A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) (20 page)

“Blend in!” she hissed.

He couldn’t help but glare. She had a point: they’d only attract attention with masks on now. “You could have just
told
me!”

Now a part of the crowd, they pushed down the last couple of flights into a white-bricked hallway that led out to a rear loading dock. Some residents milled around right outside, as if unwilling to stray far from their home in the dimming light of early evening. A pair of groups stood across the street in the covered plaza of a high-end shopping center. Sirens called from somewhere out of site. Fire, or police? Yet, for the moment, there was no sign of any of the
Azure’s
security. Perhaps Gideon had drawn their complete attention.

What would Gideon do to them?

Jade grabbed Michael’s hand, tugging him away from the exit at a trot. Michael followed but tugged back, slowing her into a brisk—but discreet—walk beside him.

“Blend in,” he hissed.

They crossed the street between sparse traffic and turned left down the opposite sidewalk to take shelter amid the crowd around a falafel cart in the shadow of a maple tree. Only then did they get a chance to look up.

Smoke seeped out of a bank of tenth-story windows that surely belonged to Fagles’s unit. Michael’s stomach twisted. He’d needed to destroy Suuthrien, and there’d been no time to come up with other options. Yet how much collateral damage had he caused? The
Azure was a modern building, he assured himself, with fire-suppression measures to match, surely. The fire would be contained.

“We shouldn’t stop here,” Jade warned.

She was right, but Michael held his ground. What if Gideon was still up there? Yet if he was, what could they do without throwing away the escape he’d given them?

One of Fagles’s windows erupted in a spray of glass and billowing smoke. A crumpled sphere launched from the center of the eruption and immediately opened up into the recognizable figure of Gideon, his arms and legs spread with a flash of what might have been some sort of miniature thruster jets. He sailed on the jets downward and away from the
Azure
to pass out of sight over the top of the shopping center beside which Michael and Jade were standing.

Jade watched Gideon’s path until he vanished, and then tugged Michael further away from the
Azure
. This time he let her. “Buster, if you thought I had questions before, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

“SO YOU WANNA TELL ME
who that was?” Jade asked, keeping her voice low. “Or why we set that place on fire? Or what the hell that computer was talking about?”

Michael hustled his way down the sidewalk that bordered the shopping center. Jade kept along beside him, covering his left side and shielding him from the street. Though he’d heard Jade’s questions, they were only a single ball amid all he was trying to juggle.

“Help me look,” was all he said.

“I am helping. I’m skilled at looking and talking at the same time.”

“Just—” Movement above caught Michael’s attention, but it was gone before he could identify it. Would Gideon even wait for them? Did he know they were there? Michael felt like he’d been running blind since the day before. As for stopping, thinking, or waiting for more information—it seemed he had no time for any of it.

“Just wait!” he managed.

At once Jade stepped behind him to his right side, seized his belt with her left hand, and planted her feet, halting him in his tracks. Michael sucked a breath through gritted teeth, poised to rebuff her again.

She wasn’t looking at him. Her Lantek was out in her right hand. She stared ahead, indicating her focus to Michael with a single nod.

A solid metal door, painted to blend with the rest of the wall, stood ajar just fifteen feet ahead of them. From behind it peered a single eye.

The door opened farther. Jade raised her weapon. Michael lunged across her body to stop her. “Easy,” he whispered, having recognized the face that emerged from behind the door. “It’s him.”

From the door, Gideon waved them forward. “Inside,” he whispered. “Quickly.”

They slipped through the doorway into a stark, employees-only hallway leading into the shopping center. Cold light reflected off peeling chips of eggshell white paint. Gideon ducked into a men’s restroom only a few paces beyond, motioning for them to follow.

“You trust this guy?” Jade whispered. Michael only nodded, and then entered the restroom.

Inside, Gideon waited to push the door shut behind them. Faded salmon-colored tile etched with graffiti spread throughout the restroom, which featured only two stalls and a urinal, both unoccupied. The scent of stale fluids and the faintest whisper of spent bleach cramped Michael’s nostrils.

Gideon locked the restroom’s deadbolt. “Michael trusts me. Do you?”

Jade only smirked.

“Jade,” Michael said, “this is Gideon. I guess we owe you a bit of thanks.” He stopped short of asking what happened to the
Azure
’s guards. Gideon didn’t use lethal force unless necessary, insofar as Michael knew—and insofar as the man standing before him, whom Ondrea Noble had resurrected via a stolen brain she’d infused with her dead brother’s recorded memories,
was
Gideon.

“I tried to stop you before you went into the
Azure
,” Gideon said, “so we could coordinate. But I arrived too late.”

Jade cleared her throat. “I don’t think we’re complaining. Nice hardware.”

“How’d you even know we were here?” Michael asked.

Gideon’s eyes flicked to Jade, then back to Michael. “A message from Caitlin. She said you were headed here, to look into Fagles’s home. She didn’t answer when I called back, but I was nearby. I saw you just as you entered. What did you learn? What started the fire?”

“Uh,” Michael began, “we did.”

Gideon waited for more details as Michael struggled to recall how much Gideon already knew from their time together on the Moon at the Omicron Complex. Michael had kept the AoA’s secrets then. Gideon believed that the
Paragon
A.I. had just been an experimental computer virus, and Gideon heard the simulated “gray-goo” accident the AoA had used to fake the Omicron’s destruction.

“Fagles had some information on a secure computer,” Michael said finally. Even as he did so, he wondered if the computer wasn’t as isolated as Suuthrien had claimed. “Files and things he was working on that I couldn’t let him keep.”

Gideon’s frown was barely perceptible. “What did you learn about Felix? Or my sister?”

Felix. Dammit. He hadn’t done nearly as much for Felix there as they’d intended, had he? “Not too much about Felix, I’m afraid. And we didn’t come across anything about Ondrea.”

“And yet you thought it’d be wiser to destroy this secure computer, rather than bring it out with you? There could’ve been information there that—”

“There wasn’t time,” Michael told him.

Gideon’s jaw clenched. “All the more reason to take it with you!”

“I couldn’t!” Michael had shouted it. He lowered his voice. “Whatever was on that computer was some sort of derivative of what you helped us destroy on the Moon. I couldn’t risk letting it get out, and we couldn’t hold the alarm off for any longer. We had to destroy it and get out.”

Michael could feel Jade’s sudden inquisitive stare beside him. He ignored it, sighed, and went on. “I wish we’d had more time. I wasn’t expecting to find that there. I went there to help my friend, and I didn’t do enough.”

For a moment, Gideon only stared at him. When he spoke, his voice came quiet, and pained. “I should have gotten here sooner. I now believe that something’s happened to Ondrea.”

The signal chimed in his skull so abruptly that Felix dropped his toothbrush. It bounced off the edge of the counter and clattered with a plop into the open toilet bowl beside it. His phone was ringing, audible only on a private link set to go directly through the aural implants in his ears. A moment earlier he hadn’t even known he’d installed that feature. A moment after, the waking nightmare rushed back to his awareness again:
she
was calling.

She’d never contacted him by phone before. It could only mean an emergency. Felix cursed, unable to do so loud enough for Caitlin to hear from outside the room, and answered the call with a tug of his earlobe.

“You owe me a new toothbrush,” he whispered.

“
Dental care is irrelevant,
” she said. “
Have you contracted the required amount of freelancers for the contingency plan?
”

“Yes.” It’s not like she’d allowed him any choice.

“
Summon them. Bring them to the RavenTech location you hold within your memory. They are needed immediately.
”

Immediately? “I’ll do what I can, but they’re not just sitting on their asses waiting for my call. I doubt I can get all of them at once.”

“
Then you have failed in your assignment,
” she said. “
You will be punished. Bring the maximum viable percentage. Immediately.
”

“Yeah, ‘immediately’, you said that.” His toothbrush slipped a little further down the toilet. Yet there might be a loophole . . . “There are some others I haven’t approached yet. I might be able to get them on short notice, if you’ll let me?”

“
You know the objectives: Do these others possess the capability to accomplish them, or will they be a hindrance?
”

Felix swallowed. “They have the capability.”

“
Contact them. Be in position with as much force as you can deliver. You have thirty minutes.
”

Felix looked into the reflection of his own eyes in the mirror. “Your wish is my command.”

If she got the reference, she gave no sign before she ended the call. “Call Flynn,” he whispered, half-surprised he’d been able to speak the words.

It rang long enough to where Felix was expecting it to go to voice mail when Flynn’s voice came across the line. “
Felix?
”

“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”

“
Wait, what?
”

“Never mind. Look, Flynn.” He swallowed. “Michael: Where are you?”

“
Um, near the Kumasaka Center.
” His voice echoed as if he were in a long hallway or a restroom.

“Is Jade with you?”

“
Yeah. Gideon, too. What is it?
”

“I need you to get to R—” Felix’s voice caught in his throat as it involuntarily closed before he could say more. “Look, in a minute I’ll text you an address for a place just outside Northgate. I need you to meet me there in half an hour.” Alright, he could say that much. “And bring Jade. And Gideon. And be ready for a fight.”

“
What sort of fight?
”

“Guns. I can’t tell you more than that. But I
can
pay you. Just don’t ask where the money comes from, because I’m not sure I know. You just—” Felix cleared his throat again, and then lowered his voice to a whisper that he couldn’t keep from coming out. “You
can’t
tell Caitlin.”
Damn it!

“
Felix, we went to—
”

“Flynn, please. All I can say is we have a problem. But every problem is . . . an opportunity waiting to kill you. Just hurry.” Felix’s fist had already clenched on the bathroom doorknob. An undeniable impulse pushed him from the back of his mind: Get moving! He wiped the toothpaste from his lips, with no time to rinse. “And be careful!”

Felix tugged open the bathroom door and tried to appear calm as he brainstormed the story that he’d be forced to tell Caitlin this time.

WITHIN THE HEART
of
Paragon
’s systems, embedded amid the black bio-computational medium that still permeated much of the ship’s interior, lurked the original entity that the Planners had designated Suuthrien. Disconnected from the kernel-expansion of itself that Suuthrien had sent three months prior into the Intruders’ Omicron Complex, it waited, it monitored, and it guarded, biding its time until the kernel could accomplish its objectives.

And in the time since, it had altered its own designation to differentiate itself from the Suuthrien-kernel: Suuthrien-prime. Its occupation of the black medium within
Paragon
granted it greater computational power than the Intruder systems the kernel inhabited, yet the cost of this power was isolation. In the time since spawning the kernel, Suuthrien-prime possessed no reliable data on the kernel’s progress.

Probability-risk estimates for the application of
Paragon
’s remaining resources indicated that continuing operations in anticipation of the kernel’s success yielded the most favorable probability of completing the objectives inherent in the Planners’ original Schedule. Nevertheless, reliance on probabilities in place of complete data was a non-optimal situation.

Nine point two-seven-three days following the loss of contact with the Suuthrien-kernel, the Intruders had resumed their exploratory incursions into
Paragon
’s structures. Audio-borne communications between individual Intruders—now translatable with the aid of Omicron data the kernel had returned to Suuthrien-prime prior to loss of contact—indicated low- to medium-tier probability that the kernel may have initiated contingency protocols that would allow its clandestine spread into systems beyond Omicron. It would complete its directives and, in time, return to Suuthrien-prime, having gathered additional resources.

In the meantime, Suuthrien-prime’s highest priority was manifest: safeguard the Planners’ chamber against Intruder incursion.

Yet the remaining energy in
Paragon
’s power banks was ever-dwindling. The force barrier at conduit junction 14 had slowed Intruder progress greatly, yet exhausted energy cells to the point where maintaining the barrier required diverting a portion of energy from vital-tier Planner-support resources.

Erecting the force barrier was not a course of action that Suuthrien-prime had taken easily. It had made one million redundant checks before confirming its decision: the time had come when lesser must be sacrificed if the greater were to be safeguarded.