Daniel Suarez - Influx

Grady’s eyes widened, and he couldn’t help but feel amazed even as he was horrified. “But… how…”

Alexa now floated alongside them, just as helpless as they were. Like a fly in a spiderweb. “I didn’t know they’d built projectors small enough to mount in assault armor.”

“Not that big really. Just requires lots of power. Certainly doesn’t fit in a flight suit like yours. So I guess Hedrick doesn’t give you all of his toys. He’s that smart at least.”

They all four hung there silently in midair, five thousand feet above rural Illinois in a cloudless night sky.

“Let us leave, Morrison.”

He shook his head at her. “You’re free to go once you turn over my prisoners.”

“Hedrick lied to me. You all lied to me. Why?”

“You’re in your fifties, Alexa. It’s time to grow up.”

“You knew what was going on at Hibernity.”

“I’m so sick of your sustained innocence. You get to waltz around and have everyone love you. You’re the future of humanity, while my project gets canceled and I become a genetic punch line. Well, I’m a survivor. I do the dirty work that no one knows about. When things need to get done, the director counts on me and my sons to do them. The outside world is a ruthless, shitty place. At least Grady and Cotton here actually have a purpose—what’s your purpose? Other than being a genetic library for when they finally figure out how to transfer minds from one body to another?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“Oh, you didn’t know about that project either? Well, we don’t tell you everything.”

Alexa stared at him, her jaw clenching.

“Now push Grady and Cotton over here.” He aimed a gloved finger on his other hand, apparently a weapon integrated into the suit.

Cotton tried to swim through the air to get behind her. “Alexa, you know they forced me to do this. I haven’t harmed a soul, I swear it.”

Morrison laughed. “You’re no saint, Cotton. Did Cotton ever tell you where we found him—a master thief trying to break into BTC headquarters? Bit off more than you could chew, eh?”

“Alexa, don’t let him do this.”

“Your ten years is just about up, anyway, Cotton.”

Alexa drew a black spikelike device from her belt. Its tip glowed with an intense indigo light.

Morrison lowered his weapon arm. “A positron gun? That’s a killing weapon, Alexa. Where did you get that?”

“You know damn well.”

Morrison’s ink-black armored face was inscrutable, but he nodded slowly to himself. “He’s weak.”

“Let us go, Morrison.”

“Listen to yourself, Alexa. You’re breaking bureau regulations. Ignoring rules about tech level exposure. Chain of command.”

Cotton shouted, “He’s going to kill us—split our water like that Davis woman.”

Morrison nodded toward her raised weapon. “How much antimatter do you have in that thing?”

“A billionth of a gram. So don’t toy with me.”

“You’re not a killer, Alexa. And you know that Grady and Cotton must come with me. Civilian government knows who Cotton is now. They’ll interrogate him—torture him if necessary—to get information out of him.”

She didn’t lower the weapon, although Grady could see she was unsure of what to do. “Don’t test me, Morrison. Just leave. And tell Graham to back off while I sort this out.”

Morrison slowly reached toward his harness. “See this? I’m getting a psychotronic weapon—nonlethal—and that’s all there is to it. I’m not going to harm you or anyone. Ask yourself: Are you going to kill me, Alexa? Are you going to kill me to stop me from using a nonlethal weapon against—”

He fast-drew the weapon, but Alexa’s reflexes were faster. A blinding flash and crack of thunder, and the front of Morrison’s suit burst apart in weirdly intricate sparks and whirling vortexes of energy—hurling him backward and then downward.

But on his way down Morrison zapped Alexa with the psychotronic gun as well. She spun out of control, causing Grady and Cotton to fall out of her local gravity field—and into free fall from the night sky.

Alexa almost immediately regained her senses and found herself free of Morrison’s projected gravity field. She scanned the sky below her with thermal imaging. Cotton was falling below her, screaming, while Grady descended farther off—probably impossible to reach at terminal velocity. However, Morrison appeared to be moving to intercept Grady—sparks issuing from his combat assault armor.

“Damnit!” Alexa soared down to try to catch up with Cotton before he hit the forest thousands of feet below. She tucked her arms onto her thighs to streamline her aerodynamic profile and descended at much more than a hundred miles an hour.

Grady’s heart pounded in his chest as the rushing air buffeted him. His watering eyes saw the dark forest racing up to meet him, and he realized that these were his final seconds of life. He glanced up at the stars above him. The beauty was heartbreaking. However, his time in Hibernity had taught him how to manage fear, and he turned toward the approaching trees—determined to see his life right up to the very end.

But suddenly he felt cold, armored hands grab his arms, and his direction of descent lurched forward—only a thousand feet above the shadows of the trees.

Grady turned to see Morrison’s onyx face mask.

“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that, Mr. Grady?”

But then Grady noticed that they had not entirely stopped falling, and he felt conflicting gravity fields over about half of his body. Classical “down” was still to some extent in force.

One of Morrison’s gauntlets released Grady, and he seemed to be struggling to get something functioning. Purple sparks burst forth occasionally from the melted front plate of the suit. Morrison’s visor popped open with a hiss, and smoke issued out of it as the red reflection of a dozen flashing warning lights lit up his face.

“That traitorous bitch! A fucking positron weapon! She fried the power system—and most of my auxiliary.”

They started to buck their descent a bit as Morrison concentrated on working his suit’s systems. But a glance below them showed Grady they were still coming down at dangerous speeds.

He grabbed onto Morrison’s armor and shouted into his face over the rushing wind. “If you don’t have enough power to maintain the size of the gravity mirror, cut stabilization!”

Morrison frowned in confusion.

“If this suit is based on my technology, then there must be stabilization—or we’d be spinning like crazy. When two gravity fields interact, they’ll revolve within each other like—”

He could see the trees accelerating to meet them at much more than seventy miles an hour.

“JUST CUT THE FUCKING STABILIZATION!”

Morrison calmly nodded and manipulated unseen controls.

Suddenly they slowed dramatically—but started spinning like a merry-go-round on two different axes. Grady held on as Morrison’s armored arms embraced him.

They plunged through a thick canopy of trees at ten or fifteen miles per hour, smashing through branches on the way to the ground. In darkness, they bounced off the forest floor, Morrison on the bottom, and hit again, then splayed next to each other. The sound of crickets suddenly was all around them.

There were several seconds without movement.

“Well. That’s something for the manual, Mr. Grady.”

Morrison struggled to sit up, his suit still issuing occasional sparks. He appeared to be having trouble moving the heavy suit as smoke issued from several crevices.

Grady leapt on top of him—slugging Morrison through his open face mask. “You son of a bitch!”