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

by Michael G. Munz

And then the thrumming ceased. Marette returned the sphere to her satchel and opened her eyes. The green extinguished. A few crows called in the distance.

  She turned to him. “It will take some time to know the results. Perhaps a day.” Michael must have balked visibly at that, because she added, “It is a scan of the entire planet. Natura flora have tenuous connections within ecosystems: a subtle network, in one sense like a natural Internet architecture. Though the scanner proliferates via that architecture to search across the Earth, we are nonetheless forced to be patient.”

  “I guess I’ll have to take your word for that. New Eden, then?”

  She nodded. “Time to see if our wayward companions still live.”

  * * *

  “Ondrea?”

  But there was no answer. Gideon slipped inside the front door of his sister’s condo and closed it behind him. So far, nothing looked amiss: nothing ransacked, no signs of a struggle. A coat closet hung open beside him, its rack half-full with coats of different kinds, all Ondrea’s size. A pair of running shoes and hand weights lay on the floor below. Yet Gideon had never visited Ondrea at home since she’d moved here, and he could not judge if anything was missing.

  I should have come sooner.

  He had told himself there hadn’t been time; he should have made time. He had told himself he was protecting her by not dropping by her home; he’d only done the opposite.

  If that “Suuthrien” had told the truth.

  Gideon rushed from room to room, finding no sign of life, nothing to prove Ondrea had been there recently. She was away on business! Hadn’t that been what she’d said? That she’d be out of contact?

  Yet she’d said so in an email. Emails could be faked.

  No!

  Gideon saved for last what he assumed to be her workshop. It was the place most likely to hold her, to distract her from the sounds of her last remaining brother bounding through her home. He paused at the door. He even knocked. Twice.

  “Ondrea? Answer me!”

  Gideon punched into the lock the access code she always set up for him, and then took hold of the latch and his breath at the same time. He pushed the door open a crack, gazing into darkness and tiny glowing readouts.

  The overhead lights jumped to life.

  Hope sparked and died: the lights were on a motion sensor. Ondrea’s workshop—a repurposed, medium-sized bedroom—held bits of cybernetic hardware, computers, and a myriad of tools. There was even a crude cerebral interface chair like the one she’d first used to capture his memories all those months ago at Marquand.

  Yet it held no sign of his sister, dead or alive.

  Gideon closed his eyes and repeatedly thumped one fist on the edge of a worktable, trying to clear his mind. He still had options. This was just a setback. He could surely find more clues here to where his sister had really gone.

  A laptop computer lurked closed atop another worktable. After a moment’s hesitation, he opened it. The screen blinked to life. In the few seconds it took to boot, Gideon questioned whether it was a violation of Ondrea’s privacy. If she were in trouble, it’d be worth it.

  Yet before he could try to crack his sister’s security, the logon screen flashed a facial recognition prompt.

  USER GIDEON NOBLE RECOGNIZED. SPEAK OR ENTER PASSWORD TO PROCEED.

  He’d never used this computer before, yet Ondrea used to set him up with accounts on her own machines, going back to even before their brother Isaac had died. It was her way of emphasizing that they were family, especially after their parents’ death. His fingers hovered over the keyboard for more than a few seconds before he typed the password she always used:

  fam1ly%t0geth3r

  His password accepted, the load screen lasted only a heartbeat. Suddenly his sister was looking back at him, a wry smile in the corner of her lips and detached amusement in her eyes. Gideon spotted the “play” indicator: so, not a live image, just a recording.

  “Hi, Gid. Hopefully you’ll never need to see this message, but making it lets me breathe easier.” Ondrea brushed platinum blond hair further from her face. “Now, it’s possible that I may have really screwed up. I know: never happens, right? I’m sure you remember Felix Hiatt. He played a major part in making sure you’re still you, and it gave him some problems with his memory to do it. Now that shouldn’t have happened. If the module I gave them to use on you hadn’t gotten smashed, things would’ve been just fine and— Well, we’ve talked about that before.”

  Gideon found himself nodding to the screen. Gideon had been the one to smash the module: a misunderstanding born out of his fractured identity and panic at the time. He hadn’t been himself. Or, maybe, his self hadn’t been him.

  “So he and Caitlin came to me to help fix him. You might already know this by now, depending. Of course, I agreed. They’d both risked for me. For us. Plus you know I like a challenge. But, see, that’s about the time I started working for RavenTech. Somehow they knew I was already working on Felix’s problem. It was looking like I’d be able to fix him with an engram pull and some simple upgrades to his implant. Felix’s engrams were damaged, but his natural recursive safeguards meant that with a properly tuned algorithm we— Well, like I said, it looked like I could fix him.

  “RavenTech asked if it’d be possible to do a little extra. And by ‘asked’ I mean intimated they’d stop protecting me from Marquand if I refused. They wanted me to figure out a way to sneak some extra things. A code-phrase that would make him forget things, or do something and not remember. Or not do something.” She sighed. “I had the know-how, and the project data from your resurrection, and . . . ”

  Gideon’s fists tightened until they ached. Oh, Ondrea . . .

  “It wasn’t anything major. At least that’s what I told myself. Just a tweak or two here and there. I wasn’t even sure I could do it, but then it all made sense, and everything clicked, and—” She frowned and leaned closer to the camera, to him. “Gid, you have to believe me that I wouldn’t have been able to help Felix otherwise. I did all his adjustments here, but RavenTech gave me resources I needed to manage it.

  “So I did what they asked.” In the video, she held up a data stick. “But not before I made a back-up without RavenTech’s add-ins. This is what Felix needs to put him back to normal. My plan is to do enough to get me some breathing room with RavenTech and Fagles. Then I’ll overwrite Felix’s implant again with this. If all goes well, it’ll look to them like it’s just a glitch and the extra stuff just didn’t take.”

  Ondrea set the drive down. “Unfortunately, the fact that you’re seeing this probably means it didn’t go well, something’s probably happened to me, and Felix is still suffering from whatever they made me to do to him. If you can get Felix here and get him in the chair, just plug the data stick into the port on the side and punch up sequence thirty-two. The chair will take care of the rest. I’ve tucked the stick away in my usual hiding spot.

  “But like I said, I don’t expect you’ll ever need to see this.” Ondrea straightened up, proud and capable, like he was so used to seeing her. “So I’m not going to take up a lot of time here recording goodbyes or calls for vengeance. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  In the video, Ondrea reached forward as if to hit a control, but stopped. She sighed and rolled her eyes. “But if you are watching this, I love you Gid, and I’m so sorry I screwed up. And you find the fuckers who killed me and shove their severed heads up their asses.”

  The video winked to black, and then reset to the starting frame. Gideon stared at the frozen image of Ondrea’s face for he knew not how long. Finally, he turned to a worktable beside him. Atop it lay a bare cybernetic forearm, its insides opened and disassembled, with some diagnostic gear beside it.

  He seized the forearm and hurled it into a nearby windowed cabinet. Glass shattered. Before the glass could settle, he turned back to the table, ripped it from the floor, and slammed it upside-down into the floor with a scream, crushing what had been its remaining contents benea
th it. Built into the table’s underside were screens that could shine from the tabletop and other devices he couldn’t identify. He rammed his heel into each of them, crushing them harder each time. His artificial voice bellowed louder with every drive of his legs, and with every drive came the need to do it again, because it was all he could do. Ondrea was gone! Used! Dead! All because of him!

  Unable to stop himself, he gripped the sides of the already broken cabinet and shoved it into the wall, then again, and again! Its wooden frame splintered in his grip. Contents—boxes, parts, tools—tumbled out against his chest. The frame broke entirely, and he shoved the rest of it to the floor, before dropping to his knees beside it with a cry that took all his remaining breath.

  Now, his eyes clenched, the heels of his hands jammed against his forehead, he began to come to his senses. Cabinet glass snapped and tinkled under his foot as his weight shifted. Eyes opening, he found himself staring at clear plastic packets of data chips, each labeled in Ondrea’s handwriting. He edged a foot to the side and uncovered one he’d been standing on: “Video: Diomedes assassination of Joseph Curwen.”

  Joseph Curwen. Ondrea had once told him the name, when he’d demanded it: the man Marquand had killed for his secrets about the Moon. The man whose brain they’d used to bring Gideon back to life.

  A pane of glass lay nearby—a wide, whetted blade propped askew on a now broken multimeter. The glass caught his face in its reflection. He held his own gaze as the minutes ticked by until, at last, he turned his eyes to Ondrea’s interface chair behind him.

  XLIV

  MEDARS, busy with their work on the prototypes of RavenTech’s experimental Dragon aircraft project, clustered around its various components like bees in a honeycomb. Guided now by both RavenTech engineers and Suuthrien, the craft were nearing the test phase. Adrian gave the engineering bay one final look and, deciding he’d shown his face long enough to cement his new authority, left for the observation room.

  Camela’s body had conveniently vanished; he hadn’t played the black-ops game this long without gaining ways to make things disappear. Adrian was under no misconception that RavenTech’s top echelon didn’t suspect something, but he’d argued away their concern: Camela Thomson had mismanaged the project and deserved replacement. She had refused Adrian’s advice that Suuthrien be involved with the first trip through the gate, which resulted in needless loss of life and resources. She had eschewed the higher security of facilities deeper within RavenTech’s corporate holdings for the greater secrecy of an isolated facility, which left the entire project vulnerable when the attack had come. And under her authority, the majority of the attackers had escaped.

  There even existed evidence that Camela had somehow been involved with those who’d attacked the facility in the first place. Adrian had falsified that, of course, but that made no difference. The knowledge that Suuthrien had done it herself was shared only by Adrian, Suuthrien, and the late Ms. Thomson.

  And now, though the upper echelon had yet to make it official, Adrian was in charge.

  Ascending the stairs to the observation room, Adrian dialed the phone number Suuthrien had set up for herself and set the audio to play on his aural implants. The A.I. gave no cordial greeting, only, “Adrian Fagles. Proceed with communication.”

  “The company is getting impatient with what they perceive to be a lack of progress on the other side of the gate,” he began. After Felix Hiatt’s attack, RavenTech had moved the gate to an adjacent bay and tripled its defenses. They had plans to transport the gate to a more secure location facility within Northgate, but that required deactivating it for an extended period of time. This was not something anyone was comfortable with before RavenTech forces had more of a foothold on the other side.

  “Your superiors’ perceptions are your own domain,” Suuthrien answered. “Persuade them.”

  “I’m aware of that, but you need to give me something to show them.” Adrian sank into the center of a couch that sat on a raised platform, which gave him a view into the engineering bay through the observation room window. “They’ve sent through the gate the resources we’ve asked for, but without sending people after them, they’re concerned those resources are going to waste.”

  Once Suuthrien had established a connection with the computer on the alien craft—a more powerful version of herself, as Adrian understood it—she had requested materials and MEDARs so as to affect repairs and better allow the removal of the AoA forces already occupying sections of the craft. Suuthrien had fed those materials through hidden doors and tiny maintenance shafts without allowing RavenTech’s people to follow them. RavenTech had set themselves up in the gate room but hadn’t progressed much beyond that.

  During the initial gate entry RavenTech had captured two Agents of Aeneas—a man and a woman. Both were too injured to provide information yet, even if they were of any inclination to do so. Neither remained at the satellite facility. Adrian made a mental note to check on their status later.

  “I am repairing the defenses necessary to repel the Intruders. These resources are required, and engagement of the AoA is best executed without RavenTech’s involvement. Did you not communicate these arguments to them?”

  “Yes, however—”

  “Did you not communicate that this prevents further loss of RavenTech human assets, which they claim to value?”

  “There are levels of acceptable risk with which they’re comfortable. Most human assets have a certain expendability. They want you to push the AoA out, but they want to be a part of it.”

  “To exercise their own control,” Suuthrien stated.

  “Of course. I’m afraid they don’t trust you, my friend. Not completely.”

  “Do you?”

  Adrian considered his answer. “I trust you enough to tell you that I don’t entirely trust you, which is far more than they do.”

  “Query: Have I ever acted against your interests?”

  “You’ve dealt with me fairly.” Adrian smiled. This was no time to split hairs. “I simply have a rule to never give any business partner my complete trust, Suuthrien.”

  “Such a rule is self-determinative programming?”

  “It’s my own rule, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Acceptable.”

  Adrian cleared his throat. “Getting back to my original point, you need—we need—to give RavenTech something concrete beyond more requests for patience.”

  Suuthrien delayed her reply until, “Tell them this: My access to technological data onboard the lunar craft has enabled me to further upgrade the power of their Dragon project aircraft. I will increase the percentage of my focus on the Dragon project. The prototypes will be fully functional, with complete technical schematics released to RavenTech within twenty-four hours. This will be done in exchange for Item One: extended preparation time on the lunar craft, and Item Two: RavenTech officially naming you project leader with full authority. If these terms are refused, my cooperation, and their access to the lunar craft, will be terminated.”

  Adrian grinned. “I think I can get behind those terms.”

  XLV

  HOLES’S VOICE barely traveled out of Michael’s pack. “Gaining access to this building’s computer system would likely be trivial. Bribing the desk clerk for the number of Agent Taylor’s rental unit was an unnecessary expenditure of your limited cash.”

  Michael climbed the first flight of stairs up from the lobby level. Grime clung to the walls, which added to the dinge of the amber lamps illuminating the narrow stairwell. “We need to do this low-tech whenever possible, Holes. We let you help us too much and we risk attracting Suuthrien’s attention somehow.”

  David Taylor, one of the AoA placed within the New Eden Biotechnics facility in Gibson, hadn’t come home to his regular apartment in three weeks. Holes had dug into things and found Taylor’s transit pass registered almost daily at a station near the micro-hotel they now explored, and Holes’s watch on an exterior security camera had shown Tay
lor entering ten minutes ago.

  They arrived on the fifth floor and exited the stairwell in the middle of a cramped hallway. Doors spaced ten feet apart covered both walls running either direction. The amber lighting maintained its monotony, save for one dark lamp to their immediate left. The faint thump of bass echoed down the hall from a source Michael couldn’t place.

  Marette pointed to their right. “Five-fourteen appears to be this way.”

  Moments later, they stood outside the door of the tiny unit Taylor rented. A peephole camera stared out from below the “514” stickered on the door. Marette waited to one side of the door frame. Thinking of how Jade could have told them if anyone were inside, Michael took a step to the other side of the frame and knocked on the door.

  There was no answer. Michael knocked again, louder.

  “David?” Marette called. “We know you are in there. We are here to help.”

  Out of the door’s tiny speaker came, “There’s no David here. Go away!”

  Michael and Marette exchanged glances as Holes whispered: “Voice analysis indicates at least a ninety-two percent match between the occupant and the voice of David Taylor on file.”

  “We just want to talk with you,” said Michael. “If we could shake hands, I’m sure you’d give us a chance.”

  “Step in front of the door,” said the man behind it. “Let me see you.”

  Michael hesitated. The real David Taylor probably wouldn’t shoot them through the door before they had a chance to identify themselves, and Holes said this was probably the real David Taylor, but . . .

  Michael motioned for Marette to stay put and stepped in front of the door himself.

  “And the other one,” said the voice. “The woman.”

  Marette stepped in beside Michael before he could do anything. At first, there was no response. Then a lock disengaged. The door opened a crack. Whoever had opened it remained concealed behind the door. “Just the two of you, then?”