Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (29 page)

Fuck, he realized. It’s everywhere.

There’s hundreds of them,
someone sent over their tight link. Tempest, he thought.

…oh fuck…

…completely out-classed…

…weren’t ready for this…

Then Angel’s level-headed thoughts came through.

We have to converge
,
she sent.
Individually, we’re getting swamped. Together, our effective signal will be stronger.

Rangan opened his eyes. Converge. Jesus. They were intentionally as spread out as they could be. And oh fucking hell.

It was something out of a nightmare.

Ahead of him, some protesters were standing around in shock, while hundreds of others were moving in a human wave at the nearest row of riot police, the ones standing in a line in front of the museum. As he watched, the riot cops fired a volley of tear gas and rubber bullets at the oncoming flood. Then the enraged mob was on them, and riot police were holding up their transparent shields, swinging electrified truncheons down on rioters, and being dragged down.

A tear gas canister flew towards him and Rangan ducked. Another landed feet from him, already giving off thick yellow clouds. The air was suddenly filled with the whizzing of rubber bullets, with the horrid pepper smell of tear gas. He coughed hard. His eyes stung and watered up immediately. He crouched down, ripped off his backpack, pulled out goggles and mask and pulled them over his head.

He looked back up in time to see a Molotov cocktail land in the back ranks of the riot cops, lighting one on fire. Then another sailed even further, striking the Museum of National History itself.

Alan motherfucking Turing. Where were the goddamn fire trucks?

He coughed again. His eyes were still watering, still burning from the tear gas he’d gotten in them in just those few seconds. The goggles were fogging up already.

Rangan!
He heard Angel calling for him.

I’m here!
he sent back.
Gather up. Where?

7
^th
Street,
Angel replied.
The south side of the Mall.

Rangan stood back up, spun to get his bearings. An enraged protester ran into him, bounced off, looked suddenly puzzled, less enraged, then got far enough away that the rage took over again. Rangan turned, watching him, then spun again. He had to go east, and south. Just a block or two each. He watched angry young protesters in goggles and bandanas light Molotovs and hurl them towards police and vehicles, watched rubber bullets slam into one of them. Watched a cop bring an electrified truncheon down on one rioter, only to have two more club him from behind with wooden fragments of signs or stages, bearing the police officer to the ground.

Just a couple blocks. Just ten or twenty thousand people between him and there.

K
ade surfed
from mindstream to mindstream, frantically. It was chaos. It was nuts. The whole crowd had erupted into mob mentality, into complete insanity.

No.

Even through the limited data coming across the mindstream feeds he could tell it wasn’t just a mob. Wasn’t just emergent anger.

This mob had been created.

Goddammit, he thought. I could just log in, debug what’s going on!

But he couldn’t, not any more.

The back doors were gone.

He was on the other side of the planet.

And all he could do was watch.

B
reece stuck
his palm in the rioter’s face and shoved, then kicked him in the groin for good measure. The man doubled over in pain.

He frowned. His tactical contacts were informing him of transmission difficulties. Several areas where either transmitters were malfunctioning… or someone was jamming him.

And now some of them were moving.

He narrowed his eyes, reached into a pocket to be sure the gun was there, and moved to pick off one of these mobile “malfunctions”.

R
angan pushed and shoved
. He dodged cops and fights. The air was thick with smoke now, yellow from the tear gas canisters blending with black from the burn of Molotovs. Some Molotovs had made it to their targets. Others had a way of falling short, falling into the crowd. Between those and the tear gas, he could no longer see the sky, just clouds of thick smoke, everywhere he turned.

He was halfway to 7
^th
when an impenetrable press of bodies forced him to turn towards one of the major stages. A jam band had been playing here the first time he’d come, their minds interlinked with Nexus. A hundred people had been dancing, totally blissed out, their egos dissolved, all hippy union with each other and the band.

Now rage seethed from all around it, as they hoisted a burning, life-size Stockton puppet from its neck. At the nearest corner of the stage, a man had a fuel cell pulled up, was using it to fill glass bottles with whatever it burned, had amassed quite a collection. Another man next to him stuffed one with a rag, stood tall with it in his hand, pointed up, way up. Rangan followed the man’s finger for an instant, saw one of the aerostats, and abruptly covered his face, brought his gaze back down.

Oh no, Rangan thought. Oh fucking no.

The thrower had the Molotov lit now, had it cocked way back for a good throw up at the hovering Homeland Security blimp.

Something struck the thrower from above. Projectile or projectiles, Rangan would never be sure. But they toppled him backwards, driving the man’s upper body straight down. Rangan saw it happen in slow motion, started to turn but it was too late; the lit Molotov was suddenly crashing backwards, down into the pile of filled and half-filled fuel bottles.

“Geeeeeeeeet doooooooooown!”

He tried to yell, but it came out in slow motion.

The explosion was a searing shock of heat, then a roar that knocked him from his feet. The world was spinning again. There was a ringing in his ears, and above that there were screams.

Rangan tried to look around, found someone atop him, shoved his way free, onto one knee on the ground. There was smoke everywhere. People were down. The stage was listing over, one corner of it gone, the rest on fire. A man was upright, stumbling around, aflame. Others were on their knees or on the ground, burning. His own eyes were on fire. He coughed, his lungs burning. He brought his hands to his face, searching for his goggles, for his mask. They weren’t there. He turned, looking for them on the ground. Instead he saw a line of riot police advancing.

Oh shit, he thought.

Rangan forced himself up. His lungs hurt, he could barely see through the smoke and the stinging in his eyes. He had to get to Angel. Move east. Move south. Move. Move. Move. He stumbled, crawled, stood, fell, stood. He remembered his scarf, pulled it up over his nose and mouth. He tried to yell out to the others with his mind, heard nothing back, and then he realized his hat was gone too. The hat with the hidden antenna that boosted his range. Shit.

He felt something change then, and he turned, looked. Through the smoke he saw a deeper yellow: Saffron robes, a shaved head, moving in the opposite direction. He felt the hate push back, felt something else touch him, a touch of that tranquility.

Then in a disorienting flash everything changed. He was outside the crowd, outside the Mall, looking down onto a hundred thousand people, not as individuals, but as a whole, a single being, a single mind.

Like Ilya would have seen it, he realized.

For that instant his own mind was clear, at peace. And in that clarity, the mind he looked down on…

That mind of a hundred thousand people was mentally ill. Insane. Drugged or diseased. Raging with a sickness.

Something else passed through him then. A feeling of being
recognized
.

Then it was gone – the perspective, the clarity, the peace. He was back in his body, the hate pressing in on him, the smoke all around him, screams and the sound of clashes, and the acrid sting of tear gas. There were no yellow robes.

Did I fucking hallucinate that? Rangan wondered.

He coughed and turned, stumbled on towards 7
^th
Street. He was almost there when a figure loomed out of the smoke. Rangan moved to go around him, but the man moved too, and then a fist rammed the breath out of him. Rangan doubled over in pain and shock. Then something swept his feet out from under him. He landed on his back, slamming his spine into the backpack containing the NANCie below him, in more pain, gasping. Then there was a hand on his throat, a bearded, scarred face inches from his own, dreadlocks falling around him, intense blue eyes staring down into his.

The man whispered hoarsely at him, “Who are you, compadre? And how are you causing the interference?”

The voice was rough, husky.

Rangan stared up at the man. This was the one. This was the one behind the hate, the rage, the amplification of the riot.

Then he felt his assailant’s hand close tighter around his throat.

“Who?” the man repeated. “And how?”

Then something slammed into the man above Rangan, knocking him away in a rolling blur of black and white checks and jester bells.

Rangan rolled to the side, coughing, his eyes burning, filled with tears.

Yards away from him, Cheyenne was on top of the scarred and bearded man, her muscled arms around his neck in a headlock.

Rangan pushed himself up to one knee.

That’s him,
he sent to Cheyenne.
He’s the one behind…

The scarred man reached back with one arm and flipped Cheyenne over his back, sending her flying through the air. Other people around them yelled in fear.

Rangan felt fear surge through him. He pushed up to standing, wobbling on his feet. He saw the scarred man come up to standing now.

Except the dreadlocks were askew. The beard and scar were half ripped off. They were fake, a disguise, like Rangan’s.

Rangan tried to turn, but his feet tangled on something, and suddenly he was down on the ground. He rolled, and he was facing up, and the man with the scar that wasn’t a scar and the beard that wasn’t a beard was standing above him, something in his hand, pointed down at Rangan, a roll of paper.

No. A gun, wrapped in a roll of paper.

“Last chance,” the man said. “Who are you?” The scar was half off, dangling from the top. Beneath it, Rangan saw there was another face.

He opened his mouth, to say something, to stay alive.

The blur came out of nowhere, hugely muscled limbs atop a torso moving like a locomotive. But this time the man moved faster, spun, did something. Rangan heard a crack. Then he saw the man, with Cheyenne’s arm trapped, lifted up to bear her bodyweight, and twisted in an unnatural angle.

Cheyenne screamed.

The man dropped her to the ground.

She kept screaming.

Rangan was crawling backwards as the man turned, took another step towards him.

“Three,” the man said. “Two.”

“I’m–” Rangan started.

“That’s enough,” another voice said.

Rangan looked over, and there was another figure there, a woman, blonde, tanned, in an oversized overcoat, just paces away. She held one arm towards the man above him, the overly long sleeve covering her hand and whatever was in it.

“This isn’t any of your business,” the man said. He was looking at the woman now, not at Rangan. In profile from this side, the dreadlock wig was askew, the beard was gone, revealing the man’s jawline.

“Safety the gun,” she said. “Then put it on the ground, still covered.”

Cheyenne was groaning beyond them, writhing in pain at whatever he’d done to her arm. Smoke filled the air. Rangan coughed, his eyes burning.

“You won’t shoot,” the man replied.

“You know I will,” the blonde woman said.

“Fine,” the man above Rangan said. There was a click, and then the man crouched down, placed a bundle at Rangan’s feet, and rose again.

“Now the transmitter,” the woman said.

The man shrugged. He reached his hand into a pocket, and very slowly pulled it out, a flat black rectangle he held in two fingers. He gestured with it at the woman. “You see what happened here? You see how they
fought?
You see how they were about to just walk away?”

“I see how many people you killed. People who agreed with you. Give it to me.”

People who agreed with you, Rangan thought. Who the fuck were these people?

The man who’d almost killed him tossed the transmitter at the woman’s feet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’s done is done.”

“You, on the ground,” the woman said. “Get your friend and get out of here.”

Oh fuck yes, Rangan thought.

R
angan half
-carried Cheyenne through a world gone haywire, looking for Angel and Tempest. There were flames everywhere. Signs were burning. Stages were burning. Trees were burning. Buildings were burning. The tear gas and the acrid smoke from the fires were filling his lungs. Tears and snot were running from his inflamed face. Sirens were wailing. Molotovs were still hurling through the air. The sound of clashes between police and rioters came from all directions, the sounds of truncheons being brought down onto bone, of rubber bullets slamming into bodies, of the rage-filled screams of tens of thousands of humans gone mad, ripping at the better armed and trained police forces trying to quell their eruption. Above it all, Cheyenne’s pain was overwhelming across their Nexus link, her right arm and shoulder sending out waves and waves of agony. They passed people lying prone on the ground, and Rangan just hoped they weren’t dead.

Then the hate flipped off, like a switch. He almost missed a step, even buffered as he was by his NANCie, then caught himself and Cheyenne. She’d turned it off. Whoever that woman was.

Cheyenne groaned in pain. More smoke rose into the sky. More screams came from somewhere off to his left, mixed with the dull crack of breaking bones. A crash and whoosh came as another Molotov struck home somewhere else. Rangan coughed again, and harder, as the burning penetrated deeper into his lungs.

That woman had turned off the hate machine.