“I’ll close it,” she said, and reached for her handheld.
“No, don’t. We funnel them through that access, and we control their entry. But we have to make sure that they don’t suspect anything. Make sure it’s guarded, just not too heavily.”
She nodded and tapped the screen, issuing orders. I was probably sending dogbodies like me to their deaths out there, guarding that door. I hadn’t meant to, but I’d risen to a management rank within a caste that wasn’t even included on the Corporate organization charts. I knew how to make war, and the first tenet is that even if you have disposable people, you don’t waste them.
“V,” I said, the way I used to when we were kids. “You’re the only one with unrestricted access to Tarrant?”
“And you, now.”
I wasn’t sure that was a bright idea, given the conflicting mixture of emotions inside of me, but this wasn’t the time to debate it. “Then I need you out of the fight. You stay in here. This is Secure Level Two. He’s Secure Level One.”
In other words, Virtue and I would be the last line of defense.
She nodded, perfectly at peace with that.
An hour passed, and nothing. Virtue monitored news and events, as well as private message traffic, on her handheld as she sat perched on the edge of a couch, where I imagine she slept most of the time. There was a blanket folded neatly at the end and a pillow pushed underneath.
“Level K is in revolt,” she said. “Somebody started a rumor that the food was being cut off. The stores closed their doors against rioters. Now it’s general chaos.”
“It’s a feint,” I said. “They’ll stir up as many trouble spots as possible to pull focus away from this place.” But I felt sick, because I remembered Level H. So did she. Riots and strikes got put down hard, and permanently. We still had friends down there.
She went back to reading. About five minutes later, she said, in a very soft voice, “A train from Level B has been destroyed. Seven hundred dead. They’re talking external competitive attack, but it’s a feint. Has to be.”
Both of us instantly were transported back to that platform, that slick lovely train, the kids in their Cup game paint and colors. Neither of us spoke. She flicked through messages, faster, faster, and then stopped.
Her mouth opened, but before she could speak, I felt it through the soles of my feet. A kind of harmonic vibration.
Then the building shook violently, rocking side to side, metal bending and screaming all around. Art toppled from the walls. Furniture tipped and slid as the building swayed. I grabbed Virtue and held on as the world shuddered around us.
When it was over, I heard the high-pitched drone of alarms going off. I zoomed the smart paper out to the master view.
Red alerts pulsed in two places: the front entry hall, and on the third floor, at the service entrance.
“I need you to stay in here,” I said. “Monitor the garden. If they come that way, get to Clark.”
She nodded, face gone tight. I rolled up the paper and stuffed it into my pocket in a wad as I moved for the outer door. I glanced back.
“Watch yourself, Zay,” she said.
Same thing she’d said at the Cup Train.
Opening the door of Virtue’s office was like opening the door onto a war zone—from soundproofed to shocking in a single burst. I ducked out and to the side, and the door zoomed shut again behind me, the lock flaring red as it cycled down. I was behind the solid ballistic armor of the balcony. I grabbed my handheld and checked camera views.
View one, the door to Virtue’s office, where I was crouched.
View two, Miss Pozynski’s desk, which had grown a shield around it, and a cannon, which she was firing at will down the stairs. Miss Pozynski looked just as pretty killing people as she did handing them welcome packages.
View three, midway down the stairs. It was a carpet of bodies. Dogsbodies, of course. Shock troops sent to overwhelm Miss Pozynski, who had been in fact underwhelmed and was still mowing them down with icy precision.
I needed a bigger gun, I decided, and took out my pistol, clicked the Autofit feature, and selected something with better firepower.
Assault rifle. That would do nicely.
There were limits to what an Autofit could accomplish, and so the pistol’s basic structure only morphed a little. However, it did give me the ability to fire multiple bursts at blurring speed, although I was likely to run out of ammunition fairly quickly. . . .
“Miss Pozynski,” I said into the handheld. “Ammunition?”
“Oh, call me Yanna; we’re all friends here. Carl is bringing it to you,” she said. “He’s on ammunition rounds.”
Carl was a kind of stock boy, with a self-driving armored cart. He was a small kid, younger than me, and he pulled up his machine in a hiss of air brakes to toss out a mound of ammunition before speeding off toward Miss Pozynski.
He never made it. A small missile whipped up the stairs in a red rush, avoided Miss Pozynski’s armor, and impacted directly with Carl’s cart, which exploded in a hail of shrapnel.
Miss Pozynski had a single-use blast shield, I saw, from the red flare that vaporized the shrapnel on contact as it sliced toward her. I had one as well, built into my handheld, and nothing but ash made it through to hit me.
Not much left of Carl, though. Or the ammunition.
I made a run for the armory door. There was an emergency access panel near the bottom, under the theory that if you’re in desperate need of ammunition, you probably don’t want to stick your head above the bulletproof barrier to gain access. Good theory. I palmed the pad, and the door zoomed open, then quickly shut as I rolled over the threshold.
It was like a candy store full of bullets. I felt positively warm inside, but that didn’t last long as the whole place shuddered from another artillery hit. I saw plate steel warping at the back.
I consulted the plans. They were targeting the windows in Clark’s office, which was what I’d have done.
I loaded up and went back out, opened up a gunport, and fired like there was no tomorrow, because there wouldn’t be if this went badly. Dogsbodies in Corporate livery fell and fell and fell on the entry level, and the chic marble floor was a mass of blood, chipped stone, and bullet casings.
Then Miss Pozynski got it, in the form of another smart missile fired from below. It probably would have come for me except that some bright boy had just lit up her metal shield with heat tracers. The missile dived straight for it, sensed the obstacle, dodged, found free space, and detonated behind the shield.
Miss Pozynski’s personal force field had one use, and this was the second missile. Game over. I got pelted with shrapnel, including something sharp and deep in my side, and didn’t look over at whatever might be left of her; it wouldn’t be pretty anymore. The fire carried on. Whatever other dogsbodies Clark had around—and I was fairly sure he had a lot—gradually lost to the incoming tide of attackers. The CEO owned a whole army of them, apparently. I checked my handheld. We were down by 50 percent already, and I knew it wasn’t close to over.
I heard feet coming up the stairs in a thunder, and without Miss Pozynski there to cut them down, they’d have me in a deadly angle in seconds. As I retreated, I caught a quick glimpse of the man leading the charge. It was Helman, bloody and grinning, and he snapped off shots at me wildly as I opened Virtue’s door and slammed it shut.
Virtue, pale and steady behind the desk, clicked keys. “I’m disabling the lock,” she said. “It won’t stop them long.”
“Helman’s turned on us,” I said. “They must have offered general pardons and transfer and promotion. Could be other defections. You need to change the codes now.”
That made her pause, but only for a second before her fingers flew across the keypad. I saw a remarkable variety of emotions flow across her face and out again—anger, fear, sadness, icy determination. “I see that Pozynski is down. What else have we got?”
“Seventeen dogsbodies around the perimeter still reg
ister as active and fighting. But they’re not going to be enough.”
She paused and looked at me, nothing at all showing in her facial expression—but something, some shadow of something, in her eyes. “We’re not going to make it,” she said. “I never expected them to offer transfer and promotion. That’ll kill us, especially if they offer signing bonuses to flip.”
“Reinforcements? Alliances?” Because that was the Corporate way to do it; Clark would have strategic alliances, partnerships with other key executives who’d have to offer support. Favors for favors.
“They’re unavailable,” she said with a bitter edge. “In private meetings.” They’d been bought off. Tarrant Clark’s bid for power had been seen as going nowhere, and accordingly, his allies had bolted en masse. His carefully crafted plans were going to hell, fast.
That left the two of us, effectively. I stared at Virtue. “What do you want to do?” Being a dogsbody, I had no choice. If I tried to surrender, they’d kill me for disloyalty. Virtue, however, was a Corporate employee, a genuine careerist; she could give up Clark and join Helman on the winning side, and nobody would hold it against her, not even on her annual review. She’d probably get a promotion out of it.
“I stay with my boss,” she said. “He needs to win, Zay. He has to win, or it’s all for nothing. Everything you and I have done, been—it’s all for nothing. You made me promise to make it right. That’s why I’m here. If we don’t, we might as well have gotten on the train and ridden it straight to hell.”
I checked my guns. “Where’s Clark’s executive escape?”
She shook her head. “There isn’t one.”
“Bullshit,” I said bluntly. “This is a Corporate executive’s Res; there’s an escape. You tell me where it is now, Virtue.”
“Why? So you can run?”
I read bitter disappointment in her eyes, quickly hidden.
“I promise you, I won’t be going far. I need you to guard Clark and run some schematics and maps for me.”
When I told her what I was going to do, the disappointment disappeared, replaced by a bright, fierce hope. She opened the intercom circuit and got Clark on the line. I could picture him in his still, quiet office, watching the battle rage outside his picture windows.
It was his decision, in the end. I couldn’t act on my own, not in this.
“Yes?” he said. Perfectly calm, it sounded like. He had truly excellent soundproofing in there; I couldn’t even hear the rattle of gunfire or steady thumping of missiles on his end, although it was plain in Virtue’s office.
“Sir, we need you to play for time,” Virtue said. “With Leo Pannizer. Call for an official Board meeting. Make a deal.”
“He’ll never agree. He’ll just stonewall me until it’s over.”
“Yes, sir, I know that. But it’s a distraction, and we need a distraction right now. We need him to think you’re in a defensive position.”
“Aren’t I?” I could almost see Clark’s eyebrows rise, along with the inflection. “What are you planning?”
“Sir, it’s better if you don’t know the details. But let’s just say that if it works out, you can take credit for the brilliant tactics. We’ll need a blanket all-actions-necessary authorization from your handheld.”
As an executive, he was more than familiar with that concept. “All right,” he said. “It’s posted and on record. I’ll try to get Pannizer to talk.” If Clark made the call himself, he was more likely to be treated with respect than if Virtue made it on his behalf. Pannizer might even signal a cease-fire until he heard Clark out on a deal. It would demonstrate his fair-mindedness, for the record. I doubted he’d go so far as to call even a virtual Board meeting, but he might. Depended on how much he cared about what the other executives thought about his management style.
Virtue and I pulled maps and schematics, and she downloaded them to my handheld, along with access codes I would need along the way. She shouldn’t have had most of them. I wondered, briefly, what Virtue’s endgame had been in her own long-term plan; something to do with access, obviously. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been exactly what I was thinking now.
“Where’d you get the tunneling codes?” I asked her. She shrugged the way she used to, down on K, with just a bare shiver of muscles, and gave me a flash of a smile.
“If it came to it, I was going to go rogue,” she said. “Go after Pannizer myself.”
“What stopped you?”
“Clark was working on it, so I kept it in the planning stages. But I put in a fail-safe a couple of days ago,” she said. “Deadman switch. I wrote together a program that monitors my life signs and launches a nasty little predator e-bomb the moment they fail. If it works the way it should, it’ll wipe all base codes and connected backups across the cloud. Bring down the whole defense grid for at least forty-five minutes before they can load from off site.”
“You mean, the whole Company’s defense grid?” I was . . . appalled. And full of admiration. Without defenses, the Company itself was vulnerable to any kind of armed hostile takeover . . . just the thing our competitors were waiting for.
Virtue grinned at me, and she was exactly the girl I’d know back on the level. “We don’t have to take out Pannizer directly, if they get me,” she said. “Our competitors come in and do a complete management shakeup. He’s downsized automatically.”
“I like the way you think,” I said. “But since it’s a last resort, let’s make sure you don’t have to use it, all right?”
“I’d rather win and stay alive,” she said. “But if I don’t, I’d rather they don’t, either.”
We agreed on that much. “Where’s the escape?”
“Right over there, in the corner. There’s a pad under the carpet. It’s . . . look, you won’t like it. It’s a fax escape.”
My skin crawled, and I felt sickened, but I nodded. A fax escape meant that I’d be dead on this end, leaving behind a corpse, as the energy and engrams of my brain patterns and DNA were ripped away, transmitted, and another body on the other end was created from vat materials. It’d be a generic body, no longer my own. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be too much loss of resolution on the mental imprints. Faxing was definitely the last resort of the desperate.
I stood where she told me to stand, and nodded once to her to confirm I was ready.
I wasn’t.
Faxing hurt like—well, like dying. There was nothing visual; the sensation came from within, like being microwaved, like every cell in your body was burst and flooding out, and you were being burned alive—
And then, I was somewhere else. Someone else.
I opened my eyes in a dark, cool, silent tunnel. I sank down on my haunches, my back against the rough stone wall, and gasped for breath as I tried to get used to the new, rubbery flesh around me, the difference in weight, balance, size. Everything was wrong, and for a few seconds I teetered on the edge of screaming crazy.
But it passed.
It was icy cold down here, because the fax process had drawn a hell of a lot of energy from all the surrounding area; luckily, they’d included executive clothing on a rack right beside the vat. For the first time, I was wearing full Corporate colors and an executive lapel pin.
There were handhelds racked on the wall; I took one and entered my employee code, and data poured in from Virtue’s console, giving me everything I needed to know, including the code for the weapons locker next to me. I loaded up fast.
The bill for this fax would be outright staggering, the price of a year’s output of an entire level. The energy-conversion charge was truly enormous. Oh, and the life span of people who were faxed tended to be about twenty years shorter, but then, I didn’t expect to see another day anyway. Twenty years of future time was effectively meaningless to me, today.
I calmed myself down with slow, deep breaths, lurched to my feet, and checked position and maps. Virtue had faxed me to a spot right outside of the alarm field, less than fifty feet from where I needed to b
e. No access panels here, of course; this was serious security, ironclad. You didn’t get in if you weren’t supposed to get in.
Theoretically.
How Virtue had managed to hack her way into this, the most protected database on the planet, I had no way of knowing. The intricacy of it was staggering. This was her one and only chance to use the information she’d planted. She’d never have another shot.
I strode forward, waiting for the alarms to engage, the kill field to come on and reduce me to bones and ash. Like I said—serious security.
Nothing happened. I walked down the length of the dimly lit tunnel, and it changed gradually to look more finished. The floor started out concrete, then became shiny. Locked, unmarked doors appeared on either side, without handles or access panels. Once again, you had to be meant to enter, or you simply didn’t. Nobody in the halls. Nobody guarding it.
And then, up ahead, a dogsbody stepped into my path and said, “Who are you?”
I gave him my handheld. He took it, looked at the orders, checked them against the central computer, and gave the device back to me, granting me the next-level access.
For which I killed him, quickly and efficiently, with a knife to the heart. It wouldn’t bleed much at all. I left him in the hallway, because trying to find a place to hide him was a useless waste of time.
Then I set off at a jog to the next door, which had an access panel. I was cleared for this one. I stepped through it, keyed it shut, and faced the next obstacle.
It went this way for three stops. They cleared me. I killed them. By the time I reached the third stop, some bright spark had found the first guard dead, and the game was up.
Didn’t matter. I was already through the last door.
I faced the Senior Administrative Assistant for Leo Pannizer, CEO. According to the nameplate on her desk, she was Naia Wade Lymon. She was good, too; every bit as pretty as Miss Pozynski had been, even better dressed, and a hell of a great shot because she drilled me right in the chest, two taps, before I’d even gotten my own gun trained on her.