Prodigal (39 page)

“Out of sight, out of mind.”

Tiernan sounded almost hopeful. “Then we still don’t know where she is.”

“Not precisely,” Pallas said, and split the feed on the display. On one side, he brought up a manifest of Tagura Interglobal’s worldwide holdings, paring the endless list down to a few hundred entities and assets. “But the connection gave me a place to start looking. I cross-referenced known
Inru
activity with Tagura’s financials, following the money to see where it took me. Lots of interesting places, as it turned out. Old Yoshii had so many shell companies funneling cash, they made the legitimate side of his business look like chump change.”

“I don’t get it,” the lieutenant said. “If he was the money man, why would Avalon kill him?”

“Because he pulled the plug,” Lea speculated. “Maybe Tagura liked to play the revolutionary, but when it comes down to it these company guys are all the same. They know when it’s time to cut their losses.”

“Give the lady a cigar,” Pallas said, as the assets dropped off the display. “Not two hours after Chernobyl, over half of these holdings just dried up—accounts frozen, proceeds liquidated, everything gone in a puff of smoke.”

“That’s why all those
Inru
nets fell off the air.”

“Total purge.” The hammerjack shook his head in amazement. “Yoshii giveth, and Yoshii taketh away. You gotta hand it to the man, though. He was one crafty old fart.”

Lea folded her arms. On-screen, Tagura’s head rolled across the floor.

“Not crafty enough.”

Pallas shrugged.

“Can’t win them all, boss.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“How about the best hiding place you never saw?”

Novak and Tiernan blinked nervously while Lea zeroed in on him.

“A possible location?”

“It fits the profile,” Pallas cautioned her, “but I don’t have any confirmation. The place is so invisible, even satellites don’t make regular sweeps.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

“It ain’t much.” With the others paying rapt attention, Pallas brought one final picture to the display: a grainy visual of a single island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “I found the ownership records buried deep inside one of Tagura’s holding companies, and eventually traced the original purchase to Yoshii himself. He bought the island a few years back, when the regional governments sold off everything they had. Kept the transaction under wraps, but nobody knows why.”

“Which one is it?” Novak asked.

“Rapa Nui.”

Lea stared into the image as Pallas clicked on several different views, each one more mysterious than the last. The island was little more than a speck, largely uninhabited for hundreds of years—except for an abandoned
gulag,
operated by the Zone Authority before South America petitioned to join the Incorporated Territories. The complex was still visible from the satellite photos, a collection of crumbling structures rising out of a craggy, almost featureless landscape.

“Signals recon keeps bouncing back,” Pallas explained, “and thermals are useless because of resurgent volcanic activity. In short, I don’t have squat on what might be happening down there. It might all be natural interference—or it could be shielding. There’s no way to be sure.”

“CSS ever send a unit there?” the lieutenant asked.

“Civilian inspectors when the prison closed, but that was it.”

“Smugglers?”

“Not since the cartels went legit. Had to be over fifty years ago.”

Novak regarded the island with superstition.

“In other words,” she said, “we’re blind. Sounds awfully familiar.”

Lea, however, had no doubts.

“That’s our target,” she said.

The ocean existed for her only as a memory, locked away in the protected recesses of her mind—the place where Avalon stored those precious few moments of life before the Forces, now yellowed and tattered from the ravages of time. Poised at the edge of a cliff, the churning Pacific extending to the horizon, she tried to mesh those impressions with the mechanical clarity of her sensors: to combine imagination and technology into a thing of beauty, or at least an approximation. None of it, however, stirred Avalon’s emotions. The detailed processing of reality, rendered with tactical precision by her sensuit, reduced her surroundings to little more than raw data. Even the cold, steady wind blowing through her hair broke down into speed and direction, the briny aroma of the sea a mélange of chemical composition.

Avalon turned it off.

Memory retreated while her sensors realigned, suppressed along with an impotent rage. Avalon didn’t know why she inflicted this torture on herself. Each attempt only made her feel helpless, the worst trauma a soldier could sustain—far greater than any battlefield injury. Of all the horrors she brought back from Mars, it was the only one that still haunted her dreams. Being a victim, at the mercy of an enemy she couldn’t fight—that was a fool’s fate, one she vowed never to suffer again.

Yet, when she was alone, she always tried.

And always failed.

A human presence entered her contact sphere, navigating up a trail that led along the crest of the volcanic crater where Avalon stood. The sun was going down, casting a long shadow across the face of the cliff, making the island seem even more lonely and isolated as the person approached—as if the two of them were marooned here. In many ways, Avalon supposed that was true. The
Inru
had nowhere else to run. Yoshii Tagura had seen to that.

“Everything is in place,” her companion said, panting from the climb. He was young—street species recruited out of the Zone but cleaner than most of the head cases the
Inru
dug up there. The kid fancied himself a hammerjack, so Avalon had given him the chance to prove it. “We’ve got power from the geothermal converters, so we should be all set.”

Avalon nodded.

He glanced around, stuffing hands into his pockets. “Pretty rough place, isn’t it?”

“It’s defensible,” she said. “What’s the status on the hive?”

“Holding together, but barely.” His tone became grave. “Our mercs are trying to filter out the incoming waves, but they keep getting stronger. We’ve been forced to keep the network off-line to avoid another catastrophic failure.”

Avalon digested the information. The kid looked to her as if she had all the answers, an illusion she didn’t refute. She had no desire to be the
Inru
messiah, but for now she had no choice.

“Have they located the source?”

“No. The point of origin is too distant.”

“How far?”

“Off-planet,” the kid said. “Beyond Earth orbit.”

Avalon didn’t react outwardly, but she found it hard to believe that the Collective could have engineered an attack using complex harmonics. The Spacing Directorate didn’t have those kinds of capabilities, and neither did Special Services. Despite that, the hive was dying—and with it, the
Inru
’s last hope.

“Direction?” she asked.

“A straight line bearing toward Mars.”

Impossible,
she thought. There
had
to be another explanation—a terrestrial one, with Lea Prism at its root. Avalon meant to find it, even if she had to rip out the woman’s spine in the process.

“What about the prison?” she asked. “Have they found it yet?”

“Just like you said,” the kid replied. “Special Services tasked one of their satellites over to have a look. It won’t be long before they come.” After a long pause, he turned to her and asked, “Are you sure about this?”

“There is no other way.”

“So few of us left,” he implored. “So many risks.”

Avalon was philosophical.

“The price of revolution,” she said. “We need to know what she knows.”

“Lea Prism is a warrior. Taking her alive won’t be easy.”

“Neither will killing her,” Avalon declared, “but it will be done.”

An hour of incarceration in the wardroom brought Eve Kellean out of her fugue. Nathan watched her through a closed-circuit monitor from the corridor outside, while Pitch caught glimpses over his shoulder. Like everyone else on board, sleep deprivation had taken its toll on the pilot—but even that couldn’t compare with seeing the lieutenant in chains under a suicide watch. The cocky man who had landed them on Mars was gone, replaced by a nervous shell of a man who paced relentlessly, muttering a slew of curses. Nathan could hardly blame Pitch. His own hands refused to stop trembling.

Pitch toned down the expletives when Lauren Farina entered the picture, taking a seat across from Kellean at the table. The captain waved off the two crewmen she had posted as guards, then waited in silence for the lieutenant to speak. Kellean lifted her hands, which were cuffed together, to the tabletop. She avoided Farina’s stare, tears carving channels through the blotches of dried blood on her cheeks. She wiped her eyes on her uniform sleeve.

The captain was chillingly calm. “You ready to talk?”

Kellean nodded, wrapping shame and remorse into a single gesture. “Is Commander Straka okay?” she asked. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“He’s fine, Lieutenant.”

“Will you please tell him I’m sorry?”

“Sure,” Farina said. “Just tell me what happened in there.”

Kellean hitched her breath, taking a moment to calm down. Nathan didn’t like it. He was no psychologist, but he knew a performance when he saw one. The lieutenant’s was just too perfect—too much what she thought the captain wanted to hear.

What are you up to, Kellean?

“I’m sorry,” she stammered, struggling to get each word out. “It’s still kind of a blur. I’m trying to remember…” Her face contorted as events bubbled to the surface. “Oh,
God,
” she sobbed. “Why did he
do
it?”

Farina didn’t react. She just allowed Kellean to vent while maintaining a stony detachment.

“Take your time.”

Clearing her throat, the lieutenant continued. “I, uh…I left the lab to catch a few minutes of rack time. I didn’t mean to be gone so long, but when I woke up it was two hours later. All of us have just been under so much stress…” Kellean didn’t finish the thought. “I ran back down to sickbay, and that’s when I saw him. He was sitting at the console, talking to himself in Hebrew…like he was angry at something.”

“Masir was in the lab?”

Kellean nodded, steeling herself before she could go further.

“I asked him what he was doing. He just turned around and looked at me, his eyes…” She drifted into dreamlike recollection. “It’s like I wasn’t even there.”

Nathan remembered his own agitation down in the core and the pain that had driven him to blinding violence. The odds against the same thing happening to Masir seemed astronomical—but it was clearly the direction Kellean was heading.

“He got up and came at me,” Kellean said, her pitch and tempo growing as she related her story, “waving his hands around like…like he was crazy—but with a
purpose.
He started going on and on about how the ship was cursed because of the survivors we picked up, just raving.” She took a deep breath. “He said they had to die. That’s when he went back and started bashing the console, trying to shut it down.”