"Come here, child. You look familiar to me."
Corrag approached, thinking hard about what he could possibly see in her.
"What's your name?"
"Corrag."
His eyes searched hers. They were so cold and bottomless they made Corrag think of a different sort of being, an alien intelligence.
"And you are?"
"With the caterers."
"Unaugmented."
"Yes."
"By choice?"
"By circumstance."
"Where is your home?"
"Edmundstown."
"Ah. You are aware your country is under martial law and has approached the Repho for military assistance."
Someone around the pool table laughed. Just then the nanowall display lit up, and a man's face appeared on it. Corrag recognized President McKinsky; the receded jaw line and protruding black eyebrows were unmistakable. Walter McKinsky was on his third term in Washington, almost as long as Gheko had been in power, sustaining himself in office by the same opportunistic and shoddy manipulations of public opinion and media control. McKinsky was about to declare an internal war, putting the Korazan and other allied national groups on the terrorist enemy list. As the Repho president's tremulous voice resounded through the soundproofed room, she felt Chagnon grab her wrist.
"Take her down to the desk. Have her searched. We can't take chances at this point, Samael," said the other man she thought was probably Mayor Gheko. He pulled on his hair, fixing the ponytail and leaned back in his seat with the hookah pipe.
"Don't leave. I'll have a word with you when this is over," said Chagnon. Corrag complied, standing limply by his side as the men sucked at the hookah and listened to their ostensible commander-in-chief on the nanowall. The pool players stopped their game and leaned against the table.
"Maxwell, what's happening?" McKinsky asked.
"Not much, Walter. We have to stop meeting like this," croaked Gheko.
"Yeah. Ha. Listen, uh. Maxwell, we have word from intelligence, scraping of media that there's something coming from the KB and associates."
"What, the riffraff are getting uptight. What's new?"
"Listen, man. You know we're going ahead with the cleanse, right? We're moving the schedule up to meet the increased threat level. You need to consult with Hinkle and see that your police units are aligned on this. This is going to be a massive mobilization to make it work cleanly and effectively. The scope of the operation cannot, must not be leaked. Another reason to move the timing up."
"We're in the middle of a big fiesta, Walter. Thought you'd at least send your Vice President to be in on this. Nobody parties like us here in the Big Apple."
"Sorry I missed it. But if we want to maintain our status with the whale we must be ruthless and now is that time, Maxwell. Are you and the Chagster capable of cleaning this situation up? Otherwise we are more than willing to send battle carriers from the Mediterranean with additional air support and personnel."
"That won't be necessary at all, Walter. We've got this tied up. I can't believe you even doubt it."
"I don't. Just doing my due diligence."
"Understood," said Gheko. Then the face faded from the screen and the piped in music resumed.
"Party hardy," said Gheko, grabbing the hookah pipe from Chagnon's outstretched hand as the men and women around the pool table cheered.
"Let the ball drop," said Chagnon, slumping back in the chair.
Two of the men at the table looked at each other. They approached Gheko. One of them spoke.
"Plans for Operation Alpha?"
"Let Hinkle know we're set to go. Countdown," said Gheko. The two men turned at the same time and walked out of the room. As they went out the door Corrag moved stealthily after them, and Chagnon croaked.
"Wait. Stop her."
Corrag stopped. Chagnon stood shakily. Everyone looked at the two of them, especially at the lizard-like old man as he lurched over to her and held her shoulder with his long-boned, stiff fingers.
"Where are you going?" asked Chagnon.
"To get you more drinks, sir. There was a request for more champagne, I believe."
"I told you I needed to see you. Come with me."
"But, sir."
Chagnon pulled her by the elbow.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked her.
"Yes, sir."
"Then don't say another word. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir."
He had her elbow in his grip and walked unsteadily out the room and down the hall, past the fighting cube, past the red and green columns, through the crowds and to the bank of elevators. People turned and parted for them. Soldiers at the elevator stood down.
"She's with me," said Chagnon, waving away a policewoman with a scanner at the door. Corrag shivered despite the jets of warm air blowing through the elevator's ventilation system. Chagnon's fingers were unrelenting in their grip. She felt helpless, like a rabbit caught in the jaws of a predator, relaxed and oddly unafraid prior to the mortal bite. The elevator climbed. When it stopped, they were on the top floor of the Sandelsky complex. The elevator door opened, and Corrag recognized at once the black obelisk from MandolinMonkey, with its darkened reflective walls and negative spaces. Chagnon's smile lit up his teeth in a neon glow. She was really on the inside, but unlike Beithune had no desire to be there and, even worse, no plan as to how to get back out.
"Relax your mind. Don't think of anything. Don't try to block it. You could black out if you do. The neutrino wave will overpower any resistance."
They were sitting on opposite sides of a box of inbuilt scanners, staring at each other over the top. Chagnon continued:
"This is my latest design. The Memory Sponge. Demand is soaring. It can establish connectivity between any two people, sieving memory banks and correlating patterned nodes.
"So? What does that mean?"
"You and I, Corrag, will establish the links between us."
"Links?"
"That is right. The times and manners we have been together in multidimensional space that may have transpired either with or without our conscious knowledge, or without leaving a strong enough memory marker. If I told you I needed to see you, it was because my extraordinarily attuned senses detected something familiar about you."
"Will you have access to all my memories?"
"I could, but that's not my intent. So don't worry. I don't really care or want to have a read-out of your entire life taking up space in my mind, even in the cloud. Although there are uses for that. But I just want to know if and how we are linked. I want to prove a hunch. See if my mental apparatus is as sharp as I think it is. Is that understood?"
"How long will this take?"
"Just a few minutes. Relax. Otherwise I'll have to strap you in and force a reading. You don't want me to do that."
She had no choice. She leaned forward into the box and opened her eyes. A strange light flashed. She lost consciousness. When she came to her senses again she was sitting in a metal chair at a plain white table, and Chagnon was sitting beside her wiping her forehead with a damp cloth.
"Some people have a stronger reaction than others."
"Are we linked?" mumbled Corrag, dreading the response. The thought of being in any kind of a relationship with Chagnon was repellent to her.
"No," he said. He sounded disappointed. "Although there was a hint of an echo correlation. Sometimes the patterns are quite complex. One of the possible answers is the multidimensionality of time, along with space. My next advance will be to take the memory sponge into parallel frames, using a quantum dark matter tracer. Dark matter remains embedded at the quantum level, even in offspring, and leaves a time stamp of decay which it may be possible to read."
He stopped talking to wipe his own sweating forehead. Corrag had the sense that he was not even very aware of her physical presence. He was talking to himself. He stared into the console.
"You really need to be augmented, kid."
&nb
sp; "I'm not interested, really."
"Why not? You want to be part of the future, don't you? History has no time for losers. The unaugments will be rounded up and forcibly made to choose between ignorance and reason. Some of them, the recalcitrant or delusional will be terminated. There is just too much at stake. It's a shame. I am not in favor of violence. Do you know that all of our actions leave quantum tracers in our genes that get handed down to our children? That's why I have decided not to procreate. Please, do yourself a favor. Don't have children. And become an augmented citizen of the Homeland before it's too late."
"Funny. For all your technological wizardry and intellectual brilliance," said Corrag, smiling to herself. She remembered Kevin and Cesar, her friends, waiting for her in the park, and the bag of food she'd hidden outside the building. "I need to go, sir," she said.
"You can't. It's too dangerous. I must make sure you're safe. Stay with me, Corrag."
"Without a choice, without freedom, without a history? What would it be? There are bots for that."
He was silent, and Corrag waited.
"Promise me you'll come back. Here. This is my access card. I have many more. Get yourself into Sandelsky if you're in any trouble, any at all, and I'll make sure you have the best augment in the world."
"And which one is that?"
"The Sandelsky Gold Plan. Everybody knows that."
"Okay. I promise." She took the shining card from his outstretched hand, invisible in the negative light. He stared hard at her, with the gleaming whites of his eyes surrounding the black holes of his pupils. But she felt safe inside her head. He couldn't reach her now.
She rode the elevator to the ground floor with three Sandelsky security officers, their emosponders crackling with bits of heightened information. Outside the main entrance, a unit of Repho National Guard troops had assembled in the square, carrying snub nosed, laser assault rifles and nanofiber shields. Quadcopter bots bristling with missiles shot down the canyons of midtown in the night sky. Corrag hurried, pressing up the avenue to get back to the park.
An air of imminent panic had taken over the city. There were people rushing in all directions, and the boats in the canal were all headed north out to the river. Corrag didn't notice the silence that had fallen until she heard her name in the shadows and realized she was alone on the sidewalk. There in a doorway were Kevin and Cesar, the Bograd and supply bags at their feet.
"Corrag. Here."
She ducked in beside them and went to her knees. She didn't say anything, just holding her breath, holding their hands, eyes closed in prayer, not believing in the luck she'd had to run right across the Korazan Brigade's front line. As her eyes adjusted she could see figures crouched in the doorways across the canal up and down in both directions. Occasional pedestrians continued to run by on the sidewalk, oblivious, not wanting to know what was going down.
"The Alpha battle will begin with you, Corrag. When we fire, that is the signal," said Kevin, his hand on her shoulder, bringing her to her senses.
Corrag knew that.
It would be her call to set the match to a fight that would certainly destroy lives and hopefully the corruption of the Repho. The enemy, she now knew, were small men, old and feeble in their desires, straddling the world with large shadows cast by their technology and their delusions. If only Korazan could see Chagnon up close in his frailty and uncertainty, would he still seek this war? She wanted to say something, but Kevin would not understand. His face was set in hard lines, his eyes casting into the distance for the sight of a predetermined vision. They had trained and prepared for this. Again she had no choice.
"Come on, then," she said. "Follow me."
The streetlights went off after a tremulous last flicker. She took them as far as they could go back down the darkened avenue, until the National Guard troops on Sandelsky Plaza were within earshot, the sounds of the officers' communications on their emosponders coming out of the night along with the faint glow of lithium lightsticks that must have hung around their necks. Then, without speaking, they put into practice what they'd learned in the weeks of drill, assembling the Bograd by feel, in the dark. They worked seamlessly, and Kevin had the hard drive and the hydrogen tank connected and tapped the ground with his foot as a signal. Corrag turned and lifted the mid-barrel to Cesar's shoulders and placed herself in front to handle the sighting lens, cranking up the extension with one squeeze of the grip.
They were out on the sidewalk in full view of the plaza. It was dangerous, but with effort she forced the thought of fear from her mind, replacing it with the words of the Edmundstown Upper School mission: "Smile all the while". The image of Ricky appeared in her mind then superimposed on the words of the motto as they appeared on Ms. Schilling's nanoboard. The quadcopters of the Repho National Guard’s 44th Air Wing stationed across Long Island Sound slowed in their reconnoitering over the plaza, then dipped before they picked up speed, telegraphing their direction. When the box went green she pulled the trigger. A bolt of ions established the path for the fireball. The quadcopter fragmented at a distance of about 900 meters above street level. The explosion's remnants, balls of flaming destruction, screwballed into the side of the Sandelsky building, and sent the soldiers in the plaza diving for cover.
"Corrag!" It was Kevin calling her. She turned, and he was pointing behind them into the sky where a quadcopter had settled, hovering. Cesar and Corrag maneuvered the barrel around and Corrag quickly sighted. She pulled the trigger. The quadcopter fired at the same time. The water in the canal emptied over their heads. Through the water she could see another ball of fire come floating down to earth. She turned, and Kevin and Cesar were urging her along. The dim figures of Korazan fighters moved up the sidewalk, hunched over with their Sig Saurs in their hands, pumping their free fists in the air in encouragement. She heard a long burst of automatic fire from the plaza. They fell, taking cover in the doorways. When her Bograd team reached the bridge, Corrag could clearly see the National Guard troops not more than 100 yards away, setting up rocket stations and piling sandbags as quickly as they could around the perimeter of the plaza. She turned to Kevin.
"Set it to Scorch.” There were two settings on the surger, Tangent and Scorch. Scorch would burn everything in the path of the ions out to a preset distance. It would also use up the hydrogen propellant at a much quicker rate. Kevin gave the thumbs up. Cesar lifted the barrel, and he and Corrag stepped around the stone column of the bridge. Corrag set the crosshairs on the main door of the Sandelsky building and pulled the trigger. She knew she would never forget the cries of pain and anger of the National Guard soldiers as they were engulfed in the Bograd's blue flame. The fire swept the plaza from right to left, burning everything combustible on it down to ash in a matter of seconds. The heat was overwhelming. The smell of burning plastic mingled with the smell of charred flesh. The flame ball turned blue, and the fire receded back along the ion path as the hydrogen in the tank ran out. Corrag dropped the end of the barrel and doubled over. She fell wretching and stumbling down to the water's edge. Kevin grabbed her from behind, stopping her before she tumbled over the low wall.
"Get it out. It's in my eyes."
"Relax, Corrag. It's just smoke."
"My eyes are burning, Kevin."
"Relax."
Corrag could see in her mind's eye the canyon wall of the San Pedro dam behind Ben Calder. She could see Joan Hunnewell in the doorway of the Northern Lights farm. Her legs were heavy and she felt a strange weakness overcome her. Immediately she sensed the root of the sensation -- a new life stirring inside her, the flowing water that Abel Marin had urged her to follow. When she opened her eyes again, she could see Cesar against the stone column working the hard drive on the surger. Kevin turned her to face him. He looked determinedly into her eyes, his expression as enigmatic as ever to her. Behind him there were cargo boats coming up the canal from under the GW Bridge, barely visible in the distance. They were Repho troop transports. She was seized with a new thought; t
he threat that these boats posed was more dangerous than anything they could have foreseen. She heard Cesar's voice insistently breaking in on her musings.
"General wants us falling back right away. I relayed initial attack and that's all he wants. 'The day is done,' he said. Fall back at once is the orders."
"We can't. Let the others know to follow the orders. We go on. Inside."
"What?" Cesar was incredulous.
"I know where the network center is. We can liberate all the augments today. Destroy the Repho's surveillance and control capabilities."
"Corrag. You don't disobey the General when he says fall back."
"I know what I'm doing. You're free to go. Both of you." Corrag's look took in both men. The boats were now approaching the stone tidal barrier lining the avenue. They could see the orderly movement of troops on the decks. Cesar turned to Kevin.
"Brother, you can stay with her if you're crazy."
"I am."
Cesar took no longer than was necessary. He unlocked the hard drive from the surger and spoke into it as he moved with it slowly back to the corner of the avenue.
"Korazan troops disengage from the fight. Orderly retreat to base positions and assume street cover."
Kevin and Corrag stood together on the bridge over the canal, holding their bootleg Chinese made Sig Sauer .40 calibers. Ahead of them were the plaza and the burning remnants of the National Guard deployment. Behind them came the sound of armored zipbikes cranking up on the Hudson River landings. The men on the decks loading the zipbikes with ammunition and modifying their programs with mental synchronizers had the look, Corrag guessed, of augment shock troops, a development in the Repho state's arsenal of force -- augmented men, drawn from the prisons and rehab centers, who voluntarily or involuntarily gave themselves over as human-bot hybrids and were said to constantly receive superhuman doses of serotonin and dopamine supplements as a reward for their services.
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 19
