Daniel Suarez - Influx

“Ah, fuck!”

The sound of servomotors whined, but Morrison didn’t seem to be able to make his suit do what he wanted it to—or even close his face plate with all the smoke issuing from inside.

Grady punched him several more times until he was sure that Morrison was unconscious.

As he kneeled on top of Morrison’s armor-clad form, Grady turned at the sound of crashing branches. In a moment, Alexa descended from the sky, clutching a struggling Richard Cotton.

Cotton fell from her arms to kiss the ground. “Oh, thank God!”

Alexa looked down at Morrison with concern. “Is he…?”

“No. Unconscious—although I don’t know for how long.”

She looked relieved and leaned down to pull a device that Grady recognized from Morrison’s belt—a psychotronic weapon. Alexa aimed the laser dot at the old commando’s head and keyed it for several moments. Then she took a reading. “Now he should stay asleep for twenty or thirty minutes.”

Grady looked at her and nodded. “Thank you for rescuing me. If that’s what this is.”

She grimaced. “I’m not sure what this is. I only know I can’t be partner to the type of evil you experienced. And that we have to stop what’s happening at Hibernity.”

“Do you still believe in your probability projections for disruptive innovations?”

She stared at him and shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Cotton stood next to them in his ridiculous orange body armor. “I hate to interrupt, but the wrath of God is going to come down on us any fucking second. So if we could have this conversation elsewhere, that would be fantastic.”

“Cotton’s right.” Alexa pulled a metal stylus from her harness and activated what appeared to be a laser-cutting device—its needle-thin beam burned wickedly in the darkness. She used it to carefully carve out a tiny nodule on the shoulder of her flight suit. She repeated the process on her boots.

“What are you doing?”

“Removing the EDSP tracking devices.”

Grady nodded. “Yeah, good catch.”

Cotton was standing over Morrison. “If someone would help me get this body armor off, I’d like to take a piss on Morrison’s face.”

She glared at him. “Leave it, Cotton. You’re lucky to be alive. Don’t make it personal—it’ll be just another reason for him to come looking for you.”

Alexa then started dumping most of her equipment onto the forest floor.

“What are you doing?”

“They all have integrated trackers. We take our tech level containment seriously. Cotton’s right. They’ll come for it soon.”

Grady gazed down at Morrison. “What about him?”

“Leave him.”

Grady studied Morrison’s armor. “What about his suit? It’ll buy us more time if we strand him out here without it. No comms. At least dump it a few miles away.”

Alexa considered this.

“Can we get it off him?”

She nodded. “There’s a medical access override, if you have the clearance. Which I do.” She knelt next to Morrison and felt around the side of his helmet. She touched a control button and spoke into her own microphone. “Emergency medical access requested.”

Suddenly Morrison’s armor started to unfasten around him, opening like flower petals.

“I’ll be damned.”

She stood. “Can’t cut diamondoid armor off with scissors.”

Grady picked up a shoulder plate and hefted it. “This doesn’t even weigh all that much.”

“And yet it’s the hardest substance known.”

They took a few moments to gather the plates of armor—Alexa being careful to toss aside the four pieces that had integrated tracking particles. As they were finishing, Morrison began to wake up.

Cotton raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, he’s about fifteen minutes early. Tough son of a bitch, isn’t he?”

Morrison felt around himself for his armor and weapons, but his equipment was in a pile some yards away.

Alexa quickly aimed the psychotronic gun at him. “Ah-ah, don’t.”

Morrison assessed the situation, looking at the equipment missing from her harness and the nearby pile. He grinned nastily. “You won’t be Hedrick’s little sweetheart after this, Alexa. You’ll be one of the little people.”

Cotton reached down and punched Morrison in the jaw, barely fazing the man.

“Goddamnit!” Cotton hopped away, nursing his paw.

Morrison gave him a disgusted look. “You’re a pussy, Cotton.”

Alexa aimed the psychotronic beam. “Night-night.”

Morrison gave her the finger even as he lay back down, and he was soon snoring soundly.

Alexa tossed the weapon onto the pile, and then motioned for Grady and Cotton to come closer to her. Grady could feel the gravity around them change—and down suddenly became up.

As they rose through the treetops, Grady turned to her. “Agent Davis is dead, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security—anyone who believed my story is dead, and the police will be out looking for Cotton in force soon, too. Where do we go?”

Cotton looked at them. “I know a place…”

It was well past midnightby the time Alexa—with Jon Grady and Richard Cotton floating beneath her gravity mirror—descended toward a flat, silvered roof of a massive, windowless ten-story brick building in the meatpacking district of Chicago. Half a mile ahead of them was a panoramic view of the downtown skyline.

As they came down from the night sky, Grady could see large, faded signs painted directly onto the brick facade of their destination: “Fulton Market Cold Storage Company” and on a brick tower the faded words “Greater Fulton Market.”

As they alighted onto the flat rooftop, Grady stood unsteadily. It was the first normal gravity he’d felt in several hours. They had flown a circuitous route from the plains, coming into Chicago low and slow from the northwest due to Alexa’s concerns about scanning, search teams, and satellite surveillance AIs teasing out their flight path from an all-seeing gaze in orbit. She was convinced Morrison and Hedrick would find them quickly—and appeared to be getting more concerned each minute.

Despite the circumstances, Jon Grady had to admit that the flight (or, more appropriately, the “fall”) here was pretty spectacular. Grady and Cotton had floated alongside Alexa in the sphere of the mirror’s influence. The summer air rushing over them all as they soared silently above the midnight landscape—at first above broad cornfields bordered by dark clusters of trees and thick underbrush. Crickets thrummed below them, and the lights of lone farmhouses and outbuildings had passed by in the night. Eventually these gave way to exurb subdivisions and big-box retail centers, and finally a contiguous grid of suburban yards and streets. Grady had found the experience the closest thing he could imagine to being a bird—flying quietly over the land.

Now that they’d landed, Alexa was scanning the skies nervously, her eyes illuminated by some device built into the crystal of her helmet’s visor.

Cotton seemed unconcerned. He was already ripping Velcro straps to remove his orange bulletproof helmet and perp-protection vest. Both had the words “Federal Prisoner” stenciled on the front and back. “Well, that was a memorable evening.” He cast a look at Grady and tossed the helmet to him. “Very interesting little invention, this gravity mirror of yours, Professor.”

Grady caught the helmet. “I’m not a professor.”

“I think you’ve earned an honorary degree somewhere.” Cotton started walking toward a steel roof-access door in a towering brick bastion behind them. Here, too, was another faded painted sign reading “Fulton Market Cold Storage” in letters three stories high—it was like a building on top of the building.