My access code.
He clawed at the keypad, fingernails skittering on the panel. The rapid squeak of boot soles against the tile floor warned him that the augie sprinted toward him.
The code, the code.
But he didn’t have a code, did he? Suddenly it appeared in his mind and he shouted, not trusting his shaking fingers to enter the string of numbers before she hit him again.
“9686425663WA”
Where had that information come from?
The door slid open and he charged through, pausing on the other side long enough to shout, “Close and lock!” The mechanism obeyed, sliding shut as a fast-moving object hit the other side with enough force to shake the entire wall.
The Nameless Man ran blind, without direction, no thought beyond escape. He blurred down corridors, bouncing off the walls when he couldn’t break his speed quickly enough around the corners. The building felt empty, with only maintenance bots in the halls to trip him if he couldn’t leap over them in time.
The fear made him angry, and anger made him sloppy. He tried to break his headlong flight, hitting the wall and careening around another corner.
Dead end.
He whirled back, but heard no sound of pursuit. Had his trick with the locked door slowed her, or was she silently trailing him? His thermal vision showed the lingering heat of his bare feet leading back up the corridor.
Might as well draw her a map.
He stared around, realizing he hadn’t run into a dead end, but a lift alcove. The panels of the three doors, each displaying a different floor, appeared frozen in time distortion, but even as he watched, they started to move, tick over, pick up speed. His perception twisted as the world slowed until he once again merged with the normal flow of time.
One car coasted to a stop and the door opened on a technician, leaning against the wall studying his tablet. Before the man looked up, The Nameless Man slugged him and lowered the limp body to the floor. Ripping out the surveillance camera came next.
He scanned the car’s display. “Maintenance. Sub-level five. Emergency activation.”
“Authorization?” The computer-generated voice challenged him.
He raked the tangle of hair out of his face and held his breath. It had worked before, but would it now? He had no memory of where that authorization code came from, or why he knew it. A distant crash startled him.
What choice do I have?
The alphanumeric string came to his lips easily, as if he’d used it all his life—a life he had no knowledge of. The doors slid shut and the car plunged downward, picking up speed.
How much longer would the code continue to work? The gray-eyed woman could be purging it from the system now, trapping him inside a building under lock-down. He laughed. No, she wouldn’t. That code revealed his every move. Each time he used it, he sent her an announcement. Here I am. Here’s where I’m going. Of course she wouldn’t block it; she’d sit back and follow his path like a scientist studying a gerbat in a maze.
No more running, reacting. Time to take the initiative. Hell, they’d made him an augie; time to act like one. He retreated into his mindscape, thought-clicking through a maze of security, firewalls crumbling under the power of that access code. A bank of security monitors swum in his vision.
The thought of locating Gray Eyes, of watching her try to puzzle out where he’d gone, tempted him, but he couldn’t risk taking the time; not when she’d soon realize the mistake of leaving him with access into the building’s security. He paged through the screens, deactivating a camera here, another there, in what he hoped would look random. Far from it, he’d opened up his escape route, along with half a dozen others, false trails to keep them running in circles.
Who was he, that he had such a high level access code? A thin man stared back at him from the polished metal of the door, pale and naked. A tangle of blond hair hung around his shoulders. He pushed it back in frustration. As soon as he could get his hands on a knife, this was coming off. Only an idiot would provide such a convenient handhold for his opponents in a brawl.
He couldn’t put a name to that face, only knew it wasn’t his. Not that he remembered what he looked like anymore than he recalled his name, but he knew he wouldn’t look like this. A blond pretty boy didn’t fit with his image of himself.
The tech moaned so he kicked him, several times, to drive out the last of the jittery fear threatening to swamp him. He changed into the man’s scrubs.
The car arrived at the requested level, the door sliding back to reveal only darkness. Machines ruled this far beneath the building. Humans rarely came down here.
He paused in the doorway. “Roof level, flyer pad, stopping at floors four, seven, and two, in that order. Then return to maintenance sub-level two and deactivate for service.” He authorized the action with that handy code, and hopped clear as the door rolled closed.
His night vision cast the echoing room in thick twilight. Shapes scurried around him, from immense to tiny, machines driven by their immutable programming. One of them would be leaving the building. Most of a medical facility’s garbage would be disposed of in recyclers, but not the bodies. Those would be taken out to a morgue, or returned to the families. Where and how often, he had no idea, but taking care of that task in the overnight hours seemed logical. His inhead informed him dawn was still hours off. He needed to be far away from here before the city woke up.
A chunk of darkness rushed toward him, solidifying into a transport cube twice his height. It glided to a halt, telltales blinking impatiently at his obstruction. As he stepped aside, it whispered on its way. He trotted along behind it until it stopped again. A section of the wall facing the bot rolled up, the scent of rain on pavement and old garbage washing over him from the opening. He charged through the door with the transport, hearing the portal slam shut behind them. The bot turned right, moving deeper into the sub-levels of the city, while he chose the other direction, its upward slant promising access to the main plazas.
Rainwater trickled down from above, running dark in gutters on each side of the ramp. A gerbat the size of a small cat watched him from an alleyway between two buildings, its eyes reflecting red in the half light.
He noticed no one until he reached the surface, still many meters below the commercial levels. Here, vagrants picked through what trash had filtered down from the more prosperous regions, and a handful of washed-up prostitutes vied for his attention. One, an Acinonix, wore only a welter of cheap beads. Her dull, graying fur did little to hide her flaccid breasts. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and ignored her challenging gaze. Not tonight, sweetheart, and not with a fur-face like you. Nothing but animals trying to look human.
But as he passed her, he nodded and grumbled a phrase so guttural that it left his throat aching. The Acinonix woman’s golden eyes widened, but she smiled and replied in kind. He hurried on, but couldn’t shake the feeling that she watched him for a long time.
So, he could speak Acinonix. One more talent he couldn’t explain.
The Nameless Man shivered in the chilly river of air flowing through the canyon of buildings, the tech’s stolen scrubs offering little in the way of warmth. A cold front moved through the city, its lowering clouds ruddy with the reflected lights of the imperial complex. He spotted the spires of the royal residence towering above the other structures, a holographic dragon flickering around them.
South of the palace lay the Warren. That’s where he planned to go to ground; a man could get lost in there forever. A memory surfaced. SpecOps paid special attention to the Warren right now, but why? He halted, trying to reel in the thread of memory, but the harder he fought to retrieve it, the further it slipped away. He could picture Gray Eyes, a fork in her hand, gesturing and explaining her increased surveillance in the Warren.
She told him? When?
He halted, squeezing his eyes shut. Damn these fouled-up memories. So the Warren was out. What did that leave? SpecOps would be running facial recognition on all the
starports and mag-lev stations, and probably waiting for him to use that damn access code again. But getting off-world seemed his smartest move.
A private starport off the coast catered to shuttle pilots. There wouldn’t be anything hypercapable, but he could steal a ship that would get him to one of the orbital stations. Until he could track down a way out of the star system, the kilometers of vents, maintenance shafts and service tunnels of the station’s underworld would serve as a perfect hiding place. Out in the Alliance, or better still, the Back of Beyond, the skills of an augie could fetch him a pretty payday, as either a bodyguard or an assassin.
Why think so small? He could find some out-of-the-way gerbat-infested station or agrarian world and just take over. He’d be the boss; screw it, he’d be an emperor. That sounded more like it.
Once in the business district, he could hijack an aircar for the flight out to the port. He turned his back on the Warren and started walking. With each step, his muscles tightened, his skin tingled. A creeping sense of uneasiness brought him to a halt. He scanned around, but no one shared the trash-littered alley with him. He huffed out a breath and continued, the simmering wrongness continuing to build until it felt like icy spider’s feet crawling on his brain.
At the end of the passage he turned right, and the odd sensations disappeared. Ahead of him, over the sprawl of low buildings, the palace’s holos painted shifting colors on the underbelly of the clouds. He’d turned back toward the Warren.
As he retraced his steps, the itching inside his mind intensified until he screamed, knotting his fists in the tangles of his hair. He dashed back to the alley and slid down the wall, huddling at its base.
Computers controlled every function inside an augie. Did Gray Eyes have a program running on one of them, forcing him to do her bidding? The sudden loss of free will terrified him. He clawed at his chest as if he could dig out the invasive electronics.
Think it through. That made no sense. Why warn me to stay out of the Warren, then try to force me to go into it?
Could it only be that elusive second set of memories that seemed to surface when he needed them? But they had never forced his actions, only passively supplied information; information that had helped him get this far. He pulled up the hem of his scrubs’ top and wiped sweat from his upper lip, then scrambled to his feet.
He told—demanded—his body to turn left as he stepped from the darkness. His feet carried him to the right. The Nameless Man reeled to a halt and glanced back over his shoulder at the path to a future now closed to him, and surrendered to the compulsion, letting it carry him into the squalor of the Warren.
After a few minutes he gave up trying to keep track of the alleys he slipped through, the narrow streets he cut across. Withdrawing into the anger of his own thoughts, he allowed that mysterious imperative to guide his steps.
His inhead display flashed across his vision in a blizzard of read-outs, alarms, and targeting reticles, sending him staggering to a stop. His combat systems lit up, settling into a hot stand-by as the threat assessment board mapped out possible scenarios. A man stood in front of him, barely discernable through the jumble of alphanumerics. He banished the display to a window at the corner of his vision, and opened up a tactical readout. It displayed the tableau from overhead, and he knew the icon in the middle represented him. Three other symbols moved in toward him from each remaining side.
“Where you off to, tech-boy?” A gaunt man faced him, his forearms bearing the telltale dotting of scabs that marked him as a RTZ addict. One shaking hand held a sharpened screwdriver. “If you’re down here looking for a hooker or a joy-boy, then you got some creds on you. Hand ’um over.”
“Sorry man, I got nothing.” He thought-clicked targeting reticles over the other three thugs.
“I ain’t buying that.” The druggie stepped forward, nodding to his friends.
When the Nameless Man dropped into HK this time, he embraced it. The world slowed to a crawl and he flashed through it like a laser beam. He twisted the weapon out of the thug’s hand, driving his palm into the underside of the man’s jaw with augmented force. Bones cracked. Trusting his inhead, he flicked the screwdriver to the left without looking. A strangled cry from behind told him his aim with the tool had been true. He spun to the right and rammed his knee up between the third man’s legs.
The final tough was fast, just not fast enough. The Nameless Man clamped his fingers around the thug’s hand on the pistol and forced it up, jamming the muzzle against the underside of the now terrified man’s jaw. He had time to savor the panic in his attacker’s eyes before squeezing the trigger. He untangled dead fingers from the pistol’s grip and turned to bring down the last of his attackers, who’d gotten up and tried to hobble away.
A search of the bodies netted him a handful of cred chips, another pistol, three knives and a jacket. It smelled of whiskey and stale sweat, but was warm. He stuffed the pockets with his newfound possessions, stepped over the bodies, and continued toward his unknown destination.
Hunger drove him into an all-night eatery. He used some of the cred chips to purchase a couple of hot meat pies, wolfing them down as he walked. In the Warren, who knew what kind of meat they contained, probably gerbat, but his hunger kept him from caring. He licked the last of the grease from his fingers as he reached a boarded-up electronics shop.
This section of the Warren catered to semi-reputable establishments, but he didn’t think this one had seen any business for many years. The sign over the entrance had long since faded into illegibility. His compulsion drove him to a set of ancient metal stairs around the side. The treads were rusted out, and groaned as he ascended. The featureless entrance, however, displayed a security lock far newer than the rest of the structure. As he reached for it, the panel slid open.
The sudden flare of light overloaded his night vision. He flinched, but a hand reached out, dragged him inside, and shoved him against a wall.
“Where the fuck you been, asshole. You should have been here hours ago.”
The Nameless Man blinked away the purple after-images, and faced a stocky stranger with ginger hair and a florid complexion. Before he could offer the man a suggestion they both knew was anatomically impossible, a cultured voice interrupted.
“I told you he would be here, Ian. He always did move at his own schedule.”
The redhead growled, but stepped back.
The speaker sat at the back of the room, his dark suit blending him into the shadows, making his thin, pale face seem to hover in midair. He smelled of expensive cologne, and the fingers resting on the table were slender and neatly manicured. At his elbow sat a tea service, a pair of delicate china cups and an ornate pot that looked to be an antique. In the shabby room, with its pealing walls and dust encrusted furniture, a two thousand credit teapot looked as out of place as a turd on a ballroom floor.
A low whisper started inside his head, along with a sense of danger so sharp the hair on his arms rose beneath his shabby coat. His threat assessment flashed, warning that the redhead had moved behind him to block his escape, and displayed a 97.3 percent chance that Red was also an augie.
The dark-clad man lifted a cup and sipped, the delicate scent of the tea with cream and sugar hung in the musty air. “You always did hate to do what you were told.”
He didn’t know this man, didn’t know what about him spawned such anger, only knew that his second set of memories screamed and clawed at the back of his mind like a trapped animal. He licked his suddenly dry lips. “So now I’m here. What the hell do you want with me?”
The thin man seemed not to have heard, but put his cup carefully on its saucer and began to prepare a second one. He dosed it liberally with cream and three sugars and stirred, the spoon clinking against the china unnaturally loud to enhanced hearing. He rose and offered the drink.
“Cup of tea, Old Friend?” the man said, and smiled.
Then The Nameless Man knew why he hated this person, knew why he wanted to rip his throa
t out. It was that smile. Most definitely the smile.
CHAPTER SIX
Fitz paced, ten strides across the hospital waiting room, ten back. She halted at the processor and ordered another cup of coffee. The last one, along with a pastry, had come back up almost as soon as she’d forced it down. This time it didn’t even make it as far as her mouth. The smell alone roiled her stomach, and the untasted cup and its contents went into the recycler. She opted instead for another hit of elixir from her pharmacopeia. The read-out showed the reservoir already half empty. She groaned. Tomorrow she’d be forced to get a refill—and an accompanying lecture—from Doc Ski. Until then, she could only pace. And wait.
“It wasn’t him, Boss Lady. It wasn’t him.” Jumper hunkered on the room’s single table, his feet tucked tight beneath his chest so that he resembled a rumpled black ball. The untouched bowl of neubeast stew beside him testified to his agitated state of mind.
“The mind I touched felt mean, thoughtless. He wanted to do terrible things to you.”
The high collar on Fitz’s uniform jacket grew uncomfortably tight, constricting her breath. She fumbled the seal open. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone wanted to hurt me.”
“Not like this.” He opened his green eyes, inner eyelids partially covering the corners like an old, sick cat. “He wanted to do sexual things. He didn’t care if it hurt you as long as he got his pleasures. Not like Wolf. I’ve been in his mind when he had kinky thoughts about you…”
“Jumper,” Fitz warned, feeling her face grow warm.
“Well, he does. And so do you, but the two of you enjoy each other. There’s love along with the lust. This was just selfish greed. It felt sociopathic.”
Fitz didn’t know which bothered her more, that Wolf had kinky thoughts about her, or that Jumper listened in on their lovemaking.
“And yet, I think I could still feel him there, far down below that other personality. Sort of like when you’re using a computer. Like Lizzy. At one level, you know she’s her usual crotchety self, but underneath there’s all this software running that makes it happen. Does that make any sense?”
Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) Page 7
