She kept glaring.
“Right. Here then . . .” He put all the ampoules on the workbench and rolled up his own sleeve. “Pick one, and I’ll inject it into myself. You’ll be coated with neurotoxin when you come back, so we all need to get inoculated, anyway. I don’t need a screaming panic attack, thank you very much—especially with a ten-story drop to the street close at hand.”
Alexa sighed in irritation.
Grady selected the center ampoule.
Alexa grabbed the autoinjector from Cotton, then the ampoule from Grady, and then loaded it.
“My dear, don’t inject angry.”
She jammed the device against his arm. There was a pop and hiss.
“Ow.” He paused for a moment, then grabbed his throat and started choking theatrically. Then he straightened. “Satisfied?” Cotton grabbed the autoinjector back from her. “Who’s next?”
Grady selected one of the two remaining ampoules and extended his arm. “Why didn’t you tell us about this before?”
He loaded the ampoule into the autoinjector. “Because I wasn’t sure she was going in alone until now, and if she had forced me to come along, I would have quietly injected myself and then saved my own skin.”
She made a disgusted sound. “You’re a disgrace, Cotton.”
“Ah, a wise coward is more valuable than a brave fool.” He injected Grady, and then, after another glare from her, he injected Alexa with the contents of the last ampoule. “I told you I would share everything. I just didn’t say when.”
They all exchanged looks.
Cotton broke the silence with a clap of his hands. “Well, good luck with the mission then. Off you go, and be in touch on the q-link.”
• • •
Grady stood on the roof wearing his gravis harness and the helmet Alexa had given him. She was thirty feet away—possibly for the last time. It was past midnight again, and as he glanced over at the Chicago skyline, he couldn’t help but remember their flight the night before. He looked over to her and smiled wanly.
She paused before putting her own helmet on and instead approached him. “Wait.”
Grady flipped up his visor. “What is it? Something wrong?”
Alexa came right up to him. “I’ve never really known anyone outside the organization. Not really. I realize that now. Be careful, Jon.” Her hand gripped his harness, and she leaned forward to give him a kiss on the cheek.
He smiled slightly and then leaned forward to kiss her on the lips. After a few moments he looked into her eyes. “Your skin feels warm.”
She nodded, looking somewhat surprised. “Yes.” She caught her breath, then put her helmet on. She walked back to her ready position.
Grady watched her and nodded. “You be careful, too.”
“Listen for my call.”
“I will.”
And with that she became weightless, pushed off the roof, and moments later fell into the starry sky like a rock tossed into a well.
Grady stared after her. After a few more moments, he realized just how much he wanted to survive the next twenty-four hours.
• • •
Alexa had charted Grady’s route with the nav unit in the scout helmet. It projected whatever maps he needed onto his visor—along with the standoff destination where he was to wait until she called.
He ascended to nearly two thousand feet above Cotton’s building before falling northward, across the city and out over the moonlit lake. It was a clear night, and though it was dark, he felt incredibly exposed. There were small plane navigation lights blinking in the distance, but he’d gotten pretty good at maneuvering and felt that as long as he kept his eyes open, he’d be able to avoid any air traffic.
With the helmet he was able to accelerate comfortably into a terminal velocity fall—roughly a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Judging by the map, that meant it would take him nearly two hours to reach his destination—a small island in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan. He wouldn’t actually move to the island until he got Alexa’s signal, but his standby position was just a few miles away.
Grady fell across the dark sky, the light of a half-moon casting its glow on the water. It was beautiful, but he had no one else to marvel at it with. He wondered if the BTC harvester teams even noticed this beauty.
He saw the lights of a passing ship off in the distance, but nothing near him. Grady fell for scores of miles. His goal was to cross the lake on a northward diagonal and then track along the eastern coast. The islands were just off the mainland, and with the night vision setting of the helmet visor, he should have been able to find them even without a map.
After a little less than an hour he saw the dark, thinly populated coast, and he came over land above what looked like a power plant near a place named Pigeon Lake, at least according to the visor’s map. Much to his consternation there was a municipal airport close by, but it looked quiet at this late hour.
He changed his angle of descent and started falling due north, hugging the coast. Grady studied the lights passing beneath him—or, as it seemed, to the side of him—as he fell alongside the vast wall of landscape. He crossed the mouth of an inlet where a lighthouse stood, then headed where sandy dunes caught the moonlight.
Two thousand feet below he caught sight of a roaring bonfire on the beach, and he couldn’t resist slowing and finally gliding to a stop. He stared between his feet as he floated in equilibrium, a light breeze buffeting him. It was otherwise silent.
And then he heard laughter and voices far below. Rock music. Grady smiled. He was like an owl in the night.
With that he jammed his controller forward and fell again, northward at terminal velocity. He kept following the contours of the coastline as it curved away and then back again.
Eventually, after nearly two hours and hundreds of miles of rural coastline, he came close to his destination. Grady started scanning the map in his visor and aimed toward the little town of Empire, Michigan. He could see there were sizable bluffs here with dunes leading down to the water and lightly forested hills inland.
Grady frowned at his map as a U.S. Air Force air station came into view some miles away—he was definitely going to avoid that. He wondered what kind of radar signature he might have. No, best to get lower. Now that he was only ten miles or so from his standoff location, he had to find a place to land and await Alexa’s signal.
Ahead of him was the top of a hill overlooking the small town and the lands beyond, so he slowed and pointed his angle of descent downward, dialing down gravity to just a quarter of its normal pull.
As the moonlit, lightly wooded landscape came up to meet him, he scanned for anyone who might see, but he was far out in the countryside. He then pulled his gravity back to almost zero and coasted down onto the ground with his forward momentum.
Grady was pleased with himself when he alighted with only a slight misstep, stood, and finally turned off the gravis entirely. He now stood on a grassy hilltop in the dark, crickets thrumming around him.
Before him was a view of the little town of Empire, Michigan, in a shallow valley.
Were there bears in Michigan? He looked around in every direction. But then he remembered he could fly. As he stared up at the stars, he smiled to himself. The situation was terrible, of course. But the universe could still be so beautiful. He thought about Alexa and hoped his diversion would help her get into BTC headquarters safely. He would make sure of it. He just hoped Cotton’s mole was reliable, and that she could get close enough to BTC headquarters to enact their plan.
• • •
After falling the two hundred and thirty miles from Chicago to Detroit (the slow way since she didn’t have a pressurized suit), Alexa came in toward the nondescript BTC headquarters using the cover of the Penobscot Building downtown to shield her approach. It stood forty-seven stories—ten taller than the aboveground portion o
f the BTC, and once she alighted onto one of its art deco ledges, she found herself nearly six hundred feet above the pavement.
She glanced below and around her to make sure no one was nearby and that she’d triggered no security alarms. She also scanned for the presence of surveillance dust. It would have been too late not to trigger an alarm, but if they knew she was here, she’d rather know now so she could attempt escape.
But there were no advanced sensors on this far side of the Penobscot, whose roof was about seven hundred feet away from the BTC. She knew the surveillance system covered the BTC headquarters in every direction—and this building gave her the most advantageous cover to draw close unobserved. Given Hedrick’s quarrels with the government and the destruction he’d wrought with Kratos, the BTC was still no doubt on high alert.
Alexa withdrew a diffraction scope from her harness and aimed it off to the side, at a perpendicular angle to the BTC building. She then activated the diffraction element, bending incoming light until the BTC building came into view. If she understood it correctly, the device gathered reflected light from numerous directions and used software to piece together the photonic puzzle pieces, discarding anything else. The picture was usually grainy, but it was safer than a periscope—BTC surveillance AIs would spot those immediately.
She spoke into her q-link. “Cotton. I’m in position and standing by. Over.”
Cotton’s voice sounded in her earpiece. “No active alarms. Yet.” A pause. “Mr. Grady, are you in position?”
Alexa heard Grady’s voice. “Yeah. I’m ready when you are.”
“Then proceed to the shipwreck. Land on deck and try not to look like you’re waiting to get captured.”
“All right. I’m headed out. Give me five minutes.”
Alexa wondered about Grady. For a civilian he seemed remarkably sane. She hoped to see him again. In the meantime, she sat on the ledge, watching intently through her diffraction scope for what seemed like an eternity.
• • •
Grady rose up to five hundred feet and then fell across the last ten miles. Cotton had assured him there would be an obvious landing spot on a shipwreck off the coast of the island. Grady activated the night vision on his visor and before long he could clearly see the wreck of the Francisco Morazan. It was a cargo ship that had run aground back in 1960—although only the rear portion remained above the water. Its hull was rippled and rusted, but Grady could see birds nested upon it.
He eased down toward the upper deck and finally came to a masterful landing on rusted plates next to what appeared to be the pilothouse and the funnel. He powered down the gravis and heard the ship’s decking creak beneath his weight. Birds rustled in their nests in the glow of his night vision. He decided to turn the gravis back on and keep it at quarter gravity just so he didn’t fall through the floor. Then Grady cast a wary eye in every direction. There was no one in sight.
There was only the sound of waves lapping against the hull and birds cooing.
• • •
A holographic display of a young Morrison appeared at Hedrick’s elbow as he sat in the command center. “Mr. Director, surveillance dust just picked up a positive ID on Jon Grady.”
“Show me.”
The elder Morrison leaned in with interest.
Suddenly a three-dimensional hologram of a half-rusted ship hovered in front of them. Hedrick grabbed the edges of it and spun the model around. He then zoomed in to see a live, ultrahigh-resolution video image of Jon Grady pacing nervously on the bird-dropping-stained upper deck. They could hear his footsteps.
“Fantastic! Finally a break.” He turned to Morrison. “Where are our closest assets?”
“Here at base.”
“But I sent teams up there.”
“There was no reason to keep them there. They dusted the wreck and left. Look, if the teams had stayed, they might have tipped off Grady and the others.”
Hedrick watched the three-dimensional avatar of Grady pacing. “Looks like he’s wearing what’s left of your assault gravis. And an older scout helmet.”
Morrison clenched his jaw. “Cotton must be helping them. Grady couldn’t have done those mods without serious equipment.”
Hedrick spoke to the operations controller. “Scan the entire area for significant heat, radiation, or other signatures.”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned to Morrison. “Cotton might have a workshop nearby. Grady’s definitely there. Alexa’s almost certainly with him.”
Morrison looked positively stoked. “Let me send assault teams.”
“Send every available operator. Focus on capturing Grady first. Return him here under guard, while the remaining teams look for Alexa and Cotton nearby. Cover the whole area with surveillance dust, and if either of them cross that grid, blast them from orbit.” Hedrick zoomed out to a satellite map of the region as seen from space. He circled the peninsula and islands, including the small town of Empire. “If you have to incinerate ten square miles to make sure they don’t escape—do it.”
Morrison nodded. “Understood, sir.”
• • •
Alexa’s q-link came to life, Cotton’s voice in her ear. “Red alert sounded. They’re sending five teams up north to get you, Mr. Grady. Two teams already ascending from the remote airfield. ETA twenty-six minutes. Expect the others not long after that.”
Grady’s voice came in answer. “Okay, I’m here. Be careful, Alexa.”
She took a deep breath. “You, too.”
Cotton’s voice returned. “Mr. Grady, it’s time to destroy your q-link. Otherwise, once they capture you, they’ll be able to monitor our communications with it. Do you remember the instructions?”
Grady’s voice replied, “Yeah, I remember. Good luck everyone.”
She answered. “Good luck, Jon.”
With that they heard from him no more.
Cotton’s voice came to her. “Alexa, at the twenty-minute mark, you make your move. Not before.” A countdown appeared in her visor’s display. “You should see the reference dot on the side of the building when you approach. As long as you stay on a level path to it, my contact says you’ll go undetected. He was able to build in a two-meter blind spot into the security array—no more. Don’t stray from that corridor no matter what. Understood?”
She nodded. “Understood.”
“For what it’s worth, I think if anyone can do this, it’s you.” There was a pause. “Best of skill, my dear.”
Alexa divided her attention between the countdown and the diffraction scope. Nothing appeared outwardly any different about the building, although she knew that would be the case. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, her timer sounded, and she leapt from the building’s ledge, falling nearly thirty stories before activating her gravis and soaring around the left side of the Penobscot Building.
BTC headquarters came into view. She was about halfway down its height, and now she could see a glowing red reference dot on its side in her visor’s heads-up display. It marked the precise location where she needed to land. She was already on a level path to the dot, and she modulated her speed.
Slower. Then even slower.
Alexa glanced up at the top corners of the building. She knew there were spinning mirror housings there that could direct powerful lasers at her or anything else approaching the BTC. But her trust in Cotton’s mole appeared to have paid off since she hadn’t been vaporized. Yet.
Instead, she kept falling toward the bland, concrete cross-hatching that the building presented to the world—although she knew it was a freestanding shell. She’d actually never seen the diamond-aggregate nanorod structure underneath. It was estimated that the physical nanorod monolith of the BTC would last a million years without maintenance.
Alexa was only a hundred meters away now. It was very late at night, but as she glanced down at the rooftops
of the shorter buildings between her and her target, she wondered what anyone witnessing this would think. She was still a good one hundred meters off the street, though. She looked up again and started to pull back on gravity. One quarter. One tenth. She started reversing the flow to bleed off momentum.
She was now within a few meters of the building’s false exterior—the fake windows and concrete columns. The red dot in her visor heads-up display was right in front of her. Very little wind. She alighted carefully onto a narrow ledge, grabbing hold of the cement columns to either side. She knew that just beyond this outer shell was an air gap of several centimeters—and then an EM plasma coursing over the surface of the diamond nanorods, themselves charged to hundreds of millions of volts. Very little could penetrate it, but as Jon Grady pointed out, gravity permeated the known universe.
She expanded her gravity mirror to its widest diameter—seven meters. They had estimated this would give her a good two-meter penetration of her own gravity field into the building, and if the red dot had marked the spot correctly, and the CAD plans had been accurate, that should be all that was necessary.
This was about as close as she was going to get. Alexa took another breath and prepared herself for what might follow this next fall. She mentally rehearsed the order that she’d have to engage her gravis controls. There’d be no second chance. After another moment, she pushed just an inch or so from the building’s facade and slammed her slide controller to one hundred percent gravity—straight up.
As Alexa fell, only an inch or two away from the building’s surface, glass and concrete raced past her cheek. Behind her, a bank of powerful multiton capacitors near the curtain wall should have fallen straight up along with her gravity field, slamming through the ceiling and across conduits that contained cabling that fed terawatts of electricity to the perimeter systems. That is, if their calculations were right . . .
She glanced between her feet as she heard a massive BOOM ten stories below. Incredibly a hole had blasted through the nanorod material and rippled through the concrete shell around it—scattering the concrete and glass like paper. A light brighter than the surface of the sun arced and crackled through the air. For a moment the entire downtown area was as bright as a sunny afternoon, replete with blue sky and clouds above. The light flickered on and off as if someone were riding the sun’s switch, and then a series of deafening booms pounded the air, shattering windows in the surrounding buildings hundreds of meters away. Another series of muffled booms in the interior of the BTC building rumbled ominously.