“It's a fuckin' seal,” Frank went on. “Hope we fare better than he did.”
With the word floating through his mind, the image before Ryan finally settled into a recognized form.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Frank said, rubbing the axe along the ice wall to free it of gore, then implanting it in the ledge between them. “You're a hard man to kill.”
“Harder than most,” Laing croaked. He looked again at the seal.
“Must have fallen in like us,” Frank said.
“We're a long way from the ocean.”
“Okay, it's a mystery,” Frank said in exasperation. “Call National Geographic. Just do it after you get me the fuck out of here.”
Ryan reached out to touch the seal. His fingers ached, joints stiff and pulsing with growing pains. “It could be thousands of years old.”
“Nah, it would rot.”
Laing turned on Frank. “Nothing rots here. Stop moving here and you freeze true.”
“Again, a good reason to get the fuck out.”
Ryan paused for a long second, going over the events that had led him here. “You saved me,” he said finally.
“Let's call it even. You took the brunt of the fall.”
“I thought you wanted me dead.”
“Laing, I'd like nothing better than to fry you up with a little seal blubber.”
Ryan pushed down an urge to shove the man off the ledge. “But?” he asked.
“But I read people pretty good. Got a few years in the field. You didn't know about Sarah Peters. I surprised you right off the rock.”
“She didn't do it,” Laing said. It sounded stupid—even to him.
“Oh, come on. This ain't a place for bullshit. You know she did.”
“There must be a reason.”
“Laing, I don't give a fuck. I want her. And you're going to help.”
Laing stretched, starting to feel better. “Not likely.”
“Oh, you will. Right now, you and I have the same goal. Find Sarah Peters.”
“I'm not going—”
“You'll go,” Frank cut in.
Laing held silent, lost within his inner struggle.
Frank pushed the deal. “You'll go because you can't bear to see Sarah die. And she will die. With the Company on her ass, it's just a matter of time. Got to catch her before she goes viral again and takes out a city.”
“If you find her, you'll kill her.”
“Probably,” Frank replied. “But you got some time to sway my resolve. Until then, we need each other.”
Ryan turned to the seal's dead stare. What had led it to this dark place? And how different was he? Ryan's decay had only been more active. The animal was lost. Maybe he could be revived.
Maybe it was time.
Sarah. She needed him. He wouldn't abandon her. Not again. If she had flipped, and Ryan knew it was possible, he needed to get to her first.
He turned back to Frank. The drones had done their work. He reached out with pink fingers to shake Frank's gloved hand.
“Okay. But hurt Sarah and our relationship ends.”
Frank smiled thin. “One way or another.”
10
Sarah ran. Her body ached, her mind reeled. She had killed them—all of them. The time after her escape from the CIA had been a blur of motion and shock. She ran. She hid. She moved without direction, hitching a string of unmanned long haulers that kept her far from human contact.
The last hauler dropped her in Alexandria, Virginia. Night ran blood dark over the Washington, D.C., suburb, a jumbled mesh of old world brick buildings and next-gen housing complexes battling for space.
Sarah passed through, trying not to disturb the night. She stumbled past restaurants and shops catering to the commuters who made Alexandria home. The plexi of a pizza place had been switched to passive entertainment for the lonely wanderers who had missed dinner.
The screen flipped to news. Sarah stared at an image of Sam Hansen. Words flashed as the screen flipped through the other faces of EMPYRE.
Tragedy at Sea.
Sam Hansen, Secretary of Homeland Security, along with Barbara Cox of the NSA, Richard Humphrey of the State Department and Lieutenant General Mike Stanton from the Defense Intelligence Agency have died en route to a summit with their European counterparts.
The image faded to a shot of wreckage spread over rough oceans.
Reports sketchy, but it appears that a mechanical glitch in the plane's pressurization system caused the crash.
Sarah knew she should keep moving but couldn't pull herself away. She waited for information on the CIA bioattack, letting the news do a full cycle. Nothing. The total lack of disclosure frightened her more than anything. If the CIA was lidding this thing, that meant Sarah could never see the light of day. There would be no due process for her.
“Oh, God.” The words fell limp, trailing to a stunned whisper. She stood frozen, staring though news of the latest football scores to a place where this was all a bad dream.
The net closing in on her would be quiet and very deadly. Desperation engulfed her. She was heavy with it. Welling tears fuzzed her vision, so it took her a moment to realize that the news feed had vanished. Her own image now cut through the passive feed. She staggered back.
“Stop!” A low booming voice coming from the screen. “Sarah Peters, you are wanted for questioning. Do not move.”
The voice echoed through the night. Sarah knew that a good amount of research had gone into massaging the tone and timbre of that voice to maximize its effect. She pushed through the desire to submit.
Stupid! she railed at herself. The shop had a tagger. Had she just passed by, it wouldn't have had time to collect her facial features, but she'd stopped and the tagger had plenty of time to run its scan. Her pursuers had piggybacked on the consumer identification interchange, catching the facial features that the tat could not hide.
Sarah fled, the booming voice suddenly squelched by the scream of high-powered coil bikes approaching. Her feet pounded, and Sarah's mind reeled. Maybe she should turn herself in—let them quarantine her. The thought of more death sickened her.
She wanted to stop. To scream. To end all this. One more block of freedom. Then she'd let them take her. She ran to bursting.
The retrieval team followed, sirens piercing the night. Sarah dug the hawkeye from its holster and hurled it into the air. Wings inflated and it soared. Coming online, Sarah saw herself and her pursuers in its flying gaze. She adapted to the new input—but not quickly enough.
Coming around the corner of Washington and King streets, she slammed into a young man getting into his car. She fell backward and scuttled away, terrified that she had infected another. But looking up at his face, she didn't see the blistering pustules. She saw only his hand, reaching down.
“Hey, there. Slow down, will ya. Here, let me help you up,” he said.
Sarah took his hand. On her feet, she stared at him, shocked dumb. Finally, a silly glee filled her. The man was okay! She wasn't contagious. In that moment, she knew she would not turn herself in.
“You okay? Looks like you seen a ghost.”
The man tried to pull his hand away. Sarah saw the hawkeye's view of the net closing around her and knew what she had to do. She stepped from the man, whipping his hand around and wrenching him to the ground. The man yelped in pain. Sarah pulled his finger around and let the car's scanner find his print. It hummed to life. She left the man whimpering, jumped in and squealed around the corner just as the coil bikes approached.
Sarah gave the retrieval team a moment to scan the car before stomping on the accelerator. The car lurched forward, whipping into the darkness. She used the oncoming traffic, throwing off a wake of squealing cars—obstacles for her pursuers to negotiate.
It would give her just enough time. She wrenched the car into a tight arc and slammed on the brakes.
“Input,” she said.
“Go ahead,” the car responded in a cool tec
h-tinny voice.
“Directions to Florida,” Sarah said as she opened the car door.
“Plotted and ready. Door is ajar,” the car replied.
“Ignore door. Engage auto-drive.”
“Engaged. Have a pleasant drive.”
The car clicked into action, moving forward, gaining speed. Sarah watched her pursuers through the hawkeye. Seconds before the bikes rounded the corner, she hurled herself from the car, managing to close the door with a twisting shove before she hit pavement. She tried to roll off the momentum, but succeeded only in scraping up her hands and back.
She stumbled into an alley as the coil bikes rounded and accelerated after the car. Her deception would work for minutes at the most before the car's 'ware was overridden.
Sarah spun, desperate. She longed to continue her flight. But something in her, the place unaffected by the disaster her life had become, ran cold calculations. Flight narrowed her decision matrix. She calmed her desire and worked out a plan.
The hawkeye soared high. Sarah moved with it, both guiding and following, running dual inputs. The unfinished tower before her would suit her purposes—for the moment.
A spindling double helix, the tower pushed up into the night sky, then frayed into carbon ridges at its apex, where work continued. Entering the construction zone wasn't difficult. Only cursory security protected the site, blocking the average looter or junkie. Sarah had more subtle means at her disposal. She used the hawkeye's augmented perception to stay clear of the motion sensors. Once found, the building's central node was a quick hack. She drew the hawkeye back to her and entered the woven scraper.
The building smelled new-car new. Spindling fibers of carbon made up the entire structure, giving it a black, organic creepiness. Super-long fibers ran the full height of the building, forming a helix-flexed skeleton. Its structural integrity was all tension—each piece of the building pulling on the next. That torquing hold filtered into Sarah's consciousness. She felt spring-loaded, ready to burst.
This being a full mechy build, only machines broke the carbon-muffled silence. Sarah entered the upward spiral that wrapped the building's interior. As she walked, heels clicking on hard carbon, she gazed up through the fiber mesh and into the vastness over her, watching the two behemoth robots work the build. A spider bot spun carbon threads at the scraper's peak, followed by a braider that wrapped those threads into the structural weave.
Sarah pulled herself from the robotic rhythm, hunting for a place to settle. She veered off the central spiral and pushed into a premolded office. The entire room, including the desk and shelving, was made out of the same weave as the building itself.
As the door slid shut, a desire to wither to nothing and disappear filled her. She refused the urge, revolted at her weakness.
I won't do it. I can't.
And yet she was under the desk in seconds, knees pulled to her chest, the scratching work of the bots her only company. She dropped her head onto her knees and let herself sink.
Dull indecision lulled Sarah into a torpor. The wake of carnage she had left behind haunted her—each face, starting with Andrew Dillon and meshing into a collage of pain and shock. So many eyes, blood-red, staring at her.
Sarah slammed her eyes shut—desperate to still the horror. She balled up tighter. Exhaustion pushed down on her, but she didn't dare sleep. The possibility that those faces would consume her dreams drove her into a waking trance. The mere thought of sleep drew bile.
So she stared into the carbon weaving, losing herself in the single braid that made the building. She had some time. Alexandria's very proximity to Langley offered a measure of security. Few would suspect that the terrorist who wreaked havoc within the Company's hallowed walls would hole up so close to the scene. They'd expect her to run—to panic.
They got the panic right.
The faces, the gore, meshed into a low pain, which then resolved into something else, something familiar. She felt the pull. That tug. The need to go back under the knife. It all hurt too much.
Once more. Just one more time, and this too will fade.
The mantra formed a rhythmic percussion in Sarah's mind.
One more session. Only one . . .
Yet even this couldn't stem the tide of images that flickered past and would not submit. Finally, she let them come, allowed them to consume her. The tears came with them. She cried into the building's silence and the anguish eased—if only slightly. As she relaxed, a realization struck her. She ran over the news feeds she had seen. And there it was. Or, more accurately, there it wasn't.
One member of EMPYRE hadn't been mentioned. That could only mean one thing: Andrew Dillon was still alive.
11
NEW YORK CITY
Reentry was a bitch.
Antarctica's razor-edged reality melted under the flickering static of civ life. Laing clung to the clarity he'd spent so long erecting, even as it crumbled around him. He was home; culture shock engulfed him.
Glancing at his travel companion, Ryan saw that even Frank looked shell-shocked by the pulsing rush of the East Coast Transit Corridor. Laing worked air through his lungs as Frank plunged into the traffic stream. The trip had been a blur. It almost felt like a magician's trick. He looked down at his hands, remembering the feel of cold granite and trying to resolve a world in which Antarctica and this frothing splash of speed-frenzied commuters could coexist.
Frank weaved through the traffic, nudging the line between aggressive and reckless. Laing white-knuckled the armrest and watched the people in their cars as they flashed by. Each had that resolute blur to his vision—cruise control all the way through. Opening himself up to the flow stream, Laing peeked in at their distractions.
Added to the visual cacophony that most saw, Ryan could make out the viscous data soup that poured over everything. With effort he could cut it away, but the pure mass of input was tough to handle.
When the drones had first come online, their interface with his own mind had been just that—an exchange between separate entities. When Echelon crashed and the drones lost their operating code, they dragged Ryan down into a well of digital gibberish. He had nearly lost himself in that black place. But, endlessly malleable, the swarming AI had shifted to operate within the parameters of his own genetic code. In that transformation, the duality melted. Man and machine became one. This synthesis contained parts of both entities, but was also something new, an amalgamation stronger than its parts. As Ryan adjusted, his consciousness continued to evolve.
Now, Laing breathed deeper as the car accelerated around a triple-decked cargo hauler. He blocked out Frank's driving and plunged into the flow. Hard reality shifted into digital representation. Around him, each car, each hauler, even the people in them and the buildings surrounding them melted and re-formed into the flow representation of the information each housed and broadcast.
Beyond flesh and bone, plaz and biocrete, the city was information: teeming, tumbling arcs of code, built and destroyed, digested and regurgitated. Ryan ran that net, a spider crawling the web underlying reality.
Buildings erupted in pulsing data bursts. Banks and brands, ads and promotions—everyone looking to draw in the flow rider. Ryan pulled up out of his geosynch and scanned the blogs for mention of Sarah. Nothing on the nodal points.
Most of the stories focused on the United States' market rebound. The hostilities in Asia had propped up the dollar and the Dow. The trade deficit with both China and India had dipped, as each gorged on America's greatest export—weaponry. The incident in Tibet had dragged India and China back into the military posturing that had consumed them for centuries. Something in the clean perfection of the assassination irked Laing. He let it go—didn't concern him.
He zoomed out, cascading through the flow, running sticky for data on Sarah. His web caught no trace of her. He tried again to hack out the corruption in her flow point and reach her directly, but it wouldn't go. He'd been cut off.
Pulling out, Ryan felt Frank's e
yes on him.
“You been lost awhile. What are you doin' in there?”
“Checking the flow. No pickup on Sarah.”
Frank nodded and gazed back out at the road. “Figured that. The Company's still running quiet on the threat.”
“Threat?”
“Yeah—threat. The fuck you think? Sarah Peters is loose and, however you wanna play it, she's got a pathogen in her that's super-nasty.”
Ryan shook his head. “You don't know.” He gazed out at the flashing scenery as Frank made his way into the Clinton Tunnel. The car went to full auto as they entered. Darkness was total; no need for lights when no one was driving. Ryan stared into the black. “She'll reach out. She will.”
Frank snorted. “Anyone jacked enough to rip through Langley like it was cheesecake won't bob up in the flow for us to pick off.” Catching Laing's glare, Frank quickly corrected himself. “Or retrieve, as the case may be.”
“Well, she isn't in Manhattan. That I guarantee.”
With surge barriers wrapping Manhattan like a condom and hard security control on the tunnels, the city would be a tricky place to enter for someone on the run.
“Limited egress,” Ryan continued. “Coming here would back her into a corner. Not a move she'd make.”
“We're not here for Sarah.”
Ryan hated this—not being in control. The clean ice simplicity of his recent past melted away. Confusion, chaos, and the gritty glint it produced in him reemerged. He held Frank's eye as the tunnel flushed them into Manhattan.
“We're here for the one that got away,” Frank said.
“Sorry—”
“Andrew Dillon.”
“He's dead.”
“Not that lucky,” Frank replied. Ryan held his cold stare and Frank continued. “Dillon had some genetic modification done several days ago. He had been tagged for rheumatoid arthritis. Somehow, the fix to that autoimmune disorder fought off the pathogen, or at least slowed it down.”
“You mean the pathogen Sarah carried—”
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