Prodigal (28 page)

“Yoshii-san,” she said. It was not a question.

Tagura’s tears followed craggy paths etched deep into his face, so flaccid that he could barely summon rage. But the businessman inside still emerged—weighing all the options, angling for a way out.

“Use caution before you act, Avalon,” he wheezed. “We can still make a deal.”

“There is no deal without trust,” she said. “You made that much clear.”

He stiffened. “Without me, the
Inru
are nothing. They do not exist.
You
do not exist.”

Avalon was unmoved.

“State of the nation,” she said. “Change is inevitable.”

Tagura wheeled himself backward. Avalon followed.

“I can dedicate my entire fortune to you,” he pleaded. “
Unlimited
resources, Avalon. The power to do anything you want. Think of all we could accomplish together.”

She planted her foot against his wheelchair.

“I don’t need your power,” she said, and kicked him into hell.

Nathan Straka convulsed himself awake. In a surge of panic, he struggled against the restraints that strapped him down, unsure of who he was and where he was—trapped in the thrall of some stale dread that short-circuited his conscious memory. Even his body felt removed from his senses, as if in some kind of free fall, making him grip the sides of his chair. Gradually, line by line, the illusion peeled away and he recognized the details of
Almacantar
’s computer core. The ceaseless drone of the ship’s engines brought him back down to where it felt safe to breathe again—even though part of him remained behind, tethered to

a shaft of light

the images that still resonated in his head. Nathan tried to shake them loose, focusing his attention on the virtual display in front of him, hypnotizing himself with the same pathways that had coaxed him into heavy immersion. Directorate security had been tougher than he expected, forcing him to go dormant outside one of the subdomains and wait until he could piggyback some encrypted traffic to get inside. But that process had taken several hours—maybe even longer, for all Nathan knew—making him drift

through the heart of the ship, through the darkness, form without mass

in and out, avoiding hard REM sleep with time-released stims. His own experience told him he couldn’t keep riding this hard, not without incurring some serious damage. At the very least, his state of mind left him prone to suggestion—and some pretty crazy ideas. They infused themselves into the chilled atmosphere of the core, curling the edges of the virtual display, which was so attuned to his synapses that it seemed as if
Almacantar
could read his thoughts. Briefly, Nathan wondered what the captain might make of him, especially if she knew

that they were not alone, that there was life in the abyssal spaces, out of sight but always there

how strung out he was. Farina would probably laugh, and say she’d seen him in worse shape after a night of drinking. But the alcohol never affected him like this—and neither did the stims, not before now. Nathan’s heart still jumped at the vivid dreamscape, which played out even as it faded into the darkness.

“How’s it going down there?”

The minicom clicked in, scattering Nathan’s thoughts. Only a vague impression remained, before it settled into the deck like fallout. He licked his lips, realizing how dry he was. Absently, he checked the time to see how long he had been out.

“Could use some room service,” he replied. It was 0430—eighteen hours after he started his first run. He rubbed his eyes. “Better make that a midnight snack.”

“I’ll send down some bread and water.”

Nathan broke a weary smile. “I must be on punishment detail.”

“Just trying to make you feel at home,” Lauren Farina said. Nathan’s earpiece masked the subtleties of her tone, but she sounded tired. “I started to get worried with you down in that cage all by yourself. Everything okay?”

“Been better,” he admitted, and left it at that. “You’re up awfully early.”

“New office hours. I don’t sleep until the crew sleeps. What’s your excuse?”

“Immersion risks. You know the drill.”

Nathan heard a series of clicks as the frequency changed to hyperband.

“Any luck?” Farina asked.

“It’s slow going,” Nathan replied, lowering his voice. Even though they were on personal comms, outside the ship’s network, conspiring about a court-martial offense still made him nervous. “Out this far, we’re on an eighteen-minute delay—which means I can’t make moves in real time. The crawler can extrapolate the jack using a series of odds-on scenarios, but it sure as hell ain’t like being on-site.”

“Were you able to turn up anything?”

“No smoking gun,” Nathan sighed. “Just a couple of low-level directives, requesting clarification on ‘the Mars situation.’ The Directorate is keeping this one off the books as much as possible.”

“Which means you were right,” the captain said quietly. “Command doesn’t scare that easy. They must have a bunch of spooks breathing down their necks.”

“Looks that way.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Pretty much up the creek.”

Farina laughed softly. “Is that the technical term for it?”

“In so many words,” Nathan said. “Directorate security is one thing. Going up against Special Services—that’s a whole different ball game, Skipper. Maybe if we were live, I’d have a one-in-ten shot. On the remote, it would take a goddamned miracle.”

“But it’s not impossible.”

“Statistically, no,” he told her, uncertain of how far she wanted to take this. “The permutations are complex but finite—nothing the crawler can’t handle. But if you want stealth, this isn’t the approach. One bad guess and CSS will crack us wide open—and it won’t take them too long to figure out who penetrated them.” Nathan paused. “If that happens, it’ll be a long ride home, Lauren.”

Farina went silent for several seconds—much longer than she usually took to make up her mind. She whispered to herself quietly during that time, a strange sound nipping at the edge of his senses. Nathan wondered if he might be imagining it, because it sounded so much like

the dead voices

what he heard in his dream, hints of suggestion that arose from those empty spaces all across the ship—places where people never went, but where something else made its home. Even now, fully awake, Nathan had a hard time believing it wasn’t real.

“Do what you can,” Farina finally told him.

Nathan settled back into his chair.

“Okay,” he said, staring into the depths of the virtual screen. He put his hands back on the manual interface, steeling himself for another run. “I’ll let you know as soon as I—”

A ghost of motion cut him off before he could finish.

What the hell?

“Nathan?”

“Stand by,” he told the captain, dimming the main display. The Directorate feed dissolved into transparency, giving him a clearer view of the ship’s navigational construct, which hovered immediately behind. A representation of fixed code iterations, NavCon recompiled only at regular maintenance intervals—which made the change he saw, subtle as it was, almost impossible to miss.

“Talk to me, Nathan.”

Nathan ignored her. He went rigid scrutinizing the construct, riveted on every possible variation. He kept it on until his eyes dried out, but the construct never wavered. It seemed more solid than ever before.

“Come on, Straka,” Farina said. “Don’t make me come down there.”

“I thought…” he began, then squeezed his eyes shut. The afterimage stuck to the insides of his lids, but never materialized when he opened them again. “Never mind. I must be getting punchy.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Yeah,” Nathan groaned. “Remind me to have a chat with our doctor about those stims he prescribed. Knowing Greg, he probably kept the good stuff—”

The construct flickered again.

“Shit,”
Nathan said, shocked back into clarity. He jumped on the console, routing NavCon to the main display. It pixelated onto the screen in time for him to spot some kind of inclusion, but for less than a second. After that, it slipped back into the larger matrix—code blending into code, indistinguishable from its surroundings.

“Commander?” Farina asked.

Nathan barely heard her as he worked the construct. He parsed out the individual sections, trying to confirm what he saw—but everything came back maddeningly normal, operating well within the razor-thin mission parameters.

“
Report,
Commander.”

“I think I bumped against some flex code,” he said hurriedly, running even more numbers in the hopes that the thing had left some trace of itself. “Maybe a worm, working its way through the NavCon subsystem. I’m trying to track it down.”

“You
think
?” Farina interjected. “You better be sure, Nathan.”

“Verifying now.” Nathan tried not to sound scared, but fell short of the mark. Out here on the edge of nowhere, a bug running loose in the core was a nightmare scenario. Without her computers,
Almacantar
couldn’t even maintain orbit, much less life support. “I just hope to hell it’s something I can contain.”

“One step at a time, Commander. Can you pinpoint the source?”

Nathan checked the data transfer ports, but those were strictly internal—routing traffic between the component subsystems. As far as he could tell, none of them had been compromised.

“Negative,” he said. “Everything looks secure.”

“Any chance it could have happened during the downlink?”

“I keep all of that stuff firewalled off from the larger system,” Nathan told her. “If something
did
get through, it would have to be pretty damned sophisticated—way better than those off-the-shelf countermeasures the Directorate has.”

“I need a recommendation, Commander.”

Farina sounded urgent, and with good reason. If Nathan couldn’t get a handle on this thing, the captain would have no choice but to scram the crawler as a precaution. Conventional backups could handle mission-critical operations—but
Almacantar
would be limping through space, half-deaf and totally blind.

“Hold on,” he fired back, and played a hunch. Bypassing the crawler, he plunged deep into the old coding base—a substratum of the original core programming, left over from the first generation of the software kernel. That foundation had none of the safeguards built into the newer layers, which made it especially vulnerable to viral attack; but it also meant that any damage it suffered as a result would light up his screen like a fireworks display.

Nathan held his breath. Strands of code stretched out before him, sifting through the diagnostic as fast as the buffers would allow. Not one of them, however, appeared in the least bit anomalous.

“Dammit.”

“So what is it?” Farina asked. “Good news or bad news?”

Nathan slumped back, his fingers tapping idly on the console. He kept watching for a while longer, as each test came back negative.

“Not sure, Skipper,” he said. “I know there’s
something
here—”

“Relax, Nathan. Anybody down in it for that long is bound to get a little trippy.” She paused, long enough for Nathan to figure out that she was assessing him. “How about you stand down for a while, maybe get some rest? Might do you some good.”