Element Zero (14 page)

“What launch?” I asked. “What was she talking about?”

“ICBMs. Fawkes has twelve of them pointed at the city.”

ICBMs. That meant nukes.

“Why? What the hell does he want?”

“We don’t know for sure,” he said, “but the bottom line is, we have to get to him first. To do that I’m going to need your help.”

“You got it,” I said. He waved me into another conference room and shut the door. He turned on the noise screen and leaned in close.

“When you did your tour, you worked with the M8 series, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever hijack a revivor from an existing command network?”

“Sure.”

“Without using some kind of override code?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“There’s only one way to command a jack,” I said, “and that’s over a command spoke. You set up a new spoke, or you take over one that’s there already. You know that. What are you after?”

“I’m looking for a way to take control of one or more revivors from an existing command network, without tipping off the person controlling them.”

“Oh,” I said. I’d pulled that kind of thing off back in the grinder. “Sure. You can set that up, but you need to grab a revivor from the target network.”

“These revivors are behind Heinlein’s security perimeter, Cal. I won’t have physical access to them.”

“You need a live command spoke from a jack that can’t turn you in to the original commander—Fawkes.”

He rubbed his nose, and I saw his right hand. It was gray, like mine. There were black scabs fused over deep gouges in the knuckles. Those came from teeth. He’d bashed someone good.

“Shit, Nico.”

I grabbed his sleeve and pushed it up. The gray skin and black veins went up to his elbow.

“It’s fine.”

“Bullshit.”

I put my dead hand on his. The skin was the same color. Usually skin felt hot under it, but now his hand was as cold as mine. He gave my dead fingers a squeeze with his. Then he pulled away. He yanked the sleeve back down.

“I heard what you did down at the VA,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like you. You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m fine,” he said again, looking at the back of his dead hand for a second. “I think I might have some bleed-through, that’s all.”

He meant nanoblood leaking through the filter that joined a new limb and infecting the real blood on the other side. It happened sometimes with a rush job, or if you stressed a new joint too much, too soon. He said it like it was no big deal, but it was. You could die from that.

“‘That’s all’?”

“I’ll get it looked at,” he said. “Never mind me. What about you? The inhibitor worked, then?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

He smiled. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“Me too,” I said. “I mean, I’m glad you’re okay.” He looked like he was going to say something else, but before he could I punched him in the arm—his good arm.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. Me, too. I got to get back to base. Tell me what you need.”

“For now, let’s say I’m able to get access to one of the revivors without Fawkes knowing,” he said. “How would I take control of the rest?”

“Easy. My CO showed me on week one. You keep the one you grab on the command spoke so you don’t tip anyone off, then drill into its control center to keep it quiet. Physically drill. After that, you can use a special package to set up your own command net, right on top of the first one.”

“That works?”

“Kind of. Any jacks you spoke to will take orders from either person controlling them, so you can still get caught. How many is he running total?”

“Inside Heinlein, probably hundreds.”

“Perfect. He can’t keep his eye on that many; it’s fucking impossible. Pick a few he doesn’t move, ones on autopilot, and use those.”

“Do you have the modules to do this?”

“I can get them.”

“Do it. Keep this quiet.”

“I’ll need to call in a favor.”

“Just keep it off the network. Fawkes had men inside Heinlein. He might have them here too. I’ll only have one shot at this.”

“Don’t worry about—”

I stopped short. A shiver ran down my spine. I heard it before I even knew I heard it.

“What is it?” Wachalowski asked.

The sound came from outside. I’d heard it enough times in the grinder to know you hit the deck when you did. It was the sound of rotors. A Chimera was coming in hot.

“Nico, get—”

The wall to my left blew into a thick cloud of powdered concrete and glass as a Gauss chain gun unloaded on the side of the building. The turret howled as it tore open the conference room around us. I caught a flash of the building across the street through the hole behind me, then hit the floor with my hands over my head.

Dust and grit fell over me as back across the hall, the wall into the war room got carved out. The conference table inside was blown to sawdust, and the people around it popped into clouds of guts. Some guy’s arm spun in the air as the wall behind him disappeared.

“Nico!”

I couldn’t hear shit. The turret ripped open the floor, and bodies fell through. I saw a bank of screens go down after them, spitting sparks, before a wall of smoke blew over me and the lights went out.

Cal, where are you?

I’m here.

I couldn’t see shit either. I could just make out shapes of people as they got back up on either side of the missing floor. The Chimera peeled off, but I heard it bank back to make another pass.

Cold wind blew through from outside and cleared the air at least a little. Wachalowski got up and jumped the gap between us. The tile broke away under his heel, and I grabbed his wrist, then hauled him over.

Street level,
he sent, and pointed behind me at the door back out to the hall.

I ran to it and turned the handle, but the wall had shifted and it was stuck. I put my shoulder to it twice and it banged open as the chain gun went off again and the wall across the room exploded.

Wht the fk?

The kid.

Nico slammed into me and shoved me through the doorway and into the hall. He’d made for the stairs when he saw me stop short.

Cal, what are you doing?

The kid.

She was back in the conference room. There was still a clear path to it. I ran for it, Nico on my heels. I cut across the hall and heard him yell, right before the sound of the turret drowned him out. Hot air hit my back, and the floor dropped out from under me. I grabbed the door handle as tiles fell away, hanging on while my boots dangled in the open air. On what was left of the hall in front of the door, I got my footing and climbed back up.

When I pushed open the door I saw her there, up against the far wall. I turned back toward Nico and saw that the hall behind me was gone. He stood on the other side of the gap, ready to jump.

Don’t. I’m coming back.

“Kid, come on!” I yelled. I dragged her to the door while she screamed something from behind me. I looked down through the hole and saw a two-story drop to the offices below.

“Hold still!”

“Don’t. We’ll fall!”

I cinched her around the waist and she screamed as I hoisted her up on my shoulder, then took two steps and jumped.

I cleared it, but when my foot hit the other edge, the floor buckled, and for a second I thought I’d go right through. I didn’t. I fell forward on one knee and Nico caught me. He grabbed Vika as she flipped off my shoulder, and dragged her back from the edge.

Back this way,
he said.
Hurry.

Vika stumbled after him, and I kept to the rear to make sure she didn’t fall behind. He took us down another hall to a stairwell. He opened it with his badge and signaled for us to go through.

The stairs shook as we went down. Behind us the wall blew out and sparks sprayed as the metal rails were shredded. Cold air blew in from outside, and as rubble came down, I saw a body fall end over end through the snow.

I hit the floor on the landing and Vika came down on top of me. Nico slammed off one wall and reached for me. A chunk of concrete banged off the wall next to his head. I put my boot on the kid’s bony ass and shoved her down the next flight of stairs as the turret turned its fire back the other way.

For the next eight flights we ran, the sounds of the attack slamming through the stairwell from above. Then it stopped. I could barely hear through the ringing in my ears.

Nico cracked open the door and looked through. He signaled it was clear, and we followed. Outside it was a mess. Glass and concrete covered the street where cars were stuck end to end. A desk had come down through the roof of one of them, and I could see bodies in the road. My bike was totaled, crushed under an avalanche of shit. Blood and oil ran down the blacktop.

Everything sounded like I was underwater, but through the ringing, I could make out the sound of rotors. They were pulling up and away. Nico had his gun out as we followed him to the sidewalk. Up in the air I could see the shadow of the Chimera as it banked around the side of a building down the street.

I looked back at the FBI building. Ten floors’ worth of the face was gone. Junk had spilled out of the hole, down onto the street. A million papers fell through the snow. Vika watched one of them come down like she was in a trance.

Wind sheared down the street and stirred up a cloud of dust. Orange light sparked in Nico’s eyes as he checked for survivors.

“Wachalowski!” The voice came from the gate to the garage. It was Van Offo.

“Come on,” he called. “They could be back.”

“Come on where?” I asked.

“There’s still people in there,” Nico said.

“Rescue’s on their way,” Van Offo said. “We need to go now. We’ll take a vehicle from the lot.”

“Go where?” I asked.

“Stillwell’s got a foothold a few blocks up,” he said. “Your squad will meet us there. Come on, we’ve got to move.”

“They’re here,” Vika said. A burst of static popped in my head.

I turned, and across the street, I caught a flash of moonlight white from a pair of eyes. A jack had been watching us. Behind it, I saw there were more.

Off to the left, another one moved out of an alleyway, then another. The static turned loud and steady.

“Let’s go,” Nico said.

Paper blew down the street like snow as we made for the garage.

5

EVENT HORIZON

Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo

By the time I could see Alto Do Mundo through the helicopter’s windshield, I’d thrown up everything there was to throw up. My stomach twisted into a knot, and my throat burned as sweat rolled down my face. I was concentrating, my jaw clenched, on the huge, lit spire at the top of the tower when I heard the pilot shout back at us.

“Hold on!”

I felt Penny’s hand on my back as I bit down and held on to the metal rail beside me. Something whipped through the air in front of us, and as it spun back around, the helicopter dropped underneath me.

Spit sprayed from between my teeth, hanging in a long strand. The lights outside spun by the window, and over the rotors I heard a high-pitched whine. There was another helicopter up ahead—no, two—and a huge muzzle flash flickered from underneath one of them. As the pilot spun us around and I slammed into the wall, I saw sparks and shattered glass explode in a trail across the side of a building. It rained down toward the street far below. A huge mob was forming down there around the building.

“They’re firing on us! We need support up here now!”

The bottom dropped out from underneath me again and bile crawled up my throat. I hit the wall again as the two helicopters disappeared for a minute behind the spire.

“We’re coming in now!”

The engine went up in pitch as the world tilted underneath us. Below, the roof of Alto Do Mundo was coming in very fast. Lights around a helipad began to flash, and I could make out soldiers as they ran past it to set up some kind of rig. One of them began to signal with a glowing baton.

“We’re going to return fire,” a voice crackled. “Hold your course!”

A flash went off on the rooftop and something hissed past the window next to me, trailing smoke behind it. A whistle sailed off into the distance, then was swallowed by the sound of the rotors.

“Was that a hit?” a voice asked.

“Negative. We missed them, but they’re moving off.”

I focused on Penny through my wet, tangled hair, and after a second she noticed me and met my eye. I reached out with one hand and groped; she moved closer and put her arm around me. As I shook, I felt her kiss me on top of the head.

A minute later we were on the ground, or the roof anyway. The soldiers flanked Penny and me as she helped me off the helicopter and across the helipad. The air was cold, but having solid ground under my feet and some fresh air made me feel better. I took a deep breath as more armed men arrived through a door about one hundred yards ahead and approached us. In no time, we were surrounded by men with guns.

Inside, the door thudded behind us and closed off the racket from the roof. The air was warm, and I rubbed my hands together, shivering as we followed the group of men to the elevator.

“Ai is waiting for you in the war room,” one of the men said. Penny nodded and took a minute to wipe my face as the car went down two floors. In the mirrored interior of the elevator car, I looked horrible; my skin was a pale, sickly gray, and there were dark circles under my eyes. My hair was a mess and caked with dried blood on one side. There was a gash on my forehead that was still wet, with a big knot underneath it.

“Get a doctor to meet us down there,” Penny told the man. “I want someone to look at that.” He nodded.

“I’m okay,” I said. She didn’t answer. She was in crisis mode and wouldn’t take no for an answer on anything, pretty much until she was out of it, so I just let it go.

The elevator doors opened and we followed the men down a long corridor, then through two doors with keypads to another hall where I could see a set of glass double doors up ahead. Through the glass I could see the room was dimly lit, and light from monitors flickered to make shadows. There was a crowd of people inside, sitting in leather chairs in a tight circle around a giant oval table in the middle of the room.

Ai was inside, I could sense her even though I hadn’t seen her yet. I could sense her whenever I was inside the building with her, but right then it was even more intense than usual. Unlike most people, her thoughts were almost fractured, with each shard clicking away, doing its own thing. They were all bound together in a master pattern, like bits of stained glass that formed a picture in a window. They said she was the next step in evolution, and maybe she was but sometimes I secretly thought she was more of an accident. No other mind was quite like hers, not even the other powerhouses that were in there humming around it.

I’d never actually been inside the war room before. Two guards stationed outside opened the doors so that Penny and I could go in. The armed men who’d escorted us down left us at the door, then turned and went back the way they came.

The inside was impressive. All of Ai’s top people were there, watching the far side of the room where a giant array of huge monitors were set up, each one displaying something different. In one, I saw General Osterhagen’s face looking back at me. Robin Raphael looked out from another one. A third, twice the size of the rest, showed the future model like a gas nebula floating in space.

Some of the other screens had faces I didn’t recognize, but most of them showed what I figured were live feeds from throughout the city. In one, I saw helicopters moving in between buildings, while people ran through the streets below. In another, I saw a vehicle on fire in the middle of a traffic jam, while soldiers tried to put it out. Everywhere I looked things were burning or smoking, and people were scared and hurt. It didn’t seem real. Less than five hours ago, everything had been normal.

“. . . the threat of the nukes is very real,” I heard Osterhagen say as we walked in.

“How did this happen?” someone else on one of the other screens snapped.

“Unlike the activation code, this security breach didn’t occur at the Stillwell compound. As best we can tell, he used contacts on the inside at Heinlein Industries to access the defense shield,” Osterhagen said.

“You’re saying this breach came from inside Heinlein Industries itself?”

“Heinlein Industries is connected to several other large military contractors, as well as the Department of Defense,” Osterhagen said. “In addition, they have their own defense satellite which is tied to the grid.”

“The Eye,” a woman said.

“They have the means for sophisticated satellite access from inside Heinlein,” Osterhagen said. “Somehow, someone on the inside was able to leverage that to find and exploit and tap into the main defense shield. We don’t know exactly how it was done yet, but it would have taken a detailed understanding of the satellite system, and a lot of time to figure out how to crack it. This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t come from Ang Chen. Fawkes had others inside Heinlein helping him. Defense system specialists, with high-level access.”

“How many have been compromised?”

“There’s no way to know,” Osterhagen said. “No one anticipated this move. It’s one of the most secure facilities in the UAC, and we weren’t watching Heinlein specifically.”

“Is this it?” the older man asked. “Is the satellite’s payload of ICBMs the catalyst for the event?”

“It’s the source of the destruction in the visions,” Mr. Raphael said. “It must be.”

“But do we know?” someone asked.

“General,” Ai said suddenly, and the rest of them stopped talking. “Can you regain control of the satellite?”

“I have a team on it,” he said. He nodded offscreen and a window popped up in the corner of the monitor along with him. In the window was the face of a pale, blond man with intense eyes and drawn cheeks.

“This is First Lieutenant Hans Vaggot.”

Eyes flashed when he said the name, and I sensed a kind of surge through the room, even from the group at the table who otherwise seemed to be in some kind of trance. The name Vaggot was tied to the very rare visions that took place inside the dark void, where most couldn’t see. I knew there were several possibilities who they thought might be the man in question, but it looked like this might be the one.

I watched his face, but it didn’t look familiar. In the vision, he was horribly deformed so it was impossible to know for sure if it was him. Those perfect, symmetrical features on the monitor didn’t seem like they could belong to the monster I’d seen, but . . .

This can’t be coincidence,
I thought.
This has to be it. The event they’ve been talking about is real. It’s happening.

“Regaining control of The Eye would be trickier,” Vaggot said calmly, “but we believe we can regain control of the nuclear satellite from here. We don’t have a time frame yet, but confidence is high that Fawkes will not be able to hold on to his nuclear option very long.”

“He doesn’t need very long,” someone said.

“Agreed,” Vaggot said. “But if he wanted to launch, he’d have launched by now so he’s waiting for something. If we can stay under his radar, he may lose this option before he has any kind of warning.”

“And if you don’t stay under his radar?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Osterhagen said. “We cannot leave those nukes under his control. We have to take them back despite the risk. A secondary defense satellite is standing by to take out The Eye once the nukes are off the table, and air teams are ready to scramble and knock out Heinlein’s ground defenses. After that, we’ll send troops in to mop up what’s left.”

As I watched Vaggot, I found myself drawn to him. I closed my eyes, and when I reached out, I found it was surprisingly easy to contact him. His presence was very strong to me, and like some I had run into in the past, he was extremely open to my will.

I cracked my eyelids and peered at his face on the screen while I concentrated on his distant little candle flame, the way Ai had helped me master. He wasn’t one of us; I could tell right away. He was sharp and intelligent, but not one of us. His mind hummed like an electronic machine, very compartmentalized and focused. He was worried, but he wasn’t scared. He believed what he said, that he could take control of the nuclear satellite back from Fawkes and back into our hands at the Stillwell camp.

On the screen, he paused for a second, confused. He sensed me.

“Leave him alone,” Ai said without looking at me. I eased off and let his consciousness fade away from me. “Mr. Vaggot, a lot rides on you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I understand.”

“I know you will not let us down.” The window with his face in it flashed and went out.

“Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, “how are efforts on the streets going?”

She sat at the head of the big table that faced the monitors, and unlike the rest, she sat cross-legged in the middle of a large, square pillow that was right up on the table itself. None of the others at the table looked at her or even seemed to know she was there. They stared down at the tabletop, eyelids half-closed. Her face had a slack, distant expression like it did when she was deep in a vision and flying on pentatrosin. She stared off at nothing, aware of the things around her but not seeing them. She didn’t see us come in, but she’d known we were coming and knew we were there. One of the many pieces of her aura turned its individual pattern toward me, green light spiking up from out of the blue. With one tiny hand, she waved us over.

“The National Guard is being utilized primarily for humanitarian efforts at this point,” Raphael said. His handsome face, young in contrast to Osterhagen’s, which scowled from the monitor next to it, looked tired. “They can handle the peacekeeping effort for now. They’re in the process of aiding the wounded and transferring them to local medical hubs, but the hospitals inside the hot zones are getting overrun. The streets are impassable along many major routes, though, and that’s making transfer to outlying facilities difficult without using air traffic.”

“Are the rescue teams encountering any resistance?” Ai asked, her soft, deep voice airy. “Are Fawkes’s revivors engaging them?”

“Only as targets of opportunity,” he said. “National Guard teams are blockading off areas, courtyards, and buildings to act as sanctuaries to people caught on the street or who can’t get home. But they’re filling up fast.”

“Have there been attempts to run those blockades?” Ai asked.

“Several,” Mr. Raphael said, “but not in any concentrated fashion. They haven’t found any pattern to it.”

“They are looking for us,” Ai said, her eyes dreamy. “But they won’t stop here, with this city. Before Fawkes destroys it, they will try to leave.”

“They’re clustered at the three towers,” Osterhagen said, “but overall movement suggests that might be the case. They’re spreading out to cover a wider area.”

“It won’t work,” someone else said. “All main routes in and out are being locked down. Some will leak through, but not enough to do any real damage.”

“They will leave,” Ai said, causing some to glance at each other nervously. “What about the virus?”

“We were unable to deploy it successfully,” Osterhagen said. “He noticed the breach, and cut off the subject we’d implanted; then, before we could try again, he cut off the lot of them. He must have identified them from the time stamp that keeps track of total reanimation time. He cut off every one of them that was active prior to his sending the code.”

“The virus is sent,” Ai said. Osterhagen frowned, but didn’t contradict her.

“We’ve tried on several captured revivors, but the initialization time is too long,” he said. “He knows what he’s looking for now; by the time the virus has gathered the network information from the mesh and is ready to execute, he’s already cut off the seed subject.”

“A door is open,” she said, staring into space. “Somewhere . . . someone he’s not expecting and cannot see. The virus is sent.”

“Do you know who?” Mr. Raphael asked. But Ai shook her head, just barely.

“I saw it,” I said, and all the faces on the screens turned to me. Penny looked at me too.

“What?” Osterhagen asked.

“I saw it,” I said. “After we crashed. I know who it is.” The room spun a little as I moved toward the screens, but in spite of everything else, I smiled.

“Who?” Penny asked.

“She’s one of your people,” I said to Osterhagen. “A soldier, the one with the weird name . . . Flax.”