But not before Lea could catch her.
She dragged Avalon away, while Nathan rushed in beside her. Avalon went cold in Lea’s arms, hardly moving. Only her eyes fluttered—not the dead silver orbs left by the Mons virus, but human eyes imbued with all the color of life.
“I see you,” Avalon rasped.
Lea nodded, not knowing what to say.
“I know,” she told her. “You injected yourself with the virus, didn’t you?”
“It was the only way,” Avalon said. “I had to make them believe.”
Lea smiled grimly.
“You sure had me convinced.”
Avalon smiled in return—a death’s mask, something Lea had wanted for so very long. Now that she had it, she wanted nothing more than to look away.
“Lea,” Nathan said. “We have to leave.”
Avalon swallowed hard, struggling to find one last fiber of strength.
“He’s right,” she said. “But there’s something you need to know.”
Avalon drew Lea close, whispering in her ear. She then let go, as understanding dawned across Lea’s face.
“It’s up to you now,” Avalon said. “Do what you know is right.”
“I will,” Lea promised. “I will.”
A tiny shuttle ejected itself from Almacantar’s landing bay, its engines leaving a cometary trail as it traversed the darkness. Smaller sections of the towing vessel’s hull broke off in the wake of its departure, plummeting into Earth’s atmosphere ahead of the spaceframe—catching fire amid the ionized gases in a spiral dance.
With Nathan Straka at the helm and Lea Prism next to him, the shuttle came about when it reached a safe distance. The ship moored itself in orbit, a perch from which its two passengers could witness the beautiful and brutal display unfolding before them. Neither said a word as the huge vessel began her final plunge, content to let Almacantar speak for herself. As the ship cleaved in two, the fore and aft sections drifted apart and died their separate deaths—much like Nathan’s memory of his life aboard. It was only yesterday, but seemed so long ago, details sinking into the quicksand of his nervous system: a reminder of the forces at work inside of him, every bit as potent as his quaking hands.
Nathan knew he didn’t have long.
But he was grateful for the chance to say good-bye.
The fuel elements in Almacantar’s engines then ignited, consuming her like a stellar aftermass. Lea blocked the light with her hands, but Nathan just sat and watched until it hurt. Tears welled up in his eyes, splitting those last moments like a crystal lattice—and when he wiped them away, she was gone. A burning cloud of dust and debris quickly dissipated into vacuum, wiping Almacantar away forever.
Nathan felt Lea’s hand upon his own.
“You did good back there,” she said.
Nathan breathed deep, a cold and alien sensation.
“Not good enough.”
“It always seems that way, doesn’t it?”
He turned to her.
“I’d like to go home,” he said, “while I can.”
Lea stared through the window at the only home they could return to. The Western Hemisphere was a blank canvas, points of light suggesting the outline of its former self. So much destruction. So much potential.
“So would I. Whatever happens.”
Central Park was empty, the cry of a hundred sirens echoing along its paths. Lea walked the paths under a leaden sky, the smell of smoke carried on a cold wind—acrid, but with trace elements of a working civilization. Main power had yet to be restored to the city, but pockets had sprung up everywhere. Ancient generators, not fired up for generations, provided a steady drumbeat to the rhythms of the street—now rife with the dialect of black marketeers, freelancers, and every other species creeping in from the Zone. Without the Axis, boundaries had become meaningless in Manhattan. It was the anarchy and chaos the Inru had always wanted.
Lea stuffed her hands in her pockets, walking toward the last place she wanted to be. Looming over the trees, she caught her first glimpse of the Chancery—far less majestic than it used to be, but still an oasis of aristocracy in the new world order. One of the few places with functional electricity, the building was like a beacon in a storm.
Lea crossed the street, greeted by several armed guards instead of a doorman. She negotiated passage with her CSS credentials, for as long as she still had them, heading for the elevator under their strict watch. As the doors closed, she punched the button for the twenty-first floor—bracing herself for the long journey sure to follow.
Upstairs, she found the entrance to the corner penthouse wide open. Entering cautiously, Lea glanced around the palatial apartment. Most of the lights were out, a gloom hovering over the expensive period furniture, as gray as the sky outside. Lea noticed several empty bottles of liquor strewn about, amber spills hemorrhaging across mahogany floors and tracing rivers through broken glass. She stepped around the damage, calling into the stillness.
“Bostic? Are you here?”
Lea heard a scuffle from inside his office.
The doors were parted slightly, muffling Bostic’s presence. Lea went in, not bothering to knock. In return, Bostic ignored her—hunched over his desk and leafing through his copy of Sun Tzu.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she said.
Bostic finally looked up at her, red-rimmed eyes betraying a lack of sleep and a full-tilt bender. A bottle of bourbon told the rest of the story, sitting on his desktop next to an empty glass.
“Seemed like a good place to be when the world ended,” he replied, pouring himself a fresh one. Sluggishly, he raised the bottle toward her. “You’re a bourbon gal, aren’t you? How about a drink?”
“Sure.”
Bostic hurled the bottle at her. Lea ducked as it narrowly missed her head, smashing against the wall behind her.
“This is all your fault!”
Lea just shook her head, laughing softly.
“What the hell’s so funny?”
She strolled over to the chair next to his desk and took a seat.
“You,” she explained. “What’s with all the drama, Bostic? With your charm, I’m sure you’ll find a way to con the Assembly into keeping your job.”
“The Assembly is dead.”
Bostic sank into his chair. Lea felt the stale contact of his shock—though it was nothing compared to her own.
“Lyssa crashed the cryofacility in Vienna,” he went on, almost as if he had a pathological need to tell her. “All the firewalls they had in place, all the barriers between them and the surface—and she carved them up like it was nothing.”
A world without the Assembly. It seemed inconceivable.
Almost like a world without the Axis.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“One thing’s for damned sure,” Bostic said, pointing at her. “I’m not taking the blame for this—no way. That was your decision, Prism. If anybody’s gonna pay, it’s gonna be you.”
“I’d reconsider that if I were you.”
The corporate counsel blinked at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Nathan Straka told me about the CSS directives,” she explained, “the ones that kept Almacantar’s captain in the dark about the signals they picked up from Mars. After that, I did a little digging. Turns out the records vault back at headquarters was still in pretty good shape.”
Lea took a memory card from her jacket pocket and slid it across the desk.
“Your orders,” she finished. “The proof is all there. You’re the one who planted a free agent on board that ship. If it wasn’t for your power play, none of this would have happened.”
Bostic sobered up in a hurry.
“It was a signal of unknown origin,” he said. “It could have been anything—even extraterrestrial. We had to investigate.”
“Not without informing the crew.”
“What if it turned out to be a profitable discovery?” he pleaded. “For Go
d’s sake—there were franchise rights at stake, Lea! Do you have any idea what that means?”
Lea stood up to leave. “I’m sure it’ll make a great defense at your trial,” she said, and headed out.
“Wait!”
Lea froze at the door but kept her back turned to him. She wanted to taste his desperation first—the same way Bostic had dangled her on the hook when they last met like this.
“We can make a deal, Lea.”
She closed her eyes and prepared herself. Dealing with Bostic was like selling her soul a piece at a time—but the man knew how to play the game. Lea hated to admit it, but so did she.
Turning back around, she found a man ready to do anything.
So she kept it simple. “What’s it worth to you?”
In spite of everything, the medical wing of Special Services was almost deserted. A single nurse maintained a lonely vigil at the main station, the pale glow from her desk monitors making her expression even more vacant—as if she worked from sheer routine, not knowing what else to do. Lea checked in with her when she stepped off the elevator, the two of them exchanging a nod but little else.
“Nathan Straka,” Lea said.
“Second door on the left,” the nurse replied. “He’s our only patient.”
Lea followed her directions down to the room, finding the door closed. She knocked softly, listening carefully for a response—heartbroken at the raspy voice that struggled to answer.
“Come on in,” he invited, still warm and welcoming.
Lea wasn’t sure what to expect when she walked in, having prepared herself for the worst. Novak had warned her that the effects of betaflex poisoning would advance rapidly near the end—but to her surprise, Lea found Nathan sitting up in bed. He smiled at seeing her, though his eyelids were heavy, the light behind them fading but restless.
“How did it go?” Nathan asked.
Lea sat down on the side of his bed. “Like we thought,” she replied. “He didn’t like it much, but he eventually saw things our way. He knows he has a lot to lose.”
“All the more reason to keep you in business.”
Lea nodded. “Something like that.”
Nathan coughed, a painful, racking spasm. Lea tried to help him, but he held her off until he could recover on his own. Even now, he punished himself. “They said it would be quick,” he chuckled. “Sure doesn’t feel that way.”
Lea took his hand. “You don’t have to wait here. I can get you out.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”
“A short trip,” Lea told him. “There’s something I want you to see.”
The Tank was nothing like she remembered. The patterns of synthetic life, once so brilliant and chaotic behind the glass, now floated in a dull gray suspension—retreating into itself, like the implosion of a neutron star. Occasional flickers of life connected between the elements, but only with random frequency. Any intelligence that once resided there had long since fled, leaving behind only traces of its essence. It was, for all intents and purposes, dead—though the ghosts of Lea’s own memories persisted, projecting themselves on the matrix in her reflection.
Behind her, Nathan stood in awe.
“So the rumors were true,” he said.
“They couldn’t do it justice,” Lea replied. “The things I saw her do—you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Any chance of bringing her back?”
Lea turned away from the Tank—away from her past, toward a very uncertain future.
“We could spend a lifetime finding out.”
Nathan looked at the interface chair.
“I already have,” he said, and hobbled over to the medieval device. He slid onto the chair and settled in. “Anybody ever try it?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out.”
Nathan drew a deep breath, then closed his eyes.
“I’m dying, Lea,” he said. “What could it hurt?”
Lea couldn’t think of a thing.
Dusk came early to the Aleutians, the island chain protruding like teeth from the churning waters of the north Pacific. Lea wanted to make use of the available light, pushing the hovercraft down on the deck and increasing speed until she arrived at her destination—a lonely, barren rock that tapered into a steep crater, one of a thousand dead volcanoes in the immediate area. She checked the coordinates Avalon had given her against the ship’s global positioning system: it was an exact match. This was the place she had told Lea about, where the Inru would make their last stand.
Lea transmitted a simple code sequence, the last secret Avalon had shared. Almost immediately, a locator beacon fired from deep within the crater. She followed it to a level area just wide enough for landing, easing the hovercraft down. As Lea shut the engines off, she could hear the gale-force winds howling outside—blowing through the jagged rocks, carving channels like the lava from so long ago, reminding her of another island where destiny changed.
Except there, she had arrived alone. Here, people rose up to meet her—dozens of them, hidden in every corner and crevice, surrounding the hovercraft in anticipation of some great event. They had heard the signal and understood. They had nothing to fear from her.
Lea popped open the canopy and looked out upon their expectant faces. They studied her in return: the mercs, the street species, the handful of Inru who had survived her pogroms and now welcomed her as one of their own. Avalon’s word had prepared the way.
As she climbed down from her ship, the Inru flocked to her—maintaining a cautious distance, saying next to nothing, but leading her across the crater and into a shallow network of caves. There, the liquid heat of geothermal activity infused the air with steam and energy—though an even greater power lay deeper within. With each step its influence worked like a narcotic among the faithful, causing them to swoon. They ushered Lea even faster, desperate for her to experience the source for herself.
But she knew. Since Chernobyl, she had known.
And in the belly of the caverns, the true scale of the Inru plan revealed itself.
Up from the depths, stacked as far as Lea could see, they were everywhere. Hundreds of extraction tanks formed a lattice of infinite complexity—a vast network of flesh and fiber, latent with a potential that had yet to be fully unleashed.
This was the future—Avalon’s future.
Bequeathed to Lea to protect and defend.
Lea awakened to a sound out of a dream, an insistent knocking at her door. She rolled out of bed in her apartment, oblivious of how much time had passed. Gathering her senses, she walked over to the window—if only to make sure that the world hadn’t changed again since the last time she left it. An incomplete skyline stretched out into the distance, towers obscured like dark matter under a new moon, a few scattered lights filling in the gaps of a seemingly empty space. Beneath that, flashing red and blue sirens prowled the streets in another endless caravan, lending a surreal glow to the landscape. At least while the fires still burned, the city at night had mass and substance. Now all Lea could do was hunger for the day.
The knocking came again. It wasn’t her imagination.
Lea walked over to her front door, half-expecting Eric Tiernan to be on the other side. In these hours, especially, it was easy to forget—a fantasy she welcomed more than she should. Clearing that notion from her head, at least until she fell back asleep, she called out into the corridor.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, Lea.”
The voice startled her into full consciousness. “Nathan?”
In a rush, Lea opened the door to find him standing outside. He smiled broadly, as if intimating some secret, while she just stared—looking him up and down for signs of sickness. Hours before, he had slipped into a coma while she waited beside him. Lea had expected news of his death ever since.
“Are you okay?” she stammered. “I thought you were—”
“I’m fine,” he assured her. “Everything is fine.”
Lea shook her head, blinking several times to make sure he was really there.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll show you,” he said, taking her into an embrace. Lea felt the urgency in the way he held her, the intensity of his emotions—and a familiarity that frightened and comforted her at the same time. “But first, I need you to believe.”
“Believe?” she asked, confusion trumping fear. “What’s happening, Nathan?”
“I’m not Nathan. Not anymore.”
He then drew back, allowing her to see the truth of it for herself. Trembling, Lea touched the side of his face.
“It’s me, Lea,” he said. “It’s Cray.”
MARC D. GILLER wrote his first science-fiction novel at the tender age of sixteen, with the certainty of fame and riches before him. When that plan didn’t work out he went to college instead, earning a bachelor of science degree in journalism from Texas A&M University.
A year in the news business only increased his fascination with making up stories for a living, so he tried a few other genres—horror, thriller, historical fiction—when a script he wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation earned him a chance to pitch ideas for the show. Though none of those stories aired, he fired off a few more novels and screenplays until Hammerjack finally caught the attention of Bantam Spectra.
Over the years, Marc has worked as a photographer, producer, computer trainer, and even had a one-night stint as a television news reporter. For the last several years, he has been manager of information systems for a Tampa law firm.
Marc makes his home in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, where he lives with his wife, two children, and a furry golden retriever. You can visit him online at www.hammerjack.net.
ALSO BY MARC D. GILLER
HAMMERJACK
PRODIGAL
A Bantam Spectra Book / October 2006
Prodigal Page 44