Prodigal by Marc D. Giller Page A

screech into the cacophony of sound that poisoned the atmosphere. Then the air itself turned hot, as if compacted by the thousands of tons of steel, concrete, and glass above their heads.
    “Heads up, people,” the lieutenant shouted. “Secure the prisoners for evac.”
    Lea barely heard him. She was enthralled by the construct and how the battle it waged coincided with the severity of the disturbance. As the countermeasures deteriorated, the quake grew more powerful; when the defenses regrouped, the shaking leveled off. It was a losing fight. Each wave of the attack pummeled the containment protocols, rendering the code brittle and porous. How long it would take those walls to crumble was anybody’s guess.
    Harmonics. Resonance.
    Insistent, voices wanting to be heard.
    There’s something else here.
    She felt Tiernan’s hand on her shoulder.
    “What’s going on, Lea?”
    “Some kind of energy surge,” she replied. “It’s generating an interference pattern—almost like a seismic wave.”
    “We have to get out of here.”
    Lea ignored him. Fumbling for her integrator, she terminated the flex viruses and dissolved herself out of the construct. The containment system was already on the brink of failure and didn’t need her in there to hasten its demise. She then purged her mission data and set the integrator to record all the active processes coming off the Inru domain clusters. The volume of information was staggering—far more than the small device could hold—which forced Lea to junk the bitstream with high compression. She just hoped she would be able to extrapolate the data later.
    If there is a later.
    “Major!” Tiernan insisted.
    “Hold station,” she ordered.
    Tiernan stared at her while she turned back to the virtual display, urging the code to rebuild itself. When that didn’t work, she jacked the programming interface herself, redirecting resources from the other clusters and using those processing cycles to do the heavy lifting for her. The fresh code was raw and corrupt—but at least it was something the system had never seen before.
    “What are you doing?” Tiernan asked, quiet but intense.
    “A little trick I learned when I made a run on the Tagura domain,” she explained. “Introducing foreign code to confuse their crawler. With any luck, it’ll keep the thing busy enough to let me sneak in.”
    On that cue, the vibrations began to subside. The building settled back down, its protests reduced to a whisper of what they once were; but beneath that an undercurrent of potential energy remained—a faint but audible growl, coursing through the foundation. The construct showed that Lea’s barrier was holding, though that measure amounted to little more than stuffing a cork in the maw of an active volcano. The pressure beneath continued to build, growing more explosive with each passing second.
    “We don’t have much time,” Lea said, getting up from the display to address the others. “Listen up, people! Beginning now, I want a full search pattern—and I mean every square centimeter of this room. There’s something we haven’t seen—and if I’m right, we don’t have a hell of a lot of time to find it.”
    The team sprang back into action. Using integrators and helmet sensors, they spread across the basement on the hunt. All except for Tiernan, who didn’t budge from Lea’s field of vision.
    “You playing a hunch?” he asked.
    “There’s a doorway in here,” she said. “Something that isn’t in the building plans.”
    The lieutenant frowned curiously.
    “A shielded bunker?”
    Lea nodded.
    “They’re here,” she decided. “And they’re mine.”
    Tiernan followed her over to where the Inru mercs lay. Lea propped one of them up, injecting him with a stim spray from her medikit. The merc’s head lolled back and forth, his eyes fluttering as the drug started to take effect.
    “You with me?” Lea asked, patting him on the cheek. “Come on, wake up.”
    The merc