The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (2 page)

There was silence, and after a few seconds of it Shaw repeated his message.

Silence again.

“Eighty clicks out,” Iverson called.

Shaw picked up the wireless again. “Listen to me. You know what weapons we have here … what we have pointed at you. It’s never too late to turn back … It doesn’t have to end this way.”

Shaw waited. That hadn’t been by the book, and Yang was giving him a funny look. It had been worth a shot. Anything to shake off this feeling.

Shaw opened his mouth to speak, but the wireless crackled. “The future is uncertain. If humanity has one saving grace, it’s that the Lattice can’t see into the future. I strike this blow because our pasts and our private thoughts should be our own and no one else’s.”

This was the first time anyone had spoken back and Shaw and Iverson exchanged a surprised look. Should he attempt to ward the pilot off again? He looked back to the map screen and saw how fast the hovercraft was approaching. Could he reason with the pilot? He thought for a few precious seconds before he gently set the wireless down.

“Fire Thunderbolts at the intruder,” Shaw said.

“Firing Thunderbolts,” Iverson repeated.

Shaw touched his ring to the red symbol of the hovercraft on the table and then brought it to his temple. Within a second he was moving at tremendous speed over the bright desert, perfectly tracking the hovercraft. Iverson hadn’t exaggerated its state of disrepair. It was a bucket of bolts. Metal plates seemed to hang off it haphazardly—some plates were scorched black, as if they’d just survived an accident in the shop; others looked like they’d been patched on from a bright red sports car.

The blast should be coming within seconds. He waited … waited … waited.

Just when Shaw started to wonder if something had malfunctioned with the Thunderbolt satellites, the blast came, shrieking toward him. Even though the blast couldn’t touch him during a jump, Shaw flinched.

He waited for the burst of flame to clear … and he was shocked to see the hovercraft had survived, hurtling through the air at a breakneck speed. It looked like a brand new vehicle. The metal plates had fallen away during the laser blast to reveal a sleek black probe that must have formed a secret inner skeleton to the ship.

Was it moving faster too? Shaw felt like he was flying at least twice as fast over the ground.

His mind was still inside the jump watching the hovercraft, but his body—still back at the table—shouted, “Fire Thunderbolts again!”

Shaw waited for the next round of lasers. He heard the lasers cut through the air more than he saw them. The craft dropped closer to the desert floor under the direct hit, but to Shaw’s amazement, it stayed aloft, and continued its deadly trajectory.

Shaw touched his ring to his temple and his mind was back at his table. The first thing he noticed was the bleating siren—an automatic system when a raider was within fifty kilometers of impact. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d heard it.

“They were counting on the lasers!” Shaw exclaimed. The readout was showing that the hovercraft was indeed moving much faster. Estimated impact was now less than six minutes.

“That rusty hovercraft was just a shell,” Iverson cursed. “The energy from the laser was somehow transferred into propulsion.”

Shaw looked to Iverson, but his ring had just tapped his temple. Shaw turned to another officer. “Bailey! Are the ground-based lasers locked?”

“No, sir,” she answered. “They’re still offline. We don’t know why.”

Shaw didn’t waste time with screaming the
What?
he wanted to shout in reply. “Get Braybrook. I need nukes online.”

He pressed his hand on the table and said, “L T C T T W 3 V 1 1 G.” DNA, heat, fingerprints, and now his voice print on a long string of memorized numbers and letters. Even this could be fooled if someone went to the trouble, but it would have been unlikely.

“Authorization confirmed by General Braybrook,” Bailey answered. “Nukes are tracking the target. Command now fully on your screen.” A portion of the map on the screen changed to a sequence of six red buttons. All he had to do was drag one of them … and literally drop it on its target.

Iverson had jumped back. “The control panel looks ancient, but underneath it, it’s all modern. More than modern. I didn’t recognize all of it. The whole thing was a goddamn con job! And I fucking fell for it,” Iverson spat. “Working on ground lasers, sir.”

Shaw looked back at the table. Thirty-five kilometers. Less than three minutes.

“Forget it. I’m not sure they would have been effective anyway. We’re taking the ship out with a nuke and we’ll figure out what the hell happened later.”

“Sir?” said a voice beside him.

Shaw ignored Yang. “Bailey, sound the radiation siren. We need to give a warning to everyone in the tower that nukes are about to be deployed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Throughout the Installation a new siren began to scream.

Shaw watched the clock. He wanted to give the people in the tower at least thirty seconds notice. The hovercraft would just be seeing the top of the tower over the landscape.

“Sir?” Yang asked again.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“Thank you for showing me about the cuffs.” Yang sounded almost regretful.

“What?” Shaw asked, looking up. Yang was at his side, too close. In his peripheral vision, Shaw saw Yang’s arm coming toward his hip, something black in his hand.

Shaw was too shocked to have consciously reacted, but he felt his body twist away, and his hand groped for Yang’s wrist. Instead of his wrist, he caught Yang’s thumb. Grasping for something, he felt the tips of two fingers touch a black pad in Yang’s hand.

There wasn’t any doubt what it was now. A nanoshock. A wet black mass of millions of nano robots, programmed to soak through the skin on contact and attack nerve cells. Their effect—

Intense pain, somehow mixed with an intense numbness. It radiated through Shaw’s body from his fingers. He recognized the sensation from a brief jump during training. Somehow the pain was worse when it was happening to his own body. Shaw tried to cry out, but none of his nerves were fully working and he only managed a grunt. His legs crumpled beneath him and he fell to the floor.

The inky blackness was spreading, visibly crawling down his two fingers.

Above him, Yang was watching him writhe, almost as shocked as Shaw. Like he’d never seen the effects before.

Yang shook himself out of it, and moved his attention to the table.

The nukes
, Shaw realized through the pain
.
He was going for the nukes.

Shaw struggled to move his arm. He had seconds left before the nanoshock left him totally immobile. His fingers were inches away from Yang’s leg. With all of his mental energy focused on the effort, Shaw lunged, his two infected fingers clasping around Yang’s ankle. Yang looked down at him, surprise on his face. Only a second or two before—there! Yang’s face wrenched and his body trembled. He was clinging to the table for support.

Shaw tried to let go, but he found his body didn’t respond at all. Any longer to grab Yang and his body would have been in the final stages of the shock, unable to move. But had it been enough? Yang was doubled over. Had he fired the nukes?

Shaw’s vision started to go, and through the growing darkness, he thought he saw Iverson throwing Yang away from the table. There was another figure too—someone at Shaw’s side, pulling up his shirt. Shaw thought he saw a needle slide into his forearm.

Instantly, the cry of pain he’d been saving up was unleashed. A terrible scream that made everything feel worse. But at least he could move. Shaw curled himself into a ball, willing the pain to lessen.

A hand was on his shoulder. “Sir? Sir? Are you all right?” Iverson. Shaw felt better, knowing that if he could recognize a voice the shock must not have reached his brain.

“The hovercraft,” Shaw coughed. “Not me. The …”

“I got it. Twelve kilometers away. Sir, we need to—”

Shaw moved his jaw again, recovering his muscles. “Help me up.”

“You need to take care of yourself, sir.”

“Help me up!”

Iverson and the other figure—a medic, it turned out—lifted him up. Shaw leaned on the table, his eyes trying to focus on the map. It kept shifting in and out of focus. Shaw took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

He counted to five and opened them. Things were clearer. His mind calmer. He looked at the map again.

The hovercraft’s trail was traced across the desert, ending in a red dot that was marked with a radiation symbol. Shaw looked down at the nuke count. Empty.

“You used all six nukes?”

“No, sir. Yang tried to deploy them against the Installation itself, but the AI asked for a second confirmation code. He started sending the nukes off into the hills, away from the hovercraft. He got five off. You stopped him from deploying the last one. If he’d gotten it off, the Installation would have been defenseless against the hovercraft … we’d all be dead.”

“You only had one shot at it?”

“Well, the computer did most of the work,” Iverson said, letting a grin spread over his face.

Shaw attempted a smile back. It was interrupted by a deep cough, and his face soured. “Let’s not celebrate too much. No raider’s ever gotten so close to the Lattice. There’s going to be hell to pay.”

Shaw paced Marc Braybrook’s office, waiting for the general to return and wondering if his career would survive the meeting.

When he got tired of pacing, he inspected the tips of his two infected fingers. They looked like blackened steel where they had made contact with the surface of Yang’s handheld weapon.

The nanoshock was a simple enough tool. Like a makeup compact, it could sit safely in a pocket until it was opened. And then … Shaw shuddered. There were low-pain and non-fatal strains of the bots for self-defense that legally could be printed at home. Shaw knew this one was not from a home printer. Yang had intended to kill.

Braybrook entered and sat down behind his mahogany desk, his eyes glancing at Shaw’s fingers. “You’re lucky you just grazed the fucking thing.”

“Yes, sir,” Shaw said, dropping his hand to his side. “Although the disinfecting bots the doc gave me didn’t work.”

Braybrook’s eyebrow went up. “There’s no antidote?”

“It stopped the pain, and stopped it from spreading. But the black’s obviously still there. They need time to reconfigure the antidote, I guess. Doc said the shock was ‘encrypted’ somehow.”

Braybrook grunted. “State of the art hovercraft, why not a state of the art nanoshock too?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sit down, Shaw,” Braybrook said.

Shaw tried to focus on the General, his wide build, his graying moustache and gray eyes—
though didn’t the right one look a little brighter?

“If you think I’m going to debrief you without a scribe …” the General said, and Shaw nodded, not surprised. Somewhere, probably in the next room, Braybrook’s assistant had jumped into Shaw’s mind and was feeding his thoughts verbatim onto Braybrook’s contact lens. It had been a while since anyone had spoken to Shaw with a scribe. But after today …

“Exactly,” the General confirmed.

“Would you like a verbal report, sir?”

“For old-time’s sake,” Braybrook said, with a trace of a smile.

“At oh-nine-fifty-six this morning Lieutenant Yang alerted me to an inbound raider,” Shaw began, and took Braybrook through the course of events that morning. It was a formality, of course. Braybrook and the Army’s team of investigators would have jumped back to see everything they needed to. Making Shaw retell it, though, allowed them to assess Shaw’s emotional response to each event, and to see what information he privileged, what he thought was important.

“In short,” Shaw concluded, “it was an expert attack, coordinated perfectly and capitalizing on all our weaknesses. They knew a jumper wouldn’t check far enough to detect that the hovercraft’s initial appearance was just a shell. They somehow took our ground-based lasers offline. And for the first time, they were able to turn one of our own without anyone knowing. Hence your scribe, I’m guessing. It was only thanks to Iverson’s quick actions that we were able to stop the hovercraft before it was in range.”

“First, to echo what Iverson said to you earlier, it was
your
quick actions to turn the shock back on your assailant that saved the day. And second, it turns out that the raiders didn’t turn one of our own. That wasn’t Yang this morning.”

Shaw sat up with a start. The scribe wouldn’t have a problem registering his true surprise. “Who was it, then?”

“A young man by the name of Yukihiro Ono. A Japanese national.”

Shaw was stunned. He thought about how often he’d recited numbers and pressed his hand against doors, thinking it was more theater than security. That the raiders had actually succeeded was … “I’m speechless, sir.”

“Getting a double into our command center wasn’t even the raiders’ most impressive feat,” Braybrook continued. “It’s their patience. We traced the hovercraft’s path to a hangar on the edge of the desert. It’s been complete for four months, waiting. They needed someone on the inside for their plan to work, and Yang’s transfer from Geneva gave them the opening they needed. Ono went through some intensive cosmetic surgery and makeup work to get him to look the part, but it was enough for him to be ready to report to duty this morning as Yang.”

“What happened to the real Yang?”

“Last night Yang went to sleep … and didn’t wake up. Drugged, not fatally, thank God. We’re still not sure how they delivered the drug, but they doped him so strongly that when the medical team got to his apartment an hour ago, they were barely able to bring him out of it,” Braybrook said.

Shaw frowned. “They were running a real risk that we’d check out Yang.”

“Of course we checked out Yang. We checked every thought he’s ever had since he was two, practically. We even jumped last night—
after
he’d been drugged no less. Sometimes people get antsy the night before they start here so we check in before they start.”

“How could we have missed it then?”