Hammerjack Read Online Free PDF

more faith in the human race.
    The cackles gave way to the pounding of boots as they saw Cray walking in. It was a thing they did whenever they met the man in charge of the mission—a sort of tribal rite that had more to do with tradition than actual respect. They also put on a show with their armor, the camochrome pixels changing colors as Cray walked past, making them bright one second and nearly invisible the next. The effect was eerie, and made them seem even less real.
    Cray didn’t try to hide his contempt. They wouldn’t have cared anyway.
    “That’s enough,” he told the agents as he took the floor. The noise died down as soon as Cray stepped behind the small podium at the head of the room. His tone of voice made the agents pay attention, but it was the money Cray’s boss had ponied up that made them listen. Phao Yin was the force behind everything Cray did, enough to make these agents think he was CSS—even though nothing could be further from the truth.
    “I want to start by making one thing clear,” he announced. “I don’t work like the people you’re used to. There is no bounty involved here, no price for flesh. I’m here to make a simple intercept, and you’re here to make sure nothing goes wrong. So don’t go thinking the mark is expendable. I want her taken
alive
. Is that understood?”
    A snicker arose. The agents probably thought Cray was looking forward to torturing his mark. If they thought that, fine. As long as it meant they followed orders.
    “Good,” Cray finished. “I know you’ve already assimilated the dossier on our target, so I won’t waste your time going over it again. If you have any questions, now’s the time.”
    The agent Cray heard when he first walked in stood up. “Your dossier is missing some information,” he said, putting on his own show of bravado. “You got no bio. You got no visual. All you got is a name and a possible description.”
    “I know.”
    “So how the hell are were supposed to make the target if we don’t even know what the bitch
looks
like?”
    “I gave you everything you need to know,” Cray said, his dark brown eyes glaring at the agent. “Identification of the mark is my responsibility, not yours. As long as you have my eyes, you don’t need to use your own.”
    There were sneers, shaking heads, muttered obscenities. Cray didn’t want to give this bunch any reason to believe he trusted them. If they didn’t know what they were looking for, they wouldn’t wander very far from him. And as long as Cray could keep them in his sight, they would be far less likely to screw everything up.
    “You got any problems with that?” he asked, giving them all a chance to back out.
    Nobody took him up on it.
    The money must be good on this one,
he thought—and smiled.

     

    Her name was Zoe, and Cray had spent the better part of the last eight months sorting her out in the Axis. The trail had not been easy to follow. It never was. Professional runners stayed alive only by keeping low profiles, hiding their real identities behinds stray bits of digital bait implanted in the Axis by the hammerjacks they worked with. The trick was in separating the fact from the fiction, and for that the Collective hired people like Cray.
    It was a job only a handful of people in the world could do well—but then again, so was running. In a place where every other depraved act of man was perfectly legal, information trafficking was a capital crime.
    Zoe was one of the best. Cray could tell from the genius of the hammerjack who employed her, some golden boy who called himself Heretic. Tagura had deployed its own version of a semi-intelligent crawler module to protect the company knowledge base—an effective deterrent, even if the crawlers were a little unstable. Heretic had taken advantage of this, using a series of protobenign viruses that attached themselves to the outer layers of the crawler and became part of its skin. Over the course of weeks, the viruses