Alexa touched down in tall grass and darkness. She examined the area with her night vision visor and saw only thickets and dense trees bordering the vacant lots. There were mattresses and other garbage dumped here and there, and graffiti on distant abandoned houses, but no one in sight.
Satisfied, she moved toward what gate sixteen had become—a flat concrete pad edged by tall grass. It had evolved over the decades as the neighborhood changed. As nearby homes were abandoned, it was decided that the elevator leading into the underground should be made as uninteresting as possible. The elevator had once been surrounded by a fenced garage but now was only edged with tall bushes and trees. Instead of lowering automobiles silently into the underground, it now accommodated flight teams.
As she crept closer, Alexa concealed herself below the leaning remains of a burned-out toolshed. She could see the weed-encrusted concrete of gate sixteen clearly from the darkness. She then waited silently. A glance at her heads-up display showed that she had perhaps fifteen minutes to wait for Grady’s security escort.
As she waited, the minutes passed slowly until she could hear someone talking—a high-pitched, disturbed voice in the distance. Her unnaturally sharp hearing was able to make it out . . .
“. . . took it. What can we do? You asked me what can we do? And I gots no answer. I gots no answer, Mariel. No answer.”
The chatter continued over minutes as an elderly African American man wandered slowly along the dark sidewalk by moonlight—passing by the ghosts of a community that had left him behind.
He waved his arms as he hobbled along. “I couldn’t! I couldn’t. You know I can’t. Why do you keep on me?”
Alexa checked the timer in her heads-up display.
“I paid them! I paid them.” The old man was crossing through the field now.
She looked for something to throw—to scare him away.
But as she looked up, the BTC strike team arrived, silently descending from the sky. One moment there was nothing, and the next there were half a dozen BTC operators in jet-black diamondoid assault armor standing with a transport shell held between them like a coffin. Their armor swallowed all reflected light—they seemed like negative spaces outlined in the lesser darkness.
She could see the homeless old man stunned into silence just meters away. Why hadn’t they scanned the area before descending? Were these operators idiots? Did they not care?
One of them nodded toward the old man, and the others looked his way.
The old man threw up his hand and pointed. “I see you, you devils! I see you there! The machinery of your deceit!”
The operators nudged each other, and then one of them pointed an armored finger at the man. An intense beam of light stabbed out, creating a sound like tearing fabric.
Intense fiery embers started to spread through the old man as if he were newspaper. He shrieked in agony as his body and clothes were consumed—and then blew away in ashes, leaving only a small spot of lush grass burning. It, too, soon faded and died away.
The assault team slapped each other on the back heartily, their armor ringing.
Alexa’s eyes narrowed at them with rage.
The team began to sink into the concrete as if it were quicksand.
Alexa knew the elevator was descending. The gate had been improved back around the turn of the millennium with a hologram that projected the concrete surface even when the elevator was descending. Likewise, she knew that not long after it began to descend, twin security doors would swing up to seal the opening.
As soon as the tops of their helmets disappeared beneath the hologram, Alexa leapt up and activated her gravis, bringing herself into free fall toward the elevator shaft—and then down through the holographic concrete and into blackness.
Her night vision visor kicked in almost immediately, and she could see the harvester team descending rapidly as the twin security doors rose toward her. She barely slipped between the doors as she fell, and then drew back on her downward motion—hovering silently ten feet above their heads and hoping none of them looked up.
Fortunately they seemed tired. She couldn’t hear their voices since they were using a team q-link, but she hoped they were lulled into a feeling of false security now that they were inside.
The elevator descended to a depth of a hundred feet, then stopped. The operators immediately grabbed the transport shell and “fell” forward into the access tunnel and out of sight. That gave Alexa a chance to glide down faster and then to fall sideways after them.
As she remembered, the passage soon came out into the subway tunnel itself along with a green tiled platform. It had been modified by the BTC long ago to accommodate vehicles—which was no longer necessary; a ramp ran down to where the tracks would have been laid. Everything was covered in dust. The arched masonry work was impressive, but that’s the way they used to build things, she thought.
From here the tunnel was a ruler-straight shot to downtown, about two miles away. The soldiers were already ahead of her, obviously eager to get back to base and get their reward for a job well done. They grabbed their prisoner’s container and shifted gravity to drop into the twenty-foot-tall shaft as though it were a massive well, and with a whoosh they disappeared into the tunnel.
Alexa powered the gravis first across the platform and then, running along the tiled wall, fell after them in the darkness.
Precisely what she was going to do next was a big question. They were heavily armed and armored. She was not.
She glanced at her display and confirmed that they were at terminal velocity—one gravity. That meant at a descent rate of about one hundred seventy-five feet per second, she had roughly sixty seconds to figure out what to do. After that, they would have arrived at the edge of the BTC complex, and she’d have nowhere to hide.
She clapped her arms to her sides and gained on them as they fell in a leisurely free-fall posture. Four of them were arrayed as a stack, one falling below the other; two additional men up front fell side by side, the transport shell below them. As she came up on the rearmost operator, she could see the soldiers were equipped with standard assault armaments: glove-based gravity projectors and XD guns, infrared lasers, psychotronic weapons. Basically enough firepower to vaporize her several times over—especially since she was only wearing a tac suit. These guys were clad in armor where the impact of a twenty-millimeter cannon round could probably be buffed out with beeswax.
But then, there was always their kinetic energy to make use of . . .
Alexa came up behind the rearmost soldier as a worker’s alcove loomed into view in the tunnel wall ahead. She moved beside him and elbowed him toward the wall.
Before he could adjust or even react he impacted face-first into the stone abutment at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, the diamondoid helmet smacked against it like a billiard ball. Alexa adjusted her gravity just in time—the stone wall rushing past just inches from her face.
Looking below she could see that none of the others had heard a thing over the roar of their descent down the tunnel. A glance back showed the smashed operator’s body still hurtling down the tunnel behind her, still in its own gravity field, as if the subway tunnel were a mine shaft—but the body was bouncing off the walls the entire way.
That was going to be a problem sooner or later . . .
Alexa slapped her arms onto her thighs again and accelerated toward the next soldier. This time she reared back and kicked him into a buttress of stone, and weaved back into the center of the tunnel as his armored body sheared some of the stones away from the wall behind her. As the stones got caught up in his gravity field, they started clattering down the tunnel behind her along with his body.
That was going to be another problem soon, too.
She descended headfirst now and spun the legs of the third soldier, causing him to cartwheel into another service alcove. He stuck there for a moment be
fore the other bodies struck him and dragged him down the tunnel.
Alexa estimated she had barely fifteen seconds left before they reached the end of the line, so she streamlined herself as best she could and spun the fourth soldier into the wall, shearing off a metal pipe in the process.
Seeing lights ahead, she pulled back slowly on her gravity field—looking behind her to bat aside bodies, rocks, and other debris that fell slightly faster than she did. As they passed her, her gravity field was warped, and she pushed off the wall at one point, narrowly avoiding another buttress.
But moments later she was behind all of the falling debris, and she cranked back her gravity in full reverse. Within seconds she had slowed to a stop—at which point she killed all gravity reflection and tumbled to a stop, standing on the floor of the tunnel. She was glad that railroad tracks had never been laid.
She then glanced up ahead to see that the two lead operators had come to a stop, placing the transport shell on the ground between them at the entrance to the BTC tunnel complex. Just as they turned around, the dead bodies of four of their comrades and assorted masonry hit them at terminal velocity and smashed them against the back wall—where they all stuck like bugs on fly paper in the altered gravity fields of the dead. For all intents and purposes, the fallen had just hit the bottom of a two-mile-deep mine shaft.
Alexa pulled her positron pistol and closed the final hundred meters on foot. As she came out into the lights at the entrance to BTC tunnel sixteen, she could tell the security detail was out of action. The impact alone probably broke their skulls within their suits—or at the very least knocked them unconscious.
She holstered her pistol and raced to the matte-black, aerodynamic transport shell. It was lying upside down, so she rolled it over and opened the control panel. She pounded the “open” button, and it hissed as the lid rose.
Jon Grady was strapped inside, asleep, and she started slapping him awake.
“Jon, get up! Wake up!”
Grady came around, greatly confused as he covered his face. “What? What is it?”
She grabbed him by the shirt collar—since his gravis had apparently been taken. “It’s me, Alexa. We need to get moving.”
He nodded, still looking confused, and slowly climbed out of the transport shell. He glanced around. “Where are we?”
“The edge of BTC headquarters. There’s a security gate ahead, but the chief AI construct has agreed to help us.”
“Hold it, what? Let me get my bearings.” He stopped as he saw the six armor-clad operators lying in an unnatural gravity field against the wall—blood now pooling around several of them at an impossible angle. “What the hell . . . ?”
“It’s a long story, and I don’t have time to tell it. Hey, wake up!” She slapped him.
“Ow! Okay, I’m awake.”
She opened the cargo hold of the transport shell and found his makeshift gravis and helmet. “Put these on while we’re moving. AIs will have noticed these guys flatlined, and we need to be long gone by the time reinforcements arrive.”
Grady nodded. “Okay. How much of the plan worked so far?”
“Enough. We need to get to the Gravitics Research Lab.”
“And security?”
“Either it’s not a problem, or it’s impossible. And we won’t be able to find out by standing around here.” With that she activated her gravis and started gliding down the well-lit corridor toward a sealed vault door. There was a large number sixteen etched into it, and a control panel to either side.
As she stopped, Grady came up alongside here, powering down his own gravis.
Alexa looked up at the vault door. “Varuna! Let us in.”
“There are already security elements headed this way, Alexa. I cannot restore your access privileges, but I can switch your biometric profile with that of the nearby deceased team leader . . .”
The vault door boomed somewhere deep in the rock and then started rolling aside.
“This will be discovered soon enough, but it should buy you some time.”
“Thank you, Varuna.”
Alexa ran into a white corridor surrounded by equipment rooms with armor and uniforms in racks. Nearby was what appeared to be a security post. It was vacant. Klaxons were sounding and lights flashing. “Where is everyone?”
“I activated a radiation alert for this section minutes ago.”
The massive vault door rolled closed again behind them.
Grady gave her an ominous look. “I hope you trust this thing.”
“We have no choice.” Alexa holstered her pistol and placed her hand on a scanner near the security station. A rack of psychotronic weapons close by unlocked, and she grabbed two of them, tossing one to Grady. “You know how to use these?”
He rolled it around in his hands, trying to figure out which way to hold it. “I know how to get shot by them. Does that count?”
She turned it around and wrapped his hand around it, then powered it up. “Aim the dot at your opponent’s head. It’ll put them to sleep—unless they’ve got armor on.”
Varuna’s voice interrupted. “The most direct route to the Gravitics Research Lab from your location is down elevator shaft eleven. Go straight, and I’ll guide you there. Unfortunately, I will also have to try to kill you along the way.”
Grady gave her a confused look. “How is that helping us?”
“I’ll explain later. Just move . . .” And she grabbed him and ran down the corridor, weapon drawn and scanning for targets.
As they ran through the deserted corridors, Varuna’s voice guided them left and then right—finally saying, “There is a ceiling-mounted laser turret ahead. It’s capable of fifteen thousand fatal pulses per second. There is no chance of a human getting safely past it or firing a weapon fast enough to hit it before it kills.”
Grady grabbed Alexa’s shoulder. “Why the hell are we listening to this thing?”
“It needs to try to kill us or they’ll shut it down. It’s juggling a lot of contradictory actions to keep antisingularity controls off its back.”
“The performance of such a weapon system would be seriously degraded by carbon fiber smoke. There is a supply of carbon microthreads in the lab across the hall.”
“Thank you, Varuna.” She got to the corner of the hallway and drew her positron pistol again. A glance at the side of it confirmed only a three percent charge left. It was already on its lowest-powered setting.
Grady nodded to the pistol. “You do realize how reckless it was for the BTC to build that, don’t you? To explode, a nuclear weapon requires a complex chain reaction—but antimatter is just itching to explode—any contact with matter and . . .” He spread his hands. “BOOM.”
“Yeah, thanks for the safety lecture.” She flipped down his visor. “This is going to be loud. Get down, cover your ears, and open your mouth to equalize overpressure.”
Grady did so, and Alexa aimed the pistol blindly at a diagonal at the far wall some twenty feet away. A light squeeze of the trigger sent a trillionth of a gram of antimatter into the white polymer wall—which detonated with the force of ten kilos of dynamite, throwing Alexa down the corridor past Grady.
In a few moments he was helping her back to her feet. “I rest my case.”
As she got up, billowing black smoke filled the hall, and now sprinklers had kicked in. “Varuna, are we good?”
“I am regrettably unable to kill you with my laser turret.”
“C’mon.” Alexa led Grady around the corner and through the smoke, coughing as they groped their way along the near wall. In a moment they came out to the far side and up to a bank of elevators—all with red lights above them. As they reached it, one of the elevator doorways opened, revealing a shaft.
“You need to go down forty-six floors to level B-ninety-four. The elevator is currently locked far below here.”
Grady had already activated his own gravis. “How big is this place, anyway?”
“Big enough.”
They both fell through the opening at roughly half speed. Grady looked around. “No elevator cables?”
She nodded. “Elevators were one of the first uses of your invention.”
It took under a minute for them to reach level B-ninety-four. The label was stenciled next to the sealed doors.
Varuna’s voice reached them. “Beyond these doors is the entrance to the Gravitics Research Lab. I’ve escalated the team leader’s credentials to grant you access. But security personnel are closing in quickly. You must act now.”
The elevator doors opened, and Alexa fell through them, Grady close on her tail. She decided to keep falling, tearing out ceiling tiles in the wake of her gravity field, and as they approached the first set of clear diamond security doors, she could see the Kratos logo of a lightning bolt coming from the stars. The doors slid open silently to admit them.
Alexa glanced up at half a dozen laser turrets arrayed in the ceiling and walls. “Varuna, why are these turrets not firing on us?”
“It is increasingly difficult to conceal what I’ve done, Alexa. I’ve locked down these turrets directly. You need to hurry. There’s no longer time for subterfuge.”
“You shouldn’t have done that! What about you?”
“Don’t fail, Alexa.”
They passed through another set of diamond security doors. The place was deserted—with Klaxons sounding and warning lights flashing. Alexa recognized it as lockdown. They shouldn’t even have been able to move from section to section. To do so in lockdown, Varuna would have had to give them emergency clearance codes. She had no doubt what it would cost Varuna if she failed.
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