There was a roar as the doors slid shut – a roar, a flash, and a gout of hideous white fluid splashed over them as they rose clear.
Bobbi slumped against the side of the elevator, panting. “Almighty mother of fuck,” she gasped, pressing a hand against her seething scalp, “what the hell was that?”
Scalli towered over her, a giant coated with artificial blood, reeking of its spoiled-milk smell and the sting of caseless propellant. He looked no less like a god of war than he did a moment ago, looking down at her through the cyclops eye of his gore-splashed visor. “A half kilo of DX-47 moldable plastoid explosive,” he deadpanned. “For when you absolutely must clear out every son of a whore in the room.”
They looked at each other for a moment, draped in the stench of battle. Then Bobbi began to laugh, loud and bright, covering her face with her hands to hide the tears that suddenly sprang there. Freida was dead, they had survived being torn to pieces by a monstrous horde, and she had managed to come away from…whatever it was…with her mind intact. Adrenaline was crashing through her mental basement and she felt herself going with it. The laughter and tears mingled together, and she found herself going away to hide in the tiny closet known as shock.
Survival had its price, as well.
It was pain that jolted her into reality again, a ringing slap that bloomed heat against the side of her face. Bobbi blinked her eyes, looking up at Scalli’s grim face. It was still spattered with artificial blood, so not much time could have passed. “I’m here,” she blurted out, as he reached up to smack her again, her reaction fueled by pain as much as surprise. “I’m here!”
Scalli frowned at her for a moment , looking into her face before he drew back. He crowded up the majority of what she now realized was the van, filling up the space around her so that she felt a little claustrophobic. “Scalli, man,” she said, holding up a hand, “lean back a little. I feel like you’re going to fall over on me.” She looked out through the windshield of the van, saw an unfamiliar street. “Where are we?”
“In the Verge, still. Up near Lake Washington.” He was still watching her, his frown turning into one of concern. “Are you all right?”
Bobbi shrugged. She didn’t feel much, really, but she expected that was likely to happen. She’d felt the same way before, after all. “I’m all right now,” she said. “Or as all right as I’m going to be. You?”
“Well they didn’t get me,” he said dully, “but I can’t say too much about this coat.” He lifted the arm he’d used to shield her, showing several large rents in the sleeve that went through the fabric covering his arm. Dark skin shown through, the ripple of muscle, but there was no trace of a wound. “You’re lucky they didn’t get you short of that hair.”
She snorted. “Luck had nothing to do with it, Marcus, and you know it.” Bobbi looked at him a moment, and then got up and hugged him without a word. Stupid guy. Stupid her for getting him dragged into it. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, none of that.” He laid a hand on her back, pressing her gently against him as he rubbed a slow circle. “I signed up on my own. I knew what I was getting into.”
She looked up at him, blinking tiredly. Her eyes hurt. Her head hurt. Well, her face as well, but that was ebbing away nicely. “What do you mean?”
Scalli shook his head. “I told you that I’d been around,” he said. “I’ve seen things like those…whatever they were. Guy I knew once used to dress them in suits and use them as bodyguards. Wonderland mods, he’d said. Guess we know that’s true.”
“Yeah.” Bobbi drew back from him and sat down again on the low bench that had taken the place of the rear seat. “I don’t know, though, I mean…to see ‘em up close…I mean…fuck. You were shooting the shit out of ‘em and it didn’t do much.”
“Headshots and severe body trauma,” he said. “It’s funny, because all I could think of was old horror movies, you know? The zombie horde.”
“I guess that ain’t too far off the mark.” Bobbi shook her head. Hey look, world, zombies were real and walking the earth, only they didn’t want to eat you. Just take your head off with their bare hands. “What happened after I…blacked out?” She didn’t want to say ‘freaked the fuck out and went catatonic on you’. “How did we get out of there?”
“I just carried you out and chucked you in the van,” he said. “Nothing came after us, but the building collapsed. I threw my other charge into the elevator before we took off, must’ve done something to the building. Whole thing collapsed in on itself.” Scalli shrugged. “Cops are all over there now, but I don’t know that they’re going to find anything. Just real hot down there is all.”
Bobbi drew a deep breath. That was about as good as she figured you could get in a situation like this, and they had gotten out of it with their hides intact. Amazing. “You saved me. I appreciate it, Marcus. Really.”
But Scalli only snorted. “Saved her, she says,” he muttered, and moved to ease himself around the front and fold himself into the driver’s seat. “Girl, if you hadn’t have done…whatever it was you’d done, they’d had killed us both already. What did you do in there, anyway? Hack the network?”
“Something like that.” Her thoughts turned hard as she considered who had sent them there. “I have to talk to Cagliostro,” she said, her voice like stone now. That fucking guy – whoever he was – had everything to answer for. “If he can’t explain himself, I swear to God, I’ll find him and fucking roast his nervous system from the inside out. Motherfucker.”
Scalli looked at her from over his shoulder, stern but silent. Bobbi grabbed up her terminal, which sat next to the bench next to the Grail, and jammed the cord into her skull socket. As she linked into her terminal, she was aware of file activity that she had previously ignored in the urgency of the moment. In the space of a thought she was aware that before she’d gone off the reservation, Freida had downloaded the file that Cagliostro had sent them for – it was absolutely miniscule, so small that Bobbi could hardly believe that it was what they had come for. Despite her rage and upset, she found herself double-checking to ensure the file was intact. Finding that it was only made her anger more powerful.
She linked to the sat antenna on top of the van and her consciousness was projected into the ether, off a preset chain of satellites, and into the molasses vat of the slow-box once more.
She continued spewing the same words for what felt like ages until at length the great voice conjured itself in her ears.
Silence met her words, long enough that she shouted again.
Bobbi waited to see if there were more, and when there wasn’t replied in kind.
More silence, and then Cagliostro’s reply. Though she couldn’t tell what the spook was thinking, she knew that he was – she got the feeling that this was unexpected.
of loss that she’d not felt since Tom had vanished.
Cagliostro did not answer, save for to ask
Bobbi paused herself now, swallowing her anger a little. Surely he would know what it was that was taking place, wouldn’t he?
She hesitated.
He had her there.
A pause that passed in milliseconds but felt like the passing of years hung between them before Bobbi finally replied,
The connection snapped into place between them and immediately Bobbi felt a sensation like cold flood through her as the data in her skull was read. It was psychosomatic, she knew; the passing of data wouldn’t elicit the sensation of ice water flooding her skin. She could only sit there for the synthesized ages that passed in the network world, where relative years felt as though they passed within hours of mortal time, and think about the being that was very nearly reading her mind. One minute Cagliostro was all-knowing, the next as confused as she was. If it was a mortal cowboy it wasn’t nearly as informed about the errands it sent her on as it should be, and if it was some god of the network, its prescience left much to be desired. Either way she felt more in her element, more assured as modules inside her skull that could not normally be accessed told it this most recent tale of woe.
Finally Cagliostro returned to the world.
Bobbi expected another round of silence on Cagliostro’s part – however he spoke up readily this time.
Bobbi was quiet for a long moment.
said Cagliostro,
Bobbi considered that for a moment, remembering how difficult it had been to even scratch the surface on the archive that Stadil have given her. How it had taken every ounce of talent and all the resources she had access to in order to start unspinning it, only to hit a wall barely halfway through.
he replied.
Should she? What if this turned out to be something horrible? What if it was a renegade AI, something cooked up in a military laboratory that would proceed to start destroying things? She might have thrown the idea away as science fiction were it not for the fact that she was living in what used to be the world of science fiction now.
Well, it was an honest answer, though the mention of Freida’s death raked her heart with cold claws.
Bobbi felt the data link snap between them like an opening valve. She hesitated but a moment longer before sending the file across; this was what she wanted, to move forward. She just hoped that she wasn’t giving what had already proved to be a dangerous being the key to being something truly terrible. The file went over in an eyeblink, as small as it was, and the data connection closed in its passing. Time passed; seconds ticked by, each one like a lead token dropped down a hopper, clattering loudly in her mind.
Finally the time for delays appeared to be gone. came the words into her mental monitor, without voice and yet intoning in her mind like the peals of a bell.
Bobbi took a deep breath out in the land of meat; she didn’t know what that meant, but she was sure that she wasn’t going to end up liking it very much.
The time for delays appeared to be gone. Cagliostro answered readily now, and as he did so the words rang in her head.
It was like someone had struck her with an iron bar; she
hung there in the silence of the slow box, stunned. This was not at all what Bobbi had expected – or, to be honest, what she was prepared for.
Bobbi felt something change, and then the voice that came into her ears was no longer the thundering voice of a distant digital god but one that she knew very well, the smarmy, Slavic tones that had belonged to the dead man whom Cagliostro claimed to be.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 15