The Lazarus Protocol: A Sci-Fi Corporate Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga Book 1)

by Pourteau, Chris

  H shrugged. “She’s just gone. Fled Shanghai. Police tried to take her into custody and she ran.”

  “But she’s alright?” Anthony asked.

  Another shrug. “She’s off the grid, that’s all we know. We don’t know if she was involved or not.”

  “Involved in what?” Viktor asked.

  “We’ve confirmed that your second key was stolen, Viktor,” H said. “The secret, unbreachable Erkennen facility on the dark side of the Moon was attacked. Everyone’s dead. All the security vids were wiped, and the key is gone.”

  Anthony felt the worm burrowing deeper in his guts. “Stolen by whom? ”

  H pursed her lips, her eyes dark pits of rage. “It looks like an inside job.”

  Was that possible? Viktor had certainly dragged his feet in developing the nanites, whatever his professed reason. But a sidelong glance at his friend showed only a graying scientist with poor laundry habits aghast at the news H had just delivered.

  H watched Anthony process the news. “I can tell you what it looks like,” she said. “China’s been hit with a massive dust storm, London with the deep freeze … and the old U-S-of-A?” She turned back to stare at the two men standing in the middle of the room. “From sea to shining sea: perfect weather.”

  Anthony blinked. “You think Teller’s behind this?” he whispered.

  H met his eyes, her own accusing. “He says you are.”

  • • •

  Ming Qinlao • Shanghai, China

  After clearing the dock superstructure of Qinlao headquarters, Ming angled upward away from Shanghai. Flying without transponders meant no collision avoidance system to protect her from wayward flyers, so her four escorts fell into loose formation, two on either side. She set a steep climb to the transcontinental traffic lanes.

  A pair of police cars, red and blue lights flashing, swept up from the city below on a course to intercept the climbing formation. The police slaved the comms of Ming’s aircar, demanding all five vehicles return to the ground.

  Two of the Qinlao cars peeled off. They made a beeline for the cops, veering at the last minute to sideswipe the police vehicles.

  Ming worked hard to keep her own car stable. She’d never been great at hands-on, unassisted flying. Ruben gave her a frightened look, his hands clutching his seat, knuckles white.

  The cars flown by the Qinlao operatives and their police targets lost altitude rapidly, then leveled out as the cops gave chase to their attackers. The two remaining aircars tightened up on Ming and Ruben. She punched the throttle and heard a grunt from her brother as their bodies pushed back into the seat cushions. Ming gritted her teeth. Speed was all they had now.

  Her navigational sensors showed another car heading into the sky ahead, also on a trajectory to intercept. Cursing, she tightened her arc of ascent to cruise at a lower altitude. She wanted to go southeast but dared not be so obvious with someone on her tail.

  Ming whipped the steering wheel hard, setting a course due east. Her air guardians followed smoothly. A thin line of pale pink shown on the far horizon.

  The pursuing car fell in behind them. Sensors identified it as a jet-black Fiero model with blacked-out windows, illegal in China. Fieros were favored by freelance drivers, especially Japan’s Yakuza mobsters. Ming watched how the car handled. Its lazy arc and slow turns meant it was armored—and likely armed.

  First the cops, now the mob? she thought, punching the throttle again.

  The Fiero’s forward hatches opened. Ming’s sensors screamed an alert at her.

  Two missiles launched, their contrails angling upward, moving far faster than Ming’s aircar.

  Auto defenses sprang into her dashboard’s virtual display. She quick-scanned to find the countermeasures, but her wingmen were faster. Both of them cut speed and fell behind, swinging across the flight paths of the missiles to draw them off. Two explosions lit the night sky behind her. At the last minute, she saw ejection notices from both vehicles and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Two pawns , Ming thought grimly, protecting their queen.

  But now she was alone in the open sky with her pursuer. Ming fretted as the minutes ticked by. The Fiero seemed to have spent its long-range arsenal, and the driver appeared content to follow, forcing her to maintain her eastward course.

  Perhaps she hadn’t been the target of the missiles after all. Maybe the goal had been simply to rid her of her escorts.

  Ming climbed to the highest possible altitude. The Fiero might be slow on turns, but it would eventually catch her in a straight-out race. The car was visible now without sensors. Soon, it would be in machine-gun range, and Ming had no countermeasures for bullets. She glanced down at Ruben, whose taut face reflected the strain on her own.

  “Are we going to die?” he asked quietly.

  “No, Ruben,” she said, wanting for his sake to mean it. “We’re not going to die.”

  This was a problem to be solved like any problem. Ito had prepared her for this kind of battle. When she was young, everyone she fought was bigger and stronger than her. But she learned how to beat them. “Use your skills, Little Tiger,” Ito would say to her .

  Her skills. Her engineering skills.

  The inkling of a plan flashed into her mind.

  “Is your seatbelt on tight?” she asked Ruben. The boy nodded.

  The Fiero was only a few hundred meters behind. Ming allowed her speed to decay slightly as they drove toward the new dawn.

  She struck when the sun peeked over the horizon. As blinding sunlight flooded her windshield, Ming threw the throttle into reverse for a second, then powered into an aerial loop. Ruben screamed at the sudden, nauseating shift in gravity. The driver of the Fiero, lulled into the monotony of pursuit and temporarily blinded by the sun, shot by beneath her.

  Ming slammed the throttle forward and dove down on to her pursuer. Her undercarriage crashed onto the blackened windshield of the Fiero with a sickening crunch of metal on metal. Ming jerked up on the steering wheel, then slammed down again, and again. With each impact, Ruben’s cries grew more terrified, his grip on his seat more desperate.

  Now Ming was the pursuer. The Fiero tried to dive, but Ming was faster. She caught him again and smashed down on the heavier car. The Fiero dove again.

  “I’ve got you now,” Ming said through clenched teeth. She put the aircar into a steep dive, aiming again for the Fiero.

  But the other driver banked into a sharp turn, forcing Ming’s aircar to glance off his fuselage. In that split second, she lost her advantage. The Fiero appeared behind them.

  Alarms blared from the dashboard. Ming heard the chunk-chunk-chunk of bullets hitting the frame of their aircar. The steering wheel trembled in her hands. She spun them into a turn, but the Fiero had his range down now.

  Think …

  Below, the open Pacific Ocean loomed in the early morning light. Even as her brain measured the steepest possible angle of descent, Ming pushed the steering wheel all the way to the stops. The Fiero, guns blazing, pursued.

  The flat gray of the Pacific took on texture as they hurtled toward it. She ignored the sound of bullets hitting her car. When she could make out the details of individual waves, she pulled up on the steering wheel.

  “Hold on, Ruben!”

  The double engines of her aircar strained, vibrating the cabin from the base of the superstructure up through their shaking seats. Ming flattened her body into the cushioned chair, pushing the soles of her feet against the car’s floor, as if trying to ward off the hard ocean surface with her feet. The water kept rising to meet them.

  Just as her screams joined Ruben’s, their aircar leveled out.

  The heavier, armored Fiero had followed closely. Too closely. Ming craned her neck as they ascended again. A white geyser erupted from the indigo sea behind them. The Fiero’s ping on the dashboard winked out.

  She throttled back the screeching engines, and the sympathetic humming of the aircar’s stressed frame diminished. Ming even remembere
d how to breathe.

  Her little brother looked at her, wide eyes floating over tear-streaked cheeks.

  The readouts of the aircar’s integrity showed nominal. A relief. The Fiero’s fire hadn’t hit anything vital. Ming turned them due south.

  As they settled in for the long trip across the Philippine Sea, she put the car on autopilot and sat back in her seat. Ming made her hands into fists to stop their shaking.

  She was in a fight for her life—and Ruben’s. If she’d had any doubt before, it was gone now.

  Was her aunt so desperate to see her dead, and Jie’s only son too? Ming’s hole card, she realized—Jie’s bylaw that protected her from being ousted—was also Xi’s motivation for murder.

  Two birds, one stone. If Xi succeeded in taking them both out in a “traffic accident,” no one could stand in her way. A little recovered DNA from an accidental crash into the ocean would be all the evidence Xi needed to take over Qinlao Manufacturing.

  But, Ming realized, this wasn’t just about her anymore.

  “You okay?” she said to Ruben after the silence had grown too long. Too loud.

  Ruben nodded, but said nothing. In the light of the rising sun, he looked very young.

  Chapter 27

  Remy Cade • Earth Orbit

  From the observation window of the Temple of Cassandra Station, Remy tried to find comfort once again in the predictability of Earth’s rotation. Behind him, in the small briefing room where they’d planned the raid on the Erkennen facility, Hattan, Elise, and Rico had been meeting for over an hour. Apparently, Cassandra herself was joining them for the debrief, and despite his actions on the Moon, Remy wasn’t yet a fully trusted member of the team. He wasn’t even allowed to see her image, in-person or projected.

  Only the faithful, he reminded himself.

  But being excluded was the least of his worries. After their return, they’d cut off his WorldNet access again. Without the always-on distraction and outside stimulation, his brain percolated with his own thoughts. Right now, that wasn’t a good thing.

  Earth turned below. Cloud cover was forming over the blue Pacific in large, finger-like bands .

  Why was he still here? To be with Elise , he told himself. To protect Elise . But that was a joke now. On the Moon, she’d been the protector, and she’d done it with ruthless efficiency and an unhesitating focus on the mission.

  The mission , he thought. The mission was all that mattered to her .

  The Elise Kisaan he knew today was worlds away from the shy, highly educated invalid he’d met five years ago on a searing New Delhi afternoon in her father’s garden. That Elise could barely meet his gaze. That Elise, despite being the envy of New Delhi society, never left her father’s compound. That Elise had never had a real friend—or a lover.

  In hindsight, their relationship seemed fated. He’d been cashiered out of the army, pursued nightly by the horrors of Vicksburg, and relegated to the role of personal bodyguard to a woman who never went anywhere. A young woman terrified by the life-altering surgeries about to come.

  They both needed comfort, so they found it in each other.

  Remy’s role gradually transformed from bodyguard to personal aide. Eventually, Elise would allow no one else to help her do anything. Only Remy was allowed to walk with her. Only Remy was allowed to transfer her from her chair to her bed. It was during those moments of forced intimacy that he came to realize Elise Kisaan was more than a spoiled little rich girl.

  When her surgeries came, Remy was by her side every horrifying step of the way. Removing her dead legs and enduring the phantom pain of their loss, laying the bio-circuits and sensors that would mesh with her own DNA to become nerves, bone-welding the support anchors in her hips, and finally the permanent attachment of her bionic limbs. From this crucible of pain, the pampered girl was transformed into a formidable young woman like a sword blade forged by a blacksmith’s fire and hammer.

  Still demure when decorum called for it, Elise was more likely now to curse like a sailor in private when angry. She’d borne her bio-transformation with a dignity well beyond her years and a fierce determination to direct her life rather than accept what was offered. By the time she took her first steps on her new bionic legs, she was smiling through each tiny victory with him. Remy had become her best friend.

  They slept together for the first time on the night after the first day she walked on her own. Their lovemaking was a passionate celebration of life, fed by the knowledge that it was also forbidden. It wouldn’t do in Indian society, so entrenched in its caste system of propriety and expectation, for the aristocrat’s daughter from Madhya Pradesh to be involved with the disgraced son of Kansas insect farmers.

  Remy became Elise’s way of discovering excitement for life again. And she became his drug of choice in laying to rest the Vicksburg nightmares.

  With her maglev chair a thing of the past, her father launched an intensive grooming campaign to entrench his daughter into the upper echelons of the global elite. A posting as an intern at the United Nations led to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Biodiversity position. A series of mysterious illnesses among the ranks of the BioD department got Elise promoted to Assistant Secretary of BioD. A scant six months later, the secretary was caught up in by a pay-for-play scandal involving the First Nations of Canada, and she was named permanently to the post.

  Her political rise seemed charmed, Remy thought at the time. Now, as he watched a circular cloud formation swirl over Beijing, he knew the Neos were behind it all. They had pushed her to the top of her profession with the same ruthlessness she’d shown herself in killing two men in cold blood on the dark side of the Moon.

  The briefing room door opened, calling Remy back from contemplation. Rico exited first without looking his way, followed by Hattan who offered Remy a nod before he disappeared. Elise came last, her lips swept upward, happy. There was no sign of Cassandra.

  Elise joined him at the window. “It’s done, Remy. It’s done!”

  “What’s done?” he asked, wondering if she’d actually tell him.

  Sure enough, her face clouded, then brightened. Apropos of nothing, she said, “They weren’t sure about you, Remy. The way you hesitated down there—”

  “Hesitated? What are you talking about?”

  Elise raised her hands. “It’s all good. I explained it. Your inexperience with the Moon’s gravity, the fact that the plan was changed. It should’ve been Rico down there with me. It was too soon—”

  “What are you talking about?” His anger vomited out of him, a sign of his desperation to have order restored—to be sure, again, who Elise Kisaan, his lover and best friend, truly was. Remy closed his eyes a moment, saying, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s alright. There was some concern that you’re not fully committed to us.” At his expression, her hands came up again. “ Despite everything that went on down there. Because of it, really. The team felt you might’ve frozen out of a lack of commitment.”

  “The team. You mean Rico.”

  Elise’s silence confirmed his theory. “Hattan defended you. So did I.”

  “And what did Cassandra think?”

  The question seemed to catch her off-guard. “Cassandra?”

  “She was in there, right? That’s why I was kept out of the meeting.”

  Elise seemed to think her answer through. “She deferred to General Hattan on the matter.”

  “And Rico?”

  “Fuck Rico!”

  He released a breath. There, at least, was the Elise he’d known and fallen in love with. Cursing like a sailor. “How’s your leg?”

  She brushed her fingers over the still-visible slit where the Bowie knife had entered. “Functional, obviously. No major biocircuitry damage, thank Cassandra. My next stop is the infirmary. They’ll patch me up and regrow the pseudo-skin in no time.”

  Remy chewed his lip and leaned against the railing of the observation window. “These people—the Neos—are not what I expected.” H
is eyes tracked to the tattoo under her ponytail. “Somehow, I don’t think this is what your father had in mind for your career.”

  Elise laughed bitterly. “My father. No, I don’t think Aarav Kisaan would approve. But it’s his own fault. He’s as much to blame as anyone for what’s happened. I’m here to make the best of his mess. ”

  “Look, I don’t think he appreciates the impact of his agricultural business on the planet—” He broke off when he saw a mocking smile trace Elise’s lips. “What?”

  “You think I’m upset with father because he’s made his farms too big? Oh come on, Remy. I never took you for a back-to-the-land type, even if you are a farm boy.”

  He cocked his head. “I’m confused.”

  “My problem with my father and his generation is that they’re not thinking big enough. We have a global catastrophe unfolding, one that’s been centuries in the making. We need a solution that’s just as big and bold as the problem. The New Earth movement is that solution.”

  Remy felt the beginnings of a headache. “I still don’t understand.”

  Elise held out her hand. “You’re cleared now. Let me show you.”

  She held his hand as they walked to the lift and descended through the heart of the station, past the crew quarters, deeper than Remy had ever gone before. The lift’s lit panel button read Control .

  The doors opened onto a dim room surrounded by arena-style seating. Below an observation railing, a massive holographic representation of the Earth dominated the center of the room. When Remy looked closer, he saw clusters of tiny red dots covering the globe. Technicians worked at various stations around the projected image.

  “Nearly one in ten people on Earth are followers of Cassandra, the second largest faith on the planet,” Elise explained. Remy’s eyebrows went up. He knew their membership was large, but he’d never suspected that large. Elise continued, “We don’t advertise that fact, of course. It would undermine our effectiveness.”

  “Effectiveness at doing what?” Remy asked in a whisper.

  “Just watch.”

  A man paced on the other side of the Earth hologram, hands clasped behind his back, studying an overlay of a massive cyclone in the Java Sea.