What are you up to, Avalon?
Running out of guesses, Lea shifted her focus to the bodies themselves. She checked the woman’s vital signs, which should have indicated the minimal levels consistent with stasis. What she found was just the opposite. Body temperature came back at 37° C, heartbeat a regular seventy-six beats per minute. The woman in the tank wasn’t down in the least.
In fact, she was perfectly normal.
“What the hell?” Lea blurted, thinking she had made some kind of mistake. She ran the calculations again, this time on another body—this one male, in a tank on the other side of the chamber.
The readings were identical.
In every way.
His heartbeat matched the woman’s precisely—beat for beat, second for second. Body heat, when it fluctuated, rose and fell at exactly the same rates. Lea quickly patched in a comparative electroencephalograph, and followed the patterns of their brain wave activity as they ticked along side by side. The lines showed intense activity, so much that the node had trouble keeping up; but more than that, the lines were in perfect sync.
“This isn’t possible,” Lea said, the edge of alarm in her voice.
The display, however, told her differently. Time and time again, as she added more tanks to the scan, she got the same result. Biochemically, neurologically, these bodies were behaving as a single entity.
“Jesus!”
Gunny stumbled back, his face awash in the watery light, his jaw wide open—his finger pointing at the tank.
Lea whirled in the direction of Gunny’s cry, and found another face staring back at her. Entangled in a web of fiber, the woman floating in the tank could barely move—but still she tried, her body jerking convulsively, as if she had just realized she was drowning. Her eyes flew wide open in terror, her expression contorting in pain. Mouth snapping open and shut, she made a desperate attempt to draw breath into a scream—but the liquid solution would not allow it.
“My God,” Lea whispered.
In the other tanks, all the bodies that had been peacefully at rest—they joined the woman in her silent plea of pain. Hands pounded against glass, their movements bypassing conscious thought. Even as a single mind, there was only one imperative left.
Escape.
Until death filled the chamber with the sound of beating wings.
An alarm pierced the air in the basement with shrill insistence, screaming from the node Lea had jacked earlier. On the virtual display, the containment construct blew itself apart, its elemental routines scattering like so much shrapnel. The codes tried to regroup, as they had dozens of times before, but this time the damage was permanent. The containment field was down. It wasn’t getting back up again.
Seconds later, a subterranean rumble took hold of the entire building. The quake was even more intense than last time, knocking over equipment racks and smashing electronics into jagged fragments of silicon and crystal. Overhead lights flickered in and out, creating a wild strobe effect that chopped all the action into a stop-motion frenzy. Between the dark spots, illuminated in cruel flashes, the cinder-block walls began to separate. The cracks gathered momentum with startling speed, as the floor beneath undulated like liquid.
“Talon Leader!” Eric Tiernan called out, as the basement tore itself apart around him. Breaking radio silence, he shouted into his transmitter. “Talon Leader, answer me!”
Tiernan pressed his helmet against the side of his head, shielding the microreceiver in his ear. Crackles of static overwhelmed the mission frequency, reducing the transmission to bits and pieces—disjointed words, in the rapid-fire of panic, fragments of orders and counterorders.
“Lieutenant…Hold station!…status…losing control—”
“I didn’t copy that! Say again!”
“…don’t…I repeat…mission…no signal—”
Feedback overwhelmed the channel, followed by a swell of static. Tangled voices emerged, in confusion and conflict, until one overwhelmed the others.
“—the hell is happening—”
The transmission cut out.
The ground heaved without warning—a single, vicious jolt that sent the gunnery sergeant tumbling. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of the chamber, blowing everyone off their feet and hurling them through the air. A horrible metallic screech followed, as the mesh walls buckled under an enormous shear. As Lea peered up through the virtual display, she saw the entire room bending and cracking, like a tin can being crushed from the outside.
Lea pulled her visor down, clearing out everything except for the vital monitors that told her the status of each member of the advance team. Their heartbeats skipped across her field of vision, racing in an electric surge, but everyone was alive—at least for now.
Lea flipped the visor back up again, visually searching for other signs of life. She saw three of her people clambering for the tunnel, holding on to each other and whatever else they could find. They stopped to help two others, whom they hoisted up and dragged with them.
That was it. The mission was over.
All that mattered was getting her people out.
“Go!” Lea ordered, waving her team toward the exit. As they headed out, she boosted the power to her transmitter, no longer caring if anyone picked up her broadcast. “Tiernan! Tiernan, do you read me? Come back.”
The reply was garbled and urgent, Tiernan’s voice barely rising above the static.
“Talon…we have a situation here…”
“Talon Point!” Lea shouted into her helmet microphone. “Abort the mission—I repeat, abort! Take the prisoners and get the hell out of there. We’ll meet you topside in three minutes.”
“…acknowledged…three minutes…now.”
Lea closed off the channel and stumbled away from the control console. She moved back to where Gunny had landed and knelt next to him. He lay propped against the rear wall, still conscious, his jaw set in a firm grimace.
“What’s your condition, Gunny?”
“Pissed off,” he grunted. “Think I fucked myself up, Major.”
Gunny cradled his shoulder—but the crack in the side of his helmet worried Lea more. His words came out sloshed, a sure indication of a head injury.
“Can you move?” she asked.
“Ain’t staying here.”
Lea smiled and helped him up.
Gunny limped as she led him away. Lea deliberately avoided looking into the extraction tanks as they hobbled past, but couldn’t help but notice the activity on the virtual display. The misty image faded in and out, hostage to power surges as the chamber warped itself. Between those flickers, Lea caught several glimpses of the readings there. Harmonious just a moment ago, they had since devolved into an interference pattern. Respiration and circulation jumped off the chart, while the EEG spiked so hard it threatened to overload the console. Waves of neural energy tore through one another, spreading outward until they consigned themselves to oblivion.
The display dissolved into random pixels, then shorted out altogether.
“Come on, Gunny,” she began to say, when the shaking ground subsided a little. It made both of them freeze in their steps, while the chamber shuddered and groaned—the sounds of a sinking ship slipping below the waves.
Then Gunny’s voice, an echo of itself.
“Major—”
Lea looked up at him first. His eyes were riveted on the extraction tanks, his face drained of all color. Lea followed his stare toward the tank with the young woman inside. Thrashing in her glass coffin, she tore against the fiber links that entangled her. The strands she ripped free floated about her extremities, their insistent pulse fading to a dull glow as data spilled out of her tissues. Her face, a mask of agony, twisted into unspeakable expressions, her jaw agape in a soundless scream. In a final, violent spasm, she threw her head back so hard that it seemed to snap her neck, bringing an instant close to her life and her struggles.
She began breaking down.
The effect was subt
le at first—just the body going limp, as a few nervous impulses fired off at random. But then the woman curled inward, her spine bending into the shape of a scythe, while her hands twitched without direction. Blood started to seep into the accelerating solution, expanding across the tank in a crimson cloud. The skin across her back had split wide open, exposing the vertebrae beneath.
“Jesus,” Lea whispered, unable to look away.
The woman’s torso decomposed rapidly. What remained of her skeleton turned into jelly, the body collapsing under its own weight. Skin and muscle peeled away in sheets, dissolving into a bizarre biological tapestry—one that spread across all the other tanks, as those bodies were also reduced to nothingness.
With the base elements of life suspended there, Lea couldn’t help but remember the first time she had seen a bionucleic matrix—and in that moment, she understood the logic of that comparison. The Inru had never given up their core ambition. They had simply changed their approach.
This is the next phase, she thought. This is their new Ascension.
Tiernan’s heart hammered against the inside of his body armor, a burst of caged adrenaline trying to find a way out. He turned a hard stare at the merc lying on the floor next to him, while the urgency of Lea’s order tumbled around inside his head. She had made it clear that the prisoners were his priority, even though his first instinct was to grab his rifle and head straight to the lower chamber. He made several abortive starts in that direction, his indecision—and anger—building each time he went back and forth.
What’s it going to be? The men or the mission?
Tiernan already knew what Lea’s answer would be. It only infuriated him more.
“Dammit,” he muttered, and went back to the prisoners.
The merc Lea had doped was still in and out of it, riding the fringes of a stim haze. Or that’s what he wants me to think, the lieutenant decided, and tested out his theory by giving him a potent kick in the ribs. The merc doubled over, wheezing in pain.
“Son of a bitch!” he coughed.
“That’s more like it,” Tiernan growled, hauling the merc up to his feet. The young man glowered back at him, though it was hard to tell what scared him more—the armed soldier holding him by the throat or the building about to collapse on top of him.
“Who the fuck are you?” the merc wheezed, wincing from the flash burns on his face and the pain in his chest. “What the fuck is going on?”
Tiernan jammed the business end of his rifle into the merc’s face.
“You got a problem,” the lieutenant said. “Whether you live or die depends on what you do about it.”
The merc believed every word. Tiernan could see that much.
And that gave him an idea.
Tiernan shoved the merc toward the control node, grabbing him by the shoulders and forcing him down into the chair. The merc’s fear changed to amazement when he saw the array of numerics on the virtual display. Even as the domain clusters shorted out all around him, he seemed dazzled by the digital free-for-all unfolding before his eyes. The image fluctuated from overloads and dropouts, but always came back even more chaotic than before.
“Holy shit,” the merc said. “It’s really happening. What the hell did you people do?”
“You tell me.”
“It’s a containment breach!” The merc tried working the node, bringing up a series of code banks, but those disintegrated as quickly as he called them. “You can’t just pull the plug on these systems, man! The wave harmonics alone are powerful enough to pulverize the foundation of this building!”
“Then fix it.”
“It’s not that easy,” the merc explained, his hands shaking heavily as he ran a few more permutations, each one a failure. “There isn’t enough of the original code to salvage. The architecture has been totally destroyed.”
“Then I suggest you think fast,” Tiernan said, stepping away and leveling his rifle at the back of the merc’s head. “Otherwise I pull this trigger and let your friend give it a shot.”
“You’re crazy! We need to get out of here!”
“Give me something and I’ll consider it.”
The merc swore under his breath, but it was obvious he had no desire to sacrifice himself for the Inru cause. Cracking his knuckles to keep himself steady, he ripped through a dizzying multitude of screens, all while the roar beneath the basement advanced and retreated in an ominous tide.
“Talk to me,” Tiernan prodded, his finger flexing on the trigger.
“We don’t have time—” the merc started to protest, his words stopping dead when the display—and all the lights—went out. Tiernan flipped his visor and switched on the infrared, scanning the basement as the rest of the clusters tripped one by one. The persistent thrum of their cooling systems lapsed into an anxious stillness—fraught with the tingle of some new, malevolent presence.
And Tiernan knew they were no longer alone.
The merc swiveled around to face him, blind eyes searching the dark. Tiernan saw that young face in the glow of his visor, a scowl of puzzlement taking a sudden turn into fear.
“What the hell…?” the merc asked, before lightning pierced his cranium.
The concentrated burst took the merc’s head off, then slammed into the control node directly behind him. A bright halo of intense heat rode the concussion that followed, smacking Tiernan hard. He stumbled backward, reeling from the blast, his arms flailing as he tried to regain his balance. Three more shots followed in quick succession, each one creasing the space where he had been standing only a moment before, each one getting closer as the shooter led the target. Tiernan didn’t even think to evade them, gravity and momentum catapulting him in random directions—saving his life in the process. But that luck was quickly fading, and would soon leave him in a smoldering heap on the floor.
Fuck this, Tiernan thought, and allowed himself to fall.
He dived into one of the equipment racks, which brought a hail of components down on him. Several of the pieces detonated in midair under the heavy barrage of pulse fire, dousing him in a flurry of white-hot sparks and acrid smoke. Sweeping the debris out of his way and keeping his head down, Tiernan tried to get a fix on the enemy. Sensors were useless in this much clutter, making it impossible for him to tell how many—but their position was obvious enough. All the weapons fire originated at the basement entry.
So much for our way out.
“Talon Leader,” he spoke into his transmitter, “this is Talon Point. Do you copy?”
Silence greeted him on the other end—not static, not interference, but absolute silence. Tiernan tried rotating frequencies, but all bands were the same.
“Talon Leader, we have hostile fire. Acknowledge.”
Nothing. Communications were off-line, probably jammed.
The Inru had him bottled in.
If that’s the way you want it…
Tiernan slowly crawled beyond the shelter of the rack, figuring out his options. The dead merc’s body was slumped nearby, the charred remains giving off a sweet, smoky odor. Looking past that, he spotted the other merc, still on the floor where Tiernan had left him, still breathing as far as the lieutenant knew. The Inru, of course, would want him dead, to preserve the secret of what they were working on here—which meant, more than ever, that Lea would want him taken alive. The longer he waited, the less likely that would happen.
Come on, Lea. Where are you?
Tiernan strained to get a look across the basement, in the general direction of the hatch the advance team had used to gain access to the lower chamber. Another pulse blast was his punishment, this one close enough to singe the top of his helmet. Completely pinned down, there was no way he would see them, even if they were coming. And the thought of lying there while the Inru took the place down was more than he could stand.
He pushed the gain on his rifle up to full.
You wanna play? Then let’s play.
Tiernan took aim above the entrance and blasted a hole i
n the ceiling, raining plaster and concrete down on the enemy position. Huge chunks, large enough to crush a man, tumbled to the floor, followed by a haphazard volley of Inru fire that erupted from scattered positions. Tiernan continued to lay it on, pummeling every place he saw those blue bursts, until the Inru’s synchronized strike fell apart. He then dragged himself toward the fallen merc, tossing a couple of flash grenades for good measure.
Thunderclaps ricocheted across the confined space, along with explosions of poison light. Tiernan still couldn’t see the Inru gunmen, but he heard their screams—and that was enough. Popping up from the floor, he sighted a line that cut straight across the basement at waist level and opened fire. Tiernan spotted two of them trying to run for cover and shredded them. Another charged straight at him, only to get hollowed out by a stray shot from one of his comrades. By the time he ducked back down, Tiernan could taste their panic. Their attack, ferocious at the start, was disintegrating along with their numbers.
It was time to end this.
He squeezed off a few more quick blasts, discarding his rifle when it started to overheat. A punch against the hip compartment of his body armor ejected his backup, a pulse pistol good for a couple of shots at maximum power. Tiernan held his fire and kept moving. The Inru put a few more bolts over his head, but nobody approached. They were scared now, reduced to taking potshots at an unseen target.
He ignored them for the moment, closing the distance between himself and the fallen merc. Reaching for the man’s shoulder, Tiernan immediately knew he was too late. The lieutenant had been around the dead and dying enough to know, even before the merc flopped over and proved him right.
Vacant eyes stared back up at him in amazement. Then there was the blood. Through the infrared, at a distance, Tiernan had not seen it: that spreading pool, black as oil, encircling the merc’s body in a viscous shadow. A few weak spurts still leaked from a slash in the man’s throat, pushed out of his carotid by a fading heartbeat. The wound wasn’t deep—just a single cut made with deadly precision and deadlier speed, by a hand practiced in dealing death.
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