Hammerjack (49 page)

The mercs who tended his machinery were a different story. Lea knew the type from her own time with the movement, when hammerjacks were looking to make a name for themselves in the underground. More egotistical than partisan, they used the
Inru
as a vehicle to learn their chops—just as they used Phao Yin to get time on some of the newest technology. They treated the newcomers with suspicion, as they would anybody who trespassed on their turf, but that was as far as their hostility went. As much as such people talked, they were not killers. Lea doubted they even knew the full extent of what Phao Yin had planned.

“I suppose congratulations are in order,” Yin said. He walked a slow, deliberate pace, keeping himself between Cray and Lea while Avalon stalked them from behind. “It’s not everyone who can evade my organization for as long as you have. You even gave my free agent a few bruises. I confess, Dr. Alden—I didn’t believe you had it in you.”

“That makes two of us,” Cray remarked in an acid tone. “I knew you had some issues, Yin—but this whole master-of-the-universe thing has me baffled.”

“Perhaps you should talk to your friend here. If not for her efforts, it’s doubtful we could have realized our goals.” Yin turned that reptilian smile on Lea. “The
Inru
owe you a great debt, Miss Prism. I’m quite pleased to have you back in our fold.”

“Save it for your trick boys,” Lea scoffed. “I’m only here to watch you go down.”

Yin laughed.

“Looks like you’re already on the way,” Lea continued. “A guy like you should be smart enough to stay off the juice. Is that what those little coffin trips are for?” she asked, jerking a thumb toward the sarcophagus. “To show the boys and girls you can still ride?”

“Nothing quite so simple,” Yin admitted. “The subjects you see here are experiments, nothing more. An exercise in evolution for future generations—built upon your work, by the way. You see,” he said, turning around to face them both, “everybody wanted to be the first. Toward that end, each one volunteered to be a vessel. To project themselves into a higher level of consciousness, so they might better understand the word.”

“You injected them with flash,” Cray translated.

“Only a variant,” Yin said with a shrug. “It took some doing to get it right, but ultimately we were successful. These minions have been out in the world for some time, helping the message take root. Now that our time has arrived, they will be there to assure the
Inru
’s continued dominance in the subculture.”

“No matter how many of them get killed in the process.”

“Where’s the revolution if there’s no injustice?”

Yin spoke with a wicked brilliance. The strategy, after all, was flawless. In crushing its enemies, the Collective only pumped more fuel for the fanatics. Once that enmity reached critical mass, the chain reaction would continue on its own until it flooded the streets with anticorporate venom. Then Yin would be in a position to deal—and the Assembly would have no choice but to accept.

“An interesting proposition,” Cray observed.

“You’re a poor liar,” Yin countered. “None of this is any mystery. You thought of it long before you came near this place.”

“What difference does that make?”

“All the difference in the world.” Yin took him by the arm and continued their march to the core. Lea watched them both, trying to decipher the cryptic intent that passed between them. “I keep coming back to the same question:
Why did you return to the Works?
You had the head start. You could have easily disappeared. What could possibly convince you to go back, to face almost certain capture?”

Cray had already explained his motives to Lea, and up until that moment she had believed him. But there was a vacancy in his eyes that invited doubt—and a willingness to follow. Cray was slipping. Lea was helpless to prevent it.

“It’s very simple,” Yin coaxed. “You
wanted
to be found.”

He stopped at the entry to the core, where several technicians were preparing the sarcophagus to receive another body. Cryogenic hoses snaked across the floor to its base, alongside coils of fiber link that carried test pulses back to an extraction apparatus. Cray fixated on the open lid, while a cool vapor spilled across the floor and beckoned absolute zero.

“Seeing Lyssa like that,” Yin said, “understanding her the way you understand yourself, you
needed
me to find you. Even if you didn’t know it, even if you didn’t
believe
—all of your instincts were driving you home. It’s the only place left for you, Cray. The only purpose that has any meaning.”

The technicians pushed Lea aside and started to remove Cray’s clothing. She tried to intervene, but Avalon was on her before she could flex a single muscle. Brought to her knees, Lea watched through tears as each garment crumpled to the floor. Cray, meanwhile, just stood there and allowed it to happen. His eyes stayed on Yin the whole time.

“You know what I saw,” he said.

“Don’t listen to him, Cray!” Lea shouted. Avalon twisted her arm, making her cry out, though Cray didn’t seem to notice. “He’s trying to trick you!”

“As much as any human being could know,” Yin replied, ignoring Lea. “Zoe started it the moment she assimilated the flash. She just didn’t know how quickly it would take effect.”

“
Please,
Cray,” Lea pleaded. She was breaking down, her voice laced with sobs. “He’s the one who killed Zoe, remember?”

Cray didn’t hear her at all.

“She was the one,” he said. “When Lyssa broke out.”

Yin nodded slowly, teacher to pupil.

“She touched Zoe first,” Cray went on. “That was her first contact.”

“She was Ascending,” Yin affirmed. “Then she passed the gift on to
you
.”

Life sparkled in the color of his eyes. Alien life.

“My Ascension,” Cray said.

“Yes,” Yin told him. “The potential that exists within each one of us. A mind even more powerful than Lyssa.” With quivering hands, he clasped both sides of Cray’s face. “That’s why she sought you out.”

Lea felt the tears freeze on her cheeks, the pain that crippled her escaping like so much ether.
This
was the secret Cray had discovered while he was alone in the Tank—the truth he would not confess to her.

“You
are
the Other.”

Cray’s resistance collapsed. The spires surrounding the core absorbed his loose energy, giving spontaneous rise to neural impulses and thickening the air with electricity. Those bursts then jumped the loop, higher and faster than Yin had managed, before coming back down on the extraction banks like pulse fire. Sparks exploded as Yin’s mercs scrambled to contain the overload, but the man himself was undisturbed. He was too in awe of Cray to be concerned with anything else.

Avalon released Lea from her grip, then stepped forward and stood next to Yin.

“You’d be wise to observe him for a time before you proceed,” the free agent said. “He may already have abilities that we don’t know about.”

Yin folded his arms. The mercs came over and gave him the damage report. It was minimal—some fused circuits in the reception pool, nothing that couldn’t be repaired in a matter of minutes. Yin waved them away to complete the job.

“The containment field will bring him down,” Yin said. “As soon as he’s in the freeze, we’ll be able to control him.”

“Are you certain of that?”

Two more mercs approached and took Cray by the arms. They led him over to the sarcophagus and placed him inside. An extraction team then moved in and began to hardwire his body with life support and fiber clusters. Cray went along blindly, his eyes almost catatonic.

“No question,” Yin decided.

He strolled away from the free agent, over to where Lea was just getting to her feet. She was unsteady, still cradling her shoulder. The
Inru
closed in on her, moving at Yin’s command, until they were close enough to fall on her with their fingernails and their fangs. Yin was waiting for the terror to appear on her face, but Lea had already resolved to deny him that. Instead, she kept her gaze leveled at
him
—seething with a violence that invited Yin to move closer, just so he could taste it for himself.

“Whatever you have in mind,” she said, “you better make it quick.”

Yin smiled. He had no such intentions.

Yin granted Lea an unobstructed view, up in a glass booth that overlooked the core. A single row of control nodes lined the darkened space, linked to vital systems that ran throughout the facility and up into Point Eiffel. Reams of information poured out of virtual displays, assuming form as logical constructs that were monitored by a Japanese crew. From their tattoo scars, Lea had them pegged for
ronin
—disgraced gangsters who were denied the dignity of ritual suicide. Avalon methodically patrolled their stations, keeping a careful vigil. Hopped up on the same drugs as the
Inru,
the
ronin
looked like they had been down in it for some time.

“Still you shed tears.”

It was Yin who addressed her, projecting his insincere charm. It was true her crying had never stopped. Lea just hadn’t noticed—not until she saw her own likeness staring back at her.

“All for a man who would destroy you,” Yin continued, shaking his head in pity as he came forward to join her. “Alden brought me countless heads in the time we worked together—but none he would have prized so much as yours. Heretic was his special project.” A lewd smirk crept across his lips. “I see now that he was yours.”

Lea stole a sideways glance at one of the displays. One of the partitions spouted out a stream of cryogenic stats, which supplied data to form a construct of the sarcophagus itself. The vessel was sealed, filling up with the liquid elements that would take Cray down. His respiration was already at half-normal and dropping fast—though brain wave activity was still off the charts. He was aware of every moment, even as his body slipped into stasis.

“Don’t push your luck,” Lea said, then turned around to face him. Tears evaporated under the heat of her resolve, a shift in the balance of power between them. “You can play your little games with the
Inru,
but don’t you dare try it on me.”

Yin was curious.

“What would you have me do?”

“Put a stop to this,” Lea demanded. “You know as well as I do that the flash has no termination sequence. Once it’s active in a living system, extraction is impossible.”

“Precisely as it was intended,” Yin explained. “The host genetic sequence must be irrevocably altered before flash-DNA can begin processing. Otherwise, the host would be dead in a matter of hours. We had hoped for a few more months of testing before actual deployment—but your friend Zoe altered the schedule.” He leaned over the window to observe Cray, and remarked, “All things considered, it worked out remarkably well.”

“Then why do this?”

Yin raised an eyebrow.

“I should have thought that obvious by now.”

Yin had made no attempt to hide his design. He had, in fact, walked Lea straight through it—but only now did she realize what she had seen.

She whirled around in a panic, planting her hands against the window. Down in the core, sporadic pulses of energy were gathering around the sarcophagus, organizing themselves into tethers of coherent light. They traveled up and down the lengths of the spires, intertwining with one another in a delicate expression of intelligence, before returning to their point of origin and sinking back into a cryogenic void.

“It’s beginning,” Yin said.

Lea pushed past him, jumping onto one of the nodes. She grabbed some mixed packets of telemetry from the other stations and dumped them onto the virtual display. The resulting model clearly showed the corollary she had already worked out in her head: the further Cray went down, the more powerful those pulses became. If it continued, the core would be generating a supernova of energy by the time Cray flatlined.

Going straight up through Point Eiffel.

Lea went numb.

“You’re projecting him into the Axis.”

Yin didn’t acknowledge her, but it was all the confirmation Lea needed. Stars then rocked her vision, exploding from a steel vise that clamped down on her wounded shoulder. Cold breath creased the back of her neck, and Lea knew Avalon had her.