Ramez Naam - Apex

Kade felt her touch the flow of data around her, like Ling did, but more so. He felt her reach out, in wavelengths short enough to pass between the gaps of the Faraday cage.

Holy fuck, he thought. That’s high frequency. High energy. The toll on her brain has to be enormous.

Jyotika’s head came back out the gap. He and Varun pulled her upright.

Two separate systems…Su-Yong sent . I’ve beaten the system down here. But there’s another, physically disconnected, up top, that must also be defeated… Couldn’t find a way…

He felt something else then. He felt water pressure finally overwhelm the maintenance doors of the quantum cluster, felt it rush in, shorting out electronics, knocking over vessels with quantum cores, disrupting coherence.

Su-Yong!he sent.

He felt Feng turn towards them in alarm. Mother!

Save… Ling…

Her mind collapsed in a wave of decoherence.

Jyotika slumped in Kade and Varun’s arms, unconscious.

Kade stared at the still-sealed elevator doors.

95

Nothing Subtle

Saturday 2041.01.19

“Sarai,” Sam said. “No, head to the bunker. Now!”

Sarai’s expression hardened. “They’re my friends too.”

“Sarai, this isn’t a game!” Sam said. “You’re twelve!”

“I’m thirteen next month,” Sarai said. “Just a year younger than you were when you fought. And I can do things you can’t . Not every problem can be solved with bullets!”

Sam bit her lip.

She nodded.

“Stay behind me,” she told the girl. “Do everything exactly as I say.”

She turned to one of the guards. “Your keys. For the vehicle outside. Now!”

She waved her key at the armored vehicle, threw open the passenger door when it responded, belted Sarai in securely, then climbed into the driver’s side.

“Manual control,” she told it.

Controls thrummed forward from the dashboard towards her, more like the two handed yoke of a jet plane than the wheel of a civilian ground vehicle.

“Advanced Computational Sciences Building. Plot a course. Fastest time. Road or off-road.”

The windshield lit up with a path in false blue light, a course that would cut through the wide green spaces of the research campus.

“Hold on,” Sam said to Sarai.

“Off-road travel inadvisable,” the vehicle began in Indian-accented English.

Sam pushed the throttle forward. Acceleration shoved her back into her seat. She heard Sarai gasp. And they were on their way towards the darkened building across the sprawling campus.

That building. Trapping people in that building. No. Sarai had said underneath that building.

That building with its massive power cables. Its excavation. Its deep bore diggers.

It’s ten centimeter thick armored glass. Too thick to shoot through.

All hidden, redacted from the records.

“Vehicle,” Sam said. “Interface with my phone. Pull up file ACSB Floorplan. Orient as a map, north-south. Scale and match outline to position of Advance Computational Sciences Building. Identify feature Service Elevator . Plot a course for Service Elevator .”

A green dot appeared on the windshield, her new target ahead and to the left.

The vehicle spoke again, with the same accent. “ Service Elevator appears to be an indoor location. Indoor driving is not…”

“Oh, shut up!” Sam said.

Then they rounded a curve in the shape of the campus, trees cleared, and the building itself came into view.

Dark. Faint red glow.

Two hundred meters. The green target dot was inside that building.

“Plot schematics,” Sam said aloud. “Show location of structural support beams.”

“Not available,” the vehicle said.

Sam frowned. It was worth a try. Her eyes scanned the front of the building. She’d looked it over many times. Glass and steel on the exterior. The supports were obvious. Deeper in they wouldn’t be…

One hundred meters.

Sam turned to her right, checked Sarai’s harness again with her hand, her eyes. All good.

“Hold on tight, Sarai,” she said.

“Sam,” Sarai said, her voice frightened now. “What are we doing?”

Too thick to shoot through.

“We’re going in,” Sam said, bringing her eyes back to the building.

Fifty meters.

Sam gunned it.

The building grew alarmingly larger in her vision.

The tires touched pavement, touched concrete, boosted their acceleration.

“COLLISION WARNING,” the vehicle yelled at her.

“Override,” Sam snapped tersely back.

The building was a plane of glass hurtling towards them, stretching out in every direction, tinted red by emergency lights, broken by grids of carbon and steel.

Sarai gasped.

Time froze. The infinite plane of glass and steel filled the universe before them.

Then Newton jerked Sam forward against the restraints of her harness. The vast glass edifice shattered as the 1500 kilogram mass of titanium and carbon composite of the armored vehicle slammed through it. A sound like thunder struck them.

And they were through, giant shards of jagged glass dropping all around them like a deadly crystalline rain.

Sam kept her hands on the yoke, kept the throttle fully open, aimed them for the green dot. She felt the carbon honeycomb tires grip the tile of the building lobby. The acceleration grabbed her, shoved her back again. An inner wall appeared, white and hung with some piece of framed art, on the far side of the building lobby, illuminated in her vehicle’s headlights. Sarai let out a screech next to her, and then deceleration grabbed them again, jerking them forward, and they were through, an exploding cloud of white dust around them.

Tires were gripping again. The armored vehicle shoved through a conference room, demolishing a long table and chairs, a viewscreen, knocking down another white wall and the viewscreen that covered it, shoving them forward into their restraints again, sending up more dust.

But now they were slowing, losing momentum, ten meters to the green dot.

They shoved into a hallway, walls on both sides. Their momentum chewed up two meters of wall, three meters of wall. And then they were done. Dust and disintegrated matter floated in the air, a minor cyclone of detritus, lit by the white headlights of their borrowed vehicle and the red emergency lights of the building.

Sam turned to look at Sarai.

“You OK?”

The girl was panting, hyperventilating, scared out of her wits.

Sarai nodded, again and again. “Yeah. OK.”

The doors on both sides were jammed. Sam popped the top hatch of the vehicle, pulled herself out, reached inside, pulled Sarai up.

Then she pulled her side-arm out.

It was eerily quiet. Except… Except for a deep bass thrumming. A rumbling sound, coming from below the floor.

Sam gestured for Sarai to stay behind her.

The girl nodded, wide-eyed.

Sam nodded back, then reached down, pulled up a piece of tile dislodged from the floor by their violent entry.

They crept down the corridor. Five meters ahead, the corridor turned to the left. Beyond that, if the floorplan was right, should be access to a service elevator. What better way to reach the levels below?

She turned to look at Sarai, then motioned her further back the hallway.

Sarai nodded and crept back quietly.

Sam stood at the edge, just before the turn in the corridor, her back against the wall, the pistol in her right hand, the chunk of broken tile in her left.

She closed her eyes, let her mind still.

The distraction of the visual world disappeared.