Hammerjack Page 34

  The suggestion seemed to amuse her. “I have no more loyalty for the Assembly than I do for the Inru. My only interest is their vision.”

  “A world populated by soulless machines?” Cray asked. “That won’t get back what they took from you, Avalon.”

  “I never believed it would,” Avalon said. “But it will make this world far more livable.”

  “And if the Assembly is destroyed in the process?”

  “So much the better.”

  The lift arrived, terminating the discussion. Avalon shoved them both inside. She then turned to the elevator control and opened a hidden panel beneath the standard interface. Cray recognized the interface as a security subsystem; ironically, it was the same hardware the Collective installed at the Works, complete with retinal scan and biometric detectors. The free agent took off her glasses and presented a blind eye for confirmation, while Cray and Lea had their endocrine levels mapped down to the last detail. The subsystem would use those unique markers to track their positions anywhere within the security sphere. Once coded, escape was impossible.

  The lift dropped through a transparent shaft, the iron skeleton of the tower enveloping them. Structural beams and supports blurred into the city skyline, alternating light and shadow. Free fall, Cray thought, knowing they would not slow until they had plunged into the ground. In a way, it was fitting. The subculture had given birth to the Inru movement, the only place where such subversive elements could move about freely. Now that subculture was set to emerge from the very same place. Cray had to admire Yin for that touch.

  They plunged into darkness.

  Lea imagined the glass walls compressing her when Paris disappeared. She placed her hands against them out of an irrational need to push back, but relented against the cool surface when she spied her own reflection there. Staring beyond the likeness, Lea saw a nightmare series of images: labyrinthine passageways twisting into forever, brick walls stained with the graffiti of a hundred languages—but mostly bones. Thousands of them. Millions of them. Human skeletons all, cobbled together and piled on top of each other, the wicked grins of skulls peeking out from the rubble of remains. In half glimpses, they took on the appearance of the damned.

  “What the hell is this place?”

  “The catacombs,” Cray told her. “A system of tunnels running underneath Paris. Most of them have been around for better than a thousand years.”

  She watched herself watching the dead.

  “What about all of these people?”

  “Been stacked down here for centuries,” Cray explained. “When the cemeteries ran out of room, they would dig up the bones and throw them down here. They’ve been gathering dust ever since.” He cast an eye toward Avalon. “Not many people go down into the tunnels. That’s what makes it such a perfect hiding place.”

  “Looks like they weren’t the first,” Lea said as the lift slowed, giving her a chance to read some of the inscriptions. It was all there: resistance slogans from World War II, the names of freedom fighters from the days of the Consolidation—as well as the distinctive marks of the Inru, which told their story in cryptic symbols and figures. Lea recognized them from her time with the movement, the loose talk of revolution she herself had once tossed around. How alive it had been for her in those days, when her first reach had been for the sword instead of reason. Now those ideas were dead to her, as lifeless as the relics strewn throughout these caves.

  The lift slowed to a stop. Iridescent markers powered on as the doors opened, brushing aside enough of the pall to light a narrow path that led deeper into the catacombs.

  “Out,” the free agent ordered.

  Cray went first, holding Lea’s hand. They stepped into a domed cavern, the ceiling a patchwork of precisely arranged tiles—like a cathedral, with all the reverence that went into the construction. As Avalon sent the lift back up to the surface, the pale light from inside the car spilled across the tiles and revealed a collage of painted frescoes. Each was an individual work, but when pieced together they formed a picture of the modern man—human in shape only, faceless and sexless, connected to an amorphous entity of energy and ideas. Darkness then fell across it like a curtain, leaving it unseen but omnipresent.

  “Go,” Avalon said.

  Cray and Lea ventured ahead, moving in the pseudolight glow of the markers. Footfalls crunched against the chalky gravel, magnified by a damp echo as they followed the passage through the murk. Lea was disconcerted by the sound, and by the odd assortment of fragments she encountered on the path. Pieces of bone were scattered like runes—most of them ancient but some unmistakably fresh, their edges gnawed and polished by predation. The marks appeared too big for rats, a thought Lea immediately dismissed as a trick of the light. Still, she went faster, not wanting Avalon to kill her and leave her out there.

  The path eventually narrowed, going beyond the range of the markers and forcing them to proceed by feel. It was like disturbing a long-sealed tomb, and the walls seemed to react to the intrusion. The bricks took on a purplish cast—more subtle than substantial, globs of light flowing down the walls like a dense liquid and forming the outline of an arched passageway.

  Lea was halfway through the entry before she realized it was there. Immersed, she stared down the length of the passage and tried to judge how far it went. It couldn’t have been any more than ten meters, coming up on what appeared to be a dead end.

  “Luminites,” Cray observed of the light, and ran his hand across the rough texture of the wall. Mortar pulverized to the touch, but sparked a brighter glow as the photic elements drew more of his body heat. “Bionucleically produced.”

  The idea halted Lea in her tracks.

  “You mean the place is alive?”

  “Not quite,” Cray said. “But close.”

  Avalon emerged out of the dark, quicksilver in hand. She used it to point the way down the passage, prodding them to move on. Lea shot Cray a dubious glance, but he was already on the move.

  Lea followed him in, trying not to touch anything. She was especially careful to avoid the purple tendrils, which jumped out toward her whenever she got close. “Jesus,” she yelped when one brushed against her, like an insect scurrying across her skin. Avalon tore through them without giving it a second thought.

  By then Cray had reached the end of the passage. The way was blocked by a pile of bricks and boulders that rose from floor to ceiling—the result of a structural collapse from long ago. Luminites migrated across the craggy surface, seeping between the cracks and illustrating the obvious. Nothing short of a blasting charge was going to get them through.

  Cray turned around. “We may have a problem.”

  Avalon remained quiet. The walls, however, did not.

  The bricks began to shift, spitting powdered mortar. A deep rumble followed, mildly violent but enough to induce terror in such a confined space. Lea reached out for the walls to steady herself, recoiling at the luminites that came in contact with her—but the tiny creatures were already fleeing, through every crack and fissure they could find. The light went with them, dropping a shroud of blackness throughout the passage that settled with the caking dust. The rest was a confused mélange of sounds.

  It started with the crushing pummel of rock against rock, and ended with Lea screaming. Somewhere in between, the route back to the cathedral cavern filled with debris. The force of the sudden downfall compacted the atmosphere into an arid, viscous mix of gas and dust—which might have been the worst of it, if not for the oppressive silence that followed.

  “Cray?” Lea choked. “Cray, are you all right?”

  No answer. Only the hiss of escaping air, followed by a cool, sterile draft. A series of massive bolts rolled away in front of her, locking into place like a hammer pounding steel. Light flooded the passageway, brilliant and painful to her eyes. Even so, Lea clutched at the light greedily, treating it as her lifeline—and took her first uncertain steps toward it.

  “Cray?”

  Lea peered betwe
en the slats of her fingers, and found him standing at the center of a large doorway. The collapsed wall that blocked the way only moments before had swung open like a bank vault, into a hidden chamber that pulsed with a vibe Lea remembered from the street. Mixed signals, frenetic and unbound—they were bouncing all around the place, the antithesis of the catacombs they left behind.

  There were people here. And they were feeding.

  Lea caught her first glimpse of them, vague shapes squeezed out of the light. They gathered around Cray, tentative hands reaching for him but drawing back before they could touch. As Lea moved closer, their faces assembled into familiar forms. All of them were young, some only children, but with a weary kind of wisdom that was a rite of passage in the subculture. Lea knew them, because she had once been one of them. The hustlers, the pimps, the Crowleys, the Goths—they were one and the same creature, the collective entity of the streets. They treated Cray as if he were their messiah.

  Inru.

  Lea stepped in next to him, into the circle the Inru dared not breach. There were only a dozen of them, just the tip of the network that operated in the underground—but the word spread out from there, interfacing with the others via a primitive link. They stared at Lea, barely containing an animal frenzy. It was clear she was not welcome, and they poised themselves for an attack.

  “Stand down,” Avalon said.

  The free agent strode in from the passageway, placing herself in front of Cray and Lea. The Inru children reacted to her much the same way they had reacted to Lea, but with one crucial difference: they were afraid.

  They did as instructed, and moved aside to let Cray and Lea pass. Others arrived as well. They remained outside the free agent’s protective zone, but never strayed farther than that. They were hungry, and wanted to be close to Cray. They drank in his presence like a narcotic.

  “They know what I am,” he observed.

  “Maybe,” Lea said. “But what the hell are they?”

  None of the Inru beckoned them with an answer. They just lined up along the deep corridor that led into an underground complex, like an honor guard sent to receive him. Cray took Lea by the hand, following Avalon’s lead and avoiding their eyes. The rank and file stepped in behind him to follow, the same kind of boys and girls Lea had known from the street—lost and desperate, forever seeking a human connection, but forsaking what made them human in the process. Pliable minds and blind faith: a perfect combination of qualities for Phao Yin’s new order.

  “I hate to admit it,” Lea said quietly as they went, “but the Collective might be right about these people. We’ve got the seeds of a real revolution here. There’s no telling how many of them Yin has out there, spreading the word.”

  “More like spreading a virus,” Cray said. “There’s a message, but it’s pathological. Yin only needed a few people to drop it into the subculture. Now it’s propagating by itself, like wildfire.”

  “You’re talking code,” she pointed out. “Person to person, through casual contact. The Inru never worked on anything like that.”

  “Part of Yin’s plan to sell the vision. CSS knows it—or at least they have an idea. That’s why they sterilized all those people at the Works. It wasn’t a political purge,” he finished, sour with irony. “It was containment.”

  Avalon held up one hand, a signal for the others to halt. Directly ahead, stretching ten meters from floor to ceiling, stood the shimmering face of a passive security curtain. The energy field warped the air into a mercurial liquid, its pixelated surface casting hollow reflections interspersed with a collage of impressions from the other side. They solidified into the form of a vaulted steel door—the final barrier between this sphere and the next.

  Avalon approached the curtain, which activated a cluster of biometric sensors lining its perimeter. Her body was the key that provided the code for unlocking the door. As soon as the sensors finished mapping her, it rolled aside without a sound.

  The curtain absorbed most of the light that emanated from the other sphere, twisting familiar forms into distorted shapes, then back again. The effect was like staring into a waterfall, through which Lea gathered a host of partial images—a combined representation, bent by a virtual prism. The pieces quickly fell together, but only in flashes, joined by laserlight and fiber that melded together in an enormous hub. She spied level upon level of the stuff—all hard links and hard-core, jackproof because it stayed outside the fringes of the Axis. The power it generated was tremendous, enough to pump ice through Point Eiffel and out across the rest of the world. This was the sum total of all Inru expectations and desires, forged into columns and relays and fused into the technology they had deployed there.

  It was their own version of the Works. And what lay beyond the curtain was their own version of Lyssa.

  The curtain thinned out just enough for them to grasp its physical configuration, which rose even higher than the cathedral outside. Most of the structure was geared toward transmission and reception—though the sheer elegance of its design was ethereal for all its complexity. Seven spires rose around a vacant core, guiding pulses of light that wrapped themselves around an intricate framework, which melded near the ceiling like a cluster of neurons. Lea watched the pulses interact with one another, hopping from one termination to the next, before joining another spire and working their way back down to the core. Bionucleic energy, she decided, probably in some kind of test phase.

  But coming from where?

  The source was at the core itself. Several tech mercs in white jumpsuits were already there, checking out the banks of control equipment that encircled the area—but the sarcophagus at its center put everything into context. The lid was closed, but even from her vantage point Lea could tell that the vessel was not empty. A window of carbon glass looked in on its occupant, a revelation of flesh and bone that was human in all its impurity. One of the mercs opened the lid, and the man inside awakened like a vampire. Sitting upright, he turned his eyes toward the curtain and stared straight through it. Teeth glinted beneath his narrow lips, a genuine smile of recognition.

  One of the mercs helped him out of the sarcophagus. It was a betrayal of weakness he could not allow in the world above—one he could not avoid below. So much of the complex was tied into his essence, it was unavoidable. Still, he eschewed assistance from the others as he made his way to the curtain, choosing instead to go it alone.

  The man walked through the energy field, his footsteps measured and careful—like a man much older than his years. Clearly, being there had taken its toll—but still he beamed that smile, as if greeting an old friend.

  “Good evening, Dr. Alden,” Phao Yin said. “It’s good to see you again.”

  He held out his hand.

  The Inru watched the exchange in hushed silence, as did Lea. Cray, however, accepted the greeting without hesitation. Yin was ashen, his hand icy to the touch. Half-dead, he was a projection of what Cray felt within himself. Yin did nothing to hide his envy.

  “Likewise,” Cray replied.

  There were no guards, no troops—and with the exception of what Avalon carried, no weapons as far as Lea could see. Phao Yin had completely entrusted his security to automated measures, leaving brute force to the surface. Even so, there was a feral quotient to the Inru that shadowed them—too many years of tecs and stimulants, of bad trips spun on cheap electrodes, that the nightmare hallucination was a permanent imprint on their collective cortex. Their tenuous grip on reality thus became Yin’s strength. They would die for him at a single word, and by that same token they would kill. Lea had to admire the purity of it. What Yin bought from the Zone Authority, these people gave him freely. They operated on the same level as zombies—but zombies made for a powerful army.

  The mercs who tended his machinery were a different story. Lea knew the type from her own time with the movement, when hammerjacks were looking to make a name for themselves in the underground. More egotistical than partisan, they used the Inru as a vehicle to learn thei
r chops—just as they used Phao Yin to get time on some of the newest technology. They treated the newcomers with suspicion, as they would anybody who trespassed on their turf, but that was as far as their hostility went. As much as such people talked, they were not killers. Lea doubted they even knew the full extent of what Phao Yin had planned.

  “I suppose congratulations are in order,” Yin said. He walked a slow, deliberate pace, keeping himself between Cray and Lea while Avalon stalked them from behind. “It’s not everyone who can evade my organization for as long as you have. You even gave my free agent a few bruises. I confess, Dr. Alden—I didn’t believe you had it in you.”

  “That makes two of us,” Cray remarked in an acid tone. “I knew you had some issues, Yin—but this whole master-of-the-universe thing has me baffled.”

  “Perhaps you should talk to your friend here. If not for her efforts, it’s doubtful we could have realized our goals.” Yin turned that reptilian smile on Lea. “The Inru owe you a great debt, Miss Prism. I’m quite pleased to have you back in our fold.”

  “Save it for your trick boys,” Lea scoffed. “I’m only here to watch you go down.”

  Yin laughed.

  “Looks like you’re already on the way,” Lea continued. “A guy like you should be smart enough to stay off the juice. Is that what those little coffin trips are for?” she asked, jerking a thumb toward the sarcophagus. “To show the boys and girls you can still ride?”

  “Nothing quite so simple,” Yin admitted. “The subjects you see here are experiments, nothing more. An exercise in evolution for future generations—built upon your work, by the way. You see,” he said, turning around to face them both, “everybody wanted to be the first. Toward that end, each one volunteered to be a vessel. To project themselves into a higher level of consciousness, so they might better understand the word.”

  “You injected them with flash,” Cray translated.

  “Only a variant,” Yin said with a shrug. “It took some doing to get it right, but ultimately we were successful. These minions have been out in the world for some time, helping the message take root. Now that our time has arrived, they will be there to assure the Inru’s continued dominance in the subculture.”