Prodigal (24 page)

“Their security could be tighter than we thought,” Novak pointed out. “In light of recent events, the idea isn’t so far-fetched.”

The GME was being kind, but everyone knew what she was talking about. The ghosts of Chernobyl hovered a scant few meters away, giving form to what nobody wanted to say.

“Alex is right,” Lea finally said. “You don’t make moves like that without causing waves. Besides, even if the
Inru
had these people running deep immersion, they were in a completely contained system. We didn’t find any live connections to the Axis—or that they even had the capacity for one.”

“Goddamned
right,
” Pallas snorted. “Bastards must be worse off than we thought. You figure with all that firepower, they’d be using it to launch virtual attacks—not wasting their resources on some crazy experiment.”

“That isn’t the whole story,” the GME interjected, and added another dimension to the graphic. A series of animated frames depicted the advanced progression of chemical changes in the frontal lobes—a steady march into the prefrontal regions, with a thick growth of new blood vessels and what appeared to be aggressive tumors.

Lea could barely contain her revulsion. Dark patches overwhelmed the entire forward half of the cerebral cortex, spreading into every unoccupied fold. She remembered the last time she had seen something like it—only back then, Cray Alden had been the one on the table. That cancer had eaten him from the inside out, consuming his body and spirit until nothing remained but raw intellect.

“Is that what I think it is?” she asked quietly.

“Yes and no,” Novak told them. “I cultured for Ascension-grade flash, along with the other known variants, but failed to get a precise match. I did, however, find an analogous genetic signature with similar replication parameters.” She looked up at Lea. “Whatever this material is, it’s within a few base pairs of the original DNA structure.”

“So they
have
reconstituted their program.”

“That’s the real mystery,” the GME said, taking her hands off the node and sinking back into her chair. “While the two strains are almost identical, their actual behavior is very different. Ascension-grade flash works much like a reverse virus, with loose bits of genetic code invading host cells and converting them according to its own design.
This
concoction,” she said, jerking her thumb into the dark matter illusion, “is more like a classic virus. It merely uses host cells to replicate itself—and quite efficiently, if these times are correct.”

Pallas frowned. “Sounds like there’s a catch.”

“Compliments, my boy,” Novak said. She turned back to the display and dissolved out of the construct, switching over to a single cluster of neurons at extreme magnification. “What you see here is a healthy control group that had no previous contact with this new flash. Watch what happens when I introduce our friend to some uninfected cells.”

Lea peered into the image, attuned to any signs of movement. After a few seconds, a slight quiver at the edge of the frame drew her attention. There, a single strand of the unknown agent started bearing down on the neurons. It approached slowly at first—then in a blur it was gone, penetrating the outer membrane of its target cell like a bullet.

“Nasty,” Pallas breathed.

“That isn’t the half of it,” Novak said. “During its little mating dance, the flash seems to alter its
own
genetic code to mimic temporarily that of the target cell. It allows for easier infiltration with a minimum amount of damage to the host.”

Lea frowned curiously. “That’s unusual behavior for this kind of bug.”

“It gets even better. Watch.”

The GME motioned toward the display, where the neuron appeared to suffer no ill effects. Novak then applied a resonance filter to cross-section the cell in three dimensions, which revealed in terrifying scope what the previous visual did not. Hundreds of viral bodies already teemed within, shuttling back and forth between axon and dendron, reaching a critical mass that threatened to burst the entire body of the cell. Before that could happen, though, the strands began to exit the same way their progenitor had moved in. Effortlessly, they slipped through the outer membrane and into the wider world, where they circled other neurons and started the process all over again.

“Several flash strands remain behind in the original host cell,” Novak explained, “but at that point they seem to go inert. I’m guessing they act as sentinels to keep others from invading once the initial life cycle is complete. At any rate, the host is left essentially intact, while the flash itself supplements the natural functioning of the body.” She smiled thinly, her admiration all but obvious. “Whoever engineered this must be a certifiable genius.”

“Or certifiably insane,” Pallas countered. “This stuff spreads like wildfire, and we don’t even know what the hell it does.”

Lea looked back toward the
Inru
corpses, their silent tongues hinting at a truth far worse than her worst-case scenario.

“What are the vectors for this thing?” she asked.

“Direct contact only,” the GME answered, putting to rest Lea’s fears about contamination. “Structured like this, it can’t survive outside a living system.”

“What about the incubation period?”

“What we saw here ran at fifty times speed. In actual time, it would be anywhere between twelve and sixteen hours before widespread infection.”

“Unbelievable,” Pallas whispered.

Lea lowered her head, shutting her colleagues out while she considered all the facts. She had never stopped believing that Ascension remained the
Inru
’s ultimate goal—but she hadn’t prepared herself for such a radical departure. This was
totally
new technology, developed in a matter of months—not the years it had taken to develop the template for the original strain.

How in God’s name did Avalon do this?

“Didi, can you bring up a base-pair sequence of this new flash?”

Novak flipped the construct again, displacing the microscopic visual with a DNA model. Lea studied the double helix closely, absorbing the endless twists and turns and the seemingly random combinations of nucleotides. It reminded Lea of her own days with the
Inru,
when the revolution had seemed so real and the possibilities endless. What floated around in that image wasn’t so different from her own design, and yet it was worlds apart. So different, but
so familiar
that Lea couldn’t escape the notion that she had seen this genetic structure before.

“Was this new flash actually the cause of death?”

“No,” Novak answered, watching Lea closely. “It was some kind of secondary effect—a harmonic wave pattern that attacked chemical bonds down at the molecular level. The bodies literally shook themselves apart.”

“Any clues on the origin?”

“Not yet. Our young Alex is still rebuilding the data recorded on your integrator in the field, which should help with my final analysis.” Novak killed the display. “I did, however, notice some unusual by-products of the replication process that might have something to do with it. Whether these are accidental or by design, I can’t say—but the quantities are sufficiently large to give me pause.”

“Anything in particular?”

“A few chemical inclusions, most of them inert,” she explained, pausing for effect before continuing, “but also high concentrations of biomagnetites. The magnetic interference threw my instruments off so much it would have been difficult to miss.”

Lea was skeptical, but the discovery explained a few things—including the short-range communications problems they had during the mission. With all those bodies pumping out biomagnetic energy at the same time, they must have lit up the radio spectrum like an EMP.

“That kind of output would require some heavy shielding to avoid detection,” Lea thought out loud, “like the background radiation at Chernobyl. From a deployment standpoint, that creates a lot of problems. So why haven’t the
Inru
figured out a way around it?”

“Maybe biomagnetites aren’t a by-product at all,” Pallas suggested. “Maybe they’re an essential part of the design.”

“What for?”

The hammerjack shrugged. “Industrially, they’re used as cultivation strata for conventional nanotech. Could be that the
Inru
are using that as a shortcut to jump-start their Ascension research.”

“I don’t see any evidence of that here,” Novak said. “Nanoparticles have a very specific signature, and would have appeared on the initial tox screen. What we have here is pure flash, designed to enhance a living system somehow.” She sighed heavily, her own expression creased with serious doubts. “Still, one wonders why the
Inru
would assume the cost and burden of such a complex experimental scheme. Under these conditions, it would have been much simpler to limit themselves to one or two test subjects instead of the dozens we found.”

“That’s
also
part of the design,” Lea said with absolute certainty. Avalon wouldn’t have bothered with it otherwise. “The trick now is figuring out how it all fits together.”

Pallas crossed his arms.

“Any ideas, boss?”

“The
Inru
wouldn’t have confined their research to Chernobyl,” she said, echoing what Vortex told her earlier. “It’s too risky to keep everything in just one place. We
have
to assume they’re running other sessions in other locations. That’s where we start.”

“There wasn’t anything like that in the intercepts you decoded,” Pallas said. “And since the
Inru
fell off the grid, Axis signatures won’t be much help—unless you think your source is holding out on you.”

Lyssa
could
have tainted the intelligence Vortex provided—but only if Vortex wasn’t aware of her actions. For that to happen, Lyssa’s personality would have to be more dominant than either Lea or Vortex suspected—and
that
opened up possibilities too frightening to consider.

At the very least, you can’t take anything Vortex tells you at face value. Not if there’s a chance that Lyssa is pulling the strings.

“My source is solid,” Lea assured him, in spite of her own doubts. “But I’ll confirm everything, just to be sure. In the meantime, we work with what we’ve got.” She leaned in toward Novak. “How distinct are those biomagnetic fields you detected?”

“Nothing you would find in natural or industrial emissions,” the GME said. “If you happened across an unshielded source, you’d know it straightaway.”

“Good. I need you to upload the frequency ranges to CSS tactical.” Lea turned to Pallas again. “Alex, you’ll be tasking the Spyglass network to do a broad sweep for that spectrum. Anything that’s even a remote match, I want it pinpointed to within half a klick.”

“That could be problematic,” the hammerjack said. “With all the precautions they’ve been taking, I seriously doubt the
Inru
are going to just drop their pants and give us a freebie.”

“Then look for
holes
in the spectrum—anything big enough to hide a facility.”

A sudden, mischievous grin bloomed across his lips as he caught her drift.

“Right,” he said, nodding. “That much shielding would act like an electromagnetic sink. All I need to do is look for a great big dead spot. Pretty slick, boss.” His face then fell as he realized the full implications of her plan. “Even if I narrow the search parameters down to likely areas, we’re still talking about a
lot
of territory. The recon spooks aren’t going to like us burning up that much satellite time.”

“I’ll handle them, Alex. You go find me some bad guys.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Pallas said with a casual salute, then headed out. He pasted the electrodes back on his head and was jacking before the door closed behind him.

Novak swiveled around in her chair. “You
do
realize that if he succeeds, he’ll be more insufferable than ever.”

“Just make sure he doesn’t overdo it,” Lea said, patting her GME on the shoulder. She started for the exit herself, while Novak went over to one of the exam tables and continued her postmortem on another set of remains. As the GME drew back the plastic sheet and began working, Lea noticed a collection of samples underneath a nearby quarantine hood.

She wandered over and peered through the glass. Inside were a rack of test tubes and several mounted slides, each with a bar code label attached. The slides contained smears of some unknown substance, while the tubes held varying amounts of a dense crimson liquid. It couldn’t have been anything but blood.

“Are these the samples you took at the scene?” Lea asked.

Novak glanced up, still up to her elbows in the body on her table.

“From the
Inru
squad that attacked us,” she said. “It’s possible that Special Services already has some of their DNA on record from previous arrests. I thought an analysis could aid in identification.”

Lea swallowed hard.

“Does that include Avalon?”

“Yes,” Novak answered. “I recovered small traces of her blood from the injuries you inflicted during combat.” After a long, tense silence, she added, “If you’re concerned about the Mons virus, you needn’t worry. Avalon’s electrostatic implants reduce the disease’s communicability factor to almost zero.”