Icarus Effect de-1

by James Swallow

  Thirteen Kilometers East of Newfoundland-North Atlantic

  He never felt the impact when he hit the rolling surface of the sea. It was the only mercy he had; perhaps it was the shock of the fall, perhaps his battered body shutting down for a brief moment in some attempt to protect him from greater trauma.

  At first, Saxon saw only flashes. The silver of the moon on the wave tops below him. A flicker of light from the jet as he spiraled away from it, the navigation lights in the dark.

  Then he was in the cradle of the shouting winds, snared by gravity. He couldn't see the ocean rushing up to meet him, and for long moments

  Saxon felt himself disconnect from the real. He could have been floating in the roaring darkness, lost in the starless space.

  The cold embrace leached the heat from his bones; Saxon squinted through the windburn and made out what he thought was the surface of the water, coming up fast, dappled by the moon's glow.

  He extended his arms like they had taught him in parachute training, making his whole body an aerofoil, trying to slow himself as much as he could. And then, when he couldn't chance it any longer, he triggered the high-fall augmentation implanted in the base of his spine.

  The device stuttered into life and cast a writhing sphere of electromagnetic energy about him, lightninglike sparks flashing where the field interacted with the air molecules. The implant ran past its tolerance limit, but Saxon retriggered it, cycling the device over and over. He felt it go hot, smoldering and heavy like a block of newly forged iron embedded in his back. The high-fall was never designed to do the job of a parachute; it was a short-span, low-duration technology, a mechanism spun off from safety implants for racing drivers, firefighters, steeplejacks.

  He screamed as it burned into him, and the blackness engulfed everything. For a moment, at least.

  Then he was in the frigid rise and fall of the waters, the salt brine smothering him with every new wave. He spun and turned, numb from the waist down. Warning telltales displayed in the corners of his optic field, function indicators for his cyberlegs showing red. He choked and shivered, feeling the weight of the augmented limbs pulling on him, robbing him of all buoyancy.

  The ocean toyed with him, and then grew bored. Saxon began to sink, and he couldn't find the strength to fight the icy embrace of the waters.

  All his defiance, his determination… it was bleeding away, second by second.

  Then he saw the lights below, rising. The waters parting as something as large as a truck broke the surface. He saw a shiny, beetlelike carapace, an arch of what might be shell. Just beneath the water, ropes of steel moved past his damaged legs, ensnaring him.

  Saxon's mind filled in the gaps; he imagined a massive nautilus coming up from the seabed to gather him into its tentacles, the giant monstrous thing festooned with glaring, sodium-bright lamps.

  He blacked out for the second time as it pulled him toward it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dundalk-Maryland-United States of America

  Through the dirty glass of the window, Kelso watched the lights of Baltimore turn dim as the sky grew lighter, losing herself in the passage of the clouds overhead and the never-ending wash of the water against the concrete pilings out on the old, abandoned docks.

  Sleep, when she'd been able to snatch a little of it, was a fitful and troubled thing. Anna couldn't settle. She dreamed about skies full of squawking ravens, and vast black wings that wheeled and turned in the sky, blotting out the watery glow of a sullen sun. In the end, Anna stayed awake, keeping to the margins of Lebedev's compound while the men from the New Sons worked at tasks she could only guess at, and

  D-Bar's hackers pored over the sealed files in the stolen flash drive. The inside of the warehouse looked exactly like what it was-a staging area for an antigovernmental terror group-and it ground against all Kelso's training as a federal agent to stand among it and do nothing.

  So she went to the windows and watched the march of the morning approaching. Looking out at the distant city, Anna wondered who was out there, looking for her. Drake would be leading the capture team, she imagined. He would have considered it a personal slight that her escape had happened on his watch. Sorrow crossed her face. What are they saying about me? She didn't want to know the answer, didn't want to imagine the looks in the eyes of the men and women who had served with her. All of them would believe the lie about the death of Ron Temple and the murders at his home. They would hate her.

  She wanted so much to run, to give in to the base impulse that tensed in the muscles of her hands. But out there, she would be prey. If

  Lebedev's stories were true, she had nowhere to go. Even if they were not, the fact did not change. Anna Kelso was alone, and she had been forced into a single choice she did not want to make.

  Trust or distrust.

  But that was the corrosive nature of any conspiracy; it played on the fears inherent in all human beings, the terror of having your secrets known by the unknown, the vicarious thrill of keeping a sinister secret yourself. These people, this group Lebedev called the Illuminati… What they were doing lived in darkness, and the part of Anna that was still an officer of the law wanted to see them dragged screaming into the light.

  She found herself back at the army tent, and ducked beneath the door flap. The place was empty, but the comms gear and the big screen were as live as they had been hours earlier. The snow of static on the monitor shifted slightly as she came closer, as if her presence were a breeze disturbing a scattering of leaves.

  "I know you can hear me," she said. "I want to ask you something."

  After a few seconds, the static settled into the familiar pattern of dispersion she'd seen before, the phantom no-face. "I will help you if I can,

  Anna," said Janus. "But please understand that I don't have all the answers "

  "These people… the Illuminati. The Tyrants. Back in D.C. there was something that D-Bar said to me, a phrase that I couldn't get out of my head." She sighed. "He talked about something called 'the Icarus Effect.'"

  "Ah, yes. A sociological construct, originally conceived in 2019 by Doctor Malcolm Bonner of the University of Texas. It's a very interesting theory, a societal echo of something that occurs in nature. Imagine a pack of animals, among which is a single individual exhibiting signs of nascent evolutional superiority. Not common superiority, that is, but a marked difference from the norm. A rare excessive." The ghost-face shimmered. "The individual's renegade nature threatens the stability of the pack. The others close ranks against it. Expunge or terminate it.

  Stability returns, and the pace of evolution is slowed to a more manageable scale."

  "We're not talking about animals here," Anna insisted. "This is about people."

  "Indeed. But the principle is the same. Like brave but foolhardy Icarus, those who dare to go beyond the boundaries will fall to their deaths."

  "But who gets to choose where those boundaries are?" she asked. "This group Lebedev talked about. I thought the Illuminati were just a historical curiosity, some kind of pre-millennium modern myth. But you expect me to believe that they're still around, and they've set themselves up as the… the stewards of humanity?"

  "I couldn't have put it better myself" Janus allowed. "They have been here for a very long time, Anna. They believe that gives them the right to run the world, and so they do not wait for the Icarus Effect to play itself out. They induce it wherever and whenever they deem it suitable. The Tyrants are one of the tools they use."

  A chill passed over her. "How… how many times have they done this?"

  "You mean, is this the first time they have manipulated global events to their own design? Oh, no. As I said before, the Illuminati have actively taken control of human history in this manner on many occasions. They have a long, long reach. World wars, disasters, famine, assassinations, cover-ups…all have been set in motion to deliberately retard the advancement of society when it threatened to go too far beyond the borders they created. We can't be allowe
d to fly too close to the sun, do you see?" Anna thought she detected bitterness in the artificially distorted voice. "Imagine a vast steel hand enveloping the world. We must wear the invisible chains they have fashioned for us, because they believe only they have the right to judge when humanity can step from the cradle."

  The screen flickered and began to display a mosaic of images, video, and still photographs from the last hundred years. She saw soldiers on the battlegrounds of the Great War, Vietnam, the Pacific, Europe, the Persian Gulf. Grainy footage of a space shuttle blossoming into a fireball. A clip from the Zapruder film. The Berlin Wall midcollapse. Waves of dark oil across the Louisiana coastline. Gas attacks on the Tokyo subway.

  Diagrams of what looked like a flying saucer. Blurry news camera shots of an airliner striking the second tower. Tanks rolling through the burning streets of Jerusalem; and there was more, but she couldn't recognize every fractional moment.

  Anna thought about Janus's words and looked down at her hands, very aware that she was seeing them not through the eyes she had been born with, but through augmentations that made her more than human. Transhuman. The word resonated with cold possibility; it felt a million miles away from Anna's very ordinary existence. The hacker seemed to sense her train of thought. "A society that can augment itself at will, a human race capable of exceeding its physical limits through the application of technology… Can you imagine what kind of threat such a thing would be to those who want to control us?"

  "We're flying too close to the sun," she said to herself.

  "The Illuminati see themselves as an intellectual elite. If we are Icarus, they think of themselves as Daedalus, his father. The guiding hand of the parent. The creator and mentor."

  Anna's lip curled. "I studied Greek mythology in college, and I remember that Daedalus was an arrogant bastard. The man built a maze of death, and killed his nephew when he thought he might be smarter than him."

  "And the Illuminati have killed, and worse. But the truth is, what you have seen is only one thread in the whole. What is taking place right now, the assassinations that claimed the life of your friend and all the others, these things are only the precursor. This is just one battle in a greater campaign they plan to win. At any cost."

  Her mouth went dry as the scope of that statement settled in her thoughts. "What do you mean?"

  When Janus replied, she felt a stab of fear deep in her gut. "Would you like me to show you, Anna? I've been building a model of all the potentials. It is incomplete, but there is truth there. You could consider it… a glimpse of our tomorrows."

  And then she heard herself answering. "Show me."

  The hacker Janus did as Anna asked. The screen rippled, and the cascade of images returned-but this time they were almost too fast for her to register, a barrage of light and color and sound that washed over her with hypnotic force. She couldn't look away, and across her scalp she felt her skin crawl. The image-storm stuttered and blinked like an old analog television signal, hazing as it tried to tune itself into her. Anna suddenly became aware of the augmented optics in her eye sockets, for the first time feeling them as if they were spheres of hard, heavy steel.

  Something was happening; Janus's images were moving in synchrony with the digital processors built into her artificial eyes. It was like a switch flipping inside her mind; and she saw – the skyline of a city made of tiers, fires raging, and weapons discharges sparkling in the twilight, chaos, and disorder rising like a tide – crowds of panicked people desperately trying to flee hordes of crazed rioters, all of them augmented, all of them mad with wild fury – a wall of video screens filled with a storm of screaming, hissing static, and before them an enhancile woman collapsing to her knees, tearing at herself in crazed agony – orbiting above the Earth, a communications satellite shutting down, lights dimming, dish antenna retracting. Then video screens, holograms, advertising billboards, cell phones, televisions, computer monitors, all of them showing the same message in bright red letters – NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL – a field of crosses, made from machine parts and cybernetic limbs, behind a sunrise over barren grassland. In the distance, a string of fallen power lines- -a ghost town of fallen buildings and empty streets-a dead future

  It ended as quickly as it had started, and Anna stumbled, suddenly robbed of her balance. Her eyes throbbed and her skull ached. The woman rubbed at the skin of her face and it was hot to the touch. She glared up at the screen, which had returned to its neutral aspect.

  "What the hell… did you do to me?" Kelso was familiar with strobe-effect crowd-control systems, and she wondered if Janus had used something similar on her, the pulse-image stream casting some kind of soporific effect through her optics. She felt weak and nauseated.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disorient you," came the reply. "But the data is only sketchy. It is only the impression of a possibility. It's difficult to comprehend in a more linear fashion. Try to breathe deeply. Normalize your heartbeat. You're not injured, believe me."

  Anna glared at the screen. "You're lucky you're not standing right here in front of me…" She trailed off, her stomach tightening.

  "I'm sorry " Janus repeated. "But do you understand now? Did you see?" She took a shuddering breath. "I'm starting to, I think."

  There was movement behind her, and she turned to see Lebedev enter the tent. He had a curious look on his face, as if he realized he had intruded on something private. "Is everything all right?"

  "Fine," Anna bit out. "Are you looking for me?"

  He nodded, sparing Janus's screen a quick look. "We have a problem. D-Bar and my people have gone through the contents of the flash drive you brought to us. There's a lot of material there, but what we really want exists in a subpartition that we cannot access. The key to the Killing

  Floor is inside that thing, if only we can crack it open. But it is protected with multiple-layer firewalls and a kill-switch. If we try to brute-force it, the drive will erase itself."

  Anna folded her arms. "I can't help you with that. Ron Temple was the only one who knew the codes for his subnet, and the Tyrants killed him right in front of me." She turned to the screen. "Can't you do something? I thought Juggernaut's hackers were the best of the best?"

  "Even we have our limits " admitted Janus. "I've been watching D-Bar's attempts to crack the device. He won't be successful. To penetrate the subpartition, we need a connection to an active Tyrant computer server. It is as if the first lock nestles inside a second. Without both, it won't open."

  "Then we're no better off than we were a day ago…" Lebedev said, his expression turning stormy.

  "There has to be some way!" Anna retorted. "After everything I went through for those damn files, we can't just write this off!"

  The ghost-image in the screen shifted slightly. "There's another solution " said the hacker, after a few long moments of silence.

  "Explain," said Lebedev.

  "It will be here within the hour."

  They waited at the dockside, and Kelso scanned the surface of the shipping channel. The water was murky, patched with rainbows of fuel oil and slicks of floating trash. Out in the middle of the vast canal, huge robot cargo ships without conning towers or portholes sailed silently toward the docks, icebergs of steel emblazoned with the names of the corporations that owned them.

  Beneath the turgid waters, something stirred, coming closer, making ripples into waves as it rose up from the gloom.

  "There!" Powell called out, pointing with a slender cyberarm. He was one of the New Sons, and from what Anna had been able to gather from watching him interact with Lebedev, the man had some degree of authority in the group. He carried himself with a swagger, and she saw prison tattoos peeking out from under the collar of his body armor. His men came quickly to the quay and took up firing positions; they were armed with an assortment of rifles, everything from twenty-year-old Heckler amp; Koch assault weapons, through to the modern MAO submachine guns that had supplanted the old AK-47 as the signature firearm of reb
ellions the world over.

  Lebedev frowned at the river as the water churned and a shape broke the surface. Anna saw a steel spine and plates of anechoic polymer as the vessel rose into the sunlight.

  D-Bar craned his neck to get a better look. "It's an autonomous trawler sub… Like, the little brother of the big computer-controlled cargo barges." Fleets of similar unmanned ships, deployed from carriers in the Atlantic, plumbed the depths for shoals of fish driven from the higher waters by the effects of pollution. "Our buddy Janus must have reprogrammed this one, split it off, and sent it here."

  A hatch opened on the dorsal hull, the plates retracting backward, and the stink of wet, rotting fish billowed out to assail them.

  Powell nodded to one of his men. "Check it."

  Gingerly, the man dropped from the concrete dock onto the top of the bobbing trawler and approached the opening. It was dark inside, and

  Anna couldn't make out anything. Powell's man snapped on a flashlight clipped beneath the barrel of his rifle and aimed it inside. "What am I looking for?" He stepped into the open hatch, grimacing at the smell. "I don't-"

  Without a moment to cry out, the man suddenly vanished, pulled from sight by something inside the trawler. Anna heard a rattling thud from within, and a moment later, Powell's man was thrown back out of the open hatch, arms pinwheeling as he fell into the dirty water. D-Bar swore and backed away from the canal's edge.

  The upper torso of a stocky, muscular figure emerged from the hatch, aiming the rifle back at the dock. Anna caught a glimpse of a grimy, weary face glaring down the weapon's iron sights.

  Powell and the others all immediately took aim. Lebedev shook his head. "No, no!" he cried. "Put your guns down! Put them down!"

  Anna could see that Powell wasn't convinced, but he lowered his assault rifle and his men did the same; still, they kept their fingers close to the triggers, ready to snap back to a firing stance in a heartbeat.

  "Where is this?" called the man on the trawler. His accent was rough, British.