Hammerjack (36 page)

Funky’s yellow eyes widened.

“What the hell?”

Lea felt a piece of her life draining into that black void. Part of her had expected it. It was the
Inru
’s idea of a fail-safe. Zoe had known it from the moment she made the disease a part of her blood. She knew she was doomed.

But Zoe was a partisan. Cray was just a victim.

Funky jumped around to different regions of Cray’s brain. Lea, meanwhile, tried to find an indication that the process had stopped elsewhere.

“Come on, Vortex,” she insisted. “Give me something.”

Cray could not oblige. The flash continued to spread, no matter where Funky searched. He pushed himself away from the interface console.

“It’s over,” he told her. “They won’t let us stop it.”

“The hell they
won’t,
” Lea said, pleading with him. “You don’t just give up on the man, Funky. Not after all this. We can still fight.”

“But
he
can’t.”

Those words closed the door on her argument. So many of Cray’s tissues had been systematically replaced, any attempt to remove them would probably kill him. Physiologically, he was a different organism—something more than human but as yet incomplete.

Whether or not he
became
complete was a decision neither one of them could make.

“I’m shutting down,” Funky said, switching off his end of the interface.

Trevor Bostic felt it on him: the push, the crush—matter and energy focused against his body, driving him away. The effect, which only intensified as the lift rose higher into the building, was like walking through water. By the time he stepped off at one hundred he was exhausted, and had to pop stimulants just to stay on his feet.

He steadied himself while the amphetamines kicked in, then walked the deserted corridor that led to the bionucleics lab. Bostic had declared the area off-limits after the incident with Alden; but then Avalon turned up in that hospital bed, suspected of
Inru
terrorism, and Bostic’s more paranoid instincts took over. An armed contingent stood guard outside the lab at all times, with orders to kill anyone who approached—Bostic himself as the only exception.

The two CSS guards appeared haggard, cadaverous. Although they rotated out every hour, the stim patches they used had begun to take their toll. Bostic wondered how long Lyssa would be able to keep it up. The power drain on her had to be enormous.

“Stand down,” he ordered the guards.

They stepped aside, allowing Bostic to pass. The corporate counsel wasted no time making his way across the lab, not knowing how long his chemical reinforcements would last. As he passed through the air lock outside the Tank, he doubted his actions here were worth the risk; but he also knew he
had
to see her, if he were ever to realize his ambitions. Phao Yin, after all, would not be around forever—especially now that his free agent had been unmasked as a spy. If he positioned himself the right way, Bostic could profit handsomely from recent events.

Lyssa, meanwhile, carried on as if he had never entered. Bostic watched her for a time, wisps of light crossing back and forth across the Tank with angry and violent purpose. Occasionally they would morph into human shapes, with the substance of ghosts, which collided with one another to release waves of neural energy—the same energy that acted upon him now.

And voices, thousands of them, shrieking Alden’s name.

“Lyssa,” Bostic said, with a measure of pity. “What did he do to you?”

Avalon stayed below the pulser grid all the way from Manhattan, using the standard free approach routes to Montreal. She made a point of following procedure, activating the hovercraft transponder as soon as she was in range of air traffic control. The transmissions were all coded to a diplomatic frequency—another one of Phao Yin’s touches. Not only did it give Avalon priority clearance, it perpetuated a useful fiction that she was on official business for the Assembly. Nobody would ask her any questions. None that mattered, anyway.

“Montreal free flight,” she signaled. “This is Special Air Mission 2000. Request confirmation of ID acquisition and approach path.”

“SAM 2000, acknowledged.” The reply was instantaneous and polite. “Welcome to the Northern Incorporated Territories. We have you on our monitors, just coming over the outer marker. Vector to course three-two-nine, we’ll catch you on automated approach.”

“Negative,” Avalon radioed back. “Initiate manual flight protocols—immediate clearance on Port Authority Gamma. This is a security matter, gentlemen. Keep it tight.”

“Received and understood. State nature of mission, please.”

“Courier.”

“Stand by.” There was a pause of a few seconds while they checked her story out.
Courier
was code for a diplomatic bag, used to ferry state secrets or large sums of cash for covert operations. The mention of the word made most controllers nervous.

Down on the ground, the lights of the Gamma runway sprang to life.

“Clearance granted,” control said. “Have a nice night.”

Avalon dropped altitude, slowing her forward velocity as she flew over the threshold beacon. Automated search floods reached up into the sky and illuminated the hovercraft as it descended, catching exhaust from the ventral jets and cradling the small ship in bright plumes of hot vapor. They parted as the hovercraft settled down on the tarmac, carried away by a steady wind that swallowed the fading whine of the engines. As Avalon shut everything down, she looked out from the cockpit at the vast, flat landscape of the airport. Traffic at that hour of the night was minimal, only a few shuttle flights taking off and landing on the general aviation runways, several kilometers distant. Her own craft was the only one in the immediate area—and though its arrival had been obvious, no ground crews were coming out to meet her.

Avalon secured the craft and popped the lower hatch, dropping the short distance to the ground. She landed like a cat, graceful and crouched. Draped in long shadows from the glare of the lights, she stepped away from the hovercraft and out into the open. Across the fields of concrete, half a kilometer away, she saw her objective. It was a massive complex of hangars—the stark white, rectangular buildings that housed Port Authority vehicles when they weren’t in use.

Avalon moved swiftly, cloaking herself in the shadows and coming up alongside the hangar at a broad angle. Circling toward the back, she followed a wide path that allowed her to get a look at the security architecture of the place. It presented her with few problems. Magnetic trip sensors sealed the doors and windows, backed up by motion detectors scattered broadly enough to leave huge gaps in the areas they covered. Avalon also spotted three cameras—macrodigital jobs, probably plugged into a vid link monitored by airport cops who got paid by the hour. She dropped an infrared filter over her visual sensors, casting a net for laser bleed and following the trail until she located a fiber hub mounted on the outside wall. As she suspected, the circuits all appeared to be local.

She zigged along the blind edge of the motion detectors, then zagged to stay out of the range of the cameras. Finding a comfortable spot, she shuffled along the wall until she reached the hub. The housing was so flimsy that it offered no resistance when she yanked it open. Inside she found a series of optical cables—transmission media for the security countermeasures she had already seen, as well as the ones inside. Avalon plucked them out one at a time, then replaced the housing to conceal her work.

She then moved on to the nearest door, carving out the lock with a stealthblade and slipping inside. Footsteps echoed against hard concrete as she walked into the heart of the building, surrounded by dozens of vehicles of every size and type. Most of them had been in storage for some time, mothballed on racks that were stacked six high from floor to ceiling: a mausoleum of modern aircraft, perched like raptors above her head. Avalon ignored them and concentrated on the recent arrivals, which were parked on the lowest level in whatever spaces were available. She wandered through the maze of jutting wings and hulking fuselages, sensors measuring the configuration of each ship, looking for the one that matched the specifications Phao Yin had given her.

Cargo pulser. L-class, heavy conversion. Registration number NSD-12879PP.

The find was a subliminal push, so natural that it seemed more like ESP than hard input. It directed Avalon toward the back of the hangar, where she found the pulser laying in wait. It faced her head-on, empty cockpit glass suggesting a blank stare.
Alive and dirty,
she thought, noting the pits and carbon scars that dotted the surface of its transluminum skin.
You’ve seen some action, haven’t you?

The pulser was still. Silent. Contemplating.

Tell me a story.

It was a huge thing, designed for mass transport of goods—as well as the occasional smuggling, if its battle scars were any indication. Avalon kept her sensors at low gain as she approached the pulser, playing instincts over enhancements in her search for clues. She ran a hand along its belly, finding the surface rough and caked with an array of exotic impurities. A rapid spectral sifted most of the components. Dust from silicon slag, fluorocarbons, stray benzene, crystalline hydrochlorics—all of them suggested more than a few flights through the Zone, where the atmosphere was rich with such pollutants.

There were also patchy concentrations of sodium chloride, deposited from evaporation, which formed granular deposits that clung to the skin of the ship. Avalon watched them crumble between her gloved fingers, the olfactory receptors of her sensuit translating the chemical composition into a pungent aroma.

Brine. The ocean. Sea salt.

The pulser had been docked at a coastal port. More than that, it had been close to the water’s edge—close enough to be doused in sea spray. High-breaking waves would account for the large volume of salts she found, which indicated the pulser had likely touched down at the edge of a heavy storm system. The salts were also clean, free from the grime and trace elements that covered the rest of the ship. That meant the storm had been recent, probably within the last twenty-four hours.

Avalon made a careful note of her findings, filing everything away into temporary buffers for later analysis. Brushing the dried powder from her hands, she went over to the open belly hatch and hoisted herself inside. She came up into the cargo bay, a cavernous and empty space still reeking from the residue of old shipments. Everything from livestock to drugs to prostitutes had occupied the chamber at one time or the other, leaving behind a collage of stains and smells that reeked of the subculture. Avalon found it stifling.

She spent as little time in there as possible, making a brief sweep for more evidence but finding it impossible to bag anything coherent. She then climbed up into the cockpit, taking a seat in one of the forward chairs and waiting for Alden’s presence to join her. Since closing her eyes was impossible, she darkened her visual sensors and substituted that input with her imagination, assembling his likeness from her memories.

Staring through the window. Face reflected in the glass. You are not alone. The woman is close to you. You know who she is, but nothing of what she’s about.

Avalon took in a deliberate breath, the world taking shape around Cray’s image.

The night passes. Stars in the void. Then clouds hide the stars. The rains come, and they take you—where?

Avalon saw the lightning and heard the thunder, the wind slapping against the pulser so hard it shook. Then unsteady ground beneath the ship as it landed, the cockpit glass crisscrossed with rivulets of seawater. Even now, the haze remained over the windows.

Someplace safe. Where could that be?

Slowly, Alden turned toward her and smiled. That cocky smile of his.

He disappeared.

Avalon was aware of her anger, but fell short of experiencing it. A disjointed emotion, it flashed and faded like the hallucination of Alden sitting next to her—but not before she had her hands around his throat, not before she made him bleed. When she came out of that fugue, she was exhausted. Killing, even when it was imaginary, took a lot out of you.

She sank back into the pilot’s chair, resuming her focus on all things real. Absently, she glazed over the instrument panel with her sensors, finding little of interest on the surface. Even fingerprints had been wiped clean. Avalon reached forward and flipped open the navigational interface, jacking the lockout codes so she could have a look at the latest series of flight logs.
New York to Montreal—nothing in between. Perfect, right down to the arrival and departure times.

So what’s missing?

Port Authority records were useless. Avalon had seen the telemetry, and it matched everything she found aboard, even the diagnostics. Alden and his friends had done a thorough job altering the pulser’s history—but they had done nothing to eradicate the trace evidence on the hull. If Alden had overlooked that detail, he could have overlooked something else. Something invisible and unique.

Avalon played a hunch, punching up a current diagnostic. She ran through everything—avionics, structural integrity, communications—but it was a minor anomaly in the pulser’s electromagnetic throughput that made her stop and look more closely. As the computer routed a simulated transmission beam down the center axis of the airframe, it displayed a .07 percent variance in conductive efficiency—a miniscule amount, but enough to suggest that the ship had suffered some damage during the course of her journey.