Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3)
Page 22
A slight muffled crunching sound broke the subsequent silence. Syme arched his back. His eyes grew wide, and he spasmed as if electrocuted. Bobbi and the others dove onto the floor, and Syme emitted a horrible sound, part screech and part gurgle, that wavered as his body jerked and tried to bow itself in half.
“God damn it,” Bobbi roared as she pulled a thermite needle gun from its place inside her jacket, “Does anybody see anything?”
Hepzibah, closest to the window, rose up on one elbow and looked out into the house’s backyard.” Target sighted.” She spoke in the awful barbed sounds of the alien, made all the more horrific as Syme screamed on. “May I intercept?”
“Go!” Bobbi raised her pistol as Hepzibah leapt through the window, her armored skin ignoring the petty thorns of splintering glass. The towering woman landed on the ground below with a thump. The brief sound of automatic fire rang out, followed by an even shorter scream of agony. Syme, still howling, spasmed over onto his side. Bobbi lay face to face with him as his eyes bulged and rolled, and blood spewed from his mouth and nostrils as whatever he’d been dosed with mulched him from the inside. Behind her, the chair she had been sitting in shot back, struck by another silent projectile.
“My lady,” Violet shouted, her voice high with mingled rage and panic. “My lady, are you all right?”
“I’m fine!” Bobbi kept low as she rolled onto her back and pointed her needler at the light fixture overhead. Its magnetic coils whined, an instant before the hiss of a single white-hot spike of thermite hurtled into the fixture like a thunderbolt, shattering it and plunging the room into darkness. Bobbi took a second to pull the combat visor from its clip on her belt and pulled it over her head, trying her best to think while Syme’s cries of agony deteriorated to a strained gurgling sound. She turned on the night-vision imager as he spasmed so hard he broke his own back. The phosphorous green image of his death mask burned itself into her corneas, his mouth working like a fish as the mad light left his eyes. Bobbi could only stare, a witness to Syme’s last seconds, but a sound like tearing cloth came from outside, breaking the spell.
Shaper’s arm cannon, spewing death.
Bobbi rose to fire through the window, but in the green-white field of augmented vision, she saw Hepzibah scaling a tree beyond the house’s backyard like an angry bear, her armored skin immune to the poisoned darts a figure in sniper kit clustered in the upper branches tried to rain down on her. Shaper’s gun roared again, and she decided to leave the poor bastard to the gentle attentions of her comrade.
“Out front,” Bobbi called to Violet, then keyed her cochlear bug.
At her call, Hepzibah slung the sniper’s ruined body over her shoulder and vaulted the house’s back fence, heading toward the window, her bare arms dark up to the elbows.
Bobbi went to the front door and opened it. Down the street, a pair of approaching headlights marked the van’s arrival, while on the other side, a pair of taillights indicated where Shaper and Sumire were already making their exit. On the sidewalk in front of the house, a trio of bodies lay in a messy tangle. Limbs missing, dark slicks of blood and tissue on the concrete. The beetle-black carapaces of combat armor had shattered, useless against the high-density HE rounds Shaper had loaded in his arm, everyone a nova in miniature. Combat rifles, mundane but no doubt loaded with military-grade ammunition, were scattered all about like toys.
“Goddamned mess,” she muttered, coming down to grab the first body and pull it toward the steps. Bobbi paused at a familiar face, large, brown, almond eyes staring up at her in agony. Mark Tanaka had caught less of the fusillade than his two partners, and so he remained alive, if not for long. He lay there shuddering, his breaths sharp and fast like a wounded animal, his face very white.
“You got your boss tagged. Whatever mission you had here, man, you failed all around.”
He tried to say something, produced only a gurgle that spattered blood across her forearm. Bobbi put the muzzle of her needler over his chest and shot him straight in the heart with a thermite spike. He died smelling of blood and shit and cooked meat, but spared further pain, a great deal more than he deserved.
“Fucker,” she muttered.
She dragged his corpse up onto the stairs, and Violet helped her get the next one as the van pulled up front and idled. Hepzibah came out of the house smelling like Kali Durga must have after killing the many demons, and chucked the last corpse into the house with one hand. That done, they piled into the van and took off in the opposite direction of incoming sirens.
Once they had taken the long way around south along the block, and the lights of Civil Protection’s cars glowed far to the north, Bobbi connected with the house computer and set off the self-destruct mechanism. The house went up in a muted roar and a tower of fire, magnesium-bright. The small drug lab they kept set up in the basement would of course be to blame, and even now, other zombie servers long ago co-opted would be spinning traces in the network to connect the three houses to a fictional, independent narcotics entrepreneur who just happened to have the lease on them.
Nobody spoke until they were well on their way toward White Center and the Sound.
Hepzibah spoke first. “There were two other corpses on the patio, Ascended Mother. I ensured that they were dealt with.”
“I trusted you to do so.” Bobbi nodded. She wasn’t driving this time, having left Violet to do it. “You recovered the rifle?”
“I did, Ascended Mother. And the sniper’s corpse. They are in the back.”
Bobbi nodded. She had been thinking of the whole thing, what Syme had said, how he had died. The gun she’d want to check out as soon as possible, see what the fuck it was Syme had gotten hot-loaded with. Why not just blow his brains out? Why shoot him with…whatever? Syme didn’t have a single implant, and he sure as shit wasn’t bulletproof. And if she were the target, why shoot him at all? Or maybe she had been the target after all, and that sniper might just as well have missed. It was possible. Tanaka’s team was prepared to take the house, so maybe Syme had just been trying to delay so they could close the net. Maybe. It seemed a right back-assward way to make a strike.
“Lovely bit of theater there.” Violet looked straight ahead as they skirted the edge of the Verge, fingers of colored light from New City holoboards strafing across the car from between old buildings.
“I was thinking that as well.” Bobbi looked at the other two women. Hepzibah had produced a packet of sterile wipes from the first aid kit under the back seat, and wiped her arms clean. The smell of blood and shit faded in the face of the astringent’s chemical edge. “Hep, who was waiting for you back with that sniper?”
“Two fighters, Ascended Mother. I killed them before they had the chance to attack the house. It was not difficult.”
Bobbi squinted at her.” And that sniper?”
“I pulled him out of the tree,” Hepzibah all but gushed. “He has implants of some sort
. He is heavier than he should be. I elected to apply overwhelming trauma to ensure his death.”
Bobbi thought of how Hepzibah smashed the guy against the base of that tree, like a catfish against a stone, and shivered. “All right. Well, it was good work incapacitating them. So where did they come from, and do you two think Syme was full of shit?”
They pulled up to a stoplight. Ahead of them, a city bus glowed under a layer of holographic signs depicting a woman surrounded by vapor-sticks, clustering around her face like some kind of sanitized frame from a pornographic movie. Bobbi looked at Violet instead, saw her friend’s face set in a flat expression that made her seem carved from marble.
“Perhaps he was,” she said. “But if so, it was a very costly ruse. I don’t know, my lady. The whole thing seems very theatrical to me. Very timed.”
“I thought the same thing.” Bobbi nodded. “Just enough information to tantalize us, even though we’d already had the bit about the factions and their leadership. And then what did he say about that Mendelsohn, yeah? Soon as shoot us on sight as say hello? I dunno, Vi, smells bad to me.”
“Yeah, that’s the idea I’ve got, too,” Violet said. The holographic bar of the stoplight flashed red, a war paint brand across her face. Her eyes dazzled a dark lilac in the blending of colors. “But why the fuck for?”
“Dunno…” Bobbi frowned at the traffic ahead, the constant twitch of anxiety in her gut.
Several scenarios seemed plausible. Syme could have told his fellows, who proceeded to decide against his idea – assuming they were ever truly on to it in the first place – and gone to take them out. But Bobbi couldn’t imagine that they would have killed Syme on purpose, unless factionalism had truly gone so far as Syme had hinted. Or could it be that Tanaka and the rest of Syme’s people were working through a different agency, and decided to kill off anyone who could be seen as collaborators? That, too, was possible, especially if Mendelsohn felt as violently toward Bobbi and her crew as Syme said. Or it could be that Tanaka just wanted to be in charge, and with Syme apparently going over to ‘unnatural parties’ decided to stage a coup. Maybe they were Yathi plants. Who knew? They didn’t exactly have time to try and check out the bodies at the scene.
The light turned green and they proceeded on their way. The antiseptic tang of the cleansing wipes filled the cabin; Bobbi reached for the window controls, opening one a crack.
“I am sorry, Ascended Mother,” said Hepzibah softly. “I should have killed them more quickly, so that the police were not called.”
Bobbi looked over her shoulder at the big woman, who took up a great deal of the back seat. She looked even more like a big she-bear with her shoulders slumped, gazing at Bobbi with her silver eyes drooping and her expression bashful. Bobbi wondered at the shyness that so many of the combat conversions had now that they were human once more, insane or not. Hepzibah, Jorge and Patrick, they all seemed aware of what they were capable of, and perhaps also that they couldn’t quite meet that same caliber of violence anymore. The killer instinct dimmed somewhat, perhaps. She didn’t know. “You’re fine, Hepzibah.” Bobbi smiled. “You saved Vi and me from getting darts in our asses at the very least, or shot up by those fuckers in the back yard. You’re a good fighter, don’t worry.”
Hepzibah ducked her head, not smiling, but seeming quietly pleased with herself all the same. She glanced out the windshield from behind Violet’s head. As Bobbi turned back to do the same, she caught movement in the corner of her eye, and Hepzibah snapped her gaze to her again. “Ascended Mother, I’ve just thought of something.”
“Mmmm?” Bobbi looked at Hepzibah, brows arched.
“I just remember how the meat—the beast—damnation. The Syme reacted to…to my voice.” Her tone dipped at the end. Her voice humiliated her, as did the choice of words the Yathi language sometimes afforded her. No word for ‘human,’ male or female, just ‘meat’ or ‘beast’ or ‘animal.’” I wonder, do you think he might have been wearing a microphone?”
Bobbi blinked at her. “I don’t understand. He might have been.”
Hepzibah nodded. “What if his comrades were listening to us through an open channel? He was telling you about the situation, but then…” She frowned. “I hope that they did not think I was one of them, and then tried to extract him.”
Nobody said anything for a few long, painful moments. Hepzibah was of course always embarrassed about the way she spoke, but her suggestion had merit. Nobody outside of Bobbi’s crew knew about Hepzibah’s linguistic curiosities, given she had been recruited after the split.
Violet muttered, “A fucking mess” just loud of enough for them all to hear, and that served them well enough. They said nothing more until they met Shaper at the predetermined extraction site, a deserted industrial lot north of the Scrap Field, where he and Sumire waited by a black Honda sedan. The van’s headlights raked the faded blacktop as it trundled into the lot, a hearse bringing in the dead.
As Violet pulled the van up and highlighted Shaper and Sumire like ghosts in the sweep of its lights, Bobbi couldn’t say for certain if the dead numbered only the body in the van, or included the whole lot of them. At least the sniper would find rest.
gincourt, Walken discovered on yet another flight, was designed in the late 2040s, built based on a schematic someone had “liberated” when some aerospace firm went bankrupt, and an angry employee conveniently trashed the majority of the company’s databases. It was an inspired piece of work, a condor with carbon-fiber bones and sensor-absorbent skin, despite the fact it had not been possible to power until the advent of miniature reactors in the ‘Seventies. Most of it had been made with industrial printers in Jacinto’s little factory setup. Hell of a thing to make as a hobby.
According to Jacinto, it had at some point been in the airspace of most of the major cities of the world and had yet to be detected. Or rather, not by anyone human. The Yathi had the ability to sniff out the Agincourt if they really tried, but why would they? They didn’t expect a resistance to have handmade stealth planes modern technology couldn’t detect, much less use them to dump assassins or assault teams within striking distance of their facilities. Which was, of course, rather the point. But there had only been one, and that left with the split. Now Jacinto flew the Agincourt under the flag of the curious conspiracy that sought the genocide of the Yathi race. No one had yet laid the goal out to Walken’s satisfaction, but the idea started to make sense.
According to Stadil’s ghost, with whom he spoke not long after he had asked Strikeboy to call that night, the secret lay in his brain. What had been done with him by the Yathi was nothing less than miraculous. Where Lionel had introduced biosynthetic tissue to produce a psychological shunt to contain the bugfuck parts of his personality, something still considered a fairy tale to modern science, the Yathi had created a method by which the alien personality within him, that which the Yathi wanted so badly, remained separated and contained within its own vessel. A vault lurked in his brain, walled up and protected with programming that Knightley’s sources had only the slightest means of understanding. It was clear that that the connections that should allow the alien personality to interface with the rest of Walken’s brain, and thus let it take over, formed so slowly as to be no threat at all. There had been something wrong with the process. Did the Mother of Systems know?
Knightley had not obtained this understanding from some miracle, however. The doctor had been in conference with Stadil, working with the disembodied mind to figure out just what his scans had meant. The method by which this had been done remained a mystery, but between the Stadil-intelligence and Knightley’s seemingly indomitable grasp on advanced neuroscience, it was only a matter of time before it could be unraveled.
Over the next few weeks, it became apparent this puzzle ran far deeper and more complex than they originally thought. Determining what had been done proved simple enough, but the how was an entirely different matter altogether. The program that Lionel had sent for Strikeboy t
o execute wasn’t some magic bullet that shattered firewalls, it simply triggered his brain’s auto-diagnostic software which in turn gifted him knowledge of what his body was capable of. It certainly didn’t give him all of the details he’d hoped for, such as what most of his body was made of beyond his synthetic brain tissue. “Previously unencountered materials” seemed to make up the bulk of it, with lab-grown diamond analog for some components, like the small pump circulating the white blood that nourished his few organic parts and the glaze over his still-unidentified bones. While Lionel was incredibly brilliant, he was also only one man. It would be necessary to secure additional specialists, a list of which Knightley had drawn up. It would be up to Walken to fetch the first of them, who would then be able to provide them with the necessary professional weight, and, in some cases, leverage, to bring them to Lionel’s banner.
Which led him to today.
They committed a month to pumping skillsoft data into unused portions of synthetic memory modules in his brain. Hand-to-hand combat styles, small arms and explosives. Between upload sessions, he danced through the industrial tangle surrounding Jacinto’s bunker, practicing with his body, and staying the hell away from prying eyes. Honing himself in this way made him feel more prepared, though only physically. He was no commando, even with the programming in his head. Finally, the time for him to head off to collect the first name on Knightley’s list came, the one who would be able to unlock the rest of them.
His name was Kim Jin Woo, and he had grown up in the Communist remnant of Korea. This would not be a problem, except for after he had departed Communist Korea, he had gone off, gotten involved with Genefex, somehow managed to garner a large amount of information on Wonderland neural technology–and by extension Yathi neural technology – without being collected or otherwise indoctrinated to the benefit of the enemy. Naturally, that meant he would be valuable to any country who sought to upgrade their technological corpus, and the Communists managed to snatch him up first. With a wife and daughter in the Democratic majority of the country, a Communist agent’s rifle never far from their heads, Kim worked to develop technology that nations really shouldn’t have.