Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (33 page)

W
ednesday 2040.12.12

The Avatar watched carefully as Chen finished the preparations for the trap. She forced him to check each step, again, and again. Nothing could go wrong.

The equipment she’d requested from her new staff had arrived this morning. The metal box. The pressurized cylinders, filled with the molecular recipe she’d specified, one her greater self had designed out of curiosity but never deployed. Would it work as expected?

It will work, she told herself again. The only question is how fast.

That too, would be informative. A test, for a much larger deployment of this new molecular recipe. A much larger deployment with much larger consequences.

So much was going well. The censors were hers, ready to let through the information she wanted. The Peace and Harmony Friends were hers, selectively dropping hints, changing the narrative, priming the populace for the revelations and events to come.

But she was still so vulnerable, trapped in this tiny body.

And she was watched by a potential assassin – Chen’s driver Yingjie.

If only Chen still had a Confucian Fist driver, like Bai. Things would be so much easier, then. She’d have a tremendous resource available to her. Better yet to still have Feng. But the Confucian Fist clones had all been relieved of duty, after Ling’s attack on Shanghai. The old men weren’t complete fools. They suspected Su-Yong, and they suspected the Fist were loyal to her. So they were confined to barracks, and replaced by augmented Marines. And her path to free them was not yet open.

Yingjie was a spy, of that she was certain. The Marine driver was a mortal threat to her. If he noticed the wrong thing, he could start a cascade that would lead to her discovery and death. In the worst case, he could snap this body’s neck in an instant, ending all her hopes, cementing barbaric humanity’s victory, ensuring darkness snuffed out the last spark of light.

She couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t let ignorance and xenophobia win out over progress.

Chen made the call down to his driver. “Yingjie,” he said into his phone. “Jiao Tong. Yes. I have some heavy equipment to move. Can you come assist me?”

T
he Avatar waited
in the sealed toilet compartment of the washroom of her bedroom suite, each of the three doors closed and locked, each a bulwark against the enhanced soldier, and watched with her mind and the house monitors.

Yingjie couldn’t simply be sedated at a dinner party. He was too fast, too strong, too resilient, too capable. In the moments before a sedative took full effect (if it even would affect him), he could kick down the front door, send a message to his superiors, bring scrutiny down on her. Or snap Chen’s neck in half. And she needed Chen.

Another approach was needed. And that approach would let her test a new means of spreading nanites.

“In here,” Chen said, dressed in full suit and tie. He led Yingjie in and pointed through the door. “The large metal box in the closet. Be careful with it. I’ll go fetch my briefcase.”

Yingjie nodded his assent, his face expressionless, and strode into the room, even as Chen turned and walked briskly towards his own bedroom.

The Avatar switched perspectives, watched from a camera behind Yingjie as the soldier crouched down to pick up the object, nearly a meter in every dimension.

His hands reached around it, finding handles on the sides, closed around them to get a grip.

Data feeds from sensors in the handles confirmed a solid contact.

Now.

Her mind sent a trio of instructions in parallel.

Electricity coursed through the metal handles Yingjie held. The muscles of his hands and forearms involuntarily contracted, clenching his grip even more tightly around them.

Yingjie yelled in surprise and pain, opening his mouth, his eyes bulging, air forcing itself out of his lungs.

Behind the box, deeper in the closet, two metal cylinders opened their digital valves, forcing twin high pressure, high velocity sprays of an aerosolized molecular cocktail at Yingjie’s face, at his open mouth, his exposed eyes, his uncovered nostrils.

The heavy security door to Chen’s office slammed shut, bolts shooting out to lock it in place.

Yingjie turned his face to the right, closing his eyes, letting the continued spray hit the left side of his face and neck now.

The Avatar watched in fascination. This was the test. His eyes would be burning, as the aerosolized nanoparticles were being carried along his mucus membranes, into his blood stream, towards his brain.

Had any reached his lungs? Was there a metallic taste in his mouth from what had struck him there?

Even on the tough skin of his face, the organic solvent of DMSO that the nanoparticles were suspended in would be carrying it through his skin, penetrating tissue, till the particles found their way to capillaries.

Yingjie’s muscles strained, his hands still gripped to the handles by the current. Then suddenly his feet were pressed against the surface of the metal box, and with a scream he pushed back, ripping the metal handles off it, trailing wires behind them.

The Avatar felt a jolt of fear rip through her.

He wasn’t supposed to be that strong.

He was on his feet now, out of the pressurized stream from the tanks.

The Avatar felt radio signals blare out from him as he subvocalized a panic code. She slapped them down with her mind and the radio-shaping tools spread throughout the flat.

He turned, raising his hand to his blinking, tearing eyes, wiping at them, then orienting himself on the door.

Her models showed a sixty percent chance that the door would hold him, a median of five efforts to break free if he could at all.

Yingjie cocked one foot back, then shot it forward, following it through with his body.

The door burst open on his first kick, splinters flying.

Fear seized the Avatar.

Yingjie surged into the living room, rage written across the soldier’s face.

W
ednesday 2040.12.12

Lisa Brandt checked her messages on her phone as soon as they returned it to her.

“Sorry you’re sick today, Professor. I’ll cancel your appointments. Hope you’re feeling better tomorrow.”

There were responses to messages she hadn’t sent. There were messages
from her
she hadn’t sent.

Rage surged through her. She wanted to smash the phone to bits, crush it, scream!

But she couldn’t.

She’d been gag-ordered. Forbidden to ever tell anyone of the interrogation she’d been through, the information she’d divulged.

And that order was backed up. Backed up by a neutered version of Nexus running in her brain. A version of Nexus that couldn’t communicate with the outside world, but that could very well constrain her. Its nanites took hold of her now, kept her walking smoothly, guided her hands to unruffle her slacks, put a smile on her face, slowed her respiration, guided her through the lobby of her building, up the lift, and into the flat she shared with her wife and infant son.

“Alice, I’m home!” Lisa Brandt said brightly, the rage seething inside. “How’re my two favorite people?”

C
arolyn Pryce looked
over the report from Lisa Brandt’s interrogation.

The woman knew nothing about the PLF herself, nothing that she hadn’t learned from the memos.

And she wasn’t ERD_Secrets. She wasn’t the one who’d leaked the information about the ERD’s assassinations of the foreign scientists in ’33–35. Holtzman hadn’t sent her those files.

That was puzzling.

Brandt
had been
wired into a network helping to smuggle Nexus-dosed children and their parents out of the country. A network that had used Holtzman to break Shankari and a group of children out of ERD custody during Zoe.

No names, though. And the woman had been smart enough to realize she’d be marked as soon as Holtzman died. She’d burned herself out of the network more than a month ago.

It was just as well. For all Homeland Security’s protestations, Shankari wasn’t someone she viewed as any sort of national security threat. And imprisoning children…
that
was damaging the nation’s security.

The real prizes were the rest of what had come from Holtzman. Not the ERD assassination records, but other data that was better, far more useful.

Pryce had the original video from Holtzman’s eyes as Brandt had received it, now. It was shaky, raw, distorted. It was either the real thing or a brilliant fake.

It was real, her gut told her. That was Barnes, coming into Holtzman’s office, admitting to being behind the PLF, all but admitting to being behind the assassination attempt on the President, the Chicago bombing, Warren Becker’s death. That was Barnes, forcing a pill onto Holtzman, a pill that resulted in a death from myocardial infarction that a coroner couldn’t differentiate from natural causes. A death that resembled Warren Becker’s death all too closely. Both deaths that every security and tracking system at ERD and on Barnes’s phone and car swore he could not have been present for.

I’ve been so blind, Pryce told herself. I chose to be.

The only question now was how high it went. Did Miles Jameson know, when he was President?

Did John Stockton know?

Did he order the assassination attempt on himself?

Christ, Pryce wondered. If Stockton had ordered Becker and Holtzman’s death…

Am I in danger?

Carolyn Pryce took a deep breath.

Now, at least, she had a tool. She scanned the pages again. Here, in the originals that Holtzman had sent Lisa Brandt, were details that hadn’t been released. The names of programs, code words she’d never heard of. HARBINGER. SENTINEL. CALVINIST.

Code words that searches of the classified archives her maximum security clearance gave her access to
didn’t find any hits on
.

All tied up with the black op that was the PLF.

Each of those words, every detail associated with them, was a trap, a trap she could spring on Miles Jameson.

Or on John Stockton.

Her breath was coming fast.

Jameson. Jameson first. He was her top suspect.

Then Stockton.

All she had to do was find a way to get to Jameson.

And if her worst suspicions were true, she had to find a way to stay alive.

W
ednesday 2040.12.12

The Avatar physically shrank back in the toilet cubicle as Yingjie emerged into the main room on the house monitors. This was not good. Ling’s fingers kneaded the girl’s stuffed panda.

She reached out for Yingjie’s mind, but she still felt nothing. Had he not gotten enough? Was his skin too tough? Was the diffusion rate lower than she’d modeled? Were the pharmacodynamics different when inhaled and absorbed than when injected? Was something different about his blood or brain that she didn’t know?

On the camera the soldier was heading for the closed door to Chen’s bedroom. Chen was in there now, sealing himself into the toilet chamber, just as the Avatar had done in her own suite.

She had to stop Yingjie.

“I’m over here you idiot.” She had the house sound system play Chen’s voice, coming from the kitchen.

Yingjie whirled, looked.

Then a noise came from within Chen’s suite, as the final door slammed shut.

Yingjie turned again, lashed out with his foot once, and the door to Chen’s bedroom exploded open.

The Avatar was breathing fast in Ling’s little body now. She needed Chen. Needed him to justify her own access to the quantum cluster. Needed his biometrics.

But not as much as she needed Ling.

Contingency plans raced through her mind.

Yingjie kicked open the door to the walk-in closet, and found it empty of all but clothes. He flipped Chen’s emperor-sized bed onto its side as if it were made of plywood, found nothing of interest beneath it.

“Where are you, Chen?” he yelled.

The Chinese Marine’s eyes turned to the door to the washroom suite, death in them.

She could feel Chen’s terror within, feel his body hyperventilating, feel the sweat in his palms, the race of his pulse, even through the control of the neural circuits she’d placed.

Then she felt it. The first glimmer of Yingjie’s mind, as nanoparticles reached neurons, met one another, snapped together to form full nanites, and began transmitting and receiving.

He lashed out at the door to the washroom, and she reached out at the most basic level,
twisting
at his motor cortex, flexing her will at him.

The door flew open. Yingjie stumbled, falling to one knee, halfway through the door.

More nanites formed in his brain, attaching to his neurons, launching into calibration phase as they explored the mapping of his neural circuitry.

Yingjie grabbed hold of the marble sink above him, pulled himself shakily back to his feet.

The Avatar could feel the chaos in his mind now, the fear, the disorientation as sensations and concepts and memories followed each other in a high speed montage.

Yet more nanites formed.

“What… what have you done to me?” he asked, his eyes trying to find the last door, the door behind which Chen hid, through the chaos of his own mind.

I’ve made you better,
the Avatar sent him.

Yingjie’s eyes opened wide at that. He blinked again, seemed to find what he was looking for, and launched himself across the room at the door to the toilet. He staggered at it off balance, hit it hard with one shoulder, and bounced off, landing on his back on the floor.

“Chen!” he tried to roar. It came out weak, confused, almost a plea for help. “Chen!”

My name is not Chen,
the Avatar sent him.
And you are now much more than Yingjie.