Hammerjack Read online

  “I’m getting really tired of women sneaking up on me.”

  “You complain incessantly,” she observed. “That was in your profile.”

  “And you make a lot of assumptions. Didn’t anybody tell you it’s bad manners to break into somebody’s hotel room?”

  She was inscrutable. As she walked into the room, Cray noticed that she moved like a soldier. He guessed that underneath her garb, her body was a flawless piece of precision engineering.

  “How did you get in here, anyway?”

  “I was in the room before you arrived.”

  “Wonder how I missed that.”

  “You didn’t look hard enough.” The woman reached into her pocket and tossed him the ECM seal. “I wouldn’t do anything in here that needs to be cloaked. The Assembly gets nervous if they can’t see what you’re up to.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind while I’m in the shower.”

  “Keep that in mind at all times, Dr. Alden.”

  Cray walked over to the minibar, mostly to give himself something to do. “They didn’t need to send you all the way over here just to tell me that,” he said, examining the row of expensive liquor bottles. “You could have just stuck a note on the door—unless you’re here to keep an eye on me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman said, coming the rest of the way into his room. “Our methods are more sophisticated than that. I’m here because I want to be.”

  “You like haunting the rooms of strange men?”

  “Only when those men have business with my employers.”

  “Didn’t my profile tell you everything you need?”

  “Profiles don’t tell the whole story, Dr. Alden. You don’t get anywhere near the Assembly unless I have a look at you myself.”

  “Ahh . . .” Cray said, dropping a few ice cubes into a glass. “CSS must be improving their standards. I’ve never met a security officer with such a hard-on for her work.”

  The woman stopped again. Her lips crept upward slightly, an approximation of a smile. She just rebutted Cray’s conclusions without saying a word.

  His eyes narrowed. “You’re a free agent.”

  “Avalon,” she told him. “Diplomatic services detachment, liaison branch.”

  “I should have known,” Cray said, consoling himself with a genuine scotch. “I have to hand it to you, though—at least you do it with more class than those guys in the Zone.”

  “They’re mercenaries, Dr. Alden.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “Mercenaries have no loyalty.”

  Cray didn’t trust her, but he took her word on that one. Unlike their counterparts in the Zone, free agents were products of military training—augmented by a genetic regimen that began at an early age. Increased strength and speed were matched only by a killer instinct for survival and a physiology that gave them an almost inhuman endurance.

  All free agents had been members of the Solar Expeditionary Corps at one time or the other, back when the Collective had been engaged in several dubious terraforming ventures on Mars. The final nail in the coffin of that program had been a virus outbreak at Olympus Mons, a costly disaster that killed over six thousand people—including most of the Corps stationed on the planet. The few soldiers who survived did so through the most brutal of tactics. Potential carriers of the disease were rounded up and killed. Civilians were butchered to conserve the food supply. And when the food finally did run out, it was said that some members of the Corps resorted to cannibalism—or so Cray heard in stories that had become more fable than fact.

  After abandoning Mars, there was still the question of what to do with the surviving group of extreme warriors. With a public relations nightmare on its hands, the Collective decided to execute most of them for crimes against humanity—after a lengthy trial and much fanfare. But the Collective also recognized talent when it saw it, and issued a secret decree that spared a few of these soldiers so that they could be put to use as free agents. Cray heard that fewer than a dozen operated in the world at any one time, carrying out the kind of work even Special Services couldn’t touch—but this was the first time he had met one.

  “Avalon,” Cray pondered. “That name for real?”

  “It’s not necessary for you to know.”

  “Just making small talk,” Cray remarked. “Can I offer you a drink?”

  “You can offer me explanations.”

  Cray took his glass back over to the bed and sat down.

  “My life’s an open book,” he said.

  “Only for the last ten years,” Avalon corrected him. Her tone, which never varied, made the exchange sound like an interrogation. Cray wondered how far she would go to get her answers. “Before that, I can’t find any real evidence that you even exist.”

  “You didn’t look hard enough.”

  “I went further than most,” she said. “All the standard background checks told me precisely what they were supposed to—you started working for GenTec right out of school, you pay your taxes on time, you’ve never been arrested. You’re considered one of the world’s foremost experts in network architecture—and according to your evaluations, your employers have nothing but the highest regard for you.”

  “Not very exciting, is it?”

  Avalon ignored his comment, turning straight to her point. “If all this is true,” she asked, “then why is it nobody seems to know who you are?”

  Cray didn’t have an answer prepared. Up until now, nobody had asked.

  “There’s not a single professor at Caltech who remembers you,” Avalon continued. “Everybody I talked to back at GenTec agrees you’re the best person they ever had—but hardly anyone knows what you look like.”

  “I keep a low profile.”

  “You’re beyond that, Dr. Alden. I ran a full search on every detail of your life prior to you going to work for GenTec. You want to guess what I found?”

  Cray shook his head.

  “Not a thing.”

  She leveled those last words like an accusation, though they were as cold and detached as the rest of their conversation. Avalon just watched him from behind black lenses, robotic in her patience and determination.

  “Tell me something, Avalon,” Cray said. “You ever talk about what happened to you back at Olympus Mons?”

  She was silent—obviously so.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, walking to the bedroom window. A fresh breeze blew the curtains past his face. “The world is smaller than it’s ever been—but it’s still big enough to keep a few secrets.”

  “I don’t like men who come out of nowhere, Dr. Alden.”

  “Get used to it.” He turned around to find her fixed on him, recording his every move—counting all the different ways she could kill him. “Just what do you think I do for a living, anyway?”

  “You’re a specialist.”

  “You’re being too kind.”

  That remark caught her off guard. In corporate circles, people got where they did by defending themselves vigorously. Cray had long since grown tired of the practice.

  The tactic was a success. Avalon backed off.

  “You’re not very cooperative,” she said.

  “That’s something you can add to my profile.”

  “It’s already done.” She plucked a data card out of one pocket, laying it on Cray’s dresser. Sunlight glinted off its burnished surface. “That’s my contact information, in case you get talkative.”

  “That’s it?” Cray asked as she headed out. “Who am I going to get to show me around town?”

  “The Assembly expects you at nine tomorrow morning,” Avalon said. “I’ll be escorting you to the Audience Chamber. Don’t be late. If I have to come looking for you, I won’t be nearly as pleasant.”

  Avalon left. Just a swirl of her overcoat and she was gone. Cray imagined he had gotten the better of her, at least for the moment. He also imagined she would remember this encounter, if there ever came a time when she would have to decide o
n how to deal with him.

  He just hoped he hadn’t pissed her off too much.

  Dex Marlowe stared through a haze.

  The numerics floated through his mind like a tec-induced fantasy, the afterimage of a trip that had left him with more headache than clarity, more confusion than consciousness. It got that way on the tail end of a buzz. He had been working off the residuals in his bloodstream for the last six hours, coasting—never breaking the interface with GenTec’s domain, not even to reload stims. What he saw was just too fascinating, and he was afraid he might never see its like again.

  Microtrodes sprouted from both of his temples, his body still except for the sporadic twitch. He was in his command chair, stubble and sweat covering his face. Occasionally a smile would poke through the grime, like the earliest forms of life crawling from a primordial soup—with it, a sudden bloom in his cheeks that was the only break in his comalike pallor. He had been riding the domain hard.

  Dex could just as easily have watched from outside, but after the encryption algorithms split, he wanted to get up close and personal. He had been hooked into the node ever since. Seated in front of the rows of consoles in his office, he looked something like a sacrifice to a great pagan deity. The only window into the machinery was the virtual display, which hovered over Dex and showed the steady but fading throb of his vitals. All the meaty stuff from the extraction was being fed directly into his synapses.

  And it was as if God had opened the floodgates of Heaven.

  Dex had been expecting some serious mischief, but nothing like this. An entire universe had been encapsulated inside Zoe’s body—not some slate of industrial secrets, but ribbons of light consisting of an infinite number of points, connected to each other in an eternal matrix of flawless arrangements. As soon as the mathematical barriers fell, Dex had found himself on the outer rim of those lights, floating freely in space and searching for his point of origin. He found it behind him: a tumbling series of morphing shapes casting out waves of partial reality like the regular pulse of a neutron star. It was a representation of the node, the only beacon he had to find his way back. Dex waited what he thought was a reasonable amount of time—though there was little to distinguish between minutes and hours in this place—looking for any signs that the node would collapse. But his connection to the outside world remained strong enough to give him confidence, and from there it was just a matter of him taking the plunge.

  The points of light beckoned him.

  Dex moved into the matrix, toward one of the interconnecting conduits. It glowed, fiercely blue, like the fiber optics that had drawn flash from Zoe’s body. Dex thought he could feel a presence when he drew closer—as if a force of life had made its own impression, as if blood was moving through those veins instead of energy. At first he was certain it was Zoe herself, a prospect that was at once both terrifying and beguiling. Those two magnetic extremes pulled on him and pushed against him, creating turbulence as he reached the conduit.

  Dex sensed it brushing against him, like heat from the embers of a dying fire, gradually building in intensity until all at once it became him. It wrapped itself around his consciousness like waves slipping over the head of a drowning man, but without pain or panic. By now Dex welcomed it, and reveled in the acceleration as currents took him downward, pulling him deeper and deeper into the abyss.

  Instantaneous transport across limitless space. He saw the world expanding and contracting—an oscillating universe of birth and death, matter and destruction. The lights coalesced into flashes and images, the faces of people both familiar and unrecognizable, before breaking down into their base elements. Hydrogen and helium. The building blocks of fusion. Nuclear fire. Then deeper still, down to the subatomic level. Electrons moving in perfect circles, spinning around dense nuclei like planets orbiting a sun. Dex shot toward one of them on a relativistic trajectory, punching through the outer walls until he found himself dancing among the quarks.

  Existence at its most regressive level. All reality mapped down to the smallest detail. The very fabric of the cosmos.

  Dex was seeing it, but hardly believing it. That all this could be encoded into flash was beyond staggering, but he simply could not grasp the reason for it. He had witnessed the wonder of creation, and now he was asking why.

  The pressure of his arrival began to build. It did not reach a crescendo so much as deposit Dex on a plateau, a solid ground of substance from which he could watch the show. Whether or not he wanted to watch was entirely up to him.

  Dex froze. He glanced upward, searching for the star that was the anchor to his own mind as it still existed in the outside world. He found the node precisely where he left it—steady, unwavering, still visible even after the big tumble. He had not moved so far from himself as he imagined. But even if he had, he doubted he would have stopped.

  All right, baby, he thought. Now’s the time. Show me what you got . . .

  The quarks parted. Impossible darkness came down in a torrent—impossible because Dex could still see, and as he moved between shadows of organic dust he could finally accept that he was not alone. There was life there—amorphous, shifting, creating forms that seemed more imagination than real—but that was the whole point, wasn’t it? After all, there was no atomic structure for

  intelligence

  because it existed on a plane all its own. There was no construct, no representation to accurately depict it. It simply was, and that left Dex to fill in the gaps for himself.

  Out of that confusion, he understood.

  Cray . . .

  It was only the briefest of flickers, barely marking the distance between axon and dendrite. By the time it ended, Dex became aware that the plug had been pulled. Somewhere, in the recesses of his own memory where things like mortality were buried, he could see the node fading. Twisting shapes grew smaller and smaller until they finally fell out of space, closing the door on what he had left behind. His body was disconnected now, and it wouldn’t be long until his mind went the same way.

  It was a pity, really.

  He had so been looking forward to letting Cray in on the joke.

  Dex lingered on for a while in dream time, then collapsed in on himself.

  Flatline.

  Heartbeat ceased instantly after Phao Yin terminated the interface, but Dex Marlowe barely reacted to the end of his life. His hands became slightly rigid, then relaxed when he stopped breathing. In many ways, Yin thought, it was a peaceful and enviable death.

  He stood over Dex for another five minutes, watching the EEG as it skipped up and down a few times, then settled.

  What, he wondered when it was finished, did you see in there?

  Doubtless the same things Zoe had seen during her brief foray into the same territory. Yin walked over to the glass sarcophagus where she still lay, her remains neatly preserved in suspension. The fiber optics had since been disconnected, allowing her to float freely in the clear solution, her body encased in pale blue light. As she was, she could have remained indefinitely—an artifact of sorts, announcing the arrival of a brave new world. But Yin would not allow it. Zoe was a liability, even in death.

  He found the controls on the pedestal of the extraction tank, disengaging the preservation mode and flooding the tank with an accelerant solution. The chemicals, in conjunction with the elements already present in Zoe’s body, worked quickly. As Yin stood by, her skin began to break down—peeling away from the flesh beneath, then dissolving into the liquid. Muscle tissue followed. Less than fifteen minutes passed, and all that remained was a skeleton. Yin finished by subjecting the bones to ultrahigh-frequency sound waves, which pulverized them into microscopic fragments.

  Ashes to ashes, he thought.

  Yin flushed out the tank. He then went back to the node console, pushing Dex Marlowe’s body out of the command chair and taking the seat for himself. As he guessed, Dex still had the extraction data in the active buffer. Yin punched up a model of the data, making sure there had been no transcr
iption errors. Satisfied the product was still in good shape, he dumped all the files into a secure directory. The transfer was so massive it took hours, but Yin was patient. He wasn’t at all concerned about Dex’s murder. After he had put everything in order, nobody else would be either.

  When the process was complete, Yin purged the node of all data and shut it down. Getting up to leave, he noticed for the first time that Dex’s eyes were still open. They had been staring at him the entire time—strangely cognizant, even though the light behind them was gone. In a way, Yin was envious. Dex had caught a glimpse of the future.

  A glimpse of the Ascension.

  Cray took breakfast in the Korso mostly to kill time, having spent most of the night in a futile chase of sleep. It was only when his coffee and pastry were on the table that he realized his stomach had joined the rest of his body in rebellion and was steadfastly refusing anything that came close to solid food.

  Weird the way that works, Cray pondered, toying with the croissant on his plate. You can kill a man and not even blink, but the tiniest thing spooks you and everything shuts down.

  The coffee he gulped burned the back of his throat. “You think too goddamned much,” he muttered to himself.

  But not enough to get a handle on what was really playing him. Cray supposed it could have been Avalon herself, and that prophetic way she had of speaking—but he was more convinced it was what she represented. Up until yesterday, there was nothing in his life that went far beyond his experience. Meeting her had changed all that. Her eyes had seen things that he could not possibly imagine—as far away as Olympus Mons, as close as across the street. Cray had never even considered that he had drawn a line between himself and those things, much less that he would ever cross it. Yet here he was, about to do just that—and he was afraid that when he saw what was on the other side, he wouldn’t know how to deal with it.