The Yathi were pinned behind the coffee bar, using it – and the corpses of the baristas and patrons – for cover. Drones in hotel uniforms crouched behind the mess, their forearms had exploded back into jointed sections and they spewed clouds of withering fire from cannon muzzles that protruded from their elbow joints. Though there were only three of them, they put out triple the fire.
Arrayed behind the abstract tree of steel and bronze that made up the centerpiece of the fountain, Mendelsohn’s people crouched in their sleek black armor and poured fire from assault rifles and a pair of man-portable support guns. The tri-barrel gatlings roared as if they were monsters, spewing streams of white hot tracers that lanced through the water and into the coffee bar, which held, somehow, against the fury of the collected guns. The bodies of the dead disintegrated to nothing more than ragged sacks of meat and fluid slumped over the bar, constantly dancing with the blistering graveyard rhythm the guns provided. Nine humans to the three Yathi, and drones or not, they had yet to take a lethal hit.
Bobbi knew that armor. She had seen corpses wearing its ruins out front of the safe house in Seattle, where Syme had died spewing his guts out all over the floor. Her blood ran cold as she keyed the link.
“Knife.”
“Plato.” Camilla rang over the link, breathing heavily. “This is Knife. What’s going on down there?”
“Got a bad situation,” Bobbi said. “Mendelsohn’s people have come to the party. You need to get out of there and into a position where you can help the rest.”
“I’m a sniper,” Camilla shot back over the heaviness of her breathing. The rifle’s camera was off, and Bobbi could imagine her double-timing it down the stairs. “I’m not a bloody commando.”
“So get down there and snipe something,” Bobbi said. “There’re casualties all over the lobby. See if you can stop the shooting and make sure that the paramedics, who are on the way with the police, have someone they can save.”
Camilla cursed under her breath.” Right, I hear you, but what about the hotel guests?”
“Locked in their rooms,” Bobbi said. “Did it the moment shit started going down. There’s a hotel full of people who are doubtless screaming for the cops to show up. Who’s the outfit that runs police down here?”
“Steeltower,” said Camilla. “Bloody hard bastards, not soft touches like your Civil Protection fellers up in Seattle. They’ll come here with paramilitary force from the start.”
On Bobbi’s screens, Camilla showed up as a bright dot swiftly proceeding down the side of her building’s wireframe. Wrench and his team were in the rear of the ground floor, and the forces in the lobby resembled two death-amoebas blasting away at each other. “Okay. I see you’re getting to the ground floor. Ah…right, I need you to get to the…” She paused as the sound of new gunfire roared inside the front of the hotel. Bobbi stared as the map view blossomed with a new mass of light, this one emerging from the back of the lobby. A mass of men and women dressed in the uniforms of hotel staff burst through a pair of security doors that led into the service areas of the hotel, doors Bobbi had locked through her manipulation of the security system.
They rushed the knot of black-armored fighters, who turned as one and opened fire on the oncoming mass. They did not stop as the bullets tore through them. White liquid spilled from their bodies, and Bobbi stared in horror as the rounds that could not penetrate the coffee bar blew huge chunks out of the surging bodies. They directed their fire toward the upper halves of the horde; shearing off heads and blasting them into fragments; Mendelsohn’s unit skillfully took apart the corpse-machines before they could get too close. One of the humans hurled an orb of black steel, a grenade, into the middle of the room. It landed as the dead began to overwhelm their targets, bounced twice, and the ops room flared with white light and static. Views from the external cameras picked up a mighty crash of sound as the explosion took out the hotel’s lobby. Glass and smoke poured out into the street, and fire blossomed in a garden of death along with it.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Bobbi hit the link again, hard. “Knife, Wrench, give me your status!”
“We’re fine,” Wrench barked. “But what the fuck was that? Sounded like a bomb!”
“That’s exactly what it was,” Bobbi said. “The Yathi seem to have replaced some of the staff with drones.”
“Fuck!” Wrench’s voice ratcheted up an octave. “You…you’re gonna get us out, right?”
“Of course I am.” Damned if she had any idea of how to do it. She glanced up at the map. Wrench’s team was locked up not far from the back of the building, and she could see a clear lane of exit.” Have you made any progress on the mag-lock they slapped on the door?”
“No way of getting through that short of a bullet,” Wrench replied. “And not a small one. Our sidearms aren’t gonna crack this nut.”
“Fortunately,” Bobbi said after a deep breath, “big bullets are what we have. Knife, I’m going to patch coordinates to your headware. I want you to take the shot where I point you, all right?”
“Affirmative,” Camilla said, still breathing hard. She let out a gush of air as Bobbi sent information streaming into the tactical package in the back of Camilla’s skull. “Bloody hell, Plato, are you sure about that?”
“Absolutely,” Bobbi said. “Can your rifle handle it?”
“I think so, but it might lose too much energy going through the masonry. Might take us two rounds.”
“We have no time,” Bobbi barked. “There are possibly Yathi still in the building, and we need to get Wrench out of there. Get that lock off, and be prepared to make your exit with them.”
“Right.” Camilla’s voice began to harden up again, but carried a note of uncertainty she could not entirely shake. “Right. I hope that your mathematics are up to snuff, Plato.”
“We’ll find out in a few minutes. Get the shot lined up and make it happen.” Meanwhile, she willed the system to search through the vehicles in the hotel’s parking garage. Several cars had been in motion at the time of the gunfire, but they had jumped the holographic cordon on their way out. She found a hospitality van outside the rear entrance, and hacked it with a thought. Police cowboys tried to slice through the walls she erected around the hotel security system, telling her that they were soon on their way. The net closed. She had to cut it open.
Camilla moved through the bottom floor of the other building, exiting it, moving to the next.
Bobbi did many things at once in that instant. She easily blasted down a security system to let Camilla in while searching for the shadow on the upper floors, but found nothing in the ducts. More Yathi drones in workers’ uniforms surged through the halls of the lower floor, methodically searching for intruders. They washed back toward Wrench and his team, and Bobbi could find no way to remove them. The building had no turrets to hack, after all, and the sprinkler system, though a halon gas unit lethal to the living, would be wasted on the walking dead. Bobbi could only seal doors in front of them as they proceeded, doors that buckled in moments under the combined crush of the mass.
“Plato, Knife here.”
“Plato.” Bobbi’s nerves sang with the multiplying strain of multitasking; she felt like a Hindu saint, many arms reaching out in many directions, each one holding a digital spike. “Are you set up?”
“As best as I can be. Can’t really guarantee anything, Plato, but I’m going to make it count.”
“You saved Ayer’s Rock with little more than a hunting rifle.” Bobbi closed her eyes against the burning in her skull. “I know that you can pull it off.”
“Fair enough.” A tiny smile winked in Camilla’s voice. “See you in a second.”
Her camera came on again. The gunsight tracked an expanse of nanopour stained with acid rainfall. Alphanumerics spilled across the display in bright orange. Range, plotted velocity, windage data. The view flickered for half a moment as the gun’s capacitors shuddered and drained, and another roar of thunder – this one far smalle
r than the blast of the grenade – pounded her eardrums. A crater the size of a watermelon appeared where the slug had hit the wall, and in the center, a hole she could’ve put her arm through. Bobbi hit the link again.
“Wrench, you there?”
Nothing.
“Wrench! Report!”
Drunken groaning on the other side of the link. For a moment, Bobbi feared that the slug or shrapnel from the hit had taken out the team. Then, Wrench’s voice, slow and pained, sounded on the link. “We’re fine… What the fuck was that?”
“A sled rifle,” Bobbi said. “Knife’s work. She get through the lock?”
“She got through the goddamned door, never mind the lock!” Wrench managed to chuckle, and Bobbi knew he was all right. “Or damn near it. It’s dented in by two feet. You tell Knife that when I see her next, I owe her all the booze in Los Angeles.”
“Gonna need to get out of there before you can do that,” Bobbi said. “I’m sending you a floor plan. Get to it, soldier, and you can shower her with kisses on the way back if you want to.”
He laughed again, this time his voice strong. “Assuming she doesn’t put a knife in me for my trouble. All right, people, let’s get out of there.” A pause. “Wait, Plato.”
“Yeah?”
“What about the guys in the elevator?”
“You let me worry about that,” she said. “There’s a van waiting for you by the exit. Get out of there before the cops are all over us. Last fucking thing we need is for you to get picked up.”
“Amen to that,” he said, and cut the link.
Bobbi switched back to Camilla, not bothering to let the dust settle. “Good shot, Knife. They’re on the move. Now get to the extraction vehicle. Dumping data to you now.”
“Roger that.” Camilla’s voice was alloyed with no small amount of satisfaction. “Out.”
The masses of corpse-machines that flooded the halls behind them made slow progress through the sealed doors, Wrench’s team moved as a line of blips double-time toward the exit. They made it out as Camilla’s red dot converged with them near the van. Somewhere down the coast, they piled into the vehicle and took off as the cops swarmed down the other way. Camilla and crew had managed to escape in less than five minutes. Badass professionals, however south the goddamned operation had turned. A one-in-a-million shot, guided by skill and math and little else. Bobbi was proud of them, despite it all.
Aftermath. A dead target, possibly not even Yathi. His killers, all definitely alien, themselves murdered in an instant by a completely unknown quantity. A horde of drones, most of which lay in pieces in the crater that remained of the hotel lobby, melted away from the eyes of the security system. Where were they going? Civilians dead in the lobby. Mendelsohn’s people rendered to paste along with them, property damage all down the line. A mess. A goddamned mess. But at least she had managed to keep the guests in their rooms, right? Kept down casualties as much as possible. If there were any blessings there, it would be that. Bobbi frowned at the floating screens, still jacked on adrenaline and disbelief, her thoughts suspended in the bright haze of what-the-fuck-just-happened. She cycled through the camera views one last time; no sign of the drones, they’d apparently gone into the underlevels. Bobbi switched to check on the potential defectors, as she intended to try and snag them or their testimonies once the cops got them out. Far too many questions to be answered.
She found only an empty elevator. Later, when she’d analyzed the footage in which the shadow pulled the four men screaming from the elevator car for the sixtieth time, she would catch a glimpse of the face that turned away so quickly from behind the hood as the shadow bent over the ruins of the murdered Yathi. She knew that profile from dark nights in a warehouse from a million years ago, lying next to her, breathing softly. Sharing loneliness as much as their own flesh.
Tom.
t did not take long for Walken to locate Kim’s conspirators. As he made his way from Kim’s suite and headed toward the vent from which he had come, he passed the floor elevators and noticed, to no small surprise, the display panel by the controls indicated that one of the cars was stuck. He communed with the elevator system, commanded it to show him surveillance feed from the damaged car, and found the four men stabbing at their wristcomps in wide-eyed panic – and not simply from being stuck in transit; from the floors far below, came the muted thunder of heavy guns and the lesser roar of small-arms fire. The mysterious troopers had most likely run into the drones. Well, fuck them. He hoped no innocents got hurt, but he couldn’t do anything about it now.
He shortcutted into the elevator shaft via the ductwork, and dropped onto the anchored car. The emergency clamps had engaged, which could not have happened without someone’s interference. Perhaps the Yathi sought to contain them until they could be dispatched? No time to waste.
The first man screamed like a child when Walken tore open the elevator hatch and pulled him out by the collar of his expensive jacket, but he did not mind. He was so fast, so strong in comparison to them. They flew up and out onto the top of the elevator car like leaves. The car would not move, though they cowered as if it might lurch upward and kill them all at any moment. It took a second or two for him to realize they feared him far more.
“Calm yourselves,” he said, trying to sound soothing despite his flat machine-chip tone. “I am not here to harm you.”
“Who are you?” one man asked. Walken looked into his face and knew him as Walter Van Pelt, neuroscientist. Formerly of Ogilvy Biomedical Solutions. Weak-willed and liked to gamble, which is why he wound up in his current position. Weakness had carried him here. “What are you – where’s Jin?”
“Kim Jin Woo is dead.” He could not voice the loss that he felt. Kim was but another in a long line of victims made today, but in the moment every human life held a particular keenness for him. He could not imagine the chaos going on downstairs. “I am here to collect you.” Walken’s head had filled with a cold haze at Kim’s death; the Yathi had to have been drawn by some clumsiness on Mendelsohn’s part. They were waiting on Kim. They were waiting for everyone.
“You’re the one, then,” said another man.
Walken looked past Van Pelt’s stricken face into the others’. Martin Bradshaw, bionics specialist, formerly of Lumex Prosthetics. Steady worker. Brilliant. Also a pedophile, though he had apparently never fallen to his urges and was voluntarily on sex-repressive drugs to crush them. Were he not forced into this little conspiracy, he would have completed the radical therapy that would have burned out his sex drive entirely. Commendable.
Bradshaw regarded him warily. “You don’t look…well…”
“Alien.” Tom peered down at himself, finding his body normal again. “You will change your mind on that soon enough. Are you unharmed?”
“As unharmed as we’re probably going to be,” said Parker Nguyen, psychologist. Specialist in cyborg therapy and consultant to many firms. Completely asexual. The most noble of the bunch, if Walken’s personality software was correct. Believed in causes. “I did not anticipate violence so early in our journey. What’s going on?”
Walken shook his head. “You would do well to anticipate violence always. I assume that the enemy is here to kill you all. They’ve already done so with a number of the hotel staff just to infiltrate the building.”
“Because of our association with that outlaw doctor? Just what the hell have you gotten us into? I mean, aliens, yeah, we knew that would be bad, but…” Bradshaw’s voice went up an octave, his eyes wide and ripe with terror.
“We thought that we could possibly buy ourselves out of that particular hole.” The last spoke, his voice calm, flat velvet. Mercer Carnegie. Much older than the rest, his eyes cold and blue. Carnegie was a nanomachine specialist, one of the first of the major-league world changers. He used to dream up alloys in his sleep and then build them, atom by atom, before selling the patents off for ridiculous amounts of money. He’d retired, thoroughly bored and cranky. “Men like us always do.
You will forgive us for our arrogance, I trust.”
“Maybe we could talk about that after we got out of the warzone,” Nguyen offered. Like Carnegie, he seemed relatively unruffled. “I trust that you have a plan?”
Walken looked into Nguyen’s face, found fear and tension there, but highly controlled. Good. “We scale the elevator shaft.” He nodded to a ladder cut into the wall that ran the entire length. “This car won’t be going anywhere at the moment.”
Bradshaw coughed softly. “Yeah, but how do we get out with a goddamn gunfight going on downstairs? Who’s even involved?”
“The enemy,” Carnegie said, and his blue eyes burned with a light far older and colder than his middle-aged body. He was one of the original recipients of Genefex’s antiagathic treatments, back in the Thirties, when the technology simply halted aging and maintained you rather than turning back the clock. He had to be over a hundred years old, though he still appeared in his sixties. At some point, he had grown sour about that, among many other things, and committed himself to the corporation’s death. Commit yourself to being the enemy of something for long enough, and you will come to learn the truth about that thing – and so was it with Carnegie, who made the annihilation of the Yathi his own quiet, private obsession. Carnegie arranged this little cabal, made the connection with Lionel Knightley. He was, in many ways, its leader.
“In general,” Walken said. “As well as unknown paramilitary forces. We find ourselves above a meat grinder, gentlemen.”
Van Pelt made a strangled sound.
Bradshaw gave his fellow scientist a look of mingled disgust and pity. “I imagine we need to get out of here, then.” He nodded to the ladder. “Lead on, boss. We’ll follow.”
Walken nodded, and glided up the wall. His fingers held the concrete without trouble, scaling the side of the shaft without bothering with the handholds. Bradshaw and the others shared looks before they proceeded after him.
“I don’t mean to cause a problem,” Bradshaw called up from beneath Walken, “but how are we going to get out of here?”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 35