In the stairwell he stopped at the door to the ground floor and pulled it open a crack. Lowgrave’s voice boomed out from somewhere, “Emily is a Crimson Unity infiltrator. I have quite a dossier on her depravity.”
Jason hesitated at the accusation. He thought of Eddie’s infiltrator. Emily might be good at that job, and her support for Half-Bit could just be a cover.
No. He remembered Wilberforce’s words: “It’s lies all the way down to hell.”
Jason climbed the stairs to the next level. Pain suddenly flooded his shoulder, and when he touched it his hand came away wet with blood. Not much. He noticed his shrapnel wound from the grenade had left a red trickle down his leg onto his sock.
He eyed the second-level access door, and the thought of turning his back on it provoked gut-wrenching fear. Continuing up could allow Lowgrave to sneak up behind him. Carefully he opened the door a crack to listen. A distant slam echoed down the corridor. Probably the stairwell door at the far end.
This offered him a chance to sneak up behind Lowgrave instead. Jason ran as quietly as possible to the other end of the corridor, slowing to a walk for the last fifteen yards. He examined the area intently. Something made him uneasy.
Dim light from inside a room to the right fell on the carpet ahead of him. As he treaded forward slowly, he studied it.
Something cast the faintest of shadows. The silhouette of a head and shoulders.
Out from the doorway came the muzzle of a submachine gun. Jason acted on reflex. He flattened himself against a closed door beside him as the gun turned and fired.
His body stuck out too far to be fully shielded by the wall. He reached back with his hand, slammed down the handle, and backed up with the opening door.
The shooting stopped.
He almost stuck his rifle around the corner to shoot back but imagined a useless stalemate as his shots hit nothing. Then a psychological game with Lowgrave would begin.
Screw that.
He turned while stepping backward into the room and sprayed half the magazine at the side wall, which should have been all that stood between him and Lowgrave.
The stairwell door slammed again. Another trick?
To hell with it.
He came out shooting, giving Lowgrave no time to make it back to his hiding place if he remained out there.
His bullets flew through the empty corridor and slammed into the end wall.
Lowgrave’s muffled voice thundered from beyond the door. “Your failure to avenge your brother defines you, Jason. Nobody ever frees themselves from a truth so profound as that. Crimson Unity degenerates will snatch power from under your nose because they’re superior.”
Opening the stairwell door would probably mean a hail of bullets, a bomb, or something just as bad. He sprinted back to the other stairwell while checking over his shoulder every few paces.
He ran up the stairs, all the way to the top floor. The stairwell had no roof access, so the one at the far end must have had it, and Lowgrave was climbing toward it. Jason carefully opened the door and crept along the corridor.
A door stood open on the right. Another trick? The chief goon couldn’t do his job on the roof with Jason creeping up behind him, so another ambush by Lowgrave made sense. Jason needed to maintain pressure on him for a few minutes more without getting shot. If he had Lowgrave trapped in that room, that was well and good. But he could already be on the roof aiming at the jammer.
Jason pulled out his neutered phone and used the camera as a periscope to see into the room. The screen showed an empty aisle and row of cubicles.
He ran the long stretch of corridor to the next door while checking behind him for a surprise attack. As he reached out with the phone to see around the corner, he looked over his shoulder one more time.
Lowgrave emerged from the first doorway with his submachine gun ready.
Jason dropped the phone, gripped the door frame, and hauled himself inside as bullets flew past and tore splinters off the wood.
“You enjoyed the Strife despite the death of your entire family. That’s your world, Jason. You believe only raiders and people bad enough to resist them should survive,” Lowgrave shouted.
Jason stood at the edge of a vast array of cubicles. It was the same long room that the first door opened into. Down at the far end, Lowgrave ran across toward the windows while swinging his submachine gun one-handed toward Jason, who hit the floor just in time to avoid a spray of bullets.
“You think you’ll get so much pussy in the worker’s collectives,” Lowgrave shouted. “When people need to be eliminated you’ll gladly take them out into the fields and shoot them.”
Jason ignored it all. To answer would mean playing Lowgrave’s game, and to play was to lose.
Keeping his head down, he headed for the second aisle, turned to move a few cubicles toward his enemy, and crouched inside one. His hearing was still deadened from the grenade blast, making Lowgrave’s movements hard to detect.
He grabbed a pen from the desk, unsure what to do with it. If he flung it high over the next row, Lowgrave might see it and trace the arc back to him. Besides, his enemy’s genius brain would well understand the game of distracting noises.
Instead he tossed it against the wall of his own cubicle. It bounced and clattered across the desk and struck the computer monitor. With luck, Lowgrave would think his pursuer had hurled it from elsewhere.
On a random whim, with quiet, fluid movements, Jason stepped up to squat on the desk while keeping his head down below the partition.
He readied the rifle and rose up.
Two-thirds of the way to the far end, the crouching figure of Lowgrave passed Jason’s row, moving toward the windows along a cross aisle. Jason caught him just after his head moved out of sight behind a cubicle.
Instantly Jason opened fire on the cubicle wall, making a line of holes in the direction of Lowgrave’s travel.
He ceased fire, and suddenly felt like a target. He stepped one leg over the cubicle wall onto the desk behind it, stopped astride it to fire a short burst around the area where Lowgrave must have been hiding, then stepped into the cubicle beside the first aisle and crouched on the desk.
Lowgrave was probably too slippery to be finished. At that very moment the bastard was probably sighting up and calculating bullet trajectories.
Jason managed to step down onto the floor before a long volley of bullets struck the cubicle he’d just left and the ones on either side.
Lowgrave’s voice followed them. “Enjoy drilling noses, Jason. You say you won’t, but you will. That thought that just passed through your mind about how you would never—you’re just trying to prove it’s not so.”
Ironic. Lowgrave was the true driller of noses and every other evil. He had forged a career of it while trying to prove otherwise.
In a crouching position, Jason moved swiftly back down the first aisle to the entrance, grabbed his phone off the carpet, and went out into the corridor. Should he head straight for the roof and wait in ambush? He’d be a sitting duck for drones up there, and besides, Lowgrave led a large paramilitary organization. Instead of attacking the jammer, he could escape and maintain a grip on power without the CMC.
Jason walked quickly but quietly to the door at the other end, where Lowgrave had fired from earlier.
Low to the ground, Jason stuck his head out and aimed the rifle inside. No Lowgrave. Beside the first cubicle Jason popped his head out for a split second to look down the row.
Empty.
Down he went to the cross aisle where Lowgrave had scrambled to avoid getting shot. On the way he checked the time—less than two minutes to impact. Half-Bit’s destruction could well send its favorite boy into an insane rage.
Blood stained the carpet in the cross aisle. Not much blood, but the trail led to the second aisle, then turned along it in the direction Jason had fired from. Toward the roof access.
Jason stood silently to look above the cubicles toward the doorway.
Nothing.
He ducked and stepped toward the blood trail, intending to follow it around the corner into the second row. But instinct stopped him beside the cubicle that he had riddled with holes earlier.
Instead, he pulled out his phone and held the camera up over the back corner to spy inside.
Lowgrave sat poised on his haunches, with his back to the camera.
Silently Jason rested the phone on the floor and rose up again, ready to swing the barrel of his gun over the wall and shoot. He knew some rounds remained in the magazine, though he’d lost track of how many. But reloading would make too much noise.
His elbow joint cracked. He froze.
A boot scraped on carpet and Lowgrave’s head popped up above the cubicle with seething resentment in his reptilian eyes.
Jason raised his M16.
Lowgrave continued to stand up and he raised his submachine gun into the firing position.
Jason pulled the trigger, desperate to shoot first.
Two bullets flew close past Lowgrave’s neck and face before shattering two windows far behind.
The third shot went through his left eye. The gun fell silent.
Jason had entered the fight with only three bullets in the magazine.
Lowgrave collapsed backward into the aisle. Jason rounded the corner and examined the body. One eye gazed at the ceiling. Blood poured from the other, and from the back of his head.
He pulled the M16’s magazine and stared at the empty space inside it.
“I guess it was meant to be.”
Down on the floor near the body, Lowgrave’s phone lay on its side against the inner cubicle wall. Protruding beyond the edge of the cubicle, the front and back cameras watched the row in both directions. A split display showed both images at once. One step more and Jason’s image would have appeared on that screen. A victim ready for slaughter.
While Jason reloaded his rifle the building began to shake. He picked up Lowgrave’s legs and dragged the body into the cross aisle.
The shaking intensified. A seismic rumbling and side-to-side swaying came up through the floor. He hit the deck.
A shock wave smashed the floor-to-ceiling windows and swept through him. It felt like his lungs were going to burst through his ribs and come up his throat at the same time. The first row of cubicles tumbled onto their sides and struck the next row. A hot wind roared past.
Out in the corridor the stairwell door bumped against its stop. Someone sprinted through the cubicles, stepping over debris.
Jason propped himself up against the cubicle wall beside Lowgrave’s body and aimed along the aisle, now jagged with displaced partitions and littered with glass, ceiling fragments, stationery, and computer keyboards.
A goon appeared at the end, wide-eyed and with an ashen face. With his rifle still pointing at the floor, he gazed at Jason.
“Your boss is dead,” Jason shouted, his voice filled with power. “Your AI is destroyed. Drop your weapon. Half-Bit is dissolved in molten metal and rock.”
The goon stood motionless.
“Drop it.” Jason fired past the goon at the wall.
With barely a movement the man released his gun. It clattered to the floor.
“Go and we won’t hang you. GO.”
The goon ran out. Seconds later the stairwell door bumped closed.
Jason went to Lowgrave’s body and dragged it across shattered glass to lay it along a gaping window frame. He booted the body out and it fell to the ground below with a thud and a crack of bones.
He shouted out below, “See who this is. Go or you’ll all be shot. Half-Bit is molten silicon.”
When Jason leaned forward a bit a goon hiding behind the parking lot wall became visible. Jason shot the wall and then shouted again, “Go. You’re finished. MOVE!”
Other Black Dove soldiers joined in, shooting over the goons’ heads.
Someone issued a command that he couldn’t make out. The hiding goon fled, and more footsteps joined his. The disarmed one ran from the building with his hands raised.
Jason ran down the stairwell to where he’d entered and went outside. Alarms were sounding everywhere. Enemy vehicles weaved and crushed their way around and across the debris in a frantic retreat toward the comm facility. Black Doves came out from cover and gathered where Jason stood.
Gordon held up his phone. “I’ve got one bar. A tower survived somewhere.” He spoke to someone briefly, then called everyone to attention. “We’ve got seismic sensor data triangulated. The impact occurred within the required area. A giant crater now lies where Half-Bit’s core once sat and exercised its iron grip over more than half a billion people.”
Jason joined in a triumphant roar. One man waved his gun exuberantly over his head and everyone followed suit. A man near Gordon opened fire on a distant fleeing goon SUV, more out of elation than any hope of hitting it. Gordon clamped a hand on his arm to stop him.
On the phone to Wilberforce, Gordon activated the speaker and said, “Roger, you’re good to go. We cut the head off the serpent and we’re waiting for a fiery speech.”
“You’ll get one,” Wilberforce replied.
Jason pointed at Lowgrave’s body and said, “The secret police are headless too. He ran that mob like a tyrant, so it’s probably a shambles now with no commander or HQ.”
“Roger will expose it in his speech. It must be taken apart.” Gordon raised his voice. “Let’s not hang around here. Execute your postbattle plans.”
Jason left with Gordon to return to the safe house. There they waited for the response to Wilberforce’s speech and the next move by the leaderless goons.
Forty-Five
EIGHT DAYS LATER, Jason walked with Gordon toward the Zarather building, where the former cell leader would take over as CEO. A sense of déjà vu swept over Jason. A few paces ahead stood the trash can where it all began. He eyed the pile of garbage inside it and smiled.
Gordon looked up from his cell phone. “We have massive support for the local militias. There’ll be no return to raiding.”
“Everyone’s tired of it all,” Jason said. “It felt like people didn’t know why they should defend their neighborhoods in those days. But they’ve found something new.”
Gordon beamed a knowing smile at him. “Sometimes you have to journey through hell to discover that you don’t want to live there, and learn how to stay out.”
Goon activity became impossible within two days of the kinetic strike. Someone located a backup of Lowgrave’s employee database on a server outside the CMC bunker, and citizens kept eyes out for them everywhere. Normal law enforcement arrested any they could find.
“I’m surprised how quiet Crimson Unity are,” Gordon said. “Their core reason for existence is gone, but even so . . .”
“Maybe they’ve fallen into despair.”
“Have you decided to speak at Wilberforce’s political conference?”
“Damn, I don’t know. Guess I should practice public speaking.”
Gordon laughed. “Ah, c’mon. It’s not like they’ll be shooting at you.”
A pained grin spread across Jason’s face. “Getting shot at is simpler—duck or shoot back.”
They walked in silence while Gordon watched something on his cell phone.
“Hell yeah,” Gordon said. “Done.”
He showed Jason a video from space. A mining thruster slammed into a cluster of thirty-nine others on the surface of the asteroid where Lowgrave had deployed them on Half-Bit’s orders. An explosion blew them all to pieces.
“Would’ve made sense to return them to 16 Psyche,” Jason said, “but it feels good to see them destroyed.”
“That’s the idea.”
Jason shook his head. “Astonishing. The whole story.”
“There’s room for AI in government but only as a tool. Though I’m aware I have a commercial incentive to believe in its use. I’ll always be aware.”
“Are you up for a rock-climbing expedition into the Half-Bit crater
? We might find the remains of the core and take a souvenir.”
“I’ll leave that with you. I guess I’m too old for it. Take people you trust. I’ll mount a piece of it on my wall as a reminder.”
“It will be an honor to supply it.”
Inside the lobby an enormous crowd awaited them. It erupted in applause as they entered, and a great party ensued. Jason eventually managed to pull Emily aside.
She shot a mischievous grin at him and acted as if she were about to leave. “I don’t know that I should be associated with a dangerous political radical.”
“Probably not,” Jason said. “You were pretty square last time I saw you.”
Emily looked down and smiled. “Just waiting for someone to overthrow the government.”
“So you’re a secret subversive. I might have a political career one day. Couldn’t possibly date a subversive.”
She looked at him with a disapproving pout. “Oh, I can’t stand politicians.”
“Me neither. Won’t even vote for myself, and I’ll have a permanent existential crisis too.”
“I’ll vote for you though, only because you look great in a suit.”
“My evil AI will watch you to make sure you do, then some young upstart will have fun destroying it.”
Emily took a deep breath and sighed.
“Kidding,” Jason said. “It’ll never happen again. Something’s changed.”
“Yeah, I hope it’s all done with. What you did was mind-blowing. Show up for a regular day at the office and your boss sends you to help destroy the government.”
“Happens all the time. Come to the beach this Saturday. I need a break.”
“I’d love that.”
Jason looked about the room and rapped his knuckles on his palm. “Goons. I need goons to shoot.”
She looked askance at him.
“I’m joking,” he said. “It’s a little difficult to wind down. But Gordon’s promoting me, so there’ll be awesome stuff to do. And fame helps.”
He linked arms with her, stuck his chest out, and began mingling with the crowd. Emily whispered into his ear.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
Silicon Uprising Page 25
