And so Bobbi and her merry party were on their way, picking through block after ruined block toward their destination. Forty years of abandonment had destroyed much of what had been clear streets back in the day – devastated pavement and collapsing buildings made travel difficult, and abandoned cars and other vehicles made for fairly difficult navigation. Getting to their destination should only take an hour at most without traffic, but given that the majority of Seattle’s southern reaches were now a gang-ridden warzone, that made the difficulty of driving much greater.
By any reach of the imagination, things were easier – but only for those people living in between the narrow alley between the interstate and highway. No sooner had they cleared the looming eastern underpass, where the black blisters of the drone turrets silently tracked their progress through smoky lenses, they were faced with the image of an ancient school bus. It had long since been abandoned and burnt away to its bones, and had been set up as a barrier and boundary marker on a curb. The side of the bus that faced the street had been draped lengths of electrical cord, each of which had been strung with various shiny fragments and holographic tags. Hanging from the centermost garland was a string of human skulls.
“Gang of ferals used to live here,” Diana was saying from the passenger seat as they drove slowly past; Mason had already squeezed himself through the ceiling hatch, one hand on the gun as he surveyed the crumbling buildings from his perch. “Big one, migrated here from out east. Highway guns thinned them out, but every now and again we would have to snipe scavengers that made it through.”
“Charming,” Bobbi muttered. She looked up through the hatch at Mason, who scanned away, and then at Scallli whose mighty bulk had been squeezed into the truck’s passenger side. They’d had to remount the seat so that it almost touched the back one; Bobbi, small as she was, was the only one that fit behind him. It was very much like sitting in a tank, she thought, with the driver and the commander up front and the gunner in his turret. That must make her the communications officer, then. Fitting.
They traveled on through the crumbling streets. They witnessed more artifacts of past butchery; bodies hung from old utility poles, flesh picked mostly clean as they swung slowly in the breeze. The corpse of a woman had been lashed to the front of an abandoned garage, set on fire and left to burn. What remained was a headless marionette in the rags of a dress, blackened to near charcoal. The carbonized halo of a burned tire hung from the stump of her neck. Bobbi could go like that, and it wouldn’t even require a tire. Just a bad run, and a counterprog pumping feedback into her skullcomp. She wondered if she would have gone like Stadil had, should that happen, with nothing left in her head but scraps of silicon and carbon. No, she thought, it wouldn’t be half so clean as that.
“Got trouble up ahead.” Mason’s voice rang down from the hatch like a lead gong.
Bobbi blinked herself back into the waking world. They were passing a large strip mall, or rather a strip mall with a large parking lot that it surrounded like a letter “L;” time and flames had assaulted much of it, turning it into a charnel ruin that yawned at them as they approached. The lot had been dotted with the bones of ancient cars, but a line of thin black smoke still twisted from among them. Bobbi squinted to see through the smoke to find an armored car wedged in the front of what used to be a liquor store. Its gray bulk was twisted violently to one side so that the ball tires on its left side could be seen from under its heavy skirts.
“That looks new,” said Scalli from the driver’s seat. He slowed the car a bit as they drew closer.
“It does,” said Diana. “Or modern, at least. Couldn’t have been there but for a couple weeks maybe.”
Bobbi frowned out the window. “Where are we?”
“Eastern Kent,” Diana said, checking the little box monitor that had been patched onto dash. “This used to be Bloody Saint territory until Redeye came and burned them out or took them.”
“Which one?”
“A little of both. Hey, Marcus, bring us closer.”
Bobbi quirked a brow. Diana was calling Scali by his first name? That was unexpected. She sat quietly as Scalli flicked a glance at her from the rearview, possibly looking for dissent, but finding none turned the truck into the weathered parking lot. Mason trained the gun on the empty shop fronts as they moved slowly past, though he occasionally shot a look over his shoulder at the cars on the other side as well. No point in leaving themselves open to an ambush.
They had drawn up close to the car when Bobbi saw the logo that had been laid onto the truck’s scorched and crumpled skin. The stylized helix of the Genefex corporation blazed out at her like a magic seal, bidding her body into action. “Stop here,” Bobbi said, and the moment she felt the truck come to a halt she was out and heading toward it to the surprise of those inside. Bobbi had her nerve crusher in her hand, but she did not remember having taken it out of her bag in the first place.
Bobbi approached the wrecked car. It had hit the mall with speed, such that the concrete facade had collapsed all around its front half. It was a long vehicle, almost as big as the armored carriers that CivPro’s Special Tactics units used, though not as well-armored; she figured that had one of those bricks hit the concrete here it would have come out the other side before grinding to a halt. She searched for an obvious wound which would have brought the car down, but found none.
Diana came up beside her, rifle out. “That’s something I never thought I’d see,” she mused with a chuckle. “What do you think?”
Bobbi squinted a bit more at the wreck. “I have no idea,” she said. “I mean, if they got hit with something, it’d have to be in the front, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Diana peered at the truck for a moment, then slung her rifle across her back. “Here, I’ll climb up and see if there’s anyone inside.”
As Bobbi watched, the slim woman clambered up the back of the car and disappeared. It wasn’t really possible to see her moving around from where Bobbi stood, but she could hear her when Diana called down to her.
“Big fucking hole up here,” she said. “Blown in. Looks like some kind of charge.”
Of course it would be a bomb. “Well,” Bobbi said, “can you see in?”
Diana scrabbled about a bit up there for a moment. “Yeah,” she said, in the slightly compressed way someone has when they’re leaning over something, “Looks like….three people in there, up in the driver’s compartment. Dead of course, and ripe. Looks like they sprayed the interior with an automatic once they opened up the top here.”
Bobbi pursed her lips. “Who’s ‘they’, do you think?”
Diana’s head and right shoulder appeared over the top of the truck. “I guess Redeye and her people,” she said with a shrug. “She’s supposed to have all kinds of good stuff, so I don’t see why breaching charges would be a problem. If she and her buddies didn’t have such a hard-on for killing off Gennies, we’d had shit our pants and run a long time ago.”
Comments like that really didn’t call for anything but a wrinkled nose. “Yeah, well,” Bobbi said, “I guess we’re lucky there.” She shook her head and came around to the back of the car where she helped Diana get down. “Is there power in there?”
“Console’s shot to Hell,” Diana said with a shrug. “But there’s some dim light in there. Yeah, I think it’s got some power at least, maybe from an emergency battery.”
Bobbi nodded. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get back to the truck and I’ll see if I can’t hack it from there.”
Diana’s brows arched. “Even with corporate security?”
Her look of disbelief got a wide grin from Bobbi, who was happy to have a little bit of an upper hand in the moment. “Hey, girl,” she said, “I’m not the wannabe cowgirl you knew, all right? I’m Brain Mother now. This thing’s my kind of job.”
It was nice to have a moment of normalcy, her old routine, out here in the nutball wilds. Bobbi gave Diana a wink and turned back to the truck to do her work.
/> That feeling of normalcy faded the moment Bobbi charged up the Grail and linked it to the feeble network presence of the armored car’s computer. She feared that she would find herself in the same kind of horrible system, the sea of cold ink in which there was no movement or escape – but instead there was the blessed, astral blankness of Awakening and the familiar sensation of an earthly system.
Bobbi reached out. In an instant she knew that the system was heavily damaged, and that the majority of the files that had been stored in the car’s computer were fragmented; she had knowledge of jagged constructs of data, orderly matrices of code tossed into a blender and left to puree. Bullets did terrible things to computers, but time was worse.
She searched the small system for something intact, and plowed through fields of ruined chaff for what seemed like hours until finally she found something in the car’s navigational program. There, laid out on a date that was a month previous, was the final course transmitted to the crew of the vehicle. There were stops, addresses in Renton that she didn’t recognize as being on the list. Finally there was the endpoint of their journey which was – as she had expected – Drone Processor 072. Wherever they were going, they were stopping through what she had thought to be dangerous territory.
Well, dangerous for them, maybe. They didn’t even make it.
Bobbi captured the intact file and began searching for more— she wanted to see what they were carrying, or were on their way to pick up. Orders, manifests, something. As she did so, however, she was aware of something stinging her forearm, a hot sensation felt very very far away. Her brain sang that something was wrong; she felt motion…distance…and suddenly she was alone in the Grail again, in its gray lobby, disconnected from the car. Curiosity and fear began to fill her as her brain did its magic, and she unplugged herself from the Grail and her terminal.
The world was a maelstrom of panicked shouting and muted thunder as Bobbi joined it once more. It was strange how her mind worked when Bobbi came out of the trance of Awakening; everything she witnessed was slow and precise, seemingly existing in and of themselves, as her brain struggled to slow down and catch up with material existence. She looked at the scene as if it were a television image seen through a monitor. The truck was rocketing along a stretch of road beyond the strip mall where they had been. Above her, Mason was manning the gun, which between the muted coughing of its suppressor and the clattering of its bolt sounded like a chain smoker playing with castanets. Hot brass rained down through the hatch. All around her sang a choir of bullets spanging off the hull. Scalli was bearing down on the wheel with an expression like a grim bodhisattva, something that Mason seemed to share as he worked the gun above them. Diana leaned out the truck’s visored window and sprayed death at assailants yet unseen.
She felt another stab of hot pain, this time far more present and immediate. Bobbi looked down to see that one of the machine gun’s cartridges had fallen on her arm and burned her – another brand blotched her white skin not far from it. It was only then that she managed to pull through the slow-motion haze and join the living world. “What’s going on,” she called as her blood began to pick up with blossoming adrenaline. “What happened while I was under?”
“Shit, you’re back!” Diana ducked in just in time for a bullet to strike the armored apron running around the passenger side window where she had been but seconds before. “We got a problem, Bobbi, so just keep your head down.”
“What kind of a problem?” Bobbi looked around the back seat; there were no real windows here, just metal plates welded onto the frame through which narrow cross-shaped apertures had been cut. There was no back window either, just a solid reinforced plate. She pressed herself up against the nearest such cross and looked out. Nothing. “What’s going on?”
This time it was Scalli who spoke. “We got someone come up behind us,” he called back to her. Diana leaned back out the window and resumed spitting fire. Both she and Mason were very precise— orderly bursts, military behavior. Bobbi’s dad would have been proud. “ferals, or gangers, or …” the truck rocked as Scalli wrenched the wheel left and they went sharply around an intersection. “Whoever. Came up on us in a built-up truck, same as this one, only filled with a lot of pissed-off people with guns.”
“Fuck’s sake, Mason,” Diana roared as she fired another burst. “Can’t you get those motherfuckers off us?”
Mason’s answer was a long burst of muted thunder, followed by the screeching of brakes and the nightmare crash of impact and the screeching of steel. “Got ‘em,” he called out, through the ensuing silence. Bobbi heard a distinct tightness in his voice that made her look up through the hatch. Mason was leaning against the back of the cupola, and blood was trickling out of the cuff of one rolled-up sleeve.
“Hey,” called Bobbi as she half-stood, half-crouched by where he was, trying to ease him down. “I think he’s hit!”
“Shit,” snapped Diana and she twisted her way between the seats, which was made difficult thanks to Scalli’s bulk. He stopped the car, pulling it onto the curb while Bobbi tried to help Mason down out of the top of the car.
Mason came down easy. He winced as he slid out onto the back soon; the sleeve of his coveralls had been cut open and a narrow wound like a mouth had been torn in his arm just below the shoulder. “I’ll be all right,” he said, waving both women away. “It’s just a flesh wound, Jesus. Diana, get the kit out and I’ll see to it.”
Bobbi sat down beside him; his face was a little pale, but Mason seemed fine otherwise. Diana, however, looked as if he might have had lost his arm instead. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Diana!”
“All right!” She turned back into her seat, digging under the passenger side of the dashboard.
“You sure that you got them?” This from Scalli, who was not looking back at them. Instead he had opened his door, and was moving to get out.
Mason shook his head. “I think so,” he said, frowning at the wound in his arm. “Might want to check and make sure.”
“Any idea who they were?” Diana came up with a medical box and handed it to Bobbi, who looked at it like she’d been given a trout.
“No,” said Mason, who reached over and took the box from Bobbi. “Not much of a medic, are you?”
Bobbi wrinkled her nose at him. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m a keyboard kind of girl. The bag’s just meant to be cute.”
”Cute,” Mason repeated with a shake of his head. “Well, I’ll say this for you, honey, you sure got a strange sense of it.” He took a battlefield patch from the kit, tearing the foil seal off its business end and sealing it against his arm. Antibac and painkillers flooded through him almost instantly, and his color started to return. “Scalli, you see anything out there?”
“Just a big fucking wreck,” Scalli replied. “Truck flipped over when you hit it that last time. It’s on fire now.
“You see any survivors?”
“No. You want to light it up again?”
Mason shook his head. “No,” he said, “it should be fine. If they aren’t getting out and screaming, we’re all set.”
“We should see who they were,” said Bobbi, who was still rubbing at her burned wrist. “Think they could have followed us from Tenleytown?”
“I doubt it. They were probably in the area and saw us poking around on that corporate bus.” Diana leaned back against the dash, squinting out the window at the wreck behind them. “Yeah, that looks like a native rig all right.”
Bobbi frowned a little. “I don’t know,” she said. “It might be important.”
Diana shook her head. “We should get going,” she said. “That noise is going to draw more attention, and we don’t need another fight.” She looked to Bobbi then. “Did you get anything off that car?”
Bobbi hesitated. Diana was right about the noise, but she didn’t like the idea of just leaving the dead unchecked. She looked to Scalli, but his expression was neutral. Diana regarded her with expectant eyes. �
��All right,” Bobbi finally said. “All right. Let’s get out of here, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
As they made speed away from the site of the battle, Bobbi told them about the stops that had been listed on the car’s itinerary. It did little to increase their understanding of the situation, but they all agreed that the crew of the armored car were up to something terrible. Though the stops made on the way to Drone Processor 072 were identified as places where, at least it had been rumored, small settlements had been set up and then vanished. “There one day, gone the next,” she said with a shake of her head. “Maybe they went the way we were afraid we would in Tenleytown.”
“What do you mean?” Bobbi asked.
“Those goddamned corporates,” Diana replied. “Well, I mean the truck was empty, right? So maybe they weren’t dropping anything off. Maybe they were picking up something to deliver to this…processor thing. Whatever it is, it can’t be good.”
“Only thing that I can think of would be people,” Bobbi said. She thought of the ghouls and shivered.
“Well,” said Mason, “we can pass those spots on our way up. Bit out of our way, but getting through Renton’s going to be a whole lot of inconvenience anyway.” He had patched himself well; the color had returned to his face and he acted as if the wound had never happened. Combat meds were some good shit. “We’ll probably have to deal with more assholes like those,” he said, indicating the wreck they had left behind with a jerk of his thumb, “but we’ve got plenty of ammo. This car is made to take a serious pounding.”
The rain of bullets plinking off the armor echoed in Bobbi’s head. “I believe it,” she said with a low whistle. “Well, look. If you think we can buzz them, fine. I’d like to know what the hell it is that we’re getting into.”
“If we can without getting shot at.” Diana shook her head.
“Not going to happen.” This from Scalli, who looked straight ahead as he kept the car going ever forward toward the northeast. “We’re driving into the darkest heart of the Old City and looking for a crazy woman who’s raising an army of equally crazy motherfuckers with enough firepower to crack open armored cars at the very least. Gathering them in one place, most likely, and setting up to wage war upon a corporation with extremely well-armed security forces. Getting shot at is the least of what we’re going to have to deal with, and you’d best get realistic about that fact.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 20