Prodigal (20 page)

Vortex fell into a stunned silence. His emotional state translated into a physical reaction, his self-projection pixelating into static and transparency. As he reassembled himself, his face contorted in a series of hard jumps—anguish one moment, anger the next. During the flashes in between, Lea didn’t see Vortex at all, but the face of rage—its features savage and violent, but unmistakably feminine.

Lyssa.

The effect was so brief that it could have been an illusion. When Lea blinked, Vortex reassumed his usual, benign form.

“Sorry,” he said. “I should have known.”

“There’s no way you could have,” Lea told him. “I reviewed the SIGINT data myself and confirmed everything you found. There could have been any number of reasons the
Inru
were delayed.” She sank back down on the end of the chair. “It was my command, my responsibility. If anything, I should have bugged out of there the second I sensed something was wrong.”

Vortex hesitated before asking his next question.

“Was it Avalon?”

Lea anticipated her own fury, but hearing that name again only made her feel drained. She explained exactly how Chernobyl had gone down, desensitized from the number of times she had gone over it. “The real hell of it was that I
wanted
Avalon to be there,” she added. “Me with my guns blazing, her ready to die like a martyr.” She shook her head and released a weary breath. “Didn’t quite work out that way.”

“That has a tendency to happen.”

“It does when you don’t listen,” Lea said. “My XO tried to warn me, but my head was in the wrong place. People died, I survived. End of story.”

“Except it isn’t that simple,” Vortex pointed out. “You don’t get to take that on all by yourself.”

“Sometimes it’s easier that way.”

“Yeah? So is dying.”

Lea smiled weakly.

“Take it from the guy who lives in a box,” Vortex said. “You lived. Now you get to deal with it, the same as me. In case you forgot, I wanted the same things you did—but
I
was the one who sent you out there. You want to take the blame? There’s plenty to go around.”

“You’re a real pisser,” she said. “You know that?”

“It’s an art,” he replied, shifting gears. “So you took a serious hit. Now we get to find out if it was worth it. Where do we stand with the
Inru
?”

“The facility at Chernobyl was effectively destroyed,” Lea explained. “Between the seismic anomalies and Avalon wiping the systems clean, there wasn’t a lot left. I managed to download some partial intercepts to my integrator, but it’s heavily compressed. Pallas is running a data extraction and interpolation right now. It should be ready for analysis in the next few hours.”

“I’d like to get a look at that.”

“There’s a mirror set in my private domain, strictly off the books. You can grab the data there and bypass the feedback trace.”

“What’s the story on those earthquakes you described?”

“Nobody really knows,” Lea admitted. “We didn’t get any precise measurements because of the sensor blackout, but our best guess puts the shocks at around 6.8 on the Richter scale. There isn’t much seismic activity in that region, so the cause is still a mystery. The
Inru
mercs talked about some problems they had with harmonics, which seems to be our best lead. My people are checking on that too.”

“Which leaves us with the bodies you found,” Vortex mused. “Have you made any positive identifications?”

“Not yet.” She shuddered, trailing off into a tense silence as she remembered the rows of tanks—and the woman who disintegrated while Lea watched. “Most of them got pulverized, so my GME doesn’t have a lot to work with. Novak is running post on all the pieces big enough to autopsy, but she’s not making any promises.”

Vortex nodded thoughtfully.

“You onto something?” Lea asked.

“Just some serious doubts,” he said. “The
Inru
don’t have the resources to jack around with secret projects like they used to. So what the hell were they
doing
there?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” Lea said, getting back up and pacing the chamber at a slow, deliberate pace. “When I saw the tanks, I assumed they were doing a standard flash extraction—but none of the bodies were in cryo, so that definitely wasn’t it. The only other possibility was something I didn’t want to think about.”

“You’re talking about Ascension-grade flash.”

“They could have resumed the program,” she said. “Started from scratch again.”

“That’s unlikely,” Vortex balked. “After what happened in Paris, the
Inru
considered Ascension a failure. As far as they know, Cray Alden died—and with him their dream of accelerated evolution. Even Avalon doesn’t know what really happened.”

On many levels, Lea knew that he was right. Avalon had escaped from the catacombs without ever knowing Cray’s fate, just before CSS destroyed the facility beneath Point Eiffel—and all the research the
Inru
stored there. Since then, the Ascension had regained mythical status, a whispered legend on the lunatic fringe of the Axis.

How that would change if they knew about
you,
Vortex.

“I think we have to consider the possibility,” Lea maintained. “Background chatter points to something major—you said it yourself. Besides, it fits the Avalon profile. She hasn’t been sitting around all this time just waiting for us to pick her up. She’s planning to take the offensive. You ask me, Chernobyl was part of that overall scheme.”

“Then she’s got a strange way of going about it,” Vortex said, still dubious. “We’ve been taking
Inru
cells down left and right. You’ve practically neutralized their ability to engage in hostilities with the Collective. How is that supposed to help them?”

“By keeping our attention diverted from their
real
objective.”

Vortex acknowledged her point with a curious scowl. Even Lyssa seemed interested, her taunting noises bleeding off into an expectant hush.

“You have to look at this
strategically,
” Lea explained, “the same way Avalon would. She knows damned well that without the covert support Phao Yin provided, the
Inru
don’t stand a chance against CSS. It’s only a matter of time. So what does she do? She makes us
believe
that she’s fighting a defensive war, throwing us some nominal victories to string us along.”

“Pawns to cover some larger gambit.”

Lea nodded. “Meanwhile,” she continued, “the
Inru
toss everything they have left into this new experiment. Avalon stays off the radar, because she knows it’s too important to risk our finding out about it.”

“Is there any reason to believe they achieved Ascension?”

“Probably not,” Lea said. “The mercs were pretty frustrated, so I don’t think they got that far. Plus all the test subjects were killed, which points to
some
kind of catastrophic failure.” She paused momentarily, mulling over something that had been bothering her. “Avalon went to a hell of a lot of trouble to destroy the data, though—which to me suggests they were getting close. At the very least, we have to proceed on that assumption.”

“You’re probably right,” Vortex agreed, adding an even darker caveat. “But if that’s the case, then we
also
have to assume that the
Inru
wouldn’t confine their tests to a single group of subjects. They would repeat the experiment—which means there are more of them out there.”

“Then I’ll find them,” Lea stated. “And I’ll destroy them.”

“Sounds reckless.”

Again, Vortex played the devil’s advocate—and again, he watched for Lea’s reaction. She wasn’t really sure what he expected from her.

“They aren’t leaving me with much choice,” she said. “Time isn’t exactly on our side.”

“Maybe that’s also part of Avalon’s plan—to goad you into another attack before you’ve had a chance to think this through.”

“What else is there to think about?” Lea asked, her voice rising. “She
killed
my people, Cray! And for all intents and purposes, she killed you too. It’s about goddamned time somebody returned the favor.”

Nothing of what Lea had said was untrue; in fact, saying it gave her the catharsis of release, unburdening her of an ugly truth she had never acknowledged openly:
Cray Alden is dead.
Confronted with his image day after day, she had just never been able to let that part of him go—in spite of all her assurances to the contrary.

Vortex, meanwhile, hardened at her outburst, the realism of his features taking on a mechanical cast. Lea instantly regretted what she had done, but talking about it would only make things worse.

“Avalon won’t get the jump on me again,” she said. “I have a feel for her tactics now, and I can assure you—the next time, things will be different.”

“I’m sure they will.”

Lea forced a thin smile.

“We’ll get through this.”

“I’ll make sure you do,” he said.

Lea considered asking him about that, but decided not to. With a shrug, she stepped away from the glass and walked back to the airlock. As the door slid open, she caught reflections in its polished surface—sparkles of infinite mass, like dying neutron stars, the bionucleic matrix reverting to a resting state. Vortex retained his basic form throughout, waiting for Lea to depart before falling back into the eddies and currents of distilled intelligence.

“There’s something you should ask yourself, though.”

Lea turned around.

“The Collective already knows about Ascension-grade flash,” he said. “So why would Avalon go to so much trouble to destroy all the evidence of something that isn’t even a secret anymore?”

And with that, he collapsed into nothing.

Lea carried the question with her all the way out, through the bionucleics lab and past the puzzled stares of Andrew Talbot, then up to the roof where her pulser waited. Climbing on board, she set her integrator to scramble and piggybacked the Port Authority’s automated subnet, converting a single-line transmission to encoded microbursts. She used the same precaution with all voice communications, staying off the conventional routes so that nobody—
Inru
or Collective—could intercept her conversations.

As the small ship spun her into the sky, Lea opened a channel. The glow of the integrator’s tiny screen clicked to SECURE mode as it made contact with its counterpart.

“You rang?” Didi Novak answered.

“It’s me,” Lea said. “How’s the post going?”

“It’s quite revealing. Our friends have really outdone themselves this time.”

Photon wash enveloped the pulser’s forward receptor dish, an excited charge slipping over the canopy. Out in front, a gauntlet of buildings parted around her as Lea jumped on the traverse grid. The navigation monitor displayed her route, twisting through the canyons of Manhattan, the line ending at CSS headquarters.

“I’m on my way,” she said, and closed the channel.

The main viewer flickered in cold black and green, at the receiving end of a grainy transmission streaked with interference lines. The audio was just as poor, riddled with dropouts and angry barbs of static, which melted the sound of human voices into the constant background noise of deep space. Though it was almost impossible to discern anything within the image, everyone on
Almacantar
’s bridge stood at rapt attention, following the shaky, claustrophobic action as best they could.

“Captain…in position…reading this?”

Lauren Farina watched from the center seat, straining to hear the message that crackled through the overhead speaker. She sneaked a look at the navigation console, where one of the monitors pointed straight down into the maw of Olympus Mons. A blinking graphic denoted the position of the recovery team.

The captain flipped a switch on her chair’s comm panel. “We’re barely receiving you, Kellean,” she said. “Try repositioning your line repeaters. That should boost your signal.”

“Copy…hold—how about now?”

A spike of white feedback flooded the viewer, then just as quickly receded. When the picture settled, it showed the outlines of two people in space suits clambering through an uneven and darkened terrain. The helmet camera that captured the image swished from side to side with each turn of Eve Kellean’s head, snapping in and out of focus. She widened the angle, bringing more of the foreground into the shot to give the bridge crew a better perspective.