CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 29
Bomber herded the small crowd of punks into a corner. He kept his pistol in hand as he barked orders. All he wanted was to make them sit together quietly and without any fuss, but he enjoyed the sinister weight of ceramic in his hands. It seemed to complete him. Just holding it was enough to tame the punks — they stared at Bomber with religious intensity, their eyes shifting back and forth between the black shape in his hand and the blood pooling on the floor behind him.
Bomber looked at the dead girl and her knife and felt nothing.
He brought his mobile phone to life with a flick of his thumb. It came up with an image of Toledo with a big sniper rifle at his shoulder, and Bomber said, “Nice shooting.”
The Spaniard nodded to accept the compliment. He scanned the deathly silent warehouse through his scope and wondered, “So what’s next?”
“Interrogation,” said Bomber, and grabbed the punk leader by his collar. “Start talkin’, kid, and I might leave the rest of you alive.”
“I don’t know anything! Honest!” he gasped, on the verge of hyperventilating. “All they told me was they’d send someone around sometime to talk, that’s all!”
“Who’s ‘they’, and when?”
“Two hours ago, I was asking around for that guy you said! Grendel, right? That was it!”
Bomber’s pulse rose instantly. He shoved the hoodie away and went for his mobile phone again, hissing, “Toledo, scan the building for camouflaged IR signatures, right now. Gabriel may know our position.” There was no response, and Bomber swore under his breath. “Toledo, if you’re still active, give me some kind of sign!”
A patch of concrete exploded into chunks next to Bomber’s foot. He jumped back and dropped into a squat behind the nearest bit of cover, the mouldering old sofa in the corner. He pointed his gun at the ceiling searching for a target. His enhanced eyes could make out little flickers of heat and movement out the corners of his eyes. Lots of ghosts, but nothing he could shoot at.
Suddenly Bomber felt a warm rifle barrel at the back of his neck and heard the minute whine of active camouflage disengaging, well beyond the range of normal human hearing. Faint heat shimmers all around the warehouse implied that there were more guns standing by, as many as anyone could possibly need to deal with a Bomber-shaped nuisance.
“Down weapons,” ordered a voice by Bomber’s ear. He obeyed, dropping his pistol on the sofa. “Lean forward and spread your legs. Don’t get any ideas, your sniper’s already cooling his heels in our care.”
“Wait.” Bomber strained to look over his shoulder at the helmeted figure behind him, but couldn’t make out a face. “I know that voice . . .”
The soldier snorted and lowered his rifle a fraction. “Well well well. I’m seeing it, but I’m not believing it.” He shook his head slowly. “D’you know, I’d actually convinced myself it had to be some other Grendel. You’re supposed to be dead, Jake.”
Bomber spun around as the soldier took off his helmet and goggles. He saw sharp cheekbones over a square slab of a chin, a high forehead, inquisitive eyes and a neck like a steroid addict. He blinked a few times as old memories came to the surface.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Captain?” the soldier said. “There just ain’t time for old friends anymore.”
Nodding slowly, Bomber struggled to contain his shock and happiness at seeing someone he used to hate. He said, “Hawk, what the hell are you doin’ with a rifle?”
“That’s Major Hawthorn now, Jake. I’m in command of the Geneva cell.”
The major stepped back and stood at ease. In the corners his squad turned off their camouflage, swimming into view with their rifles lowered. They automatically went about securing the building and its perimeter, moving the punks outside to create some privacy. A moment later Toledo was marched into the building, head held high, relieved of his rifle but not his Spanish pride.
Hawthorn continued, “Believe it or not, it’s good to see you. F Squadron is past, this is the present, and at the moment we can definitely use the manpower.”
“I’m guessin’ Colonel Obrin told you about the assault he had planned.”
A flash of pain crossed Hawthorn’s face at the mention of Colonel Obrin. “It was my idea, Jacob. Although I didn’t know he’d be sending you. You were supposed to be here weeks ago.”
“I got held up,” said Bomber. No need to bother with unnecessary detail.
Shrugging, Hawthorn said, “Gotta watch your step here, Jake. We reckon Gabriel’s got access to most of the Federal surveillance net, we’ve had to play it real quiet. Does he know you?”
“We’ve met.”
Hawthorn smiled. “You always were a tight-lipped old bastard. Okay then, chances are he knows you’re here, and he’ll assume you want to attack his compound. What he won’t know is that we’ll be there to back you up. We’re gonna have to move fast.”
Several pairs of eyes followed Bomber as he picked up his pistol from the sofa, checked the chamber, and slipped it back into his holster. The atmosphere hadn’t relaxed a bit, and nobody trusted anyone else.
“How fast?”
Hawthorn shrugged off his camouflaged backpack and dropped it on the floor in front of Bomber. Then he faded back into near-invisibility with the faint hum of a portable holographic projector, little more than a shimmer even this close up.
“How fast can you get your gear on?” his voice came, ringing with amusement.
Bomber glanced down. “You’d be amazed,” he said, and unzipped his jacket.
He opened the rifle’s magnetic bolt and searched for any damaging grit in the mechanism. It was as clean as something fresh off the assembly line. He jacked the pistol slide, watched the bullet being ejected from the chamber, caught it in mid-air, and put it back in. He flicked the variknife out to its full length. It was similar to a Fed sword — same principle, a length of razor-thin wire stiffened by electricity to make a blade. Unlike a Fed sword, however, you could set the variknife to be any length and any rigidity you wanted. You never knew when something like that would come in handy.
Even as he worked, he was replaying the memories in his head. He couldn’t stop. Every time he looked at Hawthorn it was like staring into the face of his own past. F Squadron was supposed to be dead, with Bomber as its sole survivor. Sarah and Jamie Caine were gone. Nobody had heard from Pia Gonzalez in fifteen years. That left Bomber and . . . the one who did nothing. The one who ran away.
Bomber shut his eyes tight. Five drunk pilots were drowning their sorrows at the old drinking hole just outside their airbase. By morning the Feds would be there and everything would be different. Nothing and nobody could stay the same.
It was a night full of black jokes and bitter laughter. Somebody, Bomber couldn’t even remember who, jokingly suggested busting out their experimental helicopters and taking the Feds head-on. Joke became mock-seriousness as the five swore a pact they never actually meant to follow through.
The next thing they knew they were on their way into the base, driven by their commander, Major Sarah Caine. No one believed they’d ever make it this far. Adrenaline, madness and a sense of power overcame them as they scaled the last fence before the airfield, no one around to stop them. Young Lieutenant Hawthorn should have been the last to climb over, egged on by his comrades. He stopped in front of the fence and stood rooted to the ground. Just then it was like a cold wind of sobriety blew through them all. For the first time everyone realised the enormity of what they were doing, and that they’d gone too far now to go back. Except for Hawk. Hawk, younger by nearly a decade, had more to live for than any of them.
Now Major Hawthorn stood next to him, armed and armoured, briefing his squad over the low roar of the cargo plane’s engines. Their active camouflage had switched to neon-bright primary colours, like civilian skydiver costumes. All their weapons were hidden in pockets or holsters. Seen from the ground, there would be nothing dangerous or threatening about them as they plummeted out of the sky.
“–conclusion, everyone,” Hawthorn was saying, pointing at images that only existed behind the soldiers’ goggles. His main focus was a crudely-drawn floor plan with most of the areas designated with question marks. “This is the best map of the compound we have. No records are left of its construction, it’s exempt from safety inspections, and nobody ever goes in there except Gabriel himself. We got this out of a builder who worked on the complex’s original fittings, but his memory’s sketchy and any number of changes may have been made to the interior layout. Be extremely careful, you hear me? Anything could happen. Most likely anything will happen.” He took a deep breath to recover from his hurried monologue. “Any thoughts or questions?”
Bomber stared at the map and began to calculate all the possible routes into the heart of the complex. Then he jumped.
There was no parachute, no safety mechanisms, just the fastest and most shocking way to drop into a building semi-alive. At the pull of a ripcord the pack on Bomber’s back exploded, engulfing him in a bubble of soft cushioning plastic. Two air tubes stuck themselves up his nose. Then the bubble filled itself with anti-G gel until every part of him was pressed in tight. He looked out through his goggles at the rigid green slime, unable to move a muscle.
For a long time he was weightless. It felt like the Earth had vanished from underneath him. Faster and faster he went, a blind free-fall through the roaring air and winds, his pod bucking and tumbling with each gust. The thick plastic walls got warm, then hot, then burning. Soon they were completely obscured by a black film, taking away Bomber’s last blurry view of the outside world.
Then he and six other Army troopers ploughed into the roof of Gabriel’s fortress.
The pod vomited him out again in a wash of slime, but the gel slipped right off him, designed not to stick. He climbed to his feet, tipped his rifle down to drain the barrel, and hurried out of the rubble pile in case anyone decided to start shooting.
He was in a large, empty warehouse with two exits — one big shutter to the outside, one security door leading in. Fresh morning light shone in through the hole in the roof. Nobody else seemed to have landed in the same room.
“Hawk, Grendel. Are you and your boys okay?” he asked over the wireless link. His goggles showed the other troops as distant shadows, and the only way to identify them was by the names being projected onto his goggles.
“There was a lot of drift,” Hawthorn’s voice crackled. “Regroup at these coordinates.”
A pulsing green beacon of light appeared on Bomber’s goggles, somewhere up ahead. He could easily imagine he was just playing a video game, except in video games nobody ended up properly dead.
He examined the security door, only to find it locked by an old mechanical keypad. There’d be no cracking that code. Only one bolt, though. Bomber braced himself, leaned back, and kicked as hard as he could. The lock snapped like a box of matchsticks and the door flew open.
Bomber was instantly grateful for his gas mask. The hallway on the other side was choked with dust, layered inches thick on the floor and on top of unrecognisable bits of furniture. It was as dark as an old cave; the windows were so covered in grime that only a few photons could get through. Nobody had been to this part of the complex in years.
“All, Grendel,” he whispered. “Is it just me or does this place look like a fuckin’ haunted mansion? No signs of life or recent occupation.”
The others all reported the same, until Hawthorn hushed them. “Just ’cause it’s quiet doesn’t mean it’s empty,” he reminded everyone. “Proceed with caution.”
A moment later one of the squad piped up. “Hawk, Banjo. I think I got something here, Sir. Footprints leading into a stairwell, going down.”
“Roger, Banjo, I got your telemetry. Go ahead and follow those prints. Kirby, back him up. Everybody else, secure this floor and find any other means of going up or down. If you see one, take it.”
Bomber tapped his goggles into the troop telemetry as well, placing it over one eye. In an instant he could see everything Banjo saw, could even look behind him as Banjo descended the creaking vinyl steps. There were clear tracks and scuffs in the dust. Somebody had been using that route.
“This is a lot of space to be wastin’,” remarked Bomber, looking into empty rooms that gave no hint of their function. It reminded him of his visit to the New Orleans with Gina. Nothing had quite fallen down yet, but there was a feeling of deadness here, an absence of life that was all too similar to that post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Like walkin’ into a tomb, he thought silently.
Hawthorn was waiting for him by the time he arrived at the rendezvous point. The Major quickly finished assembling all of the squad’s telemetry into a rough 3D map of the complex, then sent it out to everyone. The floor plan suddenly became clear. Huge, sprawling, and abandoned.
“Everything here must have been going on below-decks,” said Hawthorn, a little bit bemused and a little bit anxious. “One single stairwell, no working lifts, no other way of getting down there. Bad tactical position. Any advice, Jake?”
“None, Major,” Bomber shot back. He indicated the stairs with his rifle. “Shall we?”
Flicking back to Banjo’s telemetry, Hawthorn looked around and finally nodded. “Okay,” he said.
They started their descent. Bomber went first, while another soldier brought up the rear. Command always walked in the middle.
Once he’d gotten a feel for the steps, Bomber went back to watching Banjo’s telemetry. The soldier soon hit the bottom of the stairwell and reported, “Hit ground, Sir. Dust marks lead through a doorway into a large chamber. Kirby is checking for traps but it looks clean.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Hawthorn muttered. “On the outside there’s lasers, tripwires, cameras, every damn thing. So where’s the internal security? Is he really stupid enough to think nobody would be able to get in?”
“Wouldn’t count on it,” said Bomber. He shuddered as he remembered looking into Gabriel’s eyes. Behind them lay the most insanely intelligent mind Bomber had ever encountered.
Hawthorn turned to look at Bomber. The goggles ruined any expression on his face, but his voice was full of sudden emotion. “Listen, Jake, when we get time . . . I want to talk to you about what happened.”
“Ain’t nothin’ to talk about, Major,” Bomber replied and pressed ahead, stonewalling any further attempt to get his attention.
He hit the bottom of the stairwell within minutes of Banjo’s team and looked around suspiciously. The floors here were concrete, built to last, and all the structural components looked sound. The building might be a trap but it wouldn’t just come down on their heads without some encouragement.
A sudden alarm buzz chirped in his ears and yellow signals flashed across his goggles. The telemetry link cut out in an instant, all contact lost. Next to him, Hawthorn jerked upright and hissed, “Banjo! Kirby! Report!”
Nothing answered him except a steady stream of radio static.
Bomber scowled, took cover behind the doorframe and did a quick inspection of his rifle. “I think we found your internal security, Major,” he said dryly, unhooking a scrambler grenade from his belt.
“Just like old times, huh?” Hawthorn flashed a tight smile. “You got my wing, Grendel?”
“I got your fuckin’ wing, Hawk. Now shut up and move.”
Thick grey smoke hissed from pores in the outer casing, filled with reflective metal flakes that screwed up everything from lasers to radar. Then it went up like a flashbang. Thunder boomed through the cavernous chamber, deafening anyone and anything nearby, followed by a flash as bright as the heart of a sun.
Bomber dove into the smokescreen without hesitation. In one glance he took in the room and went for the nearest bit of cover, something that looked like a plastic bookcase or wardrobe lying on its side. A cloud of dust went up where he hit the ground, but instead of coming back down, a cold draft sucked much of it away towards the ceiling. There were fans spinning up there.
So the place has working electricity, thought Bomber. But that alone ain’t evidence of an AI mainframe, and still no sign of what got Banjo.
The next moment Hawthorn landed beside him and grunted, “I can’t see anything. Can you?”
“Not yet. There’s an exit over that way, where Banjo disappeared. Suggest cover to cover approach, Sir, with–” he checked the other soldier’s callsign, “–Stundog on overwatch.”
“Agreed,” said Hawthorn and muttered into his collar microphone. Then he slapped Bomber on the shoulder and nudged him along, leaving cover at a dead run.
They rushed across the room in seconds, their goggles adjusting for the near-total darkness around them. Nothing stopped them. No shots, no traps, no sign of any opposition. The dead silence worked on Bomber’s nerves, empty of everything except their own footsteps and the faint whirring of the fans up above.
“Something isn’t right here, Jake,” Hawthorn whispered, glancing around the scene where Banjo and Kirby had lost contact. There was no sign of the soldiers, not even a spent bullet casing. Nothing but a big dusty curtain strung between two concrete, faux-Roman columns. Definitely one of Gabriel’s additions.
Hawthorn went on, “You don’t lose telemetry like that without hostile action, but I didn’t see or hear a thing. There should’ve been a flash of something.”
“What do you want me to say, Major?” Bomber asked stiffly.
“I don’t know. I–”
There was a small click and all their electronics stopped working. Goggles went dark. The wrist controls on their armour blinked out. Their rifles, operated by modern electric firing mechanisms, turned into awkward plastic clubs.
Bomber swore as he tore off his headgear and threw his rifle to the ground. “Pistols!” he shouted, pulling his own out of its holster, and let his enhanced eyes adjust to the darkness. “I guess we know what happened to fuckin’ Banjo, huh?”
“Jacob?” echoed Hawthorn’s voice, trembling with self-control. “I can’t see.”
“Use your goddamned implants,” snarled Bomber, searching desperately for a target.
“Implants? Jesus, Jake, they stopped handing out eye jobs when I was a flyboy lieutenant!”
Fuck, thought Bomber viciously. Then he grabbed Hawthorn’s arm. “Okay, Hawk, stay close to me. You remember those hypno-training courses you did back in Basic? There was one on fightin’ blind, wasn’t there? Keep your mind on that and shoot where I tell you, if I tell you.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Hawthorn instantly. He seemed much happier to give up responsibility for the op.
With one of Hawthorn’s hands on his shoulder, Bomber shouted back into the big chamber, “Stundog! Hold your position and group up with anyone who comes down the stairs! You’re gonna be coverin’ our escape route if everything goes wrong!”
“Roger Wilco,” Stundog called back. There was no more sound after that, only the rustle of cloth as Bomber pushed through the curtain into the next space.
Two tiny points of light sparkled in the distance, tightly-focused blue beams that did nothing to light up the rest of the space. Bomber squinted at them but couldn’t make out anything more. Still he couldn’t find a trace of Banjo or Kirby. He checked the floors but found no dust in this room to show up scuffs, no blood or drag marks. Just a constant wind of hot, dry air blowing into his face.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a flashlight,” he whispered. Hawthorn shook his head.
Then a voice laughed softly from the shadows, and all the lights in the room came on at once. It was like sunrise condensed into one millisecond. Bomber blinked against the light and nearly gasped when Gabriel appeared hovering in the air, dressed in white robes, holding a sword of pure fire. The image flickered gently where specks of dust whirled into it. A huge wall of plastic and metal rose up behind it, filling the room from floor to ceiling with electronics; a patchwork of technology that Bomber couldn’t even begin to identify.
“Gentlemen,” said the hologram with Gabriel’s voice, looking down at them with an expression of absolute serenity, “how can I help you?”
“What happened?” she quavered, too shocked to panic.
Hideo spat, “Booby trap. People used to use them in the early days as a final fuck-you. It switches your goggle failsafes off and burns laser light into your optic nerve. Blind you for life. We banned them when we first drew up the Charter, under charge of treason.”
Swallowing waves of nausea, Rat sent a probe ahead to access the trap’s code. The light flared up again. She hurriedly deleted the whole trap with her eyes closed.
“Jock, save me a recording of this on chip, please.” Icy rage rang through Hideo’s words. “I’m going to find the person who rigged this and hang him up by his own intestines.”
“How did you know it was there?” breathed Rat.
“A hunch. Please continue, you haven’t failed the test yet.”
She crept inside, through the impossibly thick doors and all the security systems embedded into them, and Hideo followed at a respectful distance. When she finally emerged on the other side, all she could see was a great vaulted hall clad from top to bottom in glowing yellow light, empty of features except for huge paintings hovering against the walls. At first Rat couldn’t make out what the paintings represented, but slowly she began to see patterns hidden in the oddly-coloured designs, text and numbers scrambled by more protection. She waved Jock’s card in the air, letting it do its work, and moments later the murky paintings began to resolve into screens of crisp and clear data.
“Fuck me,” she murmured, reaching out to touch the nearest list. It picked up the gesture and started to scroll down along the endless file. “It’s a bunch of GlobeNet addresses, complete with passwords. Home computers. Jesus, there’s thousands of them!”
“This is unusual,” said Hideo. His helm showed no emotion but his tone of voice hinted that something had rattled him.
Jock’s voice came in, blurting, “It’s a botnet. Damn, that brings back memories.”
“A botnet?” asked Rat. This kind of stuff must’ve been well before her time.
“It’s a list of computers infected with a hidden program, what they used to call a ‘zombie.’ The zombie can take complete control of its computers and carry out whatever instructions it’s been programmed with. One command and you’ve got ten thousand systems doing whatever you want.”
Shaking his head, Hideo pointed out, “But even if you managed to infect all these machines, Jock, there’s nothing useful you could do with them. We’ve had anti-bot protocols in place for decades. And look!” He waved his hand at some of the other lists, which scrolled obligingly. “These aren’t just home systems, there’s Federal government and police mainframes, Marxie military computers, and most of our own network backbones. These lists cover nearly every system on the planet. What could you possibly do with a botnet that big?”
There was a brief silence. Rat thought about it and suggested, “You could tell them to stop talking to each other.”
The silence lasted a bit longer after that. Nobody said anything as all the horrible implications of the idea started to unfold.
“Jock, I think we may have a problem,” Hideo said stiffly. “Please ask the guards to link us up to GlobeNet, I need to make some calls. This had better not be what I think it is.” Then he turned to Rat. “Alex-han, if this is a control centre for the botnet, there may be some prototype zombies around for testing. We need to know how the zombies work if we want to counter them. I will make sure you are compensated for your work and your trouble.”
Rat shrugged. “I can have a look around, I guess.” He started to turn away from her, but she caught him by the shoulder and said in a rush, “Does this mean I got the ranking?”
“I don’t have–” he began, but stopped himself when he caught the intense look in her eyes. His avatar took off its helmet, replacing it with his own sparingly-rendered face. “Very well, Alex-han. Since it means that much to you, you have my support. I think that with your drive and attitude you could make it into the Fifteen someday.” He summoned up a leather cowboy hat in his hand, which he planted gently on her head. A genuine smile cracked his cool facade. “Welcome to the brotherhood, Alex.”
The next moment he conjured up a glowing door into the vastness of Main Street and stepped through.
Sudden emotions raged in her chest but she swallowed them down, sacrificed them for the sake of keeping her cool. A dignified exterior was vital to hackerdom, even when all she wanted was to jump up and down and squeal like a girl.
She took off the cowboy hat and turned it over in her hands.
“Thanks,” she choked out. Then she turned her real body away, quickly, before anyone in the input room saw the tears rolling down the corners of her goggles.
A seemingly endless landscape of emerald-green hills shone under the simulated sun. There was a new rock where the faerie had stood, but that in itself wouldn’t be too odd. It was only when she spotted the other faerie rocks, hundreds of them dotting the hillside, that she began to think and suspect. They hadn’t been here when she first arrived; they’d all come to this mound or barrow, their ‘gathering place’, on some kind of trigger. And now they looked like they were waiting for something.
Zombies are designed to follow instructions, she remembered, digging deep into her limited knowledge of the old ways. She put her hands around her mouth to make a speaking cone. Then she shouted, “Ping!”
Almost as one, the faeries all rose up, shifting back into their man-shapes. They rumbled back at her, “Pong.”
“Status,” she told them.
“Standing by,” they answered.
Rat smiled. Whoever programmed these things was old-school indeed. ‘Ping’ was one of the most ancient networking tools around, hadn’t been in widespread use for longer than Rat had been alive. It measured how long it took for another system to answer back to you, timing the informational round trip. Nowadays, however, even the slowest data links had unlimited bandwidth and near-instantaneous transmission. GlobeNet was to the old internet as the internet was to a network of bongo drums. You just didn’t need these old tools anymore.
Except, maybe, for managing a botnet . . .
She pointed to the lead faerie and said, “Give me your commands list.”
“There isn’t one. If you want anything, just speak to us.”
Annoyed, Rat put her hands on her hips. “Then how do you work? Do you have some kind of voice interpreter?”
“Something like that,” it said shortly.
“Give me some more information, man.”
“You’re not on the access list.” It crossed its arms. “No access, no information.”
Trying to look nonchalant, Rat let her hands wander to her hacking tools, working invisibly behind her back. Something strange was going on. The faerie’s responses sounded scripted, but there was a hostility to his words that was well beyond normal. No mere program had ever spoken to the Chrome Rat like that.
“Who has access?” she pushed.
“We’d rather you didn’t ask questions like that.”
The temperature between Rat and the faerie dropped below freezing, and the other red-headed giants shifted restlessly.
“Let me get this straight,” Rat hummed. “You only respond to a master with a special password or something?”
“That’s none o’ your business.” The faerie was scowling down at her, and seemed to grow bigger by the second. “Have you been invited? Maybe you should come back while the masters are logged on.”
Rat snorted. “Okay, let’s add me to your password list.”
She summoned up a code window and tried to access the faerie’s programming, only to come up blank. He seemed to sense the attempt and somehow shook it off, roaring in anger. Then he lunged at her with a murderous look in his eyes, only to hit the impenetrable force field around the barrow. He pounded his fists against it, and moments later all the faeries were hammering away uselessly. Their deep-throated growl rumbled through the earth itself.
“You can’t keep me out forever,” she said and brought up the code window again.
This time the faerie staggered back, and fought a losing battle against Rat’s brain and fingers — despite the fact it shouldn’t have been able to fight her in the first place, not with full control of the vault system. Then he stepped back and, with a look of frustrated impotence, began to crumble into dust. The others followed his example, and Rat realised to her horror that they were deleting themselves. She was about to lose everything.
She acted almost without thinking. She thought a command at the vault’s systems, and the whole simulation froze in mid-movement, paused until further notice. Rat hurriedly brought up a code window and copied everything she could salvage from the self-destructing faeries. Then she shut down the simulation before it could go any further.
The sudden adrenaline rush faded, and she stared numbly at the chunk of data in her hand. “It committed suicide,” she said to herself. “It was intelligent. It saw right through me, and it killed itself to protect the owners.”
There was a sudden humming noise, and Hideo reappeared beside her. If looks could kill, his expression would’ve flattened cities. With a gesture he forced an avatar to appear for Jock, to make sure of everyone’s full and undivided attention, and gave a curt nod in greeting.
“I think I know who’s responsible for this,” he said tightly. “I think we’re going to have to convene the Fifteen.”
“Tell me it isn’t Banshee,” groaned Jock.
Rat piped up, “Banshee the High King of Ireland? That Banshee?”
“Who else? I’m sure he’s responsible for what happened in Europe. Don’t know why, yet, but I intend to find out. I think somebody hired him to do it.” He spoke through gritted teeth to keep his anger in check. “There have been unreasonably large payments into his accounts from a number of sources, but when I dig down far enough I keep coming back to one company. Does the name Lowell Industries mean anything to you?”
Rat stared silently at Jock. He had gone rigid as a plank. As soon as he regained control of his sphincter he punched through into Main Street, choking out, “I gotta go call someone!”
“It’s past time we were out of here anyway,” said Hideo. He took Rat’s hand and cut their connection, like changing the picture in a slide-show. The real world flashed onto her retinas and the spell was broken.
The real world almost instantly became an awkward dangle as Rat tried to unstrap herself from the VR rig. Nobody helped her or paid her any mind. Jock was still plugged in, and Hideo had already disappeared. Biting her lip, she finished disentangling herself and sat down to wait for something to happen.
It just had to be Gabriel, didn’t it? she cursed inside and tried not to think about Gina or the niggling little core of guilt at the back of her brain.
CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 28
Little Emily Vaughan lay on her perfect feather bed in her perfect room and stared at the perfect white ceiling. There was a white desk, too, and white cupboards to match the white textured walls. The whole house was like that. Emily figured her parents would probably be buried in white coffins.
“Emily Marie Vaughan!” her mother called from downstairs, still fussing at her husband’s suit and her own elegant cream-coloured dress. “Get down here, we’re going to be late for the party!”
Sighing, Emily counted the steps as she trudged down in her faded jeans and t-shirt, new wood creaking under her feet. Moment of truth time. Maybe they’d finally get the hint that she was not going to any damned party, be it with the President or this new Federation bitch. It was tough enough to swallow the Fed propaganda she got dished up at school nowadays. She didn’t know how many more times she could nod, smile and lie through her fucking teeth.
Her father stopped her at the foot of the stairs. He looked immaculate in his suit, apart from the wispy blond hairline rapidly sprinting away from his forehead. Afternoon sunlight spilled onto him through the big bay windows along the west wall, a golden sea under orange skies.
“Oh no, no, no,” he declared. “You’re not going in that. Your mother picked out something for you to wear.”
“Teenage rebellion, dad,” she said, thick with sarcasm, arms crossed as she glared at him. “You may have heard of it.”
Dear old mother stood beside him and shared his disapproval. “This is bad cliché, Emily, and you’re not some soap starlet. We don’t have time for you to throw a tantrum. Get dressed and get going.”
Emily sneered. “Why don’t you get it through your head that I am not coming with you?” They answered with mute stares, which really got her goat. She snapped, “I’m not a fucking little robot that smiles and curtseys on command!”
Her father stepped in closer, his jaw set in anger, and a twinge of fear went through Emily. He pitched his voice low and hissed, “This is my house, and you are my daughter. You’ll do as I say.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat. Until now she wasn’t quite sure if she’d go through with her plan, but now she knew she would. “Okay, dad, you win. I’ll change right now.” She took a step back, smiled and kicked off her sandals. Then pulled her top over her head and slipped out of her jeans. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath, just stood in front of him naked as her birthday. “How’s this?”
Edward Vaughan’s teeth ground together with a sharp crunching noise. His face went red, and he raised his hand as if to settle the matter that way, but his wife took his wrist and pulled it back down. “This is foolishness,” she said to him. For Emily she had nothing but frowns. “We’ll deal with you when we get back, young lady. I’m very disappointed in you.”
Emily giggled as she flicked her mother the middle finger. Then she turned her back on their shocked gasps, gathered her clothes and marched back upstairs with triumph in her heart. She heard some argument downstairs before they finally left, at which point she grabbed her keys and purse and slid out the door. It took some doing to avoid the police patrols, and her heart raced with fear whenever she spotted uniformed Feds out in the streets, an unpleasant reminder of the occupation. The back-ways of Hong Kong didn’t offer much solace for a girl like Emily, but if you looked hard enough . . .
A subway train took her into the heart of the city, and as she sat she imagined Sir Edward and Lady Laura arriving at their party, greeted by stiff Federal Constables in their shiny grey uniforms. Everyone important under the old regime had their own Fed assigned to them for these occasions. A year and a half after the start of the occupation they still didn’t really trust the local aristocracy, but needed them to keep things running. Even good little dogs like the Vaughan family were only now beginning to worm their way back into the upper echelons, after getting treated as simple informers for the past eighteen months.
Of course none of that mattered to Emily anymore. She’d made her decision. She wouldn’t be bullied into submission anymore; with a sudden shock she realised she wouldn’t even care if she never went back.
Minutes later she arrived at a nameless, run-down old tower in an unfashionable part of the city. She could always find refuge here. She picked up a fallen piece of concrete and used it to press the intercom call button, which would otherwise shock the crap out of you. Moments later it crackled and she shouted into it, “Yo, Alf, it’s Emily! Open up!”
The lock on the door clicked open. She could hear footsteps thumping down the stairwell to greet her. Paul and Kasumi were the first to fling themselves at her, while Alf hung back and grinned silently from the doorway.
“Good to see you, Emm!” they blathered. “We missed you! Did you bring any food?”
She shook her head, much to their disappointment, but that changed instantly when she pulled out her credit card. “Order something,” she said. “It’s on me.”
Paul and Kasumi took it and ran away howling with delight. It was so easy to buy affection around here. They were all years older than Emily, but they treated her like a princess because Alf liked her, and Alf made the rules. She didn’t know what he saw in her, but there was more to it than money. Alf couldn’t be bought.
He beckoned her over and she came, leaned in and kissed him.
“You been away too long, Emm,” he told her in his rough, rude accent. He always slurred a little when he was sailing high on pixie dust. He didn’t use it around her ’cause she didn’t like it, she was always trying to get him away from the hard stuff, so he clearly wasn’t expecting her. “How I supposed to sleep if you’re not here nights?”
“I’m sure you’ve found something to get you through,” she shot back with a wicked smile.
He snorted and lit up an end of manna rolled in yellow paper, inhaled, then placed it between Emily’s lips. She took a drag and held the sweet smoke until she started to feel the buzz. To a girl who had to hide her cigarettes from her parents, it was the best thing ever.
Alf put away his lighter and said, “I know you here ’cause you need something.”
“Just someplace to kip for a couple days, right? We can make it fun.” She ran her fingers down his chest and let them slip down to his crotch. Excitement tingled in her chest as she felt him stiffen. Pixie dust amplified your emotions, including sex drive, so she could really work off her anger with him . . .
“You know you got kip anytime wherever Alfie’s at, Emm.” He jerked his head at the stairwell. “Come to my floor and we find some privacy.”
She took his hand and followed him.
Little Emily Vaughan never came back from that room.
She got a part-time job as a waitress to cover their food, while Alf kept up his habit by selling pixie dust on to other kids. Paul and Kasumi rigged up their stolen water, TV, electricity. Others joined and left their group, recruited for their skills or booted out because of personality problems, but the core team always held together.
Well, mostly. Fewer and fewer people came to their enclave, and no one stayed. Eventually Paul and Kasumi got married, got jobs, and left to rejoin the society that had abandoned them. That was the last straw for Alf, depressed and getting nowhere. He drifted further and further into his dust-induced dreams. He started to deal worse and worse things just to afford his next fix. To help Alf with his ever-growing money problem, the girl who had been Emily Vaughan quit her job and helped him run drugs through Hong Kong. She had to start using false names in order to keep them both out of trouble.
Every once in a while she stopped outside her old house, to see how her parents were doing. Moving up, of course. Always moving up.
She was twenty-two years old when she found Alf on the bathroom floor, bloody foam bubbling out of his mouth, his nostrils stained blue with dust. She knelt at his side, touched him, found him still warm. She bit back tears and closed his dry, staring eyes.
“See you later, Alfie,” she told him. Then she walked away from the flats and never looked back. The next few years were hazy. She went out a lot, drank a lot, flirted with any boy she liked but kept them all at a distance. Every once in a while she might bring one home, but never longer than one night. Slowly and gradually, Gina Hart grew into Emily’s hollowed-out soul, and that was good. She liked being Gina. Liked taking control of her own downward spiral.
So it came to be that Gina Hart stood up and blinked drunkenly at the night. The world looked very blurry. The unfocused green blob in front of her might have been a tree, or a bush, or a hill. The ceiling had hit her in the head a couple of times, and so had the floor. She didn’t feel too good.
“Gonna be sick,” she decided, then doubled over and spat acid. She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in hours. Her stomach roared and her throat begged for a drop of water.
Food she didn’t see, but there was water right in front of her. She crawled towards an open-air pond and sipped from it. Brackish and horrible on her tongue, filled with algae, but wet. She choked down two mouthfuls, starting to feel a little better.
She turned around and saw the helicopter’s cockpit dangling upside-down from a tree by its parachute. The canopy was open and empty. Gina must have been flung out of the cockpit onto the lawn below, but where were the pilots? Had they even been real?
The manicured trees, lawns and water features suggested a park of some type. The sky began to colour itself in. It’d be morning soon and she needed to move, once again left without anything to keep her safe. She missed the warm feel of her taser more than ever.
She got up and wandered around in a daze, expecting to find an exit sooner or later. In the meantime she stabbed her fingers at her mobile. It wouldn’t hold still. It took her three tries to dial Rat’s number and no one picked up. She mumbled a few words into Rat’s voicemail, then hung up.
She was beginning to think she’d be alright when a house came out of nowhere and bumped into her. Columns and big double doors swam out of the blur. She rubbed her nose and deduced with surreal clarity that she probably had a concussion. Suddenly light-headed and dizzy, she tried to lean on the wall and missed.
“I’m going to lie down here for a minute,” she said and did so. Grass soft underneath her, the sky dark and beautiful above. Little drops of rain pattered on her face.
She watched a little light circling down from the dark, swinging this way and that with smooth grace. It came down towards the lawn where Gina lay, its only sound the thin whistle of rotors slicing the air. Gina knew she ought to be worried about that, and that distant impulse of fear brought her crawling up on her hands and knees. Lightning flashed in the sky and the boom of thunder nearly knocked her back down. Her hair clung to her face as the heavens broke and the rain started pouring down in earnest.
Scraping her knees on the rough ground, she hauled herself into the underbrush. No escape. She found her path ahead blocked by a wire fence lined along the top with spikes and barbs of every variety. She was in no state to climb it even if she dared. Then she spotted a deep pit where dogs had tunnelled under the fence. She hurried into the slippy, sucking mud and strained against the mesh, forcing herself through.
As the wire dug bloody furrows into her back and legs, Gina could hear shouts and the squelching of boots on wet grass. Her dulled senses told her something was wrong, a presence close by. She closed her eyes for a moment and reached for it. It was the worst thing she could’ve done. Gabriel saw her, and there was a moment of instant, mutual recognition. All his attention whipped round to focus on her with merciless intensity.
“Gina!” Gabriel’s voice boomed, a real voice out on the grass. The next moment Gina pulled herself upright and ran. Her jacket was gone. She just threw herself through bushes and grass and puddles of water until her feet hit tarmac. She found herself on an abandoned country road lined with rows of dark, lifeless warehouses, closed for the night. Dozens of old cars sat abandoned along the verge, some resting on cinderblocks without any wheels, others showing empty space where engines should have been. Not one living soul anywhere in sight. She was alone.
Another blast of thunder rattled her teeth, and she heard Gabriel shout, “Where are you?!”
Part of her wanted nothing more than to turn back and go to him. She remembered lying in his arms, all her worries forgotten. Maybe it was time.
Then the dead city flashed into her mind, its acid-scarred towers creaking and swaying in the wind. Ash rained down from the sky like snow. Charred faces stared at her with empty eyesockets. Gina stumbled and fell to her knees, trying to shut out the horrible vision.
Gabriel wouldn’t do that, she argued with herself, but when she really thought about it she wasn’t so sure.
Forks of lightning speared the sky and suddenly there he was, standing over her.
Gina froze like a statue. A gentle touch in her mind stripped away the pain and confusion, leaving her nothing but fear and desire and love.
“No more running away,” he told her, and smiled his angelic smile. He wasn’t even wet. The horizontal rain never seemed to touch him. “You know, it’s funny. A month ago I didn’t know you, and all of my plans were going so well.”
“What plans?” she asked without understanding. Her legs wobbled and her head spun, but still she did her best to resist his intoxicating presence. Even in the real world he had a glow about him, a white aura outlined against the stormy sky, something otherworldly shining through from someplace else.
“This is the beginning of the end, Gina. We’re nearing the culmination of over ten years of research. I’d like you to be there when I finally get what I’m after.”
“That sounds like a bad idea . . .”
She said it without much conviction. One by one her resistances crumbled under the addictive touch in her mind. It was no longer a trickle, no subtle dream-like enchantment that appealed to her curiosity and sexuality. This was a tidal wave; something that swallowed everything in its way and pulled it along in the overwhelming currents. It was a drug you could never get enough of.
Emily Vaughan would’ve given up in an instant. Gina Hart, on the other hand, held on for dear life.
Synapses fired at the back of her brain. Something awakened that had been forged in anger under her father’s thumb, quenched in the icy numbness of Alfie’s death, and finally sharpened to a point in the meanest back-ways of the City. It had given up on innocence and trust and all those comfortable illusions. It was capable of putting five bullets through a thug in Hangzhou airport, pulling the trigger for each one. It could grab hold of a Federal Constable’s mind and twist it back upon itself until all the lights went out. It was a piece of the Street of Eyes she carried inside her. Without really thinking about it, five fingers curled into a fist behind her back.
It faltered when she met Gabriel’s eyes, pools of liquid fire that stared straight into her soul. She couldn’t help smiling at him, couldn’t deny the adoration that bubbled up from the very middle of herself.
Then she brought her arm around and punched him in the mouth.
The sheer surprise of it knocked Gabriel on his backside. The narcotic glow faded, and though her mind screamed for more, Gina asserted bitter control of herself. The first clear thoughts of the day coalesced in her mind. She found him staring up at her, his expression both shocked and hurt, and she knew her window of opportunity was already shrinking.
“I’ll come with you, Gabriel,” she said softly, the words coming out with pinpoint precision, “when you learn to stop playing games. This is the really real world, and people ain’t toys or pawns on some chessboard. They hurt, they bleed, and they die. Jez should’ve taught you that.”
She leaned down, kissed him quickly, then turned her back and started to walk away. It came as no surprise when her legs froze, her soles rooted to the ground.
You’re wrong, you know, Gabriel’s voice sounded in her ears without bothering to pass through the air in between. The world is a board, and people make themselves into pieces. I never did that for anyone.
The words rang through her like steel ringing off an anvil. Nothing could shut them out. Lightning lit up the sky, followed by a long blast of thunder. For a moment Gina was sure she saw a shadow moving by the side of the road, illuminated by the flash, but when she looked again there was nothing there.
“Let me go,” she told Gabriel in a voice as hard as iron.
I said, no more running. And I meant it. His emotions were not unpleasant, or angry, or even annoyed. All Gina could feel in him was a kind of patient indulgence. His fingertips explored his face where she’d hit him, and he laughed inside her mind, still a little bit shocked. You really are full of surprises, Gina.
That moment a rock flew out of the bushes, aimed squarely at Gabriel’s head. He raised a hand and caught it without even looking. Slowly he brought it up to his face, studying it with intense curiosity. They were supposed to be alone.
A sudden spike of fear echoed off to her left, but it only lasted a moment before the owner clamped down with iron discipline and dropped into a blinding rhythm of telepathy avoidance techniques. Gina slid off that mental wall as if trying to grip a handful of ice cubes. Then she heard a voice.
“Don’t just stand there, you dumb bitch!” it cried, and another rock flew out at Gabriel from the opposite direction. “Run!”
She stood stunned for a moment, then took back her limbs and bolted.
Gabriel’s power flooded the world behind her, attacking everything at once. Over her shoulder Gina saw one shadowy figure clutch its head and tumble to the ground. She’d hoped for an army but there were only two people, hopelessly outclassed. Then the ocean of force swept over her. She sagged her knees, too exhausted to go up against it. Only the avoider was still afoot, and Gabriel tracked him with the concentration of a sniper. His forehead creased slightly as he focused.
Shockwaves rippled through Gina from halfway down the street. She heard a scream, and knew her would-be rescuers had lost. They were all at Gabriel’s mercy.
Or they would’ve been if he’d spotted the van in time.
A driverless blob of white fibreglass barrelled down on him from behind, its electric engine as quiet as a knife. No human sense could’ve felt it coming. The van drove him down with a sickening crunch, leaving a red smear on the front, and his body rolled away behind. For a moment she sensed only stillness. Not even an unconscious mind burned in that mangled heap of flesh. Then Gina felt a flicker inside him, like a fire guttering back to life. It reignited with frightening speed. Gabriel reached out to her again, but this time he was too late.
Gina’s rescuers bundled her into the van. Tires squealed as the autodrive sped away, and for half a moment Gina dared to let herself think she was out of it. Then . . .
Thunder slammed into the van. It shattered every window and knocked the vehicle sideways so hard that two of its wheels left the ground. It teetered there for one endless, heart-stopping moment, then came down again.
A storm of plexiglass whistled past Gina’s ears, slicing cruelly into her skin. Her eyes stayed open out of sheer panic; she saw chunks of plastic bury themselves inches deep in the rubber interior. Even when the storm died down, though, she could feel Gabriel’s crushing presence all around her.
There was no more gentleness, no more pleasure or persuasion. Only a command so absolute that it filled Gina up from the inside. Before she even knew it her hands were fumbling at the door. She genuinely wanted to run back, to forget everything, to be with him — her deepest longings were dredged up and amplified beyond measure. She fought wildly as arms pulled her away from the door and bodies piled on top of her. They kept her down.
Pain began to throb at the base of her skull. Desire faded, replaced by a terrible stretching, her mind being pulled in one direction while her body moved on in the other. This wasn’t telepathy. This was more like being pried loose from herself, as though someone had sawed off the top of her skull and was stringing her brain out behind her like warm toffee.
Still the iron grip on her mind didn’t fade.
She howled, “Back! Take me back!”
“Hang in there,” a voice told her, tinny and distorted through the red haze of agony. “We’re almost away.”
You’re tearing me apart, she wanted to scream, but her throat had clenched shut. Everything she was was being pulled out of her. It stretched away in a thin, ghostly line, taut as a bowstring.
She made one last, desperate lunge for the door but the bodies blocked her way and wrestled her back down. She couldn’t get out, no matter how she bit and clawed and kicked.
Gabriel howled with frustration, a sound that went down through madness and out the other side. His grip suddenly changed, and Gina felt him tear something out of her. A piece of her mind ripped away, left a bleeding hole that Gabriel staunched with care and compassion. Then he poured himself into the wound, filling up the gap, trying to calm the agony inside her.
She let out one final scream and passed out.
Her dreams were dark and cold. She kept seeing mirrors, but the reflections were wrong, fragmented and confused. Her breath steamed in the air. The moisture on her eyeballs started to freeze.
The next moment she found herself looking up at Gabriel, shining like an angel, radiating warmth from his body. She basked in it for a long time and stared up in mute awe. Then she started to come back to her senses. She began to remember. An overwhelming current of rage swept her up in its arms.
“You don’t take fucking ‘no’ for an answer, do you?” she hissed, her hands balling into fists. “What did you do to me?”
“What do you think I did?” he asked gently.
She bit her tongue so hard that warm dream-blood filled her mouth and ran down her chin. Never before had she felt anything like true hate for Gabriel, but here it was. “You took something out of me, and put something else in its place. Give it back. Now.”
A calm smile played on his lips, and his eyes glinted with something like pride, or admiration. “You can have it back, but you’ll have to come and get it.”
“This is not a fucking joke!” she screamed, grabbing him by his collar.
He looked back at her, suddenly serious and sombre. His aura dimmed the closer she got to him. “I’m not joking, Gina. I can’t just undo what happened. I’ll need you here.”
With a wordless cry of frustration, she lunged forward and threw him onto the ground. She wasted no time pulling his clothes off, then climbed on top of him and ground down. He let out a gasp, and she smiled nastily, without so much as a hint of warmth.
“You made a big mistake putting yourself into my head, Mr. Lowell.” She hovered over his face as she started to move slowly back and forth. “I’m the boss here. Not you.”
The next moment he took her by the wrists and pushed her over until she was underneath him, and it was her turn to moan, her pleasure as real as anything the flesh had to offer. His arms were too strong to fight.
“Are you sure about that?” he breathed in her ear. She could feel his blood racing, and her own heart beating in her throat. Their combined rhythm boomed like drums in the background.
“Fucking positive,” she snarled and twisted her legs into a roll. They wrestled and fought until she came up straddling him, leaning on his chest with both hands, wearing nothing but her fiery hair. “Why this, Gabriel? Why hurt me like this?”
For a moment he grabbed her, stopped her from continuing, and held her eyes. “Because I have so much to show you. I’ve got to make you understand.”
“Understand what?” Gina sneered, pushing down hard enough to force the breath out of him. “That you think you can do any fucking thing you like to me and I’ll just take it? Believe me, I got that part.”
The next moment Gabriel went up in smoke, and a great black rift opened up in the floor, sucking Gina down into the abyss. Strange colours and sounds surrounded her. Then something solid appeared under her feet. She stumbled and fell to her knees, lost and disoriented.
Slowly her surroundings resolved into a clearer picture, and a strange calmness settled over her. She was alone. Things were happening.
She marched under a smoke-black sky. Her feet slipped and slid through piles of rubble amid the still-fresh nuclear wasteland. A huge yellow-black hologram hung in the sky behind her, warning people that they were reaching the edges of the ME-LA Nuclear Exclusion Zone. Bit of a clumsy name, she reckoned. People were already starting to call it ‘Radiation Alley’ instead.
She’d been hunting for something. As she crested the hill, she finally found it.
A low, burnt-out hulk of a structure stood in the sheltered valley bellow her. Time and weather were disassembling it piece by piece. A few blackened trees still clung to the slopes around the building, long dead but untouched by rot. Rot required living bacteria. Nothing lived here anymore.
She rode a slide of loose rocks down the treacherous slope, battling the unwieldy radiation suit to keep in control of her descent. Then she shook off the dust and headed into the very guts of the old hospital.
The valley had shielded it from the nuclear heat of the bombs, but in an ironic anticlimax, an ordinary wildfire destroyed the whole complex shortly after its evacuation by Federation troops. So Gina navigated through the charred timber and steel, into a maze of overturned file cabinets, towards her goal.
The old laws had required hospitals to keep hardcopy data on every patient. She was counting on that. However, many folders had spilled out, now lost to the wind, and she bit her lip hoping she wasn’t too late.
She searched tirelessly through the archives. Hours passed checking each file by hand, brushing the ash off the covers, piecing together bits of burnt paper. Finally she pulled out a folder whose name had blackened but whose contents were exactly right.
She flipped open the folder, shook some ash off the paper. It read,
John Doe, accepted April 21, 2067. A few days after the nukes, she noted. Sounded about right.
10:18: Admitted subject, adult male, mid-twenties, no clothes or identification. Trauma, acute fatal radiation poisoning. Beta and Gamma burns covering over 90% of body. Severe diarrhoea and intestinal bleeding. Subject remained conscious but irrational at arrival until administered sedatives. Declared unsalvageable at 10:23, prescribed lethal dose of morphine to facilitate humane euthanasia. Anticipated time of death 10:45, April 21, 2067.
11:00, subject has not succumbed to either radiation poisoning or morphine. Believing subject to be in intense pain, prescribed additional dosage to facilitate humane euthanasia. Anticipated time of death 11:30, April 21, 2067.
11:45, subject has still not succumbed. Radiation burns have actually receded since previous assessment. Subject immediately moved to isolation ward, Room 17, and quarantined for investigation. Violently resisted application of straps, had to be held down by 4 orderlies. Extra security personnel posted to isolation ward and Room 17 entrance.
13:00, subject has disappeared from isolation ward. No evidence of tampering on locks, windows or vents. Security personnel posted to Room 17 are also missing. Armed search of hospital grounds in progress.
14:00, search of hospital grounds resulted no further evidence of subject or missing security personnel. Search cancelled due to fallout hazards. John Doe presumed at large, description has been forwarded to
The rest of the page had been left blank. In those heady days the Federation was just being formed, and its new government was only gradually assuming control of the United States. The hospital staff hadn’t known who to forward it to.
“I don’t understand,” she said to Gabriel. “What does it mean?”
Sudden images flooded Gina’s head, memories of Gabriel’s body smashed and driven under by the van, rolling away from her limp as a rag doll. It was followed by another one of Gabriel sprawled in front of her with a huge crack in his skull. A blood-stained pipe clattering on the floor. Bomber loomed over the body, breathing hard, while Gabriel lay still. There was no movement at all, not even breathing.
Then it clicked.
“It’s you,” she whispered. “John Doe is you. You survived the nukes.”
I think so. I can’t remember. There’s nothing left from before I woke up in cold storage.
“Jesus, what happened to you?”
Nobody knows. Only one man in the world has some answers, and I’ve had people looking for him for years.
“Who?” she gasped.
You might know him. His name’s Obrin, Colonel Keith Obrin, model Marine in the best traditions of the service. Friend of a friend, I think. Gabriel chuckled with contempt. He won’t be able to hide much longer.
“But Colonel Obrin’s dead . . .”
Really? How interesting. I guess I’ll be talking to a corpse then.
It was too much to take in. Gina shut her eyes tight and fled her own mind before he could say any more.
CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 27
“Jesus,” said Bomber, cradling his head. The worst hangover in history drummed in his skull and he hadn’t even drunk anything. street lights flashed pain onto his closed eyelids. He was definitely in a car, but when he finally dared to open his eyes, he only found the unpleasantly familiar sights of Bilbao. The Spanish sun seemed to mock him, still no closer to his goal.
But when he was passing out he’d felt something, an impression of Gina, however fleeting. She had to be trying to reach him.
The driver’s seat was empty. Bomber spotted a newspaper sticking out of the door and reached over to grab it. The headline read, Communication Blackouts Lifted!, and Bomber’s eyes went wide. Then, just below it, Spain, Portugal and Southern France Still Affected. He screamed in frustration and slammed his fist into the dashboard hard enough to leave a dent.
The rest of the article told the story in terse Spanish. The Fed Controllers in the region had hired every hacker in Europe to bring their systems back online. Country by country they went and restored communications, starting with the Hacker Nations themselves — Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. At the time of writing the entire north and east was hooked up again. Only the Iberian servers remained in quarantine. The story remained light on the technical details.
Bomber read on regardless, aching to find out what he could, until he arrived at the word that said it all. ‘Sabotage.’ A cyber-attack of unprecedented proportions, perpetrated by an unknown group with unknown methods. Nobody knew how it was possible for anyone to kick Europe in the head like this.
He crumpled the newspaper in his hands. He knew who was responsible. He had to get to Geneva and recruit some help.
The driver-side door flew open and Toledo landed at the wheel, throwing a black bin bag onto the back seat. He took one look at Bomber, then the newspaper, and nodded. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Good. I don’t want to deal with you having another epileptic fit. Here.” He reached into his waistband and took out a length of matt black ceramic, a silenced pistol with magazine already in place. “Let’s cut to the chase, Cai– Bomber. Up ’till now I wasn’t too sure about you or your story. I thought you were, in all likelihood, fuck-nuts crazy and quite probably dangerous. Now . . . I believe you. I believe we need to get you out of Spain as fast as possible. Right?”
Bomber gave a tiny nod. “So you’re with me?”
“As long as your money’s good.”
“My money’s the best, Toledo,” Bomber chuckled darkly. “Get me to Geneva and I’ll make sure you get as much as your heart desires.”
“One last question, then,” hummed Toledo, glancing in his mirrors. “Do you know anything about a white van that’s been following me for the past two hours?” Bomber sat bolt upright at that, tried to find it in the mirrors, but the angle was wrong and the Ferrari itself blocked his view. Toledo continued, “One man and a woman. They never move, they just sit there and watch us.”
Bomber cursed under his breath. “Probably settin’ us up for an ambush. Any way we can shake ’em?”
“Can you handle going two hundred klicks an hour on a busy road?”
Bomber shrugged. “Sure.”
Smiling, Toledo turned to the steering wheel and said, “Autodrive. Destination Geneva, Switzerland. Maximum speed.”
The engine roared. In a heartbeat they were rocketing forward past one hundred kilometres per hour, past two hundred, pinned to their chairs by the terrible weight of acceleration. Bomber crunched all his muscles to force some blood back into his head. A look in the mirrors showed the white van desperately trying to give chase but it soon fell away behind and disappeared behind a corner. Within minutes they squealed onto the motorway, weaving left and right to dodge the traffic, and it was all Bomber could do not to throw up.
The traffic only just started to clear when Toledo signalled to look in the mirrors again. Bomber bared his teeth as he watched the same damned van — or whatever it was — pulling into the lane just behind them. No van in the world could catch up with Toledo’s Ferrari on a straight road, so it had to be something else in disguise, surrounded by cute little holograms.
“No way of losing it?” he shouted over the noise of the engine. Toledo looked again and shook his head. Calmly he grabbed his bag from the back and rummaged around until he found what he was looking for. It was a long grey tube no thicker than a spice jar, small enough to hold in one hand. Black and yellow warning stripes ran around the edges and identified it to Bomber; a state of the art anti-air missile in its own disposable launch tube. Just one of those could take out an airliner.
Bomber grabbed at Toledo’s arm as the Spaniard leaned out of his window and took aim, “You can’t!” he yelled. “There’s civilians all over the road!”
“They’ve got brakes,” Toledo barked and tried to shrug him off. Bomber’s fingers slipped away as the Ferrari hit a traffic-free stretch of road. It tore across the tarmac at insane speeds, but the van kept pace right behind it.
“We can’t be sure they’re hostile!”
“Do you know of anyone with stealth drones who likes us?!”
Bomber paused. Despite the presence of innocent people, a soldier’s first instinct was to make damn sure of his own survival. Protecting bystanders came second or third at best. In a situation like this, maybe sacrifices needed to be made.
While Bomber hesitated, Toledo locked on and pulled the trigger.
The next instant there was a flash of sun-bright fire and a smoking hole in the road, quickly fading into the distance. Flaming pieces of plastic and metal rained out of the sky, and chunks of ash pattered against the Ferrari’s roof. Traffic everywhere had all but stopped and people were getting out of their cars to look at the devastation. The autodrive swerved left and right in a vain attempt to find a way through the chaos without causing any damage or bodily harm. When it concluded that it couldn’t, it simply put on the brakes and screeched to a halt.
“Fuck this,” hissed Bomber, “I’ll drive.”
They switched places in a hurry, without protest from Toledo, and Bomber let the seatbelt wrap itself around his body as he put his foot down. The Ferrari roared through the narrow spaces between cars, scraping mirrors and scattering people left and right. Bomber steered it through turns and gaps that the autodrive would never have attempted.
“You’re paying for my paint job,” Toledo said as they passed the last few stationary cars, the road ahead of them now clear for miles. He flicked the on-board navigator in the middle of the dashboard, which sprang to life with a satellite map of the local area. The landscape grew more and more more mountainous and thickly-forested as they went along. With precise movements he drew several course corrections across the screen, leading them right into the thickest vegetation.
“Any more pursuit will have a tough time following us through the trees,” he pointed out. “Keep it as fast as you can without crashing.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Bomber, swallowing. He always thought he was a stone cold motherfucker, but after seeing the Spaniard fire that missile at a crowded motorway, he decided he might have some competition.
The next moment they skidded down the off ramp and zoomed into the trees. At this speed the autumn forest was nothing more than a red, yellow and brown blur to either side of them. The Ferrari’s tires squealed, their massive contact patches struggling to keep them on the road.
They raced into a long tunnel sloping gently up the Basque mountains. When they came into daylight again, Bomber could make out the shadows of the Pyrenees in the far distance. According to the computer this road would take them into France within the hour.
Not long now, he told himself calmly, sliding sideways around a corner while the speedometer tickled two hundred and eighty kilometres an hour.
Two press helicopters and a Spanish police pursuit vehicle followed the Ferrari as it cannoned across the French border. There was no way to avoid the attention anymore, only to keep evading them until they hit Switzerland. Ordinary police cars tried to join the chase but couldn’t keep up for more than a few minutes, outpaced by the Ferrari’s old-fashioned hydrogen-electric engine. It could drive from Bilbao to Russia at top speed without refuelling.
They were halfway to Geneva by the time the cops started throwing up roadblocks. However, the on-board navigator automatically updated the route to avoid choke points. This worked until they reached a long stretch of motorway a hundred kilometres north of Nice without any good exits, barricaded and littered with car-stopping technology. As the mass of traps and vehicles came into view on the horizon, Bomber gritted his teeth and prepared to run the blockade.
First he hit a field of caltrops and spike strips, and his knuckles turned white as he tried to keep hold of the wheel. It was like driving in an earthquake, the wheels jerking left and right with wrist-breaking force, but the Ferrari’s tires were reinforced with the same material as Federation body armour. They wouldn’t break.
Bright lights flashed outside the windows as EMP mines went off. The dashboard controls flickered from the electric violence, and the steering locked up for one heart-stopping instant before the car’s automatic safeties brought it back under control. Then, just as the road smoothed out again, Bomber ploughed into the traffic barriers at full speed.
The windscreen boomed as it hit the first bar of heavy plastic. With the second it made a frightening pop, and with the third a huge crack appeared across the driver’s side, showering Bomber’s face in tiny fragments of supposedly bulletproof perspex. He shut his eyes in pain and barked at the autodrive to take over. It didn’t respond.
“I’ve got it,” Toledo shouted, grabbing the wheel. “Just keep going! We’re through!”
Bomber blinked into his mirrors at the crowd of French policemen hopping about in shock and anger. Red blotches stained his vision, but they were already fading as his implant went to work. He took control again with a muttered thank-you to Toledo and whatever gods were watching over him.
More pursuit vehicles came up behind them. They tried to overtake and force the car to stop, but they soon stopped when Bomber steered sideways and knocked one through the guardrail. It tumbled end over end in mid-air for several seconds before coming down to plough a new trench into the French countryside. Its companions, little more than large robotic motorbikes with flashing police lights on them, kept a respectful distance after that. Even the press helicopters gave up, content to watch the action through a satellite feed.
The Swiss border was just a line across the road and a big sign to announce the change in jurisdiction. They passed it with a cheer and raced into a long mountain tunnel, finally free of pursuit.
From there the Ferrari made its way east towards Geneva, weaving across the mountain roads, until a Federal Police strike helicopter caught up with it. No car in the world was built to withstand a Federation machine gun. A sudden storm of molten metal and asphalt, then silence. The chase was over.
Bomber and Toledo climbed out of the tunnel’s emergency exit, hundreds of kilometres away from the carnage, and started to walk. The roads were empty now, but it was a far cry from being chased by the cops.
The sun slowly disappeared below the horizon as they walked into some nameless village. From there they caught a cross-country bus to Geneva, a smooth chunk of plastic covered in blue paint, its silent electric engine pushing it onwards without so much as a whisper. Not quite as glamorous as a red Ferrari, but it’d get them there eventually.
“We’ll have to rent a new vehicle,” said Toledo. He seemed a little bit put out by the loss of his car, but he’d recover. After all, he had three more of the bloody things.
“Sure,” Bomber agreed. “Anything I should know about Geneva before we get there?”
Toledo shrugged. “There’s a Fed headquarters in the city so I’d appreciate if we could keep a low profile. How were you planning on making contact with your Army friends?”
“No idea. They were supposed to find us when we landed at the airport, but that ain’t an option now, so I guess it’s up to our combined intelligence-gatherin’ skills.”
A wry smile twisted Toledo’s lips. “Ah, good. I was starting to worry that this would be easy.”
“It ain’t all bad, though,” said Bomber. “If I’m not mistaken, we’ve got comms again. Can I borrow your phone?” Toledo handed it over, and Bomber tapped in the number for Jock’s mobile. It’d be his first news of the outside world. Or rather, the only parts of the world that mattered to him.
After a minute of unanswered ringing, Bomber frowned at the phone, closed it and gave it back. “Nothing. That ain’t good.”
“He probably thinks you’re dead, my friend,” Toledo chuckled. “Or maybe he’s just busy.”
Bomber grunted and stepped off the bus. He’d spotted an automated AmeriBank branch across the road, went in, and described his needs to one of the helpful machines. After a simple biometrics scan it spat out replacements for all his old credit cards and ID, and Bomber secured the stack of plastic in his inside pocket. They’d need money. He still owed Toledo, would have to drill deep into his savings for that, but money was nothing if it led him to Gina. Right now, his best shot at that was through the Army.
They rode the early-morning bus to downtown. No driver to hassle them, no people to speak of — just the bus rolling around on its automated course, never tiring, never stopping. They stopped for some bland slabs of protein at a local burger place, then found themselves a hotel that asked no questions. The clerk took their money, handed them two keys, and that was that.
An hour later Bomber lay alone on his bed naked from the waist up. His head swam with fatigue. He didn’t really sleep much anymore, but every now and again his body needed to refuel. Of course, he was still human, and sleep refused to come no matter how much he tossed and turned.
On a whim he slapped on some clothes and went back out into the night, looking for anyone who could put him in touch with the local underground. Someone useful. At first glance the city seemed innocent, filled with the sickening, artificial cheerfulness of a genuine tourist trap. The local government had done a great job at covering up, moving or demolishing the sort of back-alley places where the darker segment of society liked to gather. However, you could never quite get rid of them all, and Bomber smiled to himself as he noticed the flickering neon sign of an all-night pawn shop.
It was located well off the main road, its windows stained with smoke and dust, and every breakable surface protected by wire mesh. Broken bottles and torn placards littered the street. Much of the walls were covered in violent graffiti, although some half-hearted attempts had been made to wash it off. Along with a few dark stains on the road, the acid residue of tear gas agent, these were the fading signs of the riots that had gone on during the comms blackout.
Two very thin people huddled together under the pawnshop’s porch sharing a joint, as pale as a pair of zombies. They shrank back when Bomber stepped up to the door and melted away to someplace darker.
The door opened with the jingle of electronic bells. A light went on somewhere but illuminated nothing. Bomber carefully walked past a parade of random items with unreadable price tags. A voice croaked from the darkness in badly-accented Conglom, “Make it quick. No diamonds, no leather, no plastic.”
“I need some information,” said Bomber. “Gotta get in touch with the right people.” He folded up a ten-thousand-dollar bill and flicked it at the counter.
“Might be able to help you, but it won’t be easy. People around here don’t like yanks.”
Bomber took out another bill and scribbled the name of his hotel and his room number in the margins. Next to it he wrote, underlined, ‘Grendel’. Then he crumpled it into a ball and slammed it on the counter. “And I don’t like being fucked about,” he growled, switching to English. “If you want more money, you get somebody to come and see me. I’ll be waiting.”
He walked away without another word and went back to the hotel, up the stairs and into his room. He yawned and threw himself down on the bed without bothering to take off his clothes.
The next thing he knew, morning light was seeping in through the blinds. A tattered piece of paper rustled as it slid under the door. Written on it in pencil was a place and a time.
Now we’re getting somewhere, he thought, reaching for his clothes.
Geneva shone in the daylight. Bomber stood in the middle of the city, looking out over the murky brown waters of the Rhone as it belched forth from Lake Geneva, mountains silhouetted against the blue-grey sky behind him. The city had kept most of its old architecture over the years, but it couldn’t stop the relentless march of progress. Towers of glass and steel surrounded and dominated the old core of the city, each one taller than the last as if competing to reach the clouds, shaped like pretty much anything the laws of physics would allow.
He unfolded the piece of paper and read it one more time. Then he glanced at his watch. The note definitely read ‘Mont Blanc bridge’, ten minutes ago.
An old copy of the local newspaper fluttered past on the wind. Bomber reached out and grabbed it, a single laminated sheet of digital paper, identifiable only by the bright Tribune logo glowing at the top. A little hologram in the corner flickered as it spelled out today’s headlines, and the more energy-intensive animated stories and advertisements were distorted across the page. The paper’s battery was already packing up. Bomber pulled up today’s articles, zoomed and scrolled his way through them with a few quick finger movements, but he couldn’t find much that wasn’t about the communications failure or the resulting massacre on the European stock market. Disgusted, he threw the paper in a waste bin and wiped his hands.
“You looking for something?” asked an androgynous voice from beside him, and a figure joined Bomber at the railing to enjoy the morning over the lake.
Bomber scratched his chin. The stubble there was quickly turning into a beard, and he couldn’t seem to bring himself to get rid of it. To the newcomer he said, “I might be. Need to get in touch with someone, quietly. It’s worth a lot to me.”
“Might be expensive, waste a lot of time on everyone’s part. Most people don’t like being found.”
“Then I guess you’ll be wantin’ payment up front,” Bomber concluded. He’d been here before.
The figure turned to smile at Bomber, eyes and the top half of the face still hidden under a thick hooded sweatshirt. “You catch on, I like that.” He or she glanced around to make sure the coast was clear. “Let’s go someplace more private. We can do business there.”
Bomber nodded and, at just the right time to look inconspicuous, peeled away from the railing to follow his new guide. Augmented senses drank in every detail, analysing and predicting everything. By now he was sure the figure was a man, from speech, smell and body language. He was rarely wrong. For one, he’d seen through Rat the second he’d met her. He just didn’t care.
And Gina . . . Well, she was definitely a woman. No question about that.
They walked a few streets away from the bridge before the hooded guy flagged down a robotic taxi. Bomber took a momentary glance around before getting in, confirming his suspicions. No CCTV cameras here to observe them getting in the taxi or catch its licence plate. Clever. Futile, but clever.
From the inside, Geneva rolled by him at a pleasant pace. He watched some nice architecture, enjoyed the cloud-filtered sunlight, and memorised every inch of the route so he could cross-reference it with the city map he’d bought and studied earlier that morning. At the back of his head another little part of him kept a running update on possible escape routes just in case they became necessary. It all fit with Bomber’s motto and private philosophy, It never hurts to have a battle plan.
“Stop here,” said the guide. The taxi faithfully rolled to a stop and asked for a credit card. Instead of money, though, he slotted in a card-sized circuit board, a scrambler designed to screw up the cab’s electronics. Sure enough an alarm started beeping and the doors popped open, accompanied by the taxi’s calm robotic voice declaring an emergency and requesting all passengers to please evacuate the vehicle.
They stepped out.
Bomber found himself in an ancient and abandoned industrial estate left to rot for an untold number of years. Most of the roofs had caved in and the ground was littered with shards of broken glass and crumbling chunks of concrete. He shrugged and followed the hoodie into the only warehouse in the neighbourhood that still had four walls and a ceiling. Meanwhile the taxi rolled away with its doors still open, swerving dangerously across the road.
On the inside the warehouse was like a teenagers’ secret clubhouse. The warehouse had been stripped down to a big tin-roofed hall, now divided up with paper screens and sheets of corrugated plastic. A big public area just inside the entrance offered a pair of mouldering old sofas to relax on. They were set close to the central attraction — flames crackling in the middle of a big firepit, cooking some form of meal. On the far side of the hall people slept on piles of rags, while the more well-off members of society stretched out on air beds inside their own paper cubicles.
What people Bomber could see were all dressed in the most outrageous crap they could find, spiked black faux-leather mixed with bright spandex and ripped denim without any rhyme or reason. Their hair was dyed and arranged into wild colours and shapes like nothing that could be found in nature. A few of them showed bruises left very recently by police batons and rubber bullets. Nobody looked older than twenty.
Neo-punks, Bomber thought bitterly. He wasn’t going to find any in-roads to Geneva’s criminal underground here. These were just kids. They had no idea what they were messing with.
The hoodie exchanged some ostentatious greetings with his pals, then introduced Bomber to them. The assembled people shot him looks of instant hostility. A handful stuck around to watch him, but the majority just went back to whatever it was they were doing, mostly nodding their heads to repetitive music. Sonic drugs, sequences of sound that induced a trance-like state filled with distorted hallucinations and heightened endorphin production, for the really frugal junkie.
“Maybe I wasn’t clear about what I need here,” Bomber said to the hoodie. “Reliable intel is what I need. Not some teenagers thinkin’ they can play super-spy.”
“You’re very hostile to our message,” said the hoodie, shaking his head. “How disappointing. It’s not very nice to insult the people you’re asking for help.”
“You’re plannin’ to rob me, not help me,” Bomber pointed out with dead calm. The possibility of violent confrontation had bubbled at the back of his mind since he walked in the door, and now he knew for certain. “Which would be a big mistake, especially if you’ve got anything that might be useful to me.”
The next moment a girl jumped onto his back. Her powerful legs clamped around his waist and cold steel touched his throat, a long knife held with elegance and strength.
“You know you walk like some fucking soldier boy, like you got boosts dans la cul,” her smoky voice whispered in his ear, speaking English with a rough and ready French accent. Her blade scraped the skin off his Adam’s apple. “But I bet I can cut you open quicker than you can get me off, hein?”
An endless moment passed in silence. Then the girl flew off Bomber’s back and smacked against the floor with a meaty thud, her head lolling at an unnatural angle due to the giant hole through her neck. The echoes of a gunshot rang through the warehouse like distant thunder while her knife clattered on the concrete. Suddenly everyone was pulling at weapons, looking for the shooter, but Bomber stepped forward into the chaos and raised his voice as loud as he could.
“Anyone who attacks me is fucking dead!” he boomed. The whole gang paused. Bomber took another step forward, ready to pull out his own piece if necessary. He continued, “I have snipers set up all around this building with infrared sights. Drop your weapons now and you’ll walk away unharmed. If you don’t do that, if anyone’s feelin’ like a big damn hero today, you better make peace with the Lord right now.”
The lead hoodie stared at Bomber, shaking in fear. An unopened butterfly knife slipped out of his slack fingers. “Please!” he whined. “We’ll tell you everything, just don’t kill anyone!”
“Good.” Bomber smiled, visibly relaxing. “Then we really are gettin’ somewhere.”
Sudden disconnect, reality switch. The world blinked out and the fantasy behind the goggles became real. Billions of dollars of equipment surrounded her, filling her with a godlike sense of power. She summoned up an avatar for herself and glanced down at it, watched the system render every detail with loving realism, her own body transferred into the virtual world.
With a thought the Chrome Rat materialised on Main Street and marvelled at its splendour. Until now she’d thought that all the structures and avatars were built at low resolution, optimised to demand as little power as possible to display them, since most people didn’t own the hardware necessary to show any further detail anyway. Now she saw that although some of the street was like that, she could instantly recognise where the builders had gone one step further. Everywhere she looked there were things of such beauty and craftsmanship that nothing in real life could live up to them. Places where the ‘Net’s elite did their work, or put up their feet.
Whoa, she thought. With this kind of hardware, I could do anything.
“The code we want is in a data vault in Ireland,” said Hideo. The voice in Rat’s ears had no point of origin — she couldn’t tell if he was right next to her or a thousand miles away. “You know how data vaults work?”
“Sort-of,” she admitted. “I’ve never seen one.”
“Okay, well, it pays to remember that data security is one of our biggest exports. There aren’t many facilities that can store top-secret data outside the reach of hackers. The Feds have their own, but even they rent vault space from us occasionally. We dominate the market.”
Rat tapped her virtual foot. “Is there a point to this?”
“Only if you don’t want to screw up the job,” Hideo admonished. “Now, these vaults are built to be completely inaccessible from the outside. They come online only on demand from the customer or to perform updates or backups. That’s the key element here.” He paused for breath. “Obviously we can’t just go to Ireland and break in. Nor can we hack into it from here. However, the vault protocol sends encrypted backups to randomly-chosen vaults in other Nations to protect against hardware failure. We have three vaults in Laputa, more than anyone else, so at least one local copy is bound to exist. Laputa and everything in it is mine. So, if you can find out where that local copy is being kept, we can go pay them a visit.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“The vault only takes ten minutes to perform its backups. You’ll have exactly that much time to get in, put a tracer on the outbound traffic, and attach a unique identifier so we can find the right data blocks once we get to the vault. And, of course, you can’t tip off anyone about what you’re doing or the whole mission is blown.”
“Right,” Rat said. Doable, she reckoned. Doable.
A flick of her mind brought out all the programming tools she would need and pinned them in the air in front of her. She made a few quick gestures and the tool windows spun like mad, dropping chunks of data into a semi-organised pile on the floor. Building the basics of a new program.
She asked, “How long before I have to be there?”
“About six minutes.”
“Right.” She sped up, bashing her program together without elegance, let the automated tools stitch things together and smooth the rough edges. Under normal circumstances that’d be unforgivable to the group of neurotic control freaks that made up hackerdom, but just for today, quality standards could get fucked as long as the job got done.
“Four minutes, Alex,” Jock chimed in. “Get ready.”
The last piece slotted into place with a click. The next moment she rocketed up Main Street with her program in hand. She went so fast that time stood still around her, the hardware on both sides unable to catch up. Vertigo tore at her brain, the meat struggling to process input from the machine, but she bit through it. Meat was just an object. The only body she needed was right here on the ‘Net.
She skidded to a stop in front of the Irish embassy, throwing up clouds of virtual dust and sending a few other avatars tumbling into the sky. Main Street enforced artificial speed limits, but those laws could be broken in all sorts of awesome ways.
Like all political establishments, the embassy’s doors were permanently open. Inside was a record of all the routing servers used by her target, and handy directions on how to reach them.
The Chrome Rat strode through the big doors like she owned the place.
On the inside it was a pretty basic affair of virtual glass and white tiles, all bathed in bright sunlight. A big white counter sat at the heart of it, surrounded by a collection of white round tables with matching white chairs. A few avatars sat ramrod-stiff in their chairs, waiting for an appointment, and the reception desk was manned by a helpful program in the shape of a woman with a fixed, ghoulish smile on her face. She spouted a greeting at Rat in her mechanically chipper voice.
The programmer had clearly designed this whole area to be light and welcoming but didn’t have much grasp of architecture or aesthetics. In the end it amounted to nothing more than a big uncomfortable lobby with one single corridor leading off towards the back.
Nobody paid her any mind as she went down the corridor and came face to face with a big metal door and a flashing red ‘NO ENTRY’ sign hovering in front of it. A voice said, “This is a VIP-only area. Please return to the lobby if you wish to be served.”
She walked through the sign with determination in her heart and a wicked smile on her face. She pulled out a little plastic card, slotted it into the wall without resistance, then whispered the code phrase. The flashing sign vanished and the doors flung open with a bang. She turned down the opacity on her goggles and glanced sideways at real-life Jock, who had gone pale.
“Where did you get that?!” he blurted.
“I had full access to your rig for two months, Jock,” she said. “Ain’t my fault you keep underestimating me.”
The dark corridors behind the security door went off in all directions, even up and down. Gravity had no meaning here. Rat simply thought about moving and her avatar would obey, guided to her destination by a little hovering arrow, courtesy of the embassy’s own friendly and helpful systems. They told her exactly where to go.
Big evil-looking robots passed her by without a second glance. Automated hunter-killers controlled by the embassy’s firewall software, covered in spines and blades and other useless decoration by bored programmers. They didn’t even know she was there.
She reached the end of the maze and slid her little card into the wall again. Then she stepped through, along miles and miles of fibreoptic connections, into the back end of the data vault.
Hideo chuckled in the background. “Very nice, Alex-han. Keep it up.”
Much as she might dislike him, his praise fanned a fierce spark of pride in her chest. She flicked back into existence near a river of light, a horizontal lightning bolt suspended in mid-air, flashing and crackling with power. The vault’s outgoing line. It was easy to forget that nothing here was what it seemed, just a simple visual representation of software packages that would take months to read and understand in their true form. She checked her time and set to work with six minutes left, summoning up new code by whispers and gestures, then packed it all into Jock’s little card and shoved the card straight into the river of light.
“Not exactly spectacular,” she remarked as she pulled herself back. She had to hurry as the wall began to unfold, releasing the data flow. The river of light ballooned out like a mushroom cloud, expanding to many times its normal size as it blasted huge pulses of power down the line, faster than anything that could be seen by human eyes. And, to Rat’s satisfaction, every packet of data bound for Laputa flashed green before disappearing down the beam.
Jock whooped, “It’s working! We’ve got a trace!”
That was Rat’s cue. She popped out of time and space, disconnecting from the embassy, then materialised at one of the gazebos leading onto Main Street. She hurried through a quick clean-up, erasing her tracks and throwing down a few false footprints to mislead anyone who came looking. No way to tell if it would work, but she couldn’t think of anything she could’ve done better.
At last she reached up and lifted the crown off her head. Real life came flooding back, a pale shadow of VR excitement, a kind of washed-out and colourless alternative to the unending pleasure of simulation. Limited. Confining, like a prison. The feeling lasted for a few seconds before she managed to shake it off.
“Round one to me,” she said to Jock and Hideo, daring either of them to argue. Jock beamed with pride. Hideo regarded her without expression, tapping two fingers against his cheek in thought.
“You cheated,” he said neutrally.
She started to spit venom, but then she realised she wasn’t even angry. So what if she cheated? She returned his implacable stare with a self-satisfied smirk and answered, “Only a little.”
He burst out laughing. Rat laughed too, and the next moment Jock swept her up and crushed her close to him.
“It’s not over yet, kid,” Jock whispered in her ear. “That was just the warm-up.”
She bared her teeth and nipped gently at his neck. “That ranking is mine, Jockey boy. No matter what.”
Rat wormed back into her clothes, her skin sticky with sweat, while Jock lay sprawled naked across the bed behind her. Not the prettiest sight in the world, but she couldn’t complain. Hot pleasure still coursed in her veins, and she smiled over her shoulder at him. “Ready to go?”
He snorted, “Life would be a lot less interesting without you in it, Alex.”
“I don’t do boring,” she said. Suddenly she burst out laughing, happy beyond words. She spun around on her toes and flung her arms out, dancing across rich carpets in a room kitted out with every comfort and convenience the twenty-first century had to offer. Hideo had lent them the room to relax in and it was perfect. Everything she ever wanted was around her, right within her grasp. Power. Glory. Respect. Love. She just needed to grab them and hang on like hell.
Suddenly Jock’s arms snaked around her and they were kissing. She held him close for a long time. Then they made their way out of Hideo’s castle and wandered through Cloud City, never looking down, until they arrived at the helipad where they were supposed to be.
Hideo stood waiting next to his private helicopter. It was an old troop carrier built by Hong Kong State Security, now painted up in silver and gold as befitting medieval royalty. Its doors slid open while Rat and Jock approached, showing it to be just as luxurious on the inside. Velvet cushions and solid gold candle holders. Rat couldn’t help but love it when she spotted the fake fireplace, clad in expensive stone just for the hell of it. That said it all.
“Ready to go?” asked Jock, shaking his friend’s hand.
Hideo smiled, “Oh yes.” Then he looked at Rat, who nodded.
“Let’s do it,” she said eagerly.
They climbed into the copter and made themselves comfortable while it lifted off. Two more transports joined them moments after pulling away from Cloud City, and took formation just behind Hideo’s. Rat shielded her eyes as she gazed at the newcomers, the first rays of the morning sun just peeking over the horizon.
She murmured, “Backup?”
“My personal bodyguard. I am a head of state, you know.” Hideo grinned, then did something under his clothes, and a holographic crown flickered into existence just above his head. “There’s plenty of people out there willing to bump Kensei off just for his ranking, much less the Kingship.”
“You must be living the fuckin’ dream.”
Hideo laughed and said, “You have no idea, Alex-han. There’s no job in the world that could beat this.”
They said nothing more as the bright cityscape grew below them. Laputa didn’t have the space to sprawl like the City did, confined to its own little island rather than thousands of miles of mainland. Laputa’s engineers had been forced to build upwards, creating structures taller than anything else in the world. Covered walkways connected them to each other, and to floating airship docks with helipads on the side. One level down from these so-called ‘starscrapers’ were the arcologies, whole city blocks condensed under one roof into huge, built-up boxes. Square man-made mountains squatting in the middle of the elegant city. On top of those boxes Rat could see the famous Laputan greenhouses, great glittering domes of glass which grew nearly half of Laputa’s food in their climate-controlled rooms.
It was hard to believe all this could have been built in just a matter of years. The rise of the Federation had changed the world in more ways than one.
The copters circled down into the gap between buildings, dropping perilously between the network of bridges and walkways. Rat kept her eyes pressed shut to avoid having to look at the rotor tips chopping mere inches short of concrete. The whoosh of air rushing past the fuselage told her just how fast they were falling. Jock squeezed her hand, and whimpered in pain as she squeezed back.
They landed in the middle of a narrow road, next to a service entrance to the massive arcology. Rat couldn’t see any end to the building from here. It took up the world and all but drowned out the sky, surpassed only by the endless starscrapers next to it.
Hideo led the way through the service entrance, disabling all the locks and alarms with a casual wave of an unmarked plastic card. The next minute they were in an elevator on the ground floor, and two of Hideo’s bodyguards were making absolutely sure that no audio or camera bugs were left working inside the carriage. Rat began to suspect that every security system in Laputa had a Kensei-shaped hole in it.
“We keep our vaults underground for security,” Hideo said to Rat. “Only a few people even know they’re there. Most Laputans I know haven’t set foot on the ground in years.”
“So how do we get in?”
“We go to the door. We knock. Then they open the door and give us anything we want.” He slotted his card into a little locked panel just below the elevator controls. It had a white button inside, which lit up when he pressed it. He gestured for her to watch the floor indicator as it dropped down below zero. It ticked to minus one, then minus two, and then it blanked out. The elevator continued down.
She smiled. “You must think I get impressed watching paint dry.”
Chuckling to himself, he said nothing more until the elevator doors opened and they walked into a room full of crab-shaped security robots and two people pointing tasers in a threatening fashion. Rat froze. Even Jock looked wary as he shuffled towards the nest of black barrels, but Hideo strode out of the elevator without a moment’s hesitation.
“I am Hideo Kagehisa,” he said. “I’ve come to audit some of your data. Please step aside.”
Rat watched uncertainty grow in the eyes of the human security guards, starting to wonder if this madman might be telling the truth, perhaps recognising Hideo’s face off the TV. Then, as one, the robots all lowered their weapons and powered down. There was a brief flash of panic among the human guards until they, too, lowered their weapons. The leader, a prune-faced Japanese man with a bearing as rigid as the stick up his arse, dropped to one knee.
“My Lord,” he mouthed in Japanese so fast Rat could barely follow it, “we are deeply honoured by your visit.”
“Show us your input room. We want to jack in.”
“Instantly, Lord.”
To Rat’s amazement the guard did exactly as told, and she found herself being led by the hand into the guts of the vault. Jock’s fingers interlaced with hers, and she felt a faint tremble of excitement. He was as worked up as she was.
They passed a huge glass wall frosted with condensation, showing only the black outlines of the server blocks inside. The whole computer room was climate-controlled and protected from any outside interference. A tiny staff room stood on the right, its door wedged unsafely open for convenience, and beyond that was a heavy security door controlled by a keypad. The guard opened it unquestioningly.
“How far do you trust him?” Rat whispered to Jock, indicating Hideo with her chin.
“I trust him with you,” Jock replied, and his smile made her glow inside. The next moment they followed Hideo into the input room.
Jock helped to strap her into the cramped VR rig inside the input room, letting his hands wander too much while he did it. As usual. She growled at him and he backed off with a sheepish grin on his face.
“This ain’t playtime,” she reminded him sternly. Then she pulled the crown down onto her forehead and snapped the goggles into place. Hideo had jacked two more crowns into the system, but without a full rig they wouldn’t be able to do much beyond simple movement. Nothing like the immediacy which Rat experienced as she sailed into the system.
The world was a flat, featureless grey plain while everything loaded up. The system took its time to check Rat for any suspicious hardware or software. She didn’t waste time, but immediately assembled her own body as her avatar. Then she decided to change it. The baggy sweatshirt and cargo trousers whisked off her, replaced by tight jeans and a form-fitting top. She needed to stop thinking like a boy with tits. If her body could make Jock drool like a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal then it ought to do same with every other smug bastard in the Nations. They would just have to learn to deal with it.
One by one the system controls popped up in front of her, mostly full of stuff she didn’t need. She grabbed the search function as it appeared and fed it the unique identifier she’d planted in the data from Ireland. Whole swathes of the system lit up, most of it completely irrelevant, but somewhere in there would be the stuff Hideo was after. Just a matter of sifting through.
She laid out her arsenal one piece at a time and left them hovering around her in case she needed them. There went the code analyser, and there her own customised information panel, made to look like a PDA. All the bits she could think of. Lastly she placed the borrowed security breaker with all the little bits she’d added to it. Jock had worked on it for years, refining it into a beautifully focused piece of software. Her own modifications stood out as crude and functional by comparison to something hand-crafted by the twelfth best hacker in the world. But, she reminded herself, he was her hacker now.
“Alex-han,” came Hideo’s voice out of nowhere. A new avatar materialised beside her, a Gothic knight in full plate armour, his face hidden behind a roaring lion-shaped helmet. He bowed in greeting. “I shall be observing you.”
Rat returned the bow stiffly. “I’m ready.”
She ran every single program in the stack, most of which asked for passwords before they’d do anything. She set Jock’s security breaker to work on them. Passwords were annoying but not exactly obstacles, not these days, if you had the right equipment. Program by program she eliminated them all until she was left with one, still stubbornly resisting the security breaker. It was only a matter of time.
She watched it until it exploded. A bright glowing doorway shimmered in front of her where the password panel had been.
Got you, thought the Chrome Rat, and stepped forward into light.
A warm golden sun cast its rays over a rough green sea. The waves whipped themselves into a froth against the shore, but without any wind to speak of. Rat’s feet stood on air a few metres above the waves, and when she looked down she could see jagged rocks just beneath the waves, sharp enough to tear the bottom out of a battleship. In the distance ahead she could see land rising out of the spray.
The air smelled of salt, algae and rotten fish. Every tiny droplet of mist prickled Rat’s skin in exactly the right place, down to the most minute detail. If she hadn’t been floating, it could just as well have been real.
“Fuck me,” she breathed. “What’s a detailed VR sim like this doing in a storage farm?”
Hideo’s voice echoed in her head. “Interesting. Perhaps there’s more to it than meets the eye?”
You know more than you’re telling me, she wanted to say, but thought better of it. What have you set me up for?
She shot off towards land at the speed of thought.
The shore rose up to greet her, mossy white cliffs topped with grass like fields of shining emeralds. Rat levitated up them and set down on a rock promontory, placing her under the simulation’s rules as soon as her feet touched the ground. Gravity and other physics imposed by the system would now take effect.
“Well, look at you! We don’t get many visitors of your kind here,” said a voice from the shade of a boulder, a thick Irish-accented slur. When Rat looked closer, she realised the voice was the boulder, speaking with no mouth. “It’s a dangerous crossing, you know. Anyone who makes it this far is welcome.”
“Welcome where exactly?” asked Rat. The boulder told her, but getting her tongue around it was a whole other challenge. “What the hell’s tear nah no?” she asked as she continued her investigation of the boulder. This was clearly some kind of greeting daemon, an automated program to welcome new logins.
“Not from around here, are ya?” the boulder laughed. Suddenly it stood up, unfurling into a wiry man with fierce red hair and blue eyes, now pink and naked as a baby. Rat resisted the urge to look down.
It continued, “This is the Otherworld, the land of green and plenty. I’m a faery. We came here in ages past, leaving Earth to the humans. I’ll take you to the gathering place.”
“Uh, sure,” said Rat. “Yeah, why don’t we do that? You can show me around.”
The boulder man swept her up in his arms and jumped before Rat could protest. She screamed as they soared over the hills, gliding through virtual air over virtual heights. She was too terrified to shut her eyes.
Every inch of land was covered in grass, forest or heather, or some combination thereof. Other faeries transformed out of the land just to wave up at them.
Hundreds of miles of countryside seemed to have gone past them by the time they landed. They touched down in front of an earthen mound with huge wooden doors leading inside, which looked sturdy enough to stop a nuclear blast. The faery set her down and then retreated, keeping his distance from the building.
“This is the only place where you can go but we cannot. No faeries allowed, you see.” He shrugged. “You’ll be alright, won’t ya?”
Still a little shaken, she blurted, “Fine, thanks. I’ll be fine.” Then she took the security breaker out of her pocket, ready to deal with the big door. “You’ve been great. See you later.”
If he spoke again, she didn’t hear it as she stalked forward, focused like a missile on the big bunker. Her insides tingled with almost sexual excitement as she slipped the breaker into the door. “Open sesame,” she whispered to it.
Something came to life inside the mound. The ground rumbled. Wood creaked as a crack appeared between the doors, slowly dragged open by an invisible force. It subsided when there was enough space for one person to pass through.
“You said this was some kind of meeting place,” she called over her shoulder. “Meeting place for who?”
“I don’t know,” replied the faery. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason, never mind.”
She shrugged and stepped into the black gap between the doors. The darkness seemed to swallow her up, coming out of the mound to engulf her, and she tried to peer through it to the inside. The walls were so far away as to be invisible, denying her any sense of scale. A small red light blinked somewhere ahead. She moved towards it.
“Alex, wait–” Hideo began, but it was already too late.
