Hammerjack (52 page)

“Let’s try that again,” she said.

Then the free agent was gone, a pirouette shooting straight into the air. The force that propelled her was unimaginable, as were the physics behind her descent. Swooping back down, she curled herself into a ball and bounced off the floor, converting her downward trajectory into a forward rush. She then flipped over in midair, inverted as she made a grab for Lea’s head.

Lea ducked. She was quick enough to avoid getting her neck snapped, but too slow to beat Avalon’s punch. Agony penetrated her skull like a drill, compressing her vision into a tunnel filled with stars. When it cleared, Lea found herself stumbling back toward the core. One hand feebly clutched the quicksilver; the other capped the new wound on her forehead, stemming fresh blood that trickled down the front of her face.

Avalon stood where Lea had been only a moment before. She had yet to break a sweat.

“Strike two,” she said.

Lea steadied herself against one of the fallen computer banks. The world around her wobbled, with only the pain keeping her conscious. Avalon wasn’t playing anymore. Still, Lea eased her hand away from the quicksilver and kept it hidden. She wasn’t ready to give up.

Not yet.

“What’s the matter?” Lea asked. Her words were slurred, between heavy breaths. “Reflexes not what they used to be? I thought you were supposed to be bad.”

Avalon turned her head slightly, toward the approaching squad. They were close, but veered off short of a direct attack. Instead, they dug themselves in at a distance and clustered their weapons for a combined assault.

“Come on,” Lea invited. “What are you waiting for?”

A muzzle flash ignited behind Avalon, outlining her body in a stellar corona. She twisted to avoid the pulse beams, channeling them between her outstretched arms. Then she leaped into the air again, riding the heat in defiance of gravity, channeling her momentum into a spear. The shots tore up the floor at Lea’s feet, but she didn’t so much as twitch. She only saw the free agent, who pounced down on her like a gigantic bat.

And the brilliance of quicksilver.

Phao Yin struggled.

His disciples dead, he played the same when the soldiers stepped over him. He would then continue, pushing himself with broken legs and pulling himself with bleeding hands. By the time he reached the core, the pain was beyond comprehension—but so was the need, as great as any pleasure he had ever pursued.

Grabbing on to one of the computer banks, Yin pulled himself to his knees and rested there for one blistering moment. He then hoisted himself up, containing his screams long enough to roll onto his back. Yin had no idea what happened next. His eyes closed, he only remembered losing himself in free fall—then a sudden, horrid jolt as he crashed upon uneven ground. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he had fallen into the core. A frigid, dry mist clung to the floor, creating an eerie white calm that cleansed him of his agony. It renewed Yin’s clarity of purpose and guided him to what should have been his destiny.

It was bleeding ice, from the disconnected hoses at its base. The crystals that settled on its surface sparkled like a thousand diamonds, beautiful in spite of the anger they inspired. Yin scrambled toward the sarcophagus, quickly because he did not know how long he could bear to look at it in his current state. He clawed at its surface, slipping time and time again while he tried to find a hold, finally throwing himself on top with a final, desperate lunge.

Embracing the thing, Yin squirmed his way up to the window. The shattered glass oozed cryogenic fluid between its cracks. Yin wiped away the viscous liquid with his bare hands, slicing his skin and freezing it at the same time. He didn’t care. Nothing would stop him from confronting his enemy. Nothing would stop him from seeing his face.

A dense fog covered the glass from the inside. Yin leaned in closer and the fog cleared. Alden’s features congealed out of the blue suspension that separated them. He had gone ashen—beyond the porcelain texture of a frozen body, into the color of the dead. With the seal breached, Alden’s life had leaked out as easily as the cryogenic fluid.

“
No!
” Yin shrieked.

He pounded against the broken glass. Glittering shards descended lazily through the fluid, settling around Alden’s shoulders, but he remained still.

“You can’t die! Not until I say!”

Alden wasn’t interested.

“
I won’t allow it!
” Yin cried, overcome with tears of impotent rage. He kept beating his fists against the sarcophagus, weaker and weaker with each blow. “You will
not
die! Not until I know!”

Alden just lay there, in taunting death.

“You son of a bitch!”

His eyes flew open.

Yin froze. He gulped one last, searing breath.

Then hands, the cold flesh of a corpse, breaking through the window. Fingers wrapped around his head, electric points penetrating his skull, and Yin tasted the pain of a hard interface. He thrashed about, trying to force himself off the sarcophagus, but the energy from his body was fading. Alden had drained it as easily as he drained Yin’s thoughts.

Yin fell.

Into Alden’s eyes, a space of light-years crossed in the breadth of a nanosecond: shadow without black, light without substance. Particles and waves, they encircled Yin in a whirlpool of chaos and data behaving as one—a logical singularity, tunnels branching out into infinite strings that behaved like water, collapsing on him only to reappear in a million different permutations. The whole of the Axis spread itself out before him, but it was only a microcosm of what lay beyond. Like the stars in the sky visible from Earth, they parted to reveal the universe as it truly was—expanding, unpredictable, infinite combinations of exquisite complexity.

The first glimpse cleaved Yin’s mind like a scalpel.

The bitstream condensed into a flat horizontal plane. Yin pierced it, breaking the surface tension of the wave, but then discovered an entire ocean underneath. His own logic failing him, he sank into the abyss and drifted through its currents—which he soon came to realize were the patterns of the dead. He listened to them all, their singing voices constant but out of tune, fragments of thought and emotion trapped in the Axis like the debris of consciousness.

Yin screamed. Nothing came out. Yin fought. His body was memory. He was already dead, to be permitted to walk among them. And the dead treated him as a father, returning to his brood after abandoning them. One by one, Yin assimilated them. And one by one, they feasted on the remains of his mind.

Alden, their host, savored the last bit for himself.

The blade guided Lea.

Even as she spun to avoid the kill, her hand knew where to go. The quicksilver just followed the lines of tracer fire that chased Avalon through the air, then made a delicate stab into her path. What happened next was illusion, a passage marked only by a quiver—but Lea knew the throb that traveled down the length of her arm, and the sound of the quicksilver when it drew blood.

Avalon tumbled.

The free agent slipped into the beams at a glancing angle, taking an indirect hit to her shoulder. The shot only grazed her, but its velocity magnified the effect tenfold. She flipped over and took a dive straight down, crashing into the computer stacks as the beams ripped into the floor around her.

Smoke rose. Debris fell.

An unnatural quiet settled over the chamber.

Lea heard shouts from the squad that fired on them, followed by a scramble of footsteps. They were coming again. She managed to pull herself up and shuffled into the dissipating mist that fled the core.

Avalon slid off the stacks, and was there to meet her. She was smoldering, hunched over and bleeding. Her left arm cradled the right, holding it up so that Lea could see the cauterized incision. The quicksilver had bitten right through Avalon’s sensuit, just above her hand. The flesh around the wound had already started to mortify.

“Strike three,” Lea said.

Avalon grimaced—her own version of a smile. Then she winced, a reaction to the isotopic toxins that crawled up her arm. She took a step back.

“You can’t stop us,” the free agent said. “The evolution will continue.”

Lea followed, and took another step toward her.

“Maybe I just need to slow it down a little.”

Avalon kept going, until she bumped against the sarcophagus. She was in considerable pain now, but maintained a defiant posture. She was through fighting—but her eyes, burned blue and black and more human than they had ever been, told Lea that there would be another time.

“Soon,” Avalon told her. “Very soon.”

She then dissolved, a flurry of incredible speed. When Lea caught up with her, the free agent was already in the escape tube. Avalon jacked the safety overrides, plugging in with her sensors and taking manual control of her descent. Lea launched herself at the tube, grabbing at the hatch before Avalon could close it—but the free agent was too far ahead of her. The hatch slammed shut.

Avalon, however, was not all there. Her wounded arm protruded from the lip of the hatch, which closed around it. Through the transparency of the tube, Lea could see the agony on the free agent’s face, but she could also see the resolve. This was survival, pure and simple. Avalon was going to live, and this was the only way to do it.

Lea turned away before the arm sheared off.

And while Avalon dropped into the catacombs, Lea kept walking. Toward the sarcophagus and toward Cray, where she found the body of Phao Yin. He was facedown against the cracked window, his arms hanging limp off the sides of the cryogenic vessel—the very place where Lea had first seen him. She pulled Yin off and dumped him on the floor, his eyes wide-open in terror as they stared up at her.

Cray, in utter contrast, lay peacefully. Lea searched her thoughts for him, hoping to catch an echo, but she fell only on silence. She reached down and touched the broken glass, tracing the contours of his face with her hand.

“What now, cowboy?”

She barely acknowledged the group of soldiers forming a cordon around the core. They kept a cautious distance, treating Lea with the same awe the
Inru
had shown Cray.

“What now?”

Faces, just outside the glass.

An endless parade of them passing back and forth with no pattern or reason. Lea recognized some of them from her former life—hammerjacks who got burned trying to repeat her runs, old
Inru
comrades who didn’t get out when she did—but mostly they were just
people,
common to each other only in their misery. Occasionally one would stop and press himself against the window, grimacing in despair—but mostly, they just stared. Permitted a glance into her luxurious world, they visited her with hatred, and used body language to promise revenge if they ever got her within reach of their hands. Then they would continue, the slow pace of the tortured and the enslaved, until they returned the next day to do it over again.

Lea tried to reason with them for the first few days. They didn’t want to listen. There was a difference between her and them. The protective wall that separated them was only the beginning. Lea was a prisoner, but she was a
valuable
prisoner. It was precisely the message her jailers wanted to convey.

They despised her for that. After a while, Lea despised them equally.

She retreated to the rear of her cell, as far away from the glass as she could get. The food she had refused, she now accepted heartily. When asked what she wanted to drink, she requested the finest wine—and got it. The sparse accommodations she had started with gave way to plush furnishings and a feather bed that was sinful in its comfort. The Collective had upgraded her status to collaborator and made certain the entire population of the gulag knew it.

Lea didn’t give a damn.

She would have known their purpose even if Cray hadn’t warned her. She understood the rite of passage for what it was. Getting through it was the only way to get to the meat of what they
really
wanted—and so Lea served it up for them. By the time she was through, Lea was totally withdrawn into herself. She went through all the motions, but she was just living. Nothing kept her mind occupied, except the waiting. And when she had waited long enough, the window frosted to black and blocked the others out forever.