You know it’s more than that.
The thought itched in the recesses of Lea’s mind. She handcuffed her two prisoners and started seeking proof in the displays, walking with Tiernan past the exotic constructs. The numerics built into mathematical crescendos, arranging themselves in designs of amazing complexity—random to human eyes but concealing some mad purpose beneath.
“Hell of a setup they have here,” the lieutenant observed, cutting into Lea’s train of thought. “It’s amazing they even have the resources to mount an operation like this.”
“If the Inru want it, they’ll find a way to get it.” The memory of Paris was still vivid in her mind—that underground lair from which Phao Yin sought to launch his crusade, and where Lea Prism’s existence as Heretic had come to an end. Still, she agreed with Tiernan. What the Inru had cobbled together here was impressive, especially for a group barely hanging on to survival. She pointed out the glowing cables that ran between their feet. “That’s quantum fiber—used for faster-than-light data transmission. And there,” she said, motioning toward a nearby computer stack. “That’s a domain cluster—and I’ve already counted at least a dozen more in this basement. They’ve got enough hardware here to bend the Axis.”
“So what are they doing?”
“Let’s find out,” Lea said, and sat down at one of the displays. She jacked the interface, bypassing the industrial-grade biometric security the mercs had tailored for their own use, shaking her head at their utter lack of originality. That’s what you get for using hired guns, she thought, her eyes narrowing as she studied the various coding patterns. They peeled away to reveal even deeper routines that went back several generations—each revision building on another, like modern architecture on top of ancient ruins. “I’ve seen protocols like this used to emulate erratic behavior in living systems. Deriving probability from chaotic elements—it’s what corporate domains use to keep crawlers stable.”
“You think the Inru have been building one?”
“Not likely,” Lea decided. “You can’t just dump one of those things into the Axis without causing a severe disturbance. It would be like sending up a signal flare telling us where they are. Besides, this is all a closed system—no ports in or out. I don’t see any evidence this was ever designed to interface with any outside networks.” The construct beeped at her, which caused Lea to slow down and retreat a little. “Wait a second,” she began—then watched as the construct started breaking down into component elements.
Tiernan leaned in toward the display. “What the hell?”
Lea felt the blood drain from her face. A galaxy of code fell apart within seconds, free-floating strands combining and recombining to generate an entirely new matrix. The sheer rapidity of the process made it clear that this was not the first iteration. This was a learning system, refortifying itself against a series of attacks.
Then she remembered what the mercs had said.
We’re losing control of the process.
“Son of a bitch,” Lea seethed, diving back into the re-formed construct. Waves of code wrapped themselves around her signature the moment she immersed—a scattershot defense that didn’t target Lea specifically but instead expanded to include the entire system. “The damn thing just opened fire,” she explained in a frantic stream, going evasive to keep herself from drowning. “It’s in full panic mode. I don’t know how long before the domain collapses.”
“What happened?” Tiernan asked.
“I was wrong,” Lea snapped. “This isn’t about control at all—it’s containment. These subroutines are getting pulverized by some kind of incursion.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“Somewhere close.” She grabbed her integrator, ramming a hard link between the small device and the node she worked on. Lea then opened a directory where she stored a salvo of flex viruses, which she injected into the construct. “If I can keep the CMs busy long enough, I might be able to triangulate the exact source—”
Lea stopped when she sensed an abrupt change: a logical redshift that set the construct awry, which translated into a physical manifestation of the virtual attack on her display. It began as a tremor—a deep disturbance, almost tectonic, that raised the dust on all the untouched surfaces in the ancient chamber. Moments later the entire building trembled, capturing matter and energy in a liquid sway.
Tiernan grabbed the edge of a desk to steady himself. Flakes of plaster rained down from the ceiling in a powdery drizzle, while the rest of the team made a run for the outer walls. Equipment racks began to slide across the floor, infusing a metallic screech into the cacophony of sound that poisoned the atmosphere. Then the air itself turned hot, as if compacted by the thousands of tons of steel, concrete, and glass above their heads.
“Heads up, people,” the lieutenant shouted. “Secure the prisoners for evac.”
Lea barely heard him. She was enthralled by the construct and how the battle it waged coincided with the severity of the disturbance. As the countermeasures deteriorated, the quake grew more powerful; when the defenses regrouped, the shaking leveled off. It was a losing fight. Each wave of the attack pummeled the containment protocols, rendering the code brittle and porous. How long it would take those walls to crumble was anybody’s guess.
Harmonics. Resonance.
Insistent, voices wanting to be heard.
There’s something else here.
She felt Tiernan’s hand on her shoulder.
“What’s going on, Lea?”
“Some kind of energy surge,” she replied. “It’s generating an interference pattern—almost like a seismic wave.”
“We have to get out of here.”
Lea ignored him. Fumbling for her integrator, she terminated the flex viruses and dissolved herself out of the construct. The containment system was already on the brink of failure and didn’t need her in there to hasten its demise. She then purged her mission data and set the integrator to record all the active processes coming off the Inru domain clusters. The volume of information was staggering—far more than the small device could hold—which forced Lea to junk the bitstream with high compression. She just hoped she would be able to extrapolate the data later.
If there is a later.
“Major!” Tiernan insisted.
“Hold station,” she ordered.
Tiernan stared at her while she turned back to the virtual display, urging the code to rebuild itself. When that didn’t work, she jacked the programming interface herself, redirecting resources from the other clusters and using those processing cycles to do the heavy lifting for her. The fresh code was raw and corrupt—but at least it was something the system had never seen before.
“What are you doing?” Tiernan asked, quiet but intense.
“A little trick I learned when I made a run on the Tagura domain,” she explained. “Introducing foreign code to confuse their crawler. With any luck, it’ll keep the thing busy enough to let me sneak in.”
On that cue, the vibrations began to subside. The building settled back down, its protests reduced to a whisper of what they once were; but beneath that an undercurrent of potential energy remained—a faint but audible growl, coursing through the foundation. The construct showed that Lea’s barrier was holding, though that measure amounted to little more than stuffing a cork in the maw of an active volcano. The pressure beneath continued to build, growing more explosive with each passing second.
“We don’t have much time,” Lea said, getting up from the display to address the others. “Listen up, people! Beginning now, I want a full search pattern—and I mean every square centimeter of this room. There’s something we haven’t seen—and if I’m right, we don’t have a hell of a lot of time to find it.”
The team sprang back into action. Using integrators and helmet sensors, they spread across the basement on the hunt. All except for Tiernan, who didn’t budge from Lea’s field of vision.
“You playing a hunch?” he asked.
“T
here’s a doorway in here,” she said. “Something that isn’t in the building plans.”
The lieutenant frowned curiously.
“A shielded bunker?”
Lea nodded.
“They’re here,” she decided. “And they’re mine.”
Tiernan followed her over to where the Inru mercs lay. Lea propped one of them up, injecting him with a stim spray from her medikit. The merc’s head lolled back and forth, his eyes fluttering as the drug started to take effect.
“You with me?” Lea asked, patting him on the cheek. “Come on, wake up.”
The merc babbled something incoherent. He stared back at Lea, but nothing registered.
“It’ll be a few minutes,” Tiernan said.
“We don’t have a few minutes.” She grabbed another stim shot, and was just about to jam it in when Tiernan grabbed her arm. Lea jerked reflexively, but he only tightened his grip.
“You’ll kill him,” he warned.
Lea didn’t care. But she paused for a moment—long enough for Tiernan to snatch the ampoule from her hand. He did it discreetly, so as not to alert the others. They didn’t need to see him questioning her judgment.
“Dead, he’s no use to us,” he said.
Tiernan was right—but that didn’t stop Lea from hating him for it.
“Major!”
Her gunnery sergeant shouted from across the room, severing the heat between Lea and her executive officer. They turned away from each other and toward the commotion, where the rest of her team quickly gathered. Two of them pointed their rifles at the floor, while the others worked together to heave an old steel furnace off the bolts that held it in place.
Tiernan started in to help, but Lea held him back.
“Stay with the prisoners,” she said. “That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
Lea watched his reaction long enough to be singed by his anger, then left him. By the time she joined the rest of the group, they had moved the furnace far enough to reveal what appeared to be a steam grate beneath. Oxidation had degraded the iron bars into rusticles, white powder caking the narrow gaps between.
“Echogram picked up a hollow chamber,” Gunny said. “Best guess, this is the point of entry.”
Lea crouched next to the grate, peering down through the jumbled light of rifle tracer beams. She caught a glint of brushed metal, along with the pale red emission of a lighted diode. She nodded at the others, who pulled the grate up and tossed it aside. The thing landed with a piercing, almost melancholy crash, which faded into the constant thrum that now enveloped the building.
The team stood aside, ready to blast anything that might pop out of the hole. Lea, meanwhile, eased herself over the opening, and found what she expected to find. A brushed-metal hatch was there, securely in place, sealed with a magnetic lock.
“What have we here?” Lea asked, and jumped down into the hole.
The lock, like the rest of the security around here, was off the shelf—no more of a challenge than the biometric keys Lea had jacked moments earlier. She had the code cracked in a matter of seconds, then waited for the magnetic seal to disengage. It let off with a loud pop, releasing a puff of cool, refined air—stale with the trace of inert gases, but amplified like photons in phase.
And there was energy: chaotic, violent, directed.
Pale green light rose up from below. Lea stared down into that radiance, in awe of its beauty and power—but also frightened in a way that transcended mortal fear. Because she knew, from her time in the Paris catacombs, that some things were far more permanent than death—and far more difficult to escape.
She looked up at the faces of her team, staring down at her.
“Follow me,” Lea said.
The hole was only wide enough to take one person at a time. Lea squeezed herself in first, her feet finding the rungs of a ladder directly below the hatch. She descended one cautious step at a time, holding on with one hand and aiming her pulse pistol with the other. In spite of the glow, visibility was poor—pseudolight alternating with amorphous shadows, creating a hallucinogenic effect. Her movements felt like slow motion, as if she had just immersed herself in a viscous gel, her extremities becoming so heavy that holding the pistol became a real effort. From there the sensation filled her lungs and constricted her throat, making it harder and harder to breathe the deeper she went.
Lea panicked and flipped down her visor, checking the atmosphere for toxins. Trace elements, oxygen, radiation—it was an exotic blend, but everything came back within safe limits. Forcing herself to stay put, Lea closed her eyes and waited. The pressure kept building, along with her terror, until she could bear it no longer.
And then it just as quickly retreated.
Lea opened her eyes in a shock, expecting to see some ghost fleeing down into the hole. Her mind supplied the illusion, a trail of wispy vapor that disappeared out of the corner of her vision, leaving behind an acrid burn of suggestion.
Something knows we’re here.
Lea dropped the rest of the way. She hit the floor with a hard thud, her body armor absorbing the impact. Instinct displaced intellect, keeping her on her feet and ready to fight. She held the pistol with both hands now, sweeping the area around her—a circle moving ever outward in a search for threats.
The chamber where she landed was covered floor to ceiling in mesh, fine strands of wire coiling around one another in crosshatches of microscopic complexity. Shielding, Lea immediately thought—and confirmed when her visor registered nothing but static off an active sensor scan. The patterns caught and reflected the light she had seen from above, which glinted back at her and exposed a mosaic of color on the surface of the mesh.
Lea lowered her pistol, widening her scope to take it all in. The mosaic was everywhere, continuous and ever-reaching, with no beginning and no end in sight. At first it appeared to be little more than graffiti—Inru ramblings and free association, the same kind of apocalyptic slogans she had seen in countless dens of the subculture. Beyond that, however, the etchings gave way to more religious iconography: endless streams of data projected onto faceless humanity, contorted figures straight out of Dante’s Inferno, the abandonment of hope in the bowels of a technological hell. Holding reign over all of it, Lea found the source of all this misery in a kind of crucifixion—a lone man impaled upon the cold personification of logic. She might have missed the significance had she not witnessed these events herself.
This was the Fall. The failure of mankind’s Ascension.
And the Inru messiah, now their fallen angel—there was no mistaking his face, even in these primitive, garish strokes.
Cray Alden.
A human presence dropped in from behind, startling Lea back into the moment. The rest of her team was moving in, settling in around her with their weapons at the ready. They were also unsure about what confronted them in the chamber, their faces turning ashen at the sight of all those images. The whole space seemed to radiate insanity.
Gunny stepped in next to Lea.
“What the hell is this place?” he asked.
The answer lay directly ahead, at the end of a short tunnel. Beyond that lay a larger chamber, hidden behind a sharp turn that concealed the source of the light. It pulsated now, the bursts growing in speed and intensity, adding even more power to the static charge that electrified the air.
An event in the making.
The team proceeded in cover formation. Lea hung back until she was the last person left, then crossed the remaining distance alone. Mesh walls crackled against her body armor as she edged herself farther into the chamber, tiny blue sparks crawling down the length of her pistol.
She stepped into the open.
The light blinded her at first, forcing Lea to block it out with her hand. As it dimmed, she caught glimpses of regular shapes and outlines—perfect symmetry, ordered regularity, a sense of grand purpose conveyed in snapshots between her gloved fingers. Those vague impressions quickly gathered into a reality of objects: large and rect
angular, the size of coffins, stacked on top of one another and stretching several meters deep to form a matrix of liquid green cells. Lea tasted moisture, a kind of primordial steam that reminded her of the protease accelerants she had used on runners in her hammerjack days. For her, it was the stuff of nightmares—made even more potent by the horror that greeted her.
There were at least a dozen extraction tanks, all of them occupied, human bodies floating in solution and tethered by glowing strands of fiber. A white frost had gathered on the glass walls of the tanks, obscuring the details of this macabre collection, but as Lea walked closer she could see both men and women contained within. Their shaved heads and slack faces rendered them almost identical—the final act of depersonalization in a dehumanizing process. Lea knew full well about that. She had performed the procedure more times than she could count.
Lea jumped on the nearest control node, while her team scouted out the rest of the chamber. She was already navigating the extraction subroutines when Gunny slipped back in beside her.
“We’re secure here, Major,” he said. “I sure don’t get it, though. The Inru obviously dropped some major jack on this facility—but so far we haven’t seen shit for security.”
“That’s what worries me, Gunny,” Lea said, her hands working the console. “Especially with this bunch.”
He gestured toward the tank directly in front of them. A woman was inside—young from what Lea could see, pale skin stretched across a slight frame.
“What’s the story on these people?”
“Tell you in a flash,” Lea replied. Her eyes darted back and forth between the tank and the display, her instincts telling her that there was much more to this picture than she first thought. Playing a hunch, Lea checked the extraction buffers. If the Inru were pulling information from the flash-DNA these people carried, the node would be processing terabytes of data. The buffers, however, were empty. In fact, the system architecture had been redesigned to bypass the extraction protocols entirely. Those resources had been freed up for some other purpose—something that required very heavy lifting.
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