which had changed since they left the power plant. There, he had asserted a quiet control. Here, he was just a stranger in another domain. This turf belonged to someone else, and so did the rules.

  The floors tumbled away as they descended.

  “Talk to me, Funky,” she said.

  “Still hanging with you,” he signaled back. “What’s your twenty?”

  “We’re inside the complex now, heading down to the Tank.”

  “Any resistance?”

  “Red carpet,” Lea said. “Place gives me the creeps.”

  “Keep it tight,” Funky warned. “GenTec traffic is starting to get intense. No telling when they’ll catch on.”

  “Roger. Keep us advised of any change in status.” She closed the link, turning back toward Cray. He opened his eyes to take measure of his reflection, which appeared in the mirrored surface of the elevator doors. “Trust me,” Lea told him. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  He smiled wearily.

  “So what do you think she’s going to show you, anyway?” she asked. “The answer to everything?”

  Cray shook his head.

  “Only as much as everything relates to me,” he said. “There’s some purpose at work here. Whether it’s Lyssa, or the Inru—I need to know what it is.”

  Lea fell into silence for a few moments, before asking the logical question.

  “And if she doesn’t cooperate?”

  Cray processed that for a time. He then reached into his jacket and pulled out his MFI.

  “You’ll know if I don’t come out of there,” he said, pressing the device into her hands. “Give yourself enough time to get out. Make sure nobody else does.”

  The elevator stopped. Lea understood Cray’s implication. His aim was to interface with Lyssa—a union no human being had ever attempted. If he didn’t emerge when it was over, his mind would already be dead. The explosive would only finish the job on his body.

  She understood the logic of his request, but her emotions gutted her response. She hesitated—but Cray just looked back at her with tenderness, offering her a reassuring smile.

  “Let’s just make sure it doesn’t come to that,” Lea said.

  He caressed the side of her cheek. “Thank you.”

  They exited the lift, walking briskly through the maze of corridors leading to the Tank. Under the klieg of red emergency lights, it was even more severe than Lea had imagined. The blast holes were fresh, the air thick with ozone and electricity and the smell of burning flesh—trace elements etched into the walls by intense violence. And it seemed to resonate with Cray, as if he had been a part of it himself. Lyssa had, after all, created all of this for his benefit. It had been her way of calling him—her way of awakening his dormant potential.

  A pair of doors opened into the Tank. Lea stood back and watched as Cray stood in front of them, his features smeared by the sterile halogen light within. His body faded momentarily into the glow, returning when she appeared at his side. He steadied himself with some resistance, but Lea sensed the substantial force drawing him in. It was the same force that pushed her away.

  She held on to Cray’s arm.

  “Only one of us is welcome here,” she said.

  “Not all of me,” Cray replied. “Only one part.”

  He took her by the hand. They went inside together, drawing strength and contact from one another, and wandered through the outer sections of the lab. Cray led her straight to the air lock that separated Lyssa from the rest of the world—the boundary between logic and chaos. It was still rimmed with the dried blood of her creators, flanked by the madness that brought them to her in the first place.

  “What if she’s already gone?” Lea tried. “She might already be unbound. You saw the way she controls this place. What if sh
e’s in the Axis, right now?”

  “It’s beyond her grasp,” Cray said. He looked at her in earnest—not as an accelerated intelligence, but as a man. He was scared, and made no attempt to hide it. “Her only chance at escape lies with the Other.”

  Lea was also frightened—almost beyond reason, almost beyond reach. She didn’t give a damn about her own life, because she had always measured it in minutes. It was for Cray’s soul she feared, that he would surrender it to Lyssa without a fight.

  “And you’re going to help her find it,” Lea said.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you stop from losing yourself?”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  It was all Cray could do to explain, and on some level it was enough. Lea let go of him, involuntarily, her movements feeling like slow motion while Cray’s seemed to accelerate. In the next moment, she saw Cray step into the air lock. His back was turned to her, and she thought it would remain so; but as the revolving door slid shut, he turned around for one last glance through the carbon glass. His face was obscure and distant, his voice swallowed up by the hiss of escaping air.

  “Five minutes,” Cray said, before the door sealed and he was gone.

  Avalon set down on the hoverpad next to the corporate transport, turbofans roaring as her ship came to a hard and quick landing. The resulting storm of light and wash easily attracted the attention of the troops down in the plaza—but none of that mattered. Avalon had every intention of being gone by the time CSS managed to pry the doors open. If that didn’t work out, she would deal them all a spectacular death.

  She kicked open the belly hatch and dropped down to the roof ahead of the others. In her sphere, she was the only living being. Ignoring her sensors for the moment, she fell back into the instinct of her training—a place where she was hardwired for the hunt. There, she saw Alden as an afterimage in the docking tunnel, his shimmering form trailing electricity and purpose. Gradually, she allowed her sensors to fill in the rest. She could still detect trace amounts of heat from his passing, fading footprints leading to the roof access door.

  The three agents assumed cover positions around her. They held their rifles up, scouting out threat zones and awaiting her cue to move.

  “Eight minutes,” Avalon ordered.

  They headed for the tunnel, running in lockstep down the narrow corridor, with Avalon taking point. She counted off the precious seconds, while the rest of her attention went to the looming doorway ahead of them. It grew beyond its boundaries in her vision, giving off the telltale ghost of a magnetic seal. Another obstacle—but she had expected nothing less. Alden was not going to make this easy for her.

  “I need a breach,” she shouted to the others.

  The lead agent responded with precision and speed, moving out ahead of the others. He stopped at the roof access doors, opening up his chest plate and pulling out a vial of covalent-action explosive. The agent sprayed the liquid around the perimeter of the door, where it aerosolized and bonded to the rough concrete surface of the wall. It quickly worked its way between molecules, until it penetrated all the way through to the other side. The other two agents did the same, boosting the explosive to saturation.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Everyone retreated to a safe distance. The lead agent flipped open another plate on his arm, activating a digital panel beneath. He keyed in a sequence to go live on a hyperfrequency detonator, then turned to Avalon.

  “Set,” he said.

  Avalon nodded.

  He hit the button. The fireworks that followed were more of an implosion, generating bursts of heat and firedust as the molecular structure of the surrounding wall collapsed. The door fell forward, crashing to the floor under the force of its own weight. An afterglow lingered as the remaining explosive evaporated, clearing out to reveal a magnetic lift inside.

  “Seven minutes.”

  Avalon jumped over the pile of debris, the long black cloak of her coat fluttering behind her. The agents followed, choking dust as an acrid cloud descended on them. It gave her pause, as if they had passed through some kind of curtain—one that had little to do with smoke, but more to do with mirrors.

  They entered the lift and proceeded down.

  From upstairs: a quiver, a shock of dread.

  Then the crush, metal against metal—or something worse.

  Lea had heard the rumble of an explosive charge the moment after her intuition warned her. She jumped onto one of the lab’s working nodes, jacking the hardwire sentry CSS had installed and bringing the structural sensors back online. As she feared, the roof level was showing localized damage.

  “Dammit.”

  She switched over to a manual video feed, patching a rooftop camera into her console and panning across the docking pad. The corporate transport was still there, but sitting next to it was a lone military hovercraft—one of those patched-up jobs, like those she had seen patrolling the skies over the Zone.

  Agents.

  Lea zoomed out from the ship, clicking on the infrared filter to seek out heat signatures. No contacts turned up. Something was very wrong here.

  She swallowed hard, tasting her own panic.

  “Talk to me, Funky,” she signaled.

  There was a crackle of static.

  “Back at you, sister.”

  “We got agents,” she said. “I can’t see them, but we got them.”

  “That’s bloody impossible,” Funky shot back. “They never trespass into the free sector. It’s too dangerous for them.”

  “Then we got some crazy boys with brass balls,” Lea breathed. “Tell me you heard something.”

  “Hold on. Let me check.”

  Funky sifted through the comm traffic, trying to isolate anything that had to do with the Works. He came back a moment later, the inflections of his voice matching her own.

  “Jesus, Lea,” he said, a cacophony of intercept chatter filling the background. “We got alerts all over the place—CSS, Port Authority, you name it. Somebody came in and shot Midtown all to shit. Hovercraft, no markings. Everybody thinks it’s Inru.”

  “It is Inru,” Lea grumbled, flipping over to the interior cameras. The stairwells showed up clean, but there was no feed from the magnetic lifts. “They’re already here.”

  “Bail out of there, Lea.”

  “I can’t. Cray is inside the Tank.”

  “Then bloody well get him out of there.”

  Lea jumped, the floor turning to liquid beneath her. It didn’t feel like running—just a nightmare of convoluted motion, every step taking her farther away from her destination. Somehow she ended up at the air lock door, her face pressed hard against the glass.

  “Cray!” she shouted, pounding on the air lock. She tried to peer inside, but could not see past the frosted glass. “Cray, they made us! We need to move!”

  He should have been able to hear her over the comm link, but even that was dead.

  “Cray!”

  He didn’t respond. He had taken himself out of the loop.

  Lea angrily pounded the air lock a few more times, knowing the effort was useless. The whole goddamned thing had been useless—and still, she allowed it to happen. As a result she was alone, in the last place she wanted to be, and the only clear thought went back to the fail-safe she carried in her pocket.

  The MFI was only a shell of what it had been—a false front for something that no longer existed, much like Cray himself. A timer setting appeared on the small screen, flashing on hold as it waited for her to specify the length of the final sequence. She keyed it for five minutes, then affixed the MFI to the wall next to the air lock.

  Hand hovering over the small device, she hesitated.

  I’m sorry, Cray.

  She let the timer go.

  “I’m aborting the mission, Funky,” Lea said, turning around and heading for the corridor. “I’ll try to get past those agents. If I don’t make it, I’ll hold them off as long as I can. You better shut things down and get t
he hell out of there.”

  “What about Vortex?” Funky asked.

  “No questions,” Lea snapped. “Just do as I say.”

  He could read her intentions, even over the link.

  “Affirmative,” he replied in a fading tone, the transmission partially obscured by more static. “I’ll terminate the tunnel construct and purge out all nodes just as soon as I—”

  Funky never finished the thought.

  His words stopped dead without any warning—just a high-pitched tone that might have been a jamming pulse, followed by complete and total silence. “Funky?” Lea called out as she tapped her earpiece, pinning what little hope she had on getting a response. She listened for background noise, stray chatter—anything to indicate Funky was still on the air, but there was nothing. The link was gone, severed at the source.

  And she was no longer alone.

  The certainty of it stopped Lea cold, just short of the exit. Hellish red light bled into the lab from the open doorway, like blood pouring from an open wound. Both hands dropped to the pulse pistols at her hips. Slowly, she drew the weapons from their holsters. It was an invitation, one her enemy was only too willing to accept.

  The corridor burst into a nova of heat and light.

  “Lea?”

  Funky worked the board with frantic energy. His eyes, meanwhile, scanned all the floating displays, sifting through telemetry for something that would explain the loss of contact.

  “Lea, answer me.”

  He spun around and looked into the construct floating above the table display, checking the structure of the encrypted tunnel Vortex created. The walls fractured as GenTec countermeasures probed and attacked them, but they were far from collapse. The game was still on, from what he could tell—but he was off the air, and he had no idea why.

  “Goddammit, Lea! Answer me!”

  Nothing. Communications were a void. Funky checked the status of the other lines, including platform-to-shore transmissions and the automated links between the stations in the fusion cluster. A diagnostic showed no electronic fault, nor did it reveal evidence of active jamming. The circuits had been cut physically—which meant someone else was out there.