Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)
Page 29
The words – or whatever they were – that Redeye entered showed up as junk characters to Bobbi. Neither her terminal or her own headware had a means of translation. It meant nothing to her, but it certainly got a reaction out of Cagliostro.
The way it was stated, the exclamation without anything but words floating in her mind, was nonetheless a thing of fury. Bobbi braced herself for some kind of assault, in case the angry digital god-thing smote Redeye for her impiety – but he did not. There was a pause, the program-mind chugging along silently, and then the brazen woman spoke again.
There was another pause, and Bobbi wondered what was next. Why had Redeye been pissing in his cereal? Why ride him at all? Cagliostro was a tricky bastard, sure, but it was like baiting a bear that wasn’t chained to a post. But then she thought of how she’d gotten there in the first place, how Redeye had known that name. Whatever name it was. Bobbi thought of fantasy novels where you could harness a demon if you knew its True Name. Perhaps it was a similar sort of situation. She sat there, waiting for one or the other to talk, milliseconds passing by with the weight of hours behind them. Finally, Cagliostro spoke.
Bobbi’s answer came right away.
With a mixture of frustrated curiosity and a little bit of anger at being asked off her own deck, Bobbi said,
A sinking sensation crystallized in Bobbi’s stomach.
Redeye replied,
Cagliostro ignored her.
The weight in Bobbi’s gut grew heavier.
“Well shit, fellas,” Bobbi said with a fragile smile, “I guess we got trouble.”
“Maybe not in there,” said Mason. “But we got trouble here.”
Bobbi looked between the two men, her brows going up as she pulled the cable from behind her ear. “What’s going on?”
“It’s the Yathi,” Scalli said.
Bobbi was suddenly very aware of the silence that had fallen throughout the incinerator room. Looking between them, past the elevator shaft, Bobbi saw the every one of the crazed ferals— Violet included— had fallen back into a statue pose, back arched and weapons ready. They looked like an army of old-fashioned tin soldiers, ready to be put on the march. Violet moved among the standing figures, drawing an eye on the faces of her fellows, the same eyes that covered the walls of the shrine, the outside of her truck. Red, glaring paint searing brands upon their skin, preparing them for their deaths. It was a ritual that Violet was obviously very familiar with. Bobbi wondered how many of those heads in her shrine she might have taken herself.
High above them, the muted thunder of an explosion sent a trembling ripple through the incinerator vault. The lights flickered; a general rumble of anger rose from among the mad legions around them, a kind of dim growl. “Shit,” Bobbi hissed, flinching. She swept her eyes over the darkened ceiling to see if the place was going to come down around them.
Mason looked as grim as Scalli, whose frown had managed to descend to new lows. Yeah, it was bad shit, all right. But she couldn’t be prepared for what the career soldier said next. “They’re already tangling with drone guns up top,” he said. “They’ve got an impressive defensive cordon. If we’d shown up without Violet, we’d have been turned into hamburger the moment we stepped off the bridge. It’s not going to hold for long, though.”
Another explosion sounded above; this time the rumbling was much closer, and fragments of dust and mortar rained down on them from above. Bobbi’s heart rocketed into her throat as she got to her feet. “How do you know it’s them?”
“Vi showed us.” Mason nodded to the far end of the room where the dim outline of a doorway could be seen. “They’ve got cameras set up all over the area, linked to computers in there; they’re crazy, but they know their shit. They showed up in armored carriers about five minutes ago.”
“They’re painted up like Civil Protection,” said Scalli. “You know, Special Tactics.”
Bobbi nodded, frowning between them. She was fast becoming the most serious of them all. “Yeah, I know them pretty well.” Last time she saw them she was hacking their helmets, keeping them all blind to Tom’s presence while he made his way through the guts of Orleans. She remembered how the Yathi slew them to a man before Tom had even gotten to them and shivered. “Okay, then,” Bobbi said, mastering the flash of terror. “So they’re going to hit this place and make it look like, what, a police raid?”
“Liable.” Scalli shook his head. “It’s bad shit. We need to get your girl awake and find out what’s going on, what’s here— Violet’s over there playing Sister Mary of Warfare over there with the troops, but I don’t figure they’re going to do much until the boss points them in a direction.
Mason nodded. “I’m going to trawl through their armory back there,” he said, nodding toward the door in the back. “See if we can’t rig up some explosives, you know. Violet said they had rockets, though now I wonder if she meant topside defenses.”
“Maybe she did,” Bobbi said. “But let’s not wait around guessing.”
Scalli grunted then. “We don’t have a lot of time, in any case,” he said. “They’ll find the elevator shaft soon.”
Bobbi stared at them. “How far out do they have these damned cameras, anyway?”
Mason laid a finger against his nose. “All over,” he said. “I figure they knew we were coming long before we were even near here.”
Bobbi closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Fantastic. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see if I can plug back in, find out if they’re
done talking.”
“And if they’re not?” Mason peered at Redeye, who still sad in her cross-legged position on the ground next to the terminal.
Bobbi shrugged. “We fight, I guess,” she said with bravado she only halfway felt. “Until she does. Either way, we can’t let them get in here. Whatever plan Cagliostro has, that woman is at the heart of it— and that means we have to do everything we can to keep her safe.”
“Then I guess we need to get on it,” said Scalli. “I’ll see if I can get Vi to put these people into action.”
It was then that another explosion sounded, this one so close that the walls of the incinerator vault trembled as if struck by the fist of God almighty. The towers of scrap metal swayed around them, threatening to collapse and drown them in rusted steel; the bleaching glow of the lamps went out, plunging the lot of them in darkness. Only the blue-white flames of the incinerator provided any sort of light now, a ghostly halo that radiated from the mouth of the furnace and transformed the room into a gloomy underworld. Around them the ferals, staring straight ahead and anointed with their lurid brands, looked more like the walking dead than the corpse-machines used by their former comrades.
“Might not be a bad idea to start thinking about the worst,” Mason said. In the strange light he looked like a ghost.
“That will not be necessary.”
The three of them looked down at once as Redeye came around. Her face was grim as she looked up at the lot of them. News was imminent, and it didn’t look positive.
“Begging your pardon, Miss,” said Mason, his brows lifted high. “Considering that the Martians decided to come visit while you were out, it seems to me that it is pretty damned necessary.”
Redeye rose. “We don’t need to worry about them,” she said. “Whatever damage they inflict here is nothing compared to what we can do, now.” Though her right eye glowed crimson, it was the other— the living one— that glittered with a light that stung deep at Bobbi’s heart. If Redeye had madness within her, it was coming out now.
“All right,” Bobbi said carefully. “What did Cagliostro tell you?”
“He was not able to finish.” Redeye shook her head, and the smile died on her lips as she scanned the ceiling. “Something attacked him. Something attacked him, and then the connection cut out with the power. They must have taken out the generators, which were also powering our contra-jamming measures.” She shook her head. “We need to get out of here. They are already invading the complex, and if we want to have any chance of escape we shall have to leave now.”
“I guess you’ll have to tell us about it later then,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head. She did not like the idea of the all-powered god of the digital voodoo getting smacked around. “All right, what do we do?”
“Go into the adjoining chamber,” Redeye said. She looked over her shoulder at the massed cult-troops, the door at the far end of the chamber past the incinerator. “Wait for me there. I have to address my people, tell them what needs to be done.”
“And what if they attack before that?” Mason frowned. “The elevator is exposed topside.”
“We aren’t going that way.” Redeye turned and started walking toward the painted ferals. “Go! I will not take long in giving orders.”
Bobbi hesitated a moment, but a nudge from Scalli sent her leading the three of them to the other end of the room. As she passed, she looked back over her shoulder; there was Redeye standing before the assembly of her people, Violet standing beside her with her mangled face set in an expression of stern pride. Nevertheless, Bobbi caught the way she looked at Redeye as she stood there, and Bobbi saw in those blue eyes the same thing that she had felt when she was running with Tom.
Poor girl, she thought. She’s probably in for the same thing as I was.
Whatever Redeye was saying, they couldn’t hear it as they hurried to the end of the room; the door was a heavy hatch secured by a rotary handle, which Scalli twisted open easily thanks to his suit. Entering the room beyond, Bobbi saw what Mason had been talking about— a computer console with a large bank of holographic displays took up one wall of a small room beyond, each one showing a camera view of different sections of the Old City. On the far end of the room was another hatch. Bobbi looked at the floating screens, and found that several of the locations that they had visited— including Violet’s shrine— were counted among the display panels.
“I guess they’d been watching us the whole time,” Scalli said with a grunt as he looked over as well. “We can’t underestimate that woman out there.”
“Scalli,” Bobbi said irritably, “I didn’t get here by underestimating people.” She looked over the screens; the displays had converged into a larger view of the industrial park, each one merging together to show a unified scene.
As they knew already, the Yathi forces had arrived. Several structures in the park were on fire, spewing ropes of black smoke into the bowl of night, and a line of armored cars had formed a semicircle around south end of the complex. They were painted up in the same flat gray of Civil Protection’s Special Tactics Unit, playing police. A large number of armored figures already strode through the crumbling buildings, forty or fifty at vague count, painted the same gray as their carriers. Each one of them cradled in their arms the complicated shapes of military battle rifles. They were already on their way toward the elevator shed, but their progress was being slowed by what Bobbi assumed were the automated guns that Redeye’s people had set up. Staccato flares of light blossomed crazily in the darkness, a garden of flame. Showers of dust and concrete boiled around the armored figures as they marched inexorably forward, answering with death in kind.
“They’re not stopping,” came Mason’s awed voice from behind her. “Look!” He reached past Bobbi to point at the screen, where the vanguard of the Yathi advance were shuddering from what appeared to be concentrated fire. The armored figures shook from the impact of the rounds spewed over them, and though their armor was heavy it was hardly impervious; holes blasted through spurted with narrow, pixelated streams of white blood. And yet, they moved on as if they were merely caught in a strong wind. Only when their armor failed entirely and they began to lose limbs and body mass were the figures stilled, lying in pools of livid white made dull gray by the shadows.
New motion drew their attention from the marching killers to the cordon of vehicles circling the complex. The central car, which Bobbi had thought to be just a bigger transport carrier, was opening up along one side. The hull hinged open like a gull-wing door; a machine began to emerge from within. This was no combat robot that she was familiar with, the brutal and angular things that looked like tank turrets lacking cannon walking on four spider’s legs. The thing that emerged was akin to a centipede, a ribbon made up of joined and articulated sections covered in heavy armored plates colored the same granite color as the rest of the force. Short, articulated legs ending in talons clicked away at the concrete beneath it as it unfurled itself from its carrier, leaving divots in its wake. And there, at the fore, its ‘head’ was a brutal, snub-nosed pyramid. A single sensor module swiveled like an eye within its housing at the flat end of the head as the machine moved forward— its tri-lobed aperture like a terrible iris, tracking things seen only to its monstrous self.
“We have got to get out of here.” In Bobbi’s voice there was no awe, only urgency. “Now.”
“Jesus, they’re really pulling out the stops.” Mason whistled low, shaking his head as he watched the sinuous machine make its way toward the fence. “I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think we need to stick around long enough to find out what it’s capable of.” Scalli sounded grim indeed as he stared at the monitor. “I was waiting for the death rays and the flying saucers, but that thing…”
The centipede-machine scuttled toward the fence, and did not stop as it clambered over and through. Its legs shredded the chain link as though it were rotten thread, tearing a hole big
enough for its ponderous body to go through. Bobbi had no idea how something that big— it was easily as long as the carrier from which it came— could have packed itself into its carrier, but now that it was out and moving they had to make their exit. “Somebody go get Redeye,” she said. “We need to get the fuck out before that thing comes down this elevator shaft.”
Presently the door opened; Scalli turned around, unlimbering his machine gun and training it on the hatch. “It’s done,” said Redeye as she entered, giving Scalli a curious look as she saw the muzzle of the gun trained on her. He grunted and slung it on his shoulder again.
Bobbi looked between the two of them. “What’s done?”
“I’ve given my people orders,” she said. Redeye entered, and Violet came in behind her. The feral priestess swung the hatch shut without a word and turned the wheel to seal it. “Their last orders, as it were.”
“Their last orders,” Mason repeated. “I know what that means. You’ve told them to hold their ground here, stage a last stand.”
“That can’t be right.” Bobbi searched Redeye’s face for some sign of mistake, but found none. Her eyes widened. “You can’t be sending your people on a suicide mission, can you?”
Behind them, the monitors flared with light as a peal of explosive thunder rattled overhead. Bobbi turned and stared; the machine had taken the forefront, and sparks played like the trails of lethal fairies across its armored hull as the turrets focused their fire upon it. The withering fusillade could do nothing to scratch its plating, though, and the centipede— now arrived at the main thoroughfare that ran through the savaged complex— had hunkered down upon its legs as if bracing itself. On the other side of the complex a building, where Bobbi had seen the muzzle flashes of turret guns before, now hosted a large hole that had apparently been blown through its facade by an unknown force. No further resistance came from that quarter.
“Christ,” barked Mason in disbelief. “That thing packing a cannon?”
Redeye frowned blackly at the monitor. “I do not know,” she said. “Perhaps a directed energy weapon of some sort. It does not matter in any case.”