Hammerjack (50 page)

The free agent yanked her away from the node, then spun her around. Avalon hooked one hand into a claw, meaning to finish Lea with a single stroke.

“Wait,” Yin commanded.

Avalon put Lea down, but held fast to both of her shoulders. She forced Lea to look at Yin, who approached with arms open and threatening. Lea knew what he wanted. She could smell it on him, that cheap anticipation.

“You can’t do this,” Lea warned. “A bionucleic matrix can’t exist within the confines of logical space. The two will tear each other apart.”

“Out of destruction comes salvation,” Yin replied. His words were as slow and deliberate as the steps he took. “Once the structure of the Axis collapses, those impenetrable walls protecting the Assembly will come tumbling down. Within moments, those old men will be drowning in a flood of chaos logic.”

Avalon pushed Lea to her knees.

“
Think
of it, Lea,” he said. “A whole new order, forged from your creation.”

Lea grimaced, twisting her expression into a defiant smile.

“With you,” she observed, “waiting in the wings to assume control.”

Yin shrugged modestly. “The burden of leadership must fall to those willing to serve. Order will have to be restored—but only after a suitable period of revolution.”

“Sounds like a real party,” Lea said, chewing on her pain. “Still, it’s not the end you had planned. Is that why you took those little coffin trips down there? So you could pretend that
you
were the one bringing the Assembly down?” She laughed at him—a pitying laugh. “It must really hack you that Cray is down there making history, while you’re sitting on your ass and watching.”

Yin stopped. Lea had found his weakness:
envy
. That most human of failings.

“How does it feel,” she goaded, “knowing that Zoe stole the only thing that ever mattered to you? Because I can tell you, it didn’t mean a damn thing to her.”

Yin’s eyes went glassy, his hands clenched and quivering with rage. Slowly, deliberately, he held out one of those hands and demanded of Avalon:

“Quicksilver.”

The free agent gave him the blade. Lea was enthralled by the play of light across the weapon’s edge, as much as she was terrified of its singsong resonance. Yin raised it above her head, the clumsy move of a man who didn’t care where the blade landed—only that it would kill.

He froze when the lights went out.

Alarms filled the closed space of the control booth, different alerts from different stations melding into a cacophony of urgent warnings. The displays all went blank, coming back up with static as they lost their connections to the vital subsystems.

Yin wrapped an arm around Lea’s throat, clutching her against his body while his eyes tried to make sense of the dark. Everything moved in strobe, a crazy patchwork of images tied together by azure light erupting out of the core.

“What’s happening?”

Avalon was an illusion in black. She vanished from Yin’s side, a blur in the brilliance as she crossed the room to emerge at the security station. There, she hard-linked her sensuit to the node, using its power to deliver enough juice to run the display. Raw numerics came pouring out, which Avalon placed in context with her own subdural processors.

“Carrier breach,” the free agent reported. “Multiple levels, media and interface layers. The local domain scrammed itself to quarantine the point of incursion.”

Lea felt Yin’s grip on her loosen.

“Where?” he breathed.

“Point Eiffel.”

Yin shook his head in disbelief, his lips mouthing the word endless times before he finally got it out.

“
Impossible.
”

“Verified,” Avalon assured him. “Without domain control, the transmitter will cycle down. Residual ice should give us a few minutes of cover, but after that we won’t be able to contain our signature.”

Yin breathed hard, the steam of his panic on the back of Lea’s neck.

“Time,” he said.

Avalon performed some calculations.

“Three minutes.”

Tremors from the core reflected off the hollow spaces of the surrounding catacombs, pounding its foundations with steady waves. Cray was breeding energy, its glow flooding the entire complex in a deep ocean blue. Lea guessed that three minutes was optimistic. With nothing to restrain him, Cray was on the verge of becoming unbound. When that happened, his bloom would be visible to every Collective satellite in orbit over the continent.

“Fields collapsing,” Avalon said. “Quarantine is breaking down.”

Yin lowered the quicksilver, absently dicing the air as his mind wandered. His body trembled against Lea, an emulsion of sweat and heartbeat.

“Terminate cryogenic support,” he ordered. “Shut everything down—
now
.”

Avalon tried, but the node wouldn’t respond. The numerics on the display froze, and a feedback alert sounded. It was only a soft beep, accompanied by a flashing indicator that washed Avalon’s face in crimson light—but in the utter silence of the booth, the sound was deafening.

The free agent removed her glasses, affixing her ruined eyes upon Yin.

“It’s too late,” she said. “They’re already here.”

Covalent explosive penetrated the vault door, seeping in between the microscopic spaces that ran along its perimeter. When it ignited, the force of the blast was so confined that it turned back
in
on itself—thousands of times in the space of a millisecond, creating an implosion of such magnitude that it generated temperatures equivalent to a fusion laser. The circular edge of the door sublimated into hot energy plasma, consuming itself as it expanded outward—but gravity fueled the most violent stage of the reaction. Five hundred metric tons of steel started to buckle under the stress of its own weight, releasing a groan into the catacombs as it broke free from the enormous pins that held it in place.

Everyone down in the core became still. It was a mirage at first, the bulge that appeared in the brushed surface of the door; but its growth was relentless, and brought several of the
Inru
closer to see. Their outlines appeared in silhouette against the glowing façade, motionless in spite of the white-hot embers that spilled out all around them. It was as if the dead on the other side had come calling, and the
Inru
could not resist the compulsion to answer.

The door collapsed in front of them.

A solid wall of heat advanced on the
Inru.
Their bodies burst into flame as they were overtaken—becoming ash in an instant, still standing in the positions they assumed in life. Then oxygen rushed out of the core to feed the voracious fire, pulverizing those figures before sucking them into the molten crater left by the fallen vault door.

That was when the ghosts of the catacombs appeared. Lea heard them before she saw them: a steady howl, coming up from the steam that rose out of the crater. Bone dust, impossibly thick and cold, blew in from the cathedral like a pyroclastic flow—a hurricane force that rushed back into the core to fill the momentary vacuum. The gray cloud snaked its way through the field of neural energy, responding to its flux and contours and assuming intelligent form as it descended upon the surviving workers. Lea caught glimpses of it in lightning flashes, but what she really tried to find was Cray. She was aware of him out in the confusion, a leader among the ghosts, and every bit as vengeful. But then he was gone, drawn back into the sarcophagus and his own physical being—and the cloud was left to play out the laws of physics.

Lea saw it coming. She closed her eyes.

The cloud smashed against the booth, shattering the windows like an explosive decompression. Lea lost her sense of everyone around her—everyone except for Phao Yin, who clutched her like a shield against the onslaught. They both stumbled backward against the full brunt of the wind, suddenly alone in the compressed reality that swirled around them.

Reaching backward, she cupped her hands around the sides of Yin’s head and slapped down as hard as she could. Lea heard him scream. His arms fell away from her, and as they separated she steeled herself to take a breath. At the same time, she detected a sweet harmonic splitting the air between them—a swipe of the quicksilver blade, disjointed and fluttering as it tumbled out of Yin’s hand. Lea made an instinctive reach, and caught the weapon by the handle before it could hit the floor.

She spun around, meaning to cut Yin and be on her way; but the dust was already clearing, and Avalon would be on her if she waited any longer. The open window was her only option. If she didn’t take it immediately, there would be no second chance.

Lea jumped.

Yin quickly recovered. He forced himself to his feet, cradling his wounded head and feeling the blood trickle out of his ears. He had to shout to hear himself, but also to cover up his fear.

“Status!”

Yin didn’t know who answered him, nor did he care. He only heard what he already knew, from the crackle of pulse fire that ripped into the core.

“Weapons discharge,” one of the
ronin
yelled. “High confidence, attack dispersal. Coming right up through the main gate.”

“Identify!”

There was a hit on one of the support pylons below the booth. Half of the nodes erupted in sparks, while the floor lurched downward. Yin grabbed the nearest console and held on, like a captain on the deck of a foundering vessel. Banks of equipment broke away from their mounts, crashing past him as the booth settled at an extreme angle. Somehow, the pylon held—but only as a gnarled mass, dangling on the verge of collapse.

Everyone was gone. Out through the broken windows, buried under piles of wreckage—all of them had disappeared. Yin struggled toward the only working node he could find, and bashed his hands against the interface until a flicker appeared on the display. All he could get was an audiograph, showing the spectrum of tactical frequencies utilized by Corporate Special Services. To Yin’s horror, the image came alive with chatter. From Point Eiffel all the way down into the catacombs, their readings were everywhere.

Yin lost the image when another explosion blew the rest of his power. He dragged himself to the window, teetering over the side—and that was when he saw them. Dozens of them, outfitted in full combat gear and with enough weaponry to fight a small war. They poured in through the hole where the vault door once stood, the advance teams laying down a constant barrage of fire while the rear echelon prepared to occupy the space.

“Avalon!”

He shrieked her name. The free agent did not reply, and still Yin called out to her. Over and over again, until his throat burned and his voice cracked—the word came back to mock him and his ruined empire.

“Answer me!”

The floor beneath him folded. What was left of the support pylons gave way, and the booth plunged with them. Yin felt the walls compressing him, pushed on by the bellow of twisting steel—a primordial sound, not unlike the rage contained in the remains of his soul. It was all he could think about.

Alden . . .

In the midst of that torture, Yin could hear him laughing.

Lea flew.

She rode the adrenaline, her intellect displaced by chemical reactions and a need for flight. It translated to a kind of animal grace, strength, and momentum, which propelled her through the air as the heat of weapons fire carved up the atmosphere around her. Lea pivoted herself downward, going headfirst into a dive while her arms reached out for anything that could arrest her fall. Through a haze of dust, she found it—and wrapped her body around the jutting shaft like it was her only tether to life.

Lea slid.

Along one of the support pylons, away from the control booth, she hit the ground hard enough to crush bones—though in her jazzed state, that would not have stopped her. Lea just went on reflex, rolling with the impact and working out the pain after she got to her feet. She remained in a crouch, her eyes narrowing as she searched the chamber for the source of the attack that had saved her. Outside of Zone agents, there was only one kind of breed that hit this hard. When Lea spotted the line of troops moving in her direction, those fears were all but confirmed.

Special Services,
she seethed.
They sent a fucking hit squad
.