Nexus 02 - Crux (53 page)

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“Is this how you killed Warren Becker?” Holtzmann demanded. “Is it?”

“Becker did what he was told,” Barnes replied. Then his left hand reached out, closed around Holtzmann’s jaw, and clenched, prying it open.

Holtzmann cried out, struggled, kicked at Barnes, beat at Barnes’ head with his hands. The man was so strong!

Then Barnes brought his other hand around, grabbed hold of Holtzmann’s upper jaw, and pulled his mouth open.

Holtzmann felt bitter powder land on his tongue as Barnes crushed the pill with his fingers. He tried to spit the powder out, but by then his mouth was shut, clamped shut by Barnes’ impossibly strong hands.

No! He struggled, refused to swallow. He got his hands on Barnes’ forearm, tried to pry the man off of him, strained with all his might.

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Nothing. Barnes was inhumanly strong.

He could feel the powder dissolving now, turning to mush on his tongue. Rivulets of a foul bitter taste were running down his throat.

No! God, no!

He stared at Barnes with eyes gone wild, found the man staring back at him, a look of grim satisfaction on his face, a fervor in the eyes, a small smile on his lips. A monster. This man was a monster.

More of the bitter fluid leaked into his throat.

Holtzmann stopped struggling then. He let himself go limp in submission. It was too late.

Barnes let him go and Holtzmann slumped bonelessly to the floor.

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He tried to spit, but there was nothing solid left in his mouth, just a thin greenness to his saliva. Barnes chuckled.

Holtzmann went Inside then. While he had the bandwidth. He piggybacked on the current connection, fired off a last message to his wife.

[I love you, Anne. I’ve always loved you. Please forgive me.]

Then he opened his eyes and looked up at Barnes.

“Why?” Holtzmann asked. “Why all this?”

Barnes stared at him for a moment, then answered. “Americans forget too quickly, Martin. Our lives are too easy. Fear is the only way to diligence.”

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Holtzmann shook his head. “But it’s a lie.” He could feel the drug working now, feel the pain in his chest, feel trembles taking hold in his arms.

Barnes shook his head in return. “It’s not a lie. It’s vigilance. It’s the price of freedom.”

A stabbing pain jabbed its way through Holtzmann’s chest. He gasped and folded his hands in. He was shaking now. His legs were twitching.

“People deserve to know…” he said weakly. “PLF is a lie… You created…”

Barnes stared coldly down at him.

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The real pain hit him then, impaling him with its intensity, forcing his whole body to arch and spasm. A giant took hold of his heart, started crushing it slowly in his fist. Its chambers gave up beating and simply clenched tight instead. Pain flooded him, rushed out from his chest and filled every inch of his body. He tried to scream but couldn’t breathe, couldn’t work his diaphragm to draw breath. His limbs spasmed, contorting of their own will. His vision went blurry, then dimmed. The world swam away from him as the blood flow to his brain ceased.

A booming crash came from outside as the storm blasted them with its fury. The last thing Martin Holtzmann saw was a blurry image of Maximilian Barnes standing above him, lit by a flash of lightning, with a single message overlaid atop him.

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And Martin Holtzmann smiled. Through the pain he grinned up at Barnes, grinned savagely, as death took him.

79

PRELUDE TO VIOLENCE

Saturday November 3rd

Breece sat in a booth in the small restaurant on K Street. He was in casual business attire, his hair and eye color changed, an extra forty pounds of false weight on his frame, temporary prosthetics changing the shape of his face. He watched on his slate as people filed in to Westwood Baptist. Security funneled the arrivals through checkpoints, scanned them for weapons, bombs, Nexus.

Inside the church, Miranda Shepherd was already beside her husband, just yards from the podium where he would stand and give his rousing speech exhorting Texans to elect Daniel Chandler, a true servant of the Lord, to the governorship.

The speech would be broadcast live to millions. And it would have a more…
explosive
conclusion than the audience might expect.

Breece smiled to himself.

9.32am.

Almost showtime.

Kade stared out at the sea and the darkening sky. The sun had set already, drowned in that endless ocean.

Was Shiva infiltrating minds already? Subverting them?

You paved the way
, Ilya whispered in his thoughts.

“Yes,” Kade whispered aloud. “Yes, I did.”

He checked the time. In little more than an hour the PLF would use Nexus to kill again. Hundreds would die. Fault lines would be cracked even wider. Retributions and reprisals. More terror.

Su-Yong Shu had seen it. A war between human and transhuman. It was beginning. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Nakamura, Sam, and Feng reviewed the plan one more time. Here – Lane’s rooms. Here – the doors the children came in and out of, the wing they were housed in. There – the vehicles by the house. There – the airfield, the hangar, the plane that Sam could fly, that could get her and the children to the Indian-occupied Andaman Islands.

Here, here, here, and here – the targets. Communications systems. Surveillance cameras. Radar. Missile launchers. Guard posts. Mobile guards on rotation.

They went through it again and again. Then it was time to go.

They launched the small inflatable boat. Thirty yards out Nakamura subvocalized a command, and the sub sank silently behind them, swallowed back up into the sea. Status updates scrolled across his retinal display as the sub set off on the next stages of its mission.

Ahead of him Sam and Feng sat on either side of the small boat. They were all in top-of-the-line chameleonware, their battle systems linked by short-range IR laser. Nakamura’s goggles painted them as translucent green outlines. He stared at Sam’s ghostly shape, and something tugged at his chest.

I hope you can forgive me, Sam, Nakamura thought. Someday.

Sam scanned the horizon as they moved in.

Her goggles picked out cameras on the house at the top of the cliff, drew red circles around them, around the guard post at the top of the cliff, around a soldier moving on patrol.

Radar swept over them twice as they approached. The combat display in Sam’s goggles alerted her, identified the sources, offered firing vectors to neutralize them.

The house and cliff ahead of them were augmented in her vision, 3D topology subtly enhanced. If she chose she could zoom in, pass through those walls and into schematics compiled by satellite and drone data, zoom through the key locations for their plan. Her teammates were arrows at the periphery of her visual field, their proximity high and their statuses both showing green.

God, I’ve missed technology, Sam thought.

Feng interrupted her thoughts.
Do you trust him?
the Confucian Fist sent her.

Sam didn’t turn, didn’t look at Nakamura, didn’t show any sign that Feng was speaking to her.

Feng continued,
He’s not going to take Kade back to the CIA?

Sam hesitated. Do I trust Kevin? Really?

Then she felt ashamed of herself, ashamed for not trusting the man who’d run into a burning building, who’d picked her up off of that floor, who’d jumped from a third-story window to save her, who’d raised her as much from that point on as her foster parents had.

Yes
, she sent it back to Feng, firmly, clearly.
I trust him.

They brought the inflatable boat ashore on the narrow strip of tumbled rocks at the base of the cliff, in a ripple of the rock that would hide them from the view of the guardhouse.

Sam shook her left shoulder out. It was stiff, but her posthuman genetics had healed most of the damage left by the bullet a week ago. She stretched, then took point on the climb, with Feng behind her and Nakamura in the rear.

The cliff was granite, vertical but run through with cracks and irregularities. Her combat goggles painted green contour lines on it, showed her every indentation and protuberance, animated a path forward for her, gently flashed location of every hand and foot hold that would keep her out of view of guards and cameras.

Sam put a hand on the cliff, and the gecko grips in the palm of her glove adhered her to it. Then she started to climb, strength and skill and technology eating up the three-hundred-foot ascent, chameleonware turning her into little more than a faint distortion against the rock.

Above, the children waited.

Feng climbed, his eyes on the rock. His body was sore, still aching from the wounds he’d taken, but better than it had been days ago. Posthuman genes, ample calories, and the medkit Nakamura had given him access to saw to that.

Feng focused his eyes and hands on the climb, but part of his mind still spun. Nakamura. Would the man truly allow Kade and Feng to go? Would he betray his CIA masters that way?

No, he thought. Nakamura had told Sam what she wanted to hear. He would double-cross them in the end, do his best to deliver Kade – and likely Feng – to the Americans.

Feng wasn’t about to let that happen.

He climbed on, his senses attuned to the man below him, his mind running through scenarios.

Nakamura paused at the top of the climb, still on the rock, just below the lip that would put them on the walkway atop the cliff. To his left the transparent outlines of Feng and Sam clung to the stone.

His retinal display tapped into the laser-delivered feed from the circling surveillance drones. They flapped their bird-like wings hundreds of yards away from the island and zoomed in their robotic eyes. Two men in the guardhouse a hundred feet north along the cliff. Another was passing by on his mobile patrol now.

Nakamura bounced instructions to the sub’s above-water antenna. Status rolled across his eyes. An aerial map of the region came alive in his senses. Out at sea, half-a-dozen green icons blinked in his vision, in a loose ring around the island, a thousand yards out from shore.

Positions, check.

Weapons, check.

Target locations, locked.

Nakamura turned his head slowly to his compatriots. Feng nodded. Sam nodded.

It was time.

Kevin Nakamura pulled a menu down with his eyes, clicked on an item, clicked again to confirm, and phase one of the assault began.

80

BRAVE GIRL

Saturday November 3rd

Ling cried for hours. She had never been so frightened in her life. Not even when her mommy’s body had died. Not even when they’d shut her off from her mommy and she’d been alone for the first time. She’d been sure it would end soon, that she’d have her mommy back and not be alone any more…

But now they were going to kill her mommy. Kill her dead, the way that
humans
died. She tried to reach out her mind for Feng again, for Kade again.

FENG! FENG, PLEASE! FENG, HELP ME!

Nothing.

KADE! KADE, I NEED YOU! KADE, PLEASE!

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Ling was alone. And only she could stop the humans from killing her mommy.

She cried curled up in a ball, the ampule and injector from the freezer clutched in her hands. She cried as softly as she could, so her father wouldn’t hear, so he wouldn’t know that
she
knew.

She watched her father in the house monitors. He was asleep, his breathing slow and regular. In just hours he would rise to murder her mother. Unless she did this. Did it now.

Ling Shu rose. She wiped her face with her dress, did her best to stop her sniffles. She was a
posthuman
. Maybe the
only
posthuman if her mother died. She had to be brave. She had to do the right thing.

The house opened the door to her mother’s room for her, and Ling crept out, slowly, quietly. Outside the floor to ceiling windows of the penthouse, Shanghai was alive with light, a city pretending that nothing had ever happened to it. The electronic face of Zhi Li stared at her, a thousand times larger than life, ruby lips smiling, green eyes winking. Ling hated her then. Hated her with a fury that she had to struggle to keep in check.

Ling took a deep breath, then a tiny step, then another, and another, illuminated only by the light of the city and Zhi Li’s porcelain glow, until she stood before her father’s door, the injector in her hand.

The door was locked, the apartment told her. He locked it every night when he retired to his room. But this apartment was hers, not his. Ling reached out with her thoughts, and the door unlocked itself for her with a quiet
snick
.

She held her breath then, waited, watched her father through the cameras in his room. He didn’t stir. He breathed deeply and slowly.

Ling reached out with her thoughts again. The door opened for her, and Ling stepped into her father’s room.

81

ASSAULT ON APYAR KYUN

Saturday November 3rd

In a loose ring around the isle of Apyar Kyun, little more than half a mile from shore, six Moray-class amphibious drones received instructions from their Manta-class submersible mother ship.

Independently, their combat AIs evaluated their instructions. Weapons-safe protocols fired off confirmation and authentication requests, checked the private encryption key used, validated the command authority. Legitimate human instruction had been received. Lethal force had been authorized. Their decision trees dictated that their weapons were now free. Independently they loaded their assault plans, phase alpha, sub-plans one, two, and three. Confirmed. Execute. Execute. Execute.

For a moment nothing happened. The dark sea gently rolled and swelled under a moonless midnight sky. Ashore, a macaw called to its mate. Frogs croaked. Insects chirped.