Daniel Suarez - Influx

Grady considered the situation. “How do they control that gravity satellite?”

Alexa shook her head incredulously. “You won’t be able to seize control. It’s an encrypted q-link. All managed by AIs that know where every single piece of BTC equipment is. For the satellite they’ll probably have several q-links as backup, but there will be only a handful of control stations in the Gravitics Research Lab at BTC headquarters.”

Cotton nodded to himself. “That means you’d need to physically access the heart of the place to have any hope of taking control of Kratos.”

“What about destroying the satellite?”

“Pffftt. Good luck with that. It’s invisible for starters—they’ve got a diffraction cloak around it. And they’ll zap anything that gets within ten thousand miles.”

“Cotton’s right; we’d need to get into the very heart of BTC’s control center—and that means through layers of bulk-diamond security walls and robotic weaponry.”

Grady considered this. “But if we could get control of the satellite, we could conceivably hold a gun to Hedrick’s head. He wants me because this technology is fearsome.”

Cotton laughed.

Alexa didn’t laugh. “I might know someone who can help us gain access.”

Cotton raised an eyebrow. “Who?”

“Never mind who. But I need to get back into the building to speak with them.”

Cotton whistled. “Break into the dark tower?”

“You’re the master thief. Can you find me a way in? They’ll have rescinded my access rights, but I know every corner of that facility. I grew up there. And I’m certified in six dozen specialties within the BTC.”

“Yeah, I’ve tried breaking and entering there once before. The place is crawling with robots, surveillance dust, high-energy fields.” Cotton grinned. “I know because I spent the last several years studying it for weaknesses.” He killed the news feeds and instead brought up holographic projections of BTC floor plans.

Alexa looked shocked.

Cotton chuckled. “I knew it was only a matter of time until they tried to whack me. I had a feeling there would be no exit interview either. So I made plans for escape or infiltration at a moment’s notice, should either prove necessary.”

She studied the floor plans, turning the model from side to side. “I won’t ask how you got hold of these. Have you found anything useful?”

“No, I must say, the AIs locked this place up tight—triple redundant systems. Their security is basically perfect—especially when they’re in high alert, which they’ll be in right now. The nanorod walls can stop just about anything, and the EM plasma rippling over its surface is conducting about four hundred gigajoules. That plasma would diffract lasers. There’s really no force short of a thermonuclear explosion that could get through it.”

Grady watched Cotton turn the 3D plans first one way, then another. “That’s not true.”

“What’s not true?”

“That there’s no force that could get through that perimeter defense. Because there is a force that already does.”

They looked at him.

Then Alexa smiled. “Gravity.”

Grady nodded. “The gravity mirror.” He approached the holographic 3D image of the building. “Cotton, your examination for weaknesses probably made a significant assumption.”

“What’s that?”

Grady swept his hand to turn the building’s image upside down. “That the direction for ‘down’ would never change. Reexamine the plans. Try to find something significant at the outer perimeter wall that might suffer a malfunction if the world were to suddenly turn upside down.”

Cotton studied the altered view of the BTC headquarters building. A grin crossed his face. “I must say, Mr. Grady, you have a decidedly devious mind…”

Jon Grady adopted a wrestler’sstance in a forty-foot section of the workshop that they’d cleared of all shelving and equipment. He wore a stripped-down version of the gravity-mirror harness that Cotton had cannibalized from Morrison’s damaged armor. Grady also wore Morrison’s armored boots and gauntlets. The boots were roomier than he’d like, but he’d padded them with foam inserts. Besides he didn’t think he’d be doing too much walking with them.

Grady studied the microscopic circuitry of the harness, glittering in the workshop’s light. “This is the gravity mirror all right, but God, it’s shrunk down a thousand times in size. How in the hell do they get enough energy to it?”

Cotton tapped an assembly elsewhere on the harness. “Sixty megawatt fusion reactor.”

“That little thing?”

“Well, it’s got armor around it, so the reactor is smaller than that.”

“Good lord. I’m walking around with enough power to light a small city.”

Alexa pushed between them. “Let’s get on with this.”

Several nylon safety straps ran from Grady’s harness to metal beams ahead, behind, left, and right, as well as iron rings on the ground and a strap looped over a rafter. Whatever direction he might fall, he wouldn’t fall far.

Alexa checked his equipment, loosening the harness a bit. “You don’t need the gravis so tight. Remember it’s not like a rappelling harness—you’re not hanging from this; it’s changing the direction of down, and you’ll be falling along with it.”

He grimaced. “Gravis—who came up with that name?”

“I don’t know. Somebody on the BTC’s mirror project team.”

“I invented the damn thing. I should have had a chance to name it.”

Cotton stood nearby. “That was your first mistake, Mr. Grady. A thing can’t exist in people’s minds until it has a name. But with a name, it can exist in people’s minds without existing at all. You should always come up with a name before you set out to create anything.”

Grady frowned. “What does gravis mean, anyway?”

Alexa was inspecting his boots. “Latin for ‘weighty.’ ‘Heavy.’”

He jumped slightly to test the weight. “Well, maybe the name fits after all. This must weigh forty pounds.”

“It won’t once you activate it. And that’s a military gravis—armored. Mine is much lighter. The suit this was part of had electroactive polymer musculature to carry around the weight.”

Cotton murmured, “We might be seeing some of those later, if things go amiss.”

“Ignore him.” She was kneeling at his boot. “You feel the control interfaces at your toes?”

The padded lining of his overlarge boots made them fit better, and Grady depressed two small nodules with this toes. “Yeah. Got ’em.”

Alexa gestured to his other boot. “And here?”

He nodded as he did the same on the left.

“All right. Default control setup works like this: You control yaw by—”

“Yaw? What’s yaw?”

“Aeronautical term—it’s the horizontal direction you’re heading.” She pirouetted gracefully and came back to her start. “You control yaw direction for descent by angling your foot like this.”

“Direction of descent—I thought you said it was a horizontal direction?”

She gave him a look.

“Oh. Right. We’re choosing the direction of down.”

Cotton snickered. “You invented the technology, Mr. Grady. Try to keep up.”

Alexa lifted her right foot and flexed it first rightward, then leftward again.

Grady lifted his own right foot and did likewise.

“Good. And you control pitch—that is, vertical direction—with your left foot.” She tapped his leg.

He picked up his left foot.

She demonstrated. “Flex your foot downward or upward—you go where your toes point.”

“Got it. Seems simple enough. And the controls inside the shoe?”