Hammerjack (43 page)

“I need a breach,” she shouted to the others.

The lead agent responded with precision and speed, moving out ahead of the others. He stopped at the roof access doors, opening up his chest plate and pulling out a vial of covalent-action explosive. The agent sprayed the liquid around the perimeter of the door, where it aerosolized and bonded to the rough concrete surface of the wall. It quickly worked its way between molecules, until it penetrated all the way through to the other side. The other two agents did the same, boosting the explosive to saturation.

“Fire in the hole!”

Everyone retreated to a safe distance. The lead agent flipped open another plate on his arm, activating a digital panel beneath. He keyed in a sequence to go live on a hyperfrequency detonator, then turned to Avalon.

“Set,” he said.

Avalon nodded.

He hit the button. The fireworks that followed were more of an implosion, generating bursts of heat and firedust as the molecular structure of the surrounding wall collapsed. The door fell forward, crashing to the floor under the force of its own weight. An afterglow lingered as the remaining explosive evaporated, clearing out to reveal a magnetic lift inside.

“Seven minutes.”

Avalon jumped over the pile of debris, the long black cloak of her coat fluttering behind her. The agents followed, choking dust as an acrid cloud descended on them. It gave her pause, as if they had passed through some kind of curtain—one that had little to do with smoke, but more to do with mirrors.

They entered the lift and proceeded down.

From upstairs: a quiver, a shock of dread.

Then the crush, metal against metal—or something worse.

Lea had heard the rumble of an explosive charge the moment after her intuition warned her. She jumped onto one of the lab’s working nodes, jacking the hardwire sentry CSS had installed and bringing the structural sensors back online. As she feared, the roof level was showing localized damage.

“Dammit.”

She switched over to a manual video feed, patching a rooftop camera into her console and panning across the docking pad. The corporate transport was still there, but sitting next to it was a lone military hovercraft—one of those patched-up jobs, like those she had seen patrolling the skies over the Zone.

Agents.

Lea zoomed out from the ship, clicking on the infrared filter to seek out heat signatures. No contacts turned up. Something was very wrong here.

She swallowed hard, tasting her own panic.

“Talk to me, Funky,” she signaled.

There was a crackle of static.

“Back at you, sister.”

“We got agents,” she said. “I can’t see them, but we got them.”

“That’s bloody impossible,” Funky shot back. “They never trespass into the free sector. It’s too dangerous for them.”

“Then we got some crazy boys with brass balls,” Lea breathed. “Tell me you heard something.”

“Hold on. Let me check.”

Funky sifted through the comm traffic, trying to isolate anything that had to do with the Works. He came back a moment later, the inflections of his voice matching her own.

“Jesus, Lea,” he said, a cacophony of intercept chatter filling the background. “We got alerts all over the place—CSS, Port Authority, you name it. Somebody came in and shot Midtown all to shit. Hovercraft, no markings. Everybody thinks it’s
Inru
.”

“It
is Inru,
” Lea grumbled, flipping over to the interior cameras. The stairwells showed up clean, but there was no feed from the magnetic lifts. “They’re already here.”

“Bail out of there, Lea.”

“I can’t. Cray is inside the Tank.”

“Then bloody well get
him
out of there.”

Lea jumped, the floor turning to liquid beneath her. It didn’t feel like running—just a nightmare of convoluted motion, every step taking her farther away from her destination. Somehow she ended up at the air lock door, her face pressed hard against the glass.

“Cray!” she shouted, pounding on the air lock. She tried to peer inside, but could not see past the frosted glass. “Cray, they made us! We need to move!”

He should have been able to hear her over the comm link, but even that was dead.

“Cray!”

He didn’t respond. He had taken himself out of the loop.

Lea angrily pounded the air lock a few more times, knowing the effort was useless. The whole goddamned thing had been useless—and still, she allowed it to happen. As a result she was alone, in the last place she wanted to be, and the only clear thought went back to the fail-safe she carried in her pocket.

The MFI was only a shell of what it had been—a false front for something that no longer existed, much like Cray himself. A timer setting appeared on the small screen, flashing on hold as it waited for her to specify the length of the final sequence. She keyed it for five minutes, then affixed the MFI to the wall next to the air lock.

Hand hovering over the small device, she hesitated.

I’m sorry, Cray.

She let the timer go.

“I’m aborting the mission, Funky,” Lea said, turning around and heading for the corridor. “I’ll try to get past those agents. If I don’t make it, I’ll hold them off as long as I can. You better shut things down and get the hell out of there.”

“What about Vortex?” Funky asked.

“No questions,” Lea snapped. “Just do as I say.”

He could read her intentions, even over the link.

“Affirmative,” he replied in a fading tone, the transmission partially obscured by more static. “I’ll terminate the tunnel construct and purge out all nodes just as soon as I—”

Funky never finished the thought.

His words stopped dead without any warning—just a high-pitched tone that might have been a jamming pulse, followed by complete and total silence. “Funky?” Lea called out as she tapped her earpiece, pinning what little hope she had on getting a response. She listened for background noise, stray chatter—anything to indicate Funky was still on the air, but there was nothing. The link was gone, severed at the source.

And she was no longer alone.

The certainty of it stopped Lea cold, just short of the exit. Hellish red light bled into the lab from the open doorway, like blood pouring from an open wound. Both hands dropped to the pulse pistols at her hips. Slowly, she drew the weapons from their holsters. It was an invitation, one her enemy was only too willing to accept.

The corridor burst into a nova of heat and light.

“Lea?”

Funky worked the board with frantic energy. His eyes, meanwhile, scanned all the floating displays, sifting through telemetry for something that would explain the loss of contact.

“Lea, answer me.”

He spun around and looked into the construct floating above the table display, checking the structure of the encrypted tunnel Vortex created. The walls fractured as GenTec countermeasures probed and attacked them, but they were far from collapse. The game was still on, from what he could tell—but he was off the air, and he had no idea why.

“
Goddammit,
Lea!
Answer
me!”

Nothing. Communications were a void. Funky checked the status of the other lines, including platform-to-shore transmissions and the automated links between the stations in the fusion cluster. A diagnostic showed no electronic fault, nor did it reveal evidence of active jamming. The circuits had been cut physically—which meant someone else was out there.

The lights went dark.

An emergency alarm sounded, while reserve power automatically kicked in to keep essential systems online. Funky mashed down on the button to scram the reactor, then turned off the rest of the core functions one at a time. The constant throb that was the heartbeat of the station gradually subsided, leaving the whole facility in a state of unconsciousness.

Funky killed the alarm and sat in total silence.

In the dim light, he found his first taste of panic since being released from prison. Somehow, he summoned the presence of mind to activate the intruder monitors. Out of the grainy images on the virtual display, he picked out eight distinct forms packed into pairs, scattered across the gangways and ladders of the station. Three of the teams moved in perfect sync with each other, closing in on the control center. The last pair kept watch over the station’s landing pad, standing guard outside the two hovercraft that had landed there.

They shimmered in and out of sight on the visual. Funky recognized the camochrome body armor and the way they moved. Zone agents.

These guys are slicker than I thought.

He switched over to infrared and tried the intruder countermeasures. As he guessed, the agents had already taken most of them down.

Very sneaky. But I’m a bit of a sneak myself.

Funky unlocked a special console, using it to patch into a custom series of countermeasures he had installed throughout the station. He energized them one at a time, indicators lighting up his board as each came online. He saved the most dangerous for last, and rigged the trap to a pressure switch he kept within easy reach. Drawing in a long breath, he placed his hands over the controls and felt the power of those weapons flowing through him. He was one with the station, joined to the interface.

“Come to daddy, love,” he said to the monitors.

Funky targeted the closest pair first. They had made it all the way down to the outside entrance of the control center—far enough for them to get overconfident and sloppy. More concerned with ambush than booby traps, they failed to notice the particle-beam emitter over the bulkhead door. When the first agent opened the door, only half of him made it inside before the emitter dropped down on him like a guillotine. The other half spilled backward onto the deck, armor plates falling off as his body was cleaved in two.

The other agent saw just enough to know what was coming. Funky watched him turn to run, as another beam lanced out and struck the agent in the back of the head. The man tumbled out of sight, leaving behind a fading cloud of stray electrons.

“Let’s see now,” Funky said, rubbing his hands together. “Who’s next?”

He clicked back over to the landing pad, where those two agents continued their stony vigil. Implacable, they stood in front of the two hovercraft with their rifles slung at the ready—unaware of what had just happened to their comrades.

This is interesting.

Since there was no way to jam their lines of communication, he had to act fast. He checked the condition of the support struts beneath the landing pad, and after some routing managed to gain control over the magnetic locks that held them in place. The struts were designed to retract and lower the platform in the event of severe weather, something Funky had never done before. He tested them out by modulating the flow of power to the locks just slightly—a subtle change, but enough to make the platform buckle beneath the agents’ feet.

The unexpected jolt knocked them both down, and caused the hovercraft to slide toward them. They dropped their rifles, struggling to get back up and out of the way. When that proved useless, they clamped down on the grated surface of the platform and tried their damnedest to hang on.

Funky made it easy on them. He siphoned off the remaining power and killed the magnetic field entirely, retracting the struts to a full downward position. The sudden drop was catastrophic, causing the two ships to bounce over the side. Along the way, they rolled right over the two agents, who dropped out of the monitor’s view and into the roiling depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Four down,” Funky said, continuing the hunt. “Four to go.”

Pulse fire blasted a hole in the wall outside the lab, kicking up a plume of white-hot shards that burst into Lea’s face. She threw an arm up to protect her eyes, right before the concussion picked her up and knocked her reeling backward.

Somewhere along the way, she managed to regain her balance. Making a dive for the ground, she rolled for the nearest cover, taking shelter behind a desk as three more bursts tore up the floor where she had been standing. Brushing the soot from her eyes, she fought to recover her senses but found herself staring into a blur of vapor and microscopic flotsam. The thickness of it obscured the entry to the lab, where she knew the attack would be coming. She only wondered how many of them were out there.

Lea resisted the temptation to fire back, waiting instead for a definite target. It appeared quickly enough, in a hulking, shadowy form that charged through the smoke in an exaggerated parody of movements. Lea’s aim was dead solid, as if the sheer force of her will guided the beam of energy to its mark. There it exploded, tearing out bits of armor and flesh from the thing’s chest—drawing a bestial howl of pain and surprise.

The thing jerked and convulsed, a macabre dance of involuntary spasms. It then collapsed, releasing a final labored breath.

It was the body of a Zone agent, lying at twisted angles a short distance from her. His helmet had been blown off, and came rolling to a stop at her feet. The agent lay twitching, as if in protest.