What could she say to that? Sorry? Bobbi shook her head; there was nothing that could be done here that would make things better, and as badly as she felt for the dying cyborg there was still the matter at hand. “I wish that things were different, Red,” she said instead, and shook her head. “I really do. But we’re going to have to get real here. I can’t let you nuke the shit out of this place, even with you…like this. You know that.”
Redeye’s eyes tightened. “I do,” she said. “But I know something else. Something very important.”
Here we go. “What is that,” Bobbi asked, but she had a good idea of what the answer was going to be.
“I know that even as badly wounded as I am, you cannot stop me.”
And she was right. Despite her injuries, Redeye was still more than capable enough to vault backward through the mist; nobody had time to even get a shot off. No sooner had she made it through the doors they began to hiss shut. “Fuck me running,” Bobbi growled, and charged ahead toward the doors. “Come on!”
She moved like a bolt of pure motion, fueled by adrenaline and worse – unarmed and unprotected, someone else might have hesitated sprinting ahead into the unknown, but Bobbi had done it so many times now that it seemed entirely second nature now. Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more, she thought as she leaped over the sundered turrets and pressed on toward the swiftly-narrowing gap. Once more, or we all get turned to vapor. Fuck that noise. She leaned into it, every footfall propelling her closer, every moment sealing the doors a little more, and behind her the chorus of boot heels that belonged to her comrades as they followed. As driven as she was, though, even she could see that she would not make it before the gap grew too narrow. She was going to fail. Redeye was going to explode, and that would be the end of it. It had all come to naught.
Except…it wasn’t. As fast as she was, Bobbi was nothing before the great black meteor that was Scalli. The power of his muscle suit wasn’t just in its armor, it was in its strength – strength to lift, strength to smash, strength to run. He moved almost as fast as Redeye as he closed with the door, and skidding to a halt took hold of the great slabs with both hands. Bobbi had just enough time as she drew close to marvel at his strength before she dove between his braced legs and through the gap into the next room.
Bobbi slid across the floor on her belly into what turned out to be another small lobby, one terminating in a perpendicular corridor which she plowed into head-first. She lay dazed for a second, and as she attempted to get up got Violet’s boots in her back as she slid in after. The air fled from her lungs a second time and she lay on the floor for a few seconds before Violet hauled her up. “We’ve gotta help Scalli,” she hissed in Bobbi’s ear, “He’s in trouble!”
The words jolted Bobbi into action through the haze of impact. Helped by Violet, she got to her feet and turned round to see that Scalli was in real trouble. There was no way that he was going to get in through the gap; it was already too small for him, but now it had shrunk against his efforts to the point that he was in real danger of losing his hands.
“Fuck,” Bobbi shouted, and the two women scrabbled to get to either side of the gap; they pulled at the doors as hard as they could, but Bobbi was a buck thirty and Violet was less than that. No way were they going to help him with physical power. “Scalli,” Bobbi said as Violet attempted to jam her rifle in the gap as a brace, “Scalli, I need you to get your arms out of there. Please, just wait for us.”
“I can’t get this fucking thing in here,” Violet was muttering to herself. “God damn it, get in there, get in there!”
“It’s all right,” Scalli said; his voice was thick with exertion and what Bobbi knew had to be pain; veins stood out in his neck through the force he applied within the suit, the force which its synthetic muscles were fruitlessly multiplying. “Baby girl, just…just get back, both of you. I’m gonna be okay here.”
“But how?” Bobbi stared at him with eyes starting to glaze with tears – she couldn’t lose him, not like this. “Oh God, Scalli, I don’t –”
“Hush!” He was talking through gritted teeth now, nearly buckling against the strain. His arms and body strained hideously as the suit went into crisis mode, ballooning so that the false flesh that coated it began to split; the braided black cords that made up those monstrous limbs showed through the dark skin as they expanded to freakish dimensions, such that Bobbi and Violet stumbled back in fear that they might burst. “I’m all right, I can get out of the suit – just get back!”
Bobbi stared at him. Scalli had been enormous since she’d met him, and even after discovering that his build was enhanced through the suit she had never thought that he could take it off. Part of her had assumed that it was fused to him. “I can get out of it,” he hissed again in the face of her hesitation, “But you need to get the fuck out of here, all right? I’ll be all right, baby girl. Just go!” There was no fear in his eyes, just a sense of assured urgency; if he was shitting her and playing hero, he was ready for the Academy.
Violet grabbed her arm and pulled. “Let’s go, Bobbi,” she pleaded. “I see her blood. We’ve got to go!”
Bobbi turned, but found her legs would not yet let her go – instead, she looked at him squarely in the face through the ever-narrowing gap. “I’m not losing two men over this,” she said, her voice even and serious despite the fact she wasn’t quite sure what she was saying in that instant. “You stay alive. I’ll be back for you.” She did not look at his face; instead she turned and ran with Violet, feeling like a complete fucking coward but knowing that there were greater stakes ahead.
They flew down the hallway, white and sterile as the lobby had been, leaving the nightmare darkness of the factories behind for something which felt even more malicious in its sterility. They ran, Violet with her rifle taking the lead as they followed the bloody trail, but Bobbi could not get the look on his face out of her head as they charged through the twisting labyrinth of eye-scouring whiteness that the Yathi had built. There was nothing ahead of them but eerie silence, and they hurried on not knowing what would await them – more Yathi defenses, Redeye awaiting to waylay them, or perhaps something entirely different.
Eventually the corridors gave way to yet another lobby and another doorway, this one open. Bobbi and Violet paused at the threshold and looked out upon the top of what appeared to be a vast, cylindrical chamber, cut out of the earth and clad in the same white material as the maze behind them. The doorway opened upon a deck, over which the top of the room curved in a bowl. Columns of machinery dotted the grillwork, devices of a kind she had not yet glimpsed – pylons of black metal shimmering with hazy glyphs of holographic light, all of them varying shades of green. Cylinders to which flanged vanes of a strange red crystal were attached, jutting out at crazy angles. Enormous holographic monitors, hovering in space, covered with the illegible script of the Yathi race. Looking through the grating of the deck more levels could be glimpsed, all lit by the bleaching glow of the lamps that shone upward from the chamber’s distant bottom pole.
The machines that dotted the deck were strange, malicious things, but these were nothing before the sight of what ran along the cylinder’s axis. Clustered upon a central trunk of weird gray-green metal were at least a hundred capsules, each large enough to contain a compact car; these tanks were filled with a milky fluid, and tubes and vanes of various ineffable design bristled from the brief caps of bronze-colored alloy that plated the ends of each. Each of the capsules were made from a heavy transparent material, and within each a vague, blob-like shadow could be seen.
“What are they?” Violet’s voice was hushed, even reverent as she gazed upon it all. “What are they supposed to be?”
Bobbi stared at the vast umbilical, and her heart felt as if it were being squeezed in her chest. Of course she knew what grew in those tanks; she had seen it in the visions that Cagliostro had given her, malicious fruit grown on an otherworldly vine. She had expected so much, but not this. Not this.
>
“Don’t go near them,” Bobbi whispered to her.
Violet looked at her. Horror of her own began to dawn in those blue eyes. “Why? What are they?”
Before Bobbi could say another word, Violet walked across the deck toward the tanks that studded to the top of the umbilical trunk. She approached the nearest one, frowning at the glass, at the white fluid and the ineffable silhouette within. “I feel like I should know what this is,” she said, equal parts curious, frightened and frustrated all at once; she peered into the glass, and seeing only darkness reached up with the muzzle of her rifle to lightly tap at against the tank’s surface. Bobbi opened her mouth to warn her back, but it was too late. Drawn to the sound, the shadow moved; a form resolved itself from the milky gloom, rushing up to the surface of the glass to see what disturbed its slumber. Though Violet blocked much of it from her vantage point, Bobbi got a clear look at a battery of long, white beetle limbs, covered with barbed hairs, ending in taloned nippers that scraped at the surface of the tank as it tried to gather purchase. Violet screamed, a high, bright sound that seemed to strain her throat as it clawed free, and leaped back with her rifle at the ready.
Bobbi lurched forward, grabbing at her shoulders. “No,” she cried out, “No!” The thing was already receding back into the depths of its tank as the movement that had stimulated it had drawn away. It might have been blind, or stupid, or simply unconcerned – whatever it was, Bobbi had been spared the sight of the rest of monstrous figure, but for the shining gleam of two rows of gleaming silver discs fading into the dark.
They stood there for a moment, Bobbi holding Violet tightly in her arms while the feral priestess shuddered and gasped; the image would stay in Bobbi’s mind forever, she knew, but Violet had just stared into the face of something that even she would never have thought would exist in this world. This place was growing something, but it wasn’t a terraforming colony. The Yathi were growing their own bodies in those tanks, the bodies which they had abandoned on their homeworld. They were trying to bring their real selves from their homeworld into this one.
After a few moments Violet’s fevered breathing slowed, and her hold on her rifle sagged. Bobbi let her go, and as Violet turned to stare at her, a look of absolute terror dawned in her eyes. The zealot, standing in the very crecheworks of her personal Satan, melted into a sudden and complete panic. She dropped her rifle and clutched Bobbi’s arm, gabbling in a strained, thin voice, reason having fled away. “We can’t be here,” she keened, her fingers tightening in a death-lock on Bobbi’s bicep. “We can’t be here, oh no, wecan’twecan’twecan’t –”
In the harsh light of understanding, the cool that had fled Violet’s mind poured into Bobbi’s own. Bobbi reached out with her free hand and slapped Violet hard across her face in order to break her growing hysteria. “Stop it,” she barked, and Violet quieted immediately, clinging to Bobbi as if she might blow away on her own. Bobbi shook her head and extricated herself, then took Violet by her arms. “Listen to me,” she said, her eyes hard. “Listen! I need you on this, Vi. You’ve had one of these things inside of you, you know what that means. They’re going to be twice as smart as they already are if they can do this kind of thing. Then we’re fucked. This place has got to go.”
Terrified, but sobered by Bobbi’s words, Violet nodded fiercely with eyes as wide as saucers. Bobbi took Violet’s face in her hands and put her brow against hers; she was as terrified as the feral was, but it was not of the monsters in their tanks – it was of the monster that she knew she would have to become if she could not shut this place down herself. And yet, she had no idea as to how to avoid it; if she couldn’t do it, she may very well have to allow Redeye to fulfill her ‘destiny’ and hope that she wasn’t dooming the city in the process.
Violet pressed her head against Bobbi’s. “I will obey,” she whispered, allowing herself to fall into the role of the priestess, submissive to her chosen deity. “I am sorry for my weakness.”
“It’s all right, honey,” Bobbi murmured in reply. “I’m as scared as you. Now c’mon, we have to find Red.” She stooped to pick up Violet’s rifle and put it back in her hands. “You look out for me.”
Violet checked her rifle and fell in next to Bobbi as she proceeded across the deck, sweeping the gun’s muzzle back and forth as they searched for the wayward cyborg. Bobbi was troubled that they hadn’t come into a warzone, their terrible discovery aside; they had heard the sounds of combat, the gutteral sounds of the Yathi tongue, but at least on this level there was no sign of Redeye.
They walked across the wide deck, looking for a way up or down, and found it on the far other side. A simple circular opening had been cut in the deck, and a ladderway ran the whole length of the cylinder. Bobbi counted fifteen levels, squinting against the glow from the bottom. “All right,” she said with a frown. “I’ll go first.”
“I can’t allow that.” Violet slipped down over the lip of the opening without a word, the rifle already slung across her chest – she’d anticipated Bobbi’s words, and swung onto the ladder without a further word. Bobbi shook her head. She didn’t want a worshipper, but she supposed that it was better than her following Redeye to her death. She closed her eyes and thought of Scalli, hoping against hope that he wasn’t bullshitting her about being able to get out of the mess she’d left him in. But that was something she’d have to deal with on her own.
The two of them descended the ladder, through level after level of bizarre technology and the terrible gestational pods. As they cleared the entrance of each deck, Violet would stop, sweep the floor with her rifle, and move on. Bobbi kept her eyes open for something that might suggest a computer terminal or control system, but there was nothing that she could clearly identify. More importantly, they still could not find Redeye.
As they drew close to the bottom deck, the lights below swallowed everything in a haze of white light and heat. The sweat stood out on Bobbi’s skin as they moved, squinting downward as they traveled – both she and Violet had put on their visors again, letting their glare filters make things bearable. The heat had released anew the smell of the synthblood on her clothes, and she shivered as they moved closer and closer to the ring of tiny suns at the pole. It seemed as if they would soon run out of decks to examine; the lowermost deck hung thirty feet above the bottom pole, and it was swiftly coming into view.
Given their luck so far, it was perhaps fitting that it wasn’t until they got to the bottom level that they found her. Violet had slipped through the opening of the next to lowest level when she stopped and hissed softly in alarm. She looked up at Bobbi as she unslung her rifle, her blue eyes wide with warning, before she nodded downward through the grillwork. From her vantage point on the ladder, Bobbi peered through the black grill of the deck above, and saw what Violet had warned her about.
The lowest deck sat just above the bottom of central shaft. Around the trunk were arranged not gestational tanks, but a series of five interface chairs. They were different from the one in which Freida had sat in the Chorus’s lair, open, elegant things that looked like wide divans of dark metal wrapping around the base of the trunk. Sockets that Bobbi recognized were used for direct neural interface were mounted in the surface of the shaft above each seat – and in the closest chair, tethered to the trunk by cables running from these very ports, was Redeye.
The pale woman was slumped in her seat, listing bonelessly like a broken toy against the metal trunk. Her eyes were open, but both of them now glowed red – but they did so very dimly, like the weakest cinders. No blood leaked from her wound now, the last of it having pooled in the seat of the chair and trickled onto the deck. She looked dead, or very nearly so.
Violet clambered down to the deck, and Bobbi followed. “The Eye,” Violet whispered, but the words died in her throat – both of them approached as if Redeye might spring up at any moment and kill them both, but Bobbi knew very well that she could not. The meat in her skull must already be dead from anoxia.
�
�She’s plugged herself into…whatever this system is, looks like,” Bobbi said. Caution left her in the face of her morbid curiosity; with Violet covering the apparent corpse with her rifle, Bobbi crouched down next to Redeye’s fallen body, peering at the hole in her torso, the scoring all over her armored flesh. She had gone through so much to get where she had, only to end up here in this way.
“Is she dead?” Violet aimed the rifle at Redeye’s temple, not at all wishing to take chances. “Can she even die?”
“I think her brain’s dead, yes,” said Bobbi, squinting at the thickening blood in the cyborg’s lap. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
Violet looked at her, startled. “What?”
Bobbi stood up and leaned over the body. “Well,” she said, “Red’s been able to access the network before, which means she would have been implanted with headware at the very least. I don’t know how much of her brain was replaced, or augmented, or what – but maybe she tried to keep her brain alive by plugging herself into the system directly. To keep power routing into her brain, you see?”
“Is that even possible?” Violet didn’t look convinced, or perhaps she just didn’t want to think it possible. She leaned forward and peered at the woman’s dimly glowing eye. “Shouldn’t she have a power supply inside of her to keep her systems going?”
A frown tugged at Bobbi’s lips. Violet had a point. “You’re right,” she muttered. “Damn it, why would she do this? Why not just go off and nuke the whole place? It seems like such a random-assed thing to do.”
“Perhaps she needed to know what they were doing,” Violet suggested. “Perhaps she needed to know what she would be stopping with her death.”
Bobbi took a step back and gazed down upon what Redeye had become, a puppet with her strings cut, and shook her head. “Maybe so,” she said. “Which spooks the hell out of me, because I’m going to have to go in there with her.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 44