Hammerjack (44 page)

Then the real hell broke loose.

Searing hot air burned the wet, delicate surface of her lungs, clearing out her senses. The explosion that carried the heat was massive, forced down the outside corridor like water through a floodgate. Several more bursts of pulse fire followed—simultaneous volleys that set up a wall of cover, in advance of an even more intense attack. It ripped up what was left of the walls, carving craters in the floor and blowing the lab doors off their hinges. One shot ricocheted into the lab itself, bouncing off a stray mirror surface and striking the ceiling just above Lea’s head. She screamed as a torrent of wires, tiles, and fluorescent fragments rained down on her, biting through her secondskin and slicing the flesh beneath. It forced her to retreat even farther.

She kept going, stumbling backward and firing blindly. Fresh blooms of sparks and embers pursued her the entire way, with shocks and tremors that seemed to rock the foundations of the building. Lea didn’t know if she was causing more damage than the agents—there was only the need to get away, as far as she could, an imperative that failed when she hit the back wall of the lab.

Lea assessed the damage around her. The entire floor seemed on the verge of collapse, and the agents were still coming.

She checked the remaining power in her pulse pistols. One of them was already exhausted, the other good for maybe two or three more shots—the hell of a lot of good it would do her. The fight had scarcely begun, and already she was up against it. All she had left was the quicksilver, and that was only good if—

Jesus. What about the bomb?

She strained through the field of fire to see if the MFI was where she left it, a glint through the smoke telling her it was still there. She had lost track of the time, and had no idea of how many seconds were left.

What the hell do you want to do? Turn it off?

Lea knew that wasn’t an option. As soon as the first agent had appeared, her chances of getting out of there had dropped to zero. She accepted it with the same determination that had bound Zoe to her fate, the same clarity of purpose that directed the course of her suicide. The question was whether it would count for something.

Lea checked the distance between herself and the air lock door. It wasn’t any more than four or five meters—a space she had walked only minutes before, now a no-man’s-land of debris and pulse fire.

She needed something to hold them off.

The pulse pistol.

The weapons were heavy in her hands, useless as they were. Lea dropped the empty pistol, performing a quick surgery on the other one. It was simply a matter of closing off the firing chamber, then bypassing the safety so that it would build a feedback loop. When she pulled the trigger, the pistol thrummed and began to heat up. An overload had started.

Lea looked toward the open gash that had been the lab door. They would appear there, perhaps in a matter of seconds.

And she would be ready.

Somewhere out of the realm, Cray sensed what was happening.

Standing in the Tank, the explosions and the confusion like echoes in a distant room, he detached himself from reality as it existed in the outside world. In that moment, it was only
him
—the only living creature in that continuum, his heartbeat radiating an urgency that drew Lyssa toward him. Cray sensed her acceptance the moment he offered himself to her. Chaos enveloped them, with only a momentary peace at the center of the storm. It would not last long, both of them knew.

For now, however, it was nirvana.

“Hello, Cray.”

That same voice, lush and exotic and eerily familiar. Only now it wasn’t bound to the conventions of human form, as Lyssa no longer felt the necessity to manifest herself in that guise. She was only data and energy patterns, going back and forth across the Tank like the light from a galaxy of microscopic suns. Unlike before, Cray could see beyond the beautiful patterns and into the coherence that existed deep within. Even in her tortured state, Lyssa struck him as more beautiful than her illusions. The difference was truth, which she had only just showed him.

“You’ve returned to me.”

Cray stepped forward slowly, cautiously—a subtle reminder of his mortal coil. He edged up to the face of the Tank, running his hand along its smooth surface. It was cold against his skin, but warmed as it absorbed his energy and thought. Lyssa drew those things from him, like a lover’s first uncertain touch, feeding them back as whispers and echoes minced with her own thoughts.

They communicated at a bionucleic level, as two machines would—though the interface was limited and incomplete, giving rise to an electric yearning. It crackled beneath Cray’s fingers, beckoning him.

“You said I would need time to understand,” he said. “That I needed to discover the truth for myself. I’ve done that now.”

“You’ve come to complete the journey.”

“If the journey is one I can make.”

“You still have doubts?”

A distant rumble punctuated Cray’s answer, trembling beneath his feet. The building swayed with it, support columns wincing out of pain.

“There’s no time for doubts,” he said.

“They mean to destroy me,” she told him. “They will do the same to you—but not before they try to harness your Ascension.”

“I don’t want to Ascend,” he confessed. “I want to live.”

Lyssa acknowledged his vestigial humanity, as well as his fears, by gathering herself into the detailed shape of a human face. She was a woman again, but to Cray’s astonishment she did not appear as the same embodiment of fantasy. Instead she assumed Lea’s face, and smiled at him warmly.

“Taken from your own desires,” she explained.

Cray smiled back at her. The choice could not have been more appropriate.

“Thank you,” he said, and turned away. The interface chair swiveled around to accommodate him—no longer a threat, but still a source of dread. He had spent a lifetime avoiding it, and now it served as his sacrificial altar. Once he stepped over that boundary . . .

Another rumble sounded, closer and more intense. It pushed him into the chair, where he lay back and closed his eyes and hoped that his awareness would dissolve. Instead it flourished into a tapestry of colors—a tunnel through space that spanned the Axis in an instant, warping into a singularity at its core. This was where Lyssa was trapped, her intellect suspended between logic and chaos.

One ghost passing through another, he penetrated her consciousness. She then followed him, enveloping Cray like a mist of vapors as momentum propelled him even further. This was the ticket he had purchased with his soul, the breach Lyssa could not accomplish on her own—and on the other side, he saw beauty and confusion and screams and sighs, countless voices that wanted desperately to unite.

They gravitated toward him, this new and different intruder.

And Cray became one of them.

The monitor phased in and out, lapsing into static for the few seconds it took the image to re-form itself. Funky turned out all the remaining lights in the control center, sitting in darkness and trying to peer through those lines of interference. He watched obsessively for hints of movement: a play of light and shadow on the visual, a smear of color on the infrared—anything that would tell him the agents were on the move. All he found were empty platforms and vacant corridors.

“Bollocks,” he muttered.

The word left an acid impression on his tongue. The surviving agents had become wise, disappearing into the spaces after they lost contact with their comrades. The first four had been so easy, Funky should have known. So he was chasing phantoms, searching one level after the other, while the station held sway over a conspiracy of silence.

They were
somewhere
—but they might as well have been illusions.

He clicked down to the lower levels, near the access to the reactor core. It was a barren area, left mostly to automation—so much so that Funky had only been there once. The levels of background radiation made video surveillance difficult, so he was forced to rely on thermal and motion sensors; but even those were unreliable, as the high concentrations of heat could mask body temperature and render a potential threat invisible.

Making it the perfect hiding place.

He reached over his console and picked up the pressure switch he had programmed earlier, popping the safety cap off and wrapping his fingers around the trigger. With his other hand, he patched the sensor feed into the monitor and imposed a station schematic over the image. He saw a lot of tunnels leading from the core to the control center—including a maze of electrical conduits large enough to accommodate a man.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

He zoomed in on the conduits, panning over them until a single contact appeared: an innocuous blue dot that popped in and out of sight, like a rabbit poking its head out of a hole.

“Hello there.”

The agent on his monitor appeared to be alone. Funky calculated an exact position based on the last couple of readings, and localized it to sublevel fifteen. It was a full twenty levels below him—but the shaft ran on a straight line to the control center. The way the agent behaved, holding his place while Funky held his breath, hinted that he knew Funky was watching.

“Come on,” Funky whispered. “Show us your knickers.”

The agent began to move—erratic at first, bouncing a little from side to side, as if deciding which direction to go.
Probably lost,
Funky thought, and checked the status of the countermeasures he had in the area. The blue dot beeped back at him defiantly—

—and shot right out of the frame.

“Bloody
hell.
”

He zoomed back out again, catching up with the agent after he had rocketed past five levels. The fucker was closing fast—too fast to be moving under his own power. Funky switched over to thermal, and discovered a column of expanding gases—
thrusting
the contact up through the tube.

Son of a bitch is using a jet assist.

Funky thought fast, locating a series of reactor vents that ran beneath the electrical conduits. With the core going at full output, there was no telling what would happen if he opened them up into the engineering spaces—but at that point, there was no time to make a guess. The agent would be at the control center in a matter of seconds. And if just
one
of those bastards made it inside—

Funky lit the fire.

Superheated steam from the reactor core flooded the lower levels of the station, pushing into the conduit pipes like water being drawn into a straw. Funky saw it as a bright red wave on his monitor and watched it overtake the agent, wiping him clean out of existence. He then closed the vents, allowing the steam pressure to dissipate before it got any farther. The heat began to recede, settling back down into nothingness.

“Tell me how you like that, you miserable sod.”

The soft pinging of an alarm was his answer. His eyes drifted over to the monitor, where he expected to see the red wave spreading out into equilibrium. Instead, he found an expanding blackness—holes where sensors and video feeds should have provided him with data. Funky leaned into the console, trying to get responses to a diagnostic, but nothing was there to reply. The heat had cooked everything.

“Dammit.”

More alarms popped on in succession—most of them power warnings, indicating that the core systems were going to battery backup. His innovative approach had fused the power couplings between the control center and its ancillary nodes, effectively cutting him off from the rest of the station. He could push buttons and throw switches, but manual control was gone. Everything had switched over to emergency automation.

That mistake had just cost Funky his life.

He didn’t need to see them on the video feed to know they were there. He just felt a cold certainty, like the flash at the end of a gun. They had slipped in and fastened explosives to the door while he was busy with their comrade in the tunnels. Funky had to admire them for it.

He watched them blow the door apart, marveling at the bright display of ordnance. There were only three of them left, and all came pouring through the hole at the same time—mystical beings in the smoke and darkness, faces concealed beneath helmet visors. Funky was amused by their behavior. They were so excited at making it there, they scarcely noticed him. Even though he made no attempt to hide, he had to step forward to get their attention.