Alexa withdrew a diffraction scope from her harness and aimed it off to the side, at a perpendicular angle to the BTC building. She then activated the diffraction element, bending incoming light until the BTC building came into view. If she understood it correctly, the device gathered reflected light from numerous directions and used software to piece together the photonic puzzle pieces, discarding anything else. The picture was usually grainy, but it was safer than a periscope—BTC surveillance AIs would spot those immediately.
She spoke into her q-link. “Cotton. I’m in position and standing by. Over.”
Cotton’s voice sounded in her earpiece. “No active alarms. Yet.” A pause. “Mr. Grady, are you in position?”
Alexa heard Grady’s voice. “Yeah. I’m ready when you are.”
“Then proceed to the shipwreck. Land on deck and try not to look like you’re waiting to get captured.”
“All right. I’m headed out. Give me five minutes.”
Alexa wondered about Grady. For a civilian he seemed remarkably sane. She hoped to see him again. In the meantime, she sat on the ledge, watching intently through her diffraction scope for what seemed like an eternity.
Grady rose up to five hundred feet and then fell across the last ten miles. Cotton had assured him there would be an obvious landing spot on a shipwreck off the coast of the island. Grady activated the night vision on his visor and before long he could clearly see the wreck of the Francisco Morazan. It was a cargo ship that had run aground back in 1960—although only the rear portion remained above the water. Its hull was rippled and rusted, but Grady could see birds nested upon it.
He eased down toward the upper deck and finally came to a masterful landing on rusted plates next to what appeared to be the pilothouse and the funnel. He powered down the gravis and heard the ship’s decking creak beneath his weight. Birds rustled in their nests in the glow of his night vision. He decided to turn the gravis back on and keep it at quarter gravity just so he didn’t fall through the floor. Then Grady cast a wary eye in every direction. There was no one in sight.
There was only the sound of waves lapping against the hull and birds cooing.
A holographic display of a young Morrison appeared at Hedrick’s elbow as he sat in the command center. “Mr. Director, surveillance dust just picked up a positive ID on Jon Grady.”
“Show me.”
The elder Morrison leaned in with interest.
Suddenly a three-dimensional hologram of a half-rusted ship hovered in front of them. Hedrick grabbed the edges of it and spun the model around. He then zoomed in to see a live, ultrahigh-resolution video image of Jon Grady pacing nervously on the bird-dropping-stained upper deck. They could hear his footsteps.
“Fantastic! Finally a break.” He turned to Morrison. “Where are our closest assets?”
“Here at base.”
“But I sent teams up there.”
“There was no reason to keep them there. They dusted the wreck and left. Look, if the teams had stayed, they might have tipped off Grady and the others.”
Hedrick watched the three-dimensional avatar of Grady pacing. “Looks like he’s wearing what’s left of your assault gravis. And an older scout helmet.”
Morrison clenched his jaw. “Cotton must be helping them. Grady couldn’t have done those mods without serious equipment.”
Hedrick spoke to the operations controller. “Scan the entire area for significant heat, radiation, or other signatures.”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned to Morrison. “Cotton might have a workshop nearby. Grady’s definitely there. Alexa’s almost certainly with him.”
Morrison looked positively stoked. “Let me send assault teams.”
“Send every available operator. Focus on capturing Grady first. Return him here under guard, while the remaining teams look for Alexa and Cotton nearby. Cover the whole area with surveillance dust, and if either of them cross that grid, blast them from orbit.” Hedrick zoomed out to a satellite map of the region as seen from space. He circled the peninsula and islands, including the small town of Empire. “If you have to incinerate ten square miles to make sure they don’t escape—do it.”
Morrison nodded. “Understood, sir.”
Alexa’s q-link came to life, Cotton’s voice in her ear. “Red alert sounded. They’re sending five teams up north to get you, Mr. Grady. Two teams already ascending from the remote airfield. ETA twenty-six minutes. Expect the others not long after that.”
Grady’s voice came in answer. “Okay, I’m here. Be careful, Alexa.”
She took a deep breath. “You, too.”
Cotton’s voice returned. “Mr. Grady, it’s time to destroy your q-link. Otherwise, once they capture you, they’ll be able to monitor our communications with it. Do you remember the instructions?”
Grady’s voice replied, “Yeah, I remember. Good luck everyone.”
She answered. “Good luck, Jon.”
With that they heard from him no more.
Cotton’s voice came to her. “Alexa, at the twenty-minute mark, you make your move. Not before.” A countdown appeared in her visor’s display. “You should see the reference dot on the side of the building when you approach. As long as you stay on a level path to it, my contact says you’ll go undetected. He was able to build in a two-meter blind spot into the security array—no more. Don’t stray from that corridor no matter what. Understood?”
She nodded. “Understood.”
“For what it’s worth, I think if anyone can do this, it’s you.” There was a pause. “Best of skill, my dear.”
Alexa divided her attention between the countdown and the diffraction scope. Nothing appeared outwardly any different about the building, although she knew that would be the case. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, her timer sounded, and she leapt from the building’s ledge, falling nearly thirty stories before activating her gravis and soaring around the left side of the Penobscot Building.
BTC headquarters came into view. She was about halfway down its height, and now she could see a glowing red reference dot on its side in her visor’s heads-up display. It marked the precise location where she needed to land. She was already on a level path to the dot, and she modulated her speed.
Slower. Then even slower.
Alexa glanced up at the top corners of the building. She knew there were spinning mirror housings there that could direct powerful lasers at her or anything else approaching the BTC. But her trust in Cotton’s mole appeared to have paid off since she hadn’t been vaporized. Yet.
Instead, she kept falling toward the bland, concrete cross-hatching that the building presented to the world—although she knew it was a freestanding shell. She’d actually never seen the diamond-aggregate nanorod structure underneath. It was estimated that the physical nanorod monolith of the BTC would last a million years without maintenance.
Alexa was only a hundred meters away now. It was very late at night, but as she glanced down at the rooftops of the shorter buildings between her and her target, she wondered what anyone witnessing this would think. She was still a good one hundred meters off the street, though. She looked up again and started to pull back on gravity. One quarter. One tenth. She started reversing the flow to bleed off momentum.