Prodigal (11 page)

Gunny stepped in next to Lea.

“What the hell
is
this place?” he asked.

The answer lay directly ahead, at the end of a short tunnel. Beyond that lay a larger chamber, hidden behind a sharp turn that concealed the source of the light. It pulsated now, the bursts growing in speed and intensity, adding even more power to the static charge that electrified the air.

An event in the making.

The team proceeded in cover formation. Lea hung back until she was the last person left, then crossed the remaining distance alone. Mesh walls crackled against her body armor as she edged herself farther into the chamber, tiny blue sparks crawling down the length of her pistol.

She stepped into the open.

The light blinded her at first, forcing Lea to block it out with her hand. As it dimmed, she caught glimpses of regular shapes and outlines—perfect symmetry, ordered regularity, a sense of grand purpose conveyed in snapshots between her gloved fingers. Those vague impressions quickly gathered into a reality of objects: large and rectangular, the size of coffins, stacked on top of one another and stretching several meters deep to form a matrix of liquid green cells. Lea tasted moisture, a kind of primordial steam that reminded her of the protease accelerants she had used on runners in her hammerjack days. For her, it was the stuff of nightmares—made even more potent by the horror that greeted her.

There were at least a dozen extraction tanks, all of them occupied, human bodies floating in solution and tethered by glowing strands of fiber. A white frost had gathered on the glass walls of the tanks, obscuring the details of this macabre collection, but as Lea walked closer she could see both men and women contained within. Their shaved heads and slack faces rendered them almost identical—the final act of depersonalization in a dehumanizing process. Lea knew full well about that. She had performed the procedure more times than she could count.

Lea jumped on the nearest control node, while her team scouted out the rest of the chamber. She was already navigating the extraction subroutines when Gunny slipped back in beside her.

“We’re secure here, Major,” he said. “I sure don’t get it, though. The
Inru
obviously dropped some major jack on this facility—but so far we haven’t seen shit for security.”

“That’s what worries me, Gunny,” Lea said, her hands working the console. “Especially with this bunch.”

He gestured toward the tank directly in front of them. A woman was inside—young from what Lea could see, pale skin stretched across a slight frame.

“What’s the story on these people?”

“Tell you in a flash,” Lea replied. Her eyes darted back and forth between the tank and the display, her instincts telling her that there was much more to this picture than she first thought. Playing a hunch, Lea checked the extraction buffers. If the
Inru
were pulling information from the flash-DNA these people carried, the node would be processing terabytes of data. The buffers, however, were empty. In fact, the system architecture had been redesigned to bypass the extraction protocols entirely. Those resources had been freed up for some other purpose—something that required
very
heavy lifting.

What are you up to, Avalon?

Running out of guesses, Lea shifted her focus to the bodies themselves. She checked the woman’s vital signs, which should have indicated the minimal levels consistent with stasis. What she found was just the opposite. Body temperature came back at 37° C, heartbeat a regular seventy-six beats per minute. The woman in the tank wasn’t down in the least.

In fact, she was perfectly normal.

“What the
hell
?” Lea blurted, thinking she had made some kind of mistake. She ran the calculations again, this time on another body—this one male, in a tank on the other side of the chamber.

The readings were identical.

In
every
way.

His heartbeat matched the woman’s precisely—beat for beat, second for second. Body heat, when it fluctuated, rose and fell at exactly the same rates. Lea quickly patched in a comparative electroencephalograph, and followed the patterns of their brain wave activity as they ticked along side by side. The lines showed intense activity, so much that the node had trouble keeping up; but more than that, the lines were in perfect sync.

“This isn’t possible,” Lea said, the edge of alarm in her voice.

The display, however, told her differently. Time and time again, as she added more tanks to the scan, she got the same result. Biochemically, neurologically, these bodies were behaving as a single entity.

“Jesus!”

Gunny stumbled back, his face awash in the watery light, his jaw wide open—his finger pointing at the tank.

Lea whirled in the direction of Gunny’s cry, and found another face staring back at her. Entangled in a web of fiber, the woman floating in the tank could barely move—but still she tried, her body jerking convulsively, as if she had just realized she was drowning. Her eyes flew wide open in terror, her expression contorting in pain. Mouth snapping open and shut, she made a desperate attempt to draw breath into a scream—but the liquid solution would not allow it.

“My God,” Lea whispered.

In the other tanks, all the bodies that had been peacefully at rest—they joined the woman in her silent plea of pain. Hands pounded against glass, their movements bypassing conscious thought. Even as a single mind, there was only one imperative left.

Escape.

Until death filled the chamber with the sound of beating wings.

An alarm pierced the air in the basement with shrill insistence, screaming from the node Lea had jacked earlier. On the virtual display, the containment construct blew itself apart, its elemental routines scattering like so much shrapnel. The codes tried to regroup, as they had dozens of times before, but this time the damage was permanent. The containment field was down. It wasn’t getting back up again.

Seconds later, a subterranean rumble took hold of the entire building. The quake was even more intense than last time, knocking over equipment racks and smashing electronics into jagged fragments of silicon and crystal. Overhead lights flickered in and out, creating a wild strobe effect that chopped all the action into a stop-motion frenzy. Between the dark spots, illuminated in cruel flashes, the cinder-block walls began to separate. The cracks gathered momentum with startling speed, as the floor beneath undulated like liquid.

“Talon Leader!”
Eric Tiernan called out, as the basement tore itself apart around him. Breaking radio silence, he shouted into his transmitter.
“Talon Leader, answer me!”

Tiernan pressed his helmet against the side of his head, shielding the microreceiver in his ear. Crackles of static overwhelmed the mission frequency, reducing the transmission to bits and pieces—disjointed words, in the rapid-fire of panic, fragments of orders and counterorders.

“Lieutenant…Hold station!…status…losing control—”

“I didn’t copy that! Say again!”

“…don’t…I repeat…mission…no
signal
—”

Feedback overwhelmed the channel, followed by a swell of static. Tangled voices emerged, in confusion and conflict, until one overwhelmed the others.

“—the hell is happening—”

The transmission cut out.

The ground heaved without warning—a single, vicious jolt that sent the gunnery sergeant tumbling. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of the chamber, blowing everyone off their feet and hurling them through the air. A horrible metallic screech followed, as the mesh walls buckled under an enormous shear. As Lea peered up through the virtual display, she saw the entire room bending and cracking, like a tin can being crushed from the outside.

Lea pulled her visor down, clearing out everything except for the vital monitors that told her the status of each member of the advance team. Their heartbeats skipped across her field of vision, racing in an electric surge, but everyone was
alive
—at least for now.

Lea flipped the visor back up again, visually searching for other signs of life. She saw three of her people clambering for the tunnel, holding on to each other and whatever else they could find. They stopped to help two others, whom they hoisted up and dragged with them.

That was it. The mission was over.

All that mattered was getting her people out.

“Go!”
Lea ordered, waving her team toward the exit. As they headed out, she boosted the power to her transmitter, no longer caring if anyone picked up her broadcast. “Tiernan! Tiernan, do you read me? Come back.”

The reply was garbled and urgent, Tiernan’s voice barely rising above the static.

“Talon…we have a situation here…”

“Talon Point!” Lea shouted into her helmet microphone. “Abort the mission—I repeat,
abort
! Take the prisoners and get the hell out of there. We’ll meet you topside in three minutes.”

“…acknowledged…three minutes…now.”

Lea closed off the channel and stumbled away from the control console. She moved back to where Gunny had landed and knelt next to him. He lay propped against the rear wall, still conscious, his jaw set in a firm grimace.

“What’s your condition, Gunny?”

“Pissed off,” he grunted. “Think I fucked myself up, Major.”

Gunny cradled his shoulder—but the crack in the side of his helmet worried Lea more. His words came out sloshed, a sure indication of a head injury.

“Can you move?” she asked.

“Ain’t staying here.”

Lea smiled and helped him up.

Gunny limped as she led him away. Lea deliberately avoided looking into the extraction tanks as they hobbled past, but couldn’t help but notice the activity on the virtual display. The misty image faded in and out, hostage to power surges as the chamber warped itself. Between those flickers, Lea caught several glimpses of the readings there. Harmonious just a moment ago, they had since devolved into an interference pattern. Respiration and circulation jumped off the chart, while the EEG spiked so hard it threatened to overload the console. Waves of neural energy tore through one another, spreading outward until they consigned themselves to oblivion.

The display dissolved into random pixels, then shorted out altogether.

“Come on, Gunny,” she began to say, when the shaking ground subsided a little. It made both of them freeze in their steps, while the chamber shuddered and groaned—the sounds of a sinking ship slipping below the waves.

Then Gunny’s voice, an echo of itself.

“Major—”

Lea looked up at him first. His eyes were riveted on the extraction tanks, his face drained of all color. Lea followed his stare toward the tank with the young woman inside. Thrashing in her glass coffin, she tore against the fiber links that entangled her. The strands she ripped free floated about her extremities, their insistent pulse fading to a dull glow as data spilled out of her tissues. Her face, a mask of agony, twisted into unspeakable expressions, her jaw agape in a soundless scream. In a final, violent spasm, she threw her head back so hard that it seemed to snap her neck, bringing an instant close to her life and her struggles.

She began breaking down.

The effect was subtle at first—just the body going limp, as a few nervous impulses fired off at random. But then the woman curled inward, her spine bending into the shape of a scythe, while her hands twitched without direction. Blood started to seep into the accelerating solution, expanding across the tank in a crimson cloud. The skin across her back had split wide open, exposing the vertebrae beneath.

“Jesus,” Lea whispered, unable to look away.

The woman’s torso decomposed rapidly. What remained of her skeleton turned into jelly, the body collapsing under its own weight. Skin and muscle peeled away in sheets, dissolving into a bizarre biological tapestry—one that spread across all the other tanks, as those bodies were also reduced to nothingness.

With the base elements of life suspended there, Lea couldn’t help but remember the first time she had seen a bionucleic matrix—and in that moment, she understood the logic of that comparison. The
Inru
had never given up their core ambition. They had simply changed their approach.