Prodigal (35 page)

Lea knew from her own immersion runs that he was right. It was part of the rush, the godlike omnipotence when you were down in it.

“And the biomagnetites?”

“Leverage,” Vortex said. “A boost to kick those connections into high gear.”

“High octane for an ESP link.”

“Precisely.”

“I don’t know, Vortex,” Lea said. “It explains a lot, but I still don’t see how this gets them any closer to Ascension.”

“It doesn’t—not on an individual basis.”

“Then how—” she began, then stopped. Vortex, meanwhile, backed away from the glass, allowing Lea to draw the conclusion for herself.

“A hive mind.”

“Even better,” Vortex said. “An
array
of minds, enhanced by this new flash—all networked telepathically and decentralized. It’s actually a brilliant solution. If the
Inru
can get them synchronized in just the right way, the resulting matrix could be very powerful.”

“
How
powerful?”

Vortex considered it. “More than me—maybe even more than a single Ascension.”

Lea felt drained. “How sure are you about this?”

“If the models I ran based on your findings are accurate,” Vortex said, “then we could have a real problem on our hands. The real question is how close the
Inru
are to overcoming the flaws in their design. If they can get that part figured out…”

He didn’t need to remind Lea of the consequences.

“Can you determine how close they are?”

“Not until we know what caused the failure in the first place,” he admitted, “and to do that I need information—a lot more than I have here.”

“Pallas is still working the data from Chernobyl.”

“I know, and there are a lot of gaps. To be honest, it could be months before I can extrapolate anything useful—maybe never.”

“You’re saying we’re blind.”

Vortex tried to ease the blow, but it didn’t make any difference. “Unless we can find something else,” he said. “We need another break, Lea.”

“Tell that to Bostic.”

“Would it do any good?”

“No,” she sighed, slowly rising to her feet. A wave of dizziness overcame her, forcing her to steady herself against the interface chair. The combination of stress and the time Lea spent in the Tank was taking its toll. “He’s already staked out his position. A retreat would make him lose face in front of the Assembly—and Bostic’s not about to let that happen.”

“So what’s left?”

“A shot in the dark,” Lea said, blinking to regain her focus. “Is there any chance you could detect one of these hive networks? Any signature you might be able to search for?”

“Probably not. The hive by its very nature is decentralized, so the components could be anywhere. And like me, the networks would be isolated from Axis traffic. Unless they present a physical characteristic that satellites can pick up, we’re out of luck.”

Vortex shimmered in Lea’s view, while behind him a cluster of bright coils materialized out of nowhere. Vortex seemed unaware of their presence, which made Lea wonder if they were an illusion. She shook her head, hoping to clear her senses, but the coils remained.

“Lea?”

She gripped the chair with both hands now.

“There has to be a way,” she muttered. “Something we missed…”

“Lea, are you all right?”

The coils spun themselves together, gaining mass—and menace. Lea started to warn Vortex but the words caught in her throat, forced back down by the fear and fascination of what unfolded before her.

“Cray…” she said, reaching for him.

And found Lyssa instead.

She lunged at Lea from inside the Tank. Pressed up against the glass, the manifestation of Lyssa’s mind contorted itself into a storm of unspeakable sounds and hellish impressions—murderous screams and mocking laughter that plucked Lea from the physical world and dropped her into that nightmare matrix.

Then, like a door slamming shut, Lyssa was gone.

Lea stumbled back, a tangle of arms and legs. She tripped over herself and collapsed to the floor, crawling backward until she bumped against the airlock. Scratching desperately against the door, she didn’t even think of the access panel until her terror began a slow retreat.

Dragging herself up, she punched in the code to unlock the door. As it slid open, she resolved not to look back into the Tank—but the periphery of her sight brought her back, where she saw Vortex yanking Lyssa into the ether. Somehow he had gained control and stuffed her into submission—but only because Lyssa surrendered. Even from her vantage point, distorted by residual fear, Lea could tell he had not beaten her.

“Lea!”

Vortex called out to her, only half-there. It was all he could do to maintain form.

Lea fled into the airlock.

“Lea,
please
…”

She stopped, just short of sealing herself off. Working up the courage, she turned back toward him.
Cray,
she forced herself to believe.
It’s still Cray.

But she could only imagine Lyssa, pumping like poison through her veins.

“I’m sorry,” Vortex pleaded. “That wasn’t me. It was
her
—”

“Don’t explain,” Lea said, trembling. “I’m fine.”

The airlock hissed shut.

Gregory Masir gawked, bleary-eyed, at a bank of sickbay monitors. The readings, piped in from the quarantine, had long ago ceased to have any meaning. To him, they were only a collection of random numerics—endless reams of data with an occasional graphic to spice things up, jammed through a computer that wasn’t designed to handle such a heavy load. The system crashed repeatedly, further reducing his ability to keep on top of all the numbers—but orders were orders, and Commander Straka had been in no mood to argue.

Three times,
Almacantar
’s engineering techs had visited to coax the overtaxed system back online, while Masir sat back and watched them perform one arcane procedure after another. To him, it all looked like guesswork—which, he noted wryly, wasn’t so different from the way most Directorate doctors practiced medicine. The only difference was that Masir’s patients could—and often did—complain. The computers, on the other hand, suffered their abuse in silence. As they went down yet again, Masir swore the damned things did it just for spite.

“Ben zona!”
he cursed, and whacked one of them hard.

The visuals snapped back on, responding with a jolt of something new.

Curious, Masir leaned in toward the monitors. He reversed one of the video feeds, taking it back a few frames until he arrived at the beginning of the sequence that grabbed his attention.

“There you are,” he muttered, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s have a closer look, shall we?”

A remote biopsy report crowded the display—one of many Eve Kellean had volunteered to run on the six survivors. The biopsies were critical, as they screened virtual blood swatches for traces of the Mons virus. So far, all of them turned up negative—but Masir had only scrutinized the text portions of those reports. This was the first time he had examined one of the electron scans up close. The image was based on an interpolation of tissue masses based on high-density resonance imaging. Since collecting actual samples was impossible without breaking quarantine, this procedure was the next best thing—and remarkably accurate, given its limitations.

At first glance, the tissues appeared perfectly normal. It was only when Masir studied them more closely that he noticed a tiny deviation. Zooming in, he quickly discovered the reason. Several sections were blank—as if the sample had been assembled from a mosaic of pieces that didn’t quite fit.

Or redacted.

It was an old medical examiner’s trick: peel away layers from a clean section and paste them over another, concealing the evidence underneath. Masir had seen it before, in the autopsy reports the Zone Authority had altered to cover up their use of biological agents during the Pan-Arab war. The hard part was getting the cellular structures to line up properly—and in this case, they didn’t.

It wasn’t even close.

Has to be a mistake.

Masir slid out of his chair and headed toward the lab. He wasn’t terribly concerned—after all, any number of factors could have accounted for such a discrepancy. Most likely, Kellean hadn’t calibrated the equipment properly the last time she used it. God knew, the woman had spent every waking hour with those corpses from the moment they arrived on board. That much time among the living dead was bound to make anyone a bit punchy.

Including
him.

The doctor had avoided the lab as much as possible, content to allow Kellean to work with her frozen friends while he remained in sickbay doing the post. As Masir drew closer, he received a potent reminder why. The atmosphere was so funereal and oppressive, his dread so palpable and crushing, it felt like marching toward the executioner’s block.

Stop that nonsense.

Taking a breath, he went inside.

Masir expected to find Kellean working inside the containment sphere or hunched over the monitoring station. But the lieutenant was nowhere to be seen—and neither was anyone else.

There was only the quarantine.

And the creatures interred within.

Masir stood transfixed, caught between fear and fascination. He took a step toward the sphere—and then another, and another still—until he reached the glass, his eyes peering inside. There, the six sarcophagi glowed with an almost divine brilliance—more alive than Masir cared to admit, their vital signs moving in faint but discernible synchronicity.

Must be a problem with the monitors. Have to speak to the lieutenant about that.

He moved over to the console, fumbling around with the unfamiliar interface for what seemed like forever, scrolling through one subsystem after another, trying to find the imaging program. To make things worse, his eyes constantly drifted back toward the window—a distraction that built upon itself, along with an unshakeable feeling that
they
were watching him.

God in heaven. How does Kellean stand it in here?

Wiping sweat from his forehead, Masir worked faster. Eventually, he stumbled across the imaging subsystem. His fingers slipped across the touch panels, taking him in several wrong directions before he finally settled into the calibration routine. Assuming that Kellean had knocked the settings out of alignment, he reached for the control to zero them out—but drew back in surprise when he saw that everything appeared nominal.

There had been no mistake.

What is this?

There was only one way for him to be certain. Switching over to a variable control interface, Masir engaged the imaging coils inside the sphere. A succession of loud thumps sounded off as they locked into place beneath each of the cryotubes, followed by a deep thrum of electromagnetic energy. Masir watched the console timer as the minutes ticked off, waiting just long enough to do a generalized scan—nowhere near the resolution Kellean had supposedly performed, but more than adequate for him to run a comparison.

He dumped the results into the memory buffer as soon as they were available, tapping his finger nervously as the image formed on the display. It started out as a blur, gradually emerging as layer upon layer filled in more detail—and a complete picture of a human body appeared.

Except it wasn’t human.

Masir’s jaw dropped open when he took in the magnitude of deformity. All the major organs seemed in place, but twisted into abnormal configurations—so much that the doctor doubted he would recognize anything if he had to open one of these people up. Even more shocking was the nervous system, which had developed far beyond any rational purpose or design. Thickened pathways spread like wild vines throughout the body—new growth entangled with the old, terminating at a brain that surged against the confines of its cranium.

Impossible,
Masir thought, mouthing the word but unable to say it.
Even in stasis, these people shouldn’t be alive.

Yet their vital signs defied his logic.