Cray, meanwhile, had nowhere else to go.
His prison gleamed in the light of a new day, its pyramid apex breaking the misty cloud cover that rolled over Manhattan. Lea signaled approach control, and right on cue a private message appeared on her integrator—gelling all the conflicts that brought her back time and time again:
back so soon—you must really miss me
“I do,” she said, but only to herself. “God help me, I do.”
The pulser touched down just long enough to drop Lea off, then roared into the sky to rejoin the dozen other aircraft that orbited the Works. She timed her arrival deliberately, giving herself enough of a window to get down to the bionucleics level just before shift rotation. At most, she would have ten minutes alone in the lab while security screened the daytime staff. Logging on to an access node at the edge of camera range, she quickly went to work.
Lea used the time to run a series of private requests, routing each one across multiple nodes and through different subdomains, each relaying a single piece of a hidden construct back to her display. She had meticulously scattered the components, utilizing swaths of native code connected via an intricate framework of encrypted tunnels, knowing that a decentralized program—even as massive as this one—would evade detection. Gradually, the individual parts assembled themselves into a whole, providing Lea with a covert interface that she used to assert control over bionucleic containment. The thing was buried so deep that even Vortex wasn’t aware of it.
He’d probably purge the code if he knew.
Lea ran an integrity check, which came back clean. A garrison of firewalls stood between Vortex and the outside world, which kept his consciousness—and Lyssa’s—from flooding the Axis. The interface put all of them at Lea’s command—a fail-safe she had installed, in the event it became necessary to dump the matrix outside the local system. In all likelihood the resulting singularity would destroy the Axis in an instant, but that wasn’t her greatest concern. She just wanted Vortex to have an escape route in case the Assembly got wise to her game and tried to have him erased.
With that finished, she locked down the node and headed for the Tank. On the other side of the airlock, Vortex already waited for her. Behind the illusion of his form, the Tank swirled with a maelstrom of color and light.
Lea found it difficult to meet his gaze.
“Not a morning person,” he remarked. “I remember what that was like.”
“Sorry,” she replied, trying to be casual. “Long night.”
“They all are these days,” he said, observing her closely. “I catch you at a bad time?”
Lea considered telling him, wondering briefly how to do it. She had to settle on the short version—the one that didn’t include Tiernan. Vortex listened thoughtfully as she told him about Bostic, and the Assembly’s new views on the Inru.
“I’m not surprised,” he said when Lea finished. “The Assembly’s been on ice too long. They don’t realize how fragmented the Collective has become, even about the war.”
“It’s crazy.” Lea shook her head. “With a bunch of fanatics running around, hell-bent on destroying civilization, you would think we’d all be on the same side.”
“Doesn’t work that way in corporate circles. Too many politics involved, too many competing interests.” Vortex seemed bitter as he recalled his own experience. “I worked some of the factions when I was back in the world. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit they pulled, undermining Collective security while pursuing their own narrow agendas.”
“You think that’s what Bostic is doing now?”
“No question. He needs a victory to consolidate his position with the Assembly, so he declares one. It’s a business decision, pure and simple.” He leaned in toward her, as if sharing a secret. “The hard part is making it stick.”
Lea started to get the twisted logic of it. “That’s what he has me for.”
“Precisely,” Vortex agreed. “Bostic has you pegged. He figures you’re in too deep to give up the fight, even if he yanks material support—so he gets you to do the dirty work for free. For him, there’s no downside. If you finish off the Inru, he gets all the credit. If the whole thing blows up, he still has you to take the blame.”
For the second time, Lea couldn’t help but admire Bostic’s cunning. “That man has discovered a whole new level of sleaze.”
“Congratulations. Now you know what it really means to be a corporate spook.”
“So what can we do?”
“Play along—for as long as we can.”
“There’s no time, Vortex. I’ve got less than a week and nothing to go on.”
“That’s not entirely true.” His tone was playful, as was his hint.
“You found something?” Lea asked.
Vortex beckoned her to come closer.
“The Inru plan,” he replied. “I think I know what it is.”
Vortex was gone, absorbed into the flotsam of his bionucleic matrix. The Tank rearranged itself into an array of flat images—simultaneous feeds he had pilfered from the Works’ research archive, utilizing a stealth gateway Lea had rigged to give him localized access. They flashed by at such speed that Lea couldn’t recognize them until Vortex slowed down and arranged the relevant pieces in a coherent order. Most were official documents with embedded video streams, along with a few scientific reports that displayed the exotic jargon of some obscure discipline. The dates Lea saw indicated they were very old—better than a century.
“The key was actually something you found at Chernobyl,” a disembodied voice explained. It sounded like Vortex, but with a shrill, subliminal echo—probably Lyssa stalking the perimeter, ever watchful of these sessions. “I had my suspicions when you described the Inru lab, but wasn’t sure of the connection until I got the forensic data from Novak’s post. After that, I had to cross-reference my analysis with the historical record—most of which was classified, by the way.”
“Is that what I’m seeing here?”
“CCRD experimental files, Project Nightwatch,” Vortex reported. “It took me a while to crack security and balance the interface protocols with a conventional system—otherwise, I would have found it sooner.”
Lea sat on the end of the interface chair, absorbed by the massive display.
“What is all this?”
“A research project conducted one hundred twelve years ago,” Vortex said. “Highly secret.”
“On what?”
“Practical telepathy.”
He augmented the video streams, particularly the one that presented an eerily familiar scene. Two human subjects, submerged in suspension tanks, were connected via a thick cluster of fiber links—a smaller, more primitive version of what Lea had seen in Chernobyl. A crowd of technicians and scientists gathered around them, taking notes, while the subjects thrashed around inside of their tanks. They appeared to be in agony.
Lea held her arms to fend off the chill.
“The Collective wanted to see if there was a way to induce telepathic abilities in persons who showed no previous disposition toward psychic activity,” Vortex narrated. “Nightwatch was devised to make that happen. Over the course of twelve years, fifty-three test subjects were conditioned with a regimen designed to stimulate growth in those regions of the brain thought to be responsible for psychic manifestations.” He paused for a moment while Lea stared, horrified but unable to look away. “The two you see here represent the terminal stage of that research.”
Another cut, and the two bodies lay on examination tables. A masked medical examiner went to work on them, opening their skulls before the feed abruptly ended.
“Nightwatch had only limited success in achieving their goals,” Vortex went on, shuffling some of the still pictures and documents for Lea. “They reported nominal increases in latent telepathy among members of the experimental group—but since very few of them survived, they had difficulty repeating the procedure with any reliability. The Collective eventually shut Nightwatch down
, saying the research methods were flawed and the results too inconclusive for them to justify the cost.”
Lea closed her eyes, hoping the images would fade from her mind. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty sick stuff.”
Vortex had reasserted his image by the time she looked back up.
“History repeats itself,” she observed. “Is that what the Inru are doing?”
“In a way,” Vortex said. “Obviously, their technology is far more advanced—but the principle is the same. From what your GME found, it looks like they’re using a similar approach to what Nightwatch did.”
Lea recalled a single word from the rush of documents Vortex showed her—something Didi Novak had also mentioned.
“Biomagnetites.”
Vortex nodded.
“The idea has been around for a while,” he said. “Parapsychologists investigated biomagnetism as a possible source for various forms of ESP as far back as the mid-twentieth century. Their efforts were dismissed as little more than voodoo science. It wasn’t until the beginnings of theoretical nanopsychology that the theory regained acceptance in the more radical circles—and you saw where that led.”
“Down a very dark road,” Lea said, remembering the lost highway that had led her to Chernobyl. “Still, it’s hard for me to imagine the Inru taking their cue from something like this. Nightwatch was such an obscure project, it’s doubtful their hammerjacks would have stumbled across it by accident.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I never did.”
Vortex gave her a dry smile, so much like Cray Alden that it made him seem human again. It was hard to conceive that both of them, at one time, had been in the game as enemies—with him as hunter and her as prey.
“Neither did I,” he agreed. “But the evidence leads in that direction.”
Lea remained dubious.
“It’s still a big shift in the Ascension paradigm,” she argued. “That’s been the Inru’s goal all along, to evolve human beings past the point of synthetic intelligence.”
“It might now be the only way to achieve that goal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” Vortex prodded. “Most of the Inru technology was destroyed. They have only bits and pieces, which they cobble back together the best they can—only it’s not enough to re-create Ascension-grade flash, at least not in a refined form. So they go back to the drawing board, creating a variant based on an earlier version—then hope like hell that they can make it work.”
Lea thought of the unknown virus under Novak’s microscope, of how it had so much in common with flash—yet behaved so differently.
“And it does,” Vortex continued. “Just not the way they expected. Maybe there’s a side effect to the design—something that caused a massive failure in Chernobyl. Whatever it is, you can bet the Inru won’t stop until they fix the problem.”
“You actually think they can use telepathy to achieve Ascension?” Lea asked.
“It’s a real possibility,” Vortex said. “Near the end of my Ascension, I was wired, you know—hard-linked to everything and everyone around me. It was almost like…drowning in some massive consciousness.” He trailed off into a loaded silence before he could finish. “Those Inru hammerjacks would have picked up on it in a heartbeat, Lea. There’s no way they could have missed it.”
Lea knew from her own immersion runs that he was right. It was part of the rush, the godlike omnipotence when you were down in it.
“And the biomagnetites?”
“Leverage,” Vortex said. “A boost to kick those connections into high gear.”
“High octane for an ESP link.”
“Precisely.”
“I don’t know, Vortex,” Lea said. “It explains a lot, but I still don’t see how this gets them any closer to Ascension.”
“It doesn’t—not on an individual basis.”
“Then how—” she began, then stopped. Vortex, meanwhile, backed away from the glass, allowing Lea to draw the conclusion for herself.
“A hive mind.”
“Even better,” Vortex said. “An array of minds, enhanced by this new flash—all networked telepathically and decentralized. It’s actually a brilliant solution. If the Inru can get them synchronized in just the right way, the resulting matrix could be very powerful.”
“How powerful?”
Vortex considered it. “More than me—maybe even more than a single Ascension.”
Lea felt drained. “How sure are you about this?”
“If the models I ran based on your findings are accurate,” Vortex said, “then we could have a real problem on our hands. The real question is how close the Inru are to overcoming the flaws in their design. If they can get that part figured out…”
He didn’t need to remind Lea of the consequences.
“Can you determine how close they are?”
“Not until we know what caused the failure in the first place,” he admitted, “and to do that I need information—a lot more than I have here.”
“Pallas is still working the data from Chernobyl.”
“I know, and there are a lot of gaps. To be honest, it could be months before I can extrapolate anything useful—maybe never.”
“You’re saying we’re blind.”
Vortex tried to ease the blow, but it didn’t make any difference. “Unless we can find something else,” he said. “We need another break, Lea.”
“Tell that to Bostic.”
“Would it do any good?”
“No,” she sighed, slowly rising to her feet. A wave of dizziness overcame her, forcing her to steady herself against the interface chair. The combination of stress and the time Lea spent in the Tank was taking its toll. “He’s already staked out his position. A retreat would make him lose face in front of the Assembly—and Bostic’s not about to let that happen.”
“So what’s left?”
“A shot in the dark,” Lea said, blinking to regain her focus. “Is there any chance you could detect one of these hive networks? Any signature you might be able to search for?”
“Probably not. The hive by its very nature is decentralized, so the components could be anywhere. And like me, the networks would be isolated from Axis traffic. Unless they present a physical characteristic that satellites can pick up, we’re out of luck.”
Vortex shimmered in Lea’s view, while behind him a cluster of bright coils materialized out of nowhere. Vortex seemed unaware of their presence, which made Lea wonder if they were an illusion. She shook her head, hoping to clear her senses, but the coils remained.
“Lea?”
She gripped the chair with both hands now.
“There has to be a way,” she muttered. “Something we missed…”
“Lea, are you all right?”
The coils spun themselves together, gaining mass—and menace. Lea started to warn Vortex but the words caught in her throat, forced back down by the fear and fascination of what unfolded before her.
“Cray…” she said, reaching for him.
And found Lyssa instead.
She lunged at Lea from inside the Tank. Pressed up against the glass, the manifestation of Lyssa’s mind contorted itself into a storm of unspeakable sounds and hellish impressions—murderous screams and mocking laughter that plucked Lea from the physical world and dropped her into that nightmare matrix.
Then, like a door slamming shut, Lyssa was gone.
Lea stumbled back, a tangle of arms and legs. She tripped over herself and collapsed to the floor, crawling backward until she bumped against the airlock. Scratching desperately against the door, she didn’t even think of the access panel until her terror began a slow retreat.
Dragging herself up, she punched in the code to unlock the door. As it slid open, she resolved not to look back into the Tank—but the periphery of her sight brought her back, where she saw Vortex yanking Lyssa into the ether. Somehow he had gained con
trol and stuffed her into submission—but only because Lyssa surrendered. Even from her vantage point, distorted by residual fear, Lea could tell he had not beaten her.
“Lea!”
Vortex called out to her, only half-there. It was all he could do to maintain form.
Lea fled into the airlock.
“Lea, please…”
She stopped, just short of sealing herself off. Working up the courage, she turned back toward him. Cray, she forced herself to believe. It’s still Cray.
But she could only imagine Lyssa, pumping like poison through her veins.
“I’m sorry,” Vortex pleaded. “That wasn’t me. It was her—”
“Don’t explain,” Lea said, trembling. “I’m fine.”
The airlock hissed shut.
Gregory Masir gawked, bleary-eyed, at a bank of sickbay monitors. The readings, piped in from the quarantine, had long ago ceased to have any meaning. To him, they were only a collection of random numerics—endless reams of data with an occasional graphic to spice things up, jammed through a computer that wasn’t designed to handle such a heavy load. The system crashed repeatedly, further reducing his ability to keep on top of all the numbers—but orders were orders, and Commander Straka had been in no mood to argue.
Three times, Almacantar’s engineering techs had visited to coax the overtaxed system back online, while Masir sat back and watched them perform one arcane procedure after another. To him, it all looked like guesswork—which, he noted wryly, wasn’t so different from the way most Directorate doctors practiced medicine. The only difference was that Masir’s patients could—and often did—complain. The computers, on the other hand, suffered their abuse in silence. As they went down yet again, Masir swore the damned things did it just for spite.
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