Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  “Wait.” This was making less and less sense by the minute; Bobbi took a step toward Violet, squinting at her. “But couldn’t you miss the signal? I mean, couldn’t someone disrupt it?”

  “Maybe,” said Violet, “But it hasn’t happened yet, not when separated by a very long distance. The implants don’t work like transmitters do. It’s something different. I don’t know the technology.” She looked a bit embarrassed now. “Honestly I’m as much in the dark here as to what things do as you are, now. My little evil spirit didn’t leave much behind, like I told you, and I don’t think she was any kind of a technician.”

  Bobbi nodded. “I guess that makes sense, considering what your job was.” She wiped at her face to get the last bit of dampness off of her cheeks. “All right, so she’s alive, then.”

  “Better than alive.” Violet was grinning. “I said we know her status, not just life-or-death. From what I can tell she’s not even nicked.”

  Images of Redeye punching holes through legions of dead on the other side of the bulkhead sprang to life in Bobbi’s mind. “Well, that’s good. Do you think we should go back through, maybe?”

  At this, Scalli shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said. “We can’t talk to her, so they’re either jamming the radio, or the walls are too thick, or something. If we can’t find out what’s going on, we shouldn’t open that door again unless she does it herself.”

  “Okay…” Bobbi’s mind was ticking over. “So what do we do, then? Wait and see?”

  “No,” said Scalli. “I think we should go to the next room, see what’s in there. Might be something that we can find, maybe a way to get back around to her.”

  Violet wrinkled her slim little nose. “I dunno,” she said. “That sounds…worrying.”

  “It’s just a storeroom,” Scalli pointed out.

  “So was the last one,” Violet spat. “And anyway, the farther we are from the Eye, the worse off we’re going to be – she’s the only one of us who can get through heavy resistance. We should—”

  “That’s enough.” The peal of command in Bobbi’s voice rang from the angles of the corridor, surprising everyone, herself included. She rode it in the silence that followed anyway. “We can’t be sure that Red’s going to get through on this side just now. She’s got to be hiding in there.”

  “Yeah,” said Scalli, nodding along. “We could get to her through the transfer chutes.”

  “Assuming we can get through them.” Violet’s frown deepened, giving her the appearance of a vaguely homicidal cheerleader. “Do you think we open the hatches if we go into the next room, assuming we don’t get flayed where we stand?”

  Bobbi shook her head. “Only one way to find out,” she said, and took a deep breath. “All right. Scalli, how much ammunition do you have left?”

  “Not a lot,” he said gravely. “Mason took his share of the rifle mags with him. I’ve got four left, maybe…” He paused to check a small screen on the top of the support gun. “Two hundred thirty-seven rounds.”

  “Let’s hope that we don’t run into anybody else, then,” Violet muttered. “That was a hell of a welcome.”

  “Well, let’s not give them any more time to break that encryption, if they’re gonna.” Bobbi stooped to pick up Mason’s rifle, frowning at the unfamiliar weight in her hands.

  Scalli looked at her brows arched. “Can you shoot that thing?”

  Bobbi looked down at the gun and nodded. “Yeah,” she said, checking the thing over – all the parts that she recognized were there, nothing a surprise. “It’s been a long time, though. Better not trust me for anything other than spewing bullets all over the place.”

  “We call it ‘suppressing fire’ in the business,” Scalli said with a faint smile. “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine. Just set it to burst and don’t dump your clip all at once. You won’t get another one.”

  “Better I just do it single shot, then.” Bobbi put the knife away and cradled the weapon in her arms for a moment, trying to get a proper feel for it, then slung it over her shoulder. “You sure you can move, Vi?”

  “Trust me,” Violet said, and her expression was dark. She was putting on her armor again, sliding her arms through the sleeves and buckling the breastplate. “I’d have to be dead to keep from doing this.”

  “Plenty of time yet.” Scalli clicked off the safety of his rifle. “All right, let’s get a move on.”

  They gathered by the door, guns at the ready while Bobbi reached out for the door system; the lock was not protected either, the same as when they had entered the first storehouse, but this time Bobbi stopped to place a fairly thick security wall around the operating code. If they needed to move back, this time they could without too much interference. The door behind them, Bobbi noted, was now absolutely without power, and therefore without any way to get through it even if it was safe to do so. They’d definitely have to use another route. So there was only forward, and forward they would go. Bobbi triggered the door and dropped back into reality as the doors began to trundle open and the three of them braced for coming death.

  But there was none. Instead the doors opened up on a new warehouse, though this one was not filled with pods. It was almost completely empty. Save for the pair of chute doors that were mounted on the left walls, only a single object lay on the polished black floor, a rectangular box made of flat gray metal. Thick cables and feed hoses sprang from mountings in its surface, connecting it to nameless ports visible only dimly in the shadows of the ceiling overhead. The three of them lingered in the doorway, Scalli and Violet sweeping the muzzles of their guns across the room while Bobbi attempted to feel out any active systems in the room. She could find none.

  There was also no other exit. They were trapped.

  “…well all right, then,” said Scalli when he was sure that nothing was going to drop out of the ceiling and try to murder them at the moment; he stepped over the threshold into the room, and the Bobbi and Violet followed.

  At once, Bobbi was drawn toward the box. She approached it, looking it over. There were no seams, nor any obvious controls – only the barbed clawtip glyphs of the Yathi tongue embossed into its surface, all along the bottom. It sat on a plinth of strange gray material that looked like graphite. To Bobbi, the machine looked like a tomb. She could not help staring at it, as if it reached out and pulled her gaze away of its own volition. As she approached, Bobbi could feel a whisper in her head, the implanted protocols suggesting that here was something here of interest, a system that she might want to see, magnificent in its complexity and artistry –

  And then hard white fingers wrapped around Bobbi’s hand, squeezing it so that she was shocked out of her reverie. She looked down at her hand; Violet grasped her firmly, so hard that her thumb made an angry red divot in the back of it. Bobbi jerked her hand away, swearing.

  “You don’t want to go near that thing,” Violet said sternly. Her eyes were hard. “Trust me on this.”

  Bobbi shook the pain out of her hand. “Fine,” she said, “but what the hell is it? It looks like some kind of coffin.”

  “Because that’s what it is,” said Violet. She frowned as she looked at the tomb, her blonde brows turning down into a sharp “V” over her eyes. “Or something like it. It’s like a cryogenic pod, sort of.”

  “‘Sort of?’” Scalli came up to join them. He frowned at the thing as well. “What does that mean?”

  Violet shook her head. “I mean it’s like…well it’s not just for preservation. They do all kinds of medical procedures. We found one in the Old City that was apparently knitting new skin over an implanted transfer. It woke up when we got the lid off, all half-covered with skin – died screaming almost the second we uncovered it. There’s definitely a Yathi in there. Best to leave it the fuck alone lest we wake it up. That’d be all we fucking need.”

  “Yeah…” Bobbi took a step back, which was a bit difficult as she took a moment to push the whispering of the software out of her mind. Having the voodoo comp
uter in her head whispering sweet nothings to her was not at all promising, and she found herself regretting the decision more and more. Was this going to happen as they encountered more technological artifacts? What if she ended up faced with something more complex, like the Chorus? A shudder ran through her body as she tore her eyes away from the tomb-machine, and stalked away toward the chute hatches and the business at hand.

  Kneeling by the first hatch, Bobbi ran her hands along the seams of the black metal portal. Featureless and with no obvious method of opening it, Bobbi wondered immediately if controls were located elsewhere; she could detect no other system save for whatever was running the tomb. “Looks like there’s nothing here,” she said. “Nothing computerized, at least. Might be something else running it, but I don’t think it’s present to be found, you know?”

  “All right,” said Scalli, who had come over to examine the door himself. “How do we get it open?” He slung his rifle on its hook, then began feeling along the hatch’s upper sides. “Surely there’s a maintenance panel somewhere, or something. Else how would they fix anything?”

  “That’s a good question,” Bobbi said, but it was Violet who had the answer. She shook her head and knocked once on the wall by the hatch.

  “If there’s not a hatch,” she said, “then they’re almost certainly being controlled from up top, right? We’d seen places that had repair drones inside the walls; they came out to fix things sometimes, when we’d blasted something before destroying the computer systems. Like xsiarhotl, just…different.”

  Bobbi quirked a brow. “Different how?”

  “Well,” Violet said, “you know how they use bodies?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They don’t always use the whole thing.”

  Scalli made a dark sound in the back of his throat. “Sooner we get out of here, the better,” he muttered. “Jesus.”

  “Well we can search around for ventilation,” Violet said. “I mean they do have air ducts in places like this. The Yathi still breathe, having human bodies. At least, most of the newer ones do. I don’t know about the old ones.”

  Bobbi frowned again. “Oh, good,” she said. “So we find an air shaft, and then…what? They cut the airflow off and keep us cordoned off until we suffocate?”

  “You mean until you suffocate,” Scalli said. “I’m too damned big to get into an air shaft like this. We’re gonna have to get those hatches open if you want me to move anywhere.”

  Violet nodded. “All right,” she said, “Well, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one. I mean they haven’t been in the past.”

  Bobbi nodded. “Then let’s get to looking,”

  They searched the chamber carefully, looking for seams or grilles in the black walls that would suggest a vent; all the while they kept a weather eye on the door as they moved, occasionally glancing over at the tomb-machine to ensure that it wasn’t reacting to their presence. It remained as still as it had when they had entered the room. They found several smaller grilles, but nothing that would admit even the smallest of them. After twenty-five minutes or so, a cry of satisfaction brought their attention to where Violet crouched down along one wall.

  “I found it,” she said, triumph in her voice. “A big one. It’s over here.”

  They joined Violet at one of the opposite corners, where low in the wall a narrow, inward-facing bevel was issuing cool air around a square section of wall about the size for someone small to get through. Violet peered into the slotted recess, clucking her tongue in thought, and then sat back on her heels. She reached her fingers in to the middle knuckles and began feeling around; after a few tense moments in which Bobbi was certain that she’d lose her fingers, Violet pushed something. The section surrounded by the vent groove swung inwardly, allowing the air to gush in earnest.

  “There we are,” Violet said with a faint grin. “All right, Bobbi, it’s your show.”

  Bobbi blinked at her. “Me?”

  Violet blinked right back at her. “Well, yeah,” she said. “I mean I can go, but I can’t interface with whatever’s up there. We can both go, I guess, but I figure you’ll be a lot safer in a vent tunnel than Scalli would be on his own should something decide to come through the door.”

  At this, Bobbi made a face. She did not like the idea of crawling through a network of ventilation shafts, possibly filled with alien creatures, and without any kind of map. “I don’t know how to get there from here,” she pointed out.

  “That’s easy enough,” Violet said with a shrug. “You just go upward. You know the general layout of this place, Bobbi. You can see in the dark, and you can hack whatever’s coming, right?”

  Bobbi wanted to make a very reasonable argument as to how this was a very bad idea, but this would be a rather hypocritical act considering where they had followed her already. “…yeah,” she said instead, and drew a deep breath. “All right, yeah. So I’ll get up there, spring the hatches, and we’ll take the chutes…where?”

  “First we get to Redeye,” said Scalli. “And then it’s down to the factory. Maybe we can blow the fucker while we’re at it, so we don’t get any further problems. Or maybe it’ll go even farther down, who knows? Either way, we’ll be closer to where we need to be.”

  Bobbi looked between them. “And if Redeye isn’t around by the time I’m done?”

  Scalli shrugged. “Then I guess it’s up to us to finish what we started.”

  As she stared at the dark mouth of the open vent, Bobbi took a deep breath. This was not her idea of a sound plan – and yet, what else could they do? Squaring her shoulders, Bobbi got down on her knees, flipped the visor down over her eyes once more, and was thankful for her augmented senses as she crawled into darkness.

  Were it not for the visor, Bobbi would have immediately become lost. There was no light, only the ghostly white-on-black geometry conjured up by ultrasonic ranging – no detail, only solid planes. It was comforting in a way; it reminded her of the primitive video games her father liked, the ones that his grandfather had shown him when he was a boy. Wireframes with primitive textures. Unreal. It helped her push the monstrousness of the truth out of her mind. She was alone, and as she soon discovered upon trying the radio link, cut off from Violet and Scalli. A distinct sensation of impending death settled over her, though if it were hers or someone else’s she could not say. There was only the dread, pushing her upward, urging her to make her way.

  And so Bobbi made her way along the duct feeling like a clot in a vein, heading upward to throw herself into the brain of this abominable complex. The visor had a mapping function which allowed her to mark her path, and it spooled out a line of red light behind her that would let her see the way back. Upward, always upward, pausing from time to time to check for signs of movement or worse, discovery. Nothing.

  As she went, she thought of Mason, felt tears start in her eyes, and flipped up the visor to clear them away when they came. Part of what drove her on was most certainly revenge, a certain bloody-mindedness that she had not had before. She did not know when it had come. Maybe it was when Tom disappeared, or when Freida died, or when Bobbi had shot the thing that wore Diana. Maybe it was when Mason threw himself to the corpse-machines to save them. It was in her blood like an infection now, something dark and vaguely feverish, waiting to erupt.

  And so around and around she went, navigating the twisting vents with no real understanding of her direction save for the virtual zenith that the goggles so helpfully projected for her overhead. At least something knew what the hell was up. For what felt like hours she carefully traversed the ducts, her knees aching, her back tight as she crawled as quietly as possible through the darkness. As she went, Bobbi realized that the ducts had been built for something to travel through; there were handholds in vertical shafts, hatches which when exposed revealed only inscrutable machinery. She felt scratches on the metal of the ducts as she went, signs of past travelers whom she could not identify. Had there been others who, trapped here in the complex, had somehow es
caped the drone factories and tissue processors to make it this far? Somehow, Bobbi didn’t think so. The dread only grew as she went along, the scratches like the Devil’s own hoofprints against her fingertips. She was getting closer.

  Eventually, she made her way along to where she thought the upper chambers must be. The elevator had fed into a receiving lobby and side rooms before feeding into the control nexus. Her hope was that she would emerge in one of these, somewhere out of the way; she wouldn’t need to be inside the secured area to work her magic, or at least she hoped so. The cuts widened out a bit, and they began to split into junction cubicles large enough to sit in. Bobbi, tired and sore from all her worming around, sat down hard inside one of these. That was when he found her.

  Bobbi had her back against the wall of the cubicle, the plating covering her torso welcome support for her tired muscles. She turned off her visor and took a deep breath, letting the darkness fill her senses. It was almost peaceful after her exertions, even with the possibility of death so close. She had taken a deep breath and fished a stick of gum laced with Pranazine out of the pocket of Tom’s coat – the same stuff she had given him when they had first met, just to calm him down. Swaddled in the pinned-up garment she almost felt him with her, and she wondered what it was that he would say to her. She thought of romantic things, perverse things, angry things. And finally she thought of him speaking to her as the Chorus had through Freida, mechanical and pitiless. If he were alive, she’d have to kill him if she found him. When she found him. Sitting there, she knew that if she made it out intact she’d be hunting the white-skinned horrors of the Yathi race for all the years of her life.

  It was when she came to that conclusion that her transceiver cut in, and she was very aware of a system awakening nearby; she heard motion coming from down one of the tunnels, but she couldn’t be certain which. A voice sounded in her head, very faint but born of the strange telepathic substratum of the network, the one to which her headware was so attuned. She realized with a thrill of mingled relief and disquiet that it bore Cagliostro’s data marker.