Prodigal (18 page)

That was more true than Lea’s employers would ever know.

“Inbound pulser,” the Works flight control officer signaled. “State your identity and purpose.”

“CCRD approach,” Lea radioed back. “This is Special Air Mission 001, registered flight plan Delta-Zulu-Tango-Alpha. Request permission for landing procedure.”

“Roger, SAM001. Welcome home, Major Prism. Transmitting cipher for final clearance.”

A succession of scrolling numbers lit up the small screen on Lea’s panel. It was a onetime, nonlinear cipher that couldn’t be duplicated anywhere else in the world, because the computer that generated it was one of a kind—and only a handful of people even knew it existed.

“Receiving,” she said, and affixed her personal integrator to the comm panel. The small device read the incoming code transmission and formulated the appropriate reply. After a moment, the cipher on her screen rearranged itself into a simple display of letters:

what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this

Lea shook her head and laughed in spite of herself.

“Charmer,” she said.

“Sorry, SAM001. I didn’t copy that.”

“Um—sorry, approach,” Lea replied, clearing her throat and wiping an unexpected tear from one of her eyes. As many times as she had done this, it never got any easier. “Just talking to myself.”

“Bucking for a Section 8, Major?”

“Too far gone for that. So you guys going to open the gate or what?”

A grapple beam fired from the roof of the Works, a column of heliox-fusion light that kicked off plumes of ionized steam. The pulser moved ahead of its own accord, its guidance system now under remote control.

“This one’s on us, Major. Sit back and enjoy.”

“Roger and out,” Lea said, sinking into her seat. “See you inside.”

Corporate Special Services waited for Lea on the roof, a line of heavily armed troops cordoning off the landing pad—though few of them understood who she really was. They just followed standard procedure, all part of a serious upgrade in security that followed the terrorist attacks here several months earlier. Lea’s own involvement in those attacks remained a classified part of her record, accessible only by the highest levels of civilian leadership within the Collective—and with good reason. CSS didn’t want it known that they had a criminal on the payroll, particularly one who had committed enough high crimes to earn a death sentence several times over.

That was the reason sponsors cultivated such an air of secrecy for their spooks. Officially, they operated outside corporate charters on the edge of the law. Unofficially, they had license to do whatever it took to close the deal—so long as they didn’t get caught. Mostly those jobs involved some kind of piracy—theft of company research, circumventing patents, reverse engineering of illegal technology coming out of the Zone—but sometimes it spilled over into wet work, like killing off a rival company’s intellectual assets or hunting down its runners. Because of that, spooks operated only one step out of the subculture, technical mercenaries who—unlike their masters—had no
Yakuza
ties and thus no fixed loyalties.

Reformed hammerjacks were a perfect fit for this kind of work—
reformed
in the sense that they were given a choice: sanction under the Collective banner or a slow, torturous death. Lea’s deal had been sweet from a lawyer’s perspective: conditional immunity from prosecution stemming from her activities as an
Inru
hammerjack, and the even greater crime of trying to destroy what she had helped them to create. Naturally, full disclosure of her expertise in bionucleics was a given—such knowledge was essential for the Collective to continue its research into functional synthetic intelligence. After years of trying to sabotage a technology she still considered an abomination, Lea was now in charge of making sure nothing slowed its advancement.

Tell that to these guys,
Lea thought as she walked along the column of CSS uniforms. They held their weapons at attention ready, ostensibly showing respect for a T-Branch officer—but she could tell that every last one of them was looking for an excuse to light her up. At least they were straightforward. In their view, Lea Prism was a spook first and anything else a distant second.

She flashed them a sideways glance as she went past, narrowed eyes sizing them up and warning them off. It was exhausting having to maintain that image all the time, projecting dominance like some malevolent
oyabun
—but thugs like these understood little else. With each step she took, they backed away just a little, eventually parting to open the way off the landing pad.

She left them behind without looking back.

Lea’s hands shook as the lift doors closed. The shiver spread from the tips of her fingers up the length of her arms, and from there made a stab into her heart. She clenched her hands until her knuckles burned white, waiting for pain to kick the shakes. It had happened a few times since Chernobyl—mostly in her sleep, at the terminal end of some nightmare she could never remember when she awoke. The attacks were less frequent now, but more intense, postcombat stress adding fuel to the fire.

It’s just the speedtecs,
Lea repeated in a mantra.
They’ll be out of your system soon.

Lea closed her eyes and prayed she was right, listening to the hum of the magnetic column while she tried to equalize. Underneath that, a status indicator chimed a steady beat as it ticked off the floors to her destination, slowing as it approached one hundred. By then Lea had composed herself, nerves opening to drain her adrenal tremens—a classic sign of tec withdrawal, which she greeted with stale relief. Residual fear was another matter. It remained like an opiate afterimage, tugging at her in places where the essential worry never ceased.

The lift stopped, doors opening into a heavy, rarefied atmosphere. In the corridor beyond, various bodies passed back and forth—a purposeful commotion of noise, a din of voices intermingling with the artificial rhythms of the Works itself. Lea drifted into that human stream, losing herself momentarily as she took in the scope of the activity. The sheer
momentum
of everything suddenly struck her as strange, even though Lea had been the one to set it all in motion. For the first time, she wondered:
How much longer can this go on?

How much longer can I protect Cray?

Lea had no way of knowing. Aside from some nebulous progress reports, she hadn’t provided much information to the Collective regarding her research. It had been deliberate on her part—a way to stall for time while she figured out what to do about the bionucleic unit, which the project engineers had code-named Lyssa. Lea, however, knew the unit by a much different name, a fact she carefully concealed from her employers. Shielding that identity was the only thing that mattered—because if the Assembly ever found out, Lea was certain they would terminate everything and everyone associated with the project.

Including the unit itself.

Lea set aside her anxiety, tucking it away in her subconscious like so many other aspects of her life. Making her way down the corridor, she swung by the executive offices and chatted briefly with a few of her program managers. She did it mostly to pick up the corporate grapevine and get a feel for the rumor mill, usually a far better source of information than the electronic memos that crossed her desk.

With that finished, Lea headed toward the bionucleic division. Along the way she passed several layers of security, which grew progressively intrusive the deeper she went. At the outer perimeter, she only needed to provide a code key and identification to proceed; by the time she neared the vaulted lab, a contingent of armed guards confronted her, backed up by a series of lethal containment fields that infused the air with an electric tingle. The guards were all T-Branch, and snapped her a familiar salute as soon as she arrived at their post—but they still went through the formality of confirming her credentials before they allowed her to continue. Lea had devised the procedures herself, to make certain
nobody
would ever be able to repeat her own success breaking into the facility.

The guards motioned her forward, into a refracting arch that functioned as a gateway through the protective field. There, clusters of biometric sensors mapped her body down to the last detail, comparing her physiology and DNA to the readings the Works had on record. Only a half dozen people in the world were authorized to enter, the few people Lea trusted enough to get close to Lyssa—but even at that, only one person had ever had actual contact with the unit. As secrets went, this was one of the darkest in the Collective. And when the force fields dropped, the guards didn’t even dare to watch Lea as she entered.

The lab itself lay behind a heavy door of double-chambered titanium alloy, flanked by frosted windows of carbon glass. Filtered light spilled through those narrow slits, marred by passing shadows that suggested all manner of secrets on the other side. Lea had never lost that image of the place, because she never forgot its origins—or her part in perpetuating the evils that had started here. As the door slid open with a quiet hiss, she hoped—as she always did—that she could accumulate enough good karma to buy some redemption.

Inside, the pulse of the lab was frantic. Rows of virtual displays churned out numerics that represented only a tiny portion of the data generated by the bionucleic unit. All of Lyssa’s output was dumped into the Works’ conventional core, which worked twenty-four hours a day to generate a working model of her mind: a snapshot of its reasoning, its pathways, and its logic, no matter how chaotic. The crew that monitored the work consisted mainly of nanopsychologists—system shrinks who spent most of their careers speculating about synthetic intelligence and now hoped to see their theories work in practice. From all the shouting and arguments going on, Lea guessed that most of them had been at it for several days, fueled by stims instead of sleep.

“See?” one of them said pointedly, stabbing a finger into one of the floating images while three of his colleagues gathered behind him. “I
told
you that you can’t count on these Hammond algorithms to extrapolate neural patterns within the baseline matrix! It just doesn’t work that way!”

“Then how the hell are we supposed to differentiate autonomic functions from higher-directed functions?” another one grumbled. “We need to set down some basic rules if we’re going to develop a road map for this thing’s thought patterns.”

“You’re approaching this
thing
on the wrong terms,” the first one said, taking offense. “She’s not a biological entity in the way you understand it—she’s the living embodiment of uncertainty.”

“So how are we supposed to observe her if she’s changing all the time?”

“You do what you would with any woman,” Lea said, stepping into the fray. All of the shrinks looked up at the same time, but only one smiled when he saw her—the same man who had chastised the others for their unexceptional thinking.

“And what would that be?” he asked cheerfully, Irish brogue on full display.

“You stay on your toes.”

“Now
that,
” the man announced, moving out from behind the display, “is the most sensible diagnosis I’ve heard in weeks.” He left the others to mutter among themselves, while he greeted Lea with open arms. “It’s good to see you again, Lea. I was starting to worry that we’d scared you off once and for all.”

“Not a chance, Drew,” she said, gladly returning his hug. “You know I can’t resist a man with three doctorates.”

“Four,” Andrew Talbot corrected her, a glint of mischief in his gray eyes. “I just completed my boards in theoretical xenopathology. You really should have been at the graduation party. My homemade
poitín
was quite a success.”

“Street legal, I assume.”

“Technically, yes,” Talbot confided, “but only if you happen to be from the Zone.”

“I’m surprised anyone made it out alive.”

“They most certainly did,” he assured Lea, taking her by the arm and escorting her to the other side of the lab. The other scientists, meanwhile, carried on their work, immersing themselves in their virtual screens. “Poor jibbers,” he observed. “If they weren’t so insufferable, I’d feel sorry for them.”

“Looks like somebody’s been cracking the whip.”

“A whip would be kind compared to this,” Talbot deadpanned—the closest Lea had ever heard him come to complaining. “It’s a grand experiment, really: lock a few nanopsychologists together for days on end and see how long it takes them to kill each other. I confess, I was just about to give in to temptation when you arrived.”

“Bostic call them in?” Lea asked, knowing the answer.

“I prefer to call him Satan without the charm.”

Trevor Bostic was the Special Services corporate liaison, a lawyer who facilitated relations between the Collective’s security apparatus and its civilian leadership. It was an influential position, held by a man whose ambition matched his fanatic dedication. Bostic’s only positive trait was that he usually played by the rules, which made him predictable—a useful quality in a company shark. He was also Lea’s boss, and the main reason she was still breathing.

“What’s so important that he’s pushing you this hard?” she asked. “Has he imposed some kind of deadline I don’t know about?”