Hammerjack Page 37

  Not yet.

  “What’s the matter?” Lea asked. Her words were slurred, between heavy breaths. “Reflexes not what they used to be? I thought you were supposed to be bad.”

  Avalon turned her head slightly, toward the approaching squad. They were close, but veered off short of a direct attack. Instead, they dug themselves in at a distance and clustered their weapons for a combined assault.

  “Come on,” Lea invited. “What are you waiting for?”

  A muzzle flash ignited behind Avalon, outlining her body in a stellar corona. She twisted to avoid the pulse beams, channeling them between her outstretched arms. Then she leaped into the air again, riding the heat in defiance of gravity, channeling her momentum into a spear. The shots tore up the floor at Lea’s feet, but she didn’t so much as twitch. She only saw the free agent, who pounced down on her like a gigantic bat.

  And the brilliance of quicksilver.

  Phao Yin struggled.

  His disciples dead, he played the same when the soldiers stepped over him. He would then continue, pushing himself with broken legs and pulling himself with bleeding hands. By the time he reached the core, the pain was beyond comprehension—but so was the need, as great as any pleasure he had ever pursued.

  Grabbing on to one of the computer banks, Yin pulled himself to his knees and rested there for one blistering moment. He then hoisted himself up, containing his screams long enough to roll onto his back. Yin had no idea what happened next. His eyes closed, he only remembered losing himself in free fall—then a sudden, horrid jolt as he crashed upon uneven ground. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he had fallen into the core. A frigid, dry mist clung to the floor, creating an eerie white calm that cleansed him of his agony. It renewed Yin’s clarity of purpose and guided him to what should have been his destiny.

  It was bleeding ice, from the disconnected hoses at its base. The crystals that settled on its surface sparkled like a thousand diamonds, beautiful in spite of the anger they inspired. Yin scrambled toward the sarcophagus, quickly because he did not know how long he could bear to look at it in his current state. He clawed at its surface, slipping time and time again while he tried to find a hold, finally throwing himself on top with a final, desperate lunge.

  Embracing the thing, Yin squirmed his way up to the window. The shattered glass oozed cryogenic fluid between its cracks. Yin wiped away the viscous liquid with his bare hands, slicing his skin and freezing it at the same time. He didn’t care. Nothing would stop him from confronting his enemy. Nothing would stop him from seeing his face.

  A dense fog covered the glass from the inside. Yin leaned in closer and the fog cleared. Alden’s features congealed out of the blue suspension that separated them. He had gone ashen—beyond the porcelain texture of a frozen body, into the color of the dead. With the seal breached, Alden’s life had leaked out as easily as the cryogenic fluid.

  “No!” Yin shrieked.

  He pounded against the broken glass. Glittering shards descended lazily through the fluid, settling around Alden’s shoulders, but he remained still.

  “You can’t die! Not until I say!”

  Alden wasn’t interested.

  “I won’t allow it!” Yin cried, overcome with tears of impotent rage. He kept beating his fists against the sarcophagus, weaker and weaker with each blow. “You will not die! Not until I know!”

  Alden just lay there, in taunting death.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  His eyes flew open.

  Yin froze. He gulped one last, searing breath.

  Then hands, the cold flesh of a corpse, breaking through the window. Fingers wrapped around his head, electric points penetrating his skull, and Yin tasted the pain of a hard interface. He thrashed about, trying to force himself off the sarcophagus, but the energy from his body was fading. Alden had drained it as easily as he drained Yin’s thoughts.

  Yin fell.

  Into Alden’s eyes, a space of light-years crossed in the breadth of a nanosecond: shadow without black, light without substance. Particles and waves, they encircled Yin in a whirlpool of chaos and data behaving as one—a logical singularity, tunnels branching out into infinite strings that behaved like water, collapsing on him only to reappear in a million different permutations. The whole of the Axis spread itself out before him, but it was only a microcosm of what lay beyond. Like the stars in the sky visible from Earth, they parted to reveal the universe as it truly was—expanding, unpredictable, infinite combinations of exquisite complexity.

  The first glimpse cleaved Yin’s mind like a scalpel.

  The bitstream condensed into a flat horizontal plane. Yin pierced it, breaking the surface tension of the wave, but then discovered an entire ocean underneath. His own logic failing him, he sank into the abyss and drifted through its currents—which he soon came to realize were the patterns of the dead. He listened to them all, their singing voices constant but out of tune, fragments of thought and emotion trapped in the Axis like the debris of consciousness.

  Yin screamed. Nothing came out. Yin fought. His body was memory. He was already dead, to be permitted to walk among them. And the dead treated him as a father, returning to his brood after abandoning them. One by one, Yin assimilated them. And one by one, they feasted on the remains of his mind.

  Alden, their host, savored the last bit for himself.

  The blade guided Lea.

  Even as she spun to avoid the kill, her hand knew where to go. The quicksilver just followed the lines of tracer fire that chased Avalon through the air, then made a delicate stab into her path. What happened next was illusion, a passage marked only by a quiver—but Lea knew the throb that traveled down the length of her arm, and the sound of the quicksilver when it drew blood.

  Avalon tumbled.

  The free agent slipped into the beams at a glancing angle, taking an indirect hit to her shoulder. The shot only grazed her, but its velocity magnified the effect tenfold. She flipped over and took a dive straight down, crashing into the computer stacks as the beams ripped into the floor around her.

  Smoke rose. Debris fell.

  An unnatural quiet settled over the chamber.

  Lea heard shouts from the squad that fired on them, followed by a scramble of footsteps. They were coming again. She managed to pull herself up and shuffled into the dissipating mist that fled the core.

  Avalon slid off the stacks, and was there to meet her. She was smoldering, hunched over and bleeding. Her left arm cradled the right, holding it up so that Lea could see the cauterized incision. The quicksilver had bitten right through Avalon’s sensuit, just above her hand. The flesh around the wound had already started to mortify.

  “Strike three,” Lea said.

  Avalon grimaced—her own version of a smile. Then she winced, a reaction to the isotopic toxins that crawled up her arm. She took a step back.

  “You can’t stop us,” the free agent said. “The evolution will continue.”

  Lea followed, and took another step toward her.

  “Maybe I just need to slow it down a little.”

  Avalon kept going, until she bumped against the sarcophagus. She was in considerable pain now, but maintained a defiant posture. She was through fighting—but her eyes, burned blue and black and more human than they had ever been, told Lea that there would be another time.

  “Soon,” Avalon told her. “Very soon.”

  She then dissolved, a flurry of incredible speed. When Lea caught up with her, the free agent was already in the escape tube. Avalon jacked the safety overrides, plugging in with her sensors and taking manual control of her descent. Lea launched herself at the tube, grabbing at the hatch before Avalon could close it—but the free agent was too far ahead of her. The hatch slammed shut.

  Avalon, however, was not all there. Her wounded arm protruded from the lip of the hatch, which closed around it. Through the transparency of the tube, Lea could see the agony on the free agent’s face, but she could also see the resolve. This was surv
ival, pure and simple. Avalon was going to live, and this was the only way to do it.

  Lea turned away before the arm sheared off.

  And while Avalon dropped into the catacombs, Lea kept walking. Toward the sarcophagus and toward Cray, where she found the body of Phao Yin. He was facedown against the cracked window, his arms hanging limp off the sides of the cryogenic vessel—the very place where Lea had first seen him. She pulled Yin off and dumped him on the floor, his eyes wide-open in terror as they stared up at her.

  Cray, in utter contrast, lay peacefully. Lea searched her thoughts for him, hoping to catch an echo, but she fell only on silence. She reached down and touched the broken glass, tracing the contours of his face with her hand.

  “What now, cowboy?”

  She barely acknowledged the group of soldiers forming a cordon around the core. They kept a cautious distance, treating Lea with the same awe the Inru had shown Cray.

  “What now?”

  Faces, just outside the glass.

  An endless parade of them passing back and forth with no pattern or reason. Lea recognized some of them from her former life—hammerjacks who got burned trying to repeat her runs, old Inru comrades who didn’t get out when she did—but mostly they were just people, common to each other only in their misery. Occasionally one would stop and press himself against the window, grimacing in despair—but mostly, they just stared. Permitted a glance into her luxurious world, they visited her with hatred, and used body language to promise revenge if they ever got her within reach of their hands. Then they would continue, the slow pace of the tortured and the enslaved, until they returned the next day to do it over again.

  Lea tried to reason with them for the first few days. They didn’t want to listen. There was a difference between her and them. The protective wall that separated them was only the beginning. Lea was a prisoner, but she was a valuable prisoner. It was precisely the message her jailers wanted to convey.

  They despised her for that. After a while, Lea despised them equally.

  She retreated to the rear of her cell, as far away from the glass as she could get. The food she had refused, she now accepted heartily. When asked what she wanted to drink, she requested the finest wine—and got it. The sparse accommodations she had started with gave way to plush furnishings and a feather bed that was sinful in its comfort. The Collective had upgraded her status to collaborator and made certain the entire population of the gulag knew it.

  Lea didn’t give a damn.

  She would have known their purpose even if Cray hadn’t warned her. She understood the rite of passage for what it was. Getting through it was the only way to get to the meat of what they really wanted—and so Lea served it up for them. By the time she was through, Lea was totally withdrawn into herself. She went through all the motions, but she was just living. Nothing kept her mind occupied, except the waiting. And when she had waited long enough, the window frosted to black and blocked the others out forever.

  Trevor Bostic turned away from the monitor in the commandant’s office, where he had watched the drama every day for the last six weeks.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  They gassed her, a potent neuralstetic that rendered her unconscious for several hours. When she woke up, she was in an apartment—an opulent suite of rooms adorned in black and white marble, like something out of a dream. Rising out of bed, she realized she was dressed in a silk nightgown. Her skin had been delicately scrubbed and smelled of lilac. Through the windows in her room, the familiar skyline of Manhattan revealed itself, sparkling lights outfitted for the gathering dark. Then she realized she had dreamed about this place many times throughout the course of her life. It had been her oasis of peace—an art deco fantasy she had promised herself if she lived long enough to enjoy the rewards of her occupation.

  Someone had plucked it out of her imagination and manufactured it for her.

  Lea picked up a robe draped across a chair next to the bed and walked across the cool tile floor to the bedroom door. Opening it, she found an escort waiting for her on the other side. The man was dark, impeccably dressed in a silk suit—Japanese to the core. Lea knew he was a gangster the moment she saw him—probably a Special Services liaison. Spook masters used them for security when they didn’t trust their own inner circle.

  “Good evening, Miss Prism,” he said, his tone businesslike—but latent with the threat of violence. “I’ve been assigned as shadow counsel for the duration of your deployment. Your presence has been ordered at corporate security headquarters—immediately.”

  Lea studied him for a moment and decided she had no choice.

  “I’ll be ready in a minute,” she said.

  They traveled by private pulser, off the Port Authority routes so there would be no record of transit. It was standard procedure for a mission that was off the books, which told Lea all she needed to know about how she got back to New York. Special Services had smuggled her in—a considerable risk, given the penalties for abetting a rogue hammerjack in the incorporated territories. It also meant Lea Prism no longer existed. All traces of her would be burned out of the Axis by now, with Heretic not far behind. There would be talk—but even that would soon dissolve into the fragments of legend. Just like Vortex, she would become a story and nothing more.

  If they only knew, Lea thought—but they wouldn’t. Some faction of the Assembly had already seen to it.

  The rooftop was empty when they landed at CSS. There was no clearance, no armed escort—only Lea’s shadow counsel, who bypassed approach control and slipped in during a programmed security downcycle. He whisked Lea over to a vaulted elevator, which took them several floors down to one of the executive levels. The doors opened upon an ornate suite, and her shadow stood aside to let her pass. Lea expected him to follow, but he remained behind. Apparently, it was to be a private meeting.

  Lea entered without asking questions. She felt light-years away from that hole in the ground in Paris but still carried the dread that originated there. She hoped nobody else would notice.

  “I trust that you slept well.”

  The owner of that voice descended a spiral staircase on the other side of the room. Like her shadow, the man was dressed to perfection—though his style was less modern and spoke of wealth as if it had always been a given. He had the look of a lawyer—the kind of man who gave orders but never got his own hands dirty. Lea disliked him on sight.

  “Said the spider to the fly,” she replied.

  The man smiled.

  “Dramatic,” he observed as he stepped away from the stairs. He strolled over to the minibar and dropped some ice into a glass. “But it does convey an understanding of your position. That makes you somebody I can deal with.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Trevor Bostic,” he said, pouring himself a scotch. “I’m the reason you’re still alive.”

  Lea raised an eyebrow.

  “I stayed alive for a long time without your help,” she said. “What makes you think I’m interested now?”

  “Because you’re smart,” Bostic told her. He walked away from the bar and took a seat on a nearby couch. “Resourceful, cunning—all the qualities that make for a superb hammerjack. If you hadn’t gotten mixed up in Alden’s business, it’s quite possible we never would have caught up with you.”

  “Yet here we are.”

  Bostic nodded.

  “A situation we can put to our mutual advantage.”

  Bostic pointed her to the seat across from him. Lea ignored the offer, going instead to the bar. She selected a very fine cognac and poured herself a generous glass. Lifting the snifter to her lips, she allowed the alcohol to tease her senses before taking a sip.

  “I have questions,” she said.

  “By all means.”

  She retreated to the window and looked a hundred floors down into the street. Even at this hour, the city was alive. Traffic passed along the traverse grid, back and forth into forever. Lea wondered how long it had be
en since she saw the light of day.

  “How did you know?”

  Bostic considered how much to tell her.

  “We had a go team deployed in every incorporated sector, awaiting word on Dr. Alden,” he said. “When we got the word on your location, we went in.”

  “Who told you?”

  “We don’t know that for certain,” Bostic admitted. “The source was an anonymous transmission jacked into our private communications band. It set off every intrusion countermeasure we have. Whoever it was wanted to get our attention.”

  Lea didn’t believe him.

  “Just like that?” she asked, turning around to face him. “Some hammerjack drops a dime and you come running.”

  “Not quite,” Bostic said. “A feedback trace isolated the source to somewhere in the research district—right in the vicinity of the Works.”

  Lea felt weak. That old fear revealed itself again—only now Bostic was around to see it. The game was up.

  “Lyssa.”

  Bostic stood and joined her at the window. He was close, but not so close that he gave anything away. The lawyer danced along the edge of what he wanted, revealing only what was necessary.

  “It’s a possibility,” he said, a bait for her interest. “Truth is, there’s a lot we don’t know about her. How she was connected to Alden is only one of those questions. The Assembly wants answers. That’s where you come in.”

  Lea shook her head.

  “No way,” she said, and retreated to the bar.

  “Alden was already working on the problem when all this started,” Bostic said, his tone getting edgy. “He was the best we had—but even he didn’t know a tenth of what you know about bionucleics. For Christ’s sake, you invented the technology. You handed it over it to the Inru, not even caring what they did with it.”

  Lea’s hands trembled as she put down her drink.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “The Assembly has a long memory,” Bostic shot back. “They know a lot about your activities over the last few years. Alden mapped the whole thing out. You’ve been sabotaging them—as much as you’ve been sabotaging Collective research. You don’t want anybody to have this thing.”