Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  What purpose did these facilities have? How was Redeye and her group – who looked from Bobbi’s point of view to be nothing but a band of crazy nomads – capable of destroying such facilities? And what about what was inside them? She had seen what had defended Orleans, the white ghouls and the quicksilver devils that were their champions. If fully armed and armored police troopers were massacred at a single site, then how the Hell were these people able to bomb four different ones on their own? Bobbi remembered the woman’s expression, that look of grim victory, and she shook her head. There was something really nasty to learn there, and a wave of chill crashed down over her – not because it would be terrible, but because she knew that she would not be able to avoid finding out what it was.

  That night she dreamt about the jungle, about a thin, dirty girl carrying a spear made of swirling alphanumerics. The foliage was lurid and vaguely pixelated, like the scenery of an old computer game. Bobbi recognized herself in the girl, had recognized the way she walked, the way she tracked a trail through the undergrowth as she made her way toward her quarry – which had been a massive old beast of a tiger lurking in the undergrowth. It came out from under an overgrown outcropping to meet her dream self, who drew the spear back in readiness, and Bobbi had seen that the beast was beautiful. Radiantly so, a real thing in the synthetic forest; white fur and silver eyes, gleaming with hate and superiority. She was staggered by the sight of it, the awesome complexity and grace of its form, long enough for it to bare fangs made of glimmering fractals … .

  Bobbi awoke in her bed, sweating in the darkness. Dreams were so goddamned stupid. Jungles? Really? Goddamned horrible silver eyes? Leave it to her imagination to choose this time to start dreaming mysteries.

  But of course, she told herself as she rose and padded toward the shower, she knew what the dream was about. It was obvious. She was diving into this whole thing once again, and she knew that would put her eventually at odds with Genefex. More to the point, it would put her at odds with the company’s silver-eyed ghoul of a founder. And then there was the girl …

  With a sigh, Bobbi stripped and stepped into the shower booth, turning on the water. Instantly she was drowned in heat, allowing it to wash away the memory of the traitorous dream and the thin girl she’d seen there. She would not let her subconscious ruin things. She had to be better than that. Bobbi closed her eyes tightly, let the water do its work, and soon had emerged refreshed and pink with the heat and with new determination.

  Checking the news yielded nothing that had anything to do with her investigation, though it looked like Germany had finally solved the takeover crisis and had solidified into an independent corporate state once again. Civil Protection was out in force after a string of robberies in Belltown. NewsNetNow’s local feed was pretty mum on anything that happened in the Verge, of course, unless it was really newsworthy. Tim Angle’s turn on screen today, chiseled features and white teeth. He’d been an actor a few years ago but he’d given it up for news. Weirdest damned thing.

  Bobbi went down to the bar floor to see Scalli. He was looming behind the bar as usual, stalwart against the dull thrum of whatever it was playing on the sound system. Kings of Clemency, an old band. Liberty-rock from the fifties, the last gasps of American jingoist culture. Strange choice. Sandy was pouring pints of Tsingtao from gleaming taps, favoring her with a smile.

  “Hey, Scalli,” Bobbi called, looking past Sandy after returning the smile and fixing her eyes on the enormous man. “Got a minute?”

  Scalli looked at her, his expression artfully casual. “Yeah, boss,” he replied with a shrug, and followed after her when Bobbi ducked back into the storeroom. She felt his dark eyes on her back as she walked, felt tension mount between them like a tether. She was ready for an altercation, and so was he. At least if they got into a shouting match, they couldn’t be heard over the guitar choruses of the Kings.

  “All right,” he said as the door sealed behind them, “what did you want?”

  It was a challenge, and no mistake. Bobbi took a deep breath before she turned on him, brushing a few strands of violet out of her eyes. “All right,” she began, “listen. I want to apologize. I want you to listen to me, please.”

  Scalli said nothing, filling up the room with a silence that made his bulk seem tiny by comparison. Bobbi took that to be her cue and so she kept on. “Now I know we’ve been friends for years.”

  “Ten years,” Scalli said grimly.

  “Right. Ten years.”

  “Since you hit town, in fact.”

  “… . okay, yes, since I got to town.” Bobbi wrinkled her nose. “Look. We’ve known each other a long damned time, it’s true. I know we’ve not always been best buddies or whatever, but we’ve always looked out for each other. And I know you’ve got…” She paused, selecting her words carefully. “…sentiments, and I appreciate that. But I just haven’t wanted to get you involved with this thing with Tom. I know you’re trying to look out for me, but it’s just…”

  Scalli shifted, his arms crossing over his massive chest. “Yeah?”

  Bobbi drew a breath. “Okay, look. Tom and I, we had a thing.” She closed her eyes a moment, trying to put it into words. “And I don’t know that I can describe it as more than that. We had strong feelings for each other, and we got into a lot of shit. You know a little about it.”

  “I know you two came out of the Old City looking like you drove through a slaughterhouse,” Scalli said. “And that you wouldn’t tell me why. Don’t think I believe anything about body retrieval, because that little girl was more than that. I’m not stupid. I know what she was.”

  It was like a slap in the face. Bobbi stood there a moment, stunned. “Okay,” she said, unable to really reply more to that. “So, I guess you kind of know what were up to a little.”

  “And I know he was being hunted by the Feds.”

  “… yeah, that’s true.” Bobbi felt her back stiffen as she spoke; this wasn’t going well. Scalli had never told her half of what he knew or didn’t know about the situation, and these revelations were only throwing her off balance even more. She might have initiated the conversation, but she was hardly master of it now. “Look,” said Bobbi in an attempt to rectify that, “the point is, I didn’t want to drag you into it. There’s a lot of unanswered questions. I know you think that he’s still around, and maybe he is, but I … if he’s still alive, it ain’t in any form or fashion that he’d be comfortable with.” The words were like hooks in her heart as she said them, but they needed to be said for both their sakes. “This ain’t about saving him, Scalli, it’s about finding out what the hell happened to him. This is for me. I can’t just let it flap in the wind, here. I gotta know.” She hoped that his would calm him, or at the very least smooth things out a little; the questions his words had sparked in her mind would have to wait until a later time to be processed.

  Scalli said nothing again; he leaned against the concrete wall, looming as if he were an extrusion of it. His expression was still as flat as it was before she’d spoken in the first place. Finally he spoke, with a kind of tired voice that she’d heard other kids’ fathers use. Resigned. “All right,” said Scalli, shaking his head. “All right. I guess I understand. And I wasn’t exactly being fair to you by bringing it up, either – just I worry about you, honey, you know? I worry that you’re gonna get killed over what seemed to me like courting a cryopen, or worse.”

  He shook his head, and Bobbi knew that she was off the hook. She came up and put her arms around Scalli’s massive torso, hands stopping just past his kidneys, and sighed. “You’re good people, baby,” she said, and she meant it. “I’m really sorry I went batshit on you. It’s just been hard, you know? He just vanished, and the circumstances were fucking awful, and I just … ” And she was hugging him hard before she knew it, not crying but close, mad at herself and at Scalli and his pushiness, and even more so at Stadil and his ridiculous plots. She was mad at the world, and at that bitch and her company, and all the horrib
le things that had happened under her watch. Most of all, though, she was mad at Tom – for vanishing, for leaving her with his puzzle that she absolutely had to solve. It took a lot for her not to break down again, the maddened, wailing beast that was her temper swirling around inside of her, but she managed it down just as Scalli put his wide hand upon her back.

  “It’s all right, Bobbi,” he murmured, his voice deep and gentle. “I get it now. You need help, you just ask me.”

  She took a step back, surprise bringing forth a laugh that sounded more like half a sob. “Jesus, Scalli,” Bobbi said, shaking her head, “Didn’t I just tell you? I didn’t want to drag you into this before, and I sure as hell don’t want to now. Even if you do know more than I thought you did, which I must admit I’m awfully damned curious about.”

  Scalli scowled faintly and shook his head. “Relax,” he said, stepping over to a nearby beverage case and taking out a can of Coca-Cola. He smacked the base against the side of the case to chill it, pulled the tab and took a deep swig before continuing. “Before you start putting me into any of your conspiracy theories, chalk it up to my past experiences. You know how I used to do security before I came to work for you, right?”

  Bobbi nodded. “Freelance,” she said. “I remember.”

  “Right.” Scalli gestured faintly with his busy hand, the Coke can like a baton. “I saw Princess Dolls before when I was working as a body man for a Mitsubishi exec. It’s the skin, you know, the artificial blood gives them away. No big mystery there.”

  She hadn’t thought about that. “All right,” Bobbi said, “I can see that. What about the rest?”

  “Well, that’s the more interesting part.” He tilted the can back, draining the remainder of his Coke down that enormous throat of his. He let out a loud sound of pleasure and tossed it into a waste bin, shook his head, and sighed. “Right. Okay, so just around the time he disappeared, you remember when you said he got a new face? When I urged you to go and get a makeover, make yourself feel better?”

  “Yeah.” Bobbi frowned a little bit and took a seat on the edge of a counter. She’d forgotten she had told him that. “I thought you were just trying to help.”

  “Well, I was,” he said with a nod. “I was. See, I still keep up with the underground boards, you see? Mostly so if I ever start working again I don’t lose any opportunities, but also because I like to keep an eye out for trouble.”

  “And you found it, I guess.”

  Scalli nodded again. “Yeah. Around that time, someone put out a pretty sizable contract on your boy. Capture or nonlethal incapacitation, three hundred thousand straight up. They’d included the description of a woman with him that sounded suspiciously like someone that I knew. And before you ask, no, the contract isn’t still open. Almost as soon as it had it was retracted, on account of your man disappearing.” He spread his hands. “So you’re in the clear.”

  Bobbi stared at him for a long moment. She wasn’t sure how she should feel, if she should be angry or touched, or what – so she settled on irritated gratitude. “… well thank you very much, Marcus,” she said, using his first name to show how she felt, “but I sure wish you’d have told me this before. Do you know who it was that put it up?”

  “Yeah,” Scalli said, turning to pick through bottles of beer. “But the name didn’t ring a bell.”

  “Try me.”

  Scalli plucked a bottle of Heineken from the rack, gave her a look that said ‘well, I told you so.’ “’Cagliostro’, the name was.”

  Bobbi frowned a little bit. ”Cagliostro,” she repeated, mulling it over. “Cagliostro. What is that?”

  “Italian,” Scalli said.

  “What’s it mean?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just a name.”

  Bobbi wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t ‘Scalli’ Italian?”

  He made a face, reached inside the drinks case for another Coke. “Doesn’t give me access to the vast racial memory of my mother’s people, girl.” He shook his head. “So anyway, that’s what I know. What are you gonna do with it?”

  “Gonna go drill that black board you were talking about, see what I can find.” She shrugged. “Gonna need the address, of course.”

  “Yeah,” said Scalli with the slightest hint of a sigh, “I figured that’d be the case.”

  Cagliostro. The name was unfamiliar to her, another bogeyman. What was it? A name? A hack handle? Some cute little alias? Bobbi sat at her desk, drinking from a tumbler of Suntory and feeling very curious indeed as she plowed through fields of data. Screens floated everywhere around her, each of them filled with some detail or another – some of it from the archive, some of it more mundane information.

  Scalli had given her the network address of the black workboard that he still frequented, which was disguised as a discussion forum for old Horizon Rangers action toys; she had ghosted in on the back of some other dude who was logged in at the time, piggybacking his access profile. She had rode it Awake, getting her money’s worth out of the latest version of Hyoong Lance, the subtle knife of modern underground intrusion software, guiding its hand personally, ensuring that she wasn’t detected.

  Bobbi was still mad at him for not telling her about the contract before, but considering the situation she didn’t exactly blame him either – no, she appreciated it, the care he felt for her. It was nice to have a friend, especially when you were digging into a mile of black-magic crazy like this was turning out to be. She wondered if Freida knew about it, and if not, if she should tell her. Well, Bobbi had told her the rest, hadn’t she? Unless it turned out that she was the enemy after all it could only help efforts to inform her. As she had made contact with the workboard’s databases and unplugged herself from direct connection, she had wondered what it was that Freida might be finding out on her own.

  It didn’t take long before she found what she was looking for. Black workboards were supposed to erase records cleanly so as not to endanger contracting parties. But as Bobbi had hoped, there were no less than ten years’ worth of contracting data in storage. Well, thought Bobbi, that’s good luck for me then. And after a little bit of searching there it was, just as Scalli had said. The terms were as he had laid them out, too: capture or nonlethal incapacitation, Tom and an unknown associate. Only the face was his original, and the description of the woman supposed to be her was pretty sketchy – but then again you didn’t need much to point her out, big pink cockatiel hairstyle like she had back then. ‘Nice ass’, it had said. She liked that. The contract had run for exactly three days, then it was retracted without anyone reporting in.

  Bobbi considered it all. Three hundred thousand dollars … well, it was expensive enough for professionals, though she imagined that it would have been more expensive to try and corral a federal agent and keep him locked up than it would be just to dust him. There was no record of a node of origin, or even a trail that she could extrapolate – the message was a mystery, a ghost letter that appeared and disappeared without the slightest trace. And that was very interesting to Bobbi, because she’d done the ghost-job before. There was always some kind of a trace. You didn’t just appear out of thin air, or data as the case might be.

  Maybe it was new technology, some kind of hardware module or even a heretofore unknown stealthing program. However it was done, it meant that this Cagliostro character was either a datanaut of supreme ability, or had access to such a person. Bobbi shivered internally; it would be like challenging Michelangelo to an art contest, going against someone like that. As good as she was, Bobbi didn’t see herself as a contemporary of any equivalent of the Great Mikey. At least, not yet.

  Bobbi sat up, pursing her lips and reaching for her interface jack. Too many strange people – Frieda, Redeye, and now this Cagliostro fellow. Too many unknown elements. Inquiries would have to be made; people would have to be spoken to. She’d need to get some information on this guy, the best way to do it would be to speak to Pierre about him. Her fingers hovered there, floating just ove
r the edges of the dustplug stuck in her socket. It had been a very long time since she’d used Pierre for anything, and egotist that he was, he’d probably assume she’d been using someone else and refuse to work with her. She figured have to do some convincing, and she wasn’t going to kiss his boots. Conflict would probably arise.

  When she finally went to see him, however, there was little in the way of a problem. Tense moments showing up, some sass thrown her way by Pierre’s belle du jour, but ultimately a little coyness and a bit of an apology worked wonders to get the Frenchman leaning her way again, especially when she produced her account balance. The relationship patched, Bobbi had Pierre run a go-to on Cagliostro in an attempt to try and get some info on this mysterious bogeyman, and also to try and drum up some information on Redeye; the former would probably be more difficult than the latter, but she left it in his hands to see what could be drummed up. The smirking bastard made sure she paid dearly for it, too, but she figured it was better than the alternative.

  Scalli had decided to play chauffeur for her, which had annoyed Bobbi at first. He drove a streamlined tank of a Mitsubishi Flare that he had modded up to accept his bulk; no passenger seat, the wheel in the middle and the canopy jacked up to fit him. He still looked like an ogre in a go-kart, but he’d given up his old transport truck in order to look more refined. The idea of her riding around in the back of his absurdity-mobile softened her enough that she agreed, though they stopped at a Rocket Chef drive-thru for some Maxi-Buns and Coke Ultras. She sat in the back of Scalli’s ridiculous car, munching at her sloppy, print-protein burger and sipping melon cola through a twisted straw, watching the city loom past her as he drove her back toward Alki Point and home. It really was like a different place, this city she had called her home since she was old enough to remember. It had always been a bad old town, she knew that. It had always been sinful and selfish, but people had just always been like that. She’d done more work for rich, sinful people than she could remember. History was like that, if you cared enough to read it – full of people wanting to get illegal shit done.