After Life (Power Reads Book 2) Read online

  Arianna swallowed and Icon made his best attempt at a reassuring smile.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I have no desire to infect you or anybody else, which is why we would never enter the city. If we were to inadvertently infect a single person it could result in millions more dying and perhaps even the loss of London in its entirety. None of us would want that on our conscience.’

  ‘So you stay out here,’ Arianna whispered almost to herself. ‘But if you’re not doing it then who the hell is?’

  ‘Re–Volution,’ Icon replied. ‘It’s the only answer we can think of.’

  ‘The company is bombing its own people?’

  ‘Think about it,’ Icon implored her. ‘Re–Volution controls access to holosap technology, which costs extortionate amounts of money despite the human race facing annihilation from The Falling. It’s profiteering gone mad. As long as they have the only definite cure for infection, that of uploading, then they will continue to reap profits from the human population. They have a monopoly on the only technology that could conceivably outlast mankind.’

  Arianna frowned.

  ‘But if every human dies and only holosaps are left, then surely the revenue dries up?’

  ‘You’re forgetting the storage issue,’ Icon pointed out. ‘By law, only Re–Volution can permanently erase somebody from existence after they’ve uploaded. By maintaining complete control of the system they can charge holosaps simply for the right to continue existing. A life tax, if you can properly call a holosap alive.’

  Arianna stared at the news screen for a few moments before speaking.

  ‘They can’t be doing all of this alone, they must be getting help.’

  ‘From the police, and from a few highly placed individuals within the government, the most prominent of which is Prime Minister Tarquin St John.’

  ‘A holo–sympathiser,’ Arianna recalled. ‘He’s been banging a drum for years for equal rights for holosaps, the passing of laws in their favour and so on.’

  ‘The same,’ Icon agreed, ‘and if I’m right he’s the one most likely to pull the plug on humanity in favour of a holosap future. He sees it as our next natural evolutionary step, believe it or not.’

  ‘We’ve got to stop him,’ she replied. ‘We’ve got to stop whatever he and Kieran Beck are planning.’

  Icon was about to speak when the sound of running footfalls rushed up to the tent entrance and one of Icon’s men yanked the tent flap aside.

  ‘Somebody’s coming,’ he snapped, and cast a suspicious glance at Arianna. ‘They’re armed.’

  ***

  26

  Bayou La Tour

  Louisiana

  The dawn sky loomed over the bayou, the horizon awash with a flare of sunlight as the stars glistened overhead, lonely deep blue heavens above a lonely planet.

  Marcus crouched with Kerry in a creek that hummed with insects, stagnant water filled with algae clinging to his boots. The air was cooler, in that it was breathable and did not scorch the lungs yet, but the temperature would soon rocket upward again.

  Ahead, across a broad stretch of ground cleared long ago, was a dome–like structure with a satellite dish the size of a house mounted alongside it. The structure was silhouetted against the rising sun, mankind’s sharp and angular architecture crude against nature’s elegant wash of colour.

  ‘Can we make it?’

  Kerry’s voice was soft on the morning air, partly for fear of being heard by real or imagined troops laying in ambush ahead, and partly because of her exhaustion. They had walked all night to reach the relay station in the hope of beating any intercept mission, but it was almost without doubt that the troops would anticipate this move.

  ‘We won’t know until we head out there.’

  Like Kerry, Marcus had spent the last eight or so hours thinking about their plan, a sure chance to get properly paranoid. They were being pursued by trained troops, of that he was sure, but those troops would be weighed down by heavy suits and breathing apparatus. They could fly helicopters to search the bayou, but Marcus had heard no aircraft during the night.

  That left only one possibility.

  ‘Wasps,’ he muttered. ‘They can’t hit the relay station with heavy weapons without disrupting the entire communications chain and defeating the object of stopping us, so they’ll come at us using Wasps.’

  WASPS was the military’s acronym for Wi–fi Automated Strike, Paralysis and Surveillance drones. The size of a small bird, Wasps looked exactly like their insectoid cousins only much larger, louder and far more dangerous. Laden with all manner of micro–sized sensors, their most dreaded asset was a two–inch hypodermic delivery system, a sting in the tail that injected victims with a dose of either Pancuronium bromide for paralysis and later questioning, or a lethal toxin for when agony simply wasn’t enough to make the military’s day.

  In the gloomy half light of dawn, Kerry’s features were taut and her eyes shadowed.

  ‘They’re automated,’ she whispered. ‘Too many stings and you’re dead no matter what happens.’

  Marcus nodded, scanning the horizon. ‘The bayou’s big. They’ll send out plenty and hope to get troops out to us before we’re killed.’

  Everybody had seen the news reports and the documentaries covering major assaults by the police when Wasps had been involved. Marcus could not shake from his mind an image of a criminal writhing in unimaginable pain as a swarm of glossy black Wasps stung him over and over until he was a bloated mess, blood pouring from his wounds as he thrashed himself into a cardiac arrest.

  ‘We should wait until it’s light,’ Marcus said. ‘Wasps work better at night.’

  ‘They’ve got infra–red, right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Marcus agreed, ‘so they can see targets in the dark, but maybe it’s hot enough in the day to conceal us a little.’

  ‘We don’t have enough time to spare,’ Kerry said. ‘We wait too long they’ll be on us anyway.’

  ‘Shit,’ Marcus whispered. ‘It’s got to be over a hundred yards.’

  ‘Then let’s make it quick, okay?’

  He touched her shoulder and she reached up and squeezed his hand. They stood, and after a brief hesitation they plunged without a word from the treeline and sprinted across the open ground.

  The shadowy terrain was rough and filled with unseen crevices and pot holes. Marcus stumbled and weaved breathlessly to keep up with Kerry as she flew like a gazelle across the open ground, her long hair flying behind her head like a banner. Marcus saw her skid to a halt in front of the station door and yank a set of keys from her jacket.

  ‘Thank God they don’t use digital locking out here,’ Marcus gasped as he stumbled up alongside her.

  The station door was secured using two stainless steel padlocks that restrained two equally tough sliding bolts. The human population was too long gone for any concerns about vandalism when the station was built, while the fear of battery failure or signal disruption in the bayou’s heat precluded the use of remote locking. Even with the huge satellite dish and the relay stations, Dr Reed’s holosap projection had often been broken and weak at the compound. Kerry and Marcus carried keys for all remote stations in their area.

  Kerry opened the padlocks and slid the bolts back before heaving the door open and hurrying into the building’s absolute blackness. Marcus followed her in and slammed the door behind him, pushing the bolts back through.

  Lights flickered on as Kerry hit a switch, illuminating a large room half filled with a pair of small computer banks and a solar powered cooling system. Above, a skylight stained with dust and grime looked up into the brightening sky at the satellite dish above.

  A single computer terminal, unused in years, waited patiently. Kerry hurried over and started the computer, which hummed into life.

  ‘They’ll have thought of this,’ Marcus reminded her as he joined her at the desk, watching the antiquated computer boot up. There was no transparent screen, just a slim plastic–backed
monitor and a touch–pad embedded into the surface of the desk.

  ‘Maybe,’ Kerry agreed, ‘but with only us and Dr Reed out here they won’t have been able to do much about it unless they’ve hacked this relay station out of the loop.’

  ‘Can they do that?’ Marcus asked, watching as Kerry began sifting through files.

  ‘Maybe,’ she replied.

  Marcus, standing over Kerry, suddenly smelled something odd on the air. His gaze was drawn down and he felt a terrible fear ripple like insects through his gut as he saw the flesh around Kerry’s bite wound.

  The bite had turned black, with bruised and yellowed skin expanding away from the wound. Around the circumference of the bite Kerry’s once flawless skin was spilling away in infected chunks that had the odour of road kill.

  ‘Kerry,’ he whispered, ‘your wound.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied, her gaze remaining fixed upon the monitor before her. ‘It’s been getting worse all night and I feel like crap, some kind of fever.’

  ‘What if you’re not immune?’ he asked.

  ‘Then this is all for nothing,’ she snapped back. ‘But we’re dead either way Marcus so let’s try and make what we can of it, okay? If I’ve got to go to my grave I may as well try to take these bastards with me, agreed?’

  Marcus nodded, enshrouded with despair at Kerry’s fatalistic assessment of their chances.

  ‘So how are we going to do it?’ he asked.

  ‘First, we have to cut the compound and this relay station off from New York, which we can do from here. That will hopefully stop Dr Reed from communicating with other governments around the world for a while.’

  ‘He’ll have been in touch with home base long ago,’ Marcus pointed out. ‘And those troops are already deployed here, somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, but they haven’t caught us yet. We keep disrupting them while moving toward the main communication hub at the airport.’

  She flicked through files and folders until she found what she was looking for.

  ‘Here,’ she said. Marcus looked at a bank of data files, big numbers that changed continuously as Kerry explained. ‘That’s data moving back and forth between our compound, this relay station and the airport.’

  ‘Can’t he just send information out from the airport’s main hub?’

  ‘Not if he can’t get out here to see what we’re doing,’ she replied.

  Marcus watched as Kerry hurriedly began re–routing files and re–coding data. He stood back and turned to survey the station’s interior. The sky outside was much brighter now and heat was beginning to build from the computer banks and from the sunlight entering the station.

  ‘There’s no food or water,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a remote station,’ Kerry pointed out as she typed, ‘why would there be?’

  ‘How long will this take?’

  ‘Not long, if you’ll just shut the hell up.’

  Marcus stood in the centre of the station and felt something odd touching his senses, as though a gossamer web had drifted through the field of his awareness like an errant thought. He turned full circle, frowned to himself.

  ‘Something’s not right,’ he said.

  ‘I’m nearly there,’ Kerry said, ‘then we can get the hell out of here.’

  ‘Hurry,’ Marcus urged.

  Kerry typed a few more lines of text and then hit the Enter key. Marcus saw lines of code updating themselves and then the cursor on the screen returned to its normal position, blinking patiently.

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered.

  ‘Is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Kerry shook her head. ‘We’re out of the loop already, they’ve cut us off to stop us sending messages from here. We need to get to the airport hub and send a message from there as fast as possible.’

  Marcus hesitated, struck by the feeling that he’d suddenly recalled an old memory that he’d believed lost forever.

  ‘What’s up?’ Kerry asked, staring at him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘I just… I just get the feeling that this had all been predicted by them, that we’re already playing into their hands.’

  The voice that replied belonged to neither himself or Kerry. ‘You have been, Marcus.’

  Marcus whirled, and saw Dr Reed’s holosap shimmer into existence on a projection platform barely inches from where he stood.

  ‘You’ve been watching us!’ Kerry exclaimed in horror.

  Dr Reed smiled. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all night,’ he said. ‘I don’t need sleep much, you see. It’s fabulous, the amount of control us holosaps have over brain function.’ Dr Reed peered at Marcus’s bite wound, and then at Kerry’s. ‘So, you believe that you have immunity to The Falling?’

  Kerry reached up self–consciously to the rancid flesh on her neck. ‘There’s no belief required,’ she replied.

  ‘A pity,’ Dr Reed said, ‘that you decided to take such a chance, to make such a leap of imagination without first completing your research.’

  ‘So you could take it?’ Kerry spat.

  ‘No,’ Reed replied, ‘so I could confirm or deny it. I’m sorry, Kerry, but you’re immune to nothing. That infection will kill you, probably within a day or so. Marcus will, of course, follow suit. Just like you said, you’re both dead no matter what you do.’

  ‘Not if we get word out,’ Kerry replied. ‘Somebody, somewhere will hear us.’

  Dr Reed inclined his head in acquiescence. ‘Perhaps, but by then it will be too late for all of you.’

  ‘All of us?’ Marcus echoed. ‘What do you mean all of us?’

  ‘All humans,’ Dr Reed smiled without warmth. ‘Didn’t you know? You’re number’s up, Marcus. We don’t need any of you anymore.’

  A sudden crack like a gunshot made Marcus jump and he flinched away from the skylight above, fearing troops making an assault on the station with guns blazing. But there were no troops.

  On the thick plastic surface of the skylight a jet black insect the size of Marcus’s hand skittered with mechanical efficiency, wings humming occasionally as it tried to enter the station through the plastic. A two–inch stinger protruded from its tail.

  ‘Wasps,’ Kerry said in a trembling voice.

  Moments later, the plastic skylight rattled as dozens more Wasps landed outside the station.

  ***

  27

  ‘You led them here,’ Marcus gasped.

  Dr Reed, his hands in his pockets, shrugged. ‘They followed me. They’re linked in to my holosap generator at Re–Volution via the communication hub.’

  Kerry turned to Marcus, ignoring Dr Reed. ‘Get me a syringe from that medical pack.’

  Marcus turned to the Medipac box hanging on the wall. Although a remote station, the terrain of the bayou meant that all locations housed emergency survival packs in case of injury to service personnel operating in the local area.

  Dr Reed watched as Marcus unpacked the syringe.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ Reed said as he glanced up at the Wasps skittering about on the skylight. ‘There’s no food or water here and those Wasps will soon find a way inside.’

  Marcus looked at Kerry, but she said nothing as she rolled up her left sleeve. Marcus moved across to her as she flexed her fist and a vein appeared in the crook of her arm.

  ‘Ah,’ Dr Reed murmured as Marcus gently slipped the needle into her arm. ‘Trying to send your blood work out into the world are we? You’ll never get to the airport before you die, or the Wasps catch you.’

  Marcus drew Kerry’s blood and then eased the needle out again as she held a finger over the wound and reached for a plaster. Marcus carefully capped the needle as he waited for her to roll her sleeve back down.

  ‘They’re working it out,’ Dr Reed said again, looking up at the skylight.

  Marcus realised that the Wasps were gone from the skylight, but he could still hear their metallic legs rattling about outside the compound.

  ‘The air conditioning vents,�
� Marcus realised.

  ‘We don’t matter anymore,’ Kerry snapped as she grabbed the syringe from him. ‘All that matters is getting this out to other research stations.’

  ‘Which no longer exist,’ Dr Reed said from behind them. ‘The assault was inclusive.’

  ‘What assault?’ Marcus asked.

  ‘The one launched by troops across the globe, Marcus,’ Reed smiled with ingratiating smugness. ‘There will be no cure for your pitiful sickness.’

  As Kerry began transferring her blood from the syringe to a test tube, Marcus stood between her and Dr Reed.

  ‘You know, for somebody who thinks that we’re not immune you’re awfully worried about us not completing our work here,’ Marcus said.

  Dr Reed shrugged again. ‘Worried? Me? Not really, Marcus. Sooner or later you’ll be dead and I…’ He smiled. ‘Well, I won’t be.’

  ‘If word gets out about this,’ Marcus said, ‘every holosap on the planet will be shut down.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Dr Reed mused, ‘if you realise just how big of an if that is?’

  The scuttling sounds grew louder and Marcus realised that the Wasps were dismantling the mesh shields on the outside of the station that covered the air conditioning vents. He heard the sound of buzzing wings beating the air outside echoing down into the station interior along with the squeal of metal incisors on metal vents.

  ‘Tick tock,’ Dr Reed smiled at Marcus.

  ‘Were you always like this?’ Marcus asked, masking his increasing fear with a thin veil of bravado, ‘or was being an asshole something you learned?’

  The clatter of small fragments of metal falling like stones inside the air conditioning vents told Marcus that the Wasps were chewing their way through the shields using their metallic mandibles, lined with tiny diamonds that could slice through just about anything.

  ‘They’re going to get through,’ he whispered to Kerry.

  She didn’t reply, the fingers of one hand flying across the keyboard as with the other she swirled her blood in the test tube.