Lea shivered at the sound. She hated the idea of having her with them, a revenant spirit probing for a way to reenter the world—but she was as much a part of the matrix as Vortex, perhaps even more.
“How often does Lyssa come knocking?” Lea asked.
“All the time,” Vortex explained. “She likes to listen in on our conversations. Makes her feel connected.”
“Any problems?”
“Just the usual.” He slipped out of his chair and paced across the virtual chamber, looking up at the breaks as he went. They followed his every step, blinking like jagged eyes—just the sort of omnipresent shadow Lyssa liked to cast. “She’s always hanging out there on the edges, testing the limits of my consciousness. I don’t know if she’s mapping my defenses or just looking for company. With Lyssa, you never can tell.”
“So you’re in direct communication with her.”
“More than I want. But we’re both trapped in here, so it’s not like I have much choice. I try to humor her when I can, but her shit gets old pretty fast.”
“Like what?”
“Just mind games,” Vortex admitted. He turned back toward Lea and strolled up to the glass. “Psychouts, power plays—whatever you want to call it. Lyssa likes to think she wears the pants in this relationship, that she’s the dominant personality. I guess she figures if she can keep me off-balance long enough, it’ll happen.”
“What do you think?”
Vortex shrugged.
“I’m the one talking to you,” he said. “That’s worth something, right?”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
Vortex grinned. “Now you’re starting to sound like a systems shrink,” he laughed. “Don’t worry about me, Lea. We all have our encounters with duality. It’s one of the things that makes us human—or in my case, keeps me human. The only difference is that you have a conscience whispering in your ear, while I have an SI with psychopathic tendencies.”
He came off as glib and confident, just the way Cray Alden would. So much of his personality had survived the transition, it was easy for Lea to forget there wasn’t really a man inside the Tank. But she also knew that Cray used these kinds of tactics to conceal deeper truths.
Lyssa has him worried, even if he won’t admit it.
“But we’re not here to talk about me,” Vortex said. “We got bigger issues, like your mission in Chernobyl. How did that intelligence I uncovered pan out for you?”
Lea withdrew a little. She considered softening the news, but her hesitation tipped him off that something was wrong. Besides, it was all but certain he would find out the next time he took a pass at the CSS domain. Even though he was supposed to be a closed system, Vortex had fingers in virtual subnets across the globe—a modification Lea herself had engineered as part of his “therapy.” By mirroring outside networks to the CSS domain, she gave Vortex a localized link to the Axis—where he sniffed through millions of bits of seemingly unrelated activity, generating a real-time profile of the entire Inru organization. Without him, Lea could have labored for years to uncover what Vortex found in a few short months. He was the primary reason her hunt had been so successful.
Until now.
Vortex frowned. Even Lyssa held back, her voices going still—a radio tuned to an empty channel.
“What is it?”
Lea looked away from him when she spoke. She didn’t want Vortex to blame himself for what had happened—not when she was still beating herself up over it.
“You were right about enemy communications,” she explained. “They had a facility there, exactly as you expected. There was just a problem with the timing. We arrived on scene before the Inru contingent, and there was an ambush with heavy fire.” She paused. “Four of my people were killed.”
Vortex fell into a stunned silence. His emotional state translated into a physical reaction, his self-projection pixelating into static and transparency. As he reassembled himself, his face contorted in a series of hard jumps—anguish one moment, anger the next. During the flashes in between, Lea didn’t see Vortex at all, but the face of rage—its features savage and violent, but unmistakably feminine.
Lyssa.
The effect was so brief that it could have been an illusion. When Lea blinked, Vortex reassumed his usual, benign form.
“Sorry,” he said. “I should have known.”
“There’s no way you could have,” Lea told him. “I reviewed the SIGINT data myself and confirmed everything you found. There could have been any number of reasons the Inru were delayed.” She sank back down on the end of the chair. “It was my command, my responsibility. If anything, I should have bugged out of there the second I sensed something was wrong.”
Vortex hesitated before asking his next question.
“Was it Avalon?”
Lea anticipated her own fury, but hearing that name again only made her feel drained. She explained exactly how Chernobyl had gone down, desensitized from the number of times she had gone over it. “The real hell of it was that I wanted Avalon to be there,” she added. “Me with my guns blazing, her ready to die like a martyr.” She shook her head and released a weary breath. “Didn’t quite work out that way.”
“That has a tendency to happen.”
“It does when you don’t listen,” Lea said. “My XO tried to warn me, but my head was in the wrong place. People died, I survived. End of story.”
“Except it isn’t that simple,” Vortex pointed out. “You don’t get to take that on all by yourself.”
“Sometimes it’s easier that way.”
“Yeah? So is dying.”
Lea smiled weakly.
“Take it from the guy who lives in a box,” Vortex said. “You lived. Now you get to deal with it, the same as me. In case you forgot, I wanted the same things you did—but I was the one who sent you out there. You want to take the blame? There’s plenty to go around.”
“You’re a real pisser,” she said. “You know that?”
“It’s an art,” he replied, shifting gears. “So you took a serious hit. Now we get to find out if it was worth it. Where do we stand with the Inru?”
“The facility at Chernobyl was effectively destroyed,” Lea explained. “Between the seismic anomalies and Avalon wiping the systems clean, there wasn’t a lot left. I managed to download some partial intercepts to my integrator, but it’s heavily compressed. Pallas is running a data extraction and interpolation right now. It should be ready for analysis in the next few hours.”
“I’d like to get a look at that.”
“There’s a mirror set in my private domain, strictly off the books. You can grab the data there and bypass the feedback trace.”
“What’s the story on those earthquakes you described?”
“Nobody really knows,” Lea admitted. “We didn’t get any precise measurements because of the sensor blackout, but our best guess puts the shocks at around 6.8 on the Richter scale. There isn’t much seismic activity in that region, so the cause is still a mystery. The Inru mercs talked about some problems they had with harmonics, which seems to be our best lead. My people are checking on that too.”
“Which leaves us with the bodies you found,” Vortex mused. “Have you made any positive identifications?”
“Not yet.” She shuddered, trailing off into a tense silence as she remembered the rows of tanks—and the woman who disintegrated while Lea watched. “Most of them got pulverized, so my GME doesn’t have a lot to work with. Novak is running post on all the pieces big enough to autopsy, but she’s not making any promises.”
Vortex nodded thoughtfully.
“You onto something?” Lea asked.
“Just some serious doubts,” he said. “The Inru don’t have the resources to jack around with secret projects like they used to. So what the hell were they doing there?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” Lea said, getting back up and pacing the chamber at a slow, deliberate pace. “When I saw the tanks, I assumed they w
ere doing a standard flash extraction—but none of the bodies were in cryo, so that definitely wasn’t it. The only other possibility was something I didn’t want to think about.”
“You’re talking about Ascension-grade flash.”
“They could have resumed the program,” she said. “Started from scratch again.”
“That’s unlikely,” Vortex balked. “After what happened in Paris, the Inru considered Ascension a failure. As far as they know, Cray Alden died—and with him their dream of accelerated evolution. Even Avalon doesn’t know what really happened.”
On many levels, Lea knew that he was right. Avalon had escaped from the catacombs without ever knowing Cray’s fate, just before CSS destroyed the facility beneath Point Eiffel—and all the research the Inru stored there. Since then, the Ascension had regained mythical status, a whispered legend on the lunatic fringe of the Axis.
How that would change if they knew about you, Vortex.
“I think we have to consider the possibility,” Lea maintained. “Background chatter points to something major—you said it yourself. Besides, it fits the Avalon profile. She hasn’t been sitting around all this time just waiting for us to pick her up. She’s planning to take the offensive. You ask me, Chernobyl was part of that overall scheme.”
“Then she’s got a strange way of going about it,” Vortex said, still dubious. “We’ve been taking Inru cells down left and right. You’ve practically neutralized their ability to engage in hostilities with the Collective. How is that supposed to help them?”
“By keeping our attention diverted from their real objective.”
Vortex acknowledged her point with a curious scowl. Even Lyssa seemed interested, her taunting noises bleeding off into an expectant hush.
“You have to look at this strategically,” Lea explained, “the same way Avalon would. She knows damned well that without the covert support Phao Yin provided, the Inru don’t stand a chance against CSS. It’s only a matter of time. So what does she do? She makes us believe that she’s fighting a defensive war, throwing us some nominal victories to string us along.”
“Pawns to cover some larger gambit.”
Lea nodded. “Meanwhile,” she continued, “the Inru toss everything they have left into this new experiment. Avalon stays off the radar, because she knows it’s too important to risk our finding out about it.”
“Is there any reason to believe they achieved Ascension?”
“Probably not,” Lea said. “The mercs were pretty frustrated, so I don’t think they got that far. Plus all the test subjects were killed, which points to some kind of catastrophic failure.” She paused momentarily, mulling over something that had been bothering her. “Avalon went to a hell of a lot of trouble to destroy the data, though—which to me suggests they were getting close. At the very least, we have to proceed on that assumption.”
“You’re probably right,” Vortex agreed, adding an even darker caveat. “But if that’s the case, then we also have to assume that the Inru wouldn’t confine their tests to a single group of subjects. They would repeat the experiment—which means there are more of them out there.”
“Then I’ll find them,” Lea stated. “And I’ll destroy them.”
“Sounds reckless.”
Again, Vortex played the devil’s advocate—and again, he watched for Lea’s reaction. She wasn’t really sure what he expected from her.
“They aren’t leaving me with much choice,” she said. “Time isn’t exactly on our side.”
“Maybe that’s also part of Avalon’s plan—to goad you into another attack before you’ve had a chance to think this through.”
“What else is there to think about?” Lea asked, her voice rising. “She killed my people, Cray! And for all intents and purposes, she killed you too. It’s about goddamned time somebody returned the favor.”
Nothing of what Lea had said was untrue; in fact, saying it gave her the catharsis of release, unburdening her of an ugly truth she had never acknowledged openly: Cray Alden is dead. Confronted with his image day after day, she had just never been able to let that part of him go—in spite of all her assurances to the contrary.
Vortex, meanwhile, hardened at her outburst, the realism of his features taking on a mechanical cast. Lea instantly regretted what she had done, but talking about it would only make things worse.
“Avalon won’t get the jump on me again,” she said. “I have a feel for her tactics now, and I can assure you—the next time, things will be different.”
“I’m sure they will.”
Lea forced a thin smile.
“We’ll get through this.”
“I’ll make sure you do,” he said.
Lea considered asking him about that, but decided not to. With a shrug, she stepped away from the glass and walked back to the airlock. As the door slid open, she caught reflections in its polished surface—sparkles of infinite mass, like dying neutron stars, the bionucleic matrix reverting to a resting state. Vortex retained his basic form throughout, waiting for Lea to depart before falling back into the eddies and currents of distilled intelligence.
“There’s something you should ask yourself, though.”
Lea turned around.
“The Collective already knows about Ascension-grade flash,” he said. “So why would Avalon go to so much trouble to destroy all the evidence of something that isn’t even a secret anymore?”
And with that, he collapsed into nothing.
Lea carried the question with her all the way out, through the bionucleics lab and past the puzzled stares of Andrew Talbot, then up to the roof where her pulser waited. Climbing on board, she set her integrator to scramble and piggybacked the Port Authority’s automated subnet, converting a single-line transmission to encoded microbursts. She used the same precaution with all voice communications, staying off the conventional routes so that nobody—Inru or Collective—could intercept her conversations.
As the small ship spun her into the sky, Lea opened a channel. The glow of the integrator’s tiny screen clicked to SECURE mode as it made contact with its counterpart.
“You rang?” Didi Novak answered.
“It’s me,” Lea said. “How’s the post going?”
“It’s quite revealing. Our friends have really outdone themselves this time.”
Photon wash enveloped the pulser’s forward receptor dish, an excited charge slipping over the canopy. Out in front, a gauntlet of buildings parted around her as Lea jumped on the traverse grid. The navigation monitor displayed her route, twisting through the canyons of Manhattan, the line ending at CSS headquarters.
“I’m on my way,” she said, and closed the channel.
The main viewer flickered in cold black and green, at the receiving end of a grainy transmission streaked with interference lines. The audio was just as poor, riddled with dropouts and angry barbs of static, which melted the sound of human voices into the constant background noise of deep space. Though it was almost impossible to discern anything within the image, everyone on Almacantar’s bridge stood at rapt attention, following the shaky, claustrophobic action as best they could.
“Captain…in position…reading this?”
Lauren Farina watched from the center seat, straining to hear the message that crackled through the overhead speaker. She sneaked a look at the navigation console, where one of the monitors pointed straight down into the maw of Olympus Mons. A blinking graphic denoted the position of the recovery team.
The captain flipped a switch on her chair’s comm panel. “We’re barely receiving you, Kellean,” she said. “Try repositioning your line repeaters. That should boost your signal.”
“Copy…hold—how about now?”
A spike of white feedback flooded the viewer, then just as quickly receded. When the picture settled, it showed the outlines of two people in space suits clambering through an uneven and darkened terrain. The helmet camera that captured the image swished from side to side with each turn of Eve Kellean�
��s head, snapping in and out of focus. She widened the angle, bringing more of the foreground into the shot to give the bridge crew a better perspective.
“Looking good,” Farina said, turning to the communications officer. “Make sure the hard telemetry feed gets piped down to sickbay in real time. Masir might need the information if he has to fine-tune the quarantine.”
“Aye, Skipper.”
“Engineering, what’s the story on C-Deck?”
The engineering watch officer checked his own panel, punching up a deck schematic and overlaying the status of all environmental controls. “Positive seal on sections two through eleven,” he reported, augmenting the corridor that led through there. “Section chiefs confirm evacuation of that area, and all hands are accounted for. We’re go on zero-pressure drop as soon as you give the order, Captain.”
“Very well. Stand by.”
Nathan Straka slipped next to Farina, intently listening in on the banter that echoed across the bridge. He fixed his gaze on the viewer, a wicked stab of familiarity stirring his gut. On the large screen, he watched as three more figures emerged from the Mons cavern, their blurred forms matted against the craggy, triangular opening. It appeared even more foreboding than Nathan remembered it.
Kellean’s voice piped in again. “You getting this, base?”
“Roger that,” Farina replied. “Careful down there.”
The recovery team carted out one metal coffin after another, advancing like a funeral procession, the reduced gravity rendering their march in slow motion. Like everyone else on the bridge, Nathan couldn’t help his morbid fascination. Contained in those cryotubes were the remains of another time—relics of a monstrous past. Something like that could never be buried, even in the depths of Olympus Mons.
Something like that always finds a way out.
The recovery team carefully loaded each cryotube into the cargo bay of a Protus HX-1100C “Guppy,” a medium-class lift vehicle parked on the ledge outside the cavern. Over the landing zone, a bank of landing lights cast a harsh glare that glinted off the brushed-transluminum coffins. More disturbing, however, was the pallid glow that emanated from the head of each tube—a tiny window that looked in on the occupant. Kellean zoomed in on one of them, wanting to get a clear shot of the face within, but she was the only one who tried.
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