Legacy

by A D Starrling

  ‘Yes,’ hissed Jonah. ‘But I didn’t want you to fry her brains until she died!’

  He studied a video display on the wall. It showed a figure lying still inside the containment room in the main research lab.

  Olivia Ashkarov had suffered a cardiac arrest during the forceful electrocution administered by Scoleri. Despite the scientists’ attempts to revive her, they had been unable to bring her back. They would have to wait for her to reawaken of her own accord.

  ‘How long will it take until she comes around?’ the Crovir Hunter muttered.

  ‘You know as well as I do that that depends on the immortal,’ snapped Jonah. ‘It might be half an hour, it might take half a day, who knows. It’s probably her first death as well, so it could be even longer.’ He stared irritably at the Hunter. ‘Have you discovered Storm and Godard’s whereabouts yet?’

  ‘No. We’re still searching for them.’

  ‘I want you to stay away from Ashkarov from now on, understood?’ Jonah said sharply.

  Scoleri hesitated before nodding reluctantly. He turned and headed toward the door.

  ‘Of course, once we’ve finished harnessing her abilities, you may do with her as you wish,’ Jonah added dismissively.

  He looked at the other screen on the wall. It showed Subject 505, the first super soldier who’d made it through Phase Three.

  ‘In the end we won’t need any of them.’ Jonah furrowed his brow. ‘The immortals or the humans. The army we will build will crush any military force in the world, including the immortals who defy us.’

  Scoleri exited the room with a cold smile.

  Where is this? Olivia blinked. Where am I?

  She looked at the hospital gown covering her frame. It was the one she had been wearing in the lab.

  Her last memories returned in a flash of distorted images and sounds. She inhaled sharply and raised trembling fingers to her lips.

  Did I die?

  She lowered her hand to her chest. Her eyes grew round. She couldn’t feel her heart beating.

  I’m dead.

  Instead of panic, Olivia felt only a strange sense of peace. After all, she was in a place where no one could hurt her.

  Beneath her bare feet lay an insubstantial whiteness. It puffed up slightly when she shifted her weight, as if it were a cloud or fog. She twisted on her heels and scanned the limitless white horizon surrounding her. She was alone.

  What do I do now?

  The answer came in the form of a breeze. It blew up suddenly, ruffling her hair and making the gown flutter against her legs. The whiteness in front of her billowed in tortuous waves and parted to expose ivory sand.

  The wind came again, stronger than before. This time, it whispered her name. Olivia stiffened and looked around wildly.

  There was no one there.

  The clouds were dissipating, revealing more sand. She took a step forward, then another. The ground moved beneath her feet, warm grains rolling across her bare toes. She looked up and followed the wind as it danced through the air and raised faint dust devils ahead.

  The landscape changed, becoming more desert-like with each passing step. Rolling dunes appeared in the distance. The sky overhead changed from white to the palest blue. The ground gradually rose, as if she were approaching a hill. She started to climb.

  An eternity passed before she reached the summit of a cliff.

  The sight that met her eyes at the top made her gasp and sag to her knees.

  It was the scene from her nightmare, the one she had on the day the abbey was attacked.

  The battlefield spread out from the base of the hill all the way to the silent army standing on the other side of a blood-soaked expanse. A fortress burned in the distance, flames leaping from the rooftops of buildings and reaching orange fingers toward the sky. A cloud of smoke stained the air above the glowing citadel.

  And there, a dozen feet in front of her, standing in a line on the crest of the elevation and facing the battleground, were eleven figures in gilded chain mail and armor.

  Olivia stared fearfully at the slender shape in the middle.

  The woman’s long, fair hair was piled up securely in a knot at the back of her head. Tendrils had escaped the golden mass and shivered slightly in the wind. She held a sword in her right hand, the hilt abnormally large in her slim fingers. Blood gleamed on the edges of the weapon and stained the handles of the sheathed daggers on the outsides of her thighs.

  Olivia scanned the other silhouettes, her eyes absorbing details of their fierce profiles. There were five men and five women beside the blonde with the bloody sword. Shock resonated through her when she saw the silhouette of one of the men. Movement captured her gaze. She looked around in time to see the central figure turn to face her. Olivia froze.

  She was looking at herself.

  The woman stared. A small smile curved her lips. She walked toward her, sword in hand and leather boots carving fresh steps in the sand.

  Now that she could see her clearly, Olivia detected subtle differences from her own features. The stranger’s lips were fuller, her forehead broader, her nose straighter. And she carried herself with more confidence than Olivia had ever felt in her entire existence.

  She pushed off the ground and rose shakily to her feet just as the stranger stopped before her.

  They were the same height.

  Olivia stared into green eyes a similar shade to hers. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am you,’ replied the stranger.

  Olivia blinked. An echo underscored the woman’s words, as if many voices had spoken. She glanced sideways. The other figures in the line had changed. There were now only nine of them. They turned to face her.

  Olivia took a step back, shock flaring through her.

  They were all fair-haired women with eyes that ranged from emerald to jade. And they all looked like they could be sisters.

  Her knees went weak when she recognized the person at the end of the row on the right. ‘Mother?’

  Natalia Ashkarov watched her silently, her eyes brimming with love.

  Olivia gazed at her for the longest time before focusing on the woman in the chain mail armor. ‘I—I don’t understand.’

  ‘This is a memory.’ The stranger indicated the battleground behind her. ‘A memory passed down my bloodline to every Seer who came after me. My memory.’

  Olivia studied the blackened sky and the bloodied corpses beneath it. ‘This is the past?’

  The figure nodded. ‘Yes. It is a past. And a beginning. One of many in this long forgotten era.’

  ‘The beginning of what?’ said Olivia.

  A shadow crossed the stranger’s face. Her eyes dimmed. ‘The beginning of a war.’

  Olivia straightened. ‘The immortal war?’

  The stranger looked at her steadily. ‘In a sense.’

  Olivia watched her silently. ‘You said…that you were me. What did you mean?’

  ‘A piece of me lives inside you.’ Sadness tinged the stranger’s voice. ‘As do a piece of my brothers, sisters, and cousins inside the ones who inherited their bloodlines and the marks.’

  She reached down, took Olivia’s right hand, and turned it over. The third eye symbol seemed to glow against the skin of her palm.

  Images and feelings flooded Olivia at the woman’s touch. They sped across her inner vision, a myriad of faces, places, and feelings from a past that stretched across several centuries and lifetimes. At times magically euphoric and at times heart-wrenchingly sad, they brought a sharp pain to her chest and tears to her eyes.

  These are her memories and thoughts. The memories of the first Seer.

  ‘Navia,’ she whispered.

  The stranger smiled and dipped her chin in acknowledgment. ‘Yes. That is my name. And now, I fear you must return, Seer.’

  Olivia blinked. ‘Return? Return where?’

  ‘To the present,’ said Navia.

  ‘I—’ Olivia bit her lip. ‘But I died.’

  Navia shrugge
d. ‘It happens to the best of us. More importantly, that is why you are here, now.’

  ‘What?’

  Navia raised a hand to Olivia’s chest, her eyes burning with an intense light. ‘It is only in this death that you can claim your true powers. Our powers. The power of ten.’

  Olivia felt a jolt deep inside her body. Her heart thumped once.

  The other Seers came toward her and laid their hands over Navia’s, where it lay on her chest. The last one to touch her was her mother.

  ‘Be strong, child,’ said Natalia. She caressed Olivia’s cheek and gazed deep into her eyes, her expression as fierce as the rest of the Seers. ‘Believe in yourself.’

  Heat exploded inside Olivia.

  Something beeped in the silent lab.

  Dr. Barry Riese opened his eyes and blinked at the computer in front of him. The lines and numbers on the screen remained unchanged. Heart rate zero. Blood pressure zero. Respiratory rate zero. Even the electroencephalogram was as flat as a pancake.

  Patient 451 remained as dead as she had been for the last two hours.

  He glanced at the bank of analyzers next to the terminal. They whirred and buzzed, the only sounds in the room beside the faint hum from the computers. Must have been one of them.

  He wiped drool from the corner of his mouth and pushed himself up, wincing at the kink in his neck. He’d fallen asleep at his desk.

  A snore rose from his right. He turned and saw his nightshift lab companion, eminent Harvard neurochemist Dr. Fraser Dunn, dozing in a chair, head propped against the backrest and mouth wide open.

  Barry squinted at the digital clock on the wall. It was almost six in the morning. They had another two hours to go before the dayshift started. He stood and headed for the coffee machine in a corner of the lab.

  They would normally have kept themselves busy analyzing and testing samples from the experimental subject in the containment room throughout the night, as they had done on so many other shifts in the last ten years. But Mark Scoleri changed all that when he went in there and started fooling around with the woman.

  Barry had seen the waif-like blonde look at him in panic when Scoleri started touching her. He’d avoided her gaze and strolled to one of the machines on the other side of the lab. He was being paid handsomely for the job he was doing at the research facility and didn’t want to jeopardize what could end up being a lofty retirement nest egg. Besides, he had seen worse— much worse—in the time he had been working for his employers. And he knew the penalty for betraying them. He didn’t want to end up as another body in the incinerator.

  ‘Fraser, you want some coffee?’ he called out over his shoulder.

  He glanced at the steel doors on the far side of the room. The soldiers normally stationed at the lab had been dismissed for the rest of the shift.

  ‘No point guarding a dead body,’ Scoleri said before he left. ‘Just call them when she comes to.’

  Barry sighed. He wished he’d been assigned to the other research level, where the remaining super soldiers had been awakened and were undergoing baseline testing. Although he’d been scared the first time he’d seen the brutes up close, he had to admit it was more exciting than watching a corpse.

  ‘Hey, Fraser?’ he said in a louder voice.

  His reply was another snore. His hand stilled on the coffee pot. Was that another beep?

  He turned and stared toward the monitor at his desk. Cold fingers brushed against his mind. His grip loosened on the handle.

  The pot crashed to the floor, spilling hot coffee across the white linoleum.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Dunn snorted and startled in his chair. ‘Huh?’ He blinked and looked around dazedly before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Did I fall asleep?’

  Barry’s heart slammed wildly against his ribs. A few hot drops of coffee had scalded his shin. He was barely aware of the sting, his gaze riveted to the strong, steady vitals on the monitor at the terminal where he’d been sitting a moment ago. He looked to the figure behind the containment wall and felt his mouth go dry.

  The icy sensation inside his head increased as an alien presence infiltrated his consciousness.

  Dunn turned and followed his line of sight. ‘Jesus!’

  The neurochemist jumped to his feet and staggered back toward Barry. Glass crunched beneath his shoes. He skidded on the wet floor and fell on his ass.

  Patient 451 was sitting up in the bed. She stared at them calmly, her expression cold and oddly curious. Her skin seemed to glow from within, filling her face with a terrible light. But that wasn’t what made Barry’s bladder clench in terror.

  The medical equipment inside the chamber had lifted off the floor and was spinning violently in the air above the gurney. The leather straps that had bound the patient’s limbs to the gurney fluttered uselessly from the metal frames, caught in the same silent, gravity-defying twister.

  The woman reached up and pulled out the electrodes in her scalp. She opened her hand and studied the wires for a moment before releasing them. They shot out of her grasp and joined the maelstrom near the ceiling.

  Barry whimpered when her gaze shifted to him and Dunn once more. Intense pain gripped his skull. He cried out and clutched his head. Dunn curled over and threw up.

  The glass containment window trembled a second before it exploded. The lights went out.

  Barry threw his arms up as he was lifted off his feet by a powerful force. He smashed into the back wall of the lab and heard a couple of ribs crack.

  Shards flew across the room and sliced the backs of his hands and arms as he slid to the ground. Emergency lights flickered above him. The red flash of an alarm punctuated the dim glow.

  He sat there for a stunned moment before searching the gloom for Dunn. Another whimper left his lips.

  The neurochemist had not been as lucky. He’d struck one of the analyzers with the back of his head; blood oozed from the depression in his skull and pooled on the floor where he had come to rest, his unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling.

  The pressure inside Barry’s head doubled, bringing a scream to his throat. It came out a choked grunt as whatever unholy force at work inside the room squeezed the remaining air from his lungs. Panic gripped him when he heard glass pop and break on the other side of the chamber. He kicked weakly at the floor and tried to push himself up.

  Patient 451 came around a workstation. She headed slowly toward him, her steps steady.

  The broken, glittering fragments on the floor should have cut into the soles of her feet. Instead, they moved from her, scattering across the linoleum as if brushed by a wind.

  Something drew the woman’s gaze. She slowed and stopped by a table.

  Through the agony searing his senses, Barry saw her lift a silver necklace with a locket from the surface. It was the one she had been wearing when she arrived at the lab. She locked it around her neck and drew closer.

  When she stopped in front of him and cocked her head to the side, her green eyes glinting with a chilling expression, Barry knew he’d be lucky if he got to enjoy even a single cent of the cash he’d been putting away.

  His vision collapsed in a flow of vivid, flickering images. It was as if someone had reached inside his mind and pressed a rewind button. He saw the interior of the lab, the passages outside, and the entire area of Level Five, where the main research facilities were located. The stark pictures were followed by the vast command center and escape tunnel on Level Six. Nausea twisted his stomach when the motion sped up, the snapshots blurring as if the person in control of his memories had grown impatient.

  The rest of the half-a-mile-deep, billion-dollar subterranean complex under the Sonoran Desert flashed before his eyes.

  The training ranges, prison cells, weapons rooms, and ammunition holdings on Level Four; the research labs and cave holding the dormant soldiers on Level Three; the secured chambers of the first subjects to successfully undergo Phase Three; the staff quarters and alternative command a
nd communication hub on Level Two; the immense hangar on Level One, carved out of the mountain itself and holding millions of dollars worth of military equipment and weapons; the artificial lakes, air ducts, and cooling towers that constituted the life force of the entire base; the underground power plants two miles south that fed the facility; the open-roofed cave with the helipads; the tunnels leading to the entrances and exits in the neighboring valleys.

  All of it played across the inside of Barry’s head like a film.

  Shit. I should never have taken this job.

  It was the last thought he had before his consciousness vanished in a searing light.

  Ethan sat up with a cry.

  His heart thundered inside his chest and his breaths came in short, sharp pants, tunneling his vision to a tight, dark circle. Tremors shook his limbs. He became aware of his clothes clinging clammily to his body and heard a distant shouting. He blinked. The roar in his ears faded and the dark veil across his eyes cleared in time for him to see Asgard.

  The Bastian noble slapped him hard across the face. ‘Hey, snap out of it!’

  Ethan hissed air through his teeth. ‘Goddamnit! I really wish you’d stop doing that!’

  Asgard leaned in and peered at him. ‘Oh. You’re back.’

  Ethan looked past the immortal’s shoulder. He was on a stretcher inside the dimly-lit cargo hold of the Globemaster. From the dozens of eyes trained on him, he guessed he’d been the center of attention for a while.

  ‘What happened?’

  He could feel his racing pulse and ragged breathing start to settle.

  ‘That’s what we should be asking you.’ A figure appeared out of the gloom. ‘You’ve been out of it for two hours,’ said Reynolds.

  A soldier appeared next to him. She squatted by the stretcher and started examining Ethan.

  ‘There’s no need for that.’ He drew back and tried to push her away. ‘I’m all right.’

  The woman ignored him and shone a light in his eyes. ‘I doubt that, sir. Your heart rate’s been close to one-sixty for the last half-hour and you’re, pardon the language, sweating like a hog in the Sahara.’