Prodigal (9 page)

A flicker of movement, more blur than substance, fluttered at the periphery of Lea’s visor. With an urgent gesture, she ordered her team to scatter across the overgrown courtyard in front of the apartment building. The commandos melted into a thicket of weeds and hedges while she and Tiernan dropped down and crawled to a position closer to the main entrance. As they took cover in the contorted shadow of a dead tree, Lea motioned for the others to wait. Tiernan, meanwhile, tightened the rifle strap around his arm, locking himself into a sniper pose.

Lea said nothing. Not until she was certain.

“There,” she whispered, pointing toward a bank of windows directly above the main entrance to the building. An afterimage of heat lingered at the edge of one of the frames, static but consistent. There was mass behind it, Lea had no doubt.

Body heat.

It assumed human shape as it moved fully into the window. The bright green outline lingered for a moment, seeming to stare back at her, though there was no outward reaction.

“Sentry,” Lea said.

“He’s got a pulse pistol,” Tiernan observed, studying the image in his rifle sight. “Hallway looks empty. I think he’s alone.”

The sentry leaned out the open window. Though it was impossible to discern his facial features, he seemed to be getting tense—as if he sensed a disturbance outside.

“Clean shot,” the lieutenant said.

“Take him out.”

Tiernan pulled the trigger, releasing a silent burst of energy that singed the frosty air. The shot pierced the sentry’s head, killing his brain before his body had a chance to notice. He jumped once, as if in surprise, dropping the pistol to the grass below. He then slumped back, disappearing from view.

“Go,” Lea said.

The two of them ran toward the building. Tiernan stopped to pick up the sentry’s dropped weapon, while Lea stepped around the layers of old debris that littered the entryway. She flipped up her visor, relying on intuition to guide her, and as she neared the open doors she came to a sudden halt. Just above the floor, nestled in the dust and rubble, was a tiny cluster of sensor globes—an improvised device of some kind, since the thing was useless for video surveillance in this environment.

Tiernan slipped beside her and followed her stare.

“Surprise,” he said.

Lea nodded, taking out her integrator. She did a quick scan, and found a burst-comm link between the cluster and at least a dozen other nodes, forming a complex web of sensor beams that covered the entire first floor.

“Trip wire,” Lea said. “The whole place is rigged.”

“The
Inru
’s idea of a warm welcome.” As the lieutenant spoke, the other members of the team arrived. “At least we know they’re here.”

“And so are we.” Lea mapped out the other clusters, then jacked the web that linked them together. Her integrator easily mimicked the signal, which she used to reprogram the clusters and neutralize them. She waved a hand in front of a nearby globe to make sure they were all down. Pinprick lights blinked at her, but that was the extent of its menace.

“Stand back,” she told the others, and walked inside.

Lea stood there for a few moments, waiting for the flash that would tell her that she had missed something—right before some unseen trap swooped down to finish her off. When that didn’t happen, she took a few more tentative steps, her eyes drawn to an odd light fixture that hung from the ceiling above the entrance. Something about it struck Lea as wrong.

What are you hiding?

She stared at the fixture until she had walked far enough around it to see for herself. There, concealed by the frosted glass, was a particle-beam microturret—no doubt linked to the trip wire she had just bypassed. It was a crude assembly, but effective. If any one of them had set it off, the resulting bloom would have cut them all to pieces.

Lea released the breath she had been holding.

“Clear,” she whispered.

The rest of her team fanned out across the space, securing every corner and checking every door. One pair headed upstairs to take care of the sentry’s body, while Lea and Tiernan proceeded toward a nearby bank of elevators. The doors stood wide open, leading into a gloomy shaft that pierced the heart of the building—all the way into the basement, a black hole that devoured their vision as they stared down into it.

Lea listened carefully: for a voice, an echo, a hint of activity coming from the depths of the pit—something to indicate the presence of her enemy. Nobody answered. She flipped her visor down, passive infrared substituting green for black, pockmarks of static giving false impressions of movement. Still nothing.

But in the midst of that…

A low, steady rhythm infused itself into the fabric of darkness. Lea didn’t dare seize upon it, for fear it was an auditory illusion, but instead allowed it to play at the edge of her senses, where it could build without interference from her imagination. As the seconds passed, she became more certain of its existence—and she looked back up at Tiernan, whose expression told her that he felt the same thing.

Repeating, cycling, a surge and retreat.

Power.

So subtle, it flirted between reality and fantasy—and stirred a memory deep within Lea.
Paris,
she immediately thought:
Dampness and dust. Decay and bones. Point Eiffel…

Lea stepped away from the edge of the shaft, quaking within the confines of her body armor. Her right hand dropped to the compartment where she kept her quicksilver hidden.

Avalon, what have you done?

Lea went to work with terminal purpose. She ordered two of her people to remain behind at the elevator shaft, where they attached rappelling lines and waited. “Don’t move until I give the order,” she said to them, then departed with Tiernan and the rest of her team. They followed her over to the end of the lobby where a large metal door led into an emergency stairwell. Lea reached down and tried the handle while the others hung back and trained their weapons on that rusted, pitted surface.

The screech of the hinges made Lea wince.

A sterile glow crept up the walls of the narrow space, emanating from below—polluted light in the visual spectrum, some kind of fluorescent discharge. Tiernan inserted himself first, staying close to the wall with his rifle pointed downward. Gradually, he edged over to the first step, craning his head to get a better look between the flights of stairs that led into the basement. At the same time, Lea checked the upper flights for motion and heat—anything that might indicate another sentry. Accordion folds of concrete and steel tapered into nothingness, with no signs of life other than their own.

Tiernan nodded at her and pointed down.

Lea responded in kind and slipped back into the lead. Tiernan covered her until she reached the first landing, where she stopped and covered the next member of her team to make the descent. They quickly formed a chain that led all the way down, each person an extension of the others. Lea watched her dosimeter drop to near zero the deeper her team went, while an ambient compression seemed to build from inside her head. Drunk on the sensation, she staggered for a moment, steadying herself against the railing while it passed.

Just like the catacombs…

But no—different from that. More intense. More
invasive
.

And reactive. Their presence here was a provocation.

We don’t have much time.

Tiernan stepped down on the landing with Lea. They waited the few moments it took for the team to secure the rest of the stairwell, then headed straight toward the bottom. There, they came across a double set of doors that had, until recently, sealed the basement off from the outside world. Now one of them stood ajar, the crack between them aglow with the pallid light Lea had seen from above. Footprints crisscrossed the dust in front of the doorway, the mud they had tracked in still fresh.

Lea eased herself over to one side of the opening, while Tiernan carefully crossed over to the other. The rest of the team took up strategic positions, spreading themselves out to maximize their field of fire. As they leveled their rifles at the point of entry, Lea leaned in close and heard the sound of voices on the other side. Tiernan picked up on it as well and plucked a stun grenade from the belt hooked to his waist.

Lea motioned for him to hold off, listening intently to the conversation. There were two voices, both of them male—and obviously strained, their irritation manifesting itself in steadily increasing volume.

“I don’t know about this,” one of them said. “There’s no way we could’ve predicted resonance levels this far beyond the normal spectrum. I think we’re losing control of the process. It’s just a matter of time before—”

“You have to be shitting me,” the other one interrupted. “How can you talk about
normal
? Nobody’s ever tried anything like this before. We don’t even
know
what to expect.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re not getting paid to like it. You’re getting paid to solve the fucking problem.”

“Not near enough for this kind of job. Goddamned place gives me the creeps.”

Tech mercs,
Lea thought.
Inru
partisans didn’t care about things like money. If these guys were just the hired help, then where the hell were the others?

Where the hell is Avalon?

She nodded at Tiernan, who pulled the pin off his grenade. She then raised a hand and counted down on her fingers.

Three. Two. One.

Go.

Tiernan yanked the door open and tossed the grenade in. Lea heard a clatter when it hit the floor, quickly followed by a cry of “What the fu—” Then the entire basement was engulfed in a blast that seemed to bring the whole ceiling down on top of them. Within half a second, though, the force of the explosion collapsed back in on itself—leaving only a haze of white smoke that poured through the opening.

The team went in. Using visors to peer through the camouflaging mist, they charged across the entire space of the basement. Lea heard them shouting orders in frantic, furious tones, overlapping one another in a terrifying cacophony: “GET DOWN! ON THE GROUND! DROP YOUR WEAPONS!” It was a battering ram of words, as effective as any deadly force, meant to shock the enemy into submission without firing a shot.

As the smoke thinned, however, Lea discovered that none of it was necessary. Other than her team, the only bodies in the room were the two mercs she’d heard earlier. They were both on the floor, lying at awkward angles, their skins singed pink from the stun grenade. Lea knelt between them, checking for life signs.

“Clear!” Tiernan announced.

One by one, in quick succession, the others answered with the same. By then, visibility was returning to normal. Tiernan flipped his visor up and walked over to where Lea examined the two mercs.

“We got survivors?” he asked.

“Affirmative,” Lea replied. “They’re a little cooked, but otherwise okay.”

Tiernan nodded, taking in the whole scope of the basement. Computer equipment was everywhere—stacked onto racks that ran the entire length of the walls, crowded onto desks that dotted the floor throughout. Bundles of fiber snaked across the floor, connecting all the nodes via an intricate web of laserlight pulses, while virtual displays poured raw data into the air with the flow and constancy of a waterfall. The entire space thrummed with electrical insistence, the finely tuned harmonics of a live wire: all that power confined to such a small area, converging on itself in wave after wave.

You know it’s more than that.

The thought itched in the recesses of Lea’s mind. She handcuffed her two prisoners and started seeking proof in the displays, walking with Tiernan past the exotic constructs. The numerics built into mathematical crescendos, arranging themselves in designs of amazing complexity—random to human eyes but concealing some mad purpose beneath.

“Hell of a setup they have here,” the lieutenant observed, cutting into Lea’s train of thought. “It’s amazing they even have the resources to mount an operation like this.”

“If the
Inru
want it, they’ll find a way to get it.” The memory of Paris was still vivid in her mind—that underground lair from which Phao Yin sought to launch his crusade, and where Lea Prism’s existence as Heretic had come to an end. Still, she agreed with Tiernan. What the
Inru
had cobbled together here was impressive, especially for a group barely hanging on to survival. She pointed out the glowing cables that ran between their feet. “That’s quantum fiber—used for faster-than-light data transmission. And there,” she said, motioning toward a nearby computer stack. “That’s a domain cluster—and I’ve already counted at least a dozen more in this basement. They’ve got enough hardware here to bend the Axis.”

“So what are they doing?”

“Let’s find out,” Lea said, and sat down at one of the displays. She jacked the interface, bypassing the industrial-grade biometric security the mercs had tailored for their own use, shaking her head at their utter lack of originality.
That’s what you get for using hired guns,
she thought, her eyes narrowing as she studied the various coding patterns. They peeled away to reveal even deeper routines that went back several generations—each revision building on another, like modern architecture on top of ancient ruins. “I’ve seen protocols like this used to emulate erratic behavior in living systems. Deriving probability from chaotic elements—it’s what corporate domains use to keep crawlers stable.”