Daniel Suarez - Influx

She pondered it a bit more. “The moment you appear, there’s the possibility that they just zap you dead.”

“I don’t think Hedrick would do that. In any event it’s worth the risk if it provides a distraction at a critical moment.” He gripped her shoulder. “No matter what happens to me, Alexa, promise me you’ll free Archie and the others. You need to get to them before the BTC does; even if you get control of the satellite, they’ll try to hide them somewhere. Don’t let them.”

“We won’t. Don’t worry, we’ll rescue them, and you’ll do it with us.”

“Hate to interrupt the touching moment.” Cotton approached with what appeared to be an autoinjector. He was loading an ampoule into it.

Alexa scowled at him. “What the hell is that?”

“You never asked how the BTC caught me when I tried to break in all those years ago. Kind of hurt you didn’t ask, actually.”

“I assumed you did something stupid.”

“Ah, funny. No, I might not have been caught had I known that they release a neurotoxin into the crawl spaces during high alarms. It makes you panic and run screaming for fresh air—even if that’s over a cliff. The stuff enters through all semipermeable membranes—lungs, skin, eyes.”

“I’ve never heard of this.”

“Have you spent much time crawling through your power conduits during security alarms?”

She just glared.

“This is what I was working on earlier.”

She kept glaring.

“Right. Here then…” He put all the ampoules on the workbench and rolled up his own sleeve. “Pick one, and I’ll inject it into myself. You’ll be coated with neurotoxin when you come back, so we all need to get inoculated, anyway. I don’t need a screaming panic attack, thank you very much—especially with a ten-story drop to the street close at hand.”

Alexa sighed in irritation.

Grady selected the center ampoule.

Alexa grabbed the autoinjector from Cotton, then the ampoule from Grady, and then loaded it.

“My dear, don’t inject angry.”

She jammed the device against his arm. There was a pop and hiss.

“Ow.” He paused for a moment, then grabbed his throat and started choking theatrically. Then he straightened. “Satisfied?” Cotton grabbed the autoinjector back from her. “Who’s next?”

Grady selected one of the two remaining ampoules and extended his arm. “Why didn’t you tell us about this before?”

He loaded the ampoule into the autoinjector. “Because I wasn’t sure she was going in alone until now, and if she had forced me to come along, I would have quietly injected myself and then saved my own skin.”

She made a disgusted sound. “You’re a disgrace, Cotton.”

“Ah, a wise coward is more valuable than a brave fool.” He injected Grady, and then, after another glare from her, he injected Alexa with the contents of the last ampoule. “I told you I would share everything. I just didn’t say when.”

They all exchanged looks.

Cotton broke the silence with a clap of his hands. “Well, good luck with the mission then. Off you go, and be in touch on the q-link.”

Grady stood on the roof wearing his gravis harness and the helmet Alexa had given him. She was thirty feet away—possibly for the last time. It was past midnight again, and as he glanced over at the Chicago skyline, he couldn’t help but remember their flight the night before. He looked over to her and smiled wanly.

She paused before putting her own helmet on and instead approached him. “Wait.”

Grady flipped up his visor. “What is it? Something wrong?”

Alexa came right up to him. “I’ve never really known anyone outside the organization. Not really. I realize that now. Be careful, Jon.” Her hand gripped his harness, and she leaned forward to give him a kiss on the cheek.

He smiled slightly and then leaned forward to kiss her on the lips. After a few moments he looked into her eyes. “Your skin feels warm.”

She nodded, looking somewhat surprised. “Yes.” She caught her breath, then put her helmet on. She walked back to her ready position.

Grady watched her and nodded. “You be careful, too.”

“Listen for my call.”

“I will.”

And with that she became weightless, pushed off the roof, and moments later fell into the starry sky like a rock tossed into a well.

Grady stared after her. After a few more moments, he realized just how much he wanted to survive the next twenty-four hours.

Alexa had charted Grady’s route with the nav unit in the scout helmet. It projected whatever maps he needed onto his visor—along with the standoff destination where he was to wait until she called.

He ascended to nearly two thousand feet above Cotton’s building before falling northward, across the city and out over the moonlit lake. It was a clear night, and though it was dark, he felt incredibly exposed. There were small plane navigation lights blinking in the distance, but he’d gotten pretty good at maneuvering and felt that as long as he kept his eyes open, he’d be able to avoid any air traffic.

With the helmet he was able to accelerate comfortably into a terminal velocity fall—roughly a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Judging by the map, that meant it would take him nearly two hours to reach his destination—a small island in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan. He wouldn’t actually move to the island until he got Alexa’s signal, but his standby position was just a few miles away.

Grady fell across the dark sky, the light of a half-moon casting its glow on the water. It was beautiful, but he had no one else to marvel at it with. He wondered if the BTC harvester teams even noticed this beauty.

He saw the lights of a passing ship off in the distance, but nothing near him. Grady fell for scores of miles. His goal was to cross the lake on a northward diagonal and then track along the eastern coast. The islands were just off the mainland, and with the night vision setting of the helmet visor, he should have been able to find them even without a map.

After a little less than an hour he saw the dark, thinly populated coast, and he came over land above what looked like a power plant near a place named Pigeon Lake, at least according to the visor’s map. Much to his consternation there was a municipal airport close by, but it looked quiet at this late hour.

He changed his angle of descent and started falling due north, hugging the coast. Grady studied the lights passing beneath him—or, as it seemed, to the side of him—as he fell alongside the vast wall of landscape. He crossed the mouth of an inlet where a lighthouse stood, then headed where sandy dunes caught the moonlight.

Two thousand feet below he caught sight of a roaring bonfire on the beach, and he couldn’t resist slowing and finally gliding to a stop. He stared between his feet as he floated in equilibrium, a light breeze buffeting him. It was otherwise silent.

And then he heard laughter and voices far below. Rock music. Grady smiled. He was like an owl in the night.

With that he jammed his controller forward and fell again, northward at terminal velocity. He kept following the contours of the coastline as it curved away and then back again.

Eventually, after nearly two hours and hundreds of miles of rural coastline, he came close to his destination. Grady started scanning the map in his visor and aimed toward the little town of Empire, Michigan. He could see there were sizable bluffs here with dunes leading down to the water and lightly forested hills inland.

Grady frowned at his map as a U.S. Air Force air station came into view some miles away—he was definitely going to avoid that. He wondered what kind of radar signature he might have. No, best to get lower. Now that he was only ten miles or so from his standoff location, he had to find a place to land and await Alexa’s signal.