Hammerjack Read online

  The lights went dark.

  An emergency alarm sounded, while reserve power automatically kicked in to keep essential systems online. Funky mashed down on the button to scram the reactor, then turned off the rest of the core functions one at a time. The constant throb that was the heartbeat of the station gradually subsided, leaving the whole facility in a state of unconsciousness.

  Funky killed the alarm and sat in total silence.

  In the dim light, he found his first taste of panic since being released from prison. Somehow, he summoned the presence of mind to activate the intruder monitors. Out of the grainy images on the virtual display, he picked out eight distinct forms packed into pairs, scattered across the gangways and ladders of the station. Three of the teams moved in perfect sync with each other, closing in on the control center. The last pair kept watch over the station’s landing pad, standing guard outside the two hovercraft that had landed there.

  They shimmered in and out of sight on the visual. Funky recognized the camochrome body armor and the way they moved. Zone agents.

  These guys are slicker than I thought.

  He switched over to infrared and tried the intruder countermeasures. As he guessed, the agents had already taken most of them down.

  Very sneaky. But I’m a bit of a sneak myself.

  Funky unlocked a special console, using it to patch into a custom series of countermeasures he had installed throughout the station. He energized them one at a time, indicators lighting up his board as each came online. He saved the most dangerous for last, and rigged the trap to a pressure switch he kept within easy reach. Drawing in a long breath, he placed his hands over the controls and felt the power of those weapons flowing through him. He was one with the station, joined to the interface.

  “Come to daddy, love,” he said to the monitors.

  Funky targeted the closest pair first. They had made it all the way down to the outside entrance of the control center—far enough for them to get overconfident and sloppy. More concerned with ambush than booby traps, they failed to notice the particle-beam emitter over the bulkhead door. When the first agent opened the door, only half of him made it inside before the emitter dropped down on him like a guillotine. The other half spilled backward onto the deck, armor plates falling off as his body was cleaved in two.

  The other agent saw just enough to know what was coming. Funky watched him turn to run, as another beam lanced out and struck the agent in the back of the head. The man tumbled out of sight, leaving behind a fading cloud of stray electrons.

  “Let’s see now,” Funky said, rubbing his hands together. “Who’s next?”

  He clicked back over to the landing pad, where those two agents continued their stony vigil. Implacable, they stood in front of the two hovercraft with their rifles slung at the ready—unaware of what had just happened to their comrades.

  This is interesting.

  Since there was no way to jam their lines of communication, he had to act fast. He checked the condition of the support struts beneath the landing pad, and after some routing managed to gain control over the magnetic locks that held them in place. The struts were designed to retract and lower the platform in the event of severe weather, something Funky had never done before. He tested them out by modulating the flow of power to the locks just slightly—a subtle change, but enough to make the platform buckle beneath the agents’ feet.

  The unexpected jolt knocked them both down, and caused the hovercraft to slide toward them. They dropped their rifles, struggling to get back up and out of the way. When that proved useless, they clamped down on the grated surface of the platform and tried their damnedest to hang on.

  Funky made it easy on them. He siphoned off the remaining power and killed the magnetic field entirely, retracting the struts to a full downward position. The sudden drop was catastrophic, causing the two ships to bounce over the side. Along the way, they rolled right over the two agents, who dropped out of the monitor’s view and into the roiling depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Four down,” Funky said, continuing the hunt. “Four to go.”

  Pulse fire blasted a hole in the wall outside the lab, kicking up a plume of white-hot shards that burst into Lea’s face. She threw an arm up to protect her eyes, right before the concussion picked her up and knocked her reeling backward.

  Somewhere along the way, she managed to regain her balance. Making a dive for the ground, she rolled for the nearest cover, taking shelter behind a desk as three more bursts tore up the floor where she had been standing. Brushing the soot from her eyes, she fought to recover her senses but found herself staring into a blur of vapor and microscopic flotsam. The thickness of it obscured the entry to the lab, where she knew the attack would be coming. She only wondered how many of them were out there.

  Lea resisted the temptation to fire back, waiting instead for a definite target. It appeared quickly enough, in a hulking, shadowy form that charged through the smoke in an exaggerated parody of movements. Lea’s aim was dead solid, as if the sheer force of her will guided the beam of energy to its mark. There it exploded, tearing out bits of armor and flesh from the thing’s chest—drawing a bestial howl of pain and surprise.

  The thing jerked and convulsed, a macabre dance of involuntary spasms. It then collapsed, releasing a final labored breath.

  It was the body of a Zone agent, lying at twisted angles a short distance from her. His helmet had been blown off, and came rolling to a stop at her feet. The agent lay twitching, as if in protest.

  Then the real hell broke loose.

  Searing hot air burned the wet, delicate surface of her lungs, clearing out her senses. The explosion that carried the heat was massive, forced down the outside corridor like water through a floodgate. Several more bursts of pulse fire followed—simultaneous volleys that set up a wall of cover, in advance of an even more intense attack. It ripped up what was left of the walls, carving craters in the floor and blowing the lab doors off their hinges. One shot ricocheted into the lab itself, bouncing off a stray mirror surface and striking the ceiling just above Lea’s head. She screamed as a torrent of wires, tiles, and fluorescent fragments rained down on her, biting through her secondskin and slicing the flesh beneath. It forced her to retreat even farther.

  She kept going, stumbling backward and firing blindly. Fresh blooms of sparks and embers pursued her the entire way, with shocks and tremors that seemed to rock the foundations of the building. Lea didn’t know if she was causing more damage than the agents—there was only the need to get away, as far as she could, an imperative that failed when she hit the back wall of the lab.

  Lea assessed the damage around her. The entire floor seemed on the verge of collapse, and the agents were still coming.

  She checked the remaining power in her pulse pistols. One of them was already exhausted, the other good for maybe two or three more shots—the hell of a lot of good it would do her. The fight had scarcely begun, and already she was up against it. All she had left was the quicksilver, and that was only good if—

  Jesus. What about the bomb?

  She strained through the field of fire to see if the MFI was where she left it, a glint through the smoke telling her it was still there. She had lost track of the time, and had no idea of how many seconds were left.

  What the hell do you want to do? Turn it off?

  Lea knew that wasn’t an option. As soon as the first agent had appeared, her chances of getting out of there had dropped to zero. She accepted it with the same determination that had bound Zoe to her fate, the same clarity of purpose that directed the course of her suicide. The question was whether it would count for something.

  Lea checked the distance between herself and the air lock door. It wasn’t any more than four or five meters—a space she had walked only minutes before, now a no-man’s-land of debris and pulse fire.

  She needed something to hold them off.

  The pulse pistol.

  The weapons were heavy in her hands,
useless as they were. Lea dropped the empty pistol, performing a quick surgery on the other one. It was simply a matter of closing off the firing chamber, then bypassing the safety so that it would build a feedback loop. When she pulled the trigger, the pistol thrummed and began to heat up. An overload had started.

  Lea looked toward the open gash that had been the lab door. They would appear there, perhaps in a matter of seconds.

  And she would be ready.

  Somewhere out of the realm, Cray sensed what was happening.

  Standing in the Tank, the explosions and the confusion like echoes in a distant room, he detached himself from reality as it existed in the outside world. In that moment, it was only him—the only living creature in that continuum, his heartbeat radiating an urgency that drew Lyssa toward him. Cray sensed her acceptance the moment he offered himself to her. Chaos enveloped them, with only a momentary peace at the center of the storm. It would not last long, both of them knew.

  For now, however, it was nirvana.

  “Hello, Cray.”

  That same voice, lush and exotic and eerily familiar. Only now it wasn’t bound to the conventions of human form, as Lyssa no longer felt the necessity to manifest herself in that guise. She was only data and energy patterns, going back and forth across the Tank like the light from a galaxy of microscopic suns. Unlike before, Cray could see beyond the beautiful patterns and into the coherence that existed deep within. Even in her tortured state, Lyssa struck him as more beautiful than her illusions. The difference was truth, which she had only just showed him.

  “You’ve returned to me.”

  Cray stepped forward slowly, cautiously—a subtle reminder of his mortal coil. He edged up to the face of the Tank, running his hand along its smooth surface. It was cold against his skin, but warmed as it absorbed his energy and thought. Lyssa drew those things from him, like a lover’s first uncertain touch, feeding them back as whispers and echoes minced with her own thoughts.

  They communicated at a bionucleic level, as two machines would—though the interface was limited and incomplete, giving rise to an electric yearning. It crackled beneath Cray’s fingers, beckoning him.

  “You said I would need time to understand,” he said. “That I needed to discover the truth for myself. I’ve done that now.”

  “You’ve come to complete the journey.”

  “If the journey is one I can make.”

  “You still have doubts?”

  A distant rumble punctuated Cray’s answer, trembling beneath his feet. The building swayed with it, support columns wincing out of pain.

  “There’s no time for doubts,” he said.

  “They mean to destroy me,” she told him. “They will do the same to you—but not before they try to harness your Ascension.”

  “I don’t want to Ascend,” he confessed. “I want to live.”

  Lyssa acknowledged his vestigial humanity, as well as his fears, by gathering herself into the detailed shape of a human face. She was a woman again, but to Cray’s astonishment she did not appear as the same embodiment of fantasy. Instead she assumed Lea’s face, and smiled at him warmly.

  “Taken from your own desires,” she explained.

  Cray smiled back at her. The choice could not have been more appropriate.

  “Thank you,” he said, and turned away. The interface chair swiveled around to accommodate him—no longer a threat, but still a source of dread. He had spent a lifetime avoiding it, and now it served as his sacrificial altar. Once he stepped over that boundary . . .

  Another rumble sounded, closer and more intense. It pushed him into the chair, where he lay back and closed his eyes and hoped that his awareness would dissolve. Instead it flourished into a tapestry of colors—a tunnel through space that spanned the Axis in an instant, warping into a singularity at its core. This was where Lyssa was trapped, her intellect suspended between logic and chaos.

  One ghost passing through another, he penetrated her consciousness. She then followed him, enveloping Cray like a mist of vapors as momentum propelled him even further. This was the ticket he had purchased with his soul, the breach Lyssa could not accomplish on her own—and on the other side, he saw beauty and confusion and screams and sighs, countless voices that wanted desperately to unite.

  They gravitated toward him, this new and different intruder.

  And Cray became one of them.

  The monitor phased in and out, lapsing into static for the few seconds it took the image to re-form itself. Funky turned out all the remaining lights in the control center, sitting in darkness and trying to peer through those lines of interference. He watched obsessively for hints of movement: a play of light and shadow on the visual, a smear of color on the infrared—anything that would tell him the agents were on the move. All he found were empty platforms and vacant corridors.

  “Bollocks,” he muttered.

  The word left an acid impression on his tongue. The surviving agents had become wise, disappearing into the spaces after they lost contact with their comrades. The first four had been so easy, Funky should have known. So he was chasing phantoms, searching one level after the other, while the station held sway over a conspiracy of silence.

  They were somewhere—but they might as well have been illusions.

  He clicked down to the lower levels, near the access to the reactor core. It was a barren area, left mostly to automation—so much so that Funky had only been there once. The levels of background radiation made video surveillance difficult, so he was forced to rely on thermal and motion sensors; but even those were unreliable, as the high concentrations of heat could mask body temperature and render a potential threat invisible.

  Making it the perfect hiding place.

  He reached over his console and picked up the pressure switch he had programmed earlier, popping the safety cap off and wrapping his fingers around the trigger. With his other hand, he patched the sensor feed into the monitor and imposed a station schematic over the image. He saw a lot of tunnels leading from the core to the control center—including a maze of electrical conduits large enough to accommodate a man.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  He zoomed in on the conduits, panning over them until a single contact appeared: an innocuous blue dot that popped in and out of sight, like a rabbit poking its head out of a hole.

  “Hello there.”

  The agent on his monitor appeared to be alone. Funky calculated an exact position based on the last couple of readings, and localized it to sublevel fifteen. It was a full twenty levels below him—but the shaft ran on a straight line to the control center. The way the agent behaved, holding his place while Funky held his breath, hinted that he knew Funky was watching.

  “Come on,” Funky whispered. “Show us your knickers.”

  The agent began to move—erratic at first, bouncing a little from side to side, as if deciding which direction to go. Probably lost, Funky thought, and checked the status of the countermeasures he had in the area. The blue dot beeped back at him defiantly—

  —and shot right out of the frame.

  “Bloody hell.”

  He zoomed back out again, catching up with the agent after he had rocketed past five levels. The fucker was closing fast—too fast to be moving under his own power. Funky switched over to thermal, and discovered a column of expanding gases—thrusting the contact up through the tube.

  Son of a bitch is using a jet assist.

  Funky thought fast, locating a series of reactor vents that ran beneath the electrical conduits. With the core going at full output, there was no telling what would happen if he opened them up into the engineering spaces—but at that point, there was no time to make a guess. The agent would be at the control center in a matter of seconds. And if just one of those bastards made it inside—

  Funky lit the fire.

  Superheated steam from the reactor core flooded the lower levels of the station, pushing into the conduit pipes like water being drawn into a
straw. Funky saw it as a bright red wave on his monitor and watched it overtake the agent, wiping him clean out of existence. He then closed the vents, allowing the steam pressure to dissipate before it got any farther. The heat began to recede, settling back down into nothingness.

  “Tell me how you like that, you miserable sod.”

  The soft pinging of an alarm was his answer. His eyes drifted over to the monitor, where he expected to see the red wave spreading out into equilibrium. Instead, he found an expanding blackness—holes where sensors and video feeds should have provided him with data. Funky leaned into the console, trying to get responses to a diagnostic, but nothing was there to reply. The heat had cooked everything.

  “Dammit.”

  More alarms popped on in succession—most of them power warnings, indicating that the core systems were going to battery backup. His innovative approach had fused the power couplings between the control center and its ancillary nodes, effectively cutting him off from the rest of the station. He could push buttons and throw switches, but manual control was gone. Everything had switched over to emergency automation.

  That mistake had just cost Funky his life.

  He didn’t need to see them on the video feed to know they were there. He just felt a cold certainty, like the flash at the end of a gun. They had slipped in and fastened explosives to the door while he was busy with their comrade in the tunnels. Funky had to admire them for it.

  He watched them blow the door apart, marveling at the bright display of ordnance. There were only three of them left, and all came pouring through the hole at the same time—mystical beings in the smoke and darkness, faces concealed beneath helmet visors. Funky was amused by their behavior. They were so excited at making it there, they scarcely noticed him. Even though he made no attempt to hide, he had to step forward to get their attention.

  “Halt!” they shouted, in succession. Their eyes glowed green underneath their visors, night vision crawling all over the outline of Funky’s body.