MANUFACTURING DISTRICT, TRENTON, NEW JERSEY
Ryan ghosted into the middle of a firefight.
The barrio lay under heavy quarantine. Feds in hazmat gear enforced the quarantine with maximum force. From ground level, the port looked like an aircraft carrier on steroids. Its thick block form rose over Laing in a jet of black steel. He got as close as he could to the barrio, which rose up the port's flank. The ragged park that extended out under the barrio now swarmed with cops and civs. Pandemonium pulsed through the crowd, mostly residents of the barrio refused access to their homes and families.
Within the quarantine line, civs clustered, sick and terrified. The virus had spread fast. Men, women, and children fell where they stood, writhing. Herd panic pushed those with any strength left to stampede. As they approached the quarantine line, a squat, multibarreled cannon set on a heavy tripod swung their way.
Laing recognized the weapon system—a Metal Storm cannon. Within the barrels were thousands of stacked rounds. The propellant behind each projectile was fired electronically, giving the Metal Storm a rate of fire exceeding two million rounds per minute. Push the button and out burped a wall of death.
With infected civs closing, the perimeter guards fired. The barrels of the cannon chattered for an instant, ejecting hundreds of thousands of rounds. They shredded the stampeding people, sending the few survivors into a frantic retreat. The civs fighting to enter the barrio immediately fell back in shock and fear. Soon the anger rose.
Ryan retreated into the throngs. Punching through the quarantine was too risky. He had to find another way. He circled the field and cut over to the massive factory buildings that ringed the airport.
Sprinting through the streets, he tried to fathom Sarah's actions. Was she really responsible for this? What would he find on getting to her? And, if she was too far gone, what would he do? The questions boiled in him. He ran out the energy, putting on a burst of speed. He turned the final corner onto Front Street.
The shift was immediate, from rough industrial to slick commercial. A two-hundred-meter-tall woman hung over the bustle. Her succulent, if holographic, lips flittered over a carton of Coke, pulling sips as if it were ambrosia. The entire wall of the port exploded in color and lights, ads and entertainment, an orgiastic symphony of consumerism. The far side of the street was jammed with stores, bars, and restaurants, all catering to the suits. It hardly seemed possible that the barrio lay on the port's far side. That it was now a killing zone seemed only to amp this population's drive to consume.
A woman laden with holo-encrusted shopping bags burst out of a high-end shoe store, crashing into Laing. The impact sent her purchases flying. She screeched, the intrusion pulling her from the input daze everyone seemed to be operating under. The woman didn't acknowledge Ryan beyond picking up the bags scattered around him.
Ryan didn't move for a moment, the sense of unreality pervading him. The crush of glossy input insulated the street from the horrors beyond. It was an active feed, flow-tranced, consumer-driven denial that ran near total.
Laing shook free of it and pushed back into a run—realizing that he was now covered in perfume. The thick scent wrapped him, clouding out even the hamburger onslaught the six-story McDonald's pumped out.
Absolutely perfect, Laing thought as he cut into the port's south entrance. Inside, the bubble of opulence only hardened. Laing gazed down the terminal at the sharply dressed passengers all queued up in clean lines. A soft hum of efficiency pervaded the place. So discordant with the chaos and death just a wall away.
MANUFACTURING DISTRICT, TRENTON, NEW JERSEY
Savakis reached the park under the barrio as a tense, heartsick calm took hold in the throng. He pushed through the slag of civs. Before them, a cordon of feds marked a black swath between the living and the dead.
As Savakis stepped forward, an overeager G-man flipped into toughguy mode. “Back off, now!”
“Take it easy, kid,” Frank said, and continued to walk.
The G-man clicked to active fire, hands twitching with fear.
“You don't want to aerate me, kid. Scan my code.”
“Wha . . . What?” the G-man sputtered. Shell shock flashed through his features.
“My code. I'm Company, you idiot!” Traumatized or not, Frank didn't have time for this shit.
He stepped forward as the kid checked his arm display. A scan of Frank popped up.
“Sorry, sir,” the kid said to Frank's back.
Frank barged into the mass of armored men, guns, and slick fear. He found the control tent. Before it, a squat, thick man gruffed out orders.
“You in charge?” Frank asked.
The man's great bulk shifted, his heavy eyes turning to Frank. A dogged street cunning showed through the man's exhaustion.
“Name's Flip,” the man said. “Trenton PD. Feds are here too, but they're suddenly not so interested in helming this mess.”
“I'll bet they aren't.” Frank said, extending his hand. “Frank Savakis. CIA.” Flip grabbed it and shook hard.
A cop pulled Flip's attention. As he dealt with the man, Frank looked out on the carnage before him. A thick soup of gore blanketed the hundred meters to the barrio's base.
“Fuck me,” Frank whispered.
“Yeah,” Flip responded.
“What happened here?”
“The residents tried to break quarantine. G-men were here with area denial weaponry.” Flip motioned to the Metal Storm cannon.
“And they just opened up?” Frank asked, staring at the weapon.
Flip nodded to the carnage before them. “All of a sudden, I'm in charge. It's now my mess.”
Frank added his own gruff chuckle to Flip's. “Well, unless you got a problem with the CIA working domestic, I'll help you clean.”
“About time,” Flip said. He beckoned Frank into the control tent. Frank looked up into the eight haphazard stories of barrio suspended over them.
He had a pretty good idea of what was going on in there.
Laing pushed through the clean, pressed passengers, each pretending to be the only sentient being in the room. That calm isolation cracked as Ryan sprinted through the main atrium. Nine stories above, hulking planes fought their way into the sky.
The scent of anxiety wafted through the air, competing with Ryan's perfume. That tension, and the beefed-up police presence, were the only hints of the crisis occurring on the other side of the airport wall.
Laing bolted up the vert, pushing past the travelers as he reached gate level. By now, people had begun to stare. In hindsight, blowing through the scan station might have been a mistake.
The electronic immobilization devices shocked him repeatedly, frying the perfume stink into something akin to roasted lilac. Beyond that, the shock did little to Laing's system. He shouted something about national security to the police—but it didn't take. Six cops bolted after him, chasing him down the terminal.
Laing could incapacitate the men, but that would take time—a resource he had in short supply. Instead, he put on a burst of speed, cutting hard right as they opened up with gel frags.
He sliced into the boarding zone for a flight to Santa Barbara, California.
“Wait!” the woman at the counter shouted as Laing smashed through the alarmed door. “Plane's not here yet!”
Ryan sprinted hard, the cops on his ass. He rounded the corner, knowing that the next moments weren't going to be fun. Frags pounded into the wall over his head. No time to ponder.
With no plane, the end of the boarding ramp hung suspended ten meters off the tarmac. Ryan put on an extra burst of speed. He hit the passageway's end like a long jumper arcing out and up, legs churning.
Jacked to high, he landed in a smooth forward roll, dissipating the impact through his right arm and down the diagonal of his back. One of the cops, unable to siphon off his momentum, wavered at the gate's end, tee-tering on the edge in a jerking dance. Another cop grabbed him, yanking him to safety.
The distrac
tion gave Laing a few meters before the cops could fire their frags. The gel slugs hit Laing's back in pocking splats. Their force was enough to knock most out cold. Laing stumbled hard but managed to keep his feet under him. The shots continued to plaster him, but their power lessened as he got farther from their source. Finally, he got out of range. He'd done it. One step closer to Sarah.
Now, all he had to do was cross a live runway.
The voice boomed through the evening air, overwhelming all else. “Sarah Peters, vacate the premises immediately. Failure to do so will result in further casualties. We cannot lift quarantine until you are apprehended.” Bullhorned up at the barrio, the harsh male voice ran the lines over and over.
Frank burst into the control tent, fuming. He approached Flip, who was standing over a bank of cops manning the monitoring gear.
“Fuckin' feds!” Frank spat. “The idiots think their message blast will flush Peters out.”
“It's a possibility,” Flip replied without much heart.
“Yeah, right. That message paints a big old bull's-eye on her chest. Those poor fuckers in quarantine will hunt her with everything they got. It's their only chance.”
“Guessing that's the scenario the feds are hoping for,” Flip replied. “Let the civs do their dirty work.” He turned back to the row of projections before him. “Pull up the scan,” he said to one of the cops. “Look here,” he said to Frank, pointing into the holo. “IR shows hot flares closing in on a single individual.”
“Peters.”
“Most likely,” Flip said.
“Looks like an old-fashioned posse. Picking up a good deal of weaponry. Even if the target is healthy, she can't hold 'em all off.”
Frank watched the holo. Finally, he looked up at Flip. “I'm going in.”
Flip looked at Frank like he'd just lost his mind. “You gotta be nuts.”
“I need Peters alive.”
“Sir, you'll be exposed to the virus.”
“You telling me there's no hazmat team here?”
“No, of course not. It's just—”
“Got no time for this,” Frank said. “Get me a suit, and get me in there.”
Flip just shrugged and showed him the way. “It's your funeral, brother.”
Over the next minutes, Frank began to think Flip might have been right. He stood in the hazmat team's trailer, butt naked, a plexi mask over his face. Soft Seal sprayed down from every angle, matting him. A tingling shrinkage as it firmed over his body. In another minute, Flip entered with a jumpsuit.
“Still up for it?”
Frank just grabbed the suit, forced his still tacky body into it and exited. He grabbed a large-bore shotgun from one of the feds as he trotted through their front lines. Passing the hastily erected bioshield caused his small muscles to spasm. The shield set up an irradiated field around the barrio.
Frank lurched his way past, electricity arcing off him in a blue haze. Then he was through—and into the dead zone.
Wayne Pierson ran on empty. Eyes blurred, he'd been going full-tilt for the last five hours straight. With the exponential increase in air traffic leaving Trenton, he'd been forced to call in all his controllers. Even the processors handling the airport's integration into the skynet ran well over capacity. Two processing plants had already buckled under the data load.
“Sir!” One of Pierson's less-skilled controllers was waving from the far corner of the air traffic control spire. The spire vaulted high over the passenger terminal, a slender spike rising up out of Trenton's pollution haze. Its clear line of sight had struck Pierson as an antiquated precaution. Air traffic controllers, on the average day, did little more than monitor the smooth flow of launches and landings that the computers operated. This was not an average day. Today, that sight line was all important.
“What is it, Rob?” Pierson shuffled over.
Rob, a sloppy lifer not quite incompetent enough to fire, didn't bother responding. He just brushed at the holo before him. The code line and three-dimensional rep of the airspace surrounding Trenton slow faded into a flurry of snow. Dead crash.
Normally, Pierson ran ice cold. He loved the active, geometric precision of flight control. From his days running jets off aircraft carriers to this, he would clock in and conduct the symphonic ebb and flow of planes with cool perfection. Now, staring into the snow, he felt an unfamiliar adrenaline spike kick at his chest.
Looking down the row, each controller's holo crashed in succession. Only the distance feeds—those from the national skynet tracking the flow of planes down the eastern seaboard—remained intact.
Wayne gulped, allowing himself a single moment of indecision. Then he locked it down and forced calm. “We go old school. Visual control, boot up the radar.”
“What?!” Rob sputtered.
Wayne pushed on. “Inform the pilots to flip to manual.”
“They're not going to like it,” another controller grumbled.
“Then they can stay right where they are and we'll dance 'em out once the crush dies down.”
Silence for a beat.
“Well, get on it!”
The room erupted in a staccato mash of controllers informing pilots. Fortunately, all the flights were outbound. With the disturbance in the barrio, the suits wanted their product off the ground. Couldn't have their shipments quarantined. That fucked up the bottom line.
Pierson wiped his eyes, trying to keep up with the exodus. For the first time in years, he stepped to the arced plexi that bubbled the spire and watched the action below.
Planes were stacked all the way back to the hangars, eight or nine deep. He'd be here all night. They all would. Still gazing into the mayhem, he toggled his link and updated skynet. Their reaction was only slightly brighter than that of his controllers. But what was he supposed to do, shut down the airport? That would be a career killer.
Slightly zoned, trying to capture a full picture in the maze of planes below, he almost missed it. Just a speck, moving fast. It staggered slightly. In a jolt, Pierson realized that nothing mechanical moved like that.
“Oh, Jesus,” he muttered, unable to fully process what he was seeing.
He whirled. “Rob!”
Rob was deep into manual operation and didn't notice the intrusion.
“Rob!”
“What?” He looked up, eyes dazed.
“Runway three.”
“Yeah?”
“There's someone on it.”
“Well, yeah. On three, we got the Air West flight to Paris, stacked behind the express shot to Caracas.”
“No—there's . . .” Pierson almost couldn't bring himself to say it. He blinked, hoping it was just exhaustion, or nerves. No luck. “There's some - one on the runway.”
Laing ran in the wake of giants. Hulking planes surrounded him. The world he had plunged into operated on a different scale. He felt like a rat crossing a city street.
Laing bolted under a candy-red Airbus. The gear loomed over him, tires a full meter over his head growling past in a crunch of weight and force. Laing misjudged the time he needed to clear the plane. He pushed harder, every muscle in his body screaming. No use.
He tried to double back—but it was too late. The plane's jet-wash lofted Ryan into the air, flipped him over and spat him backward. He slammed onto the tarmac. Rolling softened the blow, but he felt like he'd been hit with a meat cleaver. A barrage of meat cleavers.
Laing held flat for a moment, struggling to draw air, trying to see a way through.
Wayne Pierson watched the runner loft up into the air and slam to the tarmac. No movement after that. The lump stayed flat.
“Okay,” he said with his first exhale in some time. “It's done. Hold traffic on runway three long enough to get a med cart out there.” He turned to Rob. “Just long enough.”
Rob began the transmission. But before he could finish, Wayne held up his hand, his face pressed into the plexi.
“Emergency shutdown. Hold all traffic. Cut power to all mass dr
ivers, now!”
Within the raucous hubbub of verbal transmissions, there was a shift-click into emergency. Rob's nerved, tinny voice pierced through. “Shut-down in process. But we have three sleds charged. Too late to power them down.”
Wayne scanned back and forth between the runway's two ends. As there were no incoming flights, he had been snapping planes out both ways. He'd gotten some shit over the added fuel cost of launching with the wind. Pierson had made it clear that the suits could eat the cost or return their planes to hangar. None had pulled their flights.
Now, on each end, three planes dropped into sleds. The port's location required its planes to lift off more quickly than their internal engines were capable of. Thus, planes were catapulted into the sky via induction drives. The planes rolled onto giant aluminum sleds, which were then shot forward via electromags. These catapults slung the huge planes into the air, getting them up to speed in time to clear the scrapers ringing the port.
“Emergency shutdown!” Wayne repeated.
“No go—sleds are already moving. We stop now and the planes will dunk right into the scrapers.”
Pierson watched the acceleration blur of the first two planes. Time slowed. He hung over the scene, unable to stop the grisly action about to play out before him.
The man began to run.
.....
Laing wrenched himself off the tarmac. Around him, a pitched whine gained force. He felt the power potential building to release. Ryan stood at one side of the first of three live runways. Looking in either direction, he could just make out the planes' hulking silhouettes. All were beginning to accelerate.
The tingling crackle maxed. Laing tried to pull back but the magnet's force dragged him into the runway. The sled, accelerating in a coil of electromagnets, would suck him in and crunch him flat.
Laing turned into the oncoming plane, running hard to gain a slight angle. The pull increased, threatening to drag him into an engine—or worse. His legs felt like iron, his lungs bursting. He ran harder.
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