Hammerjack (47 page)

The SOT dropped out of its trajectory an hour later, while it was still over the Atlantic. As it broke the high clouds, Lea spotted the familiar outline of Incorporated Europe, the western shores of the continent coming up fast. The landmass was enshrouded in an eroding purple twilight, magnificent against the curvature of the Earth—and the last place Lea expected Phao Yin to be. Europe was the heart and soul of the Collective, far from the lawless political scape of the Zone—and that made it especially dangerous ground for the
Inru
. If Yin had been conducting his operations from there, he was better than invisible. That he kept those whispers out of the Axis was nothing short of a miracle.

The aircraft descended rapidly, dropping down into Gibraltar airspace and making a lazy roll to the northeast, just as the coastal cities turned themselves on to beat back the night. The pilot vectored along the same lines as the pulser grid, following the larger arteries that pumped traffic into the center of the continent. Cray slipped in close to Lea and traced their progress through the window, while she tried to map the subtle reach he was making with his mind. Fascinated as she was, it still scared her when Cray was only half-there.

“You got that look,” Lea observed.

“Just an impression, that’s all,” Cray told her. “There’s a lot of background noise—you know, like voices in a crowded room. It takes a while, but I can play them back from memory one at a time.”

“Is that how you found out about Funky?”

“No. That was different.”

Neurons began to tingle. Lea posed her next question with caution: “How?”

“He was in the Axis when it happened,” Cray explained. “Or at least part of him was. That part is still out there, searching. Disembodied energy working on a flatline. It’s been collecting for some time.”

“Is that . . . ?” she began, uncertain if she really wanted to know. The implications went beyond disturbing, into the realm of the existential. “What else is out there?”

“Everything and everyone connected to the Axis.”

Lea sounded distant, even to herself.

“That means part of me is out there, too,” she said. “From the interface.”

“From anybody who’s ever interfaced,” he affirmed. “First law of thermodynamics: no energy in the universe is ever created or destroyed. It only changes form.”

From reality to the Axis,
Lea thought.
Physical to virtual.

She looked up at him. “What does that make you?”

“Just a man,” Cray said, and squeezed her on the shoulder. “For as long as that lasts.” He returned to his seat, leaving her to sort out the possibilities for herself.

The drop to subsonic jolted Lea out of her thoughts. She turned pensive attention to the gridpaths and lights that meshed into the tight web on the ground below, then watched them part as the SOT entered the space of a large airport. She tried to angle ahead to get bearings on its location, but could find no distinguishing landmarks. She did, however, spot several other aircraft moving out of their way—clearing a path for them to land. The pilot, it seemed, was wasting no time in getting them down.

She glanced over at Cray, looking for clues. He was inscrutable, almost messianic.

“Hell of a day,” she whispered.

A gauntlet of straight lines bisected the dark, marking the edges of a taxiway that led to a bank of reserve hangars. As soon as the SOT landed, its pilot steered off the runway and made a run toward the buildings. Through her window, Lea spotted a small convoy of escort vehicles parked on the tarmac directly ahead. They started up as the SOT approached, a swirl of red and blue spilling out from their light mounts. They moved as a tight cluster, across the pavement on an intercept course. The convoy then branched out, quickly falling into positions all around the aircraft. Lea only wished they were the real authorities, coming to arrest her.

One of the vehicles took the lead, its driver motioning for the SOT to follow. The pilot complied and directed his aircraft toward the largest of the hangars. Spotlights ignited around the structure in advance of their arrival, bathing the aircraft in a harsh flood as the massive doors rolled open. The SOT taxied inside and stopped, as several dozen troops emerged and took up strategic positions throughout the hangar.

Avalon walked back to join her two guests. She carried Lea’s quicksilver, which protruded obviously from beneath her coat. For a second, Lea considered reaching for it—but she didn’t want to give Avalon an excuse. There would be time for that later.

“Get up,” the free agent ordered.

Both of them did as they were told. Avalon marched them down the aisle and out the door, down the stairs to where a line of troops waited. A hovercraft was docked there, open hatches awaiting their arrival.

Rifle sights followed the prisoners as they walked toward the small ship, not resting until both of them were securely on board. Avalon then cleared the troops out, climbing into the cockpit and sealing the hatch behind her. She started up the turbofans, which generated a misty hiss in the closed space of the hangar. Releasing the docking clamps, the free agent put the ship into a hover a few meters off the ground. It drifted sideways after a kick from the lateral thrusters, floating past the wide body of the SOT and turning about as it exited the hangar doors.

Once outside, Avalon killed the running lights and took the hovercraft straight up. Blackness enveloped the small ship, offset only by the dimness of the cabin lights. Lea waited until they got to altitude, then leaned forward to get a glimpse over the free agent’s shoulder. The view through the forward window offered few clues, until Avalon swung around to her intended course and the shape of a city skyline formed on the horizon. The outlines were familiar, a jumble of ancient and modern structures that Lea had once haunted on a regular basis. Her experiences there had, in fact, become legend—at least to those who knew her as Heretic. But that had been a long time ago, even if the memories were fresh enough to touch.

Paris, after all, was a city you didn’t forget.

Cray pictured their destination, long before Avalon steered them toward it. The image appeared grandiose and magnetic—though it was the latter sensation that disturbed him. Just as Lyssa had put the hook on him, so did the tower he constructed in his mind. It meant that the machinery was already in place. Phao Yin was waiting for him to set it into motion, but it was alive nonetheless.

Even without the flash acting on his nervous system, Cray would have been able to sense it. He knew the street, and right now it was popping off that wavelength like a superconductor. The city was just out of phase, its rhythms like a recording played back three-quarter speed. It wasn’t until they crossed into the Paris centerplex that he understood the magnitude of the disturbance, and then only because of the sudden
lack
of input. Beyond its borders, the city was a manufactured simulation; inside, it was a complete media blackout.

The eye of the storm,
Cray thought. No one else in the world could have picked up on it—even those who had spent lifetimes in the Axis, breaching the kind of security that passed for magic in the civilized world. Dark magic. Black ice. There was enough here to drown a thousand hammerjacks.

All radiating from a single source, directly ahead.

“Paris free flight,” Avalon signaled. “This is SAM 600 transport.”

“SAM 600, go ahead.”

“Requesting permission for high-insert approach.” She leveled off just above the traverse grid, aiming for the hub at the center of the old city. “My vector is zero-two-seven, gridline plus twenty meters. This is a courier flight, over.”

“SAM 600, acknowledged. State your destination.”

“Point Eiffel.”

“Roger that.” The voice on the other end radioed instructions, while Avalon maintained position and awaited clearance. A short distance off, the slender columns that formed the tower sloped gracefully into the cosmopolitan sky. “Come around to course zero-four-nine. You’re second in line for landing.”

Avalon disengaged the turbines and went on thrusters, swinging into a lazy turn around the east side of the tower. Massive floodlights at its base cast a reverent glow over the steel meshwork—a fusion of beauty and garishness, made more dazzling by the web of laserlight that encircled the old landmark. The free agent aimed for the top of the tower, gliding over a flotilla of pulsers that rode the grid in and out of the centerplex. As the hovercraft flew in closer, Lea spotted a small hoverpad beneath the domed apex—a tiny platform, large enough to accommodate only a few ships. Avalon hung back for a few moments to allow another craft to lift off, then moved in to take the empty spot.

A bank of landing lights blazed against the lower hull of the hovercraft as it settled out of the sky, the fans kicking up a froth of ice particles. Avalon shut the engines down, securing the ship and turning back to her two passengers.

“Move,” she ordered.

Cray and Lea walked across the hoverpad toward a magnetic lift, while Avalon shadowed them from behind. Lea was uneasy as they waited for the lift to arrive and stayed close to Cray the entire time.

“The whole tower is a transmitter,” Cray said to her. It was a foregone conclusion that Avalon could hear everything, but the free agent didn’t seem at all concerned. “That’s how the
Inru
hide this place. There’s enough concentrated ice to cover the whole damned continent. It’s like one gigantic logic trap.”

“More like a hole in the Axis,” Lea agreed.

“It
will
be,” Cray intoned, “if Phao Yin gets his way. First here, then the incorporated territories—after that, who the hell knows?”

“Speculation doesn’t befit you, Dr. Alden,” Avalon said. “Yin will be disappointed—but then, I never believed you were worth all the trouble.”

Cray smiled back coldly.

“That’s not your call to make,” he replied. “
Is
it?”

“An appeal to my vanity,” the free agent observed. “You must be getting desperate.”

“Not as desperate as you,” Cray shot back. “I never could figure out how somebody like you got hooked up with this bunch. What did Yin promise you? Money? A seat of power in his new empire? Tell me—what does it take to get a free agent to break an oath of loyalty to her masters?”

The suggestion seemed to amuse her. “I have no more loyalty for the Assembly than I do for the
Inru.
My only interest is their vision.”

“A world populated by soulless machines?” Cray asked. “That won’t get back what they took from you, Avalon.”

“I never believed it would,” Avalon said. “But it will make this world far more livable.”

“And if the Assembly is destroyed in the process?”

“So much the better.”

The lift arrived, terminating the discussion. Avalon shoved them both inside. She then turned to the elevator control and opened a hidden panel beneath the standard interface. Cray recognized the interface as a security subsystem; ironically, it was the same hardware the Collective installed at the Works, complete with retinal scan and biometric detectors. The free agent took off her glasses and presented a blind eye for confirmation, while Cray and Lea had their endocrine levels mapped down to the last detail. The subsystem would use those unique markers to track their positions anywhere within the security sphere. Once coded, escape was impossible.

The lift dropped through a transparent shaft, the iron skeleton of the tower enveloping them. Structural beams and supports blurred into the city skyline, alternating light and shadow.
Free fall,
Cray thought, knowing they would not slow until they had plunged into the ground. In a way, it was fitting. The subculture had given birth to the
Inru
movement, the only place where such subversive elements could move about freely. Now that subculture was set to emerge from the very same place. Cray had to admire Yin for that touch.

They plunged into darkness.

Lea imagined the glass walls compressing her when Paris disappeared. She placed her hands against them out of an irrational need to push back, but relented against the cool surface when she spied her own reflection there. Staring beyond the likeness, Lea saw a nightmare series of images: labyrinthine passageways twisting into forever, brick walls stained with the graffiti of a hundred languages—but mostly bones. Thousands of them.
Millions
of them. Human skeletons all, cobbled together and piled on top of each other, the wicked grins of skulls peeking out from the rubble of remains. In half glimpses, they took on the appearance of the damned.