Prodigal (38 page)

“He has his reasons,” Lea told them, “and I have mine—which is why we’re going to take this thing as far as we can, for as long as we can.” She took a breath, mustering as much confidence as she could for the benefit of her team. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

Pallas and Novak exchanged a knowing glance.

“Follow me,” the GME said, and led everyone toward her office. She made a turn into an adjoining conference room, where all of them gathered around a large table. Pallas took the chair at one end, plugging himself into a simple interface. He then engaged a virtual display, which rose above the tabletop as the overhead lights dimmed.

“Lea mentioned there was something familiar about the new flash we discovered in Chernobyl,” Novak began. The display expanded into a seemingly endless chain of base pairs, a graphic representation of a single DNA molecule. “The genetic sequence in particular. With that in mind, I did a comprehensive breakdown of its structure and compared it to all known artificial variants—bioweapons, designer narcotics, gene therapeuticals, even cosmetic products. Nothing came even close to a match.”

“What about Ascension-grade flash?” Tiernan asked.

“I thought of that,” Novak replied, directing Pallas to change the view on the display. He zoomed out several orders of magnitude so that the entire sequence stretched out before them, rotating in space. Pallas then placed an Ascension strand next to the molecule, overlaying a comparative analysis that mapped all the similarities between the two. “As you can see from these points, there are several thousand common pairs—enough to suggest an evolutionary linkage, but not much more. If I had to guess, they’re at least a hundred generations apart.”

“Not surprising if the
Inru
went back to their original strain,” Lea suggested. “They were working on it a long time before I started to refine it for them.”

“A reasonable assumption,” the GME agreed, “but that’s not the interesting part.”

Tiernan frowned. “You found something else?”

“The big prize, as it were.” She gave Pallas a nod to dissolve the display. The image of Ascension-grade flash disappeared, replaced by an entirely new model—one so identical to the Chernobyl strain that the computer noted only minor differences, which popped up as a few dozen flares in a galaxy of base pairs. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we’ve found our match—a nearly perfect analog for our friend here.”

Lea stood up and leaned closer to the floating image. Tiernan did the same from the opposite side.

“This isn’t a synthetic construct?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Novak replied. “It’s a naturally occurring virus—though not terrestrial in nature. In fact, I never would have found it if you hadn’t asked me to run those blood panels on Avalon.”

Lea swallowed hard.

“This is the
Mons
virus?”

“The one and only,” Novak announced. “It seems the
Inru
patterned their original invention after this little bug.”

Lea lowered herself back into her chair.

“That’s impossible.”

“I confirmed the findings twice,” the GME said. “There is no mistake.”

“How could that be?”

“Reverse engineering,” Novak guessed. “It’s quite simple, really. Starting off with a substrate that already possesses certain characteristics is far easier than fabricating the whole works from scratch. Standard flash is manufactured the same way, off common lines. Only later in the process are the strands manipulated to suit a specific purpose.”

“Wait a minute,” Tiernan interjected. “Are you saying the Mons virus is what
started
this whole thing?”

“At the very least, it provided a template,” Novak said, turning to Lea. “It certainly explains your familiarity with its patterns. By the time you joined the
Inru,
they probably hadn’t developed the Ascension strain much beyond what we see here. After their setback in Paris, they apparently went back to the drawing board.”

Tiernan shook his head.

“How in the hell did they make that kind of leap?”

The GME sat down. “Probably by accident,” she mused. “You’d be surprised at how many scientific discoveries are pure, random luck. What I find difficult to fathom is how a virus in nature—even an extraterrestrial one—would evolve in such a way. To pass those sorts of abilities to its host, one can’t help but wonder if there was an intelligent design involved.”

“An
alien
intelligence.” Tiernan sounded incredulous.

“Merely a hypothesis, Lieutenant.”

The idea frightened Lea more than she let on. She hadn’t asked the
Inru
any questions when they showed her their original flash strain, nor had they ever told her where it came from. She just assumed they cooked it up in some lab, under the supervision of some brilliant but half-crazed genetic architect. It had never even occurred to her that Phao Yin had procured it elsewhere—or that it had already been the cause of thousands of deaths.

“In any case,” Novak finished, “it’s quite clear who the viral source was.”

Lea tapped nervously on the table.

“Avalon,” she said.

Tiernan looked away in disgust.

“I wonder if she even knows,” Lea thought out loud.

Tiernan seethed.

“Who cares? The woman is dead meat if she gets in my sights again. Besides—what difference does it make?”

“All the difference in the world. The Mons virus destroyed Avalon’s life. It’s the reason she joined the
Inru
in the first place. She wouldn’t allow them to turn her affliction into a weapon,” Lea said, resolute in her denial. “It goes against everything she’s about.”

“She was a
free agent,
for Christ’s sake,” Tiernan argued. “She’ll use whatever weapons she has at her disposal. You of all people should know that, Major.”

“You’re damned right I do,” Lea said, addressing them all. “Better than anyone. Finding Avalon has been my
only
mission—and I put that ahead of everything, including everyone at this table. I’d still trade my life to get another shot at her, so you can rest assured when I tell you,” she said, driving the point home to each and every one of them, “I
know
this woman. She’s no fanatic—and there’s no way she would allow the
Inru
to exploit the one thing she hates the most.”

Novak leaned forward, her fingers forming a triangle under her chin. “You’re that certain?”

“Yes,” Lea said with finality, “because that’s how I would see it.”

It sickened her to make that confession—but it also grabbed everyone’s attention, their shock descending like poison gas.

Tiernan spoke again, cooler this time. “So how does this help us?”

Lea gave it some thought. “We might be able to use it to our advantage. If I’m right, we could crack the entire
Inru
network wide open.”

“How?”

“By getting Avalon to roll on them.”

The others shook heads, whispering in disbelief. Lea couldn’t blame them. A part of her thought it was crazy—but it was all she had, and with time running out a long shot seemed like the perfect play.

“You’re proposing that we
recruit
Avalon?” Novak asked. “That’s rather bold, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Lea admitted, “but we have the leverage to do it. Once she finds out what the
Inru
did to her, she’ll want payback. Trust me on this—the girl knows how to hold a grudge.”

Tiernan didn’t like it—that much was obvious.

“That’s assuming she even gets the message,” he pointed out. “What are you going to do? Post it on the Axis and hope like hell she calls back?”

“No,” Lea said. “Avalon would never go for it. She’d think we were trying to smoke her out. We need to convince her that this thing is for real.”

Everyone waited expectantly for the rest of Lea’s answer. Giving it to them was much harder than she thought—for their sakes, if not her own.

“I have to tell her myself,” she finally said. “Alone.”

Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. Lea’s team just stared—at the walls, at the display, at the table, anywhere to avoid her eyes.

“Am I the only one who remembers what happened the last time you and Avalon got together?” Tiernan asked pointedly. “Most of us didn’t make it out of there.”

“That was different,” Lea explained, hoping to sound rational. “We attacked Avalon in force, so she responded
with
force. This time, I’ll be going in by myself. No troops, no tricks—just an offer to talk.”

“What if she doesn’t listen?”

“She will. Tactically, there’s no downside for her.”

“That could change in a heartbeat, Lea.”

“Then it’s a good thing I know how to fight, Lieutenant.”

Tiernan gave up, tossing his hands in the air.

Novak, meanwhile, pursued a more logical course—noting the one obvious flaw in her plan. “Even if this could work,” she said, “you still have a sticky problem.”

Lea nodded. “Finding her.”

“In so many words.”

Lea conspicuously turned her attention to Pallas. He peered back from behind his electrodes, trying to hide in plain sight. After a long pause, he finally acknowledged her stare.

“I might be able to help you with that,” he admitted. “If you don’t mind taking a ride on the dark side.”

“What have you got, Alex?”

“Some mondo spikes on the Goth subnets over the last twenty-four,” the hammerjack said, rearranging the display to illustrate his findings. Amorphous constructs appeared out of vapor, connected by a complex latticework that spread out to fill the three-dimensional image—glowing links pumping information between the shifting shapes, representations of the domain clusters that comprised the subnets Pallas referenced. “It looked like random traffic at first—pirate sites popping up to replace the ones that went dark after Chernobyl. When I got a closer look, though, I found a couple of freaky patterns.”

Pallas highlighted over a dozen of the clusters, bringing them to the forefront. The information exchange caused the pipelines to swell and burst, then re-form into smaller streams that repeated the whole process over again.

“Most of these are Goth,” he explained, “but a couple of them belong to the Crowleys, operating out of the Asian Sphere. Normally, you don’t see that kind of volume moving between their networks—but
something
gave these guys a serious hard-on. Naturally, I got curious.”

He changed the image again, imploding the Axis cross section and rearranging it into a raging bitstream—a chaotic torrent of seemingly random data.

“I plucked this feed out of one of the tunnels,” Pallas said, manipulating it until the numbers took on coherence. “On the surface it looks like the usual didactic, that stuff the Crowleys pump out when they’re trying to rally the faithful.”

“Demon gospel,” Lea concurred. “Triple-six slang.”

“Tossed in with some Latin and Gothspeak. Crowleys use it to encode their contraband transmissions, masking them within the general broadcast. Take off the camouflage,” Pallas said, peeling away the outer layers, “and what you get is a concentrated burst, repeated at regular intervals. Goddamned hellseekers thought this one was too important to miss.”

As a picture formed on the display, Lea saw why. Line after line gradually revealed a grisly scene, filtered through a dreamlike lens: splattered blood, a stack of corpses, flash mangled even beyond the nightmare scale of a tec-induced death fantasy. In the background, the blurred form of a man in a wheelchair appeared, another figure looming over him in murky shadow. It fluttered at the edge of the frame, visible only in sporadic glimpses at first—but Lea knew who it was, even before that shape turned and revealed its face, black lenses piercing the ether.

Even in illusion, Avalon sparked fear.

“Where is this?” Lea asked, her voice a slow hush.

“Osaka,” Pallas replied. “Uploaded from a Deathplay session. One of the donors must have caught the action while he was hooked into a synapse relay.” He augmented an area toward the back, sharpening the focus. “The guy in the chair is Yoshii Tagura. Nobody’s seen him in a long time—but street talk had him into some real occult shit. Guess that explains what he was doing at the Kirin when Avalon showed up.”

“He was into a lot more than that,” Lea observed, while Avalon murdered him in a still-life sequence. “Tagura was angling for a seat on the Assembly. When that didn’t happen, I guess he went to the
Inru
for a little covert help.”

“CSS figured as much,” the hammerjack added. “Just for fun I jacked their files to see what they had on the guy. Turns out they had him under surveillance for the last few months—suspected terrorist financing. Couldn’t make anything stick, though.”

“It appears Avalon did that for them,” Novak remarked.

“Yeah,” Pallas said. “The way she worked him over, you almost feel sorry for the guy.”

“Almost,”
Lea emphasized, studying the mayhem in chilling detail. Though she doubted there were any innocents in that room, Avalon’s taste for slaughter made her shudder. The woman was a machine—perhaps beyond reason. Tiernan reminded her of that with a knowing gaze from across the table. “Did the Zone Authority pick up Avalon’s trail after she left Osaka?”