Influx (35 page)

Hedrick’s voice came in over the q-link.
“There’s no going back now, Mr. Morrison. There’s not a windowpane left for blocks. That explosion turned night into day for several seconds for miles in every direction. Our cover is blown. It’ll be all over the news. All over the Internet. Once this is over, we need to implement the plan we discussed.”

Morrison looked at the holographic model of downtown revolving in front of him. “You’re right, Mr. Director. It’s time to bring this to a conclusion.”

“Goddamn Alexa!”

“I told you we should have killed her when we had the chance.”

Varuna’s voice interrupted.
“Alexa attempted entry at the breach armed with a positron weapon. Your assumption was correct, Mr. Morrison.”

“Where is she now?”

“Her present position is unknown. She no doubt made the breach to facilitate entry into the complex. I have dispatched all available security drones to stop her.”

Morrison shouted, “Bring up a fucking hologram!”

“Area surveillance dust was scattered in the positron blast, Mr. Morrison. I will get you imagery just as soon as she moves into a coverage area.”

Morrison exhaled in irritation and started heading toward the breach. “She had better hope I don’t find her first.”

A
lexa fell across the night
sky above the city—parts of it were burning. The dark tower of the BTC was capped with a towering cloud, illuminated from below by flames. The structure was an ominous, obsidian volcano in the middle of downtown.

Richard Cotton’s voice shouted in Alexa’s ear via q-link.
“Have you lost your nerve already, my dear? I see you’re fleeing the scene.”

“Give it a rest, Cotton. I have a plan.”

“A plan? Well, you might want to let me in on it because from where I sit it looks like you’re running away.”

“I didn’t breach the wall to invade the complex. I breached it to meet my contact. Now back off and let me handle this.”

“If I’m going to be any help, I need to know the plan.”

“That’s debatable. I will contact you once I finish what I need to finish—so don’t bother me until then.”

Alexa dropped down from the night sky into the sparsely inhabited Detroit suburb of Kettering. Barely a mile and a half from downtown, Kettering had, in recent decades, begun to return to nature. There were large overgrown empty lots of grass, bushes, and trees separating abandoned houses and businesses that stood rotting or partially burned. Here and there families had stayed and appeared to be trying to bring the neighborhood back. However, half the community had been bulldozed flat in an attempt to relieve the blight.

As Alexa descended silently from the night sky, she examined the area below and saw no one. There was just the sound of crickets and distant barking dogs. The grid of streets and sidewalks was still there, along with stop signs. But there was no neighborhood to go with it. She recalled decades ago how much more densely populated this place had been. But even then it was depressed, as traditional manufacturing moved away and jobs became scarce—in her memory, it had never been a prosperous neighborhood.

What few of the locals now remembered (or cared about amid all the civic and economic strife) was that the city of Detroit had started building a subway system back in the early 1920s. Construction on three main tunnels had been completed for a couple miles, one beneath Michigan Avenue, another beneath Woodward, and the third through Kettering—beneath Gratiot Avenue. They radiated like spokes from downtown.

However, with the rise of Ford and the other car companies, the public transit project was abandoned, and Detroit instead became Motor City—the world center of the automobile. The subway tunnels running into downtown were sealed and largely forgotten.

But not by everyone.

The BTC had been using them to move unseen to and from their headquarters facility since the 1970s. The tunnels also linked to service passages that provided still more access points throughout the city. BTC officials had watched city planning commission projects closely to make certain the tunnels were never disturbed, and they had likewise removed most records of their existence from the city archives. The tunnels were deep enough that they were seldom disturbed by construction projects—and when that seemed likely, the BTC intervened through proxies.

Alexa touched down in tall grass and darkness. She examined the area with her night vision visor and saw only thickets and dense trees bordering the vacant lots. There were mattresses and other garbage dumped here and there, and graffiti on distant abandoned houses, but no one in sight.

Satisfied, she moved toward what gate sixteen had become—a flat concrete pad edged by tall grass. It had evolved over the decades as the neighborhood changed. As nearby homes were abandoned, it was decided that the elevator leading into the underground should be made as uninteresting as possible. The elevator had once been surrounded by a fenced garage but now was only edged with tall bushes and trees. Instead of lowering automobiles silently into the underground, it now accommodated flight teams.

As she crept closer, Alexa concealed herself below the leaning remains of a burned-out toolshed. She could see the weed-encrusted concrete of gate sixteen clearly from the darkness. She then waited silently. A glance at her heads-up display showed that she had perhaps fifteen minutes to wait for Grady’s security escort.

As she waited, the minutes passed slowly until she could hear someone talking—a high-pitched, disturbed voice in the distance. Her unnaturally sharp hearing was able to make it out . . .

“. . . took it. What can we do? You asked me what can we do? And I gots no answer. I gots no answer, Mariel. No answer.”

The chatter continued over minutes as an elderly African American man wandered slowly along the dark sidewalk by moonlight—passing by the ghosts of a community that had left him behind.

He waved his arms as he hobbled along. “I couldn’t! I couldn’t. You know I can’t. Why do you keep on me?”

Alexa checked the timer in her heads-up display.

“I paid them! I paid them.” The old man was crossing through the field now.

She looked for something to throw—to scare him away.

But as she looked up, the BTC strike team arrived, silently descending from the sky. One moment there was nothing, and the next there were half a dozen BTC operators in jet-black diamondoid assault armor standing with a transport shell held between them like a coffin. Their armor swallowed all reflected light—they seemed like negative spaces outlined in the lesser darkness.

She could see the homeless old man stunned into silence just meters away. Why hadn’t they scanned the area before descending? Were these operators idiots? Did they not care?

One of them nodded toward the old man, and the others looked his way.

The old man threw up his hand and pointed. “I see you, you devils! I see you there! The machinery of your deceit!”

The operators nudged each other, and then one of them pointed an armored finger at the man. An intense beam of light stabbed out, creating a sound like tearing fabric.

Intense fiery embers started to spread through the old man as if he were newspaper. He shrieked in agony as his body and clothes were consumed—and then blew away in ashes, leaving only a small spot of lush grass burning. It, too, soon faded and died away.

The assault team slapped each other on the back heartily, their armor ringing.

Alexa’s eyes narrowed at them with rage.

The team began to sink into the concrete as if it were quicksand.

Alexa knew the elevator was descending. The gate had been improved back around the turn of the millennium with a hologram that projected the concrete surface even when the elevator was descending. Likewise, she knew that not long after it began to descend, twin security doors would swing up to seal the opening.

As soon as the tops of their helmets disappeared beneath the hologram, Alexa leapt up and activated her gravis, bringing herself into free fall toward the elevator shaft—and then down through the holographic concrete and into blackness.

Her night vision visor kicked in almost immediately, and she could see the harvester team descending rapidly as the twin security doors rose toward her. She barely slipped between the doors as she fell, and then drew back on her downward motion—hovering silently ten feet above their heads and hoping none of them looked up.

Fortunately they seemed tired. She couldn’t hear their voices since they were using a team q-link, but she hoped they were lulled into a feeling of false security now that they were inside.

The elevator descended to a depth of a hundred feet, then stopped. The operators immediately grabbed the transport shell and “fell” forward into the access tunnel and out of sight. That gave Alexa a chance to glide down faster and then to fall sideways after them.

As she remembered, the passage soon came out into the subway tunnel itself along with a green tiled platform. It had been modified by the BTC long ago to accommodate vehicles—which was no longer necessary; a ramp ran down to where the tracks would have been laid. Everything was covered in dust. The arched masonry work was impressive, but that’s the way they used to build things, she thought.

From here the tunnel was a ruler-straight shot to downtown, about two miles away. The soldiers were already ahead of her, obviously eager to get back to base and get their reward for a job well done. They grabbed their prisoner’s container and shifted gravity to drop into the twenty-foot-tall shaft as though it were a massive well, and with a whoosh they disappeared into the tunnel.

Alexa powered the gravis first across the platform and then, running along the tiled wall, fell after them in the darkness.

Precisely what she was going to do next was a big question. They were heavily armed and armored. She was not.

She glanced at her display and confirmed that they were at terminal velocity—one gravity. That meant at a descent rate of about one hundred seventy-five feet per second, she had roughly sixty seconds to figure out what to do. After that, they would have arrived at the edge of the BTC complex, and she’d have nowhere to hide.

She clapped her arms to her sides and gained on them as they fell in a leisurely free-fall posture. Four of them were arrayed as a stack, one falling below the other; two additional men up front fell side by side, the transport shell below them. As she came up on the rearmost operator, she could see the soldiers were equipped with standard assault armaments: glove-based gravity projectors and XD guns, infrared lasers, psychotronic weapons. Basically enough firepower to vaporize her several times over—especially since she was only wearing a tac suit. These guys were clad in armor where the impact of a twenty-millimeter cannon round could probably be buffed out with beeswax.

But then, there was always their kinetic energy to make use of . . .

Alexa came up behind the rearmost soldier as a worker’s alcove loomed into view in the tunnel wall ahead. She moved beside him and elbowed him toward the wall.

Before he could adjust or even react he impacted face-first into the stone abutment at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, the diamondoid helmet smacked against it like a billiard ball. Alexa adjusted her gravity just in time—the stone wall rushing past just inches from her face.

Looking below she could see that none of the others had heard a thing over the roar of their descent down the tunnel. A glance back showed the smashed operator’s body still hurtling down the tunnel behind her, still in its own gravity field, as if the subway tunnel were a mine shaft—but the body was bouncing off the walls the entire way.

That was going to be a problem sooner or later . . .

Alexa slapped her arms onto her thighs again and accelerated toward the next soldier. This time she reared back and kicked him into a buttress of stone, and weaved back into the center of the tunnel as his armored body sheared some of the stones away from the wall behind her. As the stones got caught up in his gravity field, they started clattering down the tunnel behind her along with his body.

That was going to be another problem soon, too.

She descended headfirst now and spun the legs of the third soldier, causing him to cartwheel into another service alcove. He stuck there for a moment before the other bodies struck him and dragged him down the tunnel.

Alexa estimated she had barely fifteen seconds left before they reached the end of the line, so she streamlined herself as best she could and spun the fourth soldier into the wall, shearing off a metal pipe in the process.

Seeing lights ahead, she pulled back slowly on her gravity field—looking behind her to bat aside bodies, rocks, and other debris that fell slightly faster than she did. As they passed her, her gravity field was warped, and she pushed off the wall at one point, narrowly avoiding another buttress.

But moments later she was behind all of the falling debris, and she cranked back her gravity in full reverse. Within seconds she had slowed to a stop—at which point she killed all gravity reflection and tumbled to a stop, standing on the floor of the tunnel. She was glad that railroad tracks had never been laid.

She then glanced up ahead to see that the two lead operators had come to a stop, placing the transport shell on the ground between them at the entrance to the BTC tunnel complex. Just as they turned around, the dead bodies of four of their comrades and assorted masonry hit them at terminal velocity and smashed them against the back wall—where they all stuck like bugs on fly paper in the altered gravity fields of the dead. For all intents and purposes, the fallen had just hit the bottom of a two-mile-deep mine shaft.

Alexa pulled her positron pistol and closed the final hundred meters on foot. As she came out into the lights at the entrance to BTC tunnel sixteen, she could tell the security detail was out of action. The impact alone probably broke their skulls within their suits—or at the very least knocked them unconscious.

She holstered her pistol and raced to the matte-black, aerodynamic transport shell. It was lying upside down, so she rolled it over and opened the control panel. She pounded the “open” button, and it hissed as the lid rose.

Jon Grady was strapped inside, asleep, and she started slapping him awake.

“Jon, get up! Wake up!”

Grady came around, greatly confused as he covered his face. “What? What is it?”

She grabbed him by the shirt collar—since his gravis had apparently been taken. “It’s me, Alexa. We need to get moving.”

He nodded, still looking confused, and slowly climbed out of the transport shell. He glanced around. “Where are we?”

“The edge of BTC headquarters. There’s a security gate ahead, but the chief AI construct has agreed to help us.”

“Hold it, what? Let me get my bearings.” He stopped as he saw the six armor-clad operators lying in an unnatural gravity field against the wall—blood now pooling around several of them at an impossible angle. “What the hell . . . ?”

“It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. Hey, wake up!” She slapped him.

“Ow! Okay, I’m awake.”

She opened the cargo hold of the transport shell and found his makeshift gravis and helmet. “Put these on while we’re moving. AIs will have noticed these guys flatlined, and we need to be long gone by the time reinforcements arrive.”