Authors: Ramez Naam
Then the gun went off, and a freight train punched Jake in the chest.
Sam dove through the doorway into the boys’ room as the man opened fire. Something grazed her side as she did. She came down in a roll, back up to her feat, her mind working overtime.
“I’m not your enemy!” she yelled out through the door.
No response. The man’s mind was gone. He’d gone into receive-only mode so she couldn’t sense him.
She stepped behind the door, nearest the shooter, then looked around. She could dive out through the window, run towards Jake and the children. But the other men must be armed too. She needed a weapon. She needed to know what the fuck was going on.
Her augmented hearing picked up the footfalls in the hallway. He was stalking her, coming this way, quietly.
She closed her eyes, gave her hearing her full attention. The man’s footfalls gave him away. He was almost to the door, hugging the opposite wall of the hallway to give himself space, keep the advantage of his gun.
He was just across the thin wall from her now.
Sam made up her mind. She backed away from the wall, then hurled herself forward, turning her shoulder into it at the last instant.
Her augmented muscles and organic carbon-fiber bones crashed her through the thin wall. Wood splintered and gave. Drywall exploded. Then she was through, and her momentum drove her into the surprised soldier as he tried to turn, to bring his gun around.
The blow knocked him back, even as the gun boomed again in the small space. He kicked out from her, lightning fast, trying to create room, and she caught the foot with both hands, used it to spin him around like a plank. He hit the ground hard, face first, but rolled like a pro, faster than any normal human, clearly enhanced, the gun still in his hand, rising around to get a shot.
Then her foot stomped down on the forearm of his gun hand, pinning it as she stepped over him. He kept fighting, lashed out with a vicious, inhumanly fast fist towards her exposed groin. She brought her knee up faster, blocked his fist with her shin, then dropped all her weight on him with that knee, knocking the wind from him. Still he struggled, boosted muscles straining at her. So Sam took the gun from his hand and slammed it grip-first into the side of his head, below his ear. Once, twice, three times. And finally the man went limp.
Sam rose, the gun in her hand. Silenced. At least four rounds left. She turned towards the front of the house, kicked the door open in time to see one of the men put a bullet into Jake’s chest.
“NO!” Sam screamed. Distantly she heard the man who’d shot Jake cursing.
Sam raised her gun to fire but Sarai was there, in the line of sight, screaming now. She’d was trying to exit the van but the Mira woman had her by the arm. The other Mira soldier fired towards the house, and Sam dropped and rolled, her heart pounding in her chest.
She heard gravel crunch outside. They were coming towards her. She forced herself to visualize the courtyard. She had to shoot low, aim for the soldiers’ legs, stay clear of Sarai and the van and any other kids that had managed to break free.
Sam popped up in the window of the girls’ room, forced herself to take stock of the situation before she fired, to be sure that no children were in the way.
Her hesitation almost killed her. The Mira soldier who’d shot Jake fired on her and she felt a bullet punch into her left tricep. She fired back twice, ignored the burning pain, and saw the man go down as her bullets took him in the left leg.
Then she dropped below the window, rolled to another spot in the room. The wall would offer only scant protection.
She could hear the woman yelling now. “The children are the top priority! We have to get them out of here.”
Sam popped up again and the soldiers were under cover, on the other side of the van, climbing into it on the passenger side. One slid across to the driver’s side and then the van was moving. Sam took careful aim at his head and fired once, twice, thrice, four times, until the gun clicked empty. The shots hit the armored windshield, spiderwebbed it but didn’t break through. The van rushed forward and out the gate.
Sam threw herself through the window, shattering the remaining glass, feeling it cut into her in a dozen places, rolled, and came up sprinting at the retreating rear of the van. It disappeared out the gate as she crossed the courtyard. She could feel Jake’s pain and fear but she ignored it, pushed herself harder. Her left tricep groaned with the pain of the bullet wound, but Sam ignored that too. She made the gate at a full sprint and could see the van ahead, reaching the turn in the road. She ran harder, putting every ounce of effort into her legs, feeling her lungs burning, willing the van to slow down at the turn.
The van hit the turn at speed, skidded as it came around, its tires biting into the gravel, its driver expertly navigating the road.
She threw herself forward with all she had, sent her body into a horizontal leap, arms extended. One finger brushed the bumper, and for a moment she knew she had it, knew she would stop these men, whoever they were, knew she would have her children back.
Then her finger slipped off, and she crashed, rolling and skidding into the gravel as the van sped away.
Sam lay there panting for a moment. The jeep. They’d abandoned the jeep.
She pushed herself to her feet. There was gravel in the skin of her face. The palms of her hands were lacerated from her fall. A dozen cuts covered her from the glass of the window. Dust was matting blood into her hair, onto her face, everywhere. She ran hard, back uphill, got in view of the gate in time to see the jeep go up in a fireball that hit her with its searing heat from here.
She kept running, her mind refusing to believe, willing herself to find a fire extinguisher, put out the flames, chase them down.
And then she saw Jake.
34
MOST TO GAIN
Saturday October 27th
Holtzmann forced himself to sleep via Nexus. He had to rest. He had to clear his head. He had to get perspective.
He woke too soon, his heart pounding in his chest. The clock in his mind read 1.16am.
He couldn’t shake this dread. Couldn’t shake this fear that he’d been so wrong. That he’d misunderstood everything. That the world was an even darker place than he’d suspected.
He slipped out of bed, as silently as he could. Anne murmured something. He looked at her and his heart ached. What had happened that he’d decided to lie to her? To hide what was going on? What would happen now? If he was right… If he was right… Her life was in danger too.
Let me be wrong
,
he prayed to a God he hadn’t believed in since his teens. Please, Lord, let me be wrong.
Holtzmann padded into his home office, closed the door behind him, and turned on the secure terminal. He swiped his finger across the print reader, held still for the retinal scan, and then spoke his passphrase.
The terminal came alive, the Department of Homeland Security’s eagle-and-shield logo emblazoned on the screen, the ERD’s smaller atom-double-helix-and-shield sigil superimposed on its bottom right corner.
He navigated through the system, into Project November. Cooper’s team had built this, under his supervision. He’d hated that they’d made this, but it had been a miniscule crime compared to the ones he faced now.
He ignored the source code, pulled up the specifications instead. There, the on-the-wire protocol definition. He took snapshots of the data on the screen with his mind’s eye, forced his Nexus OS to commit them to storage. Then one more thing. The encryption key. Where did it live? He trawled through config options. There it was. The key itself was obscured. He had to re-enter his passphrase, his voice shaking so much he was surprised that the system took it, then answer three challenges, and then and only then the system revealed the key to him. It was a long string of hexadecimal that would make no sense to a human, but which would unlock the communication between November node and November controller. He took a snapshot of the key, verified that it was saved, then disconnected himself from the system.
His heart was pounding now. He was sweating. His breath came short. He was wrong. He was sure he was wrong. He
must be
wrong. But what if he was right?
He wanted another opiate surge. He wanted to make it all go away. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. This was too big. He had to know.
Holtzmann darkened the terminal screen, leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, and went back to his memories of that horrible day in July. The comms log. There. The encrypted traffic he’d picked up.
Encrypted data. On a Nexus frequency. Joe Duran scowling as Holtzmann looked back and forth, looked for the source behind him.
?RU5L8PP0hLarBNxfoQM23wG6+KTCEBhOIAAQyPPc76+TWhj+X/
He took the encrypted transmissions, opened them in a decryption app, and applied the private key.
The key matched.
The assassins hadn’t just used Nexus from his lab. They’d used
his code.
That was how they’d pulled off an attack so sophisticated, so far beyond what the PLF had done in years. They’d used
his work
.
His heart wanted to burst out of his chest now. His face was flushed. He wanted to scream and to weep.
One last thing to check. He pulled the on-the-wire protocol definition up in his mind’s eye, let it fill the top half of his vision while the decrypted communication filled the bottom half.
The protocol definition was a key, a legend. It let him turn the binary language of the decrypted signals into something that made sense.
He moved slowly, carefully. There in the protocol definition was the command for “fire”, the arguments that it took. He searched through the decrypted signals, looking, looking. Was it there? Could there be some mistake? Could he be wrong?
Then he found it. The Fire command.
He checked its definition again. The Fire function took two arguments, the object identifier and an offset from that target. He translated what he saw in the binary into something he could read.
FIRE (
And he was right. He was so so right. And he wished he weren’t.
Someone had used the Nexus from his lab. Someone had used the software his team had built. They’d used it to take control of Steve Travers, to turn him into a robot assassin, they’d used it to tell him to fire.
And to fire half a meter to the left of his target.
They’d used it to shoot at the President, but not to hit him. To miss.
“They could have at least been better shots!”
Anne said in his memories.
Oh no. They hit exactly what they meant to.
Who had the most to gain?
Nakamura’s voice asked him.
Stockton was
losing
until the PLF tried to kill him
, Anne answered.
He’s going to win
because of
the assassination attempt.
The answer was clear.
The President had the most to gain.
35
LAST WORDS
Saturday October 27th
Sam crossed the courtyard to Jake, fell to her knees at his side. He was face down in the gravel. His mind was still there, but in pain, and fading. A red stain was spreading across his back. A puddle was forming under him. There was a hole in his shirt, in the flesh below, where the bullet had punched all the way through him.
“Jake, Jake,” she said. “Oh my God, Jake.”
He groaned in pain. “Sunee…” he said weakly. His mind was faltering, confused, weak from blood loss.
Sam put her hands on his shirt, ripped it open as gently as she could, tried to see the wound better.
It was bad. The bullet had punched through his lung, had sent an expanding cone of carnage through his chest cavity. There was blood everywhere. Something had nicked a major blood vessel.
“Sunee…” he groaned. He was reaching out for her with his mind, trying to feel her more. She could feel him fading, fading further.
She balled up the shirt, pressed it into the wound as best she could. The blood kept coming.
No doctor, she thought. No vehicle
.
“Let me touch you…” he moaned. “Please.”
“You’re not going to die,” she told him.
His eyes were open. He was staring at her. He knew what was coming.
“Please…” he begged her.
Tears rolled down Sam’s face. A sob ripped its way out of her. She nodded. “Yes.”
Then she opened herself to him, opened herself as wide as she could, let him see who she was.
His eyes went wide as he drank her in, a confusion of images and memories and sensations. Above it all she sent her feelings for him, her admiration, her trust, her tenderness, the thing that might have been love.
He closed his eyes and when he opened them there were tears there too. A drop of blood from her cuts dripped from her face onto his. He looked at her, with those wide, amazed eyes, so surprised now to find out how right he’d been about her.
“Sam… Sam… Get them back. Get them back.”
She nodded, weeping. She would. She’d get them back.
He coughed, and blood came up, and she could feel his regret, his regret at not seeing the future, his regret that she’d never opened herself to him before.
“I wish I’d known you,” he whispered. And his mind was fluttering, faltering, on the edge of that sudden decoherence into darkness that she’d felt before.
“You did,” she pleaded with him. “You did know me. You did.”
But he was gone before the words left her lips.
She knelt there, next to Jake, weeping. She closed his still-staring eyes. Her blood and tears fell on his face to mix with his.
I wish I’d shown you, she told herself. I wish I’d trusted you. I wish I’d opened up to you
.
I’m sorry
,
she sent him.
I’m so so sorry
.
But there was no one there to hear her.
A sound snapped her back to reality. She turned, and the soldier she’d disabled inside the house was there, yards away, a long length of metal pipe in his hand, running at her, swinging it like a baseball bat with lethal, superhuman force.