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  Lea stepped back, catching a scream in her throat. Regaining her composure, she leaned back in, eyes fixated on where she had seen that slight range of motion.

  “Funky,” she said, “what’s the word on cognizant brain functions?”

  He swiveled around in his chair. “Just what you see,” he told her, reacting curiously to the spooked expression on her face. “Why?”

  She started to answer, but in a blink the notion was gone. More than anything, she tried to convince herself that it meant nothing, that Cray was simply manifesting a random nerve impulse.

  There’s no way, Lea kept telling herself. There’s just no way.

  But she couldn’t resist the impulse to test him.

  “Cray,” she said out loud, placing her hands on the surface of the tank. “If you can understand what I’m saying, move your fingers again.”

  Funky stepped away from his interface consoles, standing vigil with her beside the tank. The sealed chamber would have made it difficult for Cray to hear her, even if he was conscious; but in his current state—drugged to the gills with a body temperature of thirty C—he was more ice than human, with the intellectual capacity to match.

  Yet slowly, deliberately, each finger flexed one at a time—only millimeters, but still plainly visible.

  “I’ll be damned,” she breathed.

  Funky jerked back around to get another look at the monitors. They should have indicated that Cray’s brain had processed explicit packets of data, but the lines hardly moved. Whatever had happened, it did not originate in Cray’s nervous system.

  “That’s bleeding impossible.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Lea agreed, leaving him there and taking the controls herself. She fired up the resonance imager, applying power to a series of magnetic coils that ran along the underside of the tank. “We better get a closer look at this thing before we do anything else. I’m performing an imaging scan right now. Funky, I’ll need you to drop this view into the high-res as soon as I’m finished. Macro imaging at first, then precise targeting at five microns.”

  It took a few moments for him to hear her and put it together.

  “Funky?”

  “Yeah,” he said, shaking his head clear. He went back to his interface station, where he sat down and muttered to himself, “Damned if this isn’t some weird shit.”

  Lea ran the magnetic field through Cray’s body. The composition of his tissues created differentials in frequency that were measured by sensors in the tank, then fed into a program that interpreted them as images. “Come on, baby,” she said as the raw data flowed through her computer into Funky’s interface. “Let’s see what you’re about.”

  A transparent image of Cray’s body began to materialize on the high-res. Both of them stood back and watched as layer after layer of the image coalesced, starting with his bones and organs. Shortly after that, his blood vessels, neural pathways, and connective tissues all fell into place, forming a detailed and rather ordinary display of human anatomy—at least until the final layer appeared, and a stunning metamorphosis revealed itself.

  Darkened patches scattered throughout Cray’s body. Appearing like shadows on film, they were hazy and amorphous—suggesting themselves without being overt, ominous and subtle. The patches took root in seemingly random locations, but by far the greatest concentration was in the brain. There, they obliterated entire regions of his cerebral cortex. For some unknown reason, however, they had drawn the line at the areas that controlled conscious thought and memory. Those remained clear, like islands of light in a gathering storm.

  “Jesus,” Lea whispered.

  “Amen,” Funky agreed.

  He jockeyed the interface, taking them directly into Cray’s brain and magnifying the invaders so they could see the molecular structure. The sequencing was familiar, just like any other strands of flash, but its behavior was anything but standard. The strands were in the process of transforming Cray’s neurons, one at a time, infusing their own DNA strands into each nucleus and creating a hybrid. At this point, the activity was limited to the surface areas of the cerebral cortex; but it was burrowing deeper, starting an inexorable march that would not stop until . . .

  Until when?

  “Unbelievable,” Funky said distantly, like a voice on a radio. “This is infection on a massive scale. He shouldn’t even be alive with that much foreign tissue in his system.”

  Lea was dark, pragmatic—and logical.

  “That’s not how it works,” she said.

  “Yeah? Well, I’d bloody well like to know how it works.” Funky ran a few numbers through the computer, which only confirmed what they saw. “A full 62 percent of his brain has been replaced with whatever this stuff is. They’re smart buggers, too. Looks like the focus of their attack has been on the unused and unmapped regions of the cerebral cortex. You know—all those parts of the mind that are supposed to control ESP, telekinesis, and all the rest of that rubbish?”

  Lea closed her eyes and nodded.

  “Leaving motor skills and memory untouched,” he finished. “There’s some spreading along the main lines of the nervous system, including sensory input. Maybe that’s how Vortex was able to hear you and respond. If that’s the case, then he’s already operating on a level far beyond human range.”

  “That’s the point,” Lea snapped. “This is what the Inru were after all along. The flash isn’t supposed to kill him. It’s supposed to augment him.”

  Funky raised an eyebrow.

  “So what the hell do we do?”

  Lea stared up at the high-res with nothing short of hatred. Some of that she directed at the Inru, but most she saved for herself. This was the question they had asked her in the beginning: Can it be done? Her answer, of course, had been yes. It had always been yes, because nothing was beyond the reach of the great Heretic.

  “Lea?”

  She drew in a purposeful breath.

  “Just what we promised,” she answered. “We rip it out. Where do we stand on the extraction stats?”

  “It’s all good, if you want to rock and roll,” Funky reported, putting the final checklist on one of his displays. “Vitals are stable, and his nervous system is responsive to all transmission protocols. I just need a minute to synchronize the fiber links to our local domain. After that, we can go hot whenever you want.”

  “Have you pinpointed the flash termination sequence?”

  “Base pair seventy-nine. I’ve already transcribed the code.”

  “Good,” Lea said. Uploading the code was only the first step in what would be a lengthy process, but at least it would put a stop to the flash. How they would deal with the damage it had already done was another matter. Lea swore to herself that she would find a solution, even if it meant keeping Cray in stasis. Zoe had already died because of this shit. Lea had no intention of sacrificing another life—especially his.

  She called up a segment of the termination code on the monitor in front of her. It spilled on for page after page, mesmerizingly complex.

  “Synchronicity,” Funky called out.

  “Plug him in,” Lea ordered.

  In the tank, hundreds of individual fiber links swam through the accelerating solution and plugged into the receptors that dotted the surface of Cray’s skin. They were horrifying in their eagerness, almost alive in how they pulsated in anticipation of the draw.

  “Positive link,” Funky said. “He’s all yours, boss.”

  “Uploading termination sequence.”

  Lea engaged her console transmitter, squeezing the code into an oscillating bitstream that moved in and out of the fibers attached to Cray’s body. The ensuing biochemical reaction flooded his bloodstream with millions of free-floating base pairs, which were meant to bond with individual strands of flash and alter their DNA structure. That would end any active process, rendering the strands inert. Typically the procedure was a precautionary measure, as a way of ensuring that none of the flash data was corrupted during extraction. In Cray’s
case, it was the only way Lea knew to save his life—or at the very least, to slow the infection.

  The console beeped at her when it completed the upload.

  “Punch up a real-time construct,” she said. “Use the sample we took from him earlier as a reference.”

  Funky placed Cray’s blood sample under the scope, rendering the construct from a chemical analysis. It showed a number of flash strands slowing down, unable to penetrate the outer membranes of the cells they attacked. A short time later, they ceased to move altogether: not dead in a conventional sense, because they had never really been alive, but neutral, like viral antibodies.

  “Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum,” Funky said.

  Lea released the breath she had been holding.

  So far, so good.

  “You should be receiving another series of resonance images,” she told Funky, this time confining her scans to Cray’s head. “Six images in all, at two-minute intervals. Create an animation sequence on the high-res. I want to find out how this does in a living system.”

  “We already know the shit works,” Funky pointed out, glancing at her with a bit of concern. “You know something that I don’t?”

  “Let’s just take a look and see.”

  He shrugged, transferring the image over. The individual frames assembled over the next few seconds, then played themselves out like a movie. Cray’s brain remained dark, with no dramatic changes. Nothing much seemed to be happening—although it was difficult to tell anything at this range.

  “Go back in,” Lea said. “Five microns.”

  The microscopic soldiers appeared once again, in complete, vicious detail. Lea and Funky watched as several of them continued to invade nearby cells, as if none of them had heeded the call to stand down. The process of transformation continued unabated. If anything, it had accelerated in response to their interference.

  Funky’s yellow eyes widened.

  “What the hell?”

  Lea felt a piece of her life draining into that black void. Part of her had expected it. It was the Inru’s idea of a fail-safe. Zoe had known it from the moment she made the disease a part of her blood. She knew she was doomed.

  But Zoe was a partisan. Cray was just a victim.

  Funky jumped around to different regions of Cray’s brain. Lea, meanwhile, tried to find an indication that the process had stopped elsewhere.

  “Come on, Vortex,” she insisted. “Give me something.”

  Cray could not oblige. The flash continued to spread, no matter where Funky searched. He pushed himself away from the interface console.

  “It’s over,” he told her. “They won’t let us stop it.”

  “The hell they won’t,” Lea said, pleading with him. “You don’t just give up on the man, Funky. Not after all this. We can still fight.”

  “But he can’t.”

  Those words closed the door on her argument. So many of Cray’s tissues had been systematically replaced, any attempt to remove them would probably kill him. Physiologically, he was a different organism—something more than human but as yet incomplete.

  Whether or not he became complete was a decision neither one of them could make.

  “I’m shutting down,” Funky said, switching off his end of the interface.

  Trevor Bostic felt it on him: the push, the crush—matter and energy focused against his body, driving him away. The effect, which only intensified as the lift rose higher into the building, was like walking through water. By the time he stepped off at one hundred he was exhausted, and had to pop stimulants just to stay on his feet.

  He steadied himself while the amphetamines kicked in, then walked the deserted corridor that led to the bionucleics lab. Bostic had declared the area off-limits after the incident with Alden; but then Avalon turned up in that hospital bed, suspected of Inru terrorism, and Bostic’s more paranoid instincts took over. An armed contingent stood guard outside the lab at all times, with orders to kill anyone who approached—Bostic himself as the only exception.

  The two CSS guards appeared haggard, cadaverous. Although they rotated out every hour, the stim patches they used had begun to take their toll. Bostic wondered how long Lyssa would be able to keep it up. The power drain on her had to be enormous.

  “Stand down,” he ordered the guards.

  They stepped aside, allowing Bostic to pass. The corporate counsel wasted no time making his way across the lab, not knowing how long his chemical reinforcements would last. As he passed through the air lock outside the Tank, he doubted his actions here were worth the risk; but he also knew he had to see her, if he were ever to realize his ambitions. Phao Yin, after all, would not be around forever—especially now that his free agent had been unmasked as a spy. If he positioned himself the right way, Bostic could profit handsomely from recent events.

  Lyssa, meanwhile, carried on as if he had never entered. Bostic watched her for a time, wisps of light crossing back and forth across the Tank with angry and violent purpose. Occasionally they would morph into human shapes, with the substance of ghosts, which collided with one another to release waves of neural energy—the same energy that acted upon him now.

  And voices, thousands of them, shrieking Alden’s name.

  “Lyssa,” Bostic said, with a measure of pity. “What did he do to you?”

  Avalon stayed below the pulser grid all the way from Manhattan, using the standard free approach routes to Montreal. She made a point of following procedure, activating the hovercraft transponder as soon as she was in range of air traffic control. The transmissions were all coded to a diplomatic frequency—another one of Phao Yin’s touches. Not only did it give Avalon priority clearance, it perpetuated a useful fiction that she was on official business for the Assembly. Nobody would ask her any questions. None that mattered, anyway.

  “Montreal free flight,” she signaled. “This is Special Air Mission 2000. Request confirmation of ID acquisition and approach path.”

  “SAM 2000, acknowledged.” The reply was instantaneous and polite. “Welcome to the Northern Incorporated Territories. We have you on our monitors, just coming over the outer marker. Vector to course three-two-nine, we’ll catch you on automated approach.”

  “Negative,” Avalon radioed back. “Initiate manual flight protocols—immediate clearance on Port Authority Gamma. This is a security matter, gentlemen. Keep it tight.”

  “Received and understood. State nature of mission, please.”

  “Courier.”

  “Stand by.” There was a pause of a few seconds while they checked her story out. Courier was code for a diplomatic bag, used to ferry state secrets or large sums of cash for covert operations. The mention of the word made most controllers nervous.

  Down on the ground, the lights of the Gamma runway sprang to life.

  “Clearance granted,” control said. “Have a nice night.”

  Avalon dropped altitude, slowing her forward velocity as she flew over the threshold beacon. Automated search floods reached up into the sky and illuminated the hovercraft as it descended, catching exhaust from the ventral jets and cradling the small ship in bright plumes of hot vapor. They parted as the hovercraft settled down on the tarmac, carried away by a steady wind that swallowed the fading whine of the engines. As Avalon shut everything down, she looked out from the cockpit at the vast, flat landscape of the airport. Traffic at that hour of the night was minimal, only a few shuttle flights taking off and landing on the general aviation runways, several kilometers distant. Her own craft was the only one in the immediate area—and though its arrival had been obvious, no ground crews were coming out to meet her.

  Avalon secured the craft and popped the lower hatch, dropping the short distance to the ground. She landed like a cat, graceful and crouched. Draped in long shadows from the glare of the lights, she stepped away from the hovercraft and out into the open. Across the fields of concrete, half a kilometer away, she saw her objective. It was a massive complex of hangars—the stark white, rectangular
buildings that housed Port Authority vehicles when they weren’t in use.

  Avalon moved swiftly, cloaking herself in the shadows and coming up alongside the hangar at a broad angle. Circling toward the back, she followed a wide path that allowed her to get a look at the security architecture of the place. It presented her with few problems. Magnetic trip sensors sealed the doors and windows, backed up by motion detectors scattered broadly enough to leave huge gaps in the areas they covered. Avalon also spotted three cameras—macrodigital jobs, probably plugged into a vid link monitored by airport cops who got paid by the hour. She dropped an infrared filter over her visual sensors, casting a net for laser bleed and following the trail until she located a fiber hub mounted on the outside wall. As she suspected, the circuits all appeared to be local.

  She zigged along the blind edge of the motion detectors, then zagged to stay out of the range of the cameras. Finding a comfortable spot, she shuffled along the wall until she reached the hub. The housing was so flimsy that it offered no resistance when she yanked it open. Inside she found a series of optical cables—transmission media for the security countermeasures she had already seen, as well as the ones inside. Avalon plucked them out one at a time, then replaced the housing to conceal her work.

  She then moved on to the nearest door, carving out the lock with a stealthblade and slipping inside. Footsteps echoed against hard concrete as she walked into the heart of the building, surrounded by dozens of vehicles of every size and type. Most of them had been in storage for some time, mothballed on racks that were stacked six high from floor to ceiling: a mausoleum of modern aircraft, perched like raptors above her head. Avalon ignored them and concentrated on the recent arrivals, which were parked on the lowest level in whatever spaces were available. She wandered through the maze of jutting wings and hulking fuselages, sensors measuring the configuration of each ship, looking for the one that matched the specifications Phao Yin had given her.

  Cargo pulser. L-class, heavy conversion. Registration number NSD-12879PP.

  The find was a subliminal push, so natural that it seemed more like ESP than hard input. It directed Avalon toward the back of the hangar, where she found the pulser laying in wait. It faced her head-on, empty cockpit glass suggesting a blank stare. Alive and dirty, she thought, noting the pits and carbon scars that dotted the surface of its transluminum skin. You’ve seen some action, haven’t you?