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  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  VALLEY OF THE KINGS

  PART ONE

  THE WALKING WOUNDED

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO

  AVATAR

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  DE PROFUNDIS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY MARC D. GILLER

  COPYRIGHT

  In Memory of

  Harold and Edna Miller

  The book you hold in your hands is my second published novel, but for me it represents a lot of firsts. It’s the first time I’ve done a book that wasn’t on speculation, with a major publisher actually paying me to write. It’s also the first time I’ve ever written a sequel—a prospect that both intrigued and terrified me at the same time. While the end of Hammerjack left open lots of possibilities, I hadn’t really given much thought to how I’d continue the story during the two long years it took to sell the book. Now suddenly I had a contract stipulating that I needed to do exactly that—and I had just a little over a year in which to deliver.

  When faced with that kind of looming deadline, I usually resort to two things: fried food and brainstorming. A long lunch at an Applebee’s up in Clearwater provided the former, while John Kerwin—one of my best and oldest friends—kindly supplied the latter. There, we tossed around ideas until one of them finally stuck. I gave it some time to percolate over the next couple of weeks, and to my delight (and utter relief) the idea grew into an actual story, complete with a nice hook to drive the narrative. From there it was a mad dash to make my publication date, all while finishing the final edits on Hammerjack and taking care of a new baby in the house. Welcome to show business, friends and neighbors.

  Crazy as the last year has been, I had a great time getting to know these characters again. As they often do, Lea Prism and Avalon surprised me—both with the force of their personalities and the directions they wanted to go. Making that journey, however, wouldn’t have been possible without the dedication of a special few—people who gave of themselves selflessly but never asked anything in return.

  On the home front, it begins and ends with my wife Ildi. She never doubted my crazy dreams about being a writer—and more than that, she sacrificed all those long hours I spent in front of the computer finishing this novel. As for my children, Lexie and Christian, you continue to amaze me every day. Having you in my life has been my greatest reward.

  To Mom and Dad, what can I say? Thanks for your encouragement and confidence—and for the use of your den for all those weekends I was trying to make deadline. Whenever I wonder how to be a good parent, I need look no further than your example.

  Kimberley Cameron, my agent and friend—I needed your reassurance and wisdom even more the second time around, and am forever grateful to have you in my corner. A guy couldn’t have a better guide through the twists and turns of the book business, or a stronger advocate for the written word.

  Juliet Ulman, perhaps the most patient editor in the world—thanks for kicking my butt when I needed it and for working wonders with my first draft. You always knew how to find the novel buried within the manuscript, even with that giant, ill-tempered mutated sea bass swimming around (don’t ask). I have only one question—is anything still left in that bottle of scotch?

  Shouts also go out to Dorris Halsey, for all her behind-the-scenes work down in LA; Josh Pasternak, for his editorial insights; Jack Harris of 970 WFLA, for my early-morning radio gig; Margo Hammond of the St. Petersburg Times, for a great time at the Festival of Reading; Neal Asher and Richard Morgan, for sharing the wisdom of their experiences; John and Stephanie, for throwing the best publishing party a writer could ask for; Jeff, Manny, Curtis, Bryan, and all the poker night irregulars, for keeping my game honest; Valerie Bukowski, for authorizing all the time off; and to those who dropped me a line to tell me how much they enjoyed Hammerjack, I truly appreciate you welcoming this new author onto your bookshelves.

  Finally, a special thanks goes out to Mike Straka—a nice guy in a tough business who helped me more than he could realize.

  The ship’s computer core was not functionally intelligent—though after spending enough time there, Nathan Straka had come to believe that Almacantar whispered to him between the thrust tremors that penetrated her decks. It wasn’t a constant drone, but something that came in flashes and bursts, on frequencies that hung in the air like stray cryocarbons, flooding the empty spaces with data that anyone could sense. That is, if anyone listened.

  Nathan had started out this journey no more inclined to pay attention than anyone else on board. Like his crewmates, he was here only because of his job—one the Collective Spacing Directorate paid him handsomely to do. But this was deep space, a concept that had meant little to him back when he was jumping around the solar system at near light speed. Almacantar’s towed cargo array had slowed this journey to a crawl, however—a full seven months of continuous flight. Since then, with the bulkheads closing in over his head and the throb of the ship’s engines in his ears, the blue disc of Earth had become little more than a construct in his mind—an image on a virtual display, which he punched up every now and then just to be certain it still existed. Almacantar had been talking to him the whole time, but it was only then he began to open himself up to her.

  “Straka, you got the freqs on that background radiation yet?”

  The words from his headset echoed through his imagination, absorbed by the data patterns coursing across the display in front of him. Nathan liked to stay close, his eyes perched on the edge of that flat horizon, so he could feel the electricity of the numerics on his skin. Out here, it was as close as he could get to being plugged in. Solar winds were unpredictable and could easily fry a mind floating out in the void on the tendrils of an interface.

  “Still working that out,” Nathan replied. He had fed the approach parameters into Almacantar’s computer over thirty minutes ago, but the embedded crawler was still processing the information. Those were the whispers Nathan had been listening for, those subtle hints that the core and the crawler bridged properly. Almacantar was an older ship, way short of the specs required for a lengthy salvage operation; but she was all the Directorate had left, and the Collective wasn’t about to spend the time and money it would take to do this thing up from scratch. That was how Nathan ended up on this trip. It had been his idea to mate the computer core with a modified crawler—an arrangement that gave Almacantar the muscle she needed to run her mission-critical tasks but also required constant coaxing. At best, there might have been half a dozen systems shrinks in the world who could handle the juice. Nathan was one of them. That distinction had earned him a promotion to lieutenant commander, and his position as information command officer (ICO)—second in rank only to the captain.

  “What’s the matter, Straka?” the captain asked, needling him amicably over the comm link. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “More like my balls,” Nathan said, watching the
numbers pile up on his display. Interplanetary space was cold, but it was noisy as hell. Radiation signatures were off the scale, overwhelming the delicate traces of man-made activity he sifted for. “I might have to take some systems down to modulate the bridge. You got anything you can give me?”

  “You can have navigation after we assume orbit.”

  “How long?”

  “T–minus two minutes, twenty seconds. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

  Nathan released a thin, misty breath into the rarefied atmosphere of the core. Nobody liked it in here because it was so damned icy. Nobody but Nathan. With the cold came needed clarity.

  He patched the navigation stream from the bridge into his virtual display and ticked off the seconds as Almacantar lumbered into orbit, swinging his chair around to face the core’s memory wall: a dazzling series of silicon relays that popped into life and just as quickly faded back into darkness. This was the crawler at work, scratching against the confines of its primitive body like a prisoner beating against the bars of his cell. Nathan wasn’t concerned; the module was programmed to act this way. A crawler was designed to attack and destroy foreign data, making it a natural predator. Only the constant challenge of running the ship’s systems kept the beast in its cage, when all it really wanted was to roam the wilds of the Axis.

  Careful, Straka. You could be describing yourself.

  Right. Or he could just be projecting—that curious trait of human beings, morphing everything into their own image. In this case, it was an overly romantic thought. Nathan was good, but he was no outlaw. His instincts were sharp, but he had never made an illegal run in the Axis. He possessed that rarest of combinations: ability and conscience. The counterculture labeled him as a ticket-puncher. Nathan just thought he was practical.

  The crawler seemed to sense the change in his mood, responding with a red-shift data flow so gentle it took Nathan a few moments to realize it was there. Slowly, he saw the object of his longing: pattern recognition. The firefly flashes of the silicon relays, chaos theory in action, gradually assumed a rational bent. The bridging was stable. The crawler was at his command.

  “Bridge, core,” Nathan signaled. “I got the tiger by the tail.”

  “Bring me some good news,” the captain answered, “and I might break out a bottle of the real stuff tonight.”

  Nathan heard the cheers of the bridge crew in the background. Whether this haul was worth everybody’s while now depended on what he had to say.

  He rolled back over to the virtual display and checked the numerics again. As Almacantar swung around the dark side of her planetary objective, radiation signatures fell off dramatically. Now that Nathan had a clean slate, the real work began. He released an algorithm he had programmed earlier into the core, where the crawler absorbed it and started processing its complex instructions. That was the magic of this union: the ability to feed conventional logic into a storm of chaotic impulses, then render a finite series of results from an almost infinite series of variables. The result was an extrapolation, but a damned fine one—as close to reality as you could get from a construct. Soon, that image began to part the mists of the display, presenting Nathan with a complete representation of an entire planet down to the last conceivable detail.

  The planet Mars.

  “Unbelievable,” Nathan whispered into the comm link. He had had every confidence that his scheme would work, but had never imagined it would be so perfect, so complete. “Bridge, core. Are you getting this?”

  “Affirmative,” the captain replied. “It’s overloading the monitors, but we’re getting it.”

  Nathan reduced the throughput to the bridge nodes, buffering the overflow of data through the crawler, which had more than enough muscle to handle it. At the same time, he examined the construct for the ebb and flow of energies that would lead him to sites of potential importance. Martian topography had been painstakingly documented by previous expeditions, but Almacantar was not here on a voyage of discovery. The Directorate expected a handsome return on its investment, and that meant zeroing in on everything the last visitors here had left behind. Everything.

  Deep-Spacers were superstitious by nature, but even agnostics like Nathan couldn’t deny the potency of the stories about this place. Mars was more than a red dot in the middle of a black sky; it was a graveyard, a haunted palace. Hunting treasure here was like raiding a necropolis.

  “Core, bridge,” the captain said. “We’re coming up on the Tharsis dome now.”

  “Got it,” Nathan replied. He narrowed the construct to the northwest quadrant of the dome, a bulge in the Martian surface over four thousand kilometers across and nearly ten kilometers high. This had once been an area of incredible seismic activity millions of years ago, where lava had flowed freely across a low-gravity plain, allowing the slow buildup of the largest volcanoes in the solar system. Nathan leveled a hard stare at the display as they lumbered into view: Pavonis, Ascraeus, and Arsia Mons, mountains taller than anything on Earth, yet rising at a gentle slope because of their incredible width. As much as he had studied the topography in preparation for this mission, the sight of it still transfixed him. He could only imagine how the terraformers had seen it, sun slipping behind these flattened peaks each night, dormant monsters still capable of devouring—as the people here had discovered only when it was too late.

  Olympus, the greatest of these, stood in mute testimony to that torment.

  The massive volcano lay just past the Tharsis ridge, across what became known as Settler’s Plain. Its breadth filled the construct, breaking the display into static until Nathan attenuated the image and allowed the crawler to catch up with the numbers. The semi-intelligent module reacted much as Nathan had, overloaded by the sheer volume of information it took to process such a thing—mass beyond imagination, form beyond reasoning. Olympus Mons, meanwhile, stared back at him like a vast, unblinking eye: its caldera a collapsed dome of frozen lava, eons old and concealing secrets within secrets.

  Until one of them sparked into life before him.

  Nathan experienced it only as a vague sensation, a point of light that disappeared when he looked directly at it. From the periphery of his vision, he saw that it was on the move—a discrete but powerful surge, crisscrossing his virtual display and running along the rocky flows that rimmed the caldera. Then it stopped, and hovered, just long enough for Nathan to understand that this was not a hallucination.

  It dropped into the crater and disappeared.

  What the hell?

  Nathan jumped on the display, fingers scrambling to augment the image so he could get a closer look. It quickly dissolved into a blur, his eyes straining not to blink lest he miss any hint of movement. The pit, however, remained dark. He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was experiencing some kind of withdrawal. It could happen when you spent too much time jockeying a console. You could start seeing things that you never—

  There it is again!

  Not one signature, but six. They appeared one at a time at random intervals—independent, but connected somehow. Like a flock of birds, they darted up and out of the caldera, following one another as they glided down toward Settler’s Plain, in the shadow of Olympus, where the terraformers had set up their base. They danced about for a short time, tracing the contours of odd shapes that formed engineering patterns—buildings, vehicles, a biodome long since abandoned.

  And Nathan thought: I don’t belong here.

  The pulses rejoined one another, darting back up the slope of Olympus. Then they were gone inside the mountain, leaving an energy trail that blurred into a dull afterimage.

  Nathan shook it off, clearing his head of the whole event. Data inclusions, he thought. You get those kinds of anomalies with a crawler. Still, he couldn’t dismiss the notion that there was purpose in those movements.

  “Straka, I think we might have a situation here.”

  It was the captain, her voice mixed with a dozen others on the bridge. Nathan heard them running back and fort
h between their stations, calling out status reports while riding on a nervous edge. Almacantar was now on full alert, and as his own display lit up he saw the reason for it. The crawler had already classified the signals he intercepted, their probable source flashing in bright red letters over and over:

  BIOLOGICAL

  “I’m seeing it, bridge,” Nathan said. “Gotta be a malfunction.”

  “I sure as hell hope so,” the captain shot back. “We weren’t supposed to find anything like this.” The tension in her voice penetrated all the way down to the frigid air of the computer core. Nathan, more than anyone, understood why—and what it could mean to the mission.

  “Locking things down,” he said, already weary of Mars. “I’m on my way up.”

  Almacantar was a variable-profile vessel, a propulsion hull with a crew compartment that could be mated to a wide array of modules depending on her specific mission. Originally constructed as a joint venture between the United States of America and the Reformed Republic of China, she launched a mere seven years after the Chinese cast off the last vestiges of their experiment with socialism—and only two years before they formed a corporate alliance with the Japanese that would later develop into the Collective. Her designers had intended her for scientific exploration of Jupiter and its moons, a mission that brought both stunning success and unintended consequences. While sampling the upper reaches of the Jovian atmosphere, Almacantar had proved the viability of long-range gas mining—effectively turning Jupiter into a way station with enough fuel to power every human endeavor across the solar system.

  From that point, Almacantar’s fate was sealed. She was retooled for commercial service, and spent most of the next decade making runs between Jupiter and the scattered outposts she serviced. Along the way, Directorate engineers modified her spaceframe to accommodate the latest technological upgrades and mission requirements—all of which eventually twisted her sleek form into a crude chaos of jutting shapes and improvised lines. She sported obvious welding scars from where her conventional engines had been replaced with pulse-fusion hybrid reactors and a spatial jump drive, plus all the dents and carbon scalding that resulted from so much time in spacedock. In short, Almacantar was an ugly beast—a sad shell of her former self, a relic from a time when space travel was new and mankind’s aspirations less vulgar. But to those who knew her, she was better than a good-luck charm. In Almacantar’s entire period of service, she had never lost one member of her crew. There had been a thousand close calls and near misses, critical injuries that should have taken dozens of lives—but the ship had never returned home with fewer souls than when she departed. And for that, her officers and crew loved her.