Crossover Page 4

  Only now realising that something didn't make sense, that if someone had wanted to get her, their best bet would have been at her hotel room when she was asleep. Not in a crowded shopping centre. Unless, of course, they'd only just found out where and who she was. And had decided not to waste another hour. It was possible that they thought her that important. It was very possible.

  Her datalinks were running as she walked, sifting through the regional database, through the official traffic flows that hinted of police movements and security alerts ... and thought, as she pressed briskly through the corridor crowds toward the road overpass, to check back to her hotel records. Found them barricaded from just beyond the public perimeter, and her presence triggered an alarm ... she fried the trigger system in a burst of anger, and sent her killer systems speeding out, scanning for electronic target IDs.

  Frightened now at the speed things were deteriorating. She knew only too well what was happening. And she knew that moving slowly would gain her nothing—they had her pinged, and no casual pretence would make it otherwise.

  She sprinted straight for the overpass opening in the wall ahead. And inside, colliding hard off the railing through the nonexistent gap past some pedestrians, bodies sprawling as she raced onward up the tube, weaving fast through the traffic as yells and shouts broke out around her, ordinary people, startled and angry. She hurdled a small child at nearly thirty kph, and saw through the merging bodies that the narrow exit was blocked by a random convergence of shoppers ... planted a foot and leapt—astonished, frightened faces ducking for cover as the woman in the long coat went flying low overhead. Collected someone's head with her hip, then hit down on her legs and backside, skidding hard into another two pedestrians in a heavy impact of falling bodies ... and felt the targeting sight brush her scalp, grabbed the pedestrian for a shield (don't panic man, they'll never shoot a pedestrian) then releasing and running backward, darting across to keep the dazed man between herself and the low, crouched figure with the small, black hand weapon ...

  And off up the next hallway, broad and marble, people in suits whom she blew past at inhuman velocity, coat-tails flapping. Skidded into a painful, controlled collision with an adjoining corridor's side wall then flying up the broad stairway eight steps at a time, turning the top corner at speed as a single shot cracked loudly off the side wall.

  Stun shot, was the thought that registered in her mind as she sprang up the next flight. They wanted her alive.

  Around the next corner, and the next, sending another pedestrian crashing to the ground as she skidded up the steps ... and registered double movement up ahead, planted her next foot and leapt hard at them. And hit, grabbing her target right-handed as he dodged, and threw him hard into the back wall while bracing her own legs, slid and hit, then threw herself back at the other man. Crack! and her left arm leapt back, Sandy spinning with the shot to collect him with a roundhouse hit to the ribs that smashed him hard into the wall two metres away then sliding limply down the steps up which she'd come.

  Running again, checking her linkups to confirm there was an aircab stand on this level, and scanning the layout ahead for possible tight points. Her left arm hung limply at her side, numb from the bicep down. She knew from the queasy feeling that it was chemicals. They knew what she was all right. She had to hold the arm as she ran, to stop it from flapping about. It slowed her down.

  Past more staring pedestrians, most now alerted to the commotion in the building and standing well back, except for one brave fool who tried to tackle her and bounced off like a rubber ball when she dropped a well-timed shoulder. Then hurtling down another corridor in time to see the safety door sliding to the ground at the far end, cutting her off from the waiting cab rank. She accelerated, was caught five metres short as the door came down, hitting it with full force. Crunch. Rebounded, half stunned, looking around dazedly, trying to regather her linkups and sort herself a new way around. Found there wasn't one—she'd have to retrace her steps or be trapped.

  She turned back to the door, wound up her best sidekick and unloaded with an almighty boom! that echoed down the corridor and rocked the half-ton alloy door in its tracks. Swivelled and repeated it, twice, and again, and again. The fifth time, and the left side railings broke away with an explosion of sparks and twisted mechanisms. The sixth half-ripped the entire door from its right-side runners. She squeezed quickly through the gap, torn metal clawing at her coat.

  And found herself in an empty cab rank, an open space in the wet, gathering wind. Now about seven storeys up, looking back at the shopping complex. But no sign of aircabs—all the ranks were bare, yellow-striped spaces spattered with rain. Her linkups assured her the rank was still operating—she even had an ID signal from an incoming cab moving about the tower's far side ...

  She scanned further, cracked the signal coding down with furious determination ... and found the feeder mechanisms, and the alternate subroutines that made it look so real for someone without the time to check it further.

  Doors opened on opposite walls, armed men and women walked out, weapons trained on her. Sandy stood and watched them, shoulders heaving, clutching her dangling left arm with her right hand. Realising all too well that there was nowhere left to run. Her legs felt weak, and she was frightened.

  One man in particular caught her attention, walking to the front. His face was young, his dark hair fell loosely about his shoulders and his eyes were hard. The weapon in his right hand was fixed unwaveringly on her breastbone. He stopped four metres in front of her, too far, and she knew it. He knew it too. And grinned at her unpleasantly.

  "Let's see you get out of this one, Skin."

  And he shot her in the chest.

  Chapter 2

  Darkness. The chemicals stung, and she fought them. Established an active barrier. Failed to get immediately further, which was frightening. She should have been waking up. Unless there was a deliberate blockage, which was more frightening. She focused hard and felt that awareness trigger a response. It grew stronger. Through the tangled pathways of colour and light she found her bearings, and felt the pathways opening up on all sides.

  Sounds, faint and distant, now growing stronger. Beeping. It sounded like an audio mechanism for a monitor. Human voices. Indistinct. The whining of something mechanical. Electrical.

  "... can't you ..."

  "... much I ... insufficient penetration ..."

  And other things.

  Light, multi-spectrummed and unidirectional. She always saw that first, before the rest. Then brighter, and clearer, and she discovered her eyelids, and blinked. Lips parted, and for the briefest instant she felt them tingling.

  She was staring at the floor, she realised. Lying prone on something, face down. She couldn't feel the rest of her body. Yet. Again the whining noise. Then a thick humming. She could smell more chemicals then, rich and cloying. Antiseptic. And suffered a jolt of terror, knowing that smell intimately under different circumstances.

  "Nearly full consciousness. Damn, that's fast."

  "... not going to be able to shut it down for a while yet ... the intricacies of those barrier matrixes mean a long, hard time before the infiltrators get close enough."

  Sandy tried to speak, but her voice wouldn't work. Just a slight, ineffectual movement of her lips. She was nearly completely paralysed and numb, and was aware of something nibbling, working deeper, somewhere deep inside. She focused inward, searching for her linkups. The connections were sluggish, but they worked. And they told her that something was eating away at her barrier elements.

  She searched further. It had a power source, an external link, which meant it was plugged in somewhere. That was bad news. As for what it was ... and she recoiled as it shocked her, blanking her newly acquired vision back to darkness.

  "It's probing. Ran into the barrier elements just then. Probably try again in a moment."

  "Right, keep working. Don't get impatient..."

  It had left an impression when it shocked her, that
invader. Sandy pondered over it for a moment. And when she figured she knew what it was, she began to drop a section of her elements, slowly, fading in and out.

  "... here, you see that? That's progress..."

  "Try it slowly, see what happens ..."

  The invader moved in, sucking in the codes, breaking them down, bit by bit, eating away ... and greedily bit deeper than it ought. Sandy raised her elements hard as she could, feeling a surge of fury as she trapped the thing momentarily, and hit it with as high an attack burst as she could muster, right where she thought it most vulnerable. For a moment, it was a complete energy whiteout.

  "Shit!" There was a popping noise, and she could suddenly smell something burning, like cabling. "What the fuck was that ..." and a confusion of activity.

  Her vision was clearing. Small muscles in her face, neck and throat, and down her spine, chemicals cleared out in that energy burst, down the main neural pathways. Down her back and into her legs, a tingling rush of sensation.

  "Damn, that's wiped the chemical blockages. She's regaining contact."

  "Increase the dosage ... get that damn unit replaced, it's completely fried, you'll never restart it..."

  "That's the most powerful neural attack pattern I've ever seen from a Skin ..."

  "Dammit, I told you not to underestimate it."

  More commotion, and the movement of equipment. The smoke smell lingered. Someone pulled the cable connection from the back of her skull, only to replace it with another ... she tried to send another charge up it, but the barriers were too strong, and in her present state she was unable to find the necessary frequency modulations.

  She could feel her arms now. Numb, now that the chemical dosage was being reapplied, but she could feel them all the same. She could feel her whole body, except for her left leg below the knee. Numb, but feeling. And she had those connections firmly secured now, she knew her systems well, and knew that once re-established, no chemicals would entirely displace them. She had adapted.

  Another burst of concentration and she had her voice back.

  "Where am I?" The sound was little more than a croak, but the words were clear enough. There was a silence, except for equipment shifting.

  "Hello Cassandra," said a male voice, after that slight pause. Bemused sarcasm. Coming from somewhere above and behind her. "That is what you call yourself, isn't it? Cassandra?"

  The buzzing sound resumed from behind, and something in her right knee tingled faintly, sensation running up and down her leg. It grew stronger, and not at all pleasant.

  "What are you doing to me?"

  "Joe, can you shut it up?" No audible response.

  "Tell me!" She could hear the fear in her own voice, bad as it was. The right leg sensation got even worse. Reflexes tried to move, but nothing happened. It was the drug, and the restraints. And that damnable cord in the back of her head, probing away. She hadn't the strength to hit it again. And it wouldn't make the same mistake twice.

  "We could gag her." Sandy realised that she was hardly even breathing, the oxygen was coming from elsewhere. And something in her knee gave way with a hard pop that she felt jamming through her teeth.

  "It's not a her," that same male voice replied. "No one calls it her. Got that?" More deep concentration, and Sandy gathered another breath.

  "What are you doing to my leg?" An unsteady rasp. Pain, then, of a deep, horrible kind, far from the superficial torment of skin and flesh wounds. Conversational murmurs, working conversation and something crunched agonisingly through her knee, the buffers overriding then, making it numb. Which told her it must have been very, very bad.

  Movement, then, to one side of her head, people walking. She rolled her eyes to that side as far as she could, unable to move her head. But in her excellent peripheral vision, she saw one of the lab-coated workers was holding something in his hands, placing it carefully onto a synthetic trolley surface ... the bottom half of her right leg, amputated at the knee.

  That, obviously, was why she couldn't feel her left foot either.

  Sandy screwed her eyes shut. Tears leaked through the lids, spilling onto her eyelashes. She tried to draw a deep breath but found it difficult. This couldn't be happening. It couldn't.

  "Stop it," she croaked. No one listened. There was more conversation about other things, and the sounds of more equipment. "You can't do this. Please. Please stop."

  "I'm getting very sick of listening to that." Distracted, and bad-tempered. "Shock it."

  "We'll move faster on the barrier elements if she's conscious..."

  "I don't care, shock it."

  There was a white flash of energy, and more pain, and then darkness.

  * * * *

  Awoke with a jolt. And found herself in a living nightmare. Vision blurred in and out, and the antiseptic odour stank foully. A crushing pressure weighed upon her consciousness. She felt herself squashed into a small, cramped corner, forced by something incredibly heavy. She felt desperately for her elements, finding shards of broken code and jumbled, static-like mess. Her balance was shaky, and things floated.

  Sounds came to her as if from a great distance. Voices, once loud, then soft again. She fought the pressure, panicking, and made herself a little space amid the nausea, grabbing at the old, steady connections, squeezing desperately at the dogged pathways ... and nearly wished she hadn't. Hard pressure midway up her back, jabbing deep. A popping, hammering vibration, rattling her skull. A sickening wrench from her right shoulder, one way, then the other. The harsh whine of a power tool in her ear. A limp weight being shifted. Her arm. An impossible, grinding agony through her middle, buffers not coming to her rescue ... A frightened, agonised gasp from her lips, air spilling into empty lungs. Murmurs of consternation from nearby, echoing through the fractured sanity in her mind.

  "STOP!!!" she screamed, pure terror wrenching back control of lungs and vocals. "OH FUCK, I cant feel my legs, fucking STOP IT!!!" Drew another great, sobbing breath, something popping hard up her spine in an explosion of static pain. "Oh GOD!!! I'm SCARED, don't DO this to me!!!" That shrill whining in her ear, hard, crackling pressure through her shoulder joint... she couldn't feel her left arm either, it was gone, like her legs, like her entire pelvis ...oh Jesus, cut in half, they'd cut her in half and were working up her spine...

  "PLEASE!!!" she sobbed hysterically, shuddering breaths fighting past the growing, rasping tightness of her throat and chest ... "Oh God, I'm pegging you ... NO!!!" as with one final crack! something in her shoulder gave way, then that awful, zero-sensation of something just missing, simply not there anymore. To her right, something limp and heavy was lifted away. Her arm.

  She would have screamed. But a scream was insufficient. And then she lost her voice completely, and the pressure crushed her flat and sprawling.

  "Got through," she heard a voice, faintly. "That's the final one, it's all downhill from here ..." And nothing more.

  The pressure bore down, hard, cold and invasive. She fought. The effort was enormous—the pressure consumed, it drank down light, and thought, and everything that was hers and hers alone. It took her space and her thoughts, and her hope. It was despair. It could not be fought.

  But she could run. Sandy drew back, retreating down familiar pathways, cross-connections, withdrawing further and further into the deep, dark recesses that only she knew, hiding, making herself small. The darkness followed. It pulled, and it gnawed, and it bit. It threatened to suck her down, into oblivion. Instant by instant, it consumed those last deep pathways, snatching her hiding places, pushing her backwards, further and further, deeper and deeper. There was no hope. But she fought anyway, pointlessly clutching to the last, barest strands of what was hers. It was what she was. And it was all that she'd ever been.

  * * * *

  The thing on the operating table was a curiosity. It was a torso, although only barely recognisable as such. A human torso. Separated skin hung in great, thick folds over the table rim, draped like rubbery cloth. Musculature
glistened in the theatre glare, thickly structured and coloured a reddish-grey. White bone showed in places, the curvature of ribs. Sensory implements protruded from the spinal column like a back-ridge of slim bristles. Below the lowest rib there was nothing, only the glistening cavity where the intestinal tract had been. The spinal column ended abruptly at a single, nubbed vertebra of the middle spine. Rounded bone at the shoulder joint, smooth and glistening. Musculature trailed loosely where it had been separated.

  Above perched the black, angular arm of a scanner, waiting and watching, vulture-like. Cabling trailed down from attachments, connections inserted into that mass of wet, red-grey tissue. Systems analysed, took data, stored it. Some emitted pulses and measured the response. People in white coats looked at their monitors and pushed their buttons, absorbed in their tasks.

  Beneath a ragged mop of dark blonde hair, the woman who knew herself as Cassandra Kresnov stared sightlessly at the spotless floor, her head held in place with a metal brace, fixed tightly across the forehead. Once expressive blue eyes were blank and unmoving. Eyelids still. Her lips were pale, held slightly apart, as if frozen at the beginnings of a word, or a sentence. From a corner of her mouth hung a thin strand of saliva.

  "... absolutely incredible sophistication," one of the whitecoats was saying to the man with the shoulder-length dark hair. His voice was a hushed murmur in the morgue-like silence broken only by the beeping machines. Screen light reflected off the viewing windows, rapid scrawls of numerical data chasing infinity. "It'd take our biomechanics industries another hundred years to match this level of sophistication."

  "I know." The dark-haired man stroked his chin, gazing intently at his monitor. "It makes you wonder."

  "Sure does. Hell, I've seen Skins before, but this is something else. The neural integration is just..." He let out a small whistle and shook his head. "Absolutely mind-blowing. Seamless growth interface. There's no telling where the neurology leaves off and the technology begins. She processes datalink information like you or I process a punch in the arm—it's all reflex. More than that, if you or I had to process all the sensory input she receives we'd go mad. But she seems very stable."