Hansen gulped and jerked, eyes wide. In a final act, he pushed the gun under his chin. The wracked spasm in his cheeks eased—relief was near. He fired. Needle pierced skull and ended his torment. His head blew forward, hitting the desk with a mushy crack.
Sarah couldn't hold time. It surged past her in waves. She stumbled to her feet, unsure of her next move—of anything. How could life continue after such carnage? Had she caused it? She checked her hands, then ripped her sleeves up to reveal—nothing. No pustules, no lesions. She was fine—totally fine. Her lungs still felt pulpy, but that was it.
She forced herself to look around the room. Everyone had followed Hansen's symptoms, though at varying rates. The process had taken longer in some than others. Coughing, bleeding, then a pause before the convulsions set in. Cox's back had snapped under the pressure of her spasms. Finally, each had gone still. Dead still. Eyes wide open. Body rigid.
Through her terror, Sarah's pattern recog wouldn't shut off. Something was off pattern—a single fact in this death play that didn't fit.
The same symptoms for everyone—except Dillon!
Dillon had not gone into convulsions. With shuffling wariness, she neared the grotesque form that had been Andrew Dillon. Sarah's urge to run was almost overwhelming, but she needed to know. She stooped over him, reaching out instinctively to place a hand on his cheek, but not daring to touch him. Fear battled pity for dominance. She inched closer. The smell of death overwhelmed her.
As she neared his face, willing herself to touch him, Andrew's eyes flew open. He jerked away from her, sprawling onto the floor. Sarah bolted back—shock scared. On the floor, Dillon drew air in crackling rasps.
He had fallen to his side, facing away from Sarah with his head crushed into the carpeting. The idea of touching him revolted her. But she couldn't leave him like this.
“Andrew . . .” she whispered. “Please. I didn't know.” The words sounded hollow and ridiculous as she extended a shivering hand, gripped his shoulder and pulled.
Dillon's bulk rolled heavily, his ravaged face flopping over to meet her gaze. Through the blood and gore, she could barely recognize him. She saw his hate, though, glossy and clear.
It was only then that she noticed the gun he had pulled from his jacket. The mere act of hefting it sent him into a coughing fit. Blood erupted from his lips and trickled down his cheek.
His eyes didn't waver. He pointed the muzzle at Sarah's chest. No way he could miss. Sarah froze, kneeling over the dying man, the gun between them. Whether or not her tat trapped the bullet, the force of impact would cause massive trauma.
“Please, Andrew . . .” She tried to show in her eyes what she couldn't say.
Dillon's only response was a clenching of the jaw, a steadying of the gun.
“Traitor,” he gurgled.
No doubt now. He would fire. He would kill her. She held still, staring down at him. The hammer rocked back, nearing its apex. A dull submission filled her. She almost longed for the bullet.
The shot echoed through the room, filling Sarah's consciousness.
The tension in her arm brought her back to reality. She refocused to see her hand, grasping Dillon's wrist, wrenching his gun arm down and away from her. She followed the line of the barrel to Dillon's bloody pant leg. He continued to stare at her, pain clouding his eyes.
Sarah scuttled back, shocked at what she had done, at what she was willing to do to stay alive. She pulled up to her feet, wrenching herself from the death around her. Time whipped and slowed as she backed away and staggered through the halls.
Removed and distant, her feet pounded over the dusty carpeting, up through the old building and into the wide hall that centered the Original Headquarters Building.
The hall was thick with people. Life! She breathed a sigh of relief—having suspected that the plague had hit and she'd be the only one standing. She approached a security guard, grabbing his shoulder. He turned to her.
“I need help,” she managed.
“Hey, where's your badge?”
He took her arm, suddenly suspicious. Those passing by gave them a wide berth.
“I...I don't know. People are dead. Please!”
“Ma'am, stay right where...” His words were lost to the piercing wail of the Agency's alarm system. The rest of his breath came out in a grating cry. Then it began—the transformation—the black death. Sarah pulled back, scanning wildly. Through the hall, people fell, succumbing.
She was doing this! Somehow spreading this plague while she remained untouched. The enormity of it spread over her.
She stumbled over a corpse and scrambled free of the gore, slipping in the blood. Finally, she found her feet and sprinted—hard—with everything in her. Behind her, a trail of death ran all the way down to EMPYRE itself.
PART 2
8
QUEEN MAUD LAND, ANTARCTICA
“Fucking bitch,” Frank mumbled through clenched teeth. The words expanded into the air, then dropped in a cloud of condensation.
Bristling fury rose off Savakis as he gazed up the vast wall of granite. In the dull glow of Antarctic night, he could just make out the man moving up the rock, a thousand meters overhead. Frank stamped his feet and watched, letting his anger boil through the insistent chill.
He had his issues with Andrew Dillon and the rest of the EMPYRE. But, at the end of the day, those men and women were his men and women—his team. No one got away with this shit—no one.
He kicked free of his brooding and looked back into the link in his hand. On it, images of the carnage at the CIA whirred past. Frank fixed on a grainy feed of Dillon, face wracked and sallow. Somehow, he had managed to cling to life, but his prospects were bleak. The med-techs didn't expect him to regain consciousness.
Poor fucker, Frank thought. He forced himself to study each and every detail coming through the feed, sharpening his anger to a razor's edge.
Frank scrolled through the rest of the transmission. The woman had left a wake of death in her path. Everyone involved with EMPYRE—dead or dying. A string of deaths rising up out of the CIA's guts and into the light. She had walked right out the front gate, thwarting the CIA's counter-measures by the sheer audacity of her act.
Then, at the gates, the slaughter stopped. Once outside the Company's grounds, her trail had gone cold. While the true facts of the massacre were being withheld from the public, Peters was now the focus of the largest clandestine manhunt in U.S. history. So far, she had eluded capture.
The full weight of the attack beat down on Savakis as he terminated the link. EMPYRE was his now. With Dillon pounding on death's door, Frank was the only person who knew what all those VIPs had been doing in the CIA's basement.
Peters's attack simplified Frank's plans. No longer was there nagging doubt as to EMPYRE's means. EMPYRE was dead. Peters had killed it.
Eye for a fuckin' eye, Frank thought.
Retribution was his to reap, and he savored the raw clarity of purpose. Ryan Laing seemed like a good enough place to start. Frank looked up at the man—letting his anger draw him to action. He could dispense with all this covert shit and just go.
Revenge made life simple.
Sharp angles. Clean lines. The hard glare of black, blue, and white. Antarctica's spartan geometry soothed Laing. He dry-tooled over the granite. He eased out into the void, placing the single fang of his left crampon on a knob. He twisted on it, slowly shifting his weight. The knob groaned, but held. Laing longed to disappear into the movement and grace, the adrenaline and awe.
But each time he neared a state of oblivion, tension jolted him from peace. Sarah's transmission haunted him. Hanging over the white, suspended on needle point, Sarah's image refused to fade.
Something of her had touched him and no amount of hate would shake it. He ground down, placing an axe into a slim vertical fissure and cranking it into a jam that would hold his weight. It was nothing to worry about. Sarah was fine. Fucked up, but fine.
Ryan let it go. He move
d farther out onto the face, concentration calming him. Worry faded. He slipped into the movement with greedy expectation. But before he could lose himself in the climb, a sound pulled Laing from his peace.
A crackle of electricity, the sharp tang of an active coil field. A man moved up the wall below Ryan. The coil pack generated a huge charge that magnetized the granite, drawing the man up the rock in spurts. Laing watched the man approach, mesmerized. He had a stocky frame—not that of a climber. Out of place. His build, his tech, everything. A bursting drive to bolt flashed over Ryan; his exposure was total. He smothered the urge, settled into a comfortable position and waited.
The man rose in swooping, surreal surges. Pulling even with Ryan, he retracted his helmet's mirrored face plate. The scowling face of Frank Savakis emerged.
“Where is she?” Frank growled. He ripped a plastic needle gun from his jacket. Anything with metal in it would draw to the coil. Ryan felt his axes and crampons shimmy, pulled by the magnetic field.
“Where the fuck is she?” Frank asked again, wind ripping his words into a gentle hush.
Words croaked up from Laing's gut, his voice cracking from disuse. “You want something from me?”
Frank drew closer. “I want information.”
Ryan gazed with dull confusion at the man's anger. It seemed from another place, another world—discordant with this reality.
“I've left it,” Ryan said. “I'm out of the game.”
“You may be hanging out here with the crazies, but you're still in play, Mr. Ryan fuckin' Laing, destroyer of Echelon.”
Shock flooded Laing, and his concentration wavered. His left axe jittered with the magnetic pull. It popped free from the crack and skittered over the rock. The leash kept it from falling down the face, but the shift in balance threatened to pull Ryan off the cliff.
“Okay,” Frank said. “Now I got your attention. I know you. I know your past. I even know the sob story that brought you here to this,” Frank waved his hand holding the weapon, “this stupid fuckin' death wish.”
Ryan tried to calm himself. “Just leave me be.”
“Sorry.”
The two stared at each other over the void.
“I was tasked with retrieving your AI. And I was kinda looking forward to cutting it out of ya,” Frank said.
Ryan shook his head. The man knew everything. He pushed for a path forward, deciding on honesty as a first course of action. “The drones in me are coded to my DNA. They'll be useless to you. I'll give you a sample.”
“Oh, you'll give me more than that. In the time it took me to get here, plans changed.”
“I'm telling you—”
Frank cut Ryan off. “Sarah Peters changed 'em.”
A blast of chilled fury shot through Ryan. His eyes hardened. “Sarah tasked you with finding me?”
Now it was Frank's turn to chuckle. “Not quite. Sarah Peters worked for my associates. Two days ago, she offed 'em—all of 'em—plus a good fifty others.”
Ryan slumped into the wall, a chill seeping through his protective layers and burrowing into his chest.
“No.” It was all he could manage.
“So, plans have changed. Sarah Peters is a dead woman. Anything she loved or cared about—dead. She plays tough. I'm tougher.”
“Sarah?” Ryan stammered, unable to wrap his mind around the man's words.
Frank nodded back. “Now, you and me gonna take a nice slow descent and have a little chat about your girlfriend's whereabouts.”
Ryan's right foot popped free. Even as he scrambled, his world blurred to murky confusion.
Not Sarah. Not possible.
Standing on the wall's face, Ryan let the drones work, accessing the flow, boring into it. Firewalls did little to slow him. Within the CIA's system, he linked the man before him to a dossier.
“You're CIA,” Ryan said.
Frank nodded. “That's good tech you got. Now, hold on tight. Got a little show planned for you.”
Before Ryan could react, the CIA's system had sucked him deep into its core. He was helpless against the surge, like a swimmer caught in a riptide.
Ryan had time to register that this man had expected Ryan's incursion—planned for it even. That horrifying fact was forgotten as the system dumped him over a vid file. It blossomed around him and Laing watched Sarah walk down the hall with death following.
The drones within him latched on to Sarah's familiar pattern and searched. Ryan's mind flooded with the updates, analyses, and alerts—the chatter of her manhunt. Image on image. The woman he loved—had loved—hunted. A murderer.
No! He raged against it. Oh God, no.
But there it was. And he had let this happen. Sarah had called out for him and he had pushed her away.
The carefully crafted armor Laing had erected now liquefied under the barrage of images. The emotions he'd tried so hard to block came flooding back and the sharp geometry of his created world cracked with the weight. He couldn't hold it—couldn't process it all.
The images overwhelmed him.
Frank watched Laing crumble and part of him thrilled at the sight. But something about Ryan's reaction felt wrong. The calculating part of him, the part that allowed him to see what others couldn't, that part told him that Laing was as shocked by Sarah's act as anyone.
“You didn't know,” Frank said, the hard edge of his fury dulled.
Ryan's eyes . . . They swam in confusion and something Frank didn't think a man like this would be capable of—fear. Pure, raw fear.
Laing's arms jittered. He sensed the loss of balance too late. His right axe came free of the crack with a grating screech. Ryan flailed, trying to right himself. In that moment between holding and falling, he caught Frank's eyes, which had filled with shock.
Then life became acceleration and blur.
Even as he gained speed, Laing raged against the inevitable. Sarah had needed him. She had no one else. And he had pushed her away—again.
Failed her—again. Axes dangling from their leashes, Ryan scraped his hands over the granite. His gloves sheared away—his fingers grinding down to broken, bloody nubs in an instant. Gray drones coated the rock. He didn't slow.
Through the acceleration and pain, Ryan caught movement. The man above him—the killer—descended in giant loping arcs. He flicker-fired the coil field, positioning himself straight down. Finally, he shut the field down completely and drew into a tight dive. He threw the gun into the wind. That move cracked through Ryan's shock. The man was coming for him. Trying to save him.
Laing arched out, opening to the fall. He positioned himself facing up so he could track the man above him. The friction of his body slapping against the cold air slowed Ryan, even as the man above accelerated. Ryan cringed into the approaching crunch, knowing they neared the end. He knew it in the gaping rush of his fall. He knew it in the man's eyes.
No! Can't let this happen. No!
He saw the man slap at his coil field—giving up. But Ryan wouldn't yield. He threw his right arm toward the slowing figure. A spindling vine of drones arced from his mangled hand and shot toward the man. The man's eyes bulged wide.
The vine spindled up and wrapped the man's torso. Ryan willed contraction, and the drones pulled Laing into Frank's chest. Ryan gripped hard, wrapping himself around Frank. The coil field sputtered, unable to hold the added weight.
Ryan and the man tumbled over each other. As Laing tipped over, he saw white ice approaching. Deceleration ripped at him, but it wouldn't be enough. At the last moment, he flipped himself over, armoring the man against impact. Any moment . . .
But instead of the bone crush he'd been expecting, Ryan felt only a slight impact, then dark acceleration.
Crevasse! His mind stumbled over the word, even as they punched through the snow bridge covering the deep fissure in the Antarctic ice shelf. Light faded to a sliver.
Then Laing got the deceleration slap he'd been expecting. His head slammed into ice and perception faded to zero.
> Frank struggled out of Laing's grasp. His stomach settled to a dull ache, recovering from the adrenaline shock of the fall. He flexed his muscles, surprised to find himself in working order. A teary spike of pain on inhale informed him of a badly broken nose. He welcomed the sensation—any sensation. It beat the fuck out of the alternative.
Savakis took in his surroundings. They had come to rest on a snow ledge about twenty meters into a crevasse. The eerie silence of the ice fissure spooked Frank. He realized just how far he was from his element.
He flipped himself over to check on Laing. The bulky man lay on his back, arms splayed out. Frank watched in amazement as drones coated Ryan's hands in a protective gray. He sensed that fingers, fresh and pink, would soon emerge from the cocoon. The sight so captivated him that it took a moment to notice several other facts. The first being that Laing had an ice axe skewering him.
The second realization was more troubling. They were not alone.
9
QUEEN MAUD LAND, ANTARCTICA
A gut-wrenching tug dragged Laing back to consciousness. He cut through a bleary haze to see Frank sitting next to him, holding a gory ice axe in his gloved hand. Even as he rezzed in, Ryan sensed the drones putting him back together. The crevasse hung in cold shadow, not black, not quite twilight.
A spine tingle. Laing felt other eyes on him. He turned his head and stared into giant brown irises. Ratcheting back, he saw teeth, large and edged, lips bared. Death-gray skin stretched over a face that wasn't human. Laing skittered back, almost knocking Frank off their shared ledge.
“Hey! Hey, there. It's dead,” Frank said.
Laing stared at Frank, trying to comprehend. Then he turned and looked again.
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