“Yes,” Lea said with finality, “because that’s how I would see it.”
It sickened her to make that confession—but it also grabbed everyone’s attention, their shock descending like poison gas.
Tiernan spoke again, cooler this time. “So how does this help us?”
Lea gave it some thought. “We might be able to use it to our advantage. If I’m right, we could crack the entire Inru network wide open.”
“How?”
“By getting Avalon to roll on them.”
The others shook heads, whispering in disbelief. Lea couldn’t blame them. A part of her thought it was crazy—but it was all she had, and with time running out a long shot seemed like the perfect play.
“You’re proposing that we recruit Avalon?” Novak asked. “That’s rather bold, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Lea admitted, “but we have the leverage to do it. Once she finds out what the Inru did to her, she’ll want payback. Trust me on this—the girl knows how to hold a grudge.”
Tiernan didn’t like it—that much was obvious.
“That’s assuming she even gets the message,” he pointed out. “What are you going to do? Post it on the Axis and hope like hell she calls back?”
“No,” Lea said. “Avalon would never go for it. She’d think we were trying to smoke her out. We need to convince her that this thing is for real.”
Everyone waited expectantly for the rest of Lea’s answer. Giving it to them was much harder than she thought—for their sakes, if not her own.
“I have to tell her myself,” she finally said. “Alone.”
Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. Lea’s team just stared—at the walls, at the display, at the table, anywhere to avoid her eyes.
“Am I the only one who remembers what happened the last time you and Avalon got together?” Tiernan asked pointedly. “Most of us didn’t make it out of there.”
“That was different,” Lea explained, hoping to sound rational. “We attacked Avalon in force, so she responded with force. This time, I’ll be going in by myself. No troops, no tricks—just an offer to talk.”
“What if she doesn’t listen?”
“She will. Tactically, there’s no downside for her.”
“That could change in a heartbeat, Lea.”
“Then it’s a good thing I know how to fight, Lieutenant.”
Tiernan gave up, tossing his hands in the air.
Novak, meanwhile, pursued a more logical course—noting the one obvious flaw in her plan. “Even if this could work,” she said, “you still have a sticky problem.”
Lea nodded. “Finding her.”
“In so many words.”
Lea conspicuously turned her attention to Pallas. He peered back from behind his electrodes, trying to hide in plain sight. After a long pause, he finally acknowledged her stare.
“I might be able to help you with that,” he admitted. “If you don’t mind taking a ride on the dark side.”
“What have you got, Alex?”
“Some mondo spikes on the Goth subnets over the last twenty-four,” the hammerjack said, rearranging the display to illustrate his findings. Amorphous constructs appeared out of vapor, connected by a complex latticework that spread out to fill the three-dimensional image—glowing links pumping information between the shifting shapes, representations of the domain clusters that comprised the subnets Pallas referenced. “It looked like random traffic at first—pirate sites popping up to replace the ones that went dark after Chernobyl. When I got a closer look, though, I found a couple of freaky patterns.”
Pallas highlighted over a dozen of the clusters, bringing them to the forefront. The information exchange caused the pipelines to swell and burst, then re-form into smaller streams that repeated the whole process over again.
“Most of these are Goth,” he explained, “but a couple of them belong to the Crowleys, operating out of the Asian Sphere. Normally, you don’t see that kind of volume moving between their networks—but something gave these guys a serious hard-on. Naturally, I got curious.”
He changed the image again, imploding the Axis cross section and rearranging it into a raging bitstream—a chaotic torrent of seemingly random data.
“I plucked this feed out of one of the tunnels,” Pallas said, manipulating it until the numbers took on coherence. “On the surface it looks like the usual didactic, that stuff the Crowleys pump out when they’re trying to rally the faithful.”
“Demon gospel,” Lea concurred. “Triple-six slang.”
“Tossed in with some Latin and Gothspeak. Crowleys use it to encode their contraband transmissions, masking them within the general broadcast. Take off the camouflage,” Pallas said, peeling away the outer layers, “and what you get is a concentrated burst, repeated at regular intervals. Goddamned hellseekers thought this one was too important to miss.”
As a picture formed on the display, Lea saw why. Line after line gradually revealed a grisly scene, filtered through a dreamlike lens: splattered blood, a stack of corpses, flash mangled even beyond the nightmare scale of a tec-induced death fantasy. In the background, the blurred form of a man in a wheelchair appeared, another figure looming over him in murky shadow. It fluttered at the edge of the frame, visible only in sporadic glimpses at first—but Lea knew who it was, even before that shape turned and revealed its face, black lenses piercing the ether.
Even in illusion, Avalon sparked fear.
“Where is this?” Lea asked, her voice a slow hush.
“Osaka,” Pallas replied. “Uploaded from a Deathplay session. One of the donors must have caught the action while he was hooked into a synapse relay.” He augmented an area toward the back, sharpening the focus. “The guy in the chair is Yoshii Tagura. Nobody’s seen him in a long time—but street talk had him into some real occult shit. Guess that explains what he was doing at the Kirin when Avalon showed up.”
“He was into a lot more than that,” Lea observed, while Avalon murdered him in a still-life sequence. “Tagura was angling for a seat on the Assembly. When that didn’t happen, I guess he went to the Inru for a little covert help.”
“CSS figured as much,” the hammerjack added. “Just for fun I jacked their files to see what they had on the guy. Turns out they had him under surveillance for the last few months—suspected terrorist financing. Couldn’t make anything stick, though.”
“It appears Avalon did that for them,” Novak remarked.
“Yeah,” Pallas said. “The way she worked him over, you almost feel sorry for the guy.”
“Almost,” Lea emphasized, studying the mayhem in chilling detail. Though she doubted there were any innocents in that room, Avalon’s taste for slaughter made her shudder. The woman was a machine—perhaps beyond reason. Tiernan reminded her of that with a knowing gaze from across the table. “Did the Zone Authority pick up Avalon’s trail after she left Osaka?”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
Tiernan sounded almost hopeful. “Then we still don’t know where she is.”
“Not precisely,” Pallas said, and split the feed on the display. On one side, he brought up a manifest of Tagura Interglobal’s worldwide holdings, paring the endless list down to a few hundred entities and assets. “But the connection gave me a place to start looking. I cross-referenced known Inru activity with Tagura’s financials, following the money to see where it took me. Lots of interesting places, as it turned out. Old Yoshii had so many shell companies funneling cash, they made the legitimate side of his business look like chump change.”
“I don’t get it,” the lieutenant said. “If he was the money man, why would Avalon kill him?”
“Because he pulled the plug,” Lea speculated. “Maybe Tagura liked to play the revolutionary, but when it comes down to it these company guys are all the same. They know when it’s time to cut their losses.”
“Give the lady a cigar,” Pallas said, as the assets dropped off the display. “Not two hours after Chernobyl, over half
of these holdings just dried up—accounts frozen, proceeds liquidated, everything gone in a puff of smoke.”
“That’s why all those Inru nets fell off the air.”
“Total purge.” The hammerjack shook his head in amazement. “Yoshii giveth, and Yoshii taketh away. You gotta hand it to the man, though. He was one crafty old fart.”
Lea folded her arms. On-screen, Tagura’s head rolled across the floor.
“Not crafty enough.”
Pallas shrugged.
“Can’t win them all, boss.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“How about the best hiding place you never saw?”
Novak and Tiernan blinked nervously while Lea zeroed in on him.
“A possible location?”
“It fits the profile,” Pallas cautioned her, “but I don’t have any confirmation. The place is so invisible, even satellites don’t make regular sweeps.”
“I’ll take what I can get.”
“It ain’t much.” With the others paying rapt attention, Pallas brought one final picture to the display: a grainy visual of a single island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “I found the ownership records buried deep inside one of Tagura’s holding companies, and eventually traced the original purchase to Yoshii himself. He bought the island a few years back, when the regional governments sold off everything they had. Kept the transaction under wraps, but nobody knows why.”
“Which one is it?” Novak asked.
“Rapa Nui.”
Lea stared into the image as Pallas clicked on several different views, each one more mysterious than the last. The island was little more than a speck, largely uninhabited for hundreds of years—except for an abandoned gulag, operated by the Zone Authority before South America petitioned to join the Incorporated Territories. The complex was still visible from the satellite photos, a collection of crumbling structures rising out of a craggy, almost featureless landscape.
“Signals recon keeps bouncing back,” Pallas explained, “and thermals are useless because of resurgent volcanic activity. In short, I don’t have squat on what might be happening down there. It might all be natural interference—or it could be shielding. There’s no way to be sure.”
“CSS ever send a unit there?” the lieutenant asked.
“Civilian inspectors when the prison closed, but that was it.”
“Smugglers?”
“Not since the cartels went legit. Had to be over fifty years ago.”
Novak regarded the island with superstition.
“In other words,” she said, “we’re blind. Sounds awfully familiar.”
Lea, however, had no doubts.
“That’s our target,” she said.
The ocean existed for her only as a memory, locked away in the protected recesses of her mind—the place where Avalon stored those precious few moments of life before the Forces, now yellowed and tattered from the ravages of time. Poised at the edge of a cliff, the churning Pacific extending to the horizon, she tried to mesh those impressions with the mechanical clarity of her sensors: to combine imagination and technology into a thing of beauty, or at least an approximation. None of it, however, stirred Avalon’s emotions. The detailed processing of reality, rendered with tactical precision by her sensuit, reduced her surroundings to little more than raw data. Even the cold, steady wind blowing through her hair broke down into speed and direction, the briny aroma of the sea a mélange of chemical composition.
Avalon turned it off.
Memory retreated while her sensors realigned, suppressed along with an impotent rage. Avalon didn’t know why she inflicted this torture on herself. Each attempt only made her feel helpless, the worst trauma a soldier could sustain—far greater than any battlefield injury. Of all the horrors she brought back from Mars, it was the only one that still haunted her dreams. Being a victim, at the mercy of an enemy she couldn’t fight—that was a fool’s fate, one she vowed never to suffer again.
Yet, when she was alone, she always tried.
And always failed.
A human presence entered her contact sphere, navigating up a trail that led along the crest of the volcanic crater where Avalon stood. The sun was going down, casting a long shadow across the face of the cliff, making the island seem even more lonely and isolated as the person approached—as if the two of them were marooned here. In many ways, Avalon supposed that was true. The Inru had nowhere else to run. Yoshii Tagura had seen to that.
“Everything is in place,” her companion said, panting from the climb. He was young—street species recruited out of the Zone but cleaner than most of the head cases the Inru dug up there. The kid fancied himself a hammerjack, so Avalon had given him the chance to prove it. “We’ve got power from the geothermal converters, so we should be all set.”
Avalon nodded.
He glanced around, stuffing hands into his pockets. “Pretty rough place, isn’t it?”
“It’s defensible,” she said. “What’s the status on the hive?”
“Holding together, but barely.” His tone became grave. “Our mercs are trying to filter out the incoming waves, but they keep getting stronger. We’ve been forced to keep the network off-line to avoid another catastrophic failure.”
Avalon digested the information. The kid looked to her as if she had all the answers, an illusion she didn’t refute. She had no desire to be the Inru messiah, but for now she had no choice.
“Have they located the source?”
“No. The point of origin is too distant.”
“How far?”
“Off-planet,” the kid said. “Beyond Earth orbit.”
Avalon didn’t react outwardly, but she found it hard to believe that the Collective could have engineered an attack using complex harmonics. The Spacing Directorate didn’t have those kinds of capabilities, and neither did Special Services. Despite that, the hive was dying—and with it, the Inru’s last hope.
“Direction?” she asked.
“A straight line bearing toward Mars.”
Impossible, she thought. There had to be another explanation—a terrestrial one, with Lea Prism at its root. Avalon meant to find it, even if she had to rip out the woman’s spine in the process.
“What about the prison?” she asked. “Have they found it yet?”
“Just like you said,” the kid replied. “Special Services tasked one of their satellites over to have a look. It won’t be long before they come.” After a long pause, he turned to her and asked, “Are you sure about this?”
“There is no other way.”
“So few of us left,” he implored. “So many risks.”
Avalon was philosophical.
“The price of revolution,” she said. “We need to know what she knows.”
“Lea Prism is a warrior. Taking her alive won’t be easy.”
“Neither will killing her,” Avalon declared, “but it will be done.”
An hour of incarceration in the wardroom brought Eve Kellean out of her fugue. Nathan watched her through a closed-circuit monitor from the corridor outside, while Pitch caught glimpses over his shoulder. Like everyone else on board, sleep deprivation had taken its toll on the pilot—but even that couldn’t compare with seeing the lieutenant in chains under a suicide watch. The cocky man who had landed them on Mars was gone, replaced by a nervous shell of a man who paced relentlessly, muttering a slew of curses. Nathan could hardly blame Pitch. His own hands refused to stop trembling.
Pitch toned down the expletives when Lauren Farina entered the picture, taking a seat across from Kellean at the table. The captain waved off the two crewmen she had posted as guards, then waited in silence for the lieutenant to speak. Kellean lifted her hands, which were cuffed together, to the tabletop. She avoided Farina’s stare, tears carving channels through the blotches of dried blood on her cheeks. She wiped her eyes on her uniform sleeve.
The captain was chillingly calm. “You ready to talk?”
Kellean nodded, wrapp
ing shame and remorse into a single gesture. “Is Commander Straka okay?” she asked. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“He’s fine, Lieutenant.”
“Will you please tell him I’m sorry?”
“Sure,” Farina said. “Just tell me what happened in there.”
Kellean hitched her breath, taking a moment to calm down. Nathan didn’t like it. He was no psychologist, but he knew a performance when he saw one. The lieutenant’s was just too perfect—too much what she thought the captain wanted to hear.
What are you up to, Kellean?
“I’m sorry,” she stammered, struggling to get each word out. “It’s still kind of a blur. I’m trying to remember…” Her face contorted as events bubbled to the surface. “Oh, God,” she sobbed. “Why did he do it?”
Farina didn’t react. She just allowed Kellean to vent while maintaining a stony detachment.
“Take your time.”
Clearing her throat, the lieutenant continued. “I, uh…I left the lab to catch a few minutes of rack time. I didn’t mean to be gone so long, but when I woke up it was two hours later. All of us have just been under so much stress…” Kellean didn’t finish the thought. “I ran back down to sickbay, and that’s when I saw him. He was sitting at the console, talking to himself in Hebrew…like he was angry at something.”
“Masir was in the lab?”
Kellean nodded, steeling herself before she could go further.
“I asked him what he was doing. He just turned around and looked at me, his eyes…” She drifted into dreamlike recollection. “It’s like I wasn’t even there.”
Nathan remembered his own agitation down in the core and the pain that had driven him to blinding violence. The odds against the same thing happening to Masir seemed astronomical—but it was clearly the direction Kellean was heading.
“He got up and came at me,” Kellean said, her pitch and tempo growing as she related her story, “waving his hands around like…like he was crazy—but with a purpose. He started going on and on about how the ship was cursed because of the survivors we picked up, just raving.” She took a deep breath. “He said they had to die. That’s when he went back and started bashing the console, trying to shut it down.”
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