City of Golden Shadow (113 page)

"I can see the helicopter, sir. It's still hanging on the rocks, but with the waves it won't stay there long,"

The officer brought up the first pictures from the camera drones, and when he saw his observer's words confirmed, cursed again. Dread thought he knew just what was going through the man's mind: there had been security on this island for twenty years, even though his own employers had only gained the contract recently. Twenty years, and nothing more dangerous than a few local fishermen threatening to stray into the exclusion zone had ever happened. He had just denied landing rights, however legally, to an aircraft in distress. Could he stretch that legality to the screaming point and let any of the helicopter's survivors be killed by the submarine security drones as well? And, probably more tellingly, could he do it in front of his men and hope to keep their respect for a real security emergency?

"Son of a whore!" He had wrestled it almost to the point where action would be too late. "Blind the subs-shut down the whole marine hunter-killer grid. Yapé, get a boat out there as quick as possible to look for survivors. I'll call the boss and tell him what we're doing."

Hook, line, and sinker. Dread jumped up. "Track Two, launch." He waved to his own half of the invasionary force, a dozen men in neoprene commando suits. By the time he had finished his gesture, they were already running the boat into the water. He sprinted after them. His own work had just begun.

The boat slid silently across the bay, slithering carefully through the dormant mines. Their search-and-destroy responses had been turned off, but that didn't mean one might not explode on accidental contact. Dread sat in the back, happy for once to let someone else take charge. He had more important things to do than steer a boat.

Where is it? He closed his eyes and turned off the music. The feed from the spike into the island's security system was still open: he could hear the security commander talking to the rescue boat, which was just now setting out from the far side of the island. No one had noticed the data tap yet, but that would shortly become academic, anyway: the security forces would reach the downed helicopter in only a few minutes. Unless it was very badly damaged, they would quickly recognize that it had been wired for remote operation. They would know they had been suckered.

Where? He let himself fall backward into his own thoughts, searching for the elusive first grasp-for that pulse, that electronic heartbeat, that would show him where to grip.

He had discovered his ability to twist, as he thought of it, in his first foster home. Actually, the twist was really the second miracle: the first was that he had been fostered out at all. At seven years of age he had already killed three people, all of them children about his own age. Only one of the murders had been acknowledged, although ascribed to a tragic but momentary loss of self-control; the other two deaths had been blamed on an accident. This was all nonsense, of course. On both occasions, Dread-who had not yet chosen that melodramatic name-had carried a hammer in the waistband of his pants for days, waiting. Pushing the pair of victims in the second attack down an iron stairwell after beating in their heads had been a last bit of anger rather than a precocious attempt to disguise his work.

Even without death in his background, the Queensland Juvenile Authority would not have found it easy to place the child. Just the fact of his parentage (his alcoholic, prostitute mother an Aborigine, his father a Filipino pirate who would be captured and summarily executed not long after the transaction that resulted in baby Dread) ensured that the Authority had to offer prospective foster parents cash on the side-a rebate, as it were. But moving young Johnny Wulgaru, the agency bureaucrats had quickly decided, was worth juggling the budget. Johnny was a disaster waiting to happen.

The moments leading up to the first time he twisted something had been surprisingly ordinary. His foster mother, infuriated by his cruel treatment of the family cat, had called him a little black bastard. He had knocked something off a table and she had grabbed him, intent on locking him in his room. As she dragged him across the living room, he had reached a crescendo of screaming anger and the wallscreen had abruptly wavered and gone blank.

Much to his guardians' unhappiness, the damage to the internal electronics proved irreparable, and they had gone almost a month without a link to the normal world until they could afford to replace it.

They had not connected the occurrence with their ward, although they knew him to be capable of other, far more prosaic acts of destruction. But Johnny had noted it himself and wondered if it might be magic. A few experiments had proved that it was-or just as good as magic anyway-and it was apparently his alone. A single day in his dark room with his stepfather's pad had taught him that he could do it even without being angry, if he just thought the right things in the right way.

He had not used the ability for much of anything-minor vandalism, spiteful reprisals-for several years, and through several more foster homes. Even as his secrets grew deeper and more terrible, he never thought of using his ability to twist things for anything grander than blanking security cameras at the site of one of his robberies-or one of his chases, for those had begun even before he reached sexual maturity. It was not until the Old Man, at massive expense, had maneuvered him out of young offenders' prison, and then into a succession of mental institutions, the last one of which the Old Man more or less owned, that Dread understood he could use the twist for bigger things. . . .

The boat bounced, and for a moment he was jolted back into the real world. Dread pushed away the sky, the water, the men crouched silently beside him. Where is it? Get it back. Hold it, now.

But this kind of use was much harder than the simple destruction he had practiced in the earliest days, or the later tactic of simply freezing electronic components. Tonight's sort of trick required skills he still had not completely mastered, despite almost a year spent in one of the Old Man's labs, going through exercise after exhausting exercise while white-coated scientists offered cheerful encouragement-a supportiveness belied by the fear of him they could never quite hide. It would have been hard to say which growing power he had enjoyed more.

Find it, then reach. He grasped the data tap at last, seized it with his mind, letting his thoughts slide around it and into it as he took its measure. The mechanical intrusion into the island's electronic nerve system accomplished by his gear team had been a crucial first step: he needed to be as far into the security system as possible before beginning his own work. Already, the fine control required was making his head ache. When he used his ability for more than a few moments, he thought he could feel the twist itself glowing hot and sore in his brain like an inflamed gland.

Like a hunting hound nosing for a scent, he searched through the inexplicable inner darkness of the twist until he found just the kind of electronic surges he needed, then followed their path backward, tracking the data stream to its source in the security system's main processors and memory. Processors were only electronic artifacts, not really that much different from simpler things like surveillance cameras or car ignitions-just electrical impulses controlling mechanical artifacts. Dread knew it would be easy to twist them hard, to give them a jolt so strong that the system would shut down, but if that had been all he wanted, he would have let that jackass Celestino have his data bomb. He needed to wade through his own pain to achieve something far more subtle, more useful: he needed to find the system's soul and make it his.

The system was complex, but its structural logic was no different from any other. He found the desired set of electronic gates and gave them each a little push. They resisted, but even the resistance told him something. He had lost everything but the data stream now-even the meaningless noises on the security radio and from the night and waves that surrounded his physical body were gone. He pushed the gates again, only one at a time now, doing his best to gauge the effect of each change before he made it. He worked delicately, even though his head was throbbing so hard he felt like screaming. The last thing he wanted to do was crash the system.

At last, in a blackness shot with blood-red migrainous lightning, he found the right sequence. As the metaphorical door swung wide, a dark joy swelled inside him, almost stronger than the pain. He had constructed an indescribable something out of his own will, a skeleton key to open an invisible, un-teachable lock, and now the Isla del Santuario's entire system was opening to him like a ten-credit whore, ready to surrender its secrets. Exhausted, Dread struggled back toward the other world-the world outside the twist.

"Track Three," he said hoarsely. "I'm into the mother lode. Hook it up and sort it."

Celestino grunted a nervous affirmative and began making order out of the streams of raw data. Dread opened his eyes, leaned over the railing, and vomited.

The boat was only a half-kilometer off the island when he could think coherently again. He closed his eyes-the sight of the data windows superimposed on the choppy waters was making him feel sick again-and inspected the results of his infiltration, the naked workings of Santuario's infrastructure.

The security machinery's various scanners and checkpoints lured him for a moment, but after the obsessive way he had mapped out what to turn off and when in the planning stages of the action, he doubted even Celestino could mess it up. He also glanced at the standard programs which regulated the estate's physical being, but none of that was important at the moment. There was only one thing out of the ordinary, but that was exactly what he was looking for. Someone-some two, actually, judging by the paired input sites-was hooked up to a LEGS, a low orbit communication satellite, and a huge amount of data was moving through it both ways.

Our target is on the net, I guess. But what the hell is he doing there that he has to move so many gigs?

Dread pondered for a moment. He had everything he needed already. Still, it didn't seem like a good idea to let such high-intensity usage go unexamined. Besides, if this busy little bee really was the target, maybe Dread would get some kind of idea about why the Old Man wanted Sky God dead. A little information never went amiss.

"Track Three, spike me into one of those hot spots there-I think it's the target's lab. If what he's receiving is VR, don't give me the full wraparound, just a POV window and audio."

"Certainly, Jefe."

Dread waited for a long moment, then another window opened up against the blackness of his inner eyelids. In it, a table lined with faces that looked vaguely Indian stretched before him. There was a monkey sitting on the tabletop halfway down, and the target's gaze kept flicking to it. Dread felt an almost childlike glee. He was sitting unnoticed on his prey's shoulder like an invisible demon-like Death itself.

". . . Most of these activities were being controlled by a single group of people," someone was saying next to him. The quiet, earnest voice was not his target's. One of El Patron's academic friends, perhaps. A group of self-satisfied scientists having a little virtual symposium of some kind.

He contemplated tuning out, but the next words jumped out at him as though they had been screamed. ". . . These people, wealthy and powerful men and women, were a consortium that called themselves the Grail Brotherhood. . . ."

Dread watched and listened with rapidly increasing interest.

"Track Three," he said after a few moments, "keep this open. Are we recording this?"

"Just what you are seeing, Jefe. I can try to copy everything going in and out, but I don't think we have that much memory, not to mention bandwidth."

Dread opened his eyes. The boat was almost within range of the perimeter lights. There were other things to worry about now; he could pick up most of the details once they had secured the target. "Don't worry about it, then. But there are a lot of other people at that gathering. Find out if they're sims, and if so, where they're coming in from. But first, be ready to initiate defenses shutdown, on my order." He checked on Track Two, who were waiting about the same distance off the island on the southeastern side. The reports coming in over the island's security band told him that the rescue team was just about to discover the helicopter trick.

"Track Three-shutdown."

The perimeter lights winked out. There was a squall of indignant protest over the security band, but with the shutdown sequence now begun, none of the radio locations were talking to anyone but themselves-and Dread.

"Track Two, here we go."

He signaled to the pilot of his own boat, who gunned the engine and sent them skidding across the bumpy surf toward the beach. As they hit the shallows, his men were already rolling over the side, the first to land sweeping the beach and house walls with ELF weapons. Those of the island's guards not wearing counterfrequency gear dropped, shaken into jelly, without ever knowing what had hit them.

As he followed his men onto the sand, Dread turned off all but the necessary pictures, but he kept the voices from the target's virtual conference going in his head. Already an idea was beginning to form.

The island was so dark that Dread did not even bother to crawl up from the beach. Three more sentries in anti-ELF suits appeared on the catwalk outside the nearest guardhouse, one of them holding a high-powered flashlight-probably on his way to find out what had happened to the island's generators. Dread gestured. The silenced Trohners sounded like a stick being dragged along a picket fence as the sentries fell. The flashlight bounced from the catwalk and blinked end-over-end down to the beach.

Resistance was stiff at the front portico of the main house, but Dread was not in such a hurry now. His target was still locked into his simulation, and since Celestino had remotely sealed the doorlocks and thrown a data blanket over the target to prevent incoming calls from security, Sky God had no idea that his castle had been stormed.