Apollo Burn (Pillars of Fire and Light Sci-Fi Book 2) Read online

  Apollo Burn

  Pillars of Fire and Light Book 2

  Ken Britz

  Copyright © 2017 by Ken Britz

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For Karen and Carl.

  I love you, Mom and Dad.

  Contents

  Apollo Burn

  1. Death in the Family

  2. Jump-start

  3. Leveling Up

  4. Fly to Camelot

  5. Trust Issues

  6. Broken Dreams

  7. Priorities

  8. Systems Integrate

  9. New Data Input

  10. No-Fly Zone

  11. Family Problems

  12. Into Dark Corners I Go

  13. Test Fight

  14. Three-Letter Words

  15. Fallout

  16. Prison Break

  17. King Sacrifices Knight, Queen Takes

  18. Giving

  19. The Rundown

  20. Looking for Answers

  21. Hand of God?

  22. Matron, Mother, Daughter

  23. The Stag and the Doe

  24. Sisterly Chat

  25. Family Strife

  26. Call to Action

  27. Focus on Delphi

  28. Fight Prediction

  29. Mind Killer

  30. In Their Element

  31. Reince Returns

  32. Right

  33. Dear Longinus

  34. Mind Trip

  35. Cutting Free

  36. Doubling

  37. Making Appearances

  38. Lockdown

  39. Cascade Effect

  40. Awaken, Chimera

  41. Shifting Snows

  42. Bridge to Nowhere

  43. Bullets, Rockets, and Bombs, Oh My!

  44. Burnout

  45. Black Hounds Close In

  46. Body Dump

  47. Chimera Meets Phoenix

  48. River of Life

  49. Madam Secretary

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Ken Britz

  Apollo Burn

  Pillars of Fire and Light, Book Two

  Ken Britz

  1

  Death in the Family

  WASHINGTON, DC—

  Isolde Marks stepped off the elevator, dropping the backpack from her shoulder to dig out her keys. The police tape was across the apartment door, marking it as a crime scene. Isolde frowned, pulling out a small knife; sliced the tape; and then opened the door. It was dark inside, an open floor plan of a modern apartment, with the kitchen and living room as one large space. On either side were rooms—her father’s study on one and bedrooms on the other. Sheets of rain fell against the floor-to-ceiling glass walls that overlooked Washington, DC’s smudged skyline. The rooftop terrace was dark and gray like the room. Is there something near the ledge of the terrace? she wondered. It was hard to make out in the driving rain. She stood still, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She didn’t want to turn on the light and see the truth just yet. The old Churchill, a round-shouldered leather-covered chair, was a black shape facing the DC skyline. She lowered her pack to the floor and went into her father’s study. It was sparse—an ornate desk, some army mementos, and a few of his favorite military periodicals. She sat down at the desk and stared at the two photos in the room. On a shelf, four people within a frame were smiling—her father, Cornwall; her mother, Janine; her brother, Lance; and Isolde herself—years younger than she was now. She was maybe eleven in that photo, making it nearly a decade old.

  Isolde pulled back the hood of her University of Washington jacket. She ran a hand through her wet hair and tightened the tie on her ponytail. On the desk was a single picture of Isolde herself, taken the day she left for college. She shook her head, unable to reconcile this image of her doting father with the driven monster he had been at Tintagel. Tintagel, Isolde repeated to herself. She’d almost forgotten that place. Of course, she would never really forget Tintagel and Project Avallach. Twice her father had almost left her for dead—once while on a mission gone bad and at the end, when he wanted to destroy Avallach. That was the day she had turned her back on him, and that had made him realize he only had one child left in the world.

  Isolde’s hackles rose at a sound. She slid her fingers over the inside of the desk and pushed the catch. A compartment slid open. She drew out the M9 Beretta. With the expertise of an army officer’s daughter, she checked the clip, chamber, and safety in one smooth motion. She stood and edged out of the room, her gun close to her body and her senses on high alert. She moved back into the open part of the penthouse. The kitchen and living room were empty. She scanned and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  She stalked to the old Churchill chair in the center of the living room. Light from the rippling rain made the old leather waver as if it were a hologram. The chair faced the large windows and the balcony—toward the skyline. Except for this chair and the desk in the study, the furniture in the apartment looked new and unused. Her father hadn’t lived here until he retired from his DARPA work and Isolde had left for university just a month ago. He’d planned to follow her to Seattle, or so he said. She wanted to believe his sincerity, but now it didn’t matter.

  She caressed the leather back of the chair. He’d loved to sit and read to his children when she and Lance were young. Then she saw the perfect one-inch-diameter hole through the high back. There were no burn marks, but there was a dark stain of dried blood. She raised the gun and aimed at the chair’s damaged back. The geometry and result were wrong. She dropped the gun to her side.

  A glowing man stepped from the bedroom hallway and her arm swiveled to target him, safety off. The man carried a helmet and his hair was a close-cropped blond, pale in the gray light. With the skintight n-suit he wore, she’d have recognized that powerful build anywhere. Arthur MacGabran.

  “Jesus,” she whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” Arthur asked.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” Isolde exhaled.

  “Tough army girl like you?”

  “I could’ve shot you. I should’ve shot you.”

  Arthur raised an eyebrow. He dropped his kinetic energy field and the halo surrounding his body winked out. “You can now.”

  “What’re you doing here?” She raised a hand. “No, it’s not as much of a surprise as it should be.”

  “Looking for clues.”

  “Clues?” Isolde lowered the gun.

  Arthur pointed to the chair.

  Isolde examined the hole in the light. “The police said a fatal puncture wound, but that’s a peculiar statement. Not a gunshot wound or a stab wound.”

  Arthur held out a set of goggles. “This may help.”

  “I’m not a DAMSL anymore,” she said. During her brief time at Project Avallach, Isolde had been trained as a DAMSL—Data Analysis Monitoring Synchronous Link. They were handlers to the Avallach subjects, controlling their manifest power input/output and feeding them mission information. Isolde had an aptitude for it. She’d been Indiana Beckham’s DAMSL until Indiana was expelled from Project Avallach by the program director—Isolde’s father, Brigadier General Cornwall Marks. Indiana. Another name she wanted to forget. That was a bit harder to do. Isolde had been the same age and temperament as Indiana and she’d gotten along well with the former Olympic fencing champion. Indiana was not easy to get along with, Isolde thought with a smile.

  “It’s not a job offer.”

  Isolde took the goggles. They were less like goggles and more like thick wraparound glasses. The technology had advanced even after the death of the project. The report of which had been greatly exaggerated . . .

  She flicked them open and put them on. She tapped the power button and the lenses went dark, overlaying the room with augmented reality and artificial light. There were markers all over the room where Arthur had tagged interesting things or noted information pulled from police records. She saw the wound and the outline of her father’s body in repose.

  “He knew them,” Arthur said.

  Arthur moved to stand where the attacker had been, close to the chair. Arthur raised his arm and roughly matched the distance and angle of the attack. The Caliburn rings on his fingers gleamed. Avallach candidates were a unique breed. Genetically and neurally modified humans, they could generate, or “manifest,” power from an entropic collector grid into their bodies with the assistance of these focal rings. This power also created a kinetic energy field that surrounded and protected them from high-velocity weaponry. The focal rings—a set of rings worn on the index, pinky, and thumb—also allowed them to create blades of plasma like energy called waveblades. They functioned loosely like swords, if a sword were made of an energy/matter matrix held together by the brain-wave pattern of the candidate. There had been only a handful of manifest candidates before Cornwall Marks shut Project Avallach down. Arthur was one, and its first. Indiana was its best. Indiana. Isolde shook her head and focused on Arthur’s statement.

  “Them?” Isolde asked.

  Arthur ignored the question, so Isolde studied the data from his position. His geometry matched, and
as far as Isolde knew, there weren’t many people who could use the weapon Arthur and his Avallach team had.

  “The man had a waveblade.”

  Isolde raised her father’s sidearm. “It could’ve been you.”

  Arthur nodded, raising his hands slowly and nonthreateningly.

  Isolde flicked her hand through the information and saw a more precise time of death that the system had reported. It had been at 2:14 a.m., with a five-minute margin of error. She skimmed through the data feeds and found that Arthur had been recorded in Mumbai—countering an attack of some kind. He was rather good at thwarting key events before they happened. She examined the data carefully for editing, but the wealth of information was too great. She returned to the room itself with a flick of the wrist, examining the clues. “No fingerprints. No forced entry. Everything points to Dad expecting company.”

  Arthur nodded. “He knew his attackers. Someone he had given our tech to.”

  Her father had died in this room. Dad. Isolde had remained as detached as possible. After all, her father had ignored or used her for years until the fallout from Project Avallach. Tears blurred her vision but she held her aim steady. It hurt.

  Arthur and her father had fought bitterly and in the crucial moment, Isolde had helped Arthur against Cornwall. Her father had been so focused on getting revenge for Lance that he nearly sacrificed his only daughter, and that she could not reconcile. “I quit Avallach for him, you know? He was wrong. I’d never overcome that I wasn’t the first child, or even a boy. But you broke something in him—or maybe freed. I don’t know the word, but he knew then.” Isolde placed her hand over her heart, where a large diamond necklace rested. It was the last gift she remembered her father giving her.

  “You didn’t go to the morgue or here when they notified you?”

  “My first thought was that he was playing me. He always manipulated me. Even when I turned on him, I suspected he would still use me, maybe wait it out until school’s over. And Seattle’s a long way from DC. Why rush if he’s dead? The DAMSL data is good, but what could’ve been manipulated before you got here? I just learned to not react to him—even at his death.”

  “You left us without a word. So did T. S.”

  She missed T. S. and wanted to see him now. Another stab of emotion hit her. They had separated because of her father. Now, perhaps, the possibility of reunion had opened. Not quite yet, she thought. She pushed thoughts of T. S. away and turned her mind back to her dead father.

  Isolde fingered the necklace. “I left Avallach and went to school. Things were different. He was done. Retired. We stopped talking about it.” Isolde shrugged. “I got used to him being the father he should’ve been the first twenty years of my life. Then when I heard he was dead, I didn’t want to burst that little bubble just yet.”

  Arthur nodded in sympathy with Isolde’s plight. Arthur had never reconciled with his own father, not even in the days when both father and son had been at Avallach. Isolde never knew Aidan MacGabran. She’d just read his files. DAMSLs learned a lot about their candidates.

  “Your father had security cameras?” Arthur asked.

  Isolde sniffed, collecting herself. She pulled her snarky aura back around herself like a blanket. She brought up and waved through the data feed, accessing the camera outside her father’s apartment door. The system had already pulled the relevant information from the feed and had marked that there was a 12 percent probability the data had been altered. She played the time-stamped stream. Two people walked to the door. A man and a woman were dressed in dark jackets and knit caps for fall. The man was Arthur’s height and build, and the woman . . .

  “This can’t be right.” She lowered her gun arm.

  “If you assume only the Avallach candidates can manifest, then that should be me, and that should be her.”

  “That’s impossible,” Isolde said. She motioned, zooming in on the face, but it was obscured by a heavy scarf. Her long raven-black hair was unmistakable. Indiana.

  “Is that me?” Arthur asked.

  Isolde moved to the face of the man. “I can’t tell, but it can’t be; the system says this bit of data is clean, which rules you out. You can’t be in two places at once, can you?”

  “So that can’t be her.”

  Isolde pulled off the goggles. “Indiana burned up in the atmosphere. There’s no way she’s alive.” She refused to believe that it was Indiana. There wasn’t enough data to confirm it. “You said something about assuming only Avallach candidates can manifest. What did you mean?”

  “If that’s not me nor any of the rest of the Avallach team, then Avallach tech is out in the wild. We’ve suspected ever since Sam was kidnapped, but this just confirms that they’ve made it work.”

  In the wild? Had her father given Avallach’s tech to someone else and they’d killed him over it? Anger shot through her sadness. “I’m coming back,” she said.

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “I don’t give a damn why you’re here, and I’m pretty sure I know why. I want to be Conditioned, because whoever did this”—she pointed to the hole in the chair—“knows your tech, and I want to know it better. I don’t care why they killed him. I just want to know who, and the playing field will be even when that happens.”

  “Does this mean you believe me?”

  “I believe the data. You didn’t kill him and you kept your promise.” Isolde’s eyes narrowed. “But you had a hand in Indiana’s death. I’m never forgiving you for that.”

  “Nor should you.”

  “I brought luggage and left it downstairs at the doorman’s desk.”

  They went to the door and Isolde scooped up her pack.

  “Is that the gun he shot me with?” Arthur asked, opening the door.

  “You’re such a drama queen.” Isolde looked at the gun. She clicked the safety back on and put it into her bag. “Yes, it is.” She hooked her bag over her shoulder.

  A woman on the other side of the threshold rammed her right arm forward and Tasered Arthur with fifty thousand volts.

  2

  Jump-start

  Anora stood at the threshold. She examined the police tape and saw that it had been compromised. She pulled out her contact Taser. In theory, it should have been the best option for her to incapacitate and apprehend Arthur MacGabran. Would it work on him? Reports on Arthur were inconsistent and lean on facts, and Maven was always particular about sharing details of his work before it was ready. Maven. He appreciated her work in refining the math in his psychogenetics theorem, and it was infuriatingly beautiful. Was Avallach the reason why he had been so quiet regarding his ongoing research? Had he found a way to finally prove his theorem? Her mind dialed back to the present.

  “I should open the door,” Simon said.

  “No, if there’s no one here, I want to look around. No point in alarming anyone.” She reached for the handle to see if it was locked.

  The door opened, and Arthur MacGabran was there. Acting on the instinct, Anora shoved the contact Taser into his abdomen and hit the button. Arthur fell back, the door slamming open. Behind him was a young woman Anora had seen before. Isolde Marks. Friend? Lover? Why did that definition enter her mind?

  A heavy backpack struck her arm, knocking the Taser away, and Isolde came at Anora in a rush. Off balance at first, Anora fell back on her decade of training experience. Isolde threw a right-hand palm strike. Anora grabbed Isolde’s right wrist, leaned back, and twisted, opening her opponent’s body to attack. Anora kicked Isolde in the solar plexus, pivoted, and threw the woman onto the floor. But with the girl’s slippery jacket, Anora’s grip wasn’t sure, and Isolde rolled with the throw and out of Anora’s grasp. She bounced off the hallway wall. Anora, adrenaline flooding her system, gave a short shake of her head to Simon.