She tried to imagine what it would be like, riding a Wonderland machine; she knew how lost she’d been, trying to imagine the way the Dolls worked. She wasn’t stupid by a long shot, of course, but she had to agree with what Scalli had said; these devices were spooky. The speed with which Freida was doing things in there must be incredible, but so must be the density of data. Lots of records to go through.
And so Bobbi sat down on the edge of the dais and waited, with Scalli hovering about nearby like some dreadful meaty combat machine. Anxiety bled into boredom, and Bobbi had fallen into picking quietly at a frayed corner of her medical bag when a flash of blue light out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. She looked up; the terminal of the nearest tower had come online, and as she looked on so did the others around them. One by one, they flared blue, throwing a haze of light around them. Next, the indicator lights above exploded into a great flurry of activity; Bobbi saw that the already busy flickering had flared into a near-constant strobe of colors, throwing sparks of light everywhere across the room’s upper strata.
“That doesn’t look good,” Scalli said, but Bobbi wasn’t listening; she was already dashing to the nearest terminal in the hopes of discovering the cause of the activity. The light came from a brain-searing sea of bright blue symbols that shifted feverishly across the monitor. Bobbi stared at them for a moment before dashing to the next terminal only to find them there as well.
Scalli watched her with grim alarm, keeping his gun at the ready. “Bobbi,” he called.
“Shit, on this one too,” she muttered.
“Bobbi!”
“What?” Bobbi came around the collar of a tower, staring at him with wide green eyes.
Scalli frowned at her. “What is it?”
“I know these symbols,” she said, and very well did know them indeed; they were seared into her brain long ago, when Tom handed her the archive. “This is the same kind of language that was used to encrypt Stadil’s archive.”
“Well what does it say?” Scalli’s voice was stony.
“I don’t know what’s going on; I can’t crack this. I can’t even read it!” Scalli might be calm, but Bobbi definitely was not. Freida must have triggered something, and she couldn’t even plug in to find out what it was. All the while, the lights strobed overhead. Panic spread through her like contagion; this close she could see that even the keys were printed with the symbols, and she couldn’t tell now if they were shorthand or some language that she’d never been acquainted with. The barbed, complex symbols sure as hell weren’t Siamese, nor Asian at all. Bobbi couldn’t even tell where to start – but she didn’t let that stop her. As the lights above now formed a solid chorus of colors, she began stabbing at the keys in the blind hope that she might be able to trigger a restart or otherwise break the cycle that was taking place above her.
And then, everything was quiet.
Whatever crescendo had been reached, the machines fell silent. The lights had dimmed and were back to their quiet flickering and the terminals went dark, leaving Bobbi’s field of vision briefly imprinted with their shadows. Had she done that? She looked between the consoles to the left and right of her, and saw that they were dark as well. What the hell had happened?
“Bobbi.” Scalli’s voice rang from the center.
“I’m all right,” she called back to him. “Don’t worry. I just want to see if–”
“Bobbi!” Though his tone was calm, the word hit her with the urgency of a lead brick. She instantly came around the collar toward the center, though she was not sure what it was that she’d see.
She saw Scalli there, his back to her, taking up so much space even among the machines that towered above them. His rifle was on his hip, and he was looking at the dais at the center of the chamber. The panic in her blood had not abated, and it pulled at her even more as she stepped up to stand by Scalli and look as well.
The chair had opened, revealing the limp form of Freida in its padded confines. Her eyes were open, staring blankly toward the ceiling of the room, and the smell of ozone and burning plastic issued from the terrible throne. Bobbi saw wisps of it issuing from between the keys of Freida’s portable terminal, like the gasp of an escaping spirit. They stood there for a moment, neither one of them willing to move. Freida looked like she was dead. They should go and check on her, Bobbi knew – and yet neither one of them seemed to be able to summon the power to see if she truly was. She wasn’t sure why, and behind her hesitation loomed a burning kernel of shame.
Seconds ticked by, and finally Scalli stepped past Bobbi to approach the dais, his rifle at the ready. “Hey, girl,” he called, his voice low. “You all right in there?” Silence. Freida stared blankly at the ceiling. The smell of burnt circuits and smoke persisted. “Hey, you there?”
“I think she’s gone,” said Bobbi, and the words felt like clay in her mouth. She walked past Scalli to mount the dais, and check Freida’s pulse. Her skin was still warm, but Bobbi felt no pulse. She felt again, drawing her face down close to listen for the other woman’s breath – and as she did so, found herself staring into a pair of blue eyes that stared not toward the ceiling but were now fixed upon her.
“Jesus!” Bobbi jumped back, hands whipping back to her sides. Freida began to stir, sitting up and drawing the plug out of her head – stiffly, mechanically, as if every movement was made with painful effort.
“Get back, Bobbi,” Scalli said, and Bobbi did so as if Freida was showing signs of bursting into flames. The body in the chair continued to move; without a word Freida pulled the chair’s silver thread from the Grail and plugged it straight into her skull. That done, it merely sat there, staring at them, the pale blue eyes now harsh and cold.
Bobbi and Scalli looked at one another as she backed up to stand at his side, unsure of what to say. They both had their suspicions. Finally, Scalli spoke. “All right,” he said, and his voice was that of a soldier giving challenge in the night, “who are you, then?”
Her mouth opened, but the sound that came from Freida’s mouth was a horrible, gagging growl. Gutteral syllables, each one like jagged blades of ice, rebounded off the walls of the chamber in a hideous echo. Bobbi’s blood froze on the spot, and she found herself again unsure of what to do. Now Freida spoke again, and the words that came were flat and clipped, as harsh as her stare – and though they were understandable, Bobbi found herself wishing that they were not.
“This unit is codified as Conscripted Terminal One Six Six Two Seven.” Freida’s voice was flat, clipped, as harsh as her staring eyes. “State the purpose of this intrusion.”
Scalli looked at Bobbi. She saw the stiffening of his jaw, ripe with resolve. In that moment she envied him; her own heart was pounding, horror and a complete lack of understanding of what was happening here riding her mental processes like a horde of evil spirits. The certainty in his face gave her what she needed to push the fog back into the far recesses of her head, if only for the moment, and look back at the thing that Freida had so inexplicably become. “We were sent by someone,” she said to the staring apparition that sat in the chair. “We came here to get something. A file.”
Freida – or what she had become – stared at them, silent for several seconds before speaking again. “Intruder was searching File Stack Seven-Six-Four-Seven-Two upon seizure and conscription, subject of search ‘Exley, Gerald Wilson.’ Confirm intent of search.”
“That’s it!” Bobbi’s heart nearly leapt into her throat. Exley? Freida was looking for Exley? She licked very dry lips, thinking quickly. “That … must be what we were looking for.”
“Confirmed.” The not-Freida stared at them again for a moment. “Record logged for security purposes,” she said, and looked between the two of them. Behind them the door slid shut with a humming whisper, and Bobbi’s heart began to pound anew. The not-Freida’s words came like ice now. “Intrusion will not be tolerated. Stand down and prepare to be conscripted.”
All around them a hissing arose, like the openi
ng chords of a mechanical choir. Bobbi tore her eyes away from the horror in the chair to try and pinpoint the sound, but she could not – the sound bounced off the angled walls, as if it came from everywhere. What was it? Gas? Hydraulics? “Scalli,” she said in warning, but the big man was already on it. He swept the room with the barrel of his rifle as they began to slowly back toward the doorway, left and then right, and then …
“Up top,” he said suddenly. The visor gave him the ability to see through the darkness above, and whatever he saw made him grit his teeth. “Call them off,” he barked at the thing that wore Freida’s skin, while Bobbi searched above with frantic eyes, trying to see what he did. “Call them off, bitch, or I will blow this whole fucking system. Do you hear me?” The fear that lay beneath his threat shook Bobbi to her core.
As the seconds ticked by, dozens of shapes resolved themselves from the darkness. Pale things with gaunt limbs, pale hair, human bodies only in the vaguest form clambering down the walls. In the dim light, their eyes shone green like those of cats. She knew them well, these thin white ghouls. She knew their handiwork.
“Oh fuck,” Bobbi said, repeating the words like a mantra. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck –”
Her words were drowned out by the heavy, chugging sound of Scalli’s rifle turned on full. Yet she could not tear her eyes away from the doom that descended upon them. She expected to see them being blown off the walls, but this did not happen; instead they paused in their descent, and began to shudder, as if some invisible current shot through them; Bobbi felt something hard and broad, Scalli’s own hand, shove her forward.
“Don’t fuck around,” she heard him say, pulling her with him as he made for the throne. “Get up there and hack us out of here!”
Bobbi looked up; the chair was a bloody ruin, and the thing that was once Freida and then something else now, had been reduced to a perforated corpse slumping across the floor before it. The sight of Freida’s body galvanized her, and with limbs made of wood she propelled herself to the chair, and leapt inside. The Grail lay on the ground next to it, and she yanked the box into her lap as she yanked the dustplug from the socket behind her ear. She ignored the blood that began to soak into her jeans and the small of her back as she pulled the terminal out of her bag, stabbed the startup button, and plugged herself in. As her consciousness was shunted from her skull into the system, she caught only a glimpse of the chair as it closed up around her.
The moment she Awakened inside the Grail’s system, she knew that everything was wrong. It felt…strange. Vast. It was like stepping through the doorway of a familiar house and finding a cavern on the other side instead. The Grail was still connected to the chair, serving as the buffer between the horrible system and the cable still plugged into the back of Freida’s skull, and Freida was lying dead on the floor. And yet the network space of the Grail was not the blankness she had sensed before – it had retained what must be what system into which it had been plugged, the network made up of the machines around her.
The machines!
Bobbi scrambled to ditch the connection. The Grail answered none of her commands – neither did the terminal, she was horrified to discover. She was becalmed, as surely as she were a ship with its mast broken and no oars in its hold. She floated in the strange space around her that her body was furiously trying to translate into being cold and dark despite the lack of actual stimulus, fighting the searing drip of terror that ran through her consciousness. This system must be entirely different from what the terminal could process, entirely proprietary. But if that were so, how could she have even been able to make a connection? And yet there she was, floating, waiting in the Sargasso for something to come. Something, she knew, would want to ‘conscript’ her.
And then, as milliseconds passed with the weight of hours, she felt something approach. At first she sensed it only barely, as if from very far away – a kind of pressure, or a buildup of data that her brain translated as such. She was blind as well as deaf, of course; she could only imagine what crept in her from within the other system, floating as she was in the lobby made by the Grail, or at least that’s what she told herself. Her imagination. The brain could not sense the network, not really; it was only its attempt at parsing that conjured the sensation of pressure on her skin, as if she were being slowly squeezed inside a vacuum-sealed envelope, or perhaps by the coils of some unimaginable serpent. Her imagination that made her pulse pick up and her heart quicken. This and nothing more.
For fuck’s sake, please don’t let me turn out like Freida. Freida, in whose blood she sat in the physical world, who lay twisted at her feet. It was going to come and get her, she knew it as a solid fact. Every nerve in her body sang it; it would come and get her, and she would be no more, and something else would be living inside of her. Was it some program that got inside the interface suite, the software in your brain? How could it obliterate the self? Or perhaps, she thought with a stab of fear, perhaps you were simply hijacked. It would be nice to think that Scalli had killed a thing that had murdered Freida, but maybe he had murdered her instead. Maybe it had only been temporary.
Please don’t let me be like Freida. Please, please, please…
Her body felt as if it were being slowly crushed; no pain, no suffering, just a strange torpid weight that conjured herself around her and directed itself inward toward her body. It felt as if it were entering her; she had the sensation of something thick against her skin now, and she had the image of her skin being flattened, pores being stretched to something on the microscopic scale would be the size of manholes by tiny spider’s legs. She felt cold water trickling in to her, beyond her skin, into herself, through the flesh that clad her muscles. More than anything she felt the fear – fear and anger, a rage that was as cold as the thing that penetrated her yet burned brightly inside her head. No, she thought, No, you motherfucker, you will not do that to me, you will not. You will NOT!
And in desperation she took hold of the vision; she reached out with hands that were not there and grasped the illusory sun, imagined its heat, its brightness. She willed it to explode. In her mind’s eye she saw heat and light, a wave of white fire that spread ever outward from her center and into the penetrating dark. It washed over the night…and boiled it away, the shadows and pressure rearing back like a wall of startled snakes. The flames spread outward through her consciousness, a blaze of color driving back the pressure. Then it was gone – or at least so distant now that she could not sense it – and the space of the Grail was blank again, her own, and she willed it to reach out and snare the security network.
Her senses returned to the digital, meditation taking hold, and she fired off salvos of disruptive programming at everything she could sense. Security protocols, hardware controller routines, countersofts – everything shuddered and seared away before her presence, as if she wielded an angel’s blazing sword, and as all doors began to report open status she tried again to disconnect. This time it worked.
The first thing her meat-self heard was the dull and rhythmic thunder of Scalli’s rifle. The chair opened like a damnable lily, as her eyes opened her heart jumped in her chest. There was Scalli, standing before the chair, the combat rifle in his arms breathing fire and death. All around the dais hung hideous white tide; ghouls had surrounded him in legion, the corpse-things that Bobbi had seen at Orleans hospital. The blank faces, the silver eyes that shone green in the dark. Many of them had been peppered with bullet wounds, but it had not stopped them. Bobbi knew that they really only stopped when you either cut them apart or blew their heads off.
Yet now they stood there in a limp mob where they had obviously been advancing before, as if they had been struck collectively dumb. Scalli was taking the opportunity to clear a path to the chamber door on the other side of the room, which Bobbi saw was now open. As the gun rumbled the whip-thin horrors tumbled away in clouds of white fluid. The God of War went by the name of Marcus Scalli in that moment, his work brutal and with the purest efficiency. Bobbi
could only sit and watch for a moment as he did his work before leaping to her feet.
“We’re done,” she called, shoving the Grail into her backpack and leaping over Freida’s mangled body. Scalli didn’t look back at her, merely nodding as he took the rifle by the grip in one hand and with the other swept her up in his arm. She let out a grunt as a dark forearm as thick as her thigh knocked the wind out of her, and Scalli propelled them toward the elevator with desperate speed with her body clutched close against him.
They had made it halfway to the door when the mob returned to life. As Scalli carried her toward the ghouls began to turn into them, reaching out with clawlike nails and tearing at them both with methodical savagery. Bobbi ducked as one nearly seized her throat, instead grabbing a handful of her hair and snatching it out. She screamed, her scalp on fire; another reached for her only to have the offending creature smacked out of the way with the butt of Scalli’s rifle. “No you don’t, motherfucker,” Scalli roared as another one leapt toward them, raking its nails against across his chest. He swung his rifle stock across what had been a woman’s face, firing a burst into her as she went down. It was all very good, this effort, but active again, they were as inexorable now as they must have been while Bobbi was in the chair. Scalli angled himself into the crowd ahead and began to run, flat out, toward the elevator.
The ghouls were obscenely strong. Of that there could be no doubt. They leapt onto Scalli, trying to pull them both down as he moved like a freight train toward their goal. But where the rifle failed, the mass of his enormous body did not; it was sheer inertia that saved them as the white horrors clawed and snapped at them, plowed down in a line by the juggernaut that was Scalli. She clung against him as they barreled forward, and braced herself for impact as they reached the doorway – but Scalli turned just as they cleared the elevator, smacking against back of the car and throwing Bobbi bodily into the far corner. “Hit the button!” he shouted at her, bracing himself as the monsters threw themselves toward them in a wave, as inexorable and silent as time. As she stabbed at the button in the elevator panel, Scalli tossed the rifle aside and yanked something out from under his coat. It was a gray brick of something that Bobbi couldn’t identify. She didn’t have to, really; the detonator fixed to its side with its flashing amber light told her everything she needed to know. Duck and cover. “Eat this, you motherfuckers,” Scalli bellowed in the face of the horde, and as the doors began to close he chucked it out into the waiting arms of the silver-eyed throng. Bobbi almost thought she saw recognition in the eyes of the one who caught the thing, a flash in its unnatural eyes that could not have belonged to a mindless thing.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 14