“And then we will defeat them.”
Azrael turned and traced a claw along the neck of the patient, watching her sutured-covered chest rise and fall as she breathed slowly. “Then you will get your chance to bring in Team Ghost, Beckham, and all the rest of these traitorous bastards.”
“How, Prophet?”
“It’s easy. Just tell them exactly what they want to hear.”
— 9 —
Strapped to a chair in the parking garage outside a Variant tunnel, Kate’s head filled with a thousand pained voices crying out to be free. Men, women, children, all prisoners of the Variants, imprisoned in the webbing network. She wished she could send them some words of reassurance.
But a single moment of weakness would ruin all her efforts.
If she so much as sent them a single message, the masterminds would know she was a spy in their midst. She had to drown out their screams of agony and pleas for help.
The only way to help these people was to zero-in on what really mattered.
Finding the Prophet. Finding where the New Gods were. And sabotage any incoming attacks.
She had already missed the attack on Banff and the monsters’ communications regarding the scouts outside Houston.
The longer she remained hooked up to the network filtering through the messages, the more her head throbbed. Cold sweat dripped over her flesh, and she trembled as she listened to the terrified voices of people hooked up to the vines around the country, their bodies wasting away to feed the spreading network.
“Help!”
“Mom? Mom, where are you?”
“I can’t… breathe… I can’t…”
The voices overwhelmed her. She could hardly stand it.
Feed me. Feed. Food.
Kill it. It threatens us. Heretics.
Attack the camp. Kill the humans. Bring them to us.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
She tried to keep her mind focused. But the human voices won out again. Her muscles contracted and her skull flared with pain.
Suddenly all the voices disappeared. She blinked, her blurred vision clearing to Ron standing above her.
“Kate, you with me?” he asked, gingerly touching her shoulder.
“Yeah… How long have I been…”
“A few hours.”
“Felt like days.”
“Leslie just finished up a chromatography experiment upstairs. Maybe it would be a good time for you two to swap.”
Kate straightened in the chair. A few soldiers guarding the parking garage glanced at her, worry clear in their expression. She twisted to see Sammy at the computer behind her.
“Was it that bad?” Kate asked.
“You were screaming,” Sammy said, twisting one of her dreadlocks. “You sure you’re okay?”
Kate massaged her temples. “I need a break. Ron, you’re right. Where’s Leslie?”
“We just sent for her,” Sammy said. She walked over and handed Kate a towel for the sweat.
“Thanks,” Kate said. She felt a little embarrassed to have her assistants treating her so gently, but she couldn’t let pride get in their way.
“I can learn how to do this too, so it’s not just Leslie and you,” Ron said.
“We’ll see.”
Footsteps soon echoed down the stairs, and Leslie appeared.
“I’m ready to go,” she said. “And I’ve got the last bits of data processing upstairs for you. Took me nearly the entire day to get it ready.”
“Give me the rundown,” Kate said.
“Figuring out what was in the grenade was relatively easy. It took me a few hours to run through the basic battery of biological agent assessments, but since we knew it was bacteria, that made it easier.”
Kate braced herself. “It isn’t a new variation of airborne VX-99, is it?”
“No, actually, it contained anthrax spores.”
“Were they genetically modified?”
“Not according to the gene sequencing.”
“There’s something else this tells us,” Kate said.
“What’s that?” Ron asked.
“Anthrax isn’t hard to grow or distribute, but before the war, existing strains in the United States were tightly guarded,” she said. “Only a few national labs had access for testing and research purposes. Maybe that’s another connection we can exploit.”
“I can compile a list of all those laboratories and institutions,” Ron said.
“This might be a long shot, but we already know that the person or people responsible for the New Gods had access to several DARPA technologies. The high concentrations of activity in those former research labs in Denver and Seattle proved that.”
“But those labs only housed parts of the research for the microelectric arrays and the neural programming technology for the webbing network.”
“Exactly. And while Seattle turned out to be a site of Chimera research, there was no sign of the Prophet there. Based on the presence of anthrax in that grenade and all the crazy biological horrors like the bats, masterminds, network, and Chimeras, we need to be focusing on labs related to biodefense.”
“We’re looking for one sick former government biologist behind all this, aren’t we?” Sammy said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. It was a rogue military officer who led to the initial VX-99 outbreak, and with the number of technologies the New Gods have used, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that some traitorous Department of Defense scientist or an entire research group is behind all this.”
“But when we found out about Denver and Seattle, how would we have missed this place when we were tracking all that communication activity over the network?” Ron asked.
Sammy answered for Kate. “Firewalls, encrypted comms. Think basic cybersecurity, except adapted for a biological network. Whoever this Prophet is, he keeps proving himself smarter than we ever anticipated. If he was previously involved in national security, the guy would know to protect his digital and physical footprint.”
“Sammy, I want you to dig a little deeper in the network with Leslie,” Kate said. “See if you can find any dark corners of the network that might be protected by these firewalls. We need to redouble our search efforts.”
“I’ll get started now,” Sammy said.
Kate turned to Leslie. “How about the biopsied Chimera tissues?”
“The last of the chromatography and PCR runs were just finishing when I came down.
