Influx

  People throughout the city stopped and stared, dumbfounded. Disbelieving their eyes.

  • • •

  Alexa clawed her way across heavy debris, sending it rotating as she pushed off it, striving toward the positron pistol that twirled in the wind, bouncing it off walls.

  Morrison was close behind her, his face bloody, but his eyes filled with rage. “You freak! You might be faster and stronger, but no one is tougher than me . . .”

  Suddenly a chair collided with Alexa from behind, sending her sailing past the floating pistol. She stretched for it but instead saw Morrison’s approaching scowl as she fell away. His hand wrapped around the pistol while she accelerated her forward momentum, curling her body forward and pushing off the nearest wall with her feet.

  Just moments later a loud crack delivered a massive blast to the floor that sent her hurtling across the debris-filled air, along with sofas, tables, and now shattering curio cabinets. Her foot caught the edge of a sofa and she started tumbling end over end, impacting other objects in flight. She covered her head with her hands.

  She lost all frame of reference as she rotated out of control, loud cracks and explosions following her across the room. A sharp pain pierced her leg, and she curled up in a ball until she hit something hard—very hard. By the time she could think straight again, Morrison was headed in from above her, leading with the pistol. The walls of the room were afire with an odd, gelatinous flame, like she’d seen in space experiments. Fire with no “up” to burn in.

  Morrison lowered the smoking pistol with dismay and cast it away. “You didn’t leave me much ammo.”

  She waited for him and whirled into a roundhouse kick that sent him rolling through flaming debris.

  The walls groaned and creaked around them.

  • • •

  Grady pulled his way hand over hand toward Hedrick, keeping as much solid wreckage between them as possible. Hedrick struggled with some sort of hatchway and occasionally fired his weapon at Grady to keep him away.

  But there was now too much debris in the room, and whatever type of beam weapon Hedrick was using, the energy kept hitting intervening wreckage and scattering as scalding vapor.

  Grady was moving closer—now within twenty feet of Hedrick, ducking behind floating exhibit displays. He peered around one and could see that Hedrick was struggling to disengage a vehicle without wheels from its exhibit mount. Grady was close enough to see the glowing holographic words before it: “GMV—Gravity Mirror Vehicle.”

  He had to admit, it looked like a Porsche for the twenty-second century.

  Grady ducked back behind the display and shouted, “Hedrick! I’m not letting you leave here!”

  In the roar of wind Hedrick didn’t seem to know where Grady’s voice was coming from, so he fired several times—but each time intervening debris was vaporized. “I’ll kill you if you try to follow me! You and Cotton will pay for this!”

  Suddenly a soul-wrenching BOOM shook the building, and the walls beyond Hedrick cracked and disintegrated—sucking toward some powerful vortex. Hedrick dropped his gun to grab onto the GMV with both hands—even as he and the entire vehicle were sucked away.

  Grady was pulled in moments later. As he looked ahead, he could see a massive hole had been torn into the side of the BTC building as the massive bulk of the brittle building flexed and turned on itself.

  The view through the forty-foot-wide hole made him gasp. They were at least fifteen thousand feet in the air. The grid of city and suburbs and distant lakes spread out below them with the dawn sun breaking over the horizon.

  And then he saw Hedrick climb into the GMV, the hatch closing over him, just as the vehicle got sucked out, furniture, carpeting, and partition walls swirling around it. Grady hurtled through the opening and felt incredible vertigo as a blast of cold wind hit him. He rolled end over end in some sort of eddy as a massive black wall rolled past him like the flank of a massive ship. There was a constant dull roar like that of an avalanche.

  And then he suddenly felt himself falling again. He looked back to see the BTC tower still rising. He fell in the opposite direction just a few hundred meters away. A glance down and he could see the jagged end of the thousand-foot-long tower where it had been torn out from either the remainder of the complex or from its foundations.

  Grady noticed something even more jaw-dropping—a huge hole hundreds of meters wide and unfathomably deep had been torn in the center of Detroit’s downtown, and the Detroit River was rushing in to fill the void. A Niagara-size wall of white water was pouring in below.

  Grady snapped out of it as he continued to descend. He figured he was at only seven or eight thousand feet already. A glance up showed the jagged burning end of the BTC tower receding into the sky.

  Alexa.

  There was no way to get to her now, and he realized she had a gravis of her own integrated with her tactical suit. And she knew how to use it more than anyone. He turned his angle of descent again and saw his only course of action was to find Hedrick. To find Hedrick was to find the location of Hibernity.

  Scanning below, Grady noticed a large piece of debris heading purposefully to the south. It was a sleek form like the GMV, but it still seemed to have something attached to it. The exhibit mount.

  It was headed south, but it was also falling. Losing altitude.

  Grady nodded to himself and directed his angle of descent toward it.

  • • •

  The interior walls within the BTC tower were oscillating with the gushing wind that poured through cracks and fissures in the diamond-aggregate nanorod shell. It seemed like everything was flexing around Alexa as she pulled her way along, trying to find an exit.

  But Morrison kept on her tail. Since she couldn’t easily find a surface that wasn’t floating, it was hard to outrun him. There was nothing to run on.

  The roar of wind and groaning and shrieking of massive sheets of metamaterials bending against forces for which they hadn’t been designed was terrifying. It sounded as though mountains were colliding in the sky.

  She had to find her way to an opening. There had to be one. All of this wind meant there was a hole somewhere. A glance at the heads-up display in her helmet visor told her she was already at twenty-two thousand feet and rising. As the atmosphere thinned, they’d rise even faster. Before long even she would have trouble breathing.

  “I’m not letting you leave here, Alexa!” Morrison was panting.

  He suddenly grabbed her feet, and she rolled, kicking him off. She looked back at him as she clamored through the crack in a shattered interior wall. “I have to hand it to you, Morrison. You don’t quit.”

  “Damn right I don’t!” He pulled himself hand over hand. “That’s why I excelled . . . in the service.” He was panting like a dog now. “It’s knowing one’s . . . limitations . . . and then ignoring them.” Halfway to her he grabbed a shard of glass—or diamond more likely—that was floating between them. He tried to bring her within reach, sweeping the shard before him as best he could.

  She ducked under his swing and rained a series of sharp blows to his face. A couple of his teeth floated free along with blood and spit.

  But still he pulled himself toward her in free fall against shifting and moving walls.

  “Morrison, is your brain even connected to your body?”

  He braced his feet against a wall and launched himself at her. She pushed off another wall and shrank back from a wicked swing that nearly slit her throat.

  “The BTC is finished! We need to get out of here.” She could see he was panting for breath. “I can bring you out of here. Just surrender.”

  Morrison shook his head. “We’re not . . . leaving. If it’s the . . . last thing I do . . . I’ll prove . . . I’m better.” He rolled the diamond shard in his hand expertly.

  “You’re insane.”

  “Maybe tha
t . . . makes me better.”

  He launched himself at her again, and she pulled herself along a bent and twisted stairwell. Suddenly a sucking wind started to rush past her, and she could see daylight.

  There was a two-meter opening in the wall ahead, down a twisted and shuttering corridor filled with free-falling debris.

  She glanced back to see Morrison climbing hand over hand to the top of the stairwell, diamond shard between his teeth. Blood all over his face, missing teeth reflected in the surface of the knife. He grabbed the shard and shot a furtive glance at the tear in the side of the building.

  “That’s it? You afraid . . . to face . . . me?”

  She shook her head. “No interest. That’s something you probably never realized, Morrison. Homo sapiens never killed off Neanderthal; they just outlived them.”

  “The technology . . . it’s going with me . . . and this tower . . . into oblivion.”

  “Looks that way.”

  Morrison was panting, finding it harder and harder to exert himself at this altitude.

  “It’s over, Morrison. Give up, and I’ll take you down to the ground.”

  Morrison sucked for air. “Fuck you. How the . . . hell . . . can you breathe?”

  “I have a third more lung capacity than you, and each of my breaths metabolizes twenty percent more oxygen.”

  “Goddamned freak.”

  She studied him as he clung to the twisted stairwell handrail. His weathered face and scar-ridden body. His uniform shredded around him. “Why didn’t you ever get cell repair therapy, Morrison? Why did you let yourself grow old?”

  He was growing visibly more sleepy now. “There’s such a thing . . . as aging gracefully.”

  Alexa laughed in spite of herself. Her visor display told her they were at twenty-eight thousand feet now.

  He tapped the handrail with the knife. “Erasing . . . my only failure.”

  “A man so demanding even his clones disappointed him.”

  Morrison’s eyes were closing as ice started forming around his mouth. “Gotta have standards . . .”

  “You’re not coming with me, are you?”

  He held up the shard of diamond but was unable to speak.

  Alexa glanced at the visor. Thirty thousand feet. She realized suddenly what Cotton was doing. “You’re going to collide with Kratos. You know that? That’s where this building is headed. Cotton’s going to destroy Kratos with the BTC itself.”

  Morrison laughed, delirious. “It had to be Cotton . . .”

  “Good-bye, Morrison.”

  He saluted with the knife unsteadily, as if drunk.

  With that she leapt from the opening, aiming to get as far away from the building with her leap as possible. However, she needn’t have worried because the wind blasting away from the blunt front of the BTC building swept her out and then down, away from the artificial gravity field and out into the morning sun. The bitter cold burned.

  She glanced up to see the black tower rising into the sky, debris still trailing off it. The light shone dully from its black sides as it headed into the heavens.

  • • •

  Grady adjusted his angle of descent, following the erratic trajectory of the sleek, black GMV—which was like a bird clamped to a weight. The exhibit mount apparently was outside the radius of the vehicle’s gravity mirror, dragging it down. Not quite like a stone, but inexorably down nonetheless.

  Grady was half a kilometer behind Hedrick and could see Hedrick’s arms moving frantically, trying to keep the vehicle in a controlled descent.

  They were just a couple thousand feet above the city now, and Grady glanced back to see the tower of black and white smoke that rose above the city. Debris appeared to be raining down everywhere. It was like a scene from the Rapture—but localized to Detroit. As if the city hadn’t suffered enough.

  He didn’t know whether to blame Hedrick or himself for it. He wondered how many had perished. It had been dawn, though. He could see a twenty-story building downtown lean over and then disappear into the maw of the great hole the BTC tower had left behind. A waterfall of river water still roared after it with a great plume of steam, smoke, and dust.

  He turned back toward Hedrick with renewed anger. And it became clear where Hedrick was headed. They had descended a couple miles south of downtown, and out here there were fewer large buildings—light industrial sites and scattered houses and businesses. As Grady came down behind Hedrick’s odd-shaped craft, he noticed only one large structure amid what was clearly a decayed urban stretch—a massive twenty-story art deco building shaped like a letter I laid on its back. The building stood beside a curve of rusted railroad lines, which branched out toward it into a series of railheads.

  Grady nodded to himself. Hedrick might be making toward the nearest tall structure in order to land his vehicle somewhere where he could try to free it from its mount without being disturbed.

  Sure enough, a thousand feet above and hundreds of meters behind, Grady watched the GMV descend at an angle onto the long flat rooftop of the massive building. It kicked up debris as it did so—apparently landing hard. He lost sight of it in the dust cloud and fell toward it at terminal velocity.

  As Grady drew near, he realized this was the largest abandoned structure he’d ever seen. It was obviously a massive rail station with many floors of office space above it—and literally all of the hundreds of windows were blasted out. Nonetheless it was an artful structure—architecturally amazing. Grady couldn’t believe the place had been left to rot. It was surrounded at its base by barbed-wire fences, with huge arched windows and pillars—all of the glass broken, and the stone slathered here and there with graffiti.

  Grady descended toward the crash-landed GMV below. It was half sunken into the rooftop, but he noticed the canopy was open. Not far away Hedrick was running along the rooftop toward a yawning stairwell door. To Grady’s dismay Hedrick glanced back behind him and on seeing Grady’s approach sprinted as fast as he could toward the door.

  Hedrick didn’t appear to have any more weapons, but now the man knew he was coming. Grady touched down next to the stairwell doorway. The roof groaned as he glided toward it, and Grady realized that the decrepit structure wasn’t going to withstand odd directions for gravity. In truth it probably had its hands full dealing with regular gravity.

  He killed the power to his gravis and rushed into the darkened stairwell, crunching across trash, broken plaster, and glass. He came down onto the next floor to see that many of the interior walls were missing. There was, instead, a forest of pillars stretching out in both directions and fields of debris and names spray-painted on the walls. The windows here at the penthouse floor were arched, providing a broad view through their empty panes to the Detroit River and lakes beyond.

  More sirens than he’d ever heard in his life were wailing in the distance. There were even air-raid sirens going off mournfully somewhere.

  Grady listened. He then leaned down to look between the railings of the stairwell. He saw a form race in front of the light on the floor below, and he gave chase, rushing down the stairs. Halfway down he activated the gravis to gain speed and heard a horrendous cracking sound. He turned off the gravis as he touched the landing and dove aside as a concrete slab collapsed where he’d just been standing.

  He took a deep breath. Apparently gravity modification was not advisable in here . . .

  He moved out onto the floor in the direction he’d seen the fleeing shadow move and was relieved to see that this level, too, had few walls. He studied the layout and started moving toward the far corner—where he was pleased to see that another stairwell door was bricked up with newer cinderblocks. There did not appear to be an exit that he couldn’t easily see. And he knew Hedrick didn’t have a gravis.

  Or a weapon. Hopefully.

  Grady crunched across brick dust and garbage, listening carefully a
nd glancing in every direction. He was moving toward the tall windows now, and he could see there was broad ledge out there. Another glance and he realized that the thick window columns were the best cover for getting past him on the floor. So he carefully edged out toward it, standing in the shadows for a moment before leaning out.

  Ten feet away, clinging to a corner, was Hedrick in his now torn and dirty business casual clothes. He was bleeding in several places, his normally immaculate hair disheveled. Hedrick clung to a corner wall on the ledge but risked wagging a finger at Grady.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done, Jon?” Hedrick pointed up into the sky.

  Grady followed his gaze to where the BTC office building still rose into the sky like an alien mother ship.

  “You’ve destroyed the greatest storehouse of knowledge since the library at Alexandria. You have doomed the Western world to be eternally decades behind a . . . a synthetic intelligence in Russia and some mnemonic freak in Asia.”

  “I know you have other facilities, Hedrick. Hibernity for one. And I need to know where it is.”

  “Where?”

  “And you have copies of those technologies—of all the plans for making them.”

  “There are no backups, you idiot. We couldn’t keep those plans off-site because of the danger of BTC Asia or BTC Russia raiding us. Keystone technologies like the cure for cancer, immortality, the gravity mirror—all of that went up with BTC headquarters. Don’t you realize what you’ve done?”

  Grady felt a sinking feeling, but after a moment he nodded grimly. “We can reconstruct them. Especially if we have the innovators behind those technologies—and they’re at Hibernity.”

  Hedrick gritted his teeth as he looked out across the decayed building. “This is what happens when we don’t act as responsible stewards, Jon.” He gestured to the ruins. “Michigan Central Station—done in by the automobile. Disrupted out of existence. The entire city practically in ruins.”