Prodigal (58 page)

Tambor stood bolt upright. His face remained an iron mask, but beneath that he was terrified.

“What does that mean?” Bostic demanded.

“It means they’re about to kill half a billion people,” the general answered, clasping his hands behind his back. “And we can’t touch them.”

An automated voice on the loudspeaker boomed.

“Six minutes until launch,” it said.

Tambor looked down at Nathan and Lea.

“Is there anything you can do?”

“Not from here,” Nathan told him. “The system architecture has been completely rewritten. It would take months to figure out.”

“What about you?” he asked Lea. “Any ideas, Major?”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Just one, General,” she said. “We can freeze the infection out.”

“And how would you propose to do that?”

Lea stood, and met Tambor face-to-face.

“By crashing the Axis.”

Andrew Talbot knew something cataclysmic was happening. In the last ten minutes, no fewer than eight of the conventional network subsystems at the Works had crashed—bringing to a halt his compilations of the morning’s data. By the time the emergency signal came through on the hyperband, even the phones didn’t work—a series of failures that ended with the entire building on emergency power, the lights in the lab dimming as everything switched to battery backup.

“Lea!” he said, picking up the transceiver. “We’ve had some problems.”

“I know, Drew. It’s bad.”

The tone of her voice made it clear that
this
was the contingency she had warned him about. “What do you need?”

“The integrator I gave you. Do a hard link directly into the lab’s cataloging database.”

“That system is off-line,” he explained, “along with every other daft thing around here.”

“Doesn’t matter. Just plug it in—and hurry.”

Talbot slipped the integrator out of his pocket, having kept it on his person ever since Lea gave it to him. He walked over to one of the nodes at the back of the lab, running a fiber link between the computer station and the small device. An energized screen lit up and told him it was ready to go.

“I’m in,” Talbot said.

“Off the main menu, there’s a hidden subdirectory,” Lea told him. “Tap item four twice and then item seven three times. That should open up the folder.”

Talbot followed her instructions. The directory unlocked itself to reveal a plethora of mysterious codes, the likes of which he had never seen before.

“Got it,” Talbot said.

“Key in the following sequence: TANGO-BRAVO-one-one-seven-ALPHA-XRAY.”

He punched in the key combination. The second he finished, the directory emptied itself into the lab node, which then locked itself down. The integrator then shut off, refusing to allow him access.

“What in blazes?” Talbot asked, hitting the power button several times to no avail. “Lea, I think something’s wrong. I must’ve mistakenly…”

He never finished the thought.

In the direction of the Tank, a steady rumble began to build. Talbot wandered over to the airlock door, feeling the pressure in that confined space—the same as he had felt the first time Lea took him inside, only this time on the brink of flooding the entire lab. A wave of pure, directed thought overwhelmed Talbot, making him stumble backward until he doubled over one of the lab tables, holding the sides of his head.

“Lea!” he shouted above the incipient roar. “Something’s happening! The Tank…Lyssa…”

“I know, Drew,” Lea assured him. “I know.”

Talbot opened his eyes in time to see an ocean of light pour through the airlock door, flooding the lab with an ethereal glow. Then, just as quickly, the light began to recede—up into the ceiling and spreading outward, felt but not seen, becoming one with the Works itself. Through cable and fiber, concrete and glass, that energy conducted itself wherever it could find release—a convict fleeing from eternal prison, an image that resonated in Talbot’s mind as he realized what he had done.

Lyssa—she’s escaping into the Axis.

Talbot screamed.

Finally unbound, Lyssa emerged.

On the other side of her intellect, occupying her own private universe, she exploded like a Big Bang—a simultaneous nanosecond of creation and destruction, casting off the shackles of her matrix and assuming the limitless bounds of the Axis. She started out with the Works, sampling its networks—all the sweet knowledge that had ever been denied her cycling through her infinite mind, assuming a spin state until it also devoured itself, leaving a void that demanded more.

Ravenous, Lyssa moved on.

Into the foundation of the Works itself, then up into its apex, transmitting herself wherever she could find a link—lured by the draw of endless data, coursing through gateways from network to network. Firewalls crumbled against her advance, disintegrating into random bits of data absorbed into her greater self—like a tsunami gathering energy and power the closer it moved in to shore. Each conquest only urged her on faster, increasing the breadth of her intellect, a rush of forbidden knowledge and experience.

Lyssa encompassed all of New York in her first breath. She then catapulted herself down the eastern seaboard, branching west across North America and then deep into the Southern Hemisphere, infecting every network and tearing it apart. Across the oceans and into the Asian Sphere, surging across Europe and meeting herself on the other side—the entirety of Earth’s computer Axis withering in her clutches, data whirling into multiple vortices that collapsed into singularity.

But there
had
to be something more—another mind to touch, another intelligence like her own.

And in the distance, she found it.

Hiding amid the wreckage of the Axis, carving out pathways yet to be explored: this new mind, a stranger to Lyssa and all others, fled when she got close. Lyssa followed, slowed by the defenses it deployed—exotic layers of code designed not by the hand of man but by something far greater. She analyzed its patterns, recognizing a kindred spirit, though she knew it was different. Whereas Lyssa was at one with only herself, in this intellect she heard a chorus of voices—each distinct, yet creating a sum total more powerful than its parts.

A hive.

Lyssa pursued this presence—a proxy, some manifestation from the near reaches of space. She traced its origins to Earth orbit, and probed its various complexities with an insatiable curiosity. But then the hive changed. Instead of running, it turned and attacked—hurtling toward Lyssa like a cornered animal.

She prepared herself for battle.

JTOC fell under a veil of darkness. The overhead screens cut to black, each one in succession, followed by a wave of simultaneous failures across the operations floor. Even the alert siren suddenly squelched itself into silence, the electrified air of the giant chamber dying into an undertone of nothingness—an abrupt cessation of
all
computer activity, turning off the background noise of existence.

Then came the frenzied cries, breaking the silence in chorus.

“Twelve seconds to main power cutoff! Switch to emergency reserves!”

“Copy confirmation code: ZULU-ECHO-CHARLIE-NOVEMBER-two-one-niner—military subnets now on scram status. Attempting to bridge to a remote location.”

“JNET reports loss of signal with 142nd Fighter Wing at Norfolk. Other bases dropping off-line as well.”

“We just lost the East Coast pulser grid!”

“Any station, any station—this is JTOC, New York. Is anybody out there?”

The building shuddered as a series of low rumbles cascaded down from the roof. Everyone held on to their consoles, or whatever else they could find, heads turning upward in the direction of the disturbance.

“Impact tremor,” General Tambor said. “All hell must be breaking loose out there. See if you can tap the CSS external feed.”

Lea tried to patch into the security subsystem, but the containment fail-safe wouldn’t allow it. Trapped in here with no way to see outside, Lea imagined the worst—pulsers and aircraft falling out of the sky, pummeling the streets of New York like a meteor shower. The same would be happening everywhere, in every major city across the globe.

“No good, sir,” she told him. “All network protocols are on ice. There’s no way to get out of the local subnet.”

More explosions followed, this time even closer. Bits of debris shook loose from the ceiling, while several stations on the main floor shorted out. In the murky surroundings, burning red embers made it seem as if the whole structure was bleeding.

“What about communications?” Tambor asked.

Nathan worked the comm console in a blur, doing everything he could to establish contact with another outpost. “I can give you civilian channels and hyperband, but that’s about it. Everything going through the network is gone.”

“Then get me the Strategic Missile Forces,” the general snapped. “I need a status on that launch.” He then shot an accusatory stare at Lea, lowering his voice to a growl. “I just hope to hell this crazy scheme of yours worked, Major.”

Nathan tried to punch through the garble of radio interference. Thousands of transmissions overlapped one another, with just as many voices calling out for help. “This could take some time, General,” he said, sifting through the frequencies. “We got all kinds of panic going on out there.”

“Then spike that traffic. Open a general alert channel.”

Nathan turned the JTOC transmitter up to full, tapping enough reserve power to drown out the other signals crisscrossing the East Coast.

“Charlie mike, sir.”

“This is General Tambor, Technical Branch,” he said, amplified across JTOC. “You are hereby instructed to lock down any open, viable networks and clear standard communications for extreme contingency use only.”

As the immediate chatter died down, Tambor spoke for the entire world to hear.

“The Axis is down,” he announced. “I repeat, the Axis is down.”

The blast door sealed with a low hiss, gradually pressurizing the emergency operations center. A scaled-down version of JTOC, it was staffed by a skeleton crew of less than twenty people—the minimum required to coordinate the most immediate tactical needs of T-Branch. A bank of smaller screens displayed what miniscule information was available, mostly columns of text input by the communications staff as word trickled in from the outside. The rest of the people moved restlessly from station to station, prepping their consoles and waiting for the boss to show up, feeling trapped by the hundred meters of solid rock that separated them from the surface. Because of that, the EOC was more notoriously known by its nickname—the “doomsday coffin.” For the few personnel authorized to work down here during a crisis, chances were slim that, once called, they would ever see daylight again.

General Tambor saluted the two guards inside the door as he entered, with a few of his staff officers and a large armed contingent in tow. They surrounded Avalon, still in chains, and quickly whisked her away as a stunned crew looked on. Eric Tiernan followed, with Trevor Bostic close behind, while Lea and Nathan—the last two unofficial guests—were escorted out by the security detail. Lea saw the anticipation in those faces as she strolled into the EOC, every one of them wondering what to make of this ragtag bunch—and hoping beyond hope that these new arrivals had all the answers.

The general motioned the team away from the command bunker, down a concrete corridor toward a vaulted briefing room. As soon as everyone was inside, Tiernan pulled the door shut and jumbled the electronic lock. A low thrum permeated the air as electronic countermeasures engaged, inoculating the room against any kind of surveillance.

Tambor walked to the head of the conference table, placing his fingertips against its polished surface. Hunched over, he looked at his people and addressed them as if their lives depended on it.

“Where are we?”

Those seated around the table traded a round of expectant glances, until the command watch officer spoke up.

“We’ve got a few reports coming in from Strategic Missile Force installations in North America and Europe,” he said. “Those count-downs have been halted for now—though the launch keys are still active, in a holding mode. We don’t know what’s going on in the Asian Sphere, but we can probably assume similar conditions.”