Daniel Suarez - Influx

“Hedrick!”

Hedrick didn’t look back. He just kept moving as a set of double doors opened automatically to admit him to a gallery beyond. Grady thought he remembered it—and then it occurred to him that Hedrick was heading toward his museum of “contained” technology.

“Goddamnit…” Grady clawed at the floor or wall or whatever was next to him and pushed against floating objects to use their inertia to impart forward movement on him. He wracked his mind to calculate the best way to make progress.

And there in his sight line Grady saw his gravis wrapped around the scout helmet and floating amid the other debris. It must have landed near him since he’d had it in his hands when he fell.

Grady grabbed them both and started buckling the gravis on. As he did so, he passed below Morrison and Alexa. He could see Morrison had somehow gotten hold of a Victorian desk clock, and he was trying to bludgeon her with it.

He shouted toward her. “I found my gravis! I’m coming—”

“I already have one! Get Hedrick!”

Grady powered it up and pulled his helmet on. He glanced back at the doors where Hedrick had already disappeared. He then looked back up at Alexa and made his decision—changing his direction of descent toward her and Morrison.

But he went nowhere. He was still in free fall.

She glared down at him from thirty feet above as she peeled Morrison’s fingers from her throat. “You’re in a more powerful mirror! That’s how Morrison stopped us before! Your gravis is useless inside it!” She slugged Morrison again.

He shouted, “I don’t understand!”

“You invented the damn thing, you tell me! Just go after Hedrick! There are places he can escape to! Don’t let him get away!” She grunted and did a backward somersault, wrapping her legs around Morrison’s head and squeezing until his face reddened.

Morrison struggled mightily. “Aghh, you bitch!”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Go, Jon!”

Reluctantly, Grady continued pulling his way through the free-falling debris field and out the gallery doors. He couldn’t help but wonder at the interaction of the gravity fields—was it a matter of power? Was it like acoustics? Did they subtract each other? No… because equal fields didn’t seem to.

He snapped out of pondering gravity and looked ahead. He could now see the long exhibit gallery—only everything was turned upside down, with exhibits floating in midair. He shaded his eyes against the blinding white light of the first fusion reactor, suspended in its sealed case.

Up ahead he could see Hedrick clawing his way along the carpet.

“Hedrick!”

There was another huge rumble, followed by a colossal CRACK. A seam appeared in the wall nearby and quickly expanded, wood splitting. Suddenly the howl of wind started blowing through the corridor—although Grady was still surrounded by interior walls.

He was nearly blown back out the gallery doors into the office again, but as he looked up, he could see that Hedrick had fallen back along the exhibit gallery as well. Grady finally got a good look at the man.

Hedrick looked worried but also determined. In a moment the director fished through his pockets and came up with a small object, which he aimed back at Grady.

“Shit…” Grady pushed off from the wall and sailed across the corridor just as an explosion blasted apart the burled wood paneling and sent him rolling end over end. He landed hard against something.

He got his bearings, feeling the carpeting with his hands, and looked up through what was suddenly a great deal more debris, smoke, and now fire to see Hedrick upside down thirty feet ahead, struggling with some sort of large piece of equipment.

“Hedrick!”

Hedrick aimed again, losing control of his rotation as he looked up. The shot went wide. Grady ducked down as another blast tore apart several display cases. Thousands more pieces of flaming debris entered the air around him, burning him as he batted them away. The flames were fanned by the howling wind.

And then another sharp CRACK, like the earth itself coming apart, filled the air so loudly it momentarily drowned out the howling of the wind. The building groaned deafeningly.

Richard Cotton stared through a series of remote holographic exterior images of BTC headquarters. Beta-Tau had gotten him access to the surveillance dust littering surrounding buildings, and now before him was a three-dimensional hologram of downtown Detroit—with the jaw-dropping sight of BTC headquarters and a hundred meters of land in every direction around it tearing up out of the ground. Ten- and five-story buildings around BTC headquarters disintegrated as they fell upward—with the U.S. district court imploding on itself as concrete and soil from the ground beneath rushed through it.

But BTC headquarters did not come apart. The forty-story black slab kept rising out of the ground, getting broader and more massive as the ground around it erupted—tearing up sidewalks and asphalt as floors and floors of dark nanorod curtain wall rose from the earth.

The entire region rumbled.

Cotton said to himself, “We’re recording this, right?”

Miles away people stepped out of their homes and onto their balconies and driveways to stare in horror and shock as a towering monolith rose from the Detroit skyline in the predawn. They swayed from the tremors as they raised smartphones and started filming the dark spike that was still growing above them. Taller than any building they’d ever seen, it kept rising—a hundred stories, a hundred and twenty, and still it rose, surrounded by a crown of debris that glittered as the dawn sun caught the shards of glass. Winds thousands of feet in the air blew the smoke and debris away from the dark tower like storm clouds on a mountain peak, and yet still the massive tower rose.

People throughout the city stopped and stared, dumbfounded. Disbelieving their eyes.

Alexa clawed her way across heavy debris, sending it rotating as she pushed off it, striving toward the positron pistol that twirled in the wind, bouncing it off walls.

Morrison was close behind her, his face bloody, but his eyes filled with rage. “You freak! You might be faster and stronger, but no one is tougher than me…”

Suddenly a chair collided with Alexa from behind, sending her sailing past the floating pistol. She stretched for it but instead saw Morrison’s approaching scowl as she fell away. His hand wrapped around the pistol while she accelerated her forward momentum, curling her body forward and pushing off the nearest wall with her feet.

Just moments later a loud crack delivered a massive blast to the floor that sent her hurtling across the debris-filled air, along with sofas, tables, and now shattering curio cabinets. Her foot caught the edge of a sofa and she started tumbling end over end, impacting other objects in flight. She covered her head with her hands.

She lost all frame of reference as she rotated out of control, loud cracks and explosions following her across the room. A sharp pain pierced her leg, and she curled up in a ball until she hit something hard—very hard. By the time she could think straight again, Morrison was headed in from above her, leading with the pistol. The walls of the room were afire with an odd, gelatinous flame, like she’d seen in space experiments. Fire with no “up” to burn in.

Morrison lowered the smoking pistol with dismay and cast it away. “You didn’t leave me much ammo.”

She waited for him and whirled into a roundhouse kick that sent him rolling through flaming debris.

The walls groaned and creaked around them.

Grady pulled his way hand over hand toward Hedrick, keeping as much solid wreckage between them as possible. Hedrick struggled with some sort of hatchway and occasionally fired his weapon at Grady to keep him away.