Prodigal by Marc D. Giller Read Free Book Online Page A

how to have a good time,” Pallas remarked, interrupting Novak. The two of them lived to needle each other—though it was anyone’s guess how serious they were. “You know the only thing scarier than an Inru terrorist? A sober Russian.”
    “Or a Greek hammerjack,” Novak shot right back. “Particularly one who uses ouzo as an immersion drug.”
    “Save it for later,” Lea interrupted, stopping them before it got any further. “Patch in latest orbital pass,” she told her hammerjack, who jacked into a satellite feed of the target area and positioned it over the display. High-res images assembled into a mosaic of visual and thermal elements, smeared by the telltale blur of creeping radiation.
    “Twelve hours ago,” Lea began, “we received some intel that points to significant Inru activity. It seems that after prolonged conflict with our team, their operational cells are starting to get a little desperate.”
    The crew murmured a wave of approval. From the start, Lea had been single-minded in her dealings with the antitechnology cult—a pursuit that bordered on obsessive. Using a more extreme approach than her predecessor, she had pounded their infrastructure with virtual attacks, drying up their finances and material support. After that, she went after the Inru leadership itself, targeting them personally in a series of relentless strikes. In a matter of months Lea had effectively decapitated the major cells, pushing them even further underground. As for their leaders, most of them were now either dead or rotting in some Collective gulag.
    Most, she reminded herself, but not all.
    “Analysis based on my information points to an Inru summit,” she continued. “Some kind of high-level gathering of the surviving leadership—probably to discuss a new, larger strategy against the Collective. CSS has been wondering when they might pool their remaining resources to mount some kind of counterstrike. If what we’re hearing is true, they could be very close to making that happen.”
    “What’s the source of this intel?” one of the commandos asked.
    Lea hesitated for a moment before giving her answer.
    “Intercepted communications.”
    Muttered comments arose around the table. Lea was always secretive about how she got her information, choosing to compartmentalize intelligence operations to the nontactical members of her team. She knew it spooked them—not because of her methods, but because she was almost never wrong. In their view, Lea was clairvoyant in matters of the enemy.
    If they only knew.
    “SIGINT has been pretty flaky for a while,” Tiernan pointed out. “The Inru have been putting out a lot of false information since they got wind we compromised their networks. What are the chances this is just comm chatter designed to throw us off?”
    Lea gave Pallas a nod.
    “We picked up some weird inclusions in Axis traffic,” the hammerjack said. “Most secure communications are condensed into proprietary tokens, which means you can backtrace them to their source by parsing the routing code. CSS keeps a record of these codes, so they can listen in on pirate traffic, unauthorized exchanges, whatever pisses them off. Lea happened to notice a couple of stray tokens originating from some Port Authority nexus, so she had me check them out. Turns out they’re not stray after all—they’re repeating at regular intervals, using some custom algorithm designed to make it look random.”
    “Burst communications,” Tiernan decided.
    “Give the man a cigar,” Pallas said. “The Inru were using the North American Pulser Grid as a transmission medium—modulating photons into carrier streams, then encoding their messages with some routing key I’d never seen before.”
    “How did you crack the key?”
    Pallas tossed a sideways glance at Lea.
    “I found it while running some permutations through a CSS computer,” she said—an honest answer, though not even close to the whole story. “After a couple of