A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3)

by Michael G. Munz

  Caitlin put a hand on Felix’s shoulder, uncertain if she wanted him to reach Ondrea or not.

  “Can you at least tell me if she’s there?” Felix asked. “Yes, there. In the building? Does she work for Marquand at all anymore?” A pause. “Look, I understand you’re only— No, I’ve already left my number, but I’m trying to find out if—” Felix rolled his eyes and presumably listened to a few more sentences before, “Why not? Because I don’t remember, that’s why not! Look, if she’s still there, just give her the message, alright? Yeah, you’ve been a gargantuan help.” He hung up and met Caitlin’s eyes. For a moment, neither spoke.

  “I think we’re going to need to go hunting for her,” Felix said.

  “Do we have time for that? They said it would get worse if you don’t do something.”

  “I remember what they said.”

  “You don’t have to keep telling me things you remember, Felix.”

  “What about what I won’t remember if we do what Horizon suggests? I’ve lived with the donor’s memories in my head for years, Caitlin, they’re a part of who I am now. And they can’t even be sure I’ll keep all my own memories if they take out the implant!”

  Horizon had analyzed the damage to Felix’s implant and been unable to come up with an easy fix. Removing it entirely was their best option; it would stop his short-term memory loss and maybe even return to him the experiences of his own life that he’d begun to forget.

  “And the longer you wait to do it, the higher the risk of that is. Right now it’s a minimal risk. You don’t even know if Ondrea can help! What if it takes a week or more to track her down and she doesn’t have any other options?”

  “What if she does and I don’t find her?”

  She grabbed Felix’s arm. “You really believe she will? Gideon is the only one she cares about. She said helping Gideon wouldn’t hurt you!”

  “We didn’t exactly do it by the procedure she gave us either, you know.”

  “After what she did with Gideon, Marquand probably fired her, at the very least. She might not even have access to the project data.”

  “Caitlin, she did what she did on that project in order to resurrect her brother. She would have made her own records.”

  “Perhaps. But will they be of use?”

  Felix started to say something. Instead, he took both of her hands and sat her down beside him on the brick edge of a raised enclosure that fostered a maple sapling. “Ondrea owes us. Everything in my head, what’s mine and what isn’t, it’s who I am now. Do you want to see that die? See me die? I don’t.”

  She squeezed his hands. “Felix, if I knew for sure she could help us, I’d be completely in the saddle with this. As it is? It feels to me like a choice between saving most of you, or risking losing all of you. Call me a selfish bitch if you like; I can’t help how I feel.”

  Felix gave what almost seemed like a chuckle. “I would, but then I’d have to kick my own ass for calling you names, and I haven’t had a chance to stretch adequately for that.”

  “Felix,” she began, uncertain how to follow it up. She’d dragged him into this whole mess to help Gideon. Maybe she didn’t deserve to have a say in how to get Felix out of it.

  Bollocks.

  It had been sheer luck that he had stumbled on Felix Hiatt’s conversation. Before leaving the concealment behind the parked ambulance where he had stopped to eavesdrop, Adrian Fagles made a quick note about what he heard. Leather Oxfords clacking on the pavement, Adrian resumed his course to the hospital to learn what else he could of Michael Flynn’s condition personally.

  IV

  DAHLIA MILLER opened the door, walked into the blackness, and closed it behind her. A whisper of the late-September chill outside made its presence known. The faint sliver of city light that sliced through the curtains only accentuated the room’s otherwise total darkness. Dahlia leaned her back against the door, drew a deep breath, and smiled, savoring.

  “Lights,” she said finally.

  On command, the two table lamps and her kitchen’s overhead came to life in a rapid, artificial sunrise. She peeled herself off the door and floated to her bedroom on a wave of accomplishment. Damn, she loved days like this!

  She was fumbling to remove her heels before getting even halfway in the bedroom door. Her saltwater reef tank cast a bluish white glow across the walls. The bedroom was cramped, but it was enough. It was home.

  Dahlia sat down in her dress at the edge of the bed, a few feet from the tank. Anemones wafted and grasped in the water in a patient quest for food. A tiny sea cucumber detached from the glass and floated along the artificial current to the other side of the tank. Her two wrasse fish, Alfonse and Lorenzo, danced like flickers of flame among the corals, and a pistol shrimp named Capone scrambled back into hiding.

  “Hey, gang. Guess what I did?” Dahlia removed her other shoe and began to massage her sole. “No one? Hello?” Yeah, so she was talking to fish. She didn’t usually, but success—and, alright, the glasses of wine in her—had her giddy. “You’re looking at the woman who saved the Frankford Women’s Shelter!”

  Alfonse appeared focused on his dance. The anemones continued to waft, oblivious. Lorenzo, however, darted up to the top of the tank on the side closest to her, stopped, and pooped.

  Dahlia sniggered. “Fine, be that way.”

  All right, so fish didn’t know the northeastern Philadelphia shelter from a hole in the ground. She made for her closet, eager to trade the long black dress she’d worn to the fundraiser for something more comfortable. A few minutes later, the dress was back on its hanger and Dahlia was barefoot in a pair of black sweats. She grabbed her favorite red t-shirt from the floor, slipped it over her head, and—after a few moments at the tank to watch the feather duster worm withdraw into its tube—trotted out of the bedroom again.

  Dahlia had spent most of the fundraiser pleading the shelter’s case to various local businesspeople who might turn a compassionate eye to it. Adrenaline had sufficed for nourishment, but now her stomach growled for attention. She grabbed a can of soup and the last of an overpriced baguette teetering on the edge of going stale and set to turning them into something edible.

  If hunger hadn’t made her so impatient, she’d have ordered in. She deserved a little celebration, after all. Saving the shelter was her first major success for the Agents of Aeneas since her recruitment. That shelter helped over three dozen battered women and children each week to get back on their feet and find ways to fend for themselves.

  Beyond that, it was the nature of this particular victory that made her feel fantastic. So much of what the Agents of Aeneas did felt like subterfuge and misdirection: redirecting funds to worthy causes via computer trickery, working agents into positions of power to better guide policy decisions, or engineering back doors for fellow agents in need, like the AoA work-arounds at airport security. It was all for the cause—and the cause was a worthy one—but her efforts tonight were a straightforward appeal to the humanity of ordinary people.

  She wasn’t naïve. Without their technology, the AoA could not survive. Their crowning achievement, the secret network architecture known as the “UnderNet”, allowed global communication on a well-hidden, ghosted infrastructure lurking beneath the Internet. Partially built on something the Illuminati created during the Internet’s early days, when it was just for government functions and inter-university research exchange, the network now featured AoA additions made after the Illuminati had crumbled and the AoA rose from its ashes. Dahlia didn’t know the specifics; tech wasn’t her area. Yet it was vital.

  Even so, part of the pride swelling her heart, beyond what she’d done to aid the shelter’s work, came from knowing that such an accomplishment would mean a lot to those in the AoA who favored the organization’s humanitarian goals. It seemed the lion’s share of the AoA’s focus of late centered on the Exodus Project due to developments on the Moon with the buried alien ship codenamed Paragon. The project focused on finding a way to escap
e what the Earth had become before humanity succumbed to its own self-destructive patterns. Dahlia knew that was important, but wasn’t trying to do what they could in the present for people just as important? If the AoA could parley the craft’s technology into a viable way to build their own interstellar craft, would they just abandon everyone else?

  The question used to be academic. The AoA had geared most of its efforts toward steering humanity as a whole back on course, even if some considered it a mere delaying action. Now, each day brought the Exodus Project one step closer to completion. Where the AoA once worked in harmony, things were becoming increasingly factionalized.

  Yet they would work it out. They always had. Dahlia had spoken to Arbiter Szendroi himself on the matter just last week. He’d seen the problem, too. He would help the AoA guide itself toward a solution. After all, wasn’t the desire for harmony what brought the Agents of Aeneas together in the first place?

  Her palm hummed three times in rapid succession; it startled her so much she nearly dropped the soup taking it out of the microwave. The humming repeated: her implanted AoA chip. The code meant an emergency meeting, all agents called.

  Dahlia set the soup down, tugged a bite off of the bread, and went for her tablet computer. Despite the uncertainty of the meeting’s cause, she could not keep a grin from her face. Good news or bad—hopefully good—it meant the opportunity to try out her new neural link. Just because she cared about humanity didn’t mean she hated technology, after all. It had its place.

  It could even be fun.

  Dahlia sifted through the clutter on her dining room table, snatched up the cable she needed, and dashed for the comfort of her bedroom. The thought of experiencing the online world directly through her brain was at once frightening and alluring. Feeding directly into the brain, neural links gave better understanding, a more immersive simulation, and the ability to project her presence into a virtual meeting far more effectively. Yet it had taken her months to get up the nerve to have her link installed.

  Dahlia plugged the cable into her tablet and waited for the software to initialize. “Come on, come on,” she grinned. Did it always take this long? She batted her fingertips on the back of the tablet. “Hurry up you—”

  -PROGRAM READY. WAITING FOR NEURAL LINK.-

  Her first time. Dahlia lay back, slid the cover from the port behind her ear, and plugged the cable into her mind. Reality fell away in a dizzying exuberance and became a distant sensation as Dahlia plunged herself into the UnderNet. The AoA’s virtual meeting hall formed around her.

  It was even more real than she’d imagined. Her fellows were joining her one by one in the shadowed cloud that surrounded the AoA Council. The majority attended via neural link, others via the old fashioned screen-and-microphone interface. How long before they all used a neural link?

  Not all of the Council had yet arrived. One councilor, she knew, had gone to Paragon and thus was too far away to attend at all. There was a little time before the meeting began. Still marveling, Dahlia floated about to mingle.

  Five minutes later, seeming perplexed, Arbiter Szendroi called the meeting to order.

  Five seconds after that, fire lanced through Dahlia’s mind. She doubled over in a shriek, barely aware of her fellows doing the same.

  In Dahlia’s bedroom, the two wrasse fish continued their dance, oblivious to the trickle of blood from Dahlia’s ears and the end of her breathing.

  V

  IN THE DARKNESS, something behind him was beeping.

  The darkness was not absolute. A glow diffused through it from a place that felt almost beyond his senses. He strained to see further, to see past it, to see . . . anything.

  Michael began to realize his eyes were closed. Even with that revelation, it felt like minutes before he could hoist the tonnage of his eyelids. Light streamed through the cracks as they opened; it was blinding, indistinct. He blinked in an effort to focus, which then touched off another struggle to get his eyes open again. He’d once worked two full days without sleep on his uncle’s farm when the tractor crapped out, and even then he hadn’t felt this tired.

  What was going on?

  This time he managed to forestall his eyelids’ crashing down long enough to make out bits of the room: A TV hanging from the ceiling on the opposite wall. Drooping flowers crowded into a vase on a narrow table beside the bed in which he lay. A window to his right through which he could just make out the amber glow of the city at night.

  This wasn’t his apartment. Was it?

  No, then where . . . ?

  He was in a hospital bed?

  The room’s lights were on. So was the TV, though the volume was down and he couldn’t focus enough to make out the picture. An I.V. needle fed into his right arm, and his limbs ached as if he’d spent the day climbing. A chair sat in the corner of the room, facing the bed. It was empty save for a coat he didn’t recognize.

  Where were his clothes?

  It was a private room. To his left, the door stood ajar. It gave no view save for the occasional movements of what must be medical staff passing by. Why was he here?

  Michael eyed the coat on the chair again. Dark green leather. Its style and size suggested that it belonged to a woman. Caitlin’s? No: telltale signs of embedded armor beneath the leather. Caitlin wouldn’t wear an armor jacket. Well, he’d never seen her wear one, anyway.

  The door opened wider. Michael rolled his head along the pillow, expecting a nurse or a doctor. The woman who entered looked to be neither. She wore neither scrubs nor lab coat. Instead, pants of heavy green leather, wrapped with a silver-buckled white belt, sat below a black collared sweater, crossed with the straps of the auto-pistol shoulder holster that hung at her left side. Her hair seemed a combination of auburn and scarlet, though Michael couldn’t trust his groggy eyes to be sure. She wore it up, save for a thick, shoulder-length strand that dangled from her left temple and caught the light from the hallway far more than seemed natural. She blinked in apparent surprise to find him watching her, turned in what Michael could tell was a wary check of the space behind the door, and then, appearing satisfied, closed it behind her.

  “Who are you?” Michael asked. It escaped his throat in a ragged whisper.

  A grin turned up the corner of the woman’s mouth. “Most call me Jade.” Her pants matched the jacket. She took it from the chair’s cushion, hung it over the back instead, and sat down. The dangling strand at her temple glowed a silvery white. It wasn’t catching the light, Michael realized, it was emitting it. He caught sight of another glowing strip traveling in a curve into the rest of her hair.

  Did he know this woman? He didn’t remember why he was in the hospital; maybe he’d forgotten her, too? Michael raised his right arm. It tingled from the effort. He pointed to the AoA chip in his palm and asked, “Are you . . . ?”

  “Am I what? A hand?” Jade cocked her head. “Not all the circuits are firing up there yet, huh?”

  “No, I mean—” No sense explaining. If she were AoA she’d have understood and shaken his hand to show him her own chip. Questions muddled together in his brain. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re in Corporate Mercy Hospital; it’s, let’s see . . . Tuesday, November twenty-third, and I’m watching over you.” She crossed one ankle over her other knee, displaying a black, thick-heeled boot beneath the pant leg. Michael knew little about boots, but these flattered her.

  Wait a minute. “It can’t be November,” he said.

  “Yeah, ace, I’m pretty sure it is.”

  He’d been out for three months? “It was just August!” What happened to Felix? To Marc?

  She smirked. “You’ve been unconscious since summer while I’ve been out and about, awake at least half the time, but yeah, okay, I’m sure you’re right and I’m wrong.” The smirk softened. “Sorry, guy, it’s a fact. I’ve been watching you since Halloween. Glad you decided to wake up before I went stir-crazy.”

  Michael swallowed. She wasn’t AoA, but easily a freela
ncer. “Why?”

  “Hired to.”

  “By?”

  She shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “Let me guess: their money was good.”

  “If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. Someone wants you kept safe.”

  Michael’s eyes crashed closed again on a wave of fatigue.

  “Hey,” Jade said, giving his foot a shake. “No passing out on me.”

  “I’m . . . not.” He decided to let his eyelids rest a moment.

  The next thing Michael knew, a doctor was looking down at him. He had a kind face and russet brown skin that contrasted with the vibrant white streaks in his short hair. Jade stood at the foot of the bed. Her jacket was on.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Flynn.” The doctor didn’t look up from the tablet he held. Whatever medical readouts it displayed cast a glow across his face. “I’m Doctor Browder. Do you know where you are?”

  “Hospital,” he muttered. How long had he slept this time? “What happened?”

  “You’re out of the woods now.” The doctor shined a pen light in his eyes. “Follow the light, please.” Michael did as the doctor asked. “Any discomfort?”

  “My whole body feels tired. My muscles tingle. What happened?”

  “The tingling is from the anti-atrophics. Kept your muscles stimulated while you were unconscious. We’ve taken you off of those for now, so it should subside in a day or so. You may also experience some grogginess or dizziness, but that’s normal.” The doctor took a breath. “You’ve been in a coma for almost three months.”

  It was no easier to accept the second time. Michael glanced at Jade. Though an “I told you so” was written across her face, she kept silent. “But what happened?” Michael asked.

  Doctor Browder took a few seconds to enter something into the tablet. “You had an acute myocardial infarction; a heart attack. Quite uncommon in a man your age.” He lowered the tablet. “Yours wasn’t natural. When they brought you in they found a foreign substance in your bloodstream: a cybernetic poison of nanobots. It triggered the attack, though I’m told that more than half of the dose you had in you was already inert.”