Prodigal (52 page)

Lea scurried to the end of the outcropping, praying that she would find the stealth craft as she had left it. Part of her felt awash in relief when she saw those sleek, black contours intact, bobbing up and down on the surface of the tide.

Avalon slipped in next to her.

“Slick,” she observed. “Yours?”

“A friend’s,” Lea replied, training her sights on the advancing agents. She heard their voices in the distance, playing off each other as they coordinated their final assault. She and Avalon needed to get out of here
now
—before the agents could get close enough to blow them out of the sky. “We’d better take the shortcut.”

Lea jumped.

She landed squarely on the dorsal fuselage, bouncing off its surface. Tumbling end over end, she jammed her fingers into the wing seam to stop herself—legs dangling over the side of the aircraft, the roiling sea below. Lea planted her other hand on the wing, struggling against gravity. With a pained groan, she managed to haul herself up and crawl toward the cockpit. Opening the canopy, she looked up at Avalon between heaving breaths.

Avalon, meanwhile, jumped down effortlessly.

She absorbed the force of her fall, landing in a crouch and staying upright. She then spidered over to join Lea, who dropped into the pilot’s seat and strapped herself in. Avalon squeezed into the tiny space behind her while Lea fired up the impellers, the whine of power filling the cabin as the flight systems came online.

“I hate this place,” Lea said, and slammed the canopy shut.

She then rammed the hydrothrusters into full reverse, scraping the leading edge of the port side wing along the cave wall. Max would probably kill her for that.

“This is gonna get rough,” she told Avalon, and revved up the ramjets.

Daylight broke over the stealth craft as it exited the inlet, kicking up froths of briny spray. Incoming waves tossed the ship around, but Lea kept the throttles pinned. She could already see the Zone agents taking up offensive positions at the top of the rock wall, firing off pulse beams that vaporized the water around the ship into hot boiling pockets. If even
one
of them hit…

“Hang on,” Lea said.

The main engines opened wide up. Lea turned hard to starboard, releasing a torrent of hot gases in her wake. She unfurled the wings to give herself maximum lift, gradually feeling the ocean drop beneath her as the ship took flight. Then she retracted the hydrofoils and lit the afterburner, pushing them straight up into the sky.

G forces pinned Lea back in her seat. She watched the altimeter tick past five thousand meters, then ten, then fifteen—the wrenching turbulence of thick atmosphere fading into a smooth glide as twilight descended through the glass. Lea eased the yoke forward at twenty thousand meters, leveling off on a course that would take them back to Chile. She engaged the autopilot, peering into the rear compartment, where Avalon unfolded herself.

“You okay?” Lea asked.

“Been worse,” she replied, though it was hard to imagine how. Like Lea, Avalon should have been dead—and both of them looked the part. “Where did you learn to fly?”

“I’m still working on that.”

“I thought as much.” Avalon strained forward to get a read of the instrument panel. “Where are we headed?”

“Santiago. I know somebody who can help us disappear for a while.”

“Then what?”

“Not really sure,” Lea answered. “I’m making this up as I go.”

“Sounds like a reliable plan.”

“Best I can do for now,” Lea finished, and both women lapsed into a tired silence. She gazed into the empty horizon, not knowing what else to say—until the navigation panel beeped, and the ship banked into a long turn. Lea reached over and ran the status indicator, which displayed a major change in course. Instead of heading northeast, the stealth craft was starting to go south—and losing altitude on a shallow path.

“What the hell?”

Lea switched off the autopilot and took the yoke in both hands. She tried the rudder, but the pedals were locked. Even the wheel gave stiff resistance, barely responding to her commands. No matter what she did, the ship continued on with a mind of its own.

“What is it?” Avalon asked.

“Foils not responding,” Lea said, running a console diagnostic. All the avionics showed up normal—including the inflight computer, which had bypassed manual and was flying the craft under some kind of remote guidance. Lea attempted to jack the source, but the computer kicked her right back out.

“Max, are you there?” she signaled over hyperband. “Max, can you hear me?”

“Hello, Lea,” Max replied over the cockpit speaker.

“We got a problem here.”

“There’s no problem,” Max said—and in that moment, Lea knew. He sounded the same way Tiernan did when he revealed himself, the reluctant warrior in circumstances beyond his control. “You’re just going for a little ride.”

Lea’s hand flopped down at her sides.

“Oh no, Max,” she whispered. “Not you.”

“Sorry, Lea,” he said, a disembodied voice at the other end of a crackling transmission. “I really wanted to go through with our deal—but the Collective didn’t give me any choice. It was either you or me, sweetheart.”

Lea bashed the console, even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good.

“You’re a bastard, Max.”

“I’m a hammerjack,” he said, as if the two were the same. “And you know the game—don’t even
think
about rigging a bypass. The system is jackproof. I designed it myself.”

Lea took him at his word. Even if she could exploit a vulnerability, it would take her hours to find it—and at their rate of descent, they would land in the next few minutes. Lea stared down into the flat waters, searching for their ultimate destination. Avalon was the one who found it, pointing at a tiny speck steaming across the Pacific.

“There,” Avalon said.

An aircraft carrier loomed in her view, growing to gargantuan proportions as the craft circled, then lined itself up for a trap. Armed squads of CSS already lined the decks, awaiting their arrival.

Damn you, Bostic,
Lea thought.
And damn me too.

The engineering console seemed to mock Nathan Straka, thwarting his every move. The bridge was in pieces all around him, populated only by the dead, the hiss of his dwindling air hammering on him to work faster. He ran yet another permutation through the local subsystem, checking his oxygen every few seconds, simultaneously watching the endless columns of numbers on the display and the needle on his analog O
₂
indicator dipping into the yellow. He said a silent prayer that this time it would work, that somehow he might break the encryption algorithm that locked him out of
Almacantar
’s navigation.

But the console crashed, as it had at least a dozen times before, resetting itself and wiping out the code he injected into the system.

“Goddammit!”
Nathan shouted, beating his hands against the panel. When the screen came back up, it flashed the same ominous message that confronted him the first time he had tried to gain entry:

ALL SPACEFLIGHT ROUTINES ROUTED THROUGH
COMPUTER CORE
LOCALIZED ACCESS ONLY

The core was in total control of the ship.

And
they
were in control of the core.

Nathan tore himself away from the console, planting himself down at ops. On the view screen in front of him, a field of constellations formed a familiar pattern—telling him that
Almacantar
was getting close to the Directorate shipping lanes. Nathan confirmed the ship’s position, and calculated the amount of time remaining before she reached the coordinates for a spatial jump.

Forty-two minutes.

God only knew what would happen after that.

Assuming you make it that long. You’ve probably got half that left in your bottle.

Nathan needed to get back down to sickbay.

Standing up, he took one last look around the bridge. The crew lay in the contorted positions where they had fallen, their eyes glazed over from petechial hemorrhaging, their limbs bent at unnatural angles. Nathan walked over to the center seat, where the captain was propped against her chair—just as Nathan had left her, still in command of her vessel. He crouched next to her, touching the side of her cheek but unable to feel her through the fabric of his glove.

“They won’t get us without a fight, Lauren,” he said. “I promise you that.”

Lauren Farina stared off into deep space, where she always wanted to be.

“
Vaya con dios,
Skipper.”

Nathan walked over to the exit hatch, opening it into a sepulchral void. More bodies—stacked on top of each other, pressed against the bulkheads—lay strewn throughout the corridor. Nathan took his first step among them, cursing the breath that fogged his faceplate.

He would join them soon enough.

But first he had to sort some things out.

Nathan staggered amidships into
Almacantar
’s dead heart. The way ahead of him stretched into forever, the ship’s narrow corridors compressing and elongating with each step, until it seemed like he was going nowhere. He stopped to steady himself, leaning against the wall and reorienting his senses, blinking several times to clear his blurred vision.

It’s the betaflex,
he told himself.
That stuff is bound to mess you up.

How badly, Nathan didn’t have time to worry about. He allowed the wave of dizziness to pass, then continued on—navigating around the countless number of corpses in his path. Their pasty complexions almost glowed in the dim emergency lights, a swirling yellow cascade that brushed by their faces and revealed them in fleeting glimpses. As he neared the ladder that led down to C-Deck, Nathan came across the crowd he had encountered on the way up—a cloud of steam still pouring from the service pipe he had ruptured during his clash with them.

He reached for a nearby shutoff valve, closing the vent. The boiling mist quickly dissolved into vacuum, revealing an even greater horror. Seared bodies were piled everywhere, their skin burned so raw that Nathan couldn’t recognize any of them. With no way around them, he had to wade through their remains—shunting the carcasses aside, knowing that he had killed every one of them. They rolled away with almost no effort, several falling apart in the process, limbs attached only by strands of mesentery tissue. By the end, Nathan kicked and screamed his way through.

Losing his balance again, he fell into the heap.

He crawled the last few meters on hands and knees, emerging on the other side in a panic. Grabbing on to the ladder, he managed to haul himself up. Racking sobs coursed in and out of his lungs, consuming precious oxygen—a fact that barely registered in the dismal recesses of his brain. But then he heard Farina’s voice in his mind, coaxing him out of his fugue.

They’re still your crew,
she reminded him.
They’re counting on you, Nathan—counting on you to survive.

“I know, Lauren,” he said, cool reassurance washing over him, displacing his fragged emotions. “I won’t forget.”

“It might be better if you did,” another voice cut in—this one from outside his head, piped along the minicom in Nathan’s helmet. “Your odds aren’t good, Commander Straka. Perhaps it’s time to consider a strategic surrender.”

Nathan rose slowly, riveted to the spot. His first thought was that a small pocket of air had kept some of the crew alive—but this was no distress call, no urgent plea for help. The voice was too measured and complacent, devoid of all inflection.

“Identify yourself,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as scared as he felt.

“You wound me, Commander,” the voice replied, this time sounding more familiar. “Then again, you’ve been through a lot. Sorry about your crew—but you didn’t leave me and my comrades much of a choice.”

Nathan circled around the ladder, staring straight down into the hole that led to C-Deck. Siren light fluttered through the bowels of the ship, conveying the utter menace of what he heard over the tinny speaker.

“Kellean,” he said.