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

by Pourteau, Chris

  “Bring up Jakarta,” he ordered. As they got closer, Remy recognized the voice as Hattan’s.

  An enlarged image of Indonesia filled the air in front of the general. He squinted at the image, then touched three of the dots. “Reassign these assets to close-in observation.”

  Elise touched his arm. “You know how for a natural disaster, there’s always a few Neos that show up and seem to sacrifice themselves to the situation?”

  Remy nodded.

  “We assign them from here. Each of those dots represents a team of Cassandra’s disciples, observing—witnessing—an extreme weather event.” Her hand touched her nape as if to demonstrate what that meant. “We’re all connected back to the Temple, sending our environmental data back to Cassandra to be mapped and refined and modeled. Those three assets he just assigned to the cyclone are giving their lives in the name of science.”

  During her time at the UN, Elise had worked with a speech coach to Americanize her speech patterns, but when she spoke from the heart, her native Indian accent reappeared. Usually it reminded Remy of a simpler time when it had just been the two of them. Now, it scared the hell out of him.

  “You can communicate with individual followers from here?” Remy looked around the room then back at the Earth hologram. This center connected a few billion people? Impossible. “Using their tattoos? But why? What does Cassandra do with all that data?”

  Elise’s lips turned up at the edges. Not the kind of smile that lit up her face, but an expression of secrecy. “To the chosen come the answers,” she said, repeating one of Cassandra’s famous one-liners.

  He was still trying to reconcile his first impression of the New Earth Order as a fringe group of crackpots with the highly professional, highly organized, well-funded operation that had just conducted a military raid on a secure lunar facility. And had twelve operational bases scattered around the world, stocked full of the latest in military tech.

  A chill ran through him. No one knew about the threat they posed to the existing world order. No one.

  Elise drew him to the back of the room. “You have questions,” she said.

  Remy’s head was still swimming, but he needed answers. Anchors that could tether him to the reality around him. “The device we stole from the Erkennen facility. How does that fit into all this?”

  “I can’t talk about that, Remy.” Her voice was gently chiding.

  “You expect me to trust you. You said I was cleared. I need some answers, Elise.”

  Her face tightened. “All right, then. You want to know about truth?” She held up her wrist showing him the black ring from Erkennen’s lab. “This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

  “Rico said it was computer code. A key or something.”

  “Yes. And it’s working perfectly.” Elise nodded the three-dimensional hologram of Earth. Data screens floating in the air over specific geographic locations pulsed with information. Hattan watched the readouts closely. “Erkennen’s a genius!”

  “What does it control?” Remy asked.

  “It controls everything , Remy. All of it” —she pointed to Europe on the map where Remy saw a blue circle over southern England— “a bomb cyclone over London, a massive dust storm covering Beijing, an uber-powerful hurricane marching across Mexico. And wonderful weather along the US eastern seaboard.” She laughed, winking at him. “Let’s see what the UN makes of that!”

  Remy followed her world tour of natural catastrophes with growing alarm. “Wait … you’re telling me that the code you stole from Erkennen … you’re causing these disasters?”

  Elise laughed again. “Cassandra’s a prophet, Remy. She can predict the future. She foresaw Anthony Taulke’s ego, Teller’s greed, Viktor Erkennen’s belief in his own brilliance. She saw all of that and used it to get what she needed.”

  Elise held out the black bracelet. “With this, Cassandra doesn’t just predict the future. She controls the future of Earth.”

  Remy stared at the blue circle over London. There were how many millions of people in just that city alone, all being subjected to a deep freeze—for what? Cassandra’s whim? “But what about the people? Won’t this kill a lot of people, Elise?”

  Lit by the greenish glow from the hologram, her face beautiful in profile, Elise’s eyes shone with an inner light. But there was a hardness to her now, an alien coldness that chilled him to his core.

  “People? For fuck’s sake, Remy,” she said, her voice boiling in its native accent, “the people are the problem.”

  Chapter 28

  William Graves • Coast of Maine

  The waiting was the worst part, Graves decided. Whatever had gone wrong, knowing would be infinitely easier than the ignorance of waiting.

  He stared upward into the darkness along the circular stairway of the Maine lighthouse. It had been in the Graves family for generations, purchased for pennies on the dollar when the Coast Guard abandoned it more than a hundred years ago. When he was a child, it was his secret place, his treehouse-without-a-tree, where he fantasized his future as a real-life G.I. Joe. He marveled how his young body had carried him up these rusting steps to the very top without stopping then. Now he paused, waiting on his old man’s knees, wobbly and threatening to roll out from under him before he was halfway up.

  Hurry up and wait was the military way, but this limbo he was in had no hurry-up component, nothing to occupy mind or body. There was just the waiting with his fears, in the absence of real knowledge, foreshadowing the details to come .

  He’d stopped watching the newsfeeds. The whiplash of good news/bad news did nothing but tease his conscience with what punishment he deserved for his actions. One moment President Teller was the savior of the human species, the next he was an international terrorist bent on destroying the same. Graves was no politician, but he had the good sense to realize that his own fate was tied to Teller’s.

  He’d followed a legal order from the President of the United States to launch the missiles. Yet, the United Nations openly talked of charging Teller as a war criminal. Did that make Graves equally culpable? Like the Nazi officers in World War Two, was his public defense to be, “I was only following orders”?

  Graves resumed his ascent. How had he gone from saving people to killing them? His heart ached with the weight of responsibility. Once he reached the top of the lighthouse, maybe he should just throw himself and his troubled mind into the white-capped waters below.

  He relived the moment of the launch again and again, but still the question nagged at the back of his mind. Teller had never actually completed the order to launch before their connection had been jammed. It was clear what the president wanted, though. Graves knew with moral certainty he’d followed the president’s expressed intent.

  The United Nations was a cacophony of angry voices from all over the globe, blasting the United States for further destabilizing an already unpredictable climate. The irresponsible actions of a rogue nation under a cowboy president had made the situation much more volatile, the headlines proclaimed along with their blame. On the side of public opinion, YourVoice and the rest of the media had screamed without pause for Teller’s head.

  Finally reaching the top, Graves popped the hatch that led onto the light deck. The dirty Fresnel lenses glared at him like the vacant eye of some long-dead sea monster.

  A crisp wind snapped across his face, stinging his eyes with tears. He edged out onto the deck, where he could feel the building sway with the winds coming off the Atlantic. Graves squinted straight out at the fading blue horizon, avoiding the vertigo-inducing view of the creamy surf smashing into the base of the rocky cliffs below. As a boy, he’d been afraid to venture onto the light deck, only going so far as to poke his head out the trapdoor for a peek at the horizon.

  His sister had been the daredevil in the family. Jane would skip up the ladder and rush to the railing, leaning over to scream at the fury of the ocean, her long, brown hair trailing in the wind like a pennant. There was always wind
up here, fresh and new.

  Fighting down his boyhood fear, Graves gripped the railing and smiled grimly at this tiny victory over his childhood phobia. Jane would have been proud. But she was gone, killed in an earthquake in Mexico while working for the Red Cross disaster services. That was his sister, always running toward danger, always helping those less fortunate. Saving the world one person at a time.

  He guessed it was her death that propelled him to request a transfer to the newly formed Army Disaster Mitigation Corps. He’d picked up saving the world where Jane had left off. Graves wondered what she would think of him now, after the catastrophe of the launch .

  He’d given that launch order with the best of intentions. Those missiles were meant to save the world. Graves believed that. Still believed it, even now.

  But his heart sank as the disturbing early results filtered in. Only hours after the bio-seeding dispersal, after the world had avoided a nuclear response, a phenomenon the scientists dubbed a micro-hurricane developed in the Gulf of Mexico. It slashed, quick and deadly, across the narrowest section of the Mexican mainland, battering the city of Veracruz. The death toll was in the thousands. The hurricane had spun up so quickly, no evacuation had been possible. They hadn’t even named the damned thing until there were already bodies in its wake. A dust storm the size of Kansas buried Beijing.

  These disasters and many more were caused by the missiles he had launched. Graves believed that, too.

  Yet, in other regions, like the East Coast of the US, where he was, the weather was wonderful, spring-like even, despite the calendar showing September. He shook his head. It made no sense.

  A speck appeared on the horizon. He squinted at it, wishing he’d brought binoculars with him. Its speed brought its detail quickly, and he recognized the design of the military aircar long before it swung past the lighthouse in a long arc on approach for a landing.

  Graves hurried to the trapdoor, taking the steps carefully to favor his middle-aged legs. Around and around the steps wound down until he was dizzy. He caught his breath at the base of the stairs before opening the door. Whatever they wanted, at least the waiting was over .

  Two soldiers stood outside: a lean man with dark skin and a short Korean woman with the shoulders of a bodybuilder. They were dressed in Army working fatigues.

  “Colonel Graves?” said the woman.

  He nodded, letting the lighthouse door close behind him. Hearing its creaking hinges, perhaps for the last time, evoked a sinking sadness in Graves.

  “You need to come with us, sir.”

  So, this was it then. “I’m under arrest?”

  The pair exchanged a look, then the man spoke. “We’ve been sent to escort you to the Pentagon, sir. We’re activating Operation Haven.”

  Chapter 29

  Ming Qinlao • Darwin, Australia

  From a distance, Taulke’s space elevator looked like a strand of silver spider silk reaching from the Earth to Heaven. Ruben’s eyes widened in wonder as Ming explained how she’d ridden it several times on the way to her job on the Moon. Its tiny transit pods terminated at an intermediate station called the Low-Earth Terminal, she told him, and from the LET, passengers could book passage to Mars, if they worked for Taulke, or the Moon if they were bound for LUNa City. There was even talk of one day establishing hydrocarbon extraction stations on Titan. Ruben listened with rapt attention.

  Ming headed for a blue-collar section of town. It was packed with hotels to accommodate Darwin’s large, transient population awaiting their ride to a life beyond Earth. Parking lots doubled as automated sales lots for workers never intending to come back, and Ming sold their aircar for a deposit of ByteCoin she used to purchase work licenses for her and Ruben. Though he was only fourteen, two years below the minimum age for off-planet work, the fake ID Ito provided secured him his slot. No one looked too closely at workers willing to work in space. She also bought them third-class tickets on the space-vator’s morning lift.

  They had the rest of the day and a night to pass before embarking, and Ming was glad to have the downtime. She lay on the bed in their hotel room, eyes shut against a mind that wouldn’t stop trying to outthink her aunt. Without her implant, Ming found the quiet disturbing. It encouraged her to think too much.

  Ruben stared out the fourth-floor window to the half-empty parking lot below. Unlike Shanghai, this was not a vertical city, and the boy seemed fascinated by that fact. Stretching as far as the eye could see, Darwin teemed with human life.

  “Would you like to take a walk?” she asked. A walk would do them both good.

  He turned to her and nodded, a brave half-smile on his face, and soon they were strolling along a Darwin street looking like tourists in floppy hats and dark glasses she’d purchased at the hotel gift shop. Ming pinned one-time-use face blurring devices on their lapels to fool any cameras that might catch them. After the chase with the Fiero, she wouldn’t feel safe until they were in space.

  As they walked, Ming began to relax. She could feel her brother relaxing too, through Ruben’s hand. Holding it made her feel like a mother must feel, a role she’d never imagined for herself. A cool, ocean breeze swept out the sweaty scent of the city, leaving only the fresh smell of salt water, soothing the hot afternoon sun. A beautiful day—almost beautiful enough to make them forget they were running for their lives.

  Auntie Xi was playing for keeps this time. Ming shivered, recalling how close they’d both come to oblivion in the cold waters of the Pacific.

  Ruben squeezed her hand. “Are you okay?”

  Ming nodded.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I … I’m glad I’m with you.”

  Ming offered her little brother a faint smile. “Same here, kid. Come on. Let’s enjoy this sunshine and fresh air while we still can.”

  They walked another block in silence.

  “Can we go to the beach?”

  Ming smiled, for real this time. “Sure.”

  Once they reached the oceanfront, they took their shoes off before leaving the grass, then walked barefoot into the hot, shifting sand. Ruben giggled as the grains squeezed between his toes. He’d never been to a beach before.

  “Let’s sit,” Ming said.

  Ruben looked down. “But we’ll get sand in our … in our clothes.”

  She shrugged. “Who cares?”

  Smiling wide, Ruben plopped down. Ming joined him, and they laughed together at the feel of the wet beach beneath them.

  The surf pounded, the sea wind roared. Ming said nothing for a long time. Ruben seemed content to stare into the distance at where the dark blue of the ocean met the light blue sky.

  This is what you’ll miss , she wanted to tell him. The vast openness of life on-planet, the breeze that doesn’t come from a machine, the ability to focus on anything more than a few meters away .

  When she’d been called back to Earth, she’d only returned out of a sense of family duty. Now she found herself missing the planet already. She’d come to think of it as home again.

  How things change.

  “Will we ever come back, Ming?”

  She barely heard Ruben’s voice over the constant shush of the surf.

  Ming slid her arm around his shoulder and pulled him tight against her side. Together, they watched the water come ashore, then retreat again.

  “We’ll be back,” she said. “I promise.”

  Ruben looked up at her, seeming to gather his courage. “Will I see my mother again?”

  Ming said nothing.

  • • •

  It was just as she remembered it. The same smell of dust and rebreathed air, the same muffled clang of her boots on the stairs, the same pillars of reflected sunlight in the common spaces.

  Ming moved with urgency, her footsteps quick and light on the stone floor. Ruben lagged. He was tired, she knew. Tired from the intensity and frequency of new sensations, tired of avoiding the probing stares of others, tired of holding his sister’s hand.

  “We’re almos
t there,” she said. “Keep up.”

  He stumbled, and Ming caught his arm. She was tempted to yell at him, to tell Ruben how life from now on wouldn’t be the easy lifestyle of corporate royalty he’d known. Instead, she slowed her pace, reminding herself that he was just a boy and this was all new to him. You had to practice holding back the muscles overdeveloped in Earth’s greater gravity. Eventually, they got lazy as they acclimated to the new norm.

  “We’re almost there,” she said again. Her chest tightened as she made the final turn into the long hallway, half-dragging Ruben now, who was beginning to whine.

  Ming counted the doors as they walked. One, two, three, four…

  She pulled up short, uncertainty creeping in at the last moment.

  “Is this it?” Ruben’s tone begged for a positive answer.

  Ming nodded, her mouth dry. Before she could stop him, Ruben reached past her and rang the doorbell. A buzzer sounded from inside.

  Sounds of movement. The door slid open, and Ruben smiled at the pretty woman who’d opened it.

  Ming took in the pale skin of her face, the band of freckles on her nose, the blonde hair drawn into a loose braid. The wetness of her lips, open in surprise.

  “Ming?”

  Ming tried to keep her voice steady, but failed.

  “Lily.”

  Did you love The Lazarus Protocol ? Do you want more?

  We’ve created a bonus package exclusively for reviewers with deleted scenes from the original draft of Lazarus as well as “behind the scenes” commentary about why these scenes got cut from the book. This material is only for people who review the book. Here’s how to get it:

  Leave a review on Amazon or your trusted review service.

  Send a link to your review via email to syncorp@davidbruns.com

  And we’ll send you a copy of the exclusive Reviewer Bonus material.

  Continue the SynCorp Saga!