Prodigal (23 page)

Lea pulled a small package out of her jacket pocket. “I had to stop at two places along the way,” she said, waving it in front of the lens. “You have any idea how hard this stuff is to find? It would have been easier scoring rip tecs.”

“Merely doing my part to civilize the place.”

Locking pins disengaged with a piercing jolt. The heavy door swung open, groaning on its hinges. It revealed a small chamber on the other side, just four blank walls enclosing a spiral staircase that led in one direction—down.

Lea descended the stairs, footsteps clicking against steel mesh for two full levels until she reached the bottom. Novak waited for her there, wearing as cheerful a smile as she could manage, leavened with just the right amount of sympathy.

Lea returned a halfhearted smile of her own and handed the package over to Novak. “An apology for my behavior,” she said. “I hope you’re not too principled to accept a shameless bribe.”

“Nonsense. I lost my shame eons ago.”

“Now why don’t I believe you?”

“Because you’re hopelessly cynical,” the GME said. “And I’m hopelessly vain.”

Novak opened her arms for an embrace. Lea eagerly accepted, grateful for at least a moment’s comfort.

“Good to have you back,” Novak said, as they released each other. “I knew it wouldn’t be long until you were on the mend.”

“I’m getting there,” Lea admitted, and the two began to walk toward the GME’s office. “Been better, been worse—but not by much.”

“Spoken like a true fatalist.”

“Just a realist.” Lea exhaled, her shoulders sinking tiredly. “The Old Federation is still raising hell about our conducting operations in their territory without going through the proper channels, especially in an exclusionary zone. And I get the distinct feeling that certain factions at Special Services wouldn’t mind seeing my head on a platter.”

“In other words,” Novak observed, “nothing new.”

“Except for the casualties,” Lea reminded her, driving a dark wedge into the conversation. It was a reflex, a way to punish herself whenever she felt the least bit better—and it had the intended effect on both of them. “How’s Gunny doing?”

“He’s stable,” Novak reported. “He suffered minor damage to his spinal column—nothing terribly serious, mind you—but he did require regenerative surgery to repair some localized paralysis. The doctors also had to fuse two of his neck vertebrae as a preventive measure. It’ll take a bit of time, but he’s expected to make a complete recovery.”

“Good.” Lea sighed. “I’m glad he’s all right.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind hearing that from you.”

“I’ll tell him,” Lea promised.

Just as soon as I work up enough courage to face him.

They came to another glass door, its frosted white surface diffusing an ashen glow. In the dimness of the corridor, the tricky light exaggerated shadows from the other side, making the amorphous shapes take on sinister dimensions. From beneath the door, Lea caught the strong odor of chemical preservatives instilled with languid decay, charged to an excited state by a sustained energy field. Lea immediately recognized the smell, despite the sanitized trappings. In such a confined space, the reek of death was overwhelming.

Novak pushed the door open and the two of them went inside. The place was cold, its walls and floors a mosaic of stark white tile and brushed steel. Blacktop tables ran the length of its perimeter, crowded with dense clusters of menacing equipment—forensic technology that could have come from a medieval torture chamber, for all the dark purpose it suggested. Extraction cisterns, along with a few autopsy slabs covered in green plastic, crowded the middle of the room. The shapes underneath were vaguely human, but cavitated and flattened—the shape of a body in pieces, assembled like a puzzle from various parts. A bank of chill drawers contained the rest of what Novak had scraped off the inside of the tanks at Chernobyl.

Even more disturbing was the macabre display on the far side of the room. There, three formerly human specimens floated in perfect suspension, held aloft by the containment field Lea had sensed from outside. Their bodies were eaten away, skin and musculature stretched and torn, erasing their features into a pulp of denuded tissue. The field itself pulsated slowly, a mild strobing effect creating the illusion of movement among the dead.

Lea shivered. She took an involuntary step toward the bodies, compelled and horrified at the same time.

“I’m still in something of a disarray,” Novak said. “I’ve already cataloged the larger bits of evidence, but the rest has been rather slow going. Our
Inru
friends haven’t made matters any easier with their slash-and-burn tactics.”

Lea gazed up at the bodies, amazed they had held together at all.

“Quite something, isn’t it?” the GME lamented. “Before today, I didn’t believe the
Inru
could still shock me. At least I’m not as jaded as I thought.”

“Amen, sister,” Lea heard another voice say. Turning around, she saw Alex Pallas as he strolled through the door. He looked even more disheveled than usual, his expression hollow and his complexion pasty from endless hours of hard immersion. The play of virtual light made him seem ghostly, trailing electrodes instead of chains, plugged into a portable node strapped to his arm. “There but for the grace of God, right?”

Lea was impressed. Even at the top of her game, she had never been able to multitask the way Pallas could. He partitioned just enough of his conscious mind to interact with his environment, while the rest projected itself into the Axis at the end of an active session. The portable node kept him connected via hyperband to the main CSS gateway, which handled the direct interface—but the actual manipulation was all Pallas, who managed to keep himself oriented in two realities at the same time.

“No way, Alex,” she told him. “You’re way too smart to get involved with that bunch.”

“I don’t know,” Pallas mused, gripping her hand in a street variant of a handshake. “It might have happened if the
Inru
had some better-looking women.”

“Then it’s a good thing I found you first.”

“Indeed,” Novak agreed. “There’s no telling how long you would have rotted in prison. From what I’ve heard, the pickings there are even more slim.”

“Almost as bad as Cape Town,” the hammerjack quipped, and peeled the electrodes from his forehead. Lea watched him drop out of logical space, the interface cutting out from behind his eyes, then refocus all his attention on her. “You doing okay, boss?”

“Hanging in there.”

“Had us worried for a while.”

“Back at you,” Lea said. “How’s the grind?”

“Not riding the rapture yet,” Pallas replied, cracking his neck. “But if I’m down much longer, I might be headed for an identity crisis.”

“I remember what that was like.”

“Anytime you want a trip down memory lane,” he offered. “You talk to Eric yet?”

The mention of Tiernan’s name cut into whatever bravado Lea had left.

“Not yet,” Lea answered. “He been around?”

“Just for a while, after we got back. He didn’t say, but I think he was looking for you.”

“How is he?”

“Same as everyone,” Pallas told her. “Putting it back together. It hurt him bad that he wasn’t hurt so bad, you know?”

“I know,” Lea agreed. It wasn’t easy to watch your people die when all you got was a couple of scratches and a few bruised ribs. “So where are we on your search? You turn anything up on the
Inru
subnets?”

“Not a damned thing,” Pallas said, planting himself on the nearest stool. “All the activity that spiked over the last couple of months is
gone
—and I’m not just talking about the back channels. Everything from freechat to the hardcore sites just went
poof
and disappeared.” He rubbed his temples. “I don’t know how they did it, but Johnny Reb just up and took himself out of the Axis.”

Lea had fully expected the
Inru
to drop off the grid after her recent offensive—but not so quickly. Getting the word out to the remaining cells should have created at least a few isolated bursts of traffic, something Lea could use to get a feel for what they might do next. Avalon, it seemed, had deprived her of even that.

“Did you sift any outside sources?” Lea tried. “The subculture?”

“Somebody dropped a dime and has them all scared,” Pallas said. “Normally you can’t get street species to shut up about religion, but they’ve all got their consoles locked down on this one. Even the tec-heads are staying off-line.”

“Personal contacts?”

“I spent some time down in Chelsea checking it out,” the hammerjack said. “A couple of commerce dives, one of the flesh barns—shaking up a few of the local players. Caught a couple of them trading shots in Japanese before some
ronin
walked in and iced the conversation. The street’s pretty intense on this one, boss. Nobody wants to talk about it, even for real money.”

“Maybe we should try busting heads.”

“Or using medical science,” Novak jumped in. “A more elegant solution in my view.”

Lea turned toward her GME.

“You said you might have found something during post.”

“At the very least, a peek into the
Inru
state of mind,” Novak explained, motioning toward the suspended corpses. “It really is quite amazing what the dead can tell you. Take these three, for instance. They must have known the dangers of participating in such a radical experiment, but it’s doubtful they ever imagined their bodies ending up in a CSS laboratory.”

“They were volunteers?”

“Most certainly,” Novak said. “Although given their usual
modus operandi,
I would have expected the
Inru
to recruit test subjects from the subculture. These specimens, however, show none of the systematic abuse evident in street species—quite the opposite, in fact. Before their demise, all of them were the picture of health. If I had to guess, I’d say they were engineered that way.”

“What for?” Pallas asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Novak took a seat at one of the virtual stations. Lea and Pallas followed, hovering over the GME as she engaged the display. She loaded a three-dimensional construct of the bodies in suspension, a mathematical representation that mapped them down to the last DNA strand. “I processed random tissue samples, following the extraction protocols for standard flash. I assumed any foreign material would present itself by reacting to the antigens we use to provoke a decoding response, then compiled the results for this model. Of course, much of the data is incomplete because of the condition these people are in. But I
was
able to extrapolate some findings by generating a composite—making the most of the available material.”

Within the mists of the display the three bodies merged into a single construct, which rotated slowly to provide a full view of its tattered physiology. Significant gaps remained, stripped muscles and damaged organs showing up as transparencies in the overall picture. The nervous system, however, seemed remarkably intact—at least enough for Novak to overlay the major neural pathways.

“Of particular interest is their cortical development,” Novak said, augmenting the view of the forward area of the brain. “Since their physical conditioning seemed so perfect, I was curious to see if their mental faculties measured up to the same standard. The results proved quite interesting.”

The display showed a noticeably altered cerebral cortex. “Screens indicate high concentrations of metadopamine and various traces of radical benzodiazepines,” the GME explained, listing dozens of compounds alongside the display. “Everything you would need to maintain a persistent hypnotic state.”

“Orientation drugs,” Lea pronounced. “Jackhouse cocktail.”

“That would seem to be the case,” Novak said, punching up another graphic. A series of precisely arranged dots materialized one at a time, spreading across the frontal region of the skull like a tiny constellation. “I also found these deep-penetration-probe scars on one of the subjects. Tissue degradation makes it impossible to be certain, but it’s safe to assume that the others had them as well.” She tossed a sideways glance at Pallas. “Observe the pattern and you’ll understand.”

Pallas touched his own forehead when he saw it. His skin was still red from where he had removed the electrodes only moments ago, their placement exactly the same as on the construct.

Novak didn’t need to say more. The truth filled the ether for everyone to see.

“They were hammerjacks,” Lea said.

“Not like any hammerjack I’ve ever seen,” Novak said, echoing the enigma of the hovering construct. The virtual skull glowered at them, its dark radiance cloaking a multitude of secrets. “Prolonged exposure to direct interfacing
does
alter the neurochemical structure of the brain—but not like this. Changes on such a massive scale would mean that the subjects were down for
months
at a time, perhaps even longer.”

Alex Pallas seemed dubious and scared at the same time. “That’s ripper protocol, boss,” he said to Lea. “Ain’t a dozen jacks in the world with enough game to ride the Axis that long—and two of us are right here in this room. At best, the
Inru
might have picked up a couple of partisan hacks for the job. This here is a fucking
army.
” He shook his head. “No way they could have assembled that kind of muscle without us finding out about it.”