Hammerjack (40 page)

“Fifty clicks,” the agent reported. There was an edge in his voice, steely as the camochrome armor that encased his body. “Should be coming up on visual range.”

Avalon was way ahead of him. Her infrared had already picked out the cluster of domes on the horizon, bright and constant as neutron stars against the abyssal fabric of night. Even at this distance they were impossibly huge—a colossus of primal forces cradling fusion fire within.

“Communications,” Avalon said.

“No voice, just data,” the agent told her, tapping the link between the Fusion Directorate onshore and the power plants at sea. “Automated stream. Routine I/O and diagnostics, standard encryption.”

“What about air traffic?”

“Nothing in the immediate proximity—” the agent began, interrupted by a red indicator on the tactical display. “Wait a second. Looks like a single contact, originating at the control complex. Scanning for configuration now.”

Avalon didn’t wait for him. She flooded the sky ahead with her own active sensors, running the full spectrum at maximum resolution. Even at that, she barely picked out the tiny dot rising from the central platform—but she easily read the column of energy that pushed it up to high altitude.

“Pulser,” she said.

The agent lifted his mechanical stare from the display and turned toward her.

“Might just be cargo,” he suggested. “They run at irregular intervals.”

“Check the transponder. If it’s maintenance, they’ll be transmitting.”

The agent sifted through the Directorate frequencies, but came up dry. By then, Avalon had already decided.

“It’s
him,
” she pronounced.

“Our orders are to secure the power plant.”

“Fuck the power plant,” Avalon snapped. “Alden is the target. Where he goes, we follow.” She punched up the gridpaths the pulser could take once it jumped off the leased routes. They numbered in the thousands, the closest no more than ten minutes out. If Alden got into the network, she would never find him again. “I’m plotting a parallel course. We’ll stick on him until he reaches his destination, then pick him up.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

Avalon considered it for a moment, glancing out each side of the cockpit window. Her escorts remained close on her wing.

“Vector Two, Vector Three,” she hailed them. “Proceed to primary target and carry out your mission as instructed. Vector One team will move to intercept the outbound contact. We’ll rendezvous at our designated alternate point in two hours’ time.”

The other pilots acknowledged her signal. Avalon dropped out of formation, allowing them to roar past her in a straight line while she banked hard to port and headed north. She stayed low for as long as the satellites would allow, then shot straight up into the sky until she reached six thousand meters. After that, the hovercraft settled into one of the standard free-approach paths. Avalon flipped on her transponder and started squawking on a diplomatic frequency. The Port Authority would just assume they were another spook flight.

The agents, meanwhile, stared at her. Avalon knew the look from her combat days. She had just taken away their edge, throwing them into a new situation—not that she gave a damn. As far as she was concerned, they would be most useful if they got killed before they had a chance to get in her way.

“Wire,” she announced. “Positive acquisition.”

The agent next to her fed the reading through the cockpit monitor.

“Fixed,” he said, adding, “You better be right about this.”

Avalon searched the contact out through the canopy glass, finding the pulser’s strobe lights off her starboard. By then she could see Alden, even without sensors, and wondered briefly if he could see her. Illogically, the thought of it excited her.

“Just tell me if he changes course,” she said.

Cray withdrew for most of the journey, staring ahead at the gridlines that marked his path but processing little more through his conventional senses. Instead, he assembled his view of the outside world from singular bits of data—individual pieces, rather than the sum of the parts, still tainted with the memory of what had happened to him the last time he crossed the skies like this. Fear, of all things, was keeping him human—fear that took the shape of Avalon’s bloodied face, that blind determination and murderous delight.

Lea sensed it. If anything, she seemed relieved that Cray was still connected. “Method to your madness,” she said. “Just keep telling yourself.”

Cray smiled, welcoming the distraction for as long as it lasted. He was losing touch with himself, but at the same time gaining a detailed awareness of everything around him. Even the shores of Manhattan, laid out before him and teeming with 15 million souls, presented itself as a series of facts he could readily assimilate. Cray felt their heartbeats, sensed their neural energy, and synthesized it with the network of domains and conductors and optics that formed the backbone of the city.

And he
understood
it.

It wasn’t some abstract concept, but a reality that everyone took for granted—and only he could fully see. The framework was all there: in the towers, in the streets, coursing like blood through a massive body, directed to a single purpose. And pulling the strings, at the heart of it all, was the reason he needed to return there.

“She knows.”

Lea turned toward him. Her glance was accusatory, but subtle.

“Lyssa?” she asked.

Cray shivered. The lights of the metroplex loomed in the cockpit window, crisscrossed by shimmering webs of pulse energy that formed a ceiling over the city.

“She’s been waiting,” Cray said, fixated on the skyline. He closed his eyes, trying in vain to clear the image. It remained pressed, stubbornly, inside his lids. “This is going to be hard, Lea.”

“We can still abort, Cray.”

He reached for her hand without looking, gently pulling it away from the inverter control before she could slow them down. The move startled her, as if Cray had passed along some kind of static charge.

His voice was even and reassuring. “I’m okay.”

Lea watched him closely. Whatever spiked his adrenals had backed off, at least for the time being.

“How long are you going to be able to do this?”

“I’ll make it,” Cray promised.

Cray could tell she was caught, halfway between belief and doubt. It was the same doubt that he felt himself—the warmth of his flesh and bones supplanted by a growing detachment to his body, as intellect rushed in to fill the void. Resistance consumed almost all of his strength—but he was determined to fight.

“Hang on,” Lea said.

The Metro gateway towers parted as the pulser passed between them, a new shock of energy slicking down its center axis and pushing them into the overflight grid. Lea kept her eyes open for traffic, playing dodge with a couple of cargo jobs before entering the relatively clear zones over central Manhattan—and discovering just how alone they were up here. Spread out in all directions, the gridlines were empty. A few booster buoys marked the horizon, but most of the traffic was on the traverse grid down near street level.

“Quiet night,” she observed, jacking the navigation console and patching into the Port Authority autoframe. The display showed a heavy concentration of sentry drones circling the lower half of the island. They darted in and around the overflight grid, making random sweeps on their intended path. She muttered a brief but potent curse.

“What is it?” Cray asked.

“Charlie foxtrot,” Lea said. “Take a look.”

Cray checked out the monitor. His fingers hovered over the display, drawing data from behind the image. Simultaneously, he tapped into the comm web that controlled the movements of the drones, scanning the subfrequencies for mission chatter.

“That’s what I thought.” He sighed, even before the resulting stream appeared on the display. “The Port Authority stepped up patrols on all the free sectors—probably running interference for potential threats.”

Lea was amazed. The contacts were everywhere.

“Looks like your last trip through town put a bug up their ass.” She ran a few trajectory computations, shaking her head at the results. “They got the whole Lower East Side locked down. If you have any ideas, now would be the time.”

“You feel like playing chicken?”

She laughed—until she saw he wasn’t kidding.

“Don’t worry,” Cray told her, diving back into the nav console. “I got it covered. Just let me know when they get close.”

He motioned for her to proceed. Lea made the turn to starboard, nudging the throttles forward until proximity sounded in the cockpit. The navigational fail-safe had detected the obstacles as soon as they came into range, and bled off speed as it barked warnings about an impending collision.

“Cray?”

He bypassed the fail-safe and returned control to her.

“Stay on your heading,” he said.

It wasn’t easy. As the pulser crept back up to its cruising speed, Lea looked straight down her gridline and saw the flotilla of sentry drones for the first time. They were close, not more than fifty meters distant, visual sensors glowering red like demonic eyes peeking out of the dark. Lea tried a few evasive maneuvers to shake them off, but they matched her move for move.

“This isn’t going to work,” she said.

Cray’s face was awash in the blue glow coming off the navigational display, his features gaunt in the long shadows.

“Just give me a few more seconds.”

As soon as he spoke, six more drones dropped in on the chase. They assumed positions on the pulser’s flank, while the ones out in front arranged themselves into a spear formation—the better to impale them if they were crazy enough to make the run.

“It’s getting crowded out here.”

Cray finally finished and buttoned up the interface. He was nearly breathless, his forehead slick and shiny with sweat. He closed his eyes while he recovered, then opened them up again and smiled.

“Let’s rock,” he said.

The pulser reacted to Cray’s command.

The throttle lever jumped out of Lea’s hand, ramming itself forward and snapping the pulser like a slingshot. Up ahead, the sentry drones clustered together in an angry swarm. They lit up the pulser with wave after wave of active sensor energy, which punched through the deck in a rapid beat. Lea held her breath as the pounding grew louder and louder, the pulser shaking as it plunged headlong into that solid mass.

Crunching. Explosions. The terrible scream of metal against metal.

None of that happened.

The pulser pierced the solid membrane like it was slipping through water, with only a pass of empty air in its wake. The drones became a figment of the imagination—or had ceased to exist when the pulser came in contact with them. Lea checked for signs of structural damage, but found none. The ship was completely intact.

Straining to see behind her, Lea peered into the receding scene aft of the pulser. The sentry drones spread outward in a symmetrical bloom, scattering evenly in every direction before constricting back into their previous formation. They forgot all about the pulser. Concluding they were alone in the sky, they broke away from one another and resumed their normal patrol routes.

“Jesus,” Lea breathed, turning back toward Cray. “We’re invisible.”

“Not invisible,” he corrected her. “I just changed our signature—made the drones think that we were one of them. Once we became a friendly contact, their safety protocols kicked in and they broke off the intercept.”

“You mean they scrammed to avoid a collision.”

“Port Authority made up the standards,” Cray shrugged. “Not me.”

Lea responded to a beep from the navigation panel, punching up a vector display of their course. Cray had instructed the pulser to make the corrections automatically, and the ship confirmed that they were closing in on their target. Looking up, Lea confirmed it for herself. As they came around the concrete leviathan that was the Volksgott Tower, the Works slipped into her view.

“Never thought I’d be glad to see
that
place again,” Lea said.

“What’s up with the goon squad?”

She made a quick passive sweep over the grounds outside the Works. “What we expected,” Lea said. “Sentries, countermeasures, mobile weapons platforms—looks like CSS has a whole army posted outside the door.”

“It’s not them I’m worried about,” Cray said, affixing a microtransmitter to his ear. Lea did the same, listening in as he opened a secure communications channel back to the power plant. “Yo, Funky. How’s your signal?”

“Five by five,” came the reply. “Bloody nice of you to drop me a line. You fell off my scope a couple of minutes ago.”

“Had to pull a quick change,” Cray told him. “Everything okay at your end?”

“I haven’t cocked up, if that’s what you mean,” Funky said cheerfully. “Where are you, anyway?”

“Approaching the target,” Lea answered. “We’re in visual range now.”

“I do hope Vortex is playing nice with you.”

“Champagne and roses,” Lea said. “You wouldn’t believe what this guy does to make an impression. You ready to wake up the natives?”