Crux

by Ramez Naam

  Kade sat back, sipped at his drink, watched the crowd, and let his agent loose upon them, and the world.

  Sabrina Jensen stepped out of the club and into Saigon’s muggy night air. She’d seen him three times now. And this time she was almost sure. He looked different than the pictures. The hair was different. The tattoos. He looked older, more tired. But the face was the same. And he was always with that Chinese man.

  This was the one they were looking for, the one whose picture she’d seen posted with the reward. One thousand dollars would extend her trip another month, at least.

  She’d thought to approach him, tell him someone was looking for him, just in case it was some sort of scam or he was in some sort of trouble. But he was so aloof. Not friendly at all.

  Sabrina linked the Nexus OS in her head to her phone, downloaded the image she’d snapped with Nexus. Then she broke the link and dialed the number from the post.

  Sabrina smiled as it rang. She was about to make a cool grand. “Bali, here I come.”

  “I want that soldier disciplined,” Shiva told Ashok over their link. “Then I want him out of my employ.”

  Shiva breathed to control his frustration. A grantee killed by one of his own men! A second security man lost, dead according to his biometrics. Children traumatized. The American agent still on the loose.

  There would be hush money to pay. Cleanup to remove any linkage of the events to Shiva and the Mira Foundation. They had to boost security now around the island, find some way to locate that woman. But the worst of it was that those children had seen someone they trusted shot and killed! They’d been forcibly separated from everyone they knew. That trauma would last years, would impede his efforts to build trust…

  “We may have a sighting of Lane.”

  Shiva whirled. It was Hayes, the commander of the squad Shiva had brought with him to Vietnam. “What?”

  “We just intercepted a message internal to a group of bounty hunters,” Hayes went on. “They believe Lane is in a tourist club in Saigon right now. They’re moving in to get him.”

  “Then we have to get there first,” Shiva said.

  40

  HELL

  Saturday October 27th

  Kade sat at the bar with Feng and watched the club heat up.

  The crowd grew thicker, the music louder. Then the DJ was there, on stage. The same one as last night. Asian, muscular, with short black hair and mirrored shades and a dark T-shirt and jeans that showed off his physique. The go-go dancers climbed up to the stage as well, all in glossy red tonight – boots, hot pants, pasties, streaks through their hair. Red devil horns and shiny red devil wings topped it off.

  The smoke machine kicked in, covering the floor of the club with a foot-thick layer of smoke. Lights turned the smoke red, made the tendrils of it that crept up people’s legs into an illusion of flames.

  The music faded out, the crowd stilled, and then the DJ started in. He kicked off the set with a slow build, a flux piece that started at the downtempo end of the spectrum and then grew deeper, faster, harder, until, just minutes in, it was epic, and the crowd was dancing.

  Kade felt a small smile grow across his face. Rangan would love this.

  Then he realized what he’d thought. Ilya would have loved this too. And the smile faded. It was 10pm here. Mid-morning on a Saturday on the East Coast. He’d check on Holtzmann when they left the club, make sure the man was on track.

  Then red smoke rose in a thick cloud from the stage, and he caught his breath in anticipation, and then she was in the club, the NJ, the Nexus jockey. He felt her mind even as the smoke obscured her. And she was as glorious as she’d been the night before, sending out waves of exultation and dance and near hallucinatory visions of how the club looked to her, from up on stage, singing, raising her arms above the demonic figures crowding the club. Tonight, Heaven looked like a piece of Hell. She loved it.

  Her thoughts moved him, captivated him, pulled him out of his funk and into something else, something reverent, something full of awe, something he used to feel.

  The smoke on stage cleared and he could see her again. Lotus she called herself. She was in red tonight, a long dress of red sequins, low in the back, tight through the waist and hips, then loose again from mid-thigh to her feet. She wore iridescent red gloves that went beyond her elbows. The hair that had been platinum the night before was the color of flame, now, with bright strands that pulsed to the music woven through it. She was a mermaid, made of fire.

  She held her arms out above the crowd in benediction and parted her ruby lips to sing to them, mouth wide open, head canted back, a soaring aria that intertwined with the techno beats. Then she pumped out her mental song and it was so so good. Darker and hotter even, than the night before. It seemed a betrayal of everyone who’d died because of him to dance. But it also seemed a betrayal of Ilya and Rangan not to dance.

  Feng felt his thoughts, patted him on the back, and pointed him at the dance floor. “Go,” his friend said. “You need it. I wait here.”

  So Kade went. He went out onto the floor of a club that reminded him so very much of the parties that he and Rangan and Ilya used to throw. And he danced. He moved slowly, at first. He kept his eyes on the floor, or closed. He felt those around him, let them feel him, but made no motion to interact. He danced for Ilya. He danced for Rangan. He danced for himself, to clear his head, to fill his spirit back up, and to give him the strength to make it through all the perils that were sure to be ahead.

  Shiva sat in the back of the armored command center as they rushed into Saigon. Hayes was next to him, studying an array of screens. A map of the area showed on one. Structural diagrams of the building that had been hastily downloaded on another. On a third, status of his team members, both human and drone. And on the fourth, running progress on the attempt by their hacker to penetrate the club’s systems.

  They were tapped into this group of bounty hunters. That was the one useful thing they’d gotten from the man Shiva had interrogated – the frequencies and codes and identities of the others in his group. They were lucky that it had been that specific group that had found Kade. Had it been another, they wouldn’t have known of it.

  Audio transmissions came across the channel they’d broken into.

  “South-east corner, fifty cal and tranq, ready.”

  “North-west corner, fifty cal and tranq, ETA three minutes.”

  “Backup 1 ready.”

  “Backup 2 ready.”

  “Door 1 ready.”

  “Door 2 ready.”

  “Bait ready.”

  Hayes plotted it on the map. The bounty hunters were well organized. They’d learned from their last attempt to capture Lane. They were placing teams of snipers on the rooftops nearby, armed with heavy caliber weapons to take out Lane’s traveling companion, and tranquilizer weapons to incapacitate Lane. They were waiting for the two to emerge.

  And Shiva had no way to warn the boy.

  Kade danced hard now, his limbs moving to the beat, his eyes closed, his thoughts lost in his own head, until the sweat dripping from his body and the beat and the amplified ecstatic rhythms of Lotus’s mind and the hundred other minds that brushed his drove everything else away.

  He heard Lotus’s song, he felt her thoughts, and felt them changing, reflecting the crowd, adapting to them. The music changed as well, flowed, responded. And he realized, they were making music, the crowd, the dancers, and Lotus was channeling it, absorbing the thoughts and emotions of the heaving throng, playing their mental music back to them.

  The feedback loop closed and he wasn’t just Kade any more, wasn’t just a person. He was part of something more, a living breathing heaving organism, thousand-limbed, hundred-headed, a gestalt of all these minds and bodies.

  Grief leached out from him, absorbed and processed and healed by the union. He moved his arms and legs and body to the beat, thrashed his head and sent his new braids flinging, somehow perfectly in sync with the bodies next to him. He
was the beat. They were the beat. How could any of them step wrong?

  This is samadhi, he realized. Meditation. Complete absorption.

  The walls of his ego faded, dissipated, subsumed in this merger. He caught glimpses of a thousand thoughts, of here and now, of memories and visions. He saw the world like this, saw scientist merging into greater forms, people abandoning their distinctions.

  There was no Kade, he saw. No self, no other. There was just this experience, this epicness he was part of, this surging, moving, billowing, exulting radiance of an organism that was the crowd, was the DJ, was the tiny fragment called Lotus. This was real, more real than he was, more real than any individual. This was the now.

  He caught a flash of a thin layer of consciousness encircling the globe and it was his thought but now it was their thought and he knew it was real, not just a fantasy, and he reached out with this thoughts so he could touch those million other minds and pull all those bright points of light into this dance, this moment, this glorious luminous union…

  Kade.

  Something was tugging at this fragment, pulling at it.

  Kade!

  Feng. Feng should be here, dancing, merging, joining them!

  Kade! You’re being watched!

  An image crossed the fragment’s mind, a glimpse, an Asian man, muscled, shaved head, tattooed. His face was a mask, his eyes dead, scanning from side to side.

  The cold splash of danger struck Kade, yanking him back. He was on a dance floor, surrounded by moving, exulting bodies. Their joyous minds called to him. The ecstatic music of their thoughts…

  Come back to the bar, Feng said.

  The union beckoned. Danger is an illusion, it whispered. You’re just a small piece. Death doesn’t matter. The whole lives on.

  Kade shivered, and realized what he’d been about to do. To reveal those million minds, to reach out to them all at once... He shook his head hard, fought to snap out of the trance of union, to remember who he was.

  Smile and laugh, Feng sent him. Get a drink.

  Kade forced himself to smile on the dance floor, wiped sweat from his brow, and worked his way out of the crowd, squeezing past gyrating men and women, all moving in sync, hips and hands and minds reaching out to pull him back into their whole.

  Merger. The lifting of the veil of maya. The sweet oblivion of the self. God he wanted it.

  But I matter too, Kade told himself. Not just the whole. The individual.

  He held on to that thought as he slipped through the press of bodies.

  Feng was at the bar, smiling, making every appearance of enjoying himself.

  “You having fun?” Feng shouted over the crowd.

  “You know it!” Kade forced a smile, forced himself to focus on the here and now.

  Now what? he asked Feng.

  Can you see front and back doors? Feng asked. Through people’s eyes?

  Kade nodded mentally. He leaned on the bar, facing away from their watcher, closed his eyes, and reached out towards the front of the club, hopping from mind to mind, fighting to stay clear of that call to union, until he found the view he needed.

  Two of them out front, Kade said, showing Feng what he saw.

  Kade took his thoughts the other direction, to the service entrance in the back.

  Two more out back.

  Feng nodded mentally, his mind calm and cool.

  We’ll go out the back then. Let them think we don’t see them. Joke’s on them.

  Kade nodded. Feng felt no fear. He’d trust his friend. There was no one he’d rather have with him here and now.

  Joke’s on them, he told Feng, and forced another smile.

  “North-west corner ready, fifty cal and tranq,” came the intercepted voice.

  “Roger that,” came a reply across the same channel. “Go bait.”

  Shiva held his breath. A minute later a new voice came across the channel. “Bait has contact. They’ve seen me.”

  “They’re trying to lure Lane and his friend out,” Hayes said. “Where the snipers can pick them off.”

  “What’s our ETA?” Shiva asked.

  “Six minutes for the drones,” Hayes replied. “Twelve minutes for us.”

  Too slow, Shiva thought. The bounty hunters will get him first!

  “We’re into the club’s systems!” came the voice of their hacker. “Cameras, security system, the works.”

  “Can you see Lane?” Hayes asked.

  “It’s a zoo in there,” the hacker replied. “No sight of him.”

  The channel came to life again. “Targets moving towards the back door. Repeat. Targets moving towards back door.”

  “South-west corner, shooters ready,” came the reply.

  Damn it. They had to be there now. They had to stop those snipers from taking out Lane and his companion.

  Shiva turned to the hacker. “Can you trigger the fire alarm?”

  “Looking…” the hacker said. “Fire alarms. Yes.”

  Hayes looked up at Shiva. “Flush everyone else out? Confuse the snipers?”

  Shiva nodded. “Will it work?”

  “Better than nothing,” Hayes replied. Then, to the hacker, “Do it.”

  Kade got up calmly from the bar. Feng went ahead of him, and they started to wind their way through the crowd towards the back, the second bar, the restrooms, and the other exit from the club. The crowd beckoned to Kade, that sweet union, that sweet forgetting of the illusion that he existed, that he mattered.

  But he remembered now. He remembered who he was and why he mattered.

  Feng had a beer bottle in his hand, and Kade could feel his friend scanning, keeping track of the bounty hunter in the bar with them, looking for additional weapons he could pick up. That barstool. The mic stand. The tall bottle of whisky behind the bar.

  Then a piercing sound blasted through the club. White lights came on. Emergency exit signs lit up. The piercing noise buzzed again and again and again, now with a voice over it.

  “A fire has been detected,” a voice droned over the music. “Please exit the building. A fire has been detected. Please exit the building. A fire has been detected…”

  Confusion ruled around him. Kade felt chaos ripple through minds, tear down the coherence that had been there seconds before. People looked around. Was there really a fire? A false alarm? The DJ turned down the music, uncertain. Lotus’s mind was indecisive.

  Then the sprinklers kicked in, raining cold water on everyone, and the crowd made up its mind. Someone jostled Kade from behind, and he felt the crowd start to push towards the exits. Out of reflex he moved with them. Then Feng had hold of his arm, was yanking him off to the side, out of the way of the river of humanity making for the exits, over between a six-foot-tall stack of speakers and the wall of the club.

  Down! Feng sent to him, and Kade dropped to a crouch, partially hidden by the speakers, Feng at his side.

  What’s going on? he asked in confusion.

  Then the bounty hunter they’d seen pushed through the crowd, feet from them, and there was a gun in his hand.

  Shiva listened as the bounty hunters’ channel burst into noise.

  “Fire alarm.”

  “Crazy. Can’t see target.”

  “Can’t see him in the crowd moving out.”

  “ETA?” Shiva asked Hayes.

  “Three and nine minutes,” the commander replied.

  “Can the drones take out the snipers?” Shiva asked.

  “Affirmative,” Hayes answered.

  Then across the bounty hunters’ channel: “North-west, south-west, fire gas into the building. Repeat, into the building. Backup 1, ram the wall.”

  Kade barely had time to tense at the sight of the man and the gun. The bounty hunter’s eyes widened and the gun started to rise. Feng’s mind was suddenly like ice. The world slowed almost to a halt, and then his friend was there, impossibly fast. Feng took the bounty hunter’s gun wrist in one vise-like grip and punched the man in the face hard enough that his h
ead snapped back with an audible crack. The gun exploded in the same instant, sending a round into the wall by his side, and Kade felt the crowd jump in response. Fear flared across their minds, and people started rushing, pushing harder, crushing each other against walls or overstuffed doorways.

  Then something crashed in through a window. Something small and hard and moving fast. It hit a boy in a devil costume in the belly, sent pain lancing out from his mind, knocked him reeling back into three more dancers. The crowd held them up and the canister that had struck him fell to the floor, hissing out something that scattered the now-white fog. Kade felt Feng’s mind fill with firing angles and escape options and the trajectories of the scores of unpredictable bodies that were the crowd.

  Another canister whistled in through another window, lifting a girl in a transparent red skirt off her feet and into a table that collapsed beneath her, sending glasses and bottles flying and crashing to the ground. Kade could feel the intense pain of something broken inside her abdomen, her sudden burst of terror.

  He felt the crowd teeter on the verge of panic. People were coughing near the canisters. They were slumping, falling. He could feel them fading in his mind. Another canister punched through the window. He saw the shirtless Vietnamese boy, the one being ridden from London, try to jump out of the club through the now demolished window. A canister struck him in the head. The force of the impact knocked him down and out of Kade’s sight.

  There were people everywhere, a mass of them, upright and crowding the doors, screaming, yelling, trying to push each other out of the way, crawling over each other to make it to the exit. Others were slumping over in the middle of the club where the gas was reaching them. He saw the pretty brunette, trying to push her way through the mass of people, screaming. More and more revelers were swaying, falling as the gas spread. Every direction was blocked. The Nexus link that had been sublime union was now filled with terror and panic. Kade felt it press in on him, a cold dark tide of fear trying to take him under.