Hammerjack (35 page)

It was over an hour before CSS realized she was gone.

Cray was suspended, unconscious, the outline of his form blurred and luminous in the viscosity of the accelerating solution. Pale light engulfed him in a halo, blemished by the occasional electrochemical discharge that spidered down the length of his extremities like tiny blue tendrils of St. Elmo’s fire. They jumped over the vital electrodes plastered to his skin, congregating around the dozens of open fiber receptors awaiting connection. The extraction process had yet to begin, and already his body was urging it on.

Lea circled the transparent tank, inspecting the setup and reserving even greater care for its occupant. Cray seemed especially vulnerable to her now, surrendering himself to the mercy of her skills. Although his face was hidden beneath an oxygen sleeve, the familiar shape of his features protruded through the porous fabric, forming a tight white mask that expanded and contracted with each breath. Lea watched as the rhythm became less frequent, slowing to the steady, measured pace of a light coma.

She looked up at Funky, who watched all of the monitors.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Down in it,” Funky replied, reducing the flow of sedatives that had put Cray under. “Metabolic rates leveling out at ten minus standard, holding just above stasis. Picked up a few autonomic spikes on the EEG, though.” He turned to her and smiled. “I do believe our boy is dreaming.”

Lea wasn’t at all surprised. Zoe had talked about coming out of the tank, of the vague recollections and disembodied sensations that followed her out of that surreal experience. It was always the same. A warm surge, then smothering and drowning—but no panic. Only the most liberating kind of acceptance, like the sleep that comes before a freezing death.

Or maybe it’s something else.

Lea couldn’t help but wonder. There existed in flash a potential far greater than her ability to comprehend, even if the initial design was her own. How it might have interacted with Zoe’s mind—how it could be interacting with Cray—was anybody’s guess. Nothing was too remote a possibility.

Even the Other.

Funky had told her about Cray’s theory. Even though Cray hadn’t spoken of it, Lea suspected that his experience with Lyssa had altered his way of thinking, leaving him open to extreme suggestion. But perhaps the
real
change occurred when Cray had been with Zoe, as she had passed that part of herself over to him. Perhaps when he saw Lyssa, what he actually saw was a reflection of himself.

“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “We’ll bring you back.”

The fingers on Cray’s left hand twitched a little in response.

Lea stepped back, catching a scream in her throat. Regaining her composure, she leaned back in, eyes fixated on where she had seen that slight range of motion.

“Funky,” she said, “what’s the word on cognizant brain functions?”

He swiveled around in his chair. “Just what you see,” he told her, reacting curiously to the spooked expression on her face. “Why?”

She started to answer, but in a blink the notion was gone. More than anything, she tried to convince herself that it meant nothing, that Cray was simply manifesting a random nerve impulse.

There’s no way,
Lea kept telling herself.
There’s just no way
.

But she couldn’t resist the impulse to test him.

“Cray,” she said out loud, placing her hands on the surface of the tank. “If you can understand what I’m saying, move your fingers again.”

Funky stepped away from his interface consoles, standing vigil with her beside the tank. The sealed chamber would have made it difficult for Cray to hear her, even if he
was
conscious; but in his current state—drugged to the gills with a body temperature of thirty C—he was more ice than human, with the intellectual capacity to match.

Yet slowly, deliberately, each finger flexed one at a time—only millimeters, but still plainly visible.

“I’ll be damned,” she breathed.

Funky jerked back around to get another look at the monitors. They should have indicated that Cray’s brain had processed explicit packets of data, but the lines hardly moved. Whatever had happened, it did not originate in Cray’s nervous system.

“That’s bleeding impossible.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Lea agreed, leaving him there and taking the controls herself. She fired up the resonance imager, applying power to a series of magnetic coils that ran along the underside of the tank. “We better get a closer look at this thing before we do anything else. I’m performing an imaging scan right now. Funky, I’ll need you to drop this view into the high-res as soon as I’m finished. Macro imaging at first, then precise targeting at five microns.”

It took a few moments for him to hear her and put it together.

“Funky?”

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head clear. He went back to his interface station, where he sat down and muttered to himself, “Damned if this isn’t some weird shit.”

Lea ran the magnetic field through Cray’s body. The composition of his tissues created differentials in frequency that were measured by sensors in the tank, then fed into a program that interpreted them as images. “Come on, baby,” she said as the raw data flowed through her computer into Funky’s interface. “Let’s see what you’re about.”

A transparent image of Cray’s body began to materialize on the high-res. Both of them stood back and watched as layer after layer of the image coalesced, starting with his bones and organs. Shortly after that, his blood vessels, neural pathways, and connective tissues all fell into place, forming a detailed and rather ordinary display of human anatomy—at least until the final layer appeared, and a stunning metamorphosis revealed itself.

Darkened patches scattered throughout Cray’s body. Appearing like shadows on film, they were hazy and amorphous—suggesting themselves without being overt, ominous and subtle. The patches took root in seemingly random locations, but by far the greatest concentration was in the brain. There, they obliterated entire regions of his cerebral cortex. For some unknown reason, however, they had drawn the line at the areas that controlled conscious thought and memory. Those remained clear, like islands of light in a gathering storm.

“Jesus,” Lea whispered.

“Amen,” Funky agreed.

He jockeyed the interface, taking them directly into Cray’s brain and magnifying the invaders so they could see the molecular structure. The sequencing was familiar, just like any other strands of flash, but its behavior was anything but standard. The strands were in the process of transforming Cray’s neurons, one at a time, infusing their own DNA strands into each nucleus and creating a hybrid. At this point, the activity was limited to the surface areas of the cerebral cortex; but it was burrowing deeper, starting an inexorable march that would not stop until . . .

Until when?

“Unbelievable,” Funky said distantly, like a voice on a radio. “This is infection on a
massive
scale. He shouldn’t even be alive with that much foreign tissue in his system.”

Lea was dark, pragmatic—and logical.

“That’s not how it works,” she said.

“Yeah? Well, I’d bloody well like to know how it works.” Funky ran a few numbers through the computer, which only confirmed what they saw. “A full 62 percent of his brain has been replaced with whatever this stuff is. They’re smart buggers, too. Looks like the focus of their attack has been on the unused and unmapped regions of the cerebral cortex. You know—all those parts of the mind that are supposed to control ESP, telekinesis, and all the rest of that rubbish?”

Lea closed her eyes and nodded.

“Leaving motor skills and memory untouched,” he finished. “There’s some spreading along the main lines of the nervous system, including sensory input. Maybe that’s how Vortex was able to hear you and respond. If that’s the case, then he’s already operating on a level far beyond human range.”

“That’s the
point,
” Lea snapped. “This is what the
Inru
were after all along. The flash isn’t supposed to kill him. It’s supposed to augment him.”

Funky raised an eyebrow.

“So what the hell do we do?”

Lea stared up at the high-res with nothing short of hatred. Some of that she directed at the
Inru,
but most she saved for herself. This was the question they had asked her in the beginning:
Can it be done?
Her answer, of course, had been yes. It had always been yes, because nothing was beyond the reach of the great Heretic.

“Lea?”

She drew in a purposeful breath.

“Just what we promised,” she answered. “We rip it out. Where do we stand on the extraction stats?”

“It’s all good, if you want to rock and roll,” Funky reported, putting the final checklist on one of his displays. “Vitals are stable, and his nervous system is responsive to all transmission protocols. I just need a minute to synchronize the fiber links to our local domain. After that, we can go hot whenever you want.”

“Have you pinpointed the flash termination sequence?”

“Base pair seventy-nine. I’ve already transcribed the code.”

“Good,” Lea said. Uploading the code was only the first step in what would be a lengthy process, but at least it would put a stop to the flash. How they would deal with the damage it had already done was another matter. Lea swore to herself that she would find a solution, even if it meant keeping Cray in stasis. Zoe had already died because of this shit. Lea had no intention of sacrificing another life—especially his.

She called up a segment of the termination code on the monitor in front of her. It spilled on for page after page, mesmerizingly complex.

“Synchronicity,” Funky called out.

“Plug him in,” Lea ordered.

In the tank, hundreds of individual fiber links swam through the accelerating solution and plugged into the receptors that dotted the surface of Cray’s skin. They were horrifying in their eagerness, almost alive in how they pulsated in anticipation of the draw.

“Positive link,” Funky said. “He’s all yours, boss.”

“Uploading termination sequence.”

Lea engaged her console transmitter, squeezing the code into an oscillating bitstream that moved in and out of the fibers attached to Cray’s body. The ensuing biochemical reaction flooded his bloodstream with millions of free-floating base pairs, which were meant to bond with individual strands of flash and alter their DNA structure. That would end any active process, rendering the strands inert. Typically the procedure was a precautionary measure, as a way of ensuring that none of the flash data was corrupted during extraction. In Cray’s case, it was the only way Lea knew to save his life—or at the very least, to slow the infection.

The console beeped at her when it completed the upload.

“Punch up a real-time construct,” she said. “Use the sample we took from him earlier as a reference.”

Funky placed Cray’s blood sample under the scope, rendering the construct from a chemical analysis. It showed a number of flash strands slowing down, unable to penetrate the outer membranes of the cells they attacked. A short time later, they ceased to move altogether: not dead in a conventional sense, because they had never really been alive, but neutral, like viral antibodies.

“Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum,” Funky said.

Lea released the breath she had been holding.

So far, so good.

“You should be receiving another series of resonance images,” she told Funky, this time confining her scans to Cray’s head. “Six images in all, at two-minute intervals. Create an animation sequence on the high-res. I want to find out how this does in a living system.”

“We already know the shit works,” Funky pointed out, glancing at her with a bit of concern. “You know something that I don’t?”

“Let’s just take a look and see.”

He shrugged, transferring the image over. The individual frames assembled over the next few seconds, then played themselves out like a movie. Cray’s brain remained dark, with no dramatic changes. Nothing much seemed to be happening—although it was difficult to tell anything at this range.

“Go back in,” Lea said. “Five microns.”

The microscopic soldiers appeared once again, in complete, vicious detail. Lea and Funky watched as several of them continued to invade nearby cells, as if none of them had heeded the call to stand down. The process of transformation continued unabated. If anything, it had accelerated in response to their interference.