Hammerjack (29 page)

“We’ve cleared the Port Authority threshold,” Lea announced, buttoning up the pulser’s diagnostic console. “I’ve redirected the signal from the location transponder to cover our tracks. As far as Manhattan is concerned, this bird is heading for Montreal. That should give us enough time to reach our destination before they get wise and start looking for their missing ship.”

Cray drew a pensive breath.

“Where are we headed?”

“East Coast Fusion Directorate.” Lea settled back and let the pulser fly itself, observing her passenger with a guarded curiosity. “About a hundred clicks out to sea, right off the D.C. coast. They maintain a network of power plants out there—enough juice to supply the whole eastern continent. It’s quite a setup.”

“I can imagine,” Cray said. In truth, he didn’t need to imagine anything. GenTec had subcontracted him to the Directorate a couple of years ago to jackproof some of their systems. Their security had been full of holes, which led Cray to believe somebody had been working the place from the inside. He couldn’t prove it at the time—though now, he thought it interesting that Lea had picked that particular place to hide out. “I was under the impression that those plants were automated.”

“Not quite,” Lea told him, letting her smile imply the rest. She changed the subject. “You doing okay over there? You haven’t said much since we left the Zone.”

“I’m fine.” He paused for a few moments, then said earnestly, “Listen, I didn’t get a chance to thank you for what you did back there.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “You held up your end.”

“And I’m sorry for that crack about the speedtecs.”

“Sorry you called me a junkie?” She laughed. “I’ve been called a lot worse than that, Dr. Alden.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point.” He struggled to explain his reasons, trying not to come off as morose. “After you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you make judgments about people. It’s what keeps you alive. After watching what happened to Zoe . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.

“She didn’t use all the time, you know.”

Cray blinked. “What?”

“Zoe wasn’t in the habit,” Lea explained. “She only did it the one time. The run was too damned important. She dropped the speedtecs for insurance in case she got caught.” She reached over and touched his arm. “Heretic doesn’t blame you for what happened, Cray. The agents called the plays, just like they did tonight. You did everything you could for her.”

Cray shook his head, unconvinced.

“I didn’t have to find her.”

“You didn’t have a choice,” Lea said. “Yin would have had you killed and sent someone else. It was your
job,
Cray. And now it’s your job to let Heretic show you what’s real.”

“What if I don’t want to know?” He allowed that to hang for a while, not even certain that he wanted to bring it up. “Dex gave me a pretty good look at the stuff Zoe was running.”

Lea considered what he had said. As Cray watched her reaction, he saw sympathy in her eyes—something he hadn’t expected.

“It’s a war,” she said. The words came out virtual, dreamlike, unreal. “The Collective and the
Inru
have been going at it for a while. When you’ve been fighting long enough, you start thinking about ways to end it. That’s what the
Inru
have been working on—a big gun they can use to settle things once and for all.”

There was Heretic’s voice again, echoing inside of Cray’s head:
You already have the proof. You just don’t know it yet
.

“The new flash.”

“A blueprint for the Ascension.” It was a ghost story, a rendering of the supernatural. “The
Inru
believe the only way to fight Lyssa and the legions of SIs that follow is to outpace them—to advance
human
intelligence to a point far beyond what’s possible in a bionucleic system. Lyssa and others like her would be the redundant components among a race of superbeings, instead of the other way around. No more SIs, no more threat.”

My God,
Cray thought.
No wonder Phao Yin made up a story to get this stuff back. Nobody would believe it even if they knew
.

“Their basic idea was sound,” she continued. “The bionucleic matrix is based on chaos logic, which makes it inherently unstable and unpredictable. That it’s based on living components helps, but it’s still nowhere near as adapted to intelligence as the human mind. The new flash is supposed to augment that—to mimic the superfast relays of a bionucleic system and apply them to the human brain, freeing it from the limitations of its own electrochemistry.”

“How did Zoe fit into this?”

“Heretic had been working between the two factions, trying to keep them both off-balance,” Lea said. “The idea was to slow down the bionucleic project as well as the development of the new flash. When Heretic got word that the
Inru
had completed their experiments, he jacked the GenTec domain to steal their prototype. Zoe was his runner, so she went to collect the data. Phao Yin sent you to get it back for him.”

Cray absorbed what Lea told him, but there was still a piece missing. “I still don’t get it,” he said. “Heretic is a professional hammerjack. It doesn’t make sense he would get involved in something political. There sure as hell isn’t any profit in it.”

“Not everything is about money, Alden.”

“Yin told me the same thing.”

“Yin is a partisan.”

“If you really knew Yin,” Cray said, “you wouldn’t be saying that. Now what about Heretic? How did he get mixed up in this business?”

“It seems like a long time ago,” Lea said. Her tone was distant, drifting into the realm of the personal. “He used to work for the
Inru,
you know. That’s where he learned his chops, jacking Collective domains, plundering data—fighting the establishment, the usual bullshit.” She drifted back, resuming a more practical—and detached—demeanor. “Heretic obtained the Collective’s research on the bionucleic project. Using that, the
Inru
got a jump start on their own program. Reverse engineering saved them years of testing and development, putting them way ahead of the game. That information is what made everything possible. Without it, the
Inru
might never have succeeded.”

“So what changed his mind?”

“He found out his friends were even crazier than his enemies.” Lea shuddered a little. “The
Inru
leadership started talking jihad
.
Righteous fire cleansing the Earth, battling for human souls, some real apocalyptic stuff. By the time Phao Yin came on board, they were talking
selective
evolution—engineering a civilization in which only the true believers would be chosen for the Ascension, while the rest would be made to serve the master race. Heretic decided it was time to get out.”

The cabin was murky, with only the lights from the instrumentation to illuminate the soft features of Lea’s face. The shadows made her appear much wiser than her years.

“It couldn’t have been easy,” he said.

Lea shook her head. “It was bloody.” Then turning toward him, she added, “Or so I’ve heard. You don’t just leave the
Inru
—not when you get to that level.”

“So what is this? Penance?”

“You could call it that.”

“What would
you
call it?”

“A worthy cause,” Lea said. “Heretic doesn’t have many people he can trust. Zoe was one of them. I’m another.”

“Where does that leave me?”

Lea regarded him with some affection, though it was more guarded than that.
She’s feeling me out,
Cray decided—which was just fine with him. He was doing the same to her.

“That remains to be seen,” she told him.

A subtext moved beneath whatever Lea said. There was a lot that Cray wanted to know about her, so many questions he wanted to ask—but that was another part of her that fascinated him. To find out too much too soon would upset a delicate balance. It was better to see it in glimpses, rather than all at once.

The navigation console beeped, putting that moment on hold. Lea reached for the interface, calling up a display of their current position. “We’re two minutes out,” she reported. “I’m transferring approach over to Directorate control.”

Cray looked at the display. The screen showed a virtual construct of the fusion platform, with an overlay of their flight path. The power plant was massive—but unlike the structures of New York, it was isolated. Rising out of the waves on a black ocean, it towered over the flat nothingness without even the company of air traffic. The cargo pulser was the only blip on the screen, the stars the only other lights in the sky. As hiding places went, it was sheer perfection.

Cray leveled his eyes on the horizon, where the platform was beginning to appear. It quickly grew to magnificence, inspiring in Cray an awe he had not known in a long time. Lea had sold him on the idea of sanctuary—and though it was fleeting, at least it gave him a moment’s rest. For the moment, that would be enough.

“No place like home,” she said.

The fusion plant spread out across a platform the size of a city block, supported by four gigantic columns that plunged through the opaque depths into the ocean floor. Banks of floodlights lined its perimeter, creating a white aura around the four reactor domes that dominated its surface. A lone traverse beam shimmered through the sky directly above the plant, as if bearing the lightning from an approaching storm; but what appeared out of the night was the tiny form of a single ship, which slowed as it entered the platform’s airspace and came to a hover over one of its landing pads.

Liquid light enveloped the cargo pulser as tether beams brought the ship down. From inside, Cray watched fat droplets of sea spray splatter against his window as the pulser connected with the deck. Then the tethers disengaged and the sound of fading power was displaced by a steady wail that was almost human in its insistence.

Cray followed Lea into the cargo bay, where she opened up the belly hatch and pushed a folding ladder down to the deck below. The funneling wind caught her long hair and tossed it around her head in swirls. She pushed the tresses away from her face and gestured toward the open hatch.

“After you.”

Cray stepped down into a whipping gale that nearly blew him off his feet. He steadied himself and reached up the ladder to help Lea down, her body incredibly light in his hands. It was only when they were both outside that he realized they were not alone. A single figure concealed beneath a hooded coat emerged from the dirty glow of the landing lights. He carried two more coats under his arm.

“Put these on!” the stranger shouted, handing one to each of them. Lea bundled herself up while Cray tried to get a look at the man’s face. It was difficult to see anything between the glare and the maelstrom, and he quickly gave up on the idea. By the time he zipped up and donned his hood, he was just grateful for the warmth.

“Thanks,” Cray told him.

“No problem,” the man replied. “Now if you don’t mind . . .”

Cray felt the business end of some weapon poke him in the ribs. The stranger held a pulse pistol, his finger poised on the trigger. Looking back up, Cray caught the glint of something metallic underneath the man’s hood.
Platinum teeth,
he thought, knowing without seeing.
The son of a bitch is grinning at me
.

Cray tried to put himself between the stranger and Lea—but that was before he realized she had a weapon on him as well, the same v-wave emitter she had used back in the Zone. Her expression told him she had no reservations about using it if necessary.

“Don’t I feel like an asshole,” he said.

“Sorry about this, Alden,” Lea apologized. “But it’s for your own good, trust me.”

Cray put his hands up.

The stranger laughed—more of a giggle, the kind of thing you heard in the street when somebody got burned. Nudging Cray, he pointed his attention toward the northeast, where a line of intense thunderstorms was gathering. The enormous clouds revealed themselves in bursts of sporadic lightning, as deadly as they were beautiful.

“Winter storm,” the stranger informed him. “Maybe hurricane force. You picked a hell of a night to come out.”

Cray couldn’t agree more.

A salt-encrusted porthole was the only window in the chamber where they took him, but at least it permitted a view of the outside. To hear the rain and the thunder without a visual reference would have been maddening. The thrum of electrical power that permeated the place was already oppressive, like a trillion heartbeats pressed against the outer walls. Cray wondered how long they intended to keep him there.

He was strapped down to a table in the middle of the room, surrounded by racks of equipment he did not recognize. Mounted in the ceiling above him was another device—a homemade job cobbled together from various parts, including a radiation inducer that rotated on an electric bearing. It whirred about until it pointed itself at Cray’s head. Watching that medieval instrument close in on him, Cray still doubted that Lea had brought him all the way out here just to kill him. But torture? That was a different matter altogether.

“Hold still,” she said, via a speaker on the wall, while she watched from the other side with a remote camera. “This should only take a minute.”