Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (56 page)

M
onday 2041.01.20

What was that sound? Sam closed her eyes, tried to tune into it.

“We go to her,” she heard Kade say. “We go down the rabbit hole.”

A grinding.

“CLEAR!” Sam yelled. She flew at Kade, hampered by the heavy gear bag on her back, slammed into him just as his face came around in surprise, flattened him to the ground, heard him explosively exhale with the force of it.

Just as the elevator doors began to open.

Feng and Bai and the other Fist, named Liwei, were already reacting, vaulting back out of the line of fire, guns up.

Muzzle flash filled the space. Bullets ripped out from their assault rifles. Liwei hurled a grenade into the massive vault of the elevator as the door opened wider.

“COVER!”

Sam pressed herself down over Kade. A deafening boom sounded in the small space.

Echoes filled the silence.

Nothing returned fire.

She rolled onto her back, kept close to Kade, brought her assault rifle up.

The massive doors were still opening wider, as wide as the side of a house.

Revealing nothing. A giant, empty, concrete-and-titanium box.

ISOLATION IN PROGRESS.

She looked over at Feng, saw him glance back in consternation.

WHOOOOOOOMP.

A gale-force wind grabbed her, sucked her towards the open elevator doors where the elevator had been, tumbled her. She caught air above the floor of the computing center, caught a terrifying glimpse of the open maw of the elevator shaft, utterly devoid of an elevator, a giant sucking hole, the house-sized elevator car plunging down it at breakneck speed, creating a temporary vacuum, sucking papers and pencils and bits of detritus ahead of her into that kilometer-long fall.

The fall she was going to take if she went through those doors.

Then her own tumble brought her back towards the floor of the computing center and she slammed her left palm down, flat onto the tiles, completely open, praying the Indian gear had the same safety reflex built in that the US gear did.

“Aaaaah!”

Her left shoulder wrenched hard in pain, as the glove on her left palm shot micro-adhesion hooks into the tile floor, stuck her to it like a gecko, broke her tumble.

Something shot through the air and she reached out with her other hand, her rifle already dropped, and then something hit her and she had a hand around Kade’s wrist, keeping him from being sucked down the hungry shaft.

Something slammed into her, tried to break her hold, bounced off, and a body soared through the air, sucked into the vortex, slamming into the far wall of the elevator shaft, and then disappearing. A chair followed it, another body. Another. Someone screamed, she thought. Maybe. There was so much roaring in her ears. She couldn’t hear herself think.

She held on. Held on. Held on.

Then there was a crash, far away, like the sound of an avalanche.

And it was over.

S
am collapsed to the ground
, sweat covering her, her body aching.

Kade was trembling, panting.

She looked over. That was Feng, in the deactivated Indian chameleonware. His face… There was another Fist next to him.

Where was the third?

“Feng?”

He looked over at her.

“He saved me…” Feng said, his eyes wide. “We collided. He… he pushed me away, down, away from the elevator… pushing himself…” Feng shook his head, a look of shock on his face. “Bai!”

Oh god.

T
hey unpacked the gear
. Sam kept an eye on Feng. She saw him and Kade have a moment. But the Fist shook it off, shook it off with the attitude she knew so well.

The attitude that said the mission must go on.

Harnesses. Check.

Lights. Check.

Friction-based descenders. Check.

Powered ascenders with extra-large power packs. Check.

Guns. Ammo. Explosives. Check.

Knives. Check.

1.3 kilometer-long reel of micro-jacketed ultra-high-quality fiber optic cable, with broad spectrum, high-bandwidth, Nexus-linked, satellite-capable, internal fuel-cell-powered network access points at each end.

Check.

She checked Feng’s harness.

Feng checked hers.

They both checked Kade’s.

And he checked the networking gear.

“Good to go,” Sam said.

Liwei saluted them. “Stop the madness.”

Then he headed off, with one of the network access points, and one end of the cable.

It was for the best. He was vulnerable. Vulnerable in a way Sam wasn’t.

In a way they hoped Kade and Feng weren’t. Or at least were less so.

T
hey slid
down into the darkness, their harnesses holding them to the elevator cable, their descenders gripping just tight enough to slow their fall, their chameleonware active, their radios silent, their light-augmenting visors barely illuminating the enormous smooth-walled pit that descended straight down, down, down into the earth.

It grew colder. The dim light above receded until it was nothing more than a faint, barely seen point, dimmer than a star at night.

Network data was gone. GPS was gone. All contact with the outside world was gone, until Kade fired up that network access point sometime in the future.

Sam looked down.

The bottom could not be seen.

The pit could be infinite for all she knew. It could drop forever.

Down, down they went, into the cold, into the unknown, into the darkness.

Sam was first, in the position at the bottom, with the greatest danger.

She was the one with no technology in her brain. The one who actually had that as an asset this once.

This is the last time, she told herself. The last mission. The last killing.

Home. And then she’d swallow the Nexus again. And touch the minds of the ones she loved.

If she somehow lived through this.

If they ever let her leave this place again.

If there was anywhere left to go home to.

Something changed.

In the abyss below there came a slight lightening, a blackness that was marginally less absolute.

Infrared radiation, rocks a different temperature than the air down here, picked up by her visor, translated to visible frequencies for her eyes.

Sam twisted the tension bar on her descender. It gripped the cable more tightly, graphene and titanium parts applying more friction, slowing her descent. Feng and Kade were spaced ten seconds behind her. There were no laser links, as little data flow as possible, as little chance of detection as possible. She was as invisible to them as she would be to anyone else.

She just had to hope they saw the same, made the same decisions, or keyed off the warm spot made by the friction of her descender against the cable.

The marginally-less-black-than-absolute-blackness below her gained form. Gained structure.

Rubble.

The remains of a house-sized elevator that had plunged a kilometer to its demise.

And bodies.

All growing clearer by the second.

She slowed herself further, landed on the rubble as lightly as she could, unclipped her descender with a practiced motion, stepped away lightly, choosing her steps with care.

It was a jumbled, jagged, nightmarish mess. Broken concrete. Rebar. Shattered titanium alloy spurs.

A deadly minefield, barely visible in the dark, even with the light-augmenting full-face sensors.

She put her descender down silently, near the spot where the cable came down, then pulled her assault rifle around.

Single shot.

Knives ready.

They couldn’t just go in shooting madly. The rules of engagement she’d agreed to were limited, were an incredible handicap.

Were probably going to get her killed.

Feng was down.

Then Kade.

They spread out. Kade moved awkwardly, his knee still a problem, his natural agility never good, the landscape hellish.

Sam watched him nervously.

They spread to opposite corners of the bottom of the shaft, Kade as far back from the massive doors as he could be. Feng in the front towards them.

They were two antennae. Two parts of a compound antenna. Far enough apart they could create an ultra-low-frequency signal. Those extremely low frequencies were shit for bandwidth. They could carry barely any data whatsoever.

But they could penetrate earth and rock.

And the right signal could open this door. Chen Pang had known that signal. He’d touched his wife’s mind. And she’d been backed up, before being restored in India, and had passed that signal on to Kade and Feng.

So they said.

Sam shook her head.

Shitty rules of engagement. Terrible plan. Probable death.

Why the hell did I agree to this? she wondered.

Because a little girl’s life is at stake, she answered herself. Because a stranger risked his life to save me when I was a little girl.

She took a slow breath.

Because the woman held down here for half a year was a prisoner, a prisoner they tortured and abused, Sam thought. Because that woman saved my life once too.

Because to have the right future, we need to lay down the right past, for that future to build on.

Tit for tat.

Tit for tat.

Sam saw Feng give the signal, and she reached up with her eyes, pulled down a menu, and disabled her chameleonware, as did he.

She and Feng were the bait.

She saw Feng pull off his hood, stand perfectly still for a moment. Then he reached back and pulled his hood back on, chameleonware still disabled, his form still barely visible.

Then with a deep bass grind of stone against stone, the massive, meters-thick door started opening, light spilling into darkness.

And she was diving forward into that light, and into the sound of gunfire.

K
ade readied
himself at the bottom. It all came down to this.

He left his chameleonware active, but peeled back his hood to free himself from the Faraday lining of the thing. Then he closed his eyes, and he and Feng were linking up, conjoining, their minds forming two poles of a compound antenna, manipulating a wave on a long, long wavelength, as long as the distance between them, sending a slow, deep signal, searching through the cold rock for the receiver on the other side.

And then a key fit a lock.

Kade felt it. He reached back, pulled the chameleonware hood back over his face, settled it in place. A vertical crack of light, twenty feet tall at least, split the wall of the elevator shaft. It widened, widened.

Then he saw Feng and Sam roll through it, moving in opposite directions, and gunfire burst out, someone inside, firing out, full auto, shooting at them.

He moved forward, slowly, careful on the rocks, limping on his damaged knee.

Gunfire kept emerging in staccato bursts. He heard thuds, grunts. He couldn’t see inside.

He made it down the rubble, his knee aching. He moved quietly, slowly, was just crossing through the tunnel created by the meters-thick door when he caught a glimpse of the battle, bodies moving, muzzle fire.

Something rocked his head, slammed it hard into the stone door like a blow from a hammer.

It set his world to spinning.

It plunged his visor and its feed into black.

S
am dove forward
. Dynamic entry. Gunfire exploded as she threw herself into a roll in the widening space between the doors. Her visor threw up attack vectors, arrows identifying the sources of the fire.

Three arrows. Three sources of gunfire.

She came up out of the roll, spinning to change the course of her path, arms out, assault rifle in her right hand. More gunfire erupted, ripping through the space her trajectory would have put her in.

Her eyes took in the scene as she spun. The giant glass walls. The quantum data-center behind them. The control panels. The little girl in the dress, back to them, at one of those panels. The middle-aged Chinese man, tapping away next to her.

The Confucian Fist in the plain fatigues flying through the air, between Sam and the quantum cluster, an angle she couldn’t fire on, his rifle coming around towards her new position.

Sam pulled her arms in and across her body to accelerate the spin, ducked her head down to turn her motion into a half-flip, knowing it was too late, knowing his bullets were about to punch through her.

K
ade’s visor
cut to black.

He stumbled, disoriented, reeling from the blow to his head, expecting another.

No second blow came.

He reached up, pulled the hood off his head, looking, searching.

Feng and Sam were fighting for their lives. For everyone’s lives.

There. There was Ling. And Chen. At the consoles of the quantum cluster.

Still going through its boot sequence. Not yet complete!

The fiber optic cable was behind him. The network access point waiting for him to activate it. But he might not need it. He might not. Not yet.

Ling was turning towards him. He could see a malevolent intelligence behind her eyes that wasn’t her own. That wasn’t the eight year-old girl he’d gotten to know.

He reached Inside, and the origami tools Su-Yong had given him unfolded again, expanding to thousands of times their size, fractally decompressing, becoming orders of magnitude more complex.

He reached out towards Ling’s mind, bombarded it with viral fragments, millions of them, mutating in real time.

All a feint.

T
he Avatar used
Ling’s face to smile at the boy. She was ready for him this time. He came at her with viruses. Again? Silly child.

She fired phages into the shared spectrum, evolved things, tailored for the viral attack she’d seen him use already, that she’d first seen the hostile posthuman use in Bangalore. The phages were simple things, tiny compared even to the viruses. She unleashed billions of them. They swarmed the viral code, attacking weaknesses Darwinian methods had found in the minutes since their last encounter, shredding the viruses to bits, decimating them.