Element zero, p.22
Element Zero, page 22
part #3 of Revivors Series
Penny was calm, but was ready to physically act. She spent a lot of time like that, and she almost never relaxed, even when she was drunk, but I’d never felt her so alert before. Part of her mind was turned toward me and I sensed a bond there, a protectiveness I’d never quite noticed before. I’d always known she would kill for me, but somehow I’d never seen the devotion that drove it until that moment.
I reached out, following the connections Ai kept with the others at their remote locations, and found Osterhagen and Raphael. Raphael was worried. He was worried for himself and us, but mostly he was worried for the people on the ground; he was afraid for them, and not just our people but the innocent bystanders about to be caught in Fawkes’s attack. Osterhagen was angry and frustrated. He was confident he could defeat Fawkes—in fact, he was certain of it—but the nukes had tied his hands, and, yes . . . there . . . buried away deep inside, he was scared too.
The people in the room continued to talk in restrained, clipped tones, and as I took the pulse of their thoughts as a whole, I realized that fear had begun to creep into the entire network. It was fear of the unknown. It was the fear that despite all the manipulation and information tracking and careful planning, they were delving into an unknown where they couldn’t see clearly. That scared the hell out of them, all of them.
Even Ai.
They don’t know what to do, I thought, and even though I felt like that should make me scared too, it didn’t. I thought maybe I knew what they didn’t.
There was someone I needed to communicate with. The person who had stood next to me in my vision and the only one in the room I knew would survive along with me if we failed.
“ . . . the lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it . . . ”
Hans Vaggot was isolated, and I could tell that although Ai was watching him, she wouldn’t touch him. He was being left alone to retake the satellite, and as soon as I entered his mind, I knew he was getting close. There was a relief there, like a cool undercurrent beneath the hot colors of his mind. He’d recently made some kind of breakthrough and was closing in. I couldn’t tell how long it would be, but although he was still focused like a laser, I could sense his hope—he knew he would succeed; he was only worried about the timing. If he knew it and I knew it, then at least Ai and Osterhagen knew it too. Despite their misgivings, they had begun to think that in spite of everything, they still might stop the event from happening.
Except they were wrong.
Mr. Vaggot, I whispered into the back of his mind. I felt the flow of his thoughts hiccup, and I knew he’d sensed me. In a second, Ai would sense me too, and when she did she’d shut me out again. I only had a short time to communicate with him, to plant, maybe, an idea in his mind. It was an idea that I didn’t totally understand myself yet, but somehow I knew it was the answer. When I thought back to what I’d learned about Noelle, who came before me and before Penny, it suddenly seemed clear. She’d known. She’d known all along; she just couldn’t handle it.
I took a long swallow off the bottle in my hand and wormed my way further into his mind.
When you retake the satellite, don’t shut down the launch, I told him. I felt anxiousness in him from somewhere deep inside as the command took root. Don’t shut it down. Wait for my signal. . . .
I felt Ai then, and my eyes snapped open as the connection was broken. When I looked over at her, her large eyes had narrowed and there was a hard glint in them.
“I told you to leave him,” she said in a low voice. “I—”
She stopped short and perked up, as if she’d heard something. The anger went out of her eyes and I felt a spike of alarm from her, licking out of her consciousness like a solar flare.
“Robin, wait,” she said.
“Hold on,” Mr. Raphael said. He checked something offscreen.
In all the activity, no one else saw Ai sit up straight suddenly. Her eyes looked startled as they opened wide and stared into space. The others around the table jerked in their trances, sitting up straight along with her.
“Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, and the voices quieted.
“Yes, Motoko?”
“Abandon the CMC Tower immediately.”
“We’re organizing the evacuation now—”
“Forget the rest,” she snapped. “Use the helipad.”
“Motoko, there are sixteen thousand people in this building,” he said. “Tell me what you saw. . . . ”
On Mr. Raphael’s screen, he turned toward a window behind him where something outside had started to glow in the sky above the electric city lights.
“What is that?” he muttered.
The screen flickered and went out. A second later, all of the screens went out and the room went dark.
Nico Wachalowski—Stillwell Corps Base
From the helicopter, I could see fire in the streets below. A car burned in an intersection, flames spraying cinders as the wind howled through the street. Two blocks down, smoke was pouring from the broken window of a residential building.
Alice, we need to start tracking the bites that occurred since the activation code was sent.
We’ll coordinate with local hospitals. If this is true, though, Wachalowski, our best bet is going to be stemming it at its source, not chasing thousands of leads.
We need to contain the city. No one in or out.
We’re working on it.
The snow began to pick up as the helicopter took us back toward the Stillwell Corps base. Visibility was down and the ride was choppy. The windshield turned black, and a computerized view appeared in its place as the pilot passed between two buildings.
What about you? she asked. If this really is true, wouldn’t you be affected?
I’m okay.
But have you been affected?
A notification appeared in front of me as my internal diagnostic finished. My JZI called out my new arm on the system tree with a low-level warning. The necrotic bleed-through had been identified. It was true—the altered nanoblood was leaking into my bloodstream.
No, I lied.
The chopper hit a patch of turbulence and bucked underneath me. My stomach dropped. The vectors tilted in the windshield display, and through the side window I watched the buildings below as we banked left and veered over one of the main strips. From our position, I could see the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance, and beyond that, nearly lost in the snow, the UAC TransTech Center.
Keep me informed, she said. Let me know as soon as you have something we can use against Fawkes. She broke the connection.
I pulled my collar down to check my shoulder and saw what looked like bruising there. The bleed-through was getting worse. I wondered if the filter was no longer able to screen the altered nanotech at all. I could be running out of time.
I opened a new link over the channel MacReady had provided.
MacReady, this is happening fast. Do you have a revivor I can use?
It’s on its way. I will have it shortly.
Let me know the second you do.
Understood, Agent.
In the meantime, I have a question. Something revivor related.
I’ll help if I can.
You said you continued the Zhang’s Syndrome study?
Yes.
Was the condition ever recorded in a living person?
It’s a condition that occurs during reanimation. No, it does not affect living people.
What about a person experiencing necrotic bleed-through?
It doesn’t work that way, Agent. Even with the M10 series, the synthetic blood is something wholly separate from the revivor nodes that interface with the brain. Synthetic blood leaking into an organic system does not, and cannot, cause reanimation. If the traces of synthetic blood were to make their way into the brain, they would most likely kill the affected person.
Understood.
Do you know someone who is suffering from this condition? he fished.
What if the nanoblood were altered somehow? I asked. Could it be changed to that much of a degree?
You’re referring to Fawkes’s use of the transmitter earlier.
Is it possible?
I don’t know, he said. In theory . . . at the molecular level, many of the components are generic. They could be recoded to perform different functions, but not easily.
So it is possible?
I would say yes. Particularly if you had high-ranking scientists like the ones you named on your team. That kind of research would, of course, be highly illegal, but I would say possible, in theory.
Understood.
Are you saying that you’re—
Just get the revivors I asked for. And hurry. There isn’t much time.
I understand. I think you should know this before the time comes, though: you have a relationship to this revivor.
What—
It’s the revivor of Faye Dasalia, he said.
Even as the storm outside caused the chopper to buck, I felt a pang in my chest. For a minute, I forgot about the rest—Fawkes, the arm, everything.
Faye is part of this, I said. She’s with Fawkes now. She’s close to him; you can’t use her.
Trust with revivors doesn’t hold the same connotation as it does for humans. I believe she was the one who compromised Heinlein’s security and allowed Fawkes access, he said. But something has happened since then and she’s no longer part of his network.
If she’s not on his network, then—
Trust me, Agent. Fawkes is trying very hard to reconnect her, and I’ll see to it that he succeeds, but only once we’re ready.
She’ll tell him—
She can’t tell him what she doesn’t know, and anyway, at the end of the day, she is a revivor. It doesn’t matter what she did before or why she did it. When I’m finished with her, you’ll have the access you need.
It was still hard for me to swallow. Everything that had happened, all those people dead and dying in the streets, all of it had happened with Faye standing at Fawkes’s side.
Agent?
I’m here, I said. Set it up.
Stand by, he said. I should have access shortly—
His message clipped off as the helicopter started to descend toward the building tops. On several of them, I could see groups of people bundled in coats and scarves that whipped in the wind. They were looking down at the city, at the streets below.
MacReady?
Down on the street, pedestrians looked up as we approached. Police blues flashed against the white of snowbanks where a group of officers waited, keeping a crowd of people from entering a strip mall whose windows had been smashed in.
The pilot chattered over the radio and was pointing down toward the street, but I didn’t hear him. In the corner of my eye, an FBI alert popped up:
IMMINENT ORBITAL STRIKE
The pilot and copilot looked at each other, and the pilot shouted into the radio. Before I could pull up the details, Alice cut back in.
Wachalowski, get out of the area now.
I just got an alert about an orbital strike. Is it an ICBM?
No. The DoD just detected a massive energy buildup in Heinlein’s orbital-defense satellite, The Eye. It’s going to fire in the next minute.
Fire at what? What kind of buildup?
They’re not sure what the target is, but this charge is off the charts. A spy satellite observing it saw it go into targeting mode two minutes ago. It looks like it’s focusing every lens it’s got on a common target that is outside of Heinlein’s security perimeter.
I brought up the specs for the satellite. It had more than one hundred lenses for striking multiple targets such as missiles, aircraft, or ground forces. Any one of them could generate a beam capable of incinerating a large vehicle or even a tank at only half capacity.
Can they stop it? I asked.
Not in time. A communication from Fawkes warned that if The Eye is destroyed, he’ll launch another—
The connection skipped, then cut out. A second later, the radio chatter on the helicopter cut out as well.
Something flashed and lit up the sky. A hole appeared in the clouds and a light shone there like a second sun. The hole blew out, until the clouds were gone and a huge, blinding beam of energy arced down toward the ground below.
The helicopter banked hard as I threw my hand in front of my eyes. Everything went white, and a loud thunder crack pounded in my ears. Spots danced in front of me as the white-hot light burned over the skyline and struck the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance.
The pilot screamed to the copilot, but I couldn’t hear anything over the racket outside. I stared in shock as a ball of fire engulfed the base of the tower and began to expand.
Clouds of glass blew out and rained down toward the street as the flames began to boil from the windows. The air rippled, and in seconds the base of the tower turned an angry, molten red.
The pilot was screaming to hold on. A blast of hot air rushed in as the beam writhed and arced through the night sky, setting the surrounding building tops ablaze. The helicopter began to shake violently, then fell into a slow spin.
Concrete and glass split under the waves of heat and tumbled down toward the streets below. Over everything else, I heard a low, earsplitting moan echo through the sky as the huge structure started to twist on its failing foundation.
The city reeled through the window as the helicopter’s spin got worse. As the remains of the CMC Tower whipped past the windshield, the arc of light flashed and went out, leaving a dark line to float in front of my eyes. The tower was lit up like white phosphorus, while a cloud of black smoke and fire blew out from around it in every direction.
The peak dropped down toward the other buildings it towered above, and then the mighty structure began to implode. As we spun around again, I saw it crumble, and begin a slow collapse down into the debris.
“We’re going down! I’m going to try to land her!” the pilot yelled. My stomach rolled as the deck jumped again, but he managed to stop the spin and stabilize us. The street below tilted at a steep angle as we whipped, dangerously close, past a mirrored building face.
“Hang on!”
The buildings tapered off up ahead where a large, flat area was carved out. It was the Stillwell Corps base. Security alerts began flashing as we passed into their airspace. The pilot was barking into the radio, requesting an emergency landing even as we began to drop.
“Negative! Negative!” a voice came back.
“We don’t have a choice! We’re coming in!”
A helipad was lit up on one of the buildings up ahead. At street level, I caught several bright flashes of gunfire as we banked around and began our descent.
“The security perimeter has been breached!” the voice on the radio said. “Repeat, our security perimeter has been breached!”
As we came back around toward the helipad, I saw more muzzle flashes from below, and when the helicopter’s floodlight washed over the street, I saw why: hundreds of bodies surged toward a chain-link fence whose gate had been forced open. Blood sprayed through the air as soldiers on the other side opened fire on them, but there were too many. Already they were breaking their way into the buildings on either side of the street.
The pilot veered off at the last second, struggling to keep control of the helicopter as we passed over the heads of the clawing mob. The copilot pointed out the windshield at another rooftop, farther into the base, past the fence.
The pilot switched off the radio, cutting off the screaming voice on the other end as he began to take us down.
7
OUROBUROS
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo Penthouse
The silence that came after the lights went out was worse than all the chaos that went on before it. I stood in the dark with the others for what felt like a long time before the overheads flickered back on, but even once they did, the screens on the wall stayed dark. The feeds were all dead.
“What happened?” I asked. Ai was staring into space, not moving or saying anything. At first she looked like she had a seizure or something, but when I focused on her, I saw her mind was still working; she was just in some kind of trance. None of the others at the table moved either.
The armed guards were all alert but weren’t sure what to do. One of them called on his radio to see about the power, while the noise outside rumbled off into the distance. No one approached the table or Ai.
“What happened?” I asked again.
“It was the CMC Tower,” Penny said. Her face was lit by the glow from her computer tablet. “Fawkes just destroyed it.”
“What?”
She turned the tablet toward me, and on it I could see a video feed from somewhere in the city across town. Someone was filming from the window of a building that would have looked out at the spot where the Central Media Communications Tower would have been, if it had been there.
“Oh . . . ” It was all that came out. I stared at the image as thick black smoke billowed up from flames that had spread through the surrounding blocks. The CMC Tower was gone. It just . . . wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t get my brain around it.
“That’s why we lost all the feeds,” Penny said, her voice flat. “It was all going through a hub at the CMC Tower.”
“Mr. Raphael—”
“He’s dead, Zoe.”
I just stared. I liked Mr. Raphael. He was always nice to me, and whenever we’d met face-to-face, he’d always brought me a little gift of some kind. The last thing he’d gotten me had been my little diamond solitaire. I put my hand to my throat without thinking, but I wasn’t wearing it.
“He blew up the CMC?” I asked. My voice seemed to be acting independently from my brain, which was still trying to take in the size of the wreckage I was seeing on the screen. The fire blazed as waves of smoke and dust several stories high boiled down the surrounding streets, swallowing up the cars and streetlamps as they went. Pieces of debris were still falling down through the air, raining down into the expanding cloud below. The CMC Tower had been almost as big as Alto Do Mundo, and now it was just gone.
