Influx

  Grady looked at her with surprise. “They created you.”

  “That doesn’t mean they own me.”

  They heard Cotton’s voice shout across the loft. “Hey! Get in here! There’s something you should see!”

  They exchanged looks. Grady was still irritated at Cotton, but he stopped the video. They both headed out into the hall, where they could see Cotton waving to them from the far end of the workshop.

  “What is it?”

  “Just come here!”

  As they walked toward him, they could see several holograms of live television. Cotton pointed. “It’s all over the news. I had some AIs scanning for any sign of BTC activity, and boy did they ever find it.”

  Grady and Alexa came up alongside him. They were gazing up at horrendous carnage in a downtown area.

  “Anything about the deputy secretary’s assassination?”

  “No, not a peep about that. What you’re looking at is downtown Detroit.”

  On-screen a plume of white smoke towered over the city, and aerial images of the streets showed what could only be described as utter devastation—with twenty-story buildings missing their facades, their interiors open to the air, a broad avenue now a deep trench. Hundreds of emergency vehicles surrounded the scene.

  Alexa nodded to herself. “Just a few hundred meters from BTC headquarters.”

  Grady studied the images. “What happened?”

  “Media’s saying it was a sinkhole that killed a few dozen people—some critical infrastructure collapse due to deferred maintenance. Actually pretty clever.” Cotton pointed with some sort of tool he’d been holding. “I’m guessing somebody tried to kick in Hedrick’s front door. Stupid move.”

  “There’s no possibility of a sinkhole anywhere near BTC headquarters.” Alexa’s eyes moved from screen to screen. “Perhaps the government tried to retaliate for the deputy secretary of Homeland Security.”

  Cotton shrugged. “Well, where’s the wreckage? For that matter, where’s all the rubble from those collapsed building facades?”

  Alexa looked grim. “It’s Kratos.”

  “Kratos? Don’t tell me they actually built that thing?”

  Grady looked from one to the other. “What’s Kratos?”

  She met his gaze. “It’s you, Mr. Grady. Your gravity mirror technology writ large. One of the researchers found a way to project the gravity mirror effect over an arbitrary distance—like you saw Morrison do last night. An extogravis, and they put it into a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit at Lagrange point two—twenty thousand miles up.”

  Grady pondered this. “You’re saying they have a satellite-based gravity weapon?”

  She nodded and pointed to the screen. “It’s why Hedrick was bringing you back from Hibernity. He needed you to improve it. They can reverse gravity in an area a mile across—narrower if they like.”

  “Holy hell . . .” Cotton turned from examining the carnage on-screen. “That’s some technology you came up with. That’s why there’s no wreckage—it all fell into the sky.”

  Alexa nodded.

  “Sort of explains the chatter on the Web. Kooks there are saying there was a military force that got sucked up by the hand of God. Folks filmed it on their phones, but there wasn’t any cell service—and during the night somebody reached into their phones and deleted the evidence. Wacky, wacky people on the Web . . .”

  Alexa watched the screens.

  Cotton nudged Grady’s arm. “Pretty impressive.”

  Grady shook his head. “My God—they have a satellite that can level a city.”

  “Suck it into space more like.”

  Grady walked away, sobered. “I can’t believe what I’ve done. I’ve given these madmen absolute power over us all. And they’ll only become more powerful over time.”

  Alexa turned to him. “You didn’t give them anything. They took it from you, and I’m starting to realize that BTC probability models didn’t include themselves.”

  Meanwhile, on television, pundits were discussing the long history of urban decay in Detroit, and an infrastructure bill being introduced in Congress to rush federal aid.

  Cotton nodded. “Looks like Washington has backed off. Well, Hedrick won’t hesitate to use this power. I expect our government friends will be licking their wounds for the moment. Which probably means they won’t be of much help in springing the inmates from Hibernity, even if you tell them about it.”

  Grady looked up. “We need to locate Hibernity. Rescuing those prisoners and getting them safely to the authorities might be the only chance to level the playing field with Hedrick.”

  “But for that you’ll need someone willing to receive them. And with Hedrick playing God, they might not risk it. In fact, the feds might turn you over to him.”

  Alexa took a deep breath. “We have to decide what we’re going to do. We can’t stay here forever. Hedrick and Morrison will never stop hunting for us. So we’ll need to deal with them sooner or later.”

  Grady considered the situation. “How do they control that gravity satellite?”

  Alexa shook her head incredulously. “You won’t be able to seize control. It’s an encrypted q-link. All managed by AIs that know where every single piece of BTC equipment is. For the satellite they’ll probably have several q-links as backup, but there will be only a handful of control stations in the Gravitics Research Lab at BTC headquarters.”

  Cotton nodded to himself. “That means you’d need to physically access the heart of the place to have any hope of taking control of Kratos.”

  “What about destroying the satellite?”

  “Pffftt. Good luck with that. It’s invisible for starters—they’ve got a diffraction cloak around it. And they’ll zap anything that gets within ten thousand miles.”

  “Cotton’s right; we’d need to get into the very heart of BTC’s control center—and that means through layers of bulk-diamond security walls and robotic weaponry.”

  Grady considered this. “But if we could get control of the satellite, we could conceivably hold a gun to Hedrick’s head. He wants me because this technology is fearsome.”

  Cotton laughed.

  Alexa didn’t laugh. “I might know someone who can help us gain access.”

  Cotton raised an eyebrow. “Who?”

  “Never mind who. But I need to get back into the building to speak with them.”

  Cotton whistled. “Break into the dark tower?”

  “You’re the master thief. Can you find me a way in? They’ll have rescinded my access rights, but I know every corner of that facility. I grew up there. And I’m certified in six dozen specialties within the BTC.”

  “Yeah, I’ve tried breaking and entering there once before. The place is crawling with robots, surveillance dust, high-energy fields.” Cotton grinned. “I know because I spent the last several years studying it for weaknesses.” He killed the news feeds and instead brought up holographic projections of BTC floor plans.

  Alexa looked shocked.

  Cotton chuckled. “I knew it was only a matter of time until they tried to whack me. I had a feeling there would be no exit interview either. So I made plans for escape or infiltration at a moment’s notice, should either prove necessary.”

  She studied the floor plans, turning the model from side to side. “I won’t ask how you got hold of these. Have you found anything useful?”

  “No, I must say, the AIs locked this place up tight—triple redundant systems. Their security is basically perfect—especially when they’re in high alert, which they’ll be in right now. The nanorod walls can stop just about anything, and the EM plasma rippling over its surface is conducting about four hundred gigajoules. That plasma would diffract lasers. There’s really no force short of a thermonuclear explosion that could get through it.”

  Grady watched Cotton turn the 3
D plans first one way, then another. “That’s not true.”

  “What’s not true?”

  “That there’s no force that could get through that perimeter defense. Because there is a force that already does.”

  They looked at him.

  Then Alexa smiled. “Gravity.”

  Grady nodded. “The gravity mirror.” He approached the holographic 3D image of the building. “Cotton, your examination for weaknesses probably made a significant assumption.”

  “What’s that?”

  Grady swept his hand to turn the building’s image upside down. “That the direction for ‘down’ would never change. Reexamine the plans. Try to find something significant at the outer perimeter wall that might suffer a malfunction if the world were to suddenly turn upside down.”

  Cotton studied the altered view of the BTC headquarters building. A grin crossed his face. “I must say, Mr. Grady, you have a decidedly devious mind . . .”

  CHAPTER 27

  Learning to Fall

  Jon Grady adopted a wrestler’s stance in a forty-foot section of the workshop that they’d cleared of all shelving and equipment. He wore a stripped-down version of the gravity-mirror harness that Cotton had cannibalized from Morrison’s damaged armor. Grady also wore Morrison’s armored boots and gauntlets. The boots were roomier than he’d like, but he’d padded them with foam inserts. Besides he didn’t think he’d be doing too much walking with them.

  Grady studied the microscopic circuitry of the harness, glittering in the workshop’s light. “This is the gravity mirror all right, but God, it’s shrunk down a thousand times in size. How in the hell do they get enough energy to it?”

  Cotton tapped an assembly elsewhere on the harness. “Sixty megawatt fusion reactor.”

  “That little thing?”

  “Well, it’s got armor around it, so the reactor is smaller than that.”

  “Good lord. I’m walking around with enough power to light a small city.”

  Alexa pushed between them. “Let’s get on with this.”

  Several nylon safety straps ran from Grady’s harness to metal beams ahead, behind, left, and right, as well as iron rings on the ground and a strap looped over a rafter. Whatever direction he might fall, he wouldn’t fall far.

  Alexa checked his equipment, loosening the harness a bit. “You don’t need the gravis so tight. Remember it’s not like a rappelling harness—you’re not hanging from this; it’s changing the direction of down, and you’ll be falling along with it.”

  He grimaced. “Gravis—who came up with that name?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody on the BTC’s mirror project team.”

  “I invented the damn thing. I should have had a chance to name it.”

  Cotton stood nearby. “That was your first mistake, Mr. Grady. A thing can’t exist in people’s minds until it has a name. But with a name, it can exist in people’s minds without existing at all. You should always come up with a name before you set out to create anything.”

  Grady frowned. “What does gravis mean, anyway?”

  Alexa was inspecting his boots. “Latin for ‘weighty.’ ‘Heavy.’”

  He jumped slightly to test the weight. “Well, maybe the name fits after all. This must weigh forty pounds.”

  “It won’t once you activate it. And that’s a military gravis—armored. Mine is much lighter. The suit this was part of had electroactive polymer musculature to carry around the weight.”

  Cotton murmured, “We might be seeing some of those later, if things go amiss.”

  “Ignore him.” She was kneeling at his boot. “You feel the control interfaces at your toes?”

  The padded lining of his overlarge boots made them fit better, and Grady depressed two small nodules with this toes. “Yeah. Got ’em.”

  Alexa gestured to his other boot. “And here?”

  He nodded as he did the same on the left.

  “All right. Default control setup works like this: You control yaw by—”

  “Yaw? What’s yaw?”

  “Aeronautical term—it’s the horizontal direction you’re heading.” She pirouetted gracefully and came back to her start. “You control yaw direction for descent by angling your foot like this.”

  “Direction of descent—I thought you said it was a horizontal direction?”

  She gave him a look.

  “Oh. Right. We’re choosing the direction of down.”

  Cotton snickered. “You invented the technology, Mr. Grady. Try to keep up.”

  Alexa lifted her right foot and flexed it first rightward, then leftward again.

  Grady lifted his own right foot and did likewise.

  “Good. And you control pitch—that is, vertical direction—with your left foot.” She tapped his leg.

  He picked up his left foot.

  She demonstrated. “Flex your foot downward or upward—you go where your toes point.”

  “Got it. Seems simple enough. And the controls inside the shoe?”

  “Each shoe has a button and a slide controller. Ignore the buttons for now—they’re locks, so you can maintain whatever setting you’re on without effort. But indoors, that could be dangerous for a novice. So only work with the slide controller for now. Do you feel them?”

  Grady felt with his toes and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “The right controller sets the diameter of the gravity mirror—you can make it just big enough to cover you, or a bit bigger than that to accommodate extra material. And the left controller sets the focus—nudge it forward with your toes and the gravity is focused one hundred percent in that direction; pull back on it and the gravity gets dispersed.”

  “So half gravity, quarter gravity—like that?”

  “A percentage, but yes.”

  Grady frowned. “Wait. Even in microgravity, I’d keep accelerating until I achieved relative terminal velocity.”

  “Normally true, but software in the gravis curtails acceleration.”

  “How’s it do that?”

  “It flips the mirror for microseconds in order to maintain constant velocity relative to the ambient gravitational field.”

  Grady considered this. “Huh. I probably would have thought of that eventually . . .”

  “Pay attention, Jon.” She motioned to her boot. “Pull the slide controller all the way back, and you diffuse gravity into an equilibrium.”

  “Meaning I float at a full stop.”

  “Well, as you know, equilibrium won’t cancel out momentum you already have. To slow down you need to reverse direction of descent momentarily.” She looked him up and down. “You ready to give it a try?”

  He tugged at the nylon harnesses holding him in place. They seemed secure. “Sure. How much trouble can I get in?”

  Cotton chuckled. “Famous last words.”

  “Start out by pulling the right controller all the way back. I want your gravity field to be as narrow as possible. That’ll make it just above your height.”

  Grady used his toes to pull the controller back. “So a roughly six-foot sphere around me will be subjected to my gravity field.”

  “Right. In fact, do press the button to lock that setting. We don’t want you accidentally expanding the sphere and bringing a wall down on us.”

  He clicked the button and tried nudging the slider. It was locked down fast. “Okay. I got it. It’s locked.”

  “Now pull back on the left controller to set it to equilibrium. That way you won’t fly off anywhere.”

  He did so and nodded.

  “Okay. Let’s power it up.”

  Grady hesitated a moment before studying his gauntlets for the control interface. The boots and gauntlets apparently had power sources of their own and were paired via a q-link to the harness—and presumably to the rest of the assault armor, had it been prese
nt. In a moment Grady remembered how to make a pop-up holographic control panel appear above his arm.

  Alexa pointed. “Remember not to go into this interface while you’re airborne. Never power down while in the air.”

  “Got it.” He tapped the master power switch.

  And suddenly felt like he was in free fall. His stomach lurched as if he’d plunged down the first hill on a roller coaster. He pushed off slightly from the concrete floor and moved upward until the nylon straps restrained him.

  Grady felt a smile spread across his face, and he laughed. “This is really incredible!”

  Cotton stood next to Alexa now, watching. “They really must have messed with his head in that prison.”

  Alexa waved to get Grady’s attention. “Okay. Now I want you to experiment with directional control. Don’t do it at full gravity—we can’t trust these straps or the beams in an old building like this. So choose your direction of descent with both feet . . .”

  Grady concentrated and chose a direction to the left—toward an open space of lab.

  “Good. Now slowly push forward on the left controller to bring yourself up to a quarter gravity.”

  Grady took a deep breath and nudged his toes forward against the control. He suddenly felt a physical manifestation of the natural forces of the universe reaching out to him, tugging him to the left—which had now suddenly become a wholly convincing “down.” A glance at Alexa and Cotton made it seem as though they were standing on the face of a concrete cliff, while the workshop floor stretched down in a sheer drop to a brick wall a hundred feet below. “My God!”

  The nylon straps restrained him from continuing, and he hung like a bug in a spiderweb until he could get his heart rate to come down.

  “You look a little red-faced, Jon. You all right?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Beautiful! It’s amazing. Just gotta wrap my head around it, that’s all.”

  Grady changed the direction of down without changing the intensity of gravitation, and the angle of down swept across his horizon like the sun rising and setting. The straps and beams creaked.

  “Just miraculous . . .” He experimented a bit more, flexing the nylon straps first one direction and then another. Finally he looked up at them and nodded. “I’m ready for a free flight, I think.”