The mark of an assassin.
The image intruded on Tiernan’s mind before it materialized in reality: a gaunt figure in flowing black that formed the outlines of a woman, her body defined by the shimmering web that clung to her like secondskin. Tiernan followed the contours of her sensuit all the way up to her face, which glared down at him in ghostly indifference, her eyes hidden behind onyx lenses.
Avalon.
She cocked her head slightly as she regarded him. Tiernan froze in that fraction of a second, willing himself to move but unable to obey his own command. Avalon hooked her right hand into a claw, knocking the pistol out of his hand.
She was on him before he even knew the weapon was gone.
“Fire in the hole!”
One of Lea’s junior officers was halfway through the ceiling hatch when he sounded the warning. He dropped off the access ladder just as the air above him burst into flames, sending down a shower of rubble and cinders. The rest of the team grabbed the wounded and threw themselves against the outer walls, taking cover from the burning embers that scampered across the mesh floor.
Lea pressed herself against Gunny, riding out a wave of intense heat that swept through the lower chamber. With it came a cloud of noxious smoke and crackling ozone—the telltale signs of heavy pulse fire. The explosions kept coming, one after the other, a constant siege that must have torn the basement to pieces.
And Tiernan was in the middle of it.
Lea signaled him, shouting into her transmitter. Dread overcame her the moment she realized all channels were dead, including the telemetry lines that connected her to the members of her team. The Inru had done a thorough job of boxing them in—and trapped underground, they were as good as dead.
Lea quickly surveyed her team. All of them were on their feet, two just barely. That included Gunny, who swayed unsteadily next to her. Lea gently lowered him to the floor.
“How’s your aim?” she asked.
He laughed painfully.
“Better than yours, Major.”
Lea took his rifle and slung it over her shoulder. She then pressed a pistol into his hands and put her last shot of stim into his neck. Gunny’s eyes widened, a tiny spark igniting behind them.
“Stay sharp,” she told him. “I’ll be back, I promise.”
He nodded in understanding. Lea patted him on the shoulder, then left him to join the others. She snapped them to attention with the tone of her voice. “Anybody who can walk and shoot, you’re with me. Everybody else remain here.”
Gloves slapped against rifles, in stark contrast to the uncertainty on her team’s faces.
“Nobody gets left behind,” Lea assured them, not flinching as another blast lit up the ceiling hatch. “We make quick work of this Inru trash, then we get our people out of here. You read me?”
Nobody said a word. It was all the answer she needed.
“Raise some hell.”
Lea scrambled up the ladder first. With no way to ascertain the situation above, she hoped the Inru wouldn’t pick her off the moment she stuck her head out in the open. She hauled herself up through the hatch, taking in a split-second visual before a couple of glancing shots forced her back down again. From what she saw, the basement had suffered heavy damage. At the same time, the Inru fire leveled off, less directed than before. There was a good chance they were on the run, trying to get out of here before it was too late. If that was the case, Lea would have no better opportunity to seize the initiative.
With half a hope and half a prayer, she pounced into the thick of it.
The support column behind her blew open from a sideways hit, blinding Lea with concrete dust. She rolled away from the danger zone, not stopping until she crashed into a stack of wooden boxes. Wiping the grime from her eyes, she peered out from between the boxes toward the heaviest concentration of enemy fire. Lea counted two gunners at most, on opposite ends of the basement. Far from coordinated, they appeared to be shooting at random—one in her general direction, the other where Tiernan should have been.
Lea turned loose a salvo of her own.
She missed the enemy by a wide margin but didn’t care. She just wanted to give her people enough cover to move up and spread out. The plan worked. The Inru gunners immediately hit the ground, while two of her commandos slipped out from below. One of them joined Lea in laying down a stream of grazing fire, keeping the enemy pinned while the other scouted out a sniper position.
Lea watched the sniper’s progress out of the corner of one eye. He crawled behind one of the heavy equipment racks, hiding behind the large computer chassis as he used the shelves as a ladder and climbed to the top. There, he rested the barrel of his rifle between two of the machines. With a nod, he signaled he was ready—and Lea ceased fire.
She motioned for the others to taper off. As expected, the Inru gunners reacted to the lull by popping back up again. One of them started to return fire, but only got off a single shot before the sniper picked him off. The other one started to run, but didn’t get more than a few steps before he got clipped and went down.
The room fell into a sudden, unnatural quiet.
Lea waited, scanning the melee of drifting smoke. She flipped her visor back down and found indeterminate life signs in the no-man’s-land between her and the doorway. She thought they might be Inru survivors, wounded among the wreckage—until Tiernan appeared in the middle of it all, rising from the ashes.
And he was not alone.
A figure in black swooped in behind him, wrapping its arms around him in a chokehold. The lieutenant struggled, trying to peel the steely fingers away while fumbling around for one of his weapons, all of them out of reach. The entire time, Tiernan’s captor barely moved—until her head turned and she revealed her pallid face.
Lea pulled the trigger without thinking.
The beam was on wide aperture, and spread like a shotgun blast. Avalon reacted with inhuman speed, flinging Tiernan off while she turned to get out of the way. Their bodies parted just ahead of the shot, which passed harmlessly between them before slamming into the far wall. It was only in that half second of lucidity that Lea realized: had she hit her mark, she would have incinerated the lieutenant as well. Instead, he bounced off a nearby desk and collapsed to the floor, rolling out of sight.
Lea had no idea if he was alive or dead.
Avalon was on the move.
The sniper fired off a string of rounds. Tiny flashbulb explosions whipped up a vortex of debris, dogging Avalon’s every step. Lea tried to box Avalon in by lighting up her other flank, but that only pushed her harder. With the sensuit guiding her, she twisted herself across the edges of the fire zone, riding the intense heat wave. In seconds, Avalon got so close that Lea and the sniper had to shorten their beams just to keep from frying each other.
And just like that, Avalon was on top of them.
She went after the sniper first, ejecting a stealthblade above her right hand and wielding it like a shuriken. With a single flip of her wrist, the blade whisked through the air with a high-pitched whine and buried itself in the sniper’s visor. Lea heard an abbreviated scream, then saw her man plummet from his perch as he clutched at his face. He went limp the moment he hit the floor, hands falling away from the metal shard that protruded from his head.
Avalon swooped down on him, plucking the blade out in a single, fluid motion and returning it to its sheath. In the same breath, she scooped up his rifle and closed in on Lea.
Anger and paralysis collided, short-circuiting Lea’s impulses. She beat a clumsy retreat, almost losing her rifle as she tried to contort herself into a better firing position. Avalon, meanwhile, kept on coming. She brandished her right arm like a weapon, a mechanical extension of her own flesh and bone. The prosthesis replaced the limb Avalon had lost in the Paris catacombs, after Lea had slashed it with her quicksilver.
That memory energized Lea, infusing her with a flicker of strength. She raised her rifle at the same time as Avalon, the two barrels meeting ea
ch other a scant few meters apart. Lea imagined the warm recoil in her hands as sweet fire carved a hole through Avalon’s body; but her initial hesitation cost her dearly—and her enemy would not allow that mistake to pass.
Avalon shot first, her beam striking the breastplate of Lea’s armor at a shallow angle. The impact spun her around, disorientation crowning the heat and pressure that seeped into the closed space next to her skin. Lea willed herself to stay upright, but her legs folded like tissue paper, rifle flying from her hands as she went down. Her vision compressed into a tunnel of agony and jumbled images, leaving her helpless to do anything.
Except die.
Lea expected it in the next second—the flash that would announce the end of her life, taken more easily than she ever thought possible. Avalon had only to flex her finger and it would be done. But as Lea came to rest on her back, Avalon stepped over her with hardly a glance—just a moment’s stop to kick Lea’s rifle away, then she was gone. Lea rolled over, still collecting her senses as she watched Avalon fire on the last man left from the advance team.
Lea didn’t see him fall, but she didn’t need to. When Avalon threw down the sniper’s rifle, there was no room for doubt. But instead of coming back to finish Lea off, Avalon ran toward an optical hub at the back wall of the basement. The hardware connected all the domain clusters, most of which lay in scattered ruins. In spite of that, Avalon worked the fiber jacks, rearranging them into feedback loops before attaching a small, translucent module to one of the open ports.
A killcast.
Even in her fogged state, Lea recognized the device—as well as Avalon’s objective. What the Inru had buried here, Avalon meant to keep secret. Lea and her people had simply been obstacles in the way of her real target.
She’s erasing the goddamned evidence….
Avalon flipped a switch guard at the tip of the killcast, pressing a button that caused the small device to glow bright red. She ducked for cover as red intensified to orange, then orange to white. High-frequency sound popped across the spectrum, building to a climax that released itself in a microsecond of contained energy—all of it forced into the hub, and from there into the dead and dying clusters.
The module went dark as soon as its work was finished. By now, the crystalline storage matrices that housed the data generated within would be hopelessly corrupted—wiping clean all traces of the experiment Lea had seen in the lower chamber.
Avalon’s mission was accomplished.
The outline of her form appeared over Lea again, as if materializing out of nothingness. Lea glared up at her, remembering all the weapons stashed away in her body armor—but knowing the slightest twitch toward one of them would bring instant death.
“I knew you would come,” Avalon said. “Eventually.”
Lea managed to sit up.
“I don’t like unfinished business,” she replied.
Avalon took another step toward Lea. She meant to strike fear, her voice lowering an octave as she asked her first and only question.
“How did you find this place?”
Lea smiled mockingly. “Wild guess.”
Avalon flexed her artificial hand. A spring load pushed the stealthblade out again, which locked into place with a loud metallic snap.
“How?”
Lea put on a façade of apathy. Beneath, she understood the choice Avalon was giving her: a quick and painless death, or protracted suffering, the likes of which she never thought possible. Either way, Lea would talk—but she wasn’t about to let Avalon have it for free.
“Go to hell,” she spat.
“You first,” Avalon said, and lunged.
Lea dodged the blow with surprising speed, reflex augmenting her depleted muscles with one last reserve of strength. Avalon’s blade fell wide of the mark, scraping harmlessly against Lea’s armor. Lea seized the opportunity and grabbed Avalon by the arm, using her own momentum to yank her off-balance. Avalon tumbled, somersaulting across the floor and landing on her feet—but now there was precious distance between them, and enough time for Lea to rearm herself.
Lea slapped her leg compartment and ejected the quicksilver. Radiation trailed the blade in a warm current, lighting up the infrared field of Lea’s visor.
“Let’s try that again,” she said.
Avalon accepted without hesitation.
In a whirlwind twist, she leaped into the air. Her legs carved a deadly arc, taking a swipe at the quicksilver. Lea sidestepped the intended blow, stabbing at the afterimage of motion and hitting nothing but air. Avalon swung around again, this time landing a kick squarely in Lea’s chest—right where her deformed armor made her most vulnerable. Tender skin and bruised ribs screamed from fresh injuries, consuming what little fight she had left.
Lea chewed on pure adrenaline, thinking of the speedtecs in her medikit, wishing she had enough time to down them. As it was, she used every last effort just to stay on her feet. Avalon followed as Lea stumbled backward—a fast, inexorable march that matched Lea move for move, staying in her face the entire way. Lea jabbed at her but Avalon remained just past the quicksilver’s reach, a predator with an eye for her prey’s every weakness.
Then, with a cold and hard finality, Lea felt the push of concrete against her back. Avalon had driven her into the wall, leaving her nowhere else to go.
Lea held the quicksilver at arm’s length, its toxic resonance building to a falsetto ring in her trembling hand. Avalon batted it away as an afterthought, her prosthetic hand wrapping around Lea’s neck. Mechanical fingers pressed the armor seam against Lea’s windpipe, tight enough to cut off her flow of oxygen but short of crushing it entirely. Gasping for breath, Lea struggled against Avalon’s grip, her legs flailing as they slowly left the floor.
Lea grabbed the prosthetic, her slippery fingers tearing at the fabric of Avalon’s sensuit. The artificial limb held fast, polymer skin and alloy skeleton nonreactive to pain and touch. Vision retreated from her visor, green and black dimming to gray. One hand fell loosely at Lea’s side, while the other clutched at Avalon’s face.
“That’s right,” Avalon whispered. “You get to watch me watching you die.”
Lea’s other hand brushed against her left leg, just below the hip compartment of her body armor. In the dimming recesses of her mind, she somehow remembered the flash grenades hidden in there. With her fingers twitching convulsively, Lea pawed at the compartment, unaware if she was even close to finding it—until she felt the cover pop loose and the string of hard cylinders in her hand.
Avalon sensed it immediately, her grip on Lea relaxing just a little as she processed the new danger. Oxygen flooded Lea’s eyes with incremental color, her lungs gulping air and returning control to her body. She flipped the safety cap off one of the grenades, her thumb mashing down on the pressure switch. At the same time, Lea clenched her free hand into a fist, wielding her arm like a club and smashing into the side of Avalon’s head.
Avalon let go.
Suddenly free, Lea crumpled. Avalon stepped back, momentarily dazed, blood seeping from her temple. She stared down at Lea, her face a contortion of surprise and pain, ready to turn back on her and deliver that final, fatal strike—but Lea had already uncurled her fingers, revealing the grenade she had pulled from the chain.
She tossed it.
The tiny cylinder tumbled through the air, bouncing off the floor with the sound of metal chimes. Lea turned away and shielded herself, only to be smacked into the wall when the thing went off. Light shrapnel pelted her, embedding itself in her armor, each piece a needle pricking the skin on her back. That close, without protection, Lea would have been shredded.
Rolling back over, she hoped that would be Avalon’s fate. Lea dragged herself up, anxiously searching for the torn remains of her enemy. Instead, she found an empty space where Avalon had stood only seconds before. No blood, no body parts—just a fading impression of heat and the memory of her presence.
It can’t be. Nobody’s that fast.
; Then Lea glimpsed a hint of movement at the edge of her visor. She zoomed in on that sector, just in time to spot Avalon beating a path toward the exit. She bounded over fallen racks and piles of debris, making the whole thing appear effortless even as Lea had just regained her balance.
“Avalon!” Lea screamed.
Avalon paused and looked back, but only for a moment—just long enough for her to convey what both of them already knew.
This isn’t over.
Then she was gone, as silently as she had come.
Lea waded through the basement, her armor heavier than it had ever been. She averted her eyes from the bodies of her team, picking up the sniper rifle and making for the exit. Unintentionally, her path took her right past Eric Tiernan, who was still where he had landed after Avalon discarded him. He was conscious, stirring in a disoriented way. His visor was cracked, the face beneath bruised and scraped.
Lea crouched to help him up. “Are you all right?”
Tiernan shook his head clear.
“I’m sorry, Lea,” he said. “I should have known she was there. I just didn’t—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lea said, abruptly cutting him off. She pulled Tiernan to his feet, steadying him until he could stand on his own. “Can you get around?”
“Yeah.”
“I need you to evacuate survivors. As fast as you can.”
“Survivors?” Tiernan asked, the reality still dawning on him. “Oh, Jesus…”
Lea tightened her grip on his arm, the stern tone of command in her voice.
“Save it for later, Lieutenant,” she ordered. “Right now, I need you to do your job. Are you with me?”
Tiernan stiffened, swallowing his own shock.
“I got it,” he said, his voice and expression vacant.
Lea gave him half a smile. “Good,” she told him. “Vital sensors aren’t working for shit, so check everyone. Get some distance as fast as you can and call for transport as soon as you clear interference. I’ll be right behind you.”
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