Hammerjack (31 page)

“Impress me,” she said.

Cray nailed the gateway hard, focusing his attack on the crawler. The module sidestepped his approach, meaning to let him pass, then flank him—but Cray was wiser. Predicting the shift, he simply turned directly into it, arriving at that point in real time before the module did, then moving in before it could react. Skirting the edge of its matrix, Cray peeled off entire strings of code and wrapped them around himself, cloaking his signature and making it indistinguishable from the module itself. As far as the crawler was concerned, Cray was invisible—and since he was invisible, he no longer existed in that continuum. The module returned to passive mode, resuming its post outside the domain.

Cray, meanwhile, was
inside
—floating motionless in logical space, surrounded by spirals of corporate data that were now his for the taking. He was breathing hard, not from exertion but from pure adrenaline. It had been a long time since he had taken a ride like that.

“
Shit,
” Funky said again.

Cray terminated the construct.

“You showed me,” he told Lea, “So I showed you.”

Funky circled the table, putting a tentative hand on Cray’s shoulder, touching him just to feel if he was giving off heat. “That was some brilliant work,” he said, beaming as if he had crossed paths with a deity. “If you’re a spook, I’m a duffer.”

Lea agreed. “What did they call you when you were a hammerjack?”

Cray let go of the touch controls and rubbed his hands together. They still tingled with the memory of his run, a high he never realized he had missed until now.

“Vortex.”

His admission stunned them both into silence. Nobody made runs like Cray just had—not since interfacing had become part of the game. But Vortex had been famous for just that. Vortex had been famous for a lot of things.

“Vortex fell off the screen ten years ago,” Lea said dubiously. “The way I heard it, one of his own dropped a dime on him. Said he got a little
too
good.” She scoffed. “Me, I think the whole thing was just a myth.”

“Some people say Heretic is just a myth,” Cray retorted. “And yet here you are.”

“You’re serious,” Funky interjected. “You’re really Vortex?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“No such thing as ancient history,” Funky said. “Not when you’re in
this
life. I grew up on stories about you, mate. Hell, you were making deep-immersion runs before anybody had even
heard
of a face kit. You set the standard. Everybody in the digital sub wanted to be like you.” He clapped his hands together in delight. “Vortex and Heretic,
in the same house
! I am truly in the presence of greatness.”

“So what happened?” Lea asked.

Cray got up from his chair and strolled over to one of the portholes, watching the storm outside as he cleared his mind and dragged heavy memories to the surface.

“There were only a few of us in those days,” Cray answered. “Maybe half a dozen who knew what they were doing. By that time, CSS had caught up with most of the amateurs and fragged them. We survived because we knew the territory better than the spooks did.”

Cray turned away from the window and faced them again. “It got to the point where the competition was insane. We made fortunes doing runs for corporate ventures—so much that the money was meaningless. Pretty soon we were making things up just to keep the juice going. Crazy stuff that had nothing to do with the job. We pushed frontiers to find out what was possible, staying in the Axis for weeks at a time. I used to
dream
about it when I wasn’t there.”

Cray trailed off into silence.

“What about the others?” Lea asked.

“I knew them all,” Cray told them. “But only by their signatures. We never saw each other’s faces.” He laughed bitterly, a reflection on his own naïveté. “Pretty soon, pushing the envelope turned into trying to knock the other guy off. From then on, I spent most of my time stealing from other hammerjacks to keep my edge. They did the same thing to me—but it wasn’t about the challenge anymore. Things started getting vicious. I didn’t know how bad it was until I caught one of them trying to sniff out my identity. Turns out the son of a bitch was working for the
Collective,
trying to collect the bounty on my head. I figured if one of them had balls enough to try it, then the others would eventually.” He paused for several breaths. “I decided I wasn’t going to give them the chance.”

“You did it to them first,” Lea said.

“One at a time,” Cray confessed. His face was devoid of expression, his soul on autopilot. “I sold them out. I didn’t take the money, but I sold them out.” He looked at Lea. “You want to become a good stalker? Try hunting down your friends. By the time I was finished, there wasn’t anybody else but me.”

“Man,” Funky moaned. “That’s pretty cold.”

“I could tell you I didn’t have a choice,” Cray said. “I could even say I was just protecting myself. I’ve told myself the same lie over and over—but it doesn’t change the truth. What I really wanted was to make them pay. I mean, Vortex was a legend. Vortex was the
master
. Who the hell were
they
to take me out of the game?” He shuddered. “I was pretty ruthless about it. It wasn’t enough that I turned them in. I had to make sure they knew Vortex was the one who did it.”

“You broke the code,” Lea observed.

“There
wasn’t
any code,” Cray said. “I was the reason they invented the damned code.”

He shuffled back to his chair. Telling the story had taken even more out of him than the session in Funky’s dungeon.

“So how did they get you?” Lea asked.

“I got sloppy,” Cray said. “Business was good, and that’s where my head was. I paid too much attention to what I was doing in the Axis and not enough to the real world. CSS set up a sting and traced one of my numbered accounts back to me. When I went to collect on the job, they were there waiting for me. I never saw them coming.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to.”

“Suicide?” he asked her, more than a little amused. “Not my style, Miss Prism. It was my desire to save my own ass that landed me here in the first place.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I ended up at Special Services,” Cray said. “I told them everything they wanted to know in two hours—but that didn’t stop them from keeping me there for two weeks. After that, they shipped me off to a gulag for a couple of months. I was in solitary the whole time, waiting for the hammer to fall—but all they did was make me watch the other prisoners, like I was getting special treatment. They had no idea who the hell I was, but I could tell they hated me. They hated me because I was on the other side of the glass, and there was nothing they could do to touch me. But I knew what would happen if they could.” He looked away into the distance, still seeing their faces. “I wouldn’t have lasted more than a day.”

“They were messing with your head,” Funky said. “Special Services got all kinds of ways to do that.”

Lea reached across the table and took Cray’s hand.

“What did they offer you?”

“A full walk,” Cray answered. “A lot of the officers on the Collective board had occasion to use my services in the past and thought that I could be useful. Phao Yin was more impressed with the way I eliminated my rivals. He offered to take responsibility for me if I came to work at GenTec. By then, the choice wasn’t hard to make.”

“Amen to that,” Funky agreed.

“So now you know the story,” Cray said, turning his hand over and squeezing Lea’s gently. He didn’t know why, but it comforted him. “Got anything
you
want to share with me?”

“Funky here knows most of my secrets,” she said, deliberately coy. “Nobody knows everything.”

“Maybe I can change your mind.”

“What if you don’t like what you find?”

“I wouldn’t care.”

Lea raised an eyebrow. She could see that he was absolutely serious.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Funky interrupted. “Far be it from me to break up this little do, but we have some work to finish.”

Lea withdrew from Cray—just a little, but quickly enough for him to notice. She took up Funky’s proposal, resuming with a tone that was all business. “He’s right. By now, the Assembly knows you’ve gone AWOL—and if they know about it, so does Phao Yin. As soon as he puts you together with me, we’re all going to be in a world of shit.”

“How much does he know about this place?” Cray asked.

“Nothing,” Lea said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t find out. Funky, I need you to work up the prelims for a general flash extraction. Any chance we can get him on the table in the next couple of hours?”

“Sure.”

“Good. The sooner we pull that stuff out of him, the better.” She looked back at Cray. “You ready to give up your career as a runner?”

“Mule is more like it,” Cray said, more than ready. “Just tell me what you want and how much you need.”

“It’s simple,” Funky explained, taking him by the arm and leading him out of the command center. “I just need a blood sample to run the numbers. After that, we put you out and stick you in the tank. When you wake up, you’ll be nice and clean.”

Cray tossed a dubious glance back at Lea.

“Don’t worry,” Lea assured him. “He’ll take good care of you.”

Lea heard Funky chattering the entire way out, voices receding into the stacks as he rehashed old Vortex stories and asked Cray if they were true. That was the problem with legends: the fantasy was far more interesting than the fact, and far more likely to be carried down through the years. But in Cray’s case, she wasn’t so sure. What she had seen him do on that Tagura run was next to impossible. Sure, she had jacked the same domain herself—but that had been after weeks of planning and dozens of dry runs with the interface. Cray had done it in a heartbeat, using his guts and reflexes.

And still he bleeds for Zoe,
she thought.
He needs atonement, just like me. For something he unleashed on the world—just like me.

Lea reengaged the construct, leaving the interface electrodes alone and absorbing the feel of the naked controls beneath her hands. Cruising the Axis, she ducked through one dark tunnel after the other—anxiously at first, then smoothing out as she hit the populated subnets. Floating above them, she marveled at how much of her concentration was consumed by such a simple task; but it had never occurred to her to do this any other way. The interface had always been her link, but it had never forced her to see anything for herself.

“You’re a beast, Alden,” she said to herself, a smile percolating across her lips. “Look what you made me do. I’m a virgin again.”

Ascending into the highest regions of logical space, she kept on climbing. Below her, the Axis shrunk to microscopic levels, with nothing but emptiness between her and the horizon. Endless space, waiting to be taken up.

Lea wondered if there really was something more.

Phao Yin had never met his brethren. He only knew them as voices at the other end of a transmission, encrypted by a random key and relayed through a thousand different stations to conceal their points of origin. Communications between all the
Inru
cells were conducted in the same fashion: tiny bursts, oscillating at stratospheric frequency, concealed in the myriad information exchange between satellites, fiber optics, individual domains, and the vast web of subnets that comprised the Axis. No single cell knew the identity or location of the others. No mention of specific names or places was permitted. Nobody knew the exact structure of the
Inru
leadership, which made betrayal of it impossible. Security began—and ended—with the strength and weakness of the individual cell.

Which was why Phao Yin had a disaster on his hands.

He took the first SOT out of Malaysia as soon as he heard the news, traveling under an assumed name and arriving in New York alone. He then hailed a ground cab into Manhattan, not wanting to risk any contact with the Port Authority. He paid cash for everything and avoided the communication subnets—precautions he normally used to evade his masters at the Collective, but in this case he was evading his brethren. It was only a matter of time before the other
Inru
discovered his ruse, but it was time Yin would use to rectify his mistake. No longer would he trust the important jobs to his subordinates. This one he would handle himself.