Hammerjack (11 page)

An old-fashioned lift deposited Cray on the top floor, where he discovered that his was the only suite. Pillars of green marble flanked a pair of cherrywood doors leading into the rooms. Cray gripped the doorknob and heard the lock click open. He went inside, finding the appointments within even more lavish than what he had seen downstairs. In the foyer, light so natural and thick that it flowed like water poured in through a single large window, between parted velvet curtains that showed him a view of Oldtown. Alabaster walls practically glowed, and as Cray heard the doors closing behind him, he felt strangely trapped—like he had been sealed in a vast coffin of luxury.

He tossed his bag and his jacket on the nearest sofa, taking some time to scout the place and map out all the possible exits. He also made a sweep with his MFI, locating no fewer than eight bugs—none of them active, probably left over from the last few times GenTec hosted their heavies here. Cray just disabled them, making a note to turn the devices back on before he left. He didn’t want to interfere with Yin’s voyeuristic habits.

Finishing up, Cray fished a portable ECM seal out of his bag and placed it next to the front doors. It was another one of his innovations—a scaled-down version of the same blanket that protected the State Opera House across the street. While not nearly as powerful or sophisticated, it was enough to discourage most remote monitoring hookups; and if anyone did manage to punch through it, Cray’s MFI would broadcast an alert and automatically trace any sensor activity back to its source.

The seal responded with an affirmative beep when he turned it on. Checking his MFI screen, Cray was satisfied with the stream of telemetry coming off the device.

No jamming, no intrusions. Time to check the mail.

The suite came equipped with half a dozen virtual terminals. Cray opted for the one in the bedroom, which was embedded in the ceiling directly above the huge, oversized bed. Amused by the sheer novelty of it, he plunked himself down and activated the terminal. The level of comfort was extreme enough to be disconcerting.

“This is Cray Alden,” he exhaled. “Display coded message, please.”

The room lights dimmed a little, and a three-dimensional construct phased into existence above his head. Cray skipped past the usual welcome blurbs from the hotel and the confidentiality agreements, expecting to find some verbose communication from the Assembly or from Phao Yin. But instead, the message he received was cryptic. A seemingly random collection of large red letters floated in the air, though there were enough vowels arranged in the correct order to tell him this wasn’t a code—just a jumble of scrambled words.

Somebody was being cute.

“I don’t like puzzles,” Cray announced to the construct. “Get to the point.”

The letters seemed to respond to his cue, darting around each other like a swarm of excited insects. They settled back down after a few moments, regrouping into a series of words—a simple enough message, ominous in its tone:

NOTHING IS RANDOM

Another line beneath it began to take shape. Letters bounced over one another, playing leapfrog in a jolly way that was presumably meant to give the impression of laughter. Cray expected nothing less, considering the source:

A REMINDER FROM YOUR FRIEND,
HERETIC

He terminated the construct. “I hate this hammerjack shit.”

“I’d say you’re in the wrong business.”

The voice came from the bedroom door. Cray jumped off the bed, not knowing what to expect—least of all the woman who had breezed into his room unnoticed. Her shape was unnervingly still, concealed beneath a full-length overcoat, her hands coolly clasped behind her back. The voice matched the face: darkly female, features immutable as her body, eyes concealed behind opaque glasses. Her long black hair swept back dramatically over her head, creating an image that was statuesque in its severity.

“I’m getting really tired of women sneaking up on me.”

“You complain incessantly,” she observed. “That was in your profile.”

“And you make a lot of assumptions. Didn’t anybody tell you it’s bad manners to break into somebody’s hotel room?”

She was inscrutable. As she walked into the room, Cray noticed that she moved like a soldier. He guessed that underneath her garb, her body was a flawless piece of precision engineering.

“How did you get in here, anyway?”

“I was in the room before you arrived.”

“Wonder how I missed that.”

“You didn’t look hard enough.” The woman reached into her pocket and tossed him the ECM seal. “I wouldn’t do anything in here that needs to be cloaked. The Assembly gets nervous if they can’t see what you’re up to.”

“I’ll keep that in mind while I’m in the shower.”

“Keep that in mind at
all
times, Dr. Alden.”

Cray walked over to the minibar, mostly to give himself something to do. “They didn’t need to send you all the way over here just to tell me that,” he said, examining the row of expensive liquor bottles. “You could have just stuck a note on the door—unless you’re here to keep an eye on me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman said, coming the rest of the way into his room. “Our methods are more sophisticated than that. I’m here because I want to be.”

“You like haunting the rooms of strange men?”

“Only when those men have business with my employers.”

“Didn’t my profile tell you everything you need?”

“Profiles don’t tell the whole story, Dr. Alden. You don’t get anywhere near the Assembly unless I have a look at you myself.”

“
Ahh
. . .” Cray said, dropping a few ice cubes into a glass. “CSS must be improving their standards. I’ve never met a security officer with such a hard-on for her work.”

The woman stopped again. Her lips crept upward slightly, an approximation of a smile. She just rebutted Cray’s conclusions without saying a word.

His eyes narrowed. “You’re a free agent.”

“Avalon,” she told him. “Diplomatic services detachment, liaison branch.”

“I should have known,” Cray said, consoling himself with a genuine scotch. “I have to hand it to you, though—at least you do it with more class than those guys in the Zone.”

“They’re mercenaries, Dr. Alden.”

“And
you’re
not?”

“Mercenaries have no loyalty.”

Cray didn’t trust her, but he took her word on that one. Unlike their counterparts in the Zone, free agents were products of
military
training—augmented by a genetic regimen that began at an early age. Increased strength and speed were matched only by a killer instinct for survival and a physiology that gave them an almost inhuman endurance.

All free agents had been members of the Solar Expeditionary Corps at one time or the other, back when the Collective had been engaged in several dubious terraforming ventures on Mars. The final nail in the coffin of that program had been a virus outbreak at Olympus Mons, a costly disaster that killed over six thousand people—including most of the Corps stationed on the planet. The few soldiers who survived did so through the most brutal of tactics. Potential carriers of the disease were rounded up and killed. Civilians were butchered to conserve the food supply. And when the food finally did run out, it was said that some members of the Corps resorted to cannibalism—or so Cray heard in stories that had become more fable than fact.

After abandoning Mars, there was still the question of what to do with the surviving group of extreme warriors. With a public relations nightmare on its hands, the Collective decided to execute most of them for crimes against humanity—after a lengthy trial and much fanfare. But the Collective also recognized talent when it saw it, and issued a secret decree that spared a few of these soldiers so that they could be put to use as free agents. Cray heard that fewer than a dozen operated in the world at any one time, carrying out the kind of work even Special Services couldn’t touch—but this was the first time he had met one.

“Avalon,” Cray pondered. “That name for real?”

“It’s not necessary for you to know.”

“Just making small talk,” Cray remarked. “Can I offer you a drink?”

“You can offer me explanations.”

Cray took his glass back over to the bed and sat down.

“My life’s an open book,” he said.

“Only for the last ten years,” Avalon corrected him. Her tone, which never varied, made the exchange sound like an interrogation. Cray wondered how far she would go to get her answers. “Before that, I can’t find any real evidence that you even exist.”

“You didn’t look hard enough.”

“I went further than most,” she said. “All the standard background checks told me precisely what they were supposed to—you started working for GenTec right out of school, you pay your taxes on time, you’ve never been arrested. You’re considered one of the world’s foremost experts in network architecture—and according to your evaluations, your employers have nothing but the highest regard for you.”

“Not very exciting, is it?”

Avalon ignored his comment, turning straight to her point. “If all this is true,” she asked, “then why is it nobody seems to know who you are?”

Cray didn’t have an answer prepared. Up until now, nobody had asked.

“There’s not a single professor at Caltech who remembers you,” Avalon continued. “Everybody I talked to back at GenTec agrees you’re the best person they ever had—but hardly anyone knows what you look like.”

“I keep a low profile.”

“You’re beyond that, Dr. Alden. I ran a full search on every detail of your life prior to you going to work for GenTec. You want to guess what I found?”

Cray shook his head.

“Not a thing.”

She leveled those last words like an accusation, though they were as cold and detached as the rest of their conversation. Avalon just watched him from behind black lenses, robotic in her patience and determination.

“Tell me something, Avalon,” Cray said. “You ever talk about what happened to you back at Olympus Mons?”

She was silent—obviously so.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, walking to the bedroom window. A fresh breeze blew the curtains past his face. “The world is smaller than it’s ever been—but it’s still big enough to keep a few secrets.”

“I don’t like men who come out of nowhere, Dr. Alden.”

“Get used to it.” He turned around to find her fixed on him, recording his every move—counting all the different ways she could kill him. “Just what do you think I do for a living, anyway?”

“You’re a specialist.”

“You’re being too kind.”

That remark caught her off guard. In corporate circles, people got where they did by defending themselves vigorously. Cray had long since grown tired of the practice.

The tactic was a success. Avalon backed off.

“You’re not very cooperative,” she said.

“That’s something you can add to my profile.”

“It’s already done.” She plucked a data card out of one pocket, laying it on Cray’s dresser. Sunlight glinted off its burnished surface. “That’s my contact information, in case you get talkative.”

“That’s it?” Cray asked as she headed out. “Who am I going to get to show me around town?”

“The Assembly expects you at nine tomorrow morning,” Avalon said. “I’ll be escorting you to the Audience Chamber. Don’t be late. If I have to come looking for you, I won’t be nearly as pleasant.”

Avalon left. Just a swirl of her overcoat and she was gone. Cray imagined he had gotten the better of her, at least for the moment. He also imagined she would remember this encounter, if there ever came a time when she would have to decide on how to deal with him.

He just hoped he hadn’t pissed her off too much.

Dex Marlowe stared through a haze.

The numerics floated through his mind like a tec-induced fantasy, the afterimage of a trip that had left him with more headache than clarity, more confusion than consciousness. It got that way on the tail end of a buzz. He had been working off the residuals in his bloodstream for the last six hours, coasting—never breaking the interface with GenTec’s domain, not even to reload stims. What he saw was just too fascinating, and he was afraid he might never see its like again.