Free Radical (49 page)

He tore his eyes away from the malevolent face of Shodan to see the crowd of bots that encircled him. Several were security bots, standing in silence with their deadly weapons trained on him. The was no explanation for why they hadn't simply shot him.

"Shodan!," he screamed. He reached into the deep pocket on the hip of his suit, and extracted the last remaining unit of gel-pack explosive. He held it up over his head and shouted between gasping breaths, "You know that I had four of these things about half an hour ago."

He waited. The bots had gathered around him in a tight circle, forming a wall of moving power-tools and appendages. None of them moved. Shodan was silent.

He propped himself up against the wall and bled for a few moments. When it was clear that Shodan was just waiting for him to speak, he continued. "I had four of them, and now I have one. The question you must be asking yourself now is: 
Where are the other ones?
"

He waited. Again, Shodan offered no response, so he just kept talking, "I'm not about to tell you, and there is no way you'll find them all in the next... ," he consulted the digital display one the detonator, "...twenty-three minutes. So, if you want to find out where they are, you can either wait for them to go off, or you can have a look in here," he pointed a bloodied finger at the side of his head, "and find out beforehand."

He sat in silence for a few moments and watched the digital display count down. He squirmed every few seconds, trying to find a position that wouldn't aggravate his numerous wounds.

Finally the circle of bots parted and pulled away. Deck braced himself against the wall and fought his way into a standing position. The bots headed down the corridor, in the direction of the bridge.

Not knowing what else to do, he followed them.

One by one, the bots broke away to return to their tasks, leaving Deck to follow a lone security bot to his destination. They were beyond the construction areas now. Here, Shodan's renovations were complete.

The only light came from the sparse supply of display screens that were built into the wall. His eyes adjusted reluctantly to the weak, headache-inducing flicker. The screens would change images, flashing pictures and words like subliminal messages, enticing his eyes to investigate. When he gave in and looked directly at the screen, it flashed disturbing images of horror and human suffering as captured by Shodan's countless electronic eyes. When he looked away, he found his eyes dazzled and unable to see properly.

The walls were a honeycomb of outlets and sockets. Some were just big enough to act as a female connection for a memory core, while others were wide enough that a human could insert a hand without touching the sides. They stared back at him like a thousand empty eye sockets.

Bundled cables were run neatly from the ceiling to the floor, like mated stalactites and stalagmites. The floor was smooth metal, traced with faint, overlapping tire marks. Every few meters, a temperature regulator protruded from the wall, breathing out a steady supply of needlessly chilled air.

The continuous exhale from the regulators seemed to resonate, creating an eerie howling sound. Underneath it all, the walls seemed to vibrate with some inaudible yet deafening pulse. His wounds throbbed in time to the slow, penetrating beat.

A sound came from behind. Deck turned to see a vacuum bot following him, cleaning up the trail of blood he was leaving. He found it interesting that Shodan was concerned about such things.

Deck squinted in the darkness. Up ahead, the corridor looked different. The sockets were not empty, but filled with cylinders of memory cores. Some were heavy components the size of a bass drum, while others seemed to be made up of only a few individual cores. They lined the walls and ceiling of the corridor.

The cores didn't look like the half-baked hodgepodge of random loose chips he's witnessed elsewhere in the station. These were arranged in tidy, purposeful patterns that suggested they had been custom manufactured, and not scavenged from some other source. They gave the place an organic appearance.

Now was as good a time as any. "Hacker here."

The surprised face of Rebecca appeared, "Just when we give you up for dead, you reappear."

"Yeah well, don't take me off the casualty list yet. I think I'm almost done."

She nodded, "Look, I want to talk about your extraction."

As he walked into the memory core-encrusted corridor, he could feel the heat radiating off the walls. Somehow, Shodan had worked out a way to create new chips. She would have no way to create modern chips with the resources available on Citadel, so she had probably fallen back on some older technology - probably silicon. That would explain the heat and power drain.

Up ahead, the corridor appeared to end. Deck had never been in this part of the station before, but he knew it was unlikely that a major corridor such as this one would have come to a dead end in the original design.

Rebecca was sitting very still. Deck waited a few more seconds, and finally he grew impatient. "Ok, go ahead."

She remained motionless. Finally he realized that the signal was broken. The video feed had halted.

There was a flash of color in his mind, and for a moment Rebecca's face was replaced with Shodan's. Her hair, made up of thousands of interweaving cables, reached out to envelop and smother him.

The image vanished.

"I don't know, the signal noise went through the roof, and the encryption broke." Rebecca was hammering away at the keyboard as she spoke, running the standard battery of procedures used to recover a lost signal. She knew it was futile, but went through the motions anyway.

The Director drew in a slow, angry breath. His calm facade had been deteriorating quickly over the past few hours. The constant state of sleep deprivation seemed, at last, to be affecting his mood. However, he didn't look fatigued so much as unhinged. "Can you get him back?"

"I'm trying. It's like there is a ton of noise overlapping his signal. I'm narrowing the reception cone, but I can't block out the noise.

One of the techs jumped in, "Shodan does have her own transmitter. Its low-bandwidth just like hacker's connection, but she could probably mask him out with it."

"Yeah but that's on the bridge," the Rebecca protested.

"What difference does that make?," the Director shot back.

She sighed, "Well, for her to block him out like this, he would have to be really close to her transmitter. I think he would have to be on the bridge."

"Get him back," The Director said flatly. His face still seemed calm, but his body was tensing like he was ready for a fight. The tech made himself scarce.

Deck staggered unevenly behind the security bot. As they reached the end of the corridor, the bot stopped and stepped to one side. It stood facing him, with its weapon trained on his head. The inaudible pulse was stronger here.

He fell onto his hands and knees. The floor was shockingly cold. He was panting, and his head was swimming. His thoughts were disjointed and dreamlike. He was exhausted and dizzy. The fatigue, pain, and blood loss were catching up with him. If the floor hadn't been so frigid he might have been tempted to lie down and nod off for a few moments.

He regained his senses and lifted his head. There were no screens close by, and the tiny fraction of light available came from the screens off in the distance, around the bend. His eyes had acclimated to the extreme darkness, and he could finally see that this was not a dead end, but a door. The outline was just barely visible to his straining eyes.

He looked up at the bot, "So what now?"

A loud metallic impact, like the sliding of a massive deadbolt, came in answer. A blade of light appeared along the bottom of the door as the seal was broken. It assaulted his dilated eyes and forced him to look away.

As the door rolled upwards the corridor was bathed in pure, overpowering white light. A rush of even colder air washed over him.

Deck lowered his hand from over his eyes and tried to cope with the intense light. As his eyes adjusted, it became clear that the light was not terribly bright or remarkable at all. It was the normal, full light that was once used constantly before the disaster, but seemed blinding after days of darkened gloom.

Like hot breath on a cold day, the mist poured off of the memory cores and dispersed as it was pushed away by the wind.

He stood slowly, making sure his legs were up to the task of holding him erect on their own. Standing brought a new wave a of light-headedness. The once hot sweat and blood had turned frigid cold, and now siphoned away his strength as they dried. He was going cold and numb again. The feeling was so familiar to him now that he paid it little regard. He looked into the light, and then looked at the bot. It had no answers to give him.

He knew this was a one-way trip.

The moment he stepped through, the door began to slide closed behind him. It sealed with a solid, hammering impact. Out of curiosity, he slapped his hand against the surface. Of course it didn't move. There were no features, no controls, no way for anyone but Shodan to control this door. It wouldn't open again until she wanted it to.

He was at the bottom of a gradual ramp leading up into what could only be the bridge. He'd seen many pictures of the original in various marketing and documentary pieces on Global Net. It seemed larger in real life. Up above was the large dome ceiling, inset with numerous thick, triangular windows that fit together to form a mosaic of the exterior view. Every fourth triangle in the pattern was a light instead of a window, providing the constant, potent illumination. The brightly lit interior cast glare on most of the windows, making them useless for any sort of real stargazing.

The room was about twenty meters in diameter. The walls were encased in memory core formations. Most of the various control stations in the center of the room were gone, replaced with more pillars of memory. The temperature reminded him of being in the walk-in fridge on the crew deck. Mist poured off of the larger structures of hardware, as if they were smoldering.

In the back of the room was the door that led to the head and officer's lounge. That door had been sealed shut and plated over.

On the left side of the room was what remained of the executive elevator. The door stood open, revealing the exposed shaft. Chilled air rushed out of the opening, filling the room. This was obviously now part of Shodan's new ventilation and cooling system.

On the right side of the room was an office for the commanding officer. The door had been removed, and by the looks of it the room was now just another space for Shodan's brain.

A single chair served as the lone reminder that this place had once been used by people. It sat at the last remaining console.

The bridge was quiet, aside from the constant breath of moving air. The pulse was strongest here. It seemed to deaden the air, negating the possibility of sound.

Despite the surreal setting, what amazed him most was that he was alone. Shodan had allowed him into the inner sanctum without so much as a lone cyborg to stand guard. He could whip out his sword and begin hacking away at hardware if he wanted, and she had no way to stop him. Either that, or she had some concealed means of dispatching him quickly if the need arose.

He took his seat.

As he threw his tired, broken body into the chair, a panel slid open at the console to reveal the only dataport he had seen on the bridge.

He drew the last gel-pack out of his pocket and separated the pouch from the detonator. He set the milky-white packet of volatile gel on the floor, and placed the detonator on the console in front of him. He checked the timer.

Eighteen minutes.

He hesitated for several moments with his right hand hovering over the dataport.

He needed to hack into her again, to find what he was missing. Something had driven him to this place, to reconnect. He had to find out what that was. He also needed to keep her from finding out where the explosives were hidden.. He had no idea how to do this. As far as he knew, she had read him like an open book last time. If she discovered where the other three gel-packs were, she would have no use for him.

He had no idea how to keep her out. Like Coffman said, the human brain really doesn't have ICE. He wished he could somehow erase the information from his own brain. The best he could do was force himself to imagine putting the bomb in places he didn't, and to avoid thinking about the real locations at all.

With his hand still hovering over the dataport, he reflected on the insanity of joining his mind to a psychotic, murderous AI in search of something he couldn't even identify.

He jacked in.

It all came flooding back to him the instant he broke the surface. He was rushing over a glowing plain of data that extended to every horizon. Cities of glittering geometric shapes rolled past beneath him like waves of scrolling text. The shapes flickered with the promise of overflowing detail, masked only by his relative speed and distance. The grid of shapes flew by with increasing speed as he accelerated toward the horizon, searching for the edge. The cities became a strobing blur of color as he raced onward.

The first thing he had ever hacked - the keypad in D'Arcy's office - was in here somewhere. He was on the other side of the wall of black ICE now, and he could see the digital landscape of Citadel in all its glory and terrifying detail. That one lone keypad, which had seemed so intricate when discovered, would be no more than a single brick in one of the building-like towers that passed beneath him at blinding speeds.