Prodigal (45 page)

All alone.

Nathan slid out of the command chair, back over to the ops station. Reactor status appeared borderline on the control panel, intermix temperatures still dangerously low. Nathan also checked
Almacantar
’s orbital position, worried that the main engines could ignite the excited gases around the ship if she was too far down—but he was out of options, and falling fast.

“Hang on, Skipper,” he said, and engaged the engines.

Almacantar
shuddered as power coursed through her frame, eerily silent within the airless bridge. Nathan held on, sinking into his seat under the mounting g forces, the deck heaving beneath his feet. A whole array of new alarms glared up at him from the control panel, integrity sensors going haywire as massive shear twisted the ship in different directions, subjecting her to forces she had never been designed to withstand. Nathan quickly punched up a structural schematic, watching grimly as failures spread from bow to stern—flashing red dots that peppered the hull at vulnerable points, all those sections close to buckling.

Almacantar
, meanwhile, began to climb.

“Come on, old girl,” Nathan urged. “Show me what you can do.”

The bridge shook even harder than before, tossing the dead around like an afterthought—Farina among them, who slid away from Nathan and out of sight. Looking up at the viewer, he extinguished a flare of panic. Mars was in retreat, but still throttling
Almacantar
with gravity and friction. Nathan didn’t know how much longer the ship could hold together.

“Just a little more.”

The control panel responded with another warning.

Son of a bitch…

The display lit up as one of the reactors went critical. Internal pressure had already risen to the point of an imminent breach—and if that happened, the resulting explosion would incinerate the ship. Working from instinct, Nathan routed main engineering through the ops console and tried to scram the reactor—but got nothing. Like the orbital maneuvering system, those controls were now off-line.

Nathan jumped out of his chair, stumbling over to the engineering station. The circuits were all intact and sprang to life as he activated the interface. He keyed in a sequence to isolate the reactors from localized commands, transferring full authority to the bridge. He then rammed a kill code into the network pipeline, and waited for an acknowledgment to come back.

It materialized less than a second later.

REMOTE OVERRIDE REJECTED
INVALID OR UNRECOGNIZED CODE SEQUENCE

“No!” Nathan shouted, bashing the console. The reactor was now past maximum tolerance and still rising. Nearly out of ideas, he tried the kill code again—but added a tracer, parsing out the reason for the previous failure:

REMOTE OVERRIDE ALREADY ENABLED
REMOTE OPERATIONS CANNOT BE DEFINED
CONCURRENTLY AT SEPARATE LOCATIONS

What other location?

Nathan entered a query before the thought even formed, eyes darting between pressure readings and his harried diagnostic. His heart stopped when the result crawled across the screen:

REMOTE OPERATIONS ROUTED TO MAIN COMPUTER CORE

“My God.”

Nathan tried to bypass the core, but the system locked him out. Attacking the layers of security, he smacked right into a wall of encryption—the same ice used to partition the crawler from its conventional components. It now asserted total control, isolated behind an impenetrable barrier of chaos logic.

Jacked by an outside source.

Playing a hunch, Nathan ran a signals sweep for burst communications—and found dozens of active tunnels between C-Deck and the computer core. Triangulating the precise point of origin, he followed those links directly to sickbay—and into the quarantine.

You bastards…

Nathan rammed another query into the console, mapping out the functions under remote control. Line by line, the list grew—until every major system scrolled down the display, including the four that were killing his ship:

ENGINEERING
LIFE SUPPORT
NAVIGATION
ORBITAL CONTROL

Almacantar
was beyond Nathan’s reach.

He took his hands off the console, turning to face the view screen. Mars settled into a slow spin as the ship limped back into a stable orbit, but none of that mattered anymore. Within moments,
Almacantar
and all aboard her would begin to disintegrate. In the meanwhile, at least Nathan had the satisfaction of knowing that the monsters from Olympus would die with him.

Closing his eyes, he welcomed that bright flash.

But it never came.

Almacantar
kept on climbing, turbulence subsiding into a smooth glide. She then nudged herself into a high orbit, the telltale plumes of her thrusters flickering at the edge of the main viewer. Nathan watched the surreal scene unfolding before him, a ship with nobody at the wheel and manned by a cadaverous crew. With trepidation, he got up and went back over to the ops console, running his fingers across the glassy surface. It showed the main engines still at one-third—and the critical reactor now easing off to nominal pressures. Somehow the thing had shut itself down, redirecting power through another unit in the stack.

The engines cut out.

Almacantar
fell into an uneasy calm. Nathan glanced around the bridge, senses probing every corner to get a feel for the rest of the ship. A deep groan reverberated through the hull, working its way from the aft sections, followed by intense pounding—the sound of impellers unlocking heavy clamps at the stern. The last time Nathan had heard that sound was back in spacedock, when
Almacantar
was mated to her cargo hull. A flashing message on the control panel confirmed what he already knew, as the ship suddenly lost the bulk of her mass:

WARNING! WARNING!
SERVICE MODULE JETTISON IN PROGRESS

Nathan switched to a reverse angle on the viewer. There, trailing into the vast expanse of space, the cargo section detached itself and started to drift. Sporadic burns on the leading edge caused a steep pitch, casting it out into the void. Gravity took care of the rest, drawing the discarded hull toward Mars and making it tumble faster, finally clearing the ship and leaving her free to navigate.

Almacantar
fired her main engines again.

This time she throttled up to flank speed. The ensuing slingshot hurled the ship out of orbit, her velocity on an exponential curve. Nathan hunched over the ops console, watching reactor output spike to maximum, while the red disc of Mars fell away rapidly. He ran a quick series of calculations through NavCon, hoping like hell that the core wouldn’t bounce them before he could figure out the ship’s heading. At the same time, he kept a close eye on structural integrity. Unlike before,
Almacantar
operated at the outer range of her limits but never went past them. The crawler—and those who controlled it—had apparently learned from their mistakes and had no wish to tear the ship apart.

Lucky me.

NavCon processed his request, displaying the raw numerics on his panel. Nathan washed them through the ops console, overlaying the result on a star chart that displayed
Almacantar
’s current position and projected course. He followed that line into the Directorate shipping lanes, less than two hundred thousand kilometers distant—the closest designated point for a spatial jump.

All the way back home.

All the way back to Earth.

Like most of South America, the nation of Chile was an annex of the Incorporated Territories—though its Zone heritage was on full display in Santiago, where Lea Prism arrived shortly before dark. The suborbital transport had gotten her as far as Buenos Aires, the last die-hard Collective outpost on her journey, with conventional aircraft carrying her the rest of the way—short hops that became wilder and more dangerous the farther south she went. Stepping off the gangway into the sensory overload of the airport, Lea took in the sights and sounds of her past: double deals and gutter talk, bargaining and baiting in a dozen dialects, hard currency changing hands—and the crossbred faces that leered, then forgot her from one moment to the next. Though she had never been here before, Lea had spent a lifetime in places just like it. With the practiced ease of street species, she blended into the crowd and disappeared.

Pushing her way through a steady tide of commerce, she hailed a cab to get into town. The driver didn’t speak English, or any of the other languages Lea tried, but understood perfectly when she told him what she wanted.

“Expatriates,” she said.

The driver paused to see if Lea was serious. She made her point by dropping a bag of Krugerrands on the seat next to him. He muttered something that sounded like a prayer, then put the car in gear and drove off toward an electric nightfall.

Twenty minutes later they passed into Las Condes, the casino version of a demilitarized zone. With all the street vendors and bicycle traffic, walking would have been faster; but Lea allowed the driver to go on, feeding him even more coins while she took the pulse of the city—grateful for the reinforced glass that enclosed the back of the cab. The
Yakuza
were virtually unknown here, the local gangs free to pursue their own agendas. Their incandescent graffiti was everywhere, marking territory from building to building, foot soldiers patrolling outside the gambling dens and mixing it up with their rivals—probably holdouts from the old days, former Zone Authority types stirring the pot to keep a cold war running hot. They ran a constant insurgency in border regions like these, straddling the line between civilization and anarchy. Special Services would eventually get around to clearing them out, but for now at least they ran the show.

A state of affairs that—if she was right—would work to Lea’s advantage. If not, it stood a pretty good chance of getting her killed.

The cab slowed outside the Hotel Altocastello, a sliver of a building at the heart of Santiago’s commerce district. Time had been kinder to the old structure than most, though it hadn’t been spared the ravages of retrofitting. Glaring neon stretched from cornerstone to penthouse, wrapping itself around each floor and dumping light into a garish sign above the main entrance. Lea had seen the spires all the way from the airport, and should have known. The Expatriates weren’t known for keeping a low profile. The terror they inspired did most of the talking for them.

The driver stopped, jerking a thumb at the hotel. His expression in the rearview mirror told Lea he wasn’t about to wait for her.

“Nice talking to you,” she said, and got out.

The cab took off, leaving Lea behind in a cloud of exhaust fumes. As the smoke cleared, she studied the tide of people moving in and out of the Altocastello—refugees from a third-world party that never stopped, dressed like characters out of some old movie. The drunken laughter didn’t faze the armed muscle that patrolled the doorway, machine pistols strapped to their shoulders. They seemed almost oblivious to the flamboyant gamblers and their flashy girlfriends, though Lea did not underestimate them one bit. She knew a professional when she saw one, and these men were as cool and deadly as any
Yakuza
assassins, with the combat tattoos to prove it.

But even the guards were only the first line of defense. With a discerning eye, she found at least a dozen particle turrets positioned at various tactical locations, bottling the entire street into one long kill zone. She had no way to tell, but Lea also imagined that the entire building was cloaked under an ice field, blocking sensor energy from moving in and out of the place. It was the same setup she’d used on the power station where she and Funky had set up operations, back when she was still part of the revolution. The Expatriates, it seemed, had learned from her example.

You guys are so predictable.

Stepping into the middle of the street, she held her hands out to the air in the shape of a cross—the better to attract the guards’ attention, not to mention the automated sentries. She then crossed the rest of the way, cutting in front of the line outside the casino. As expected, one of the trick boys stuck a gun in her ribs, staring her down from behind a pair of reflective lenses. His face never moved.